One of the most important and foundational elements of a successful fascist movement is setting the parameters of the public discourse regarding the hot-button issue(s) of choice on your own racist/fascist/misogynistic/anti-er’body but wealthy white males, terms.
And a measure of that success is creating an arena of dialogue so skewed that even if your fascist bunch “loses” the public discourse, y’all’s Nazi asses still win.
It’s called “moving the goalposts;” changing the rules or criterion of a process or competition (in this case, public dialogue or debate on an issue) while it is still in progress, in such a way that the new goal offers one side not only an advantage but assured victory, even if they appear to “lose.”
Case in point: the dialogue on “Woke” education.
Everyone is up in arms that DeSantis (I refuse to refer to him as DeSatan—that’s a low blow to satan) is teaching school children in Florida that Blacks benefited from slavery because it taught them skills… and the focus of all lessons on the white domestic terrorist-led destruction of Oklahoma’s Black Wall Street will focus on “acts of violence perpetrated by Blacks.” This, after changing the language in public school textbooks to refer to the enslaved as “workers.” This, after overthrowing an entire university and witch-hunting any teachers/professors who dared teach the truth about the violent, bloody-thirsty, insidious torture, murder and lynching of Black people by whites, and the wholesale theft of their land, homes and businesses—those homes and businesses that those mobs of white domestic terrorists didn’t burn to the ground in spite, jealous of Black ingenuity, drive, initiative and success.
Stone crazy, right? But that’s the point. More on this in a minute.
DeSantis has become the poster child for the war against what his SS members call the “Woke Agenda.” And the Sunshine State’s Overcompensater-in-Chief is far from alone.
But before going in deeper on education, colonizing the word “Woke” is another example of moving the goalposts.
“Woke,” a term originating from the Black consciousness, as most things do, meant to stay aware of the mucked up things white domestic terrorists were doing and could do to you at any moment. “Stay informed, stay vigilant, stay ready to fight back if necessary, because whitefolk’s historic and current actions have never matched their holier-than-thou christian (little “c” intentional) rhetoric. Stay woke—know your history that they have always fought to distort, destroy, ignore, belittle or claim as their own. Stay woke!”
The fact that the term “woke,” originally a positive and uplifting and empowering and humanistic call to action, has become internationally known as a “negative,” is a powerful example of fascists’ ability to shift the narrative in the direction they want—i.e. away from those ideals and words on paper about democracy, “liberty and justice for all,” “we the people,” ad- nauseum.
Point: Hitler wannabes.
But where these Club Nouveau Nazis are poised to score their biggest victory, is in the conversation I alluded to earlier; the one surrounding the educational curriculum.
The tsunami of attacks against actual, factual history, including the banning of books that discuss anything Black, books that spotlight Black history as American history and world history, books that offer social commentary (historic and/or contemporary) through a Black lens; the criminalization of teachers who seek to produce enlightened students; and the demonization of elected officials who stand against the Fahrenheit 451, Nazi-style burning of books and destroying of knowledge and attacking of intellectuals and artists, is so great and so overwhelming and so all-encompassing, that it has people of goodwill and good sense fighting tooth and nail to preserve the current curriculum—the one in use all across the U.S. before this massive and insidious purge of everything not klan robe white.
Folk who have the eyes to see that this anti-woke movement as evil and wrong and destructive to the intellectual, social and moral growth of all children, have been backed into a corner, and are coming out swinging—fighting for the education U.S. schools were pushing before this anti-woke war began.
And I’m dumbfounded that people can’t see what’s going on here. The goalpost movers have been so successful at shifting the narrative even farther to the right of Barry Goldwater, Mussolini and Stephen Miller that we’ve forgotten that the education our children were receiving pre-anti-wokeness was already some eurocentric bullshit.
It’s 2023, and schools are still teaching “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and discovered America. Sure, there’s some growing pushback from adults on this false narrative, but most schools are still lifting Cristoforo Colombo as a hero, and not the facilitator of one of the most horrific genocides in history.
It’s 2023, and schools are still feeding our children the myth that the American colonists broke from Great Britain and fought what “historians” call the Revolutionary War because those children of Europe living in the colonies, simply wanted religious freedom and were outdone at the idea of “taxation without representation.”
That lie still trumps the truth—that enslaved Africans resisted enslavement with such ferocity, intensity and consistency that darn near every enslaver country in Europe was getting out of the slavery business, because it was too costly. And when Great Britain started talking about ending slavery, the American colonists knew that would literally destroy their entire way of life, which was wholly dependent upon the insane profits that the kidnapping, human trafficking and forced labor of African human beings afforded them.
The colonists knew life would be over for them without the “Peculiar Institution.” So, as real historian Dr. Gerald Horne points out in his book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America… well, the title says it all. The “Revolutionary War” was actually a counter-revolution, counter to the revolution started by the enslaved fighting for their freedom so ferociously and fervently that European nation after nation got out of the slavery game. The American colonists started a “counter-revolution” to fight for the right to maintain their slavery system. And because they won, slavery in the “land of the free” continued to exist for an extra 100-plus years.
It’s 2023, and schools are still teaching the “I have a dream,” 1963 version of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and not the 1965-1968 version who sounded more like Malcolm X than Malcolm X sounded like Malcolm X.
The 1965-1968 version of MLK that said, looking back, “his dream had become a nightmare.” The 1965-1968 version of MLK that said, this nation needs a guaranteed income. The 1965-1968 version of MLK that said, “The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.” The 1965-1968 version of MLK that said, “A nation that continues year after year, to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” The 1965-1968 version of MLK that called out the long U.S. history of affirmative action for white people and charged Blackfolk with the responsibility of supporting Black businesses and putting their money in Black-owned banks.
It’s 2023, and Black/Pan-African History is still but an elective on college campuses.
It’s 2023, and Rome and Greece are still viewed as the creators of what we call “civilization” when David Walker knew in 1828, as he wrote in his book known as “David Walker’s Appeal,” that it was Africans of ancient Egypt (Kemet) who built the pyramids and gave the world religion, art, science and civilization.
It’s 2023, and folk are still acting like the thesis of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project is controversial—that this nation was literally founded upon the institution of slavery—even though all evidence from the enslavers’ own words, the profits from the multi-gazillion-dollar businesses founded via enslavement and the records of those Ivy League campuses that would not exist without enslavement money verify her assertion.
The MAGA, DeSantis, Jan 6 Insurrections crowd, and their gazillionaire funders, have so pushed the education conversation into the realm of the ridiculous that they have successfully convinced folk who care about truth, who want all people’s stories and histories and perspectives to be taught, to fight for an educational standard that was already whitewashed.
So, even if all the anti-woke, anti-truth madness is overturned, we’re still left with a problematic, Eurocentric educational paradigm. But because those goalposts have been moved, we’ll see that as victory.
And that’s the brilliance of fascists…who aren’t all that smart; just persistent as hell.
But if we really want a victory, we need to put our true brilliance on display, see through their ploy, and shove those goalposts up their SSes while we produce a real curriculum, beyond the current status quo; one that’s straight, no chaser… Black coffee no cream.
