If time and other work permits, I may get back to Stanley’s editorial and try to publish a follow-up somewhere. Overall it sounds the right notes, and I thought this was particularly well-put and important to emphasize:

Democracy involves informed decision-making about policy. These laws are intended to render such deliberation impossible when it comes to minority groups. The United States suffers from immense racial disparities, which result in periodic outbreaks of political protest. Without an understanding of the structural factors that keep schools and cities segregated, and certain populations impoverished, Americans will not be able to react to these outbreaks with understanding – they will find them befuddling. These laws eliminate the knowledge and understanding required to react democratically to Black political protest to structural injustice.

The authors targeted by these laws do not just theorize about problematic structures – their work is also essential for understanding solutions. For example, Roderick Ferguson writes about social movements for liberation, including student movements. These laws make it illegal to teach students about the history and strategy of social movements targeting structural injustice. More generally, these laws make it illegal to teach students about how to form social movements to challenge dominant interests and structures.

There’s much to agree with here. But just to have it in the public record, I want to note that Stanley commits a howler of a modal fallacy in the middle of the editorial, inferring from a law (whose text he quotes) prohibiting instruction that students must feel race-based (and etc.) personal responsibility and anguish for events in which they played no part, to a conclusion that what is criminalized is instruction that results in feelings of anguish associated with one’s racial identity (“[t]he ‘anguish’ and ‘psychological distress’ these laws forbid are only anguish felt by the dominant racial group, white Americans”). I understand that it’s an editorial, and say what you want about the merits of either formulation, the fact is they’re importantly different, and it doesn’t do right by the public sphere to run them together.Report