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DeSantis’s Apartheid Pedagogy in the Age of Fascist PoliticsIt is hard to understand how African Americans who were raped, tortured, whipped, and subject to unimaginable acts of dehumanization somehow benefited from the horrors of slavery.by Henry A. Giroux
July 23, 2023
LAProgressive
IMAGE: Cagle Cartoon: Dave Granlund
The cult of manufactured ignorance now works through disimagination machines engaged in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. Matters of justice, ethics, equality, and historical memory now vanish from the classrooms of public and higher education and from powerful cultural apparatuses and social media platforms that have become the new teaching machines.
In the current era of white supremacy, the most obvious version of apartheid pedagogy is present in attempts by Republican Party politicians to rewrite the narrative regarding who counts as an American, especially in the whitening of American history. This whitening of collective identity is largely reproduced by right-wing attacks on diversity and race sensitivity training, critical race programs in government, and social justice and racial issues in the schools. These bogus assaults are all too familiar and include widespread and coordinated ideological and pedagogical attacks against both historical memory and critical forms of education.
The fight to censor critical, truth-telling versions of American history and the current persistence of systemic racism is part of a larger conservative project to prevent teachers, students, journalists, and others from speaking openly about crucial social issues that undermine a viable democracy. Such attacks are increasingly waged by conservative foundations, anti-public intellectuals, politicians, and media outlets. These include right-wing think tanks such as Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, conservative scholars such as Thomas Sowell, right-wing politicians such as Mitch McConnell, and far-right media outlets such as City Journal, The Daily Caller, Federalist, and Fox News. The threat of teaching children about the history and systemic nature of racism appears particularly dangerous to politicians such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who claim that critical race theory and other “anti-racist” programs constitute forms of indoctrination that threatens to undermine the alleged foundations of Western Civilization.
In doing so, they attempt to undermine and discredit the critical faculties necessary for students and others to examine history as a resource in order to “investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.”[1]
White ignorance is crucial to upholding the poison of white supremacy.
White ignorance is crucial to upholding the poison of white supremacy. Apartheid pedagogy is about denial and disappearance—a manufactured ignorance that attempts to whitewash history and rewrite the narrative of American exceptionalism as it might have been framed in in the 1920s and 30s when members of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan shaped the policies of some school boards. Apartheid pedagogy uses education as a disimagination machine to convince students and others that racism does not exist, that teaching about racial justice is a form of indoctrination, and that understanding history is more an exercise in blind reverence than critical analysis. Apartheid pedagogy aims to reproduce current systems of racism rather than end them. Apartheid pedagogy most ardent proponent is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who has become America's most prominent white supremacist. Nowhere is his version of apartheid pedagogy most obvious than in the new African American history standards adopted in 2023 by the Florida Board of Education. Under the new standards, middle-school students are told that slaves benefited from slavery by “developing new skills which…could be applied to their personal benefit.”
It is hard to understand how African Americans who were raped, tortured, whipped, and subject to unimaginable acts of dehumanization somehow benefited from the horrors of slavery. This is white supremacy on steroids. Under this form of apartheid pedagogy, students are also instructed that the acts of violence committed against African-Americans [as in] the “1905 Atlanta race riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” were perpetrated not only by whites but also by African Americans.[2] White supremacy is once again rewriting history by stating that mass violence and massacres committed by white racist mobs were sparked by violence from Blacks. In fact, in all of these massacres, whites entered Black communities and destroyed homes, businesses, and murdered Blacks. Two examples will suffice.
In the November 2, 1920, the Ocoee massacre took place. As Isis Davis-Marks observes, a white mob “of around 250 burned 22 homes, 2 churches and a fraternal lodge. The number of black residents killed in the attack remains unknown, with estimates ranging from 3 to 60. Several contemporary observers placed the death toll at between 30 and 35.” [3]
During the Tulsa Race Massacre, which took place on May 30, 1921. whites committed numerous acts of violence against Black people. The Red Cross later estimated that “some 1,256 houses were burned; 215 others were looted but not torched. Two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores and many other Black-owned businesses were among the buildings destroyed or damaged by fire.”[4] 36 Black people were murdered.
DeSantis’ attempt to rewrite history and engage in a form of apartheid pedagogy is an attempt to both cover up this violence and strip away a history of structural racism. It is also an attempt to eliminate those historical narratives that instruct us to see what is wrong in our history so it cannot be repeated. This type of racist pedagogy is aimed at both whitewashing history and erasing the hard-fought struggles by African Americans to expand and protect their fundamental rights. Under such circumstances, history becomes a petri dish of lies designed to shift the country into a time when white oppression was legitimated and normalized. In addition, DeSantis’ attempt to distort the authoritarian ideology, menacing tactics, and violence aimed at those groups considered excess, a threat, and disposable is part of a larger attempt to erase how his own politics are closely aligned with fascist ideologies and practices rooted in the past.[5]
This is a form of “patriotic education” being put in place by a resurgence of those who support Jim Crow power relations and want to impose pedagogies of repression on students in the classroom. This type of retribution is a part of a longstanding politics of fear, censorship and academic repression that has been waged by conservatives since the student revolts of the 1960s.[6]
The public imagination is now in crisis. Radical uncertainty has turned lethal. In the current historical moment, tyranny, fear, and hatred have become defining modes of governance and education. Right-wing politicians bolstered by the power of corporate controlled media now construct ways of thinking and feeling that prey on the anxieties of the isolated, disenfranchised, and powerless. to substitute disillusionment and incoherence for a sense of comforting ignorance, the thrill of hyper-masculinity, and the security that comes with the militarized unity of the accommodating masses waging a war on democracy. The public imagination is formed through habits of daily life, but only for the better when such experiences are filtered through the ideals and promises of a democracy. This is no longer true. Under neoliberal fascism, the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite has ensured that any notion of change regarding equality and justice is now tainted, if not destroyed, as a result of what Theodor Adorno called a retreat into apocalyptic bombast marked by “an organized flight of ideas.”[7]
America’s slide into a fascist politics demands a revitalized understanding of the historical moment in which we find ourselves
America’s slide into a fascist politics demands a revitalized understanding of the historical moment in which we find ourselves, along with a systemic critical analysis of the new political formations that mark this period. Part of this challenge is to create a new language and mass social movement to address and construct empowering terrains of education, politics, justice, culture, and power that challenge existing systems of racist violence and economic oppression.
Any viable pedagogy of resistance needs to create the educational and pedagogical tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness, capable of both recognizing the scorched earth policies of neoliberal capitalism, and the twisted ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot take place without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.[8] Niko Block gets it right in arguing for a “radical recasting of the leftist imagination,” in which the concrete needs of people are addressed and elevated to the forefront of public discussion in order to address and get ahead of the crises of our times. He writes:
"The crises of the twenty-first century call for a radical recasting of the leftist imagination. This process involves building bridges between the real and the imaginary, so that the path to achieving political goals is plain to see. Accordingly, the articulation of leftist goals must resonate with people in concrete ways, so that it becomes obvious how the achievement of those goals would improve their day-to-day lives. The left, in this sense, must appeal to people’s existing identities and not condescend the general public as victims of “false consciousness.” All this means building movements of continual improvement and refusing to ask already-vulnerable people for short-term losses on the abstract promise of long-term gains. This project also demands that we understand precisely why right-wing ideology retains a popular appeal in so many spaces.[9]
A pedagogy of resistance must be on the side of hope and civic courage in order to fight against a paralyzing indifference, grave social injustices, and mind deadening attacks on the public imagination. At stake here is the struggle for a new world based on the notion that capitalism and democracy are not the same, and that we need to understand the world, how we think about it and how it functions, in order to change it. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr’s call for a more comprehensive view of oppression and political struggle, it is crucial to address his call to radically interrelate and restructure consciousness, values, and society itself. In this instance, King and other theorists such as Saskia Sassen call for a language that ideologically ruptures and changes the nature of the debate about democracy, education, politics, hope, and social justice. We live in an era in which the distinction between the truth and misinformation is under attack. Ignorance has become a virtue, and education has become a tool of repression that elevates self-interest and privatization to central organizing principles of both economics and politics. The socio-historical conditions that enable racism, systemic inequality, anti-intellectualism, mass incarceration, the war on youth, poverty, state violence, and domestic terrorism must be remembered in the fight against that which now parades as ideologically normal. Historical memory and the demands of moral witnessing must become part of a deep grammar of political and pedagogical resistance in the fight against neoliberal capitalism and its updated forms of fascism.
Central to any viable notion of pedagogical resistance is the courage to think about what kind of world we want—what kind of future we want to build for our children. These are questions that can only be addressed when address politics and capitalism as part of a general crisis of democracy. This challenge demands the willingness to develop an anti-capitalist consciousness as the basis for a call to action, one willing to dismantle the present structure of neoliberal capitalism. Chantal Mouffe is right in arguing that “before being able to radicalize democracy, it is first necessary to recover it,” which means first rejecting the commonsense assumptions that capitalism and democracy are synonymous.[10]
[11] There is ample evidence of such solidarity in the policies advocated by the progressive Black Lives Matter protest, the call for green socialism, movements for health as a global right, growing resistance against police violence, emerging ecological movements such as the youth-based Sunrise movement, the Poor People’s Campaign, the massive ongoing strikes waged by students and teachers against the defunding and corporatizing of public education, and the call for resistance from women across the globe fighting for reproductive rights.
What must be resisted at all costs, is an “apartheid pedagogy,” rooted in the notion that a particular mode of oppression, and those who bear its weight, offers political guarantees.[12] Identifying different modes of oppression is important, but it is only the first step in moving from addressing the history and existing mechanisms that produce such trauma to developing and embracing a politics that unites different identities, individuals, and social movements under the larger banner of democratic socialism. This is a politics that refuses the easy appeals of ideological silos which “limits access to the world of ideas and contracts the range of tools available to would-be activists.”[13]
The urgency of the historical moment demands new visions of social change, an inspired and energized sense of social hope, and the necessity for diverse social movements to unite under the collective struggle for democratic socialism. The debilitating political pessimism of neoliberal gangster capitalism must be challenged as a starting point for believing that rather than being exhausted, the future along with history is open and now is the time to act. It is time to make possible what has for tool long been declared as impossible.
NOTES: [1] George Sanchez and Beth English, “OAH Statement on White House Conference on American History,” Organization of American History (September 2020). Online.
[2] Antonio Planas. “New Florida standards teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills,” NBC News (July 20, 2023). Online:
[3] Isis Davis-Marks, “The Little-Known Story of America’s Deadliest Election Day Massacre,” Smithsonian Magazine (November 13, 2020). Online:
[4]
History.com editors, “Tulsa Race Massacre,” History (May 31, 2023).
[5] This issue is taken up brilliantly by Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).
[6] Michelle Goldberg, “The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness,” New York Times. (February 26, 2021).
[7] Volker Weiss, “afterword,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (London: Polity, 2020), p. 61.
[8] See Robert Latham, A. T. Kingsmith, Julian von Bargen and Niko Block, eds Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left—Recasting Leftist Imagination (Winnipeg, Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2020).
[9] Nico Block, “Augmenting the Left: Challenging the Right, Reimagining Transformation,” Socialist Project: the Bullet (August 31, 2020).
[10] Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism, [London: Verso, 2018], p. 37.
[11] Institute for Critical Social Analysis, “A Window of Opportunity for Leftist Politics?” Socialist Project: the Bullet (August 3, 2020).
[12] I have taken the notion of “apartheid pedagogy” from Adam Shatz, “Palestinianism” London Review of Books (43:9 (May 6, 2021), p. 28.
[13] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response,” Boston Review, (March 7, 2016).
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
TAGS: RacismfascismRonDesantiswhitesupremacydesantis
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, 2nd edition (Haymarket Books 2020); and Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021), Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022). His latest book is Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-revolutionary politics (Bloomsbury in 2023). His website is
www.henryagiroux.comIMAGE: Cagle Cartoon: Dave Granlund
