Jill Lepore on Parents’ Rights and the Culture War
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2022
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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.
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| 1:11.3 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden on On today's Politics and More podcast, Jill Lippoor discusses the history |
| 1:17.6 | of book banning in the United States. She relates the modern anti-anty racism movement to the |
| 1:24.4 | anti-evolution campaign of the 1920s. |
| 1:29.7 | Right now, a wave of book bannings is sweeping schools around the country. The examples are many. |
| 1:37.0 | But the focus is clearly on how schools teach race and racism, whether acknowledging some of |
| 1:43.1 | the realities of history is just too divisive. |
| 1:47.8 | The political ramifications go well beyond the classroom. In the state of Virginia to take one |
| 1:53.2 | recent race, Glenn Yunkin, the Republican, made the alarm over critical race theory a cornerstone |
| 1:59.8 | of his campaign for governor, which he won, |
| 2:02.7 | even though CRT is not part of the state curriculum. |
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