BY JENNIFER RUTH

“Where woke goes to die.” Let’s call this phrase what it is: fascist propaganda. In “The Collapse of Radical Reconstruction,” the first episode of Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s podcast “History is Us,” Le Moyne College professor Douglas Egerton says, “Reconstruction did not fail. Reconstruction was killed.” What does “where woke goes to die” mean if not DeSantis’s intent to kill what UT Austin professor Peniel E. Joseph calls “The Third Reconstruction?” and what Glaude, in this Atlantic piece, calls a potential “third founding”?

This is what killing looked like on December 28th:

Attempting to ground authority for his order in sections of the Florida Statutes that call for, as the memorandum vaguely states, “dutiful attention to curriculum content at our higher education systems,” the Florida Governor requires a dollar amount that he likely will claim as within his purview to subtract from the state’s books—“the total spent to support [programs or activity related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory], the amount that is state funded.”  So: the defunding of classes and programs on critical race theory and racial justice. So: a targeted attack on race, a topic indivisible from the study of American history and society. So: a targeted attack on the academic freedom that higher education requires if it is not to be forcibly deformed into an instrument of raw political power. Unlike totalitarian, authoritarian, and fascist states, two-party and multi-party democracies have generally respected—or at least professed to understand—the need for higher education to maintain a significant degree of autonomy from partisan politics.

How is DeSantis’s memorandum not patently consistent with what Goldsmiths lecturer Alberto Toscano calls “the long shadow of racial fascism”? “Attending to the long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance—to what Cedric Robinson called a ‘Black construction of fascism’ alternative to the ‘historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist’—could serve to dislodge the debate about fascism from the deadlock of analogy, providing the resources to confront our volatile interregnum,” Toscano wrote in Boston Review in October 2020. For more on the memorandum, please see the following stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Florida Governor Asked All Public Universities For Spending Data on Diversity and Critical Race Theory” and “A Florida University is Quickly Assembling a List of Courses on Diversity. Why? DeSantis Asked.” For an excellent piece in Pro Publica exploring the ramifications of state-sponsored censorship in Florida, see ““Muzzled by DeSantis, Critical Race Theory Professors Cancel Courses or Modify Their Teaching.”

If some of us were hopeful that the midterm elections indicated that the tide had perhaps turned on the ugly white patriarchal backlash to movements pursuing racial and social justice, we’d be wise to listen to UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley, who told Boston Review editor Deborah Chasman, that the relative good news of the midterms “was not the result of a sudden, rapid diminishing support for emergent fascism or some wholesale abandonment of Trumpist ideas (which, by the way, are not really Trump’s but have circulated for decades).” “There was,” Kelley points out, “a red wave of a kind, but it resembled the ‘red shirts’ of the post-Reconstruction South—the white supremacist organization that used terror to keep Black people and all Republicans from the polls to ensure Democratic victories.”

The blog’s previous post issued University of Oregon professors and faculty editors Michael Dreiling and Pedro García-Caro’s call for submissions to volume 14 of the Journal of Academic Freedom. If you haven’t already, please take some time to read the recently published volume 13. One of the strongest volumes in JAF‘s thirteen-year history, it consists of thirteen excellent essays that cover, in different ways, the state-driven campaigns to restrict teaching on critical race theory and racial and social justice. Dreiling and García-Caro write in the editors’ introduction “Memory Laws or Gag Laws? Disinformation Meets Academic Freedom”:

The contributors to this volume offered a chilling panorama of the ongoing struggle between legitimate scholarship and nostalgic propaganda—between informed discourse seeking to enlighten and expand knowledge about past and present and dogmatic censorship. This escalating onslaught against academic freedom ironically confirms in prime time the arguments against the exceptionalist reading of the United States as a unique experiment with freedom, or as an alleged libertarian utopia immune to tyranny and authoritarianism.

See, or rather hear, also Louisiana State University professor and associate dean Lori Latrice Martin discuss her essay in the volume, “Black Out: Backlash and Betrayal in the Academy and Beyond,” on episode 10 of the AAUP podcast AAUP Presents.

Finally, for the necessary background and context with which to understand why the DeSantis memorandum is best read not as a simple request for information but as a fascist forewarning of state-sponsored censorship, see Whitman College professor Timothy V. Kaufmann-Osborn’s two-part series in the blog, “Neo-Fascism, Florida Style– Part I” and “Neo-Fascism, Florida Style, Part II” as well as his more recent post “Who Rules the Curriculum at Florida’s Universities?”

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (2022). 

Related post: “What Responsibility Do All Academics Have to Critical Race Theory?“