Betsy McCaughey Off the Rails Again

 

      Betsy McCaughey Off the Rails Again

    In a recent column in the local rag, the loathsome Betsy McCaughey leads with the following.: “Schools are becoming indoctrination factories, trying to turn children against their country and their own parents’ values. It's what the teachers’ unions intend. Amazingly, that's just fine with President Joe Biden.”

    Digging deeper into the article, it becomes soon obvious that the real complaint here is that teachers may not teach or reinforce their students’ parental biases and/or bigotry or might present factual materials to refute the Far-Right anti-revisionist history that says, in effect, that, “America has always done everything perfectly and nothing we ever did was detrimental to anybody else.” This is somewhat analogous to insisting that German schools ignore the Holocaust. America has had its own holocausts if you define holocaust as an attempt to either relegate an entire race or group to secondary status or even, in the most extreme cases, eliminate them.

    Ms. McCarthy proceeds to lambaste teachers’ unions, the President, Secretary of Education, and anybody else who believes America is a great country which could be an even better country if all our citizens were given the treatment the constitution supposedly guarantees them. When Ms. McCaughey says schools are trying to turn children against their country that is an incredibly misleading statement because what schools are actually doing, if they're teaching honest unbiased history, is discussing all things that have been done historically, not just the ones that support the Far-Right narrative.

    In my position as a teacher of Advanced Placement U.S. History that meant that we talked about the Tulsa race riots. We discussed the fact that even though the Constitution had been amended to attempt to protect the Black minority in the South, social Reconstruction was largely farcical, simply because the law was not enforced or simply just circumvented at the State level. That's not fiction and that's not revisionist history. That is data-based analysis of the situation. It is Ida Wells Barnett publishing every time somebody black was lynched in the South. it is the NAACP being formed as a reaction to the lack of constitutional protection being afforded to Black people in America.

    Now, if you're a bigot or white supremacist, you may very well not want your children to hear that. If you fear your children being told the truth and the whole truth about those less savory moments in our history, then you're the problem, not the victim. We talked about white soldiers coming home from World War One believing that their jobs, some of which were now being held by Black workers, should simply be given back to them and the Blacks should be fired. It means that, in 1920, Black people in Ocoee Florida died, or had their homes burned because they tried to vote. It means discussing Wounded Knee as what it was - an unwarranted attack on Native Americans and the absolute lack of any control of the armed US Army forces who fired upon them.

    One example I used is that of George Armstrong Custer who has been lionized on the silver screen by such actors as Errol Flynn in the movie “They Died with Their Boots On.” In that version of the Custer story or more correctly, the Custer myth, Custer's 7th cavalry was attacked for no apparent reason by a brutal horde of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors. The facts are categorically contradictory to that and every single reputable historian who has evaluated the situation acknowledges this. But don't tell that to the Far-Right. To understand the present and put it in proper context, it is crucial and absolutely necessary to understand the past. The Far-Right fears this in some degree.

    This has been a paradox in many historical contexts, one example and then we move on. The great famine in Ireland was a result of not only a crop failure, but prejudice against Catholic Irish by Protestant British who had simply been given control of land by royal grant. As some Southerners would say of Black people during reconstruction, British MPs were treated to such verbal pap as, “The Irish must learn to live within their means.” Of course, those “means” included lands which they were not allowed to farm for food because even in the face of starving Irish peasants, exports of food to Britain continued. Ireland continued to export large quantities of food, primarily to Great Britain, during the potato blight. In cases such as livestock and butter, exports actually increased during the Potato Famine.

     In 1847 alone, commodities such as peas, beans, rabbits, fish, and honey continued to be exported from Ireland, even as the Great Hunger ravaged the countryside. Some luckier Irish managed to immigrate to the USA.

     Now flash ahead to the 1900s. Many descendants of these abased and poorly treated Irish immigrants became, themselves, some of the most racist residents of northern cities. One reflects on poor whites being some of the most bigoted, Trump supporting, Americans today. Teaching critical race theory without calling it that is one way to at least address this paradox 

        Shining the light of truth on racial, sexual, or religious discrimination is not “Turning children against their own country.” It should, one hopes, help them to see that it could be better.

    Then, in a turn for the worse (if that’s even possible) Ms. McCaughey then says, “All children deserve kindness but that doesn't mean kindergarteners should be instructed in how boys can transition to become girls or vice versa.” She then says nearly half of teachers agree those issues don't belong in the classroom. There are two significant errors in her method again. The first is that no one with a brain has ever suggested kindergartners should be instructed and how to transition if they’re gender dysphoric. No public-school teacher who even suggested such a thing would lose their job soon after a parent called the principal. That is far different from teaching or even mentioning transitioning at the kindergarten level. It just doesn't happen, it hasn't happened, and no responsible teacher (not “almost half”) thinks it should happen but, using the dog whistle political type of rhetoric made popular by Richard Nixon, Ms. McCaughey throws it out there just like throwing feces at the wall, hoping that some will stick.

    She then states that the American Federation of Teachers website declares that “The U.S. is facing health, economic, and racial challenges all made worse because of Donald Trump. All are demonstrably true. She just tosses it into the conversation because she wishes the unwashed Red Hatters to somehow link an under-educated (couldn’t even get into Grad school) buffoon to real education issues. Go figure.

    Finally, she ends with a union-bashing quote which declares, as if it were the threat of nuclear destruction, that the American Federation of Teachers website urges visitors to “Take action on student debt, voting rights and passing the Equality Act.” For the uninformed, the Act prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in areas including public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury system. By implication, this seems as if Ms. McCaughey favors voter discrimination, predatory student debt lending and discrimination against some citizens for reasons which affect no one else. (And she probably does).

     I have to stop writing about Betsy McCaughey now, because my computer just threw up.