Black History Month ends, but Missouri and Kansas politicians can’t erase diversity | Opinion

Black History Month is coming to an end. Or, as some of the loudest voices on the right would say, just another old month is coming to an end — since any mention of race needs to be erased from public discourse circa 2023.

That has become a depressing theme of the day in too many corners of America: the topsy-turvy notion that any pursuit of diversity, equity and inclusion is synonymous with the pursuit of injustice.

Let’s get the deadest of flogged horses out of the way first: The GOP-dominated Missouri Senate finally caved to common decency and sense earlier this month and dropped its ban on so-called “critical race theory” from state educational curricula. Yet the watered-down legislation that advanced still forbids teaching that anyone should “bear collective guilt and are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by others.” Guilt is in the eye of the beholder, so what does it say about lawmakers who seem to be worried most about it?

The mythical CRT beast has reared its head in the Kansas Legislature’s Republican supermajority over the past couple years as well, and Gov. Laura Kelly has correctly dismissed it as the political smokescreen it is: “cooked up to get people up in arms about something that’s not real.”

On the national stage, many Republican kingmakers are looking to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the next great presidential hope for their party. DeSantis auditions frequently to be the poster child for turning “woke” into a slur. He’s the instigator of his state’s “Stop Woke Act,” which prohibits educational institutions and businesses from teaching students and employees anything that would supposedly cause one to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” because of their race, color, gender or national origin.

In other words, don’t put the American-born white people in the position of being taught uncomfortable but accurate history. And where have we heard that sort of language before?

LGBTQ rights targeted

It isn’t just skin color. Lawmakers in Missouri and Kansas have been marching in lockstep with GOP-controlled legislatures around the country wasting time by debating LGBTQ rights in the guise of protecting people from drag queens and transgender youth athletes. But these are issues for families, schools and student activities boards to deal with, not politicians looking to rile up potential voters.

Far-right figures in broadcast and social media have been making a new push in recent years to undermine any acknowledgment, respect or celebration of the differences that create the fabric of our nation. And don’t dare mention reparations if you don’t want to hear toxic objections spewed at the idea that Black Americans might finally get their overdue payment of 40 acres and a mule.

It’s not just you: We didn’t hear this stuff in mainstream rhetoric in decades past. GOP North Stars used to tell racists loudly that they had no place in the Republican Party. President Ronald Reagan made it clear while denouncing racial and religious bigots at the 1981 NAACP convention:

“You are the ones who are out of step with our society. You are the ones who willfully violate the meaning of the dream that is America. And this country, because of what it stands for, will not stand for your conduct.”

As CNN recently reported, even some members of the GOP think DeSantis goes too far in his attacks on the “woke” agenda. Forgive us for wondering whether that’s for pragmatic political reasons more than for a love of diversity, equality and inclusion work.

Today, “woke” has become worse than a bad word. It’s become an expression of contempt, as if to care about honoring and noticing the preferences and choices of others is somehow ridiculous — or should be illegal.

But here’s the thing: Erasing diversity is not going to happen. As a society, there is a baseline of respect that every segment of our country demands. Movements, protests and legal reckonings will not go away, no matter how much we seemingly move backward.

Yes, rights can be revoked, as we’ve seen with Roe v. Wade — but the pushback isn’t going to disappear. African Americans aren’t going to go back to Jim Crow. The LGBTQ community won’t return to the closet. Jewish people will not allow our schools to fold Holocaust denialism into the teaching of history.

GOP-led initiatives can pass in statehouses. Companies and educational institutions can forbid certain conversations. But no law is going to make gay people straight, or send anyone to the back of the bus again. The real America won’t go away because some people are afraid of historical accountability.

Slavery, Japanese internment, abortion rights

For too many, it’s uncomfortable to teach about slavery. To teach about Japanese American internment camps during World War II. To teach about the forced sterilization of Indigenous women in the 1970s. To teach about how women had to fight for abortion rights, only to have the landmark case affirming them overturned almost 50 years later by an arch-conservative Supreme Court majority installed by a president who lost the popular vote twice..

But discomfort will not put the genie back in the bottle.

This is a country where after every step you take, you stand beside fellow Americans with rich personal and cultural histories different from your own. So while laws can attempt to paint this country into a homogeneous tapestry of beige, it won’t work.

It’s not that the pendulum will eventually swing all the way to the past. At some point, the people who are frantically trying to turn back the hands of time are going to find themselves standing aside and watching as that whole clock is ripped from the wall.