Turn to today’s entries, and you will see black ink spiderwebbing the face of my bullet journal pages like the netting of a Victorian widow’s mourning veil. Which is what it is, I suppose, since I chose black ink for my #trumpocalypse posts in the first place precisely because it helps express the grief that I feel every day.
In this morning’s news, over an unfinished, stone cold pot of coffee, I read Kimberlé Crenshaw’s take (Crenshaw & Stanley, 2026) on Lonnie Bunch’s impending “retirement”.1
(That is not a typo. Nor is it meant to be disrespectful although it is, fortuitously, absolutely that. I have simply, for nearly ten years now, been unable to speak his name.)
She wrote:
In Mein Kampf, Hitler criticizes the historical education of Weimar democracy as failing to provide “a real national enthusiasm”. In its place, Hitler calls for history to be replaced by a system of education that makes “the really significant men of our people appear as outstanding heroes in the eyes of the present, to concentrate the general attention upon them, and thus create a unified mood.” The education under Weimar, Hitler complains, was “not able to raise what was glorious for the nation… above the level of objective presentation, and fire the national pride by such gleaming examples.”
(This is pretty nearly the same wording Rump has used in his various Executive Orders on history, museums, parks, and education in general, but as Molly Ivins once quipped, it “probably sounded better in the original German (Engel, 2019)” and so I thought I’d reproduce der Führer’s own words for you here.)
It’s no surprise that this is how Rump thinks, as Mein Kampf is probably the only book he’s ever read cover to cover–if indeed he has managed to finish it. (It is my understanding–I think it was his niece, Mary, the psychologist, who said so once–that it was on his bedside table for years.) As for the rest of MAGA, that’s precisely the kind of education we all had growing up, just until recently in fact, and I can see why some white male conservatives would want to go back to it. It privileges them.
Understatement of the year.
But as Crenshaw and Stanley remind us, that kind of education came about right after the Civil War and as W.E.B. DuBois noted (Crenshaw & Stanley, 2026), it was just as deliberate, just as calculated, had the same aims (roll back Reconstruction then, our civil rights now), and we’ve all seen the awful result. It took almost a century to even begin to try to root out all the untruths and uncover what was buried under the crap and in the meantime it did a metric shit-ton of harm. It supported racism in every form: interpersonal, legislative, social, medical, financial, you name it. The deliberate choice to remain ignorant oneself and keep everyone else ignorant as well was its foundation. And it kept its victims feeling bad about themselves and each other, and despairing of change, bereft of hope.
And yeah, I cuss. I am so angry.
Anyway. Seen in this light, the word “really” in the passage from Mein Kampf is doing a lot of work here. That dog whistle today would translate to ‘not Black’, or ‘not female’ and certainly ‘not LGBTQQI’ — and indeed we’ve seen this administration already trying to wipe Black and female and gay Americans from history on, for example, the military’s various historical websites and institutional walls and walks of honor. It’s the battle they were waging against Bunch that apparently has finally worn him down. (In their ignorance, the DOGE kids even tried to take down a photo of the Enola Gay, an airplane, FFS, named after the pilot’s sweetheart.)
But I digress.
That is not what teaching is for — not in history, and not in psychology. That’s Goebbels-level propaganda, is what that is, and they know it. And that’s why, setting aside the rampant cheating/onslaught of AI, which was fast sucking all the joy out of teaching, and the age factor, my days in the classroom were numbered anyhow because no way would I do any such thing. I personally have gotten pushback for teaching Buddhist psychology, one complaint about my ‘woke’ praxis made it all the way up to Betsy DeVos’s desk, and we’re all under pressure not to talk about sex and gender in a way that accurately reflects the massive body of research on it that’s accumulated over the past 80+ years. In Florida, for example, the entire Sex and Gender chapter was removed from the same textbook that I taught before it was distributed to their AP Psychology students. One of my favorite chapters, it featured a tasteful nude photograph of Prince on the first page and another whole page towards the end from the American Psychological Association’s tips on how to support your transgendered friends and family members. And even today, three months into retirement, I worry about what [insert anybody on campus here] will think about what I’m writing and whether it will get me into what kind of trouble. The pressure to self-censor is just that relentless. Then I thought, What are they gonna do? Fire you? and decided to just let ‘er rip.
We who work so hard to see life as it is and to teach it honestly out of the utmost respect and love for our professions and our students are accused now of “indoctrination” when it is they who want–and have in fact already begun–to indoctrinate.
It is only going to get worse.
References
Crenshaw, K., & Stanley, J. (2026, September 11). The Smithsonian chief’s exit is a blow to democracy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/11/smithsonian-chief-exit-trump
Engel, J. (Director). (2019). Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins [Documentary]. Netflix.
Can we talk?
How were you educated? Do you believe you were lied to? How did you feel about that when you figured it out? When and how did you start learning the truth? What do you do to continue correcting the record for yourself and others?
For me, it was exactly as Hitler described. U.S. history was white history, and it was all about the menz, but it got you loving everything about America, unquestioningly. And it hid a lot of ugliness. I was raised in the South, where “the really significant men of our people” were General Lee (the man, not the car) and Jeb Stewart (girls actually crushed on him in my day). At 74, I’m still discovering things that women and non-white men did that were cool.
But then we were blessed with Mrs. Joyner, this tiny, sick-pregnant, amazingly-brave-for-the-time-and-place high school English teacher, armed with nothing more than a B.A. and a lot of heart, who designed and taught an African-American lit course as an elective one year, and reading people like Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin literally woke me up to the world. And not just me: I came home from school one day that semester to find my mother, raised by a Klansman and steeped in Lost Cause mythology growing up, curled up on the couch with a gin and tonic and my copy of Soul on Ice. Half a century later, I’m still reading and trying to learn.
My 45-year-old son’s education was not much different, so I spent a lot of time sharing what I had learned, and still do with others–just like I am right now, here.
Next up: Happiness in teaching (or any other pursuit) in spite of it all.
Subscribe here to receive a notification when it drops:
And if you thought this was interesting, if it got you thinking, or if you are enjoying the discussion (assuming we can get one going LOL because online that’s like pulling teeth), please… buy me a coffee!
- For those of you who don’t know, Lonnie Bunch is a historian of some note and Director of the Smithsonian. ↩︎
Leave a Reply