Jill Lepore on Parents’ Rights and the Culture War

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2022

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A wave of book bannings sweeping the country, along with conservative fury over titles like “Antiracist Baby,” seems like a backlash against the heightened racial consciousness of the post-George Floyd era. The historian and staff writer Jill Lepore sees these conflicts as the continuation of an old dynamic. She relates today’s “anti-anti-racism” movement to the anti-evolution campaign of the nineteen-twenties, which included the prosecution of a Tennessee teacher for teaching Darwin’s theory in a high-school class. Lepore tells David Remnick that what links these battles over biology and history is the argument that parents have the right to determine their children’s education in public schools.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.5	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Right now, a wave of book bannings is sweeping schools around the country. The examples are many. But the focus is clearly on how schools teach race and
0:23.5	racism, whether acknowledging some of the realities of history is just too divisive. The political
0:31.2	ramifications go well beyond the classroom. In the state of Virginia to take one recent race,
0:40.3	Glenn Yonkin, the Republican, made the alarm over critical race theory a cornerstone of his campaign for governor, which he won,
0:45.3	even though CRT is not part of the state curriculum.
0:49.3	And Ted Cruz made school library books a set piece in the confirmation hearings of Judge
0:55.4	Katanji Brown Jackson.
0:57.0	I find that statement a little hard to reconcile with the public record because if you
1:03.1	look at the Georgetown Day School's curriculum, it is filled and overflowing with critical
1:09.4	race theory.
1:10.8	Critical race theory and introduction.
1:14.2	They include the end of policing and advocacy for abolishing police.
1:21.2	They include how to be an anti-racist by Ibram Kendi.
1:25.6	They include literally stacks and stacks of books, and I'll tell you two of the ones that were most stunning.
1:30.3	They include a book called Anti-Racist Baby by Ibram Kendi. Now this is a book that is taught at Georgetown Day School to students in pre-K through second grade, so four through seven years old. Do you agree with
1:48.0	this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist? Senator, I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or though they are not valued or though they are less than, that they are victims, that they are oppressors, I don't
2:20.3	believe in any of that. But what I will say is that when you...
2:24.3	But if this culture war is today's headlines, the dynamics have been around for a long time,
2:29.3	at least a century. That's according to my colleague Jill Lepore, who's a staff writer and a historian at Harvard.
2:36.8	Lepore sees the school's issue in light of another epic culture war, the fight over revolution
2:41.7	in the 1920s.
	...

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