Shock Report Finds Democracy for Black Americans is Under Attack

The National Urban League says that some politicians are trying to limit what history is taught in schools and hurt how Black leaders do their jobs. This is one of the biggest dangers for Black Americans when it comes to democracy.

Marc Morial, who is the leader of a group that fights for civil rights and helps cities grow, noticed something bad in Tennessee recently. Two Black people were kicked out of a meeting because they stood up to demand better gun control after a school shooting that left six people dead in Nashville.

Morial said in an interview that it was wrong to censor and ignore Black history and this new issue continues with the same poisonous idea of suppressing people.

After there was a lot of loud complaining about it, both those Tennesee lawmakers who had been removed from their positions were put back into their jobs in the House.

The “State of Black America” report from the Urban League was released this past Saturday. Researchers have collected data and polled several organizations, like UCLA Law School and the Anti-Defamation League, to help them decide their findings. They saw an increase in hate crimes, efforts to change what is taught in schools, attempts to make voting harder and extremist views spreading through politics, military and law enforcement.

Critical Race Theory is a way of thinking studied by experts that began in the 1970s and 1980s. This theory thinks racism is built into our country’s systems, leaving white people with more power. Even after civil rights laws were made in the 1960s, there was still not enough change, so scholars created Critical Race Theory to help solve this problem.

Director Taifha Alexander said that UCLA Law School started up the Forward Tracking Project in answer to what happened after people protested due to George Floyd being killed in 2020, as well as an order from President Donald Trump (at that time) against diversity training.

Since September 2020, over 600 initiatives were taken by different parts of the government with the aim to fight against critical race theory. Alexander said this process is still an ongoing battle, with new targets being attacked all the time.

She mentioned that changing some laws which stop people from talking about certain racial conflicts can cause big gaps in understanding history and social justice. Alexander also said that this anti-CRT campaign will make it difficult for us to accomplish our goal of becoming a multiracial democracy, because future leaders won’t have all the necessary information needed to tackle these problems.

She said there was an example of this in Florida. The materials that some elementary schools teach about Rosa Parks and why she didn’t give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus back in 1955. In one version of the rewriting, they removed all mention of race. This change was reported by The New York Times.

It’s not just Florida where these changes are happening – it is happening in many other places too.

In Florida, similar events have happened and the governor said they will keep happening. This means other states will do the same thing too.

This past week, a plan to stop teaching “controversial topics” was approved in Alabama. Last year, the state of Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin (a Republican) got rid of content about diversity and equality because he felt it caused conflict between people.

In 2021, Oklahoma’s Governor Kevin Stitt made it illegal for public school teachers to talk about certain topics about race and racism. In Texas, the Llano County Commissioners had a special meeting recently to decide if they should shut down their entire public library system because of a judge’s order that said they must put back books about things like teenage sexuality and discrimination.

After hearing both support for and against the closing down, the committee members ruled to take it off their plans.

“It is trying to stop black people from getting to read books or talk about racism or learn their history or their AP classes,” Morial said. “It’s just trying to suppress black people.”

The report from his group also looked into topics like extremism in the police and military, energy, climate change, and how people’s opinion changes public policy. Some states like Missouri and Mississippi have ideas for giving more power to them instead of Black-majority cities.

This report shows us what many people have been thinking about in the past few years. It shows that our country is split on topics like what students learn about racism and sexuality in school, or whether the 2020 election was real.

Last year, when people voted in elections, 40% of them said that the public schools weren’t teaching enough about racism issues in America. 34% thought that it was already too much and 23% thought the amount was just right.

When it comes to race, two-thirds of Black voters said more should be taught while half of Latino voters and a third of white voters all wanted more information given on racism education.

The Urban League recently reported that violence is a big problem. This was after a really bad shooting happened in Buffalo, New York in 2022 where the person who did it left behind a letter mentioning something called “great replacement theory” as the reason they did it.

The FBI released data saying that hate crimes went up from 2020 to 2021 and African Americans were more effected by this than other people with 30% of cases involving them when bias was known.

The second largest group of people that were targeted in the single incident category were white people, making up 10%. Rachel Carroll Rivas from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project said that when they looked at all the activities including hate crimes, mean words and discrimination based on race, there is a big problem that affects Black Americans more than other races.

Julie Wright in Kansas City and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington both helped to write this story.