To Understand What the Republican Trigger Warning Means ...
Substitute a Single Letter for "Tr"
Make no mistake, the Republican strategy in the Virginia election and across the country is entirely about tapping into deep-seated racial fears among white voters. The only thing they have to sell is the sort of “fear itself” to which Franklin D. Roosevelt referred in 1933. FDR said that the great danger was “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” While the terror that Republicans are attempting to spread today is unreasoning and unjustified, it is certainly not nameless.
Beneath their attempt to seize power by mocking “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” “wokeness,” and “snowflakes” who want “trigger warnings” because they are too delicate to endure “microaggressions” is their own version of a warning designed to trigger latent racism.
The focus of Glenn Youngkin’s campaign to become Virginia’s governor has come to be on what is taught in schools. His leading applause line is his call to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” in Virginia’s schools. It is, as the Post editors detailed in September, an entirely bogus argument. The concept is not taught in K-12 schools in Virginia or anywhere else. It is the very definition of a “bogeyman”—a story about a terrifying creature (traditionally, often a black man) who will come and get you. It is a patent attempt to spread terror among white parents.
It is of a piece with Republicans’ all-out efforts to whitewash the American past by returning to the days before the early 1960s when the nation’s history was portrayed in terms of how the West was won, with no consideration of the people who were losing it, the existence of slavery was mentioned, but then the “peculiar institution” was abolished and apparently all black people apart from Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver vanished from the American story.
The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature has enacted a law, of course called the “Critical Race Theory bill,” that stipulates what must be taught and what may not be taught in social studies in the state’s schools. Among the topics eliminated from previous standards are ““the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong” and “the history and importance of the civil rights movement.” The new law also omits teaching about the history of Native Americans, the Chicano and labor movements, and the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.
In 1964, topical songwriter and folksinger Tom Paxton recorded a song, “What Did You Learn in School Today?” It is a biting satirical attack on the misinformation that was then being taught about the American past. The son in the song responds to his father’s question by saying he learned that everyone in the United States is free, our country is always right and just, the police are always our friends, the wars America fights are always good, and so on. Paxton’s lyrics seem tailormade for the “guilt-free” mythology that Republicans today are imposing on school curricula and calling it “history.”
Indeed, the whole Republican agenda is about repealing the progressive accomplishments made in 1964 and ensuing years and return the nation to the days when America was “great”—albeit not so much for those with darker complexions or a second x-chromosome. Their motto is essentially that of the party that ran on racism in 1868, the Democrats: “This Is a White Man’s Country: Let White Men Rule.”
The Youngkin campaign has made its message unmistakable by closing its argument with an ad featuring a white mother who wants to cancel Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved in order to protect her snowflake son from learning about the horrors of slavery. While ridiculing those who complain about “microaggressions,” the Republicans want to shield high schoolers from the learning of the macro-aggressions inflicted on enslaved women by rapist enslavers.
It is time to speak the obvious truth: The now ubiquitous Republican version of a trigger warning replaces the first two letters of trigger with a single letter, the one between “M” and “O.”
{Millsaps College historian Robert S. McElvaine is the author of ten books. His latest, “The Times They Were a-Changin’ – 1964: The Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn,” will be published by Arcade in May.}