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since ago For more than a year, Donald Trump has broken through one of his own discursive barriers. All in order to seek the largest number of votes for the elections next November. Now it was the turn of one of the most explosive sections of his own electorate: the current vicissitudes of the black population. If his rhetoric against migration seeks to gather the anger unleashed by the high rates of unemployment and impoverishment among those over 45 years old, by placing the emblem of the Mexican at its center he seeks to heat up the engines of racial discord. Migration and ethnicity thus become scapegoats for a social and economic crisis that seems to have no end. However, until now Trump had refrained from taking this officialization of segregation to references that alluded to the African-American world. Finally, in 2016, 8 percent of his voters and in 2020, 12 percent, gave him their support. In close elections, the number can be decisive.
This barrier appears to have been lifted. The campaign speech he gave in South Carolina in December 2023 leaves little doubt about this. These were his words: “Banish the critical race theory “The elimination of our schools is not just a matter of values, it is a priority for national survival. We have no choice. And we will proceed.”
Until now, in the political world, no one had given such publicity to this philosophy of praxis conceived by TW Adorno and Max Horkheimer towards the end of the 1940s, whose dissemination among American intellectual circles seems to be an irreversible phenomenon. In other words, for the first time critical theory is actually entering the social fabric where hegemonic languages are configured. Not even Marcuse would have imagined this.
As early as March 2023, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis paved the way for a crusade to banish this vision of society from primary and secondary education spaces. Several laws were passed in the local Congress to start the campaign for the ideological cleansing
(ideological cleansing). The use of the words “ideological cleansing” was expressly prohibited. slavery
and black
in classrooms and 180 history and civics titles were removed from school libraries across the state.
DeSantis’ argument delves into a current (and essential) problem in the writing of history: the complex and conflictive relationship between history, guilt and responsibility. In his speech before Congress, the governor of Florida appealed to the need to Strengthening parental rights
. Teaching should be dedicated to offering a good education
and not to political indoctrination
. By prohibiting the use of the terms of slavery
and black” would protect the children of all races from an education that does not turn them into perpetual victims
. And with that the people were freed. white children
from the feeling that they are inherently racist
.
HB 1467 requires that all classroom materials must display the state’s official seal. In addition, teachers who violate the law could face up to five years in prison. Who is to police and prosecute teachers for using the now subversive terms? Obviously, the children’s parents.
The first question the Florida Teachers Association asked itself was how then to teach American history without the concepts of slavery
, race
and blackness
How to explain the Civil War?, the Jim Crow laws?, the Ku Klux Klan?, the fight for civil rights in the 1960s?
But what is critical race theory? Cornell West, one of the greatest American intellectuals and philosophers, as well as its main architect, explains it in a simple way. Society is always viewed from different theories. Critical theory is the theory that adopts the perspective of those who have suffered and endured discrimination, exclusion and violence. Whether it be blacks, Mexicans, gender diversity, women, the disabled. It represents a narrative about historical responsibility.
. Every social theory, obviously, begins with a theory about the observation of society. West agrees with the reflections of Judith Butler, who has understood this form of observation from another angle of exclusion: that of gender diversity.
The attacks on critical theory are aimed at more than just votes from the conservative world. If it is a vision that legitimizes individual rights – such as gender rights – on the premise of the emancipation of bodies, its main effect covers a universal domain: the erosion of the foundations of the traditional family. Or, if you will, it advances a concept of a community of coexistence that affects the very foundations that sustain the validity of that traditional organism. These foundations are none other than those that sustain the State itself. There is no State without the concept of family, and it bases the roots of its domination on it.
Amazing. Critical theory has found the languages capable of piercing the most sensitive fibers of the hegemony of capital, both in the sphere of work and in that of the sovereignty of individuals. Honor to the thinkers who have created it.
