Those concepts seem so simple — and yet they are made complicated based on who gets to define them. And in the United States, those definitions are usually and overwhelmingly written by people in power who want to keep their power. So seemingly simple questions become complicated, like: What defines “life”? What does true “liberty” look like in practice? Is it okay if happiness for me is different than happiness for you?
So many of the themes of this new season of “United Shades” take on those questions, but none of the episodes confront it more directly than this Sunday’s premiere: “The Woke War.” It takes place in one of America’s newest and most surprising battleground states, Arizona. And in Arizona they take the “battle” part of the battleground very seriously. Don’t go to a school board meeting without a flak jacket and your head on a swivel. I’m kidding…mostly.
Knowing all that, it makes sense that Arizona, like much of the country, is in a frenzy over “woke” in all of its forms.
In an interview we did in 2019 for “United Shades,” CUNY professor Syreeta McFadden and I even declared “woke” dead because of all this. But that scene got deleted. Maybe if we had included it, we might not be in this mess right now. Maybe this is all my fault.
While fear of “woke” is the battering ram to get our attention, the GOP’s real plan is to remake public education in their own overwhelmingly White image. And they found the perfect way to do it: smart Black people and their smart ideas. You know it. You love it! (Or maybe you hate it.) Critical Race Theory, aka CRT. But before we get into all that, I have a question that I asked many people the week I was in Arizona.
Do you believe that our schools should teach an accurate and age-appropriate history of the United States of America?
I hope the answer is “Yes.” If it isn’t, then we have a problem. Isn’t that why we teach history? So we can learn from it? If it isn’t accurate, then the learning ceases to happen.
But most importantly, I talked to some students. These were LGBTQ+ high school students who are feeling the effects of all this nonsense. But it isn’t nonsense to them. Unsurprisingly, schools that won’t teach an accurate history of America are also not places that encourage their LGBTQ+ students. Much like the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, if we let our public schools teach an inaccurate history of this country, they are sure to use that to also leave out teaching about lots of other things, including the LGBTQ+ community, religions other than Christianity and Black people not named Martin Luther King, Jr.
I hate to say it, but this “woke war” is a symbol of so much more. Remember those PSAs that said “The more you know” and had a fun jingle? That’s all “woke” is. It’s the more you know. The more you know the better you’re able to maneuver through this life and understand that the world is not all about you. And when politicians, and the media, and bad actors, and Elon Musk and the Muskettes, and Tucker Carlson and the mother tuckers use the word “woke,” they are just trying to distract us from the fact that this country is on fire. And the only way we’re going to put it out is if we learn how the fire started.
But the more we learn about the fires, the real ones, the metaphorical ones, the historical ones, the better able we are to put the fires out. Don’t let people use kids as the shield. This is not about the children! When people say, “think of the children,” I say, “Yeah, I am thinking of the children. My children. And I want them to learn all about this country. I want them to learn about slavery, algebra, January 6, Frank Sinatra, great trans folk in history, Janelle Monae, the pet rock, the war in Ukraine, science and much, much more. You want your kids to learn much, much less? Ugh, I feel bad for you. Why would you raise kids like that?”
See you on Sunday!
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