Ignoring history seems to be repeating

We are in strange times, but a sense of history can help you make sense.

Well, not “sense,” but at the very least, if you know your past, you at least begin to see patterns.

Let’s think back a few years ago when school boards became battlegrounds for people who opposed “critical race theory,” a 40-year old academic concept that began as a means of studying power structures through the prism of race. Spurred on by politicians and television talking heads acting in bad faith, parents came to meetings with pitchforks to argue that the whitewashed history they learned in school was, in fact, the only history worth learning.

You cannot oppose looking at all of history and then cherry-pick the racist bad acts you don’t like, but we are living in a time when the very people who vociferously oppose DEI efforts — diversity, equity and inclusion — are among the first people to decry antisemitism. An Antisemitism Awareness bill circulating in D.C. is an effort to set for the Department of Education a legal definition of antisemitism, and place in jeopardy federal funds of any entity that runs counter. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, RGeorgia, opposed the bill because she worries that if it passes, Christians would be held liable for antisemitism if they believe that Jews killed Jesus.

(The truth is far more complicated. Christians — and I say this with love — should be more concerned with living as Jesus lived rather than assigning blame for his murder.)

But overlooking Greene (as history probably will), the previous conservative push to pretend critical race theory was actually a threat is now working against all of us.

The Anti-Defamation League says that after the horrendous October attack by Hamas, antisemitic incidences skyrocketed. Last year, the ADL recorded 7,523 incidents of antisemitism in the United States in 2023, compared with 3,697 in 2022. The incidents, from the ADL, “included harassment, vandalism and assault, targeting Jewishowned businesses, Jewish institutions and organizations and Jewish students.”

Still, you can no more say that all protesters are antisemitic than you can say none of the protesters are, but that’s exactly the kind of surface discussion — racing to demonize the people with whom we disagree — that comes from a lack of education.

Last week, some public school administrators appeared before a mostly Republican House committee to defend their schools against charges of antisemitism. Unlike their peers from higher institutions — earlier hearings that resulted in the departure of some college presidents — these administrators came loaded for bear. Some of the most pointed questions in the sessions came from Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., who trumpets on his website his battles against the “leftist agenda,” which includes a full review of history as it really happened.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Do not teach history as it actually occurred, but do stand ready to play to the cameras to condemn the results of that ignorance. And don’t take responsibility for the ignorance. Absolutely don’t take responsibility for it.

When facts do not matter, when hypocrisy rules, when schools are not allowed to teach history the word, “antisemitism” remains up for grabs. Almost as soon as DEI became an accepted acronym, people in some circles began to turn against such programs that had cropped up after the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation, that rock-ribbed hoister of the conservative petard, published a report that said DEI hires among universities and colleges were overwhelmingly antisemitic. Well, the report actually said the hires were “anti-Israel,” and they drew that conclusion by studying the Twitter feeds of “741 DEI personnel at 65 universities” and compared those tweets on the same feeds to posts about China.

I know, right? It was not — and I say this with all the respect such a report is due — the most rigorous of studies, but the chilling effect of such shoddy research is pretty telling. According to the job posting site Indeed, in 2021 there were nearly 500 DEI job postings, compared with 272 such postings in January of this year. You could chalk some of that up to all the jobs being filled, but that’s still a big drop.

You might start to think that for some entities, DEI efforts served strictly as tornado shelters. Everyone ran into them to escape the storm, and now the next storm is coming — anti-DEI, antisemitism — gutless corporations and other public entities declare that the problem has been solved.

Meanwhile, a Virginia school board just decided to let two schools revert to their original Confederate names after deciding in 2020 that honoring Stonewall Jackson and Turner Ashby, two slave-owning traitors, was a bad idea. The Southern Poverty Law Center says this reversal may be a first in the country, post-George Floyd, but I’m going to guess it will not be the last.

You can want the best for two groups of people and not be a racist, but so long as we send our students out into the world with zero or a scant sense of history, this — violence and hate and their ugly cousin, stupidity — is just a pattern that will keep repeating itself.

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “TempestTossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.

Jill Karnicki/Houston Chronicle Several of the books commonly assigned in college and law school courses focused on critical race theory.