They crush our song for a reason: How the ruling class snuffs out the individual spirit

[cbabe]

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/why-they-crush-our-song/

They crush our song for a reason: How the ruling class snuffs out the individual spirit

Chris Hedges and ScheerPost October 17, 2022

…

It is your song, your voice, your history, Walker tells him, which gives you your identity and your freedom. And your song, Walker tells him, is what the white ruling class seeks to eradicate.

This denial of one’s song is instrumental to bondage. Black illiteracy was essential to white domination of the South. It was a criminal offense to teach enslaved people to read and write.

…

The poor, especially poor people of color , remain rigidly segregated within educational systems. The backlash against critical race theory (CRT), explorations of LGBTQ+ identities and the banning of books by historians such as Howard Zinn and writers such as Toni Morrison, are extensions of this attempt to deny the oppressed their song.

PEN America reports that proposed educational gag orders have increased 250 percent compared with those issued in 2021. Teachers and professors who violate these gag orders can be subject to fines, loss of state funding for their institutions, termination and even criminal charges. Ellen Schrecker, the leading historian of the McCarthy era’s widespread purging of the U.S. education system, calls these gag bills “worse than McCarthyism.”

…

The more social inequality grows, the more the ruling class seeks to keep the bulk of the population within the narrow confines of the American myth: the fantasy that we live in a democratic meritocracy and are a beacon of liberty and enlightenment to the rest of the world. Their goal is to keep the underclass illiterate, or barely literate, and feed them the junk food of mass culture and the virtues of white supremacy, including the deification of the white male slaveholders who founded this country.

When books that give a voice to oppressed groups are banned, it adds to the sense of shame and unworthiness the dominant culture seeks to impart, especially toward marginalized children. At the same time, bans mask the crimes carried out by the ruling class. The ruling class does not want us to know who we are. It does not want us to know of the struggles carried out by those who came before us, struggles that saw many people blacklisted, incarcerated, injured and killed to open democratic space and achieve basic civil liberties from the right to vote to union organizing. They know that the less we know about what has been done to us, the more malleable we become. If we are kept ignorant of what is happening beyond the narrow confines of our communities and trapped in an eternal present, if we lack access to our own history, let alone that of other societies and cultures, we are less able to critique and understand our own society and culture.

W.E.B. Du Bois argued that white society feared educated Blacks far more than they feared Black criminals.

“They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can, but the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man,” he wrote.

…

Those, like Du Bois, who was blacklisted and driven into exile, who pull the veil from our eyes are especially targeted by the state. Rosa Luxemberg. Eugene V. Debs. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King. Noam Chomsky. Ralph Nader. Cornel West. Julian Assange. Alice Walker. They speak a truth the powerful and the rich do not want heard. They, like Bynum, help us find our song.

In the U.S., 21 percent of adults are illiterate and a staggering 54 percent have a literacy level below sixth grade. These numbers jump dramatically in the U.S. prison system, the largest in the world with an estimated 20 percent of the globe’s prison population, although we are less than five percent of the global population. In prison, 70 percent percent of inmates cannot read above a fourth-grade level, leaving them able to work at only the lowest paying and most menial jobs upon their release.

…

Education should be subversive. It should give us the intellectual tools and vocabulary to question the reigning ideas and structures that buttress the powerful. It should make us autonomous and independent beings, capable of making our own judgments, capable of understanding and defying the “cultural hegemony,” to quote Antonio Gramsci, that keeps us in bondage. In Wilson’s play, Bynum teaches Loomis how to discover his song, and once Loomis finds his song, he is free.

[Irish_Dem]

1. "In the U.S., 21 percent of adults are illiterate and 54% have a literacy rate below 6th grade."

Democracy depends upon an educated public.

This is how MAGAs install fascist rule.

[brer cat]

2. And also why we can't have rational conversations with MAGAs.

[Kid Berwyn]

8. The Sweet Smell of Excess

[standhero]

3. Black Klansman -Willmott

I have worked with Kevin Willmott- 'Chiraq' 'CSA' 'Black Klansman' and 'The Only Good Indian for over 30 years. Kevins voice and activism has gained the attention of the world in the last 8 years and we are proud of his voice and insight as he addresses the profound insights of the above 'post'.

[dlk]

4. This is one important reason why strong public schools are a foundation of our democracy

And why Republicans have worked tirelessly against them for decades.

[markodochartaigh]

5. Ignorance and apathy are the Achilles' heels of democracy.

Ignorance and apathy are the Achilles' heels of democracy.

[dlk]

7. Yes and in America, non-voters are the largest group

We need to do a better job of making voting an obligation. Of course removing many of the Republican-enacted obstacles to voting would be a good start. As a minority party, low voter turnout works in their favor.

[Igel]

6. Ever consider consider states Gini coefficients?

It's not always as predicted a priori.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income_inequality

PR I understand. It fits predictions.