VIRGINIA 2022 HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE STANDARDS OF LEARNING

“Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.”

—James Baldwin

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"Also, there have been uproars in Georgia, Utah, and Virginia that are similar to this one in Tennessee. Can we expect groups like Moms for Liberty and other organizations to revive Lost Cause ideologies once promoted by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the near future? Is it just a matter of time before they have a counter-campaign to the removal of the Confederate monuments, starting, Heaven forbid, with the removal of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial?"

Native American Heritage Month runs from November 1st to November 30th, with Native American Heritage Day being observed the day after Thanksgiving. As part of both commemorations, it has been advised that public elementary and secondary schools should provide classroom instruction focusing on Indigenous Americans' achievements, contributions, and history. After being  released on November 11th, on a very poignant November 17th during the business agenda session of the Virginia Board of Education, the Virginia Board of Education Proposed Revised 2022 History and Social Science Standards of Learning and Guiding Principles were vigorously debated, having been reduced from 402 pages to 53 since the August 17th meeting earlier this year. They were voted on and tabled until 2023.

Indigenous people in the Americas were reduced to "America's first 'immigrants' from Asia." The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was excluded. Lessons on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Juneteenth were limited to grades 6 and higher, meaning that there is a distinct possibility that some of our youngest Virginians might spend much of their early childhood celebrating these respective holidays without really understanding their true meaning, if they are ever allowed to celebrate them at all.  This forms a habit and a mindset that may lead them to believe that these things, as well as others like Meroë & Kush, Kemet, Al-Andalus, the Tang Dynasty, the Mayans, Aksum, and the Empire of Mali, are not as important to them and simply do not matter as much as ancient Greece and Rome.

As this bleak world view takes hold in a new generation, we find another point on the through-line of systemic racism as we come to know it. There is an even greater swelling of the ranks as the campaign to further divide America progresses. This is education as intellectual warfare against cultural imperialism and a romanticized, national anti-intellectualism, where teachers quit themselves as foot soldiers armed with curricula, gaining ground in the battle-space of a child's mind.