Rejecting Brain-Dead Neutrality and Censorship
As I mentioned last week, this upcoming Sunday will be the first anniversary of Takes & Typos. I am planning to publish a reader mailbag to mark the occasion. If you have questions or thoughts about this or any of the prior newsletters, feel free to throw them my way.
This week’s newsletter is a Palestine-adjacent piece that I’ve been kicking around in my head for the last month as I’ve watched the ongoing assault on Gaza.
As readers know, I work at an embassy school in the Arabian Gulf. The majority of the students (according to school by-laws) are US citizens but there are over fifty nationalities represented in the student body. My school was on fall break when the Hamas attack occurred on October 7th. After the break, as we prepared for the return to school the bombs had been dropping on Gaza for nearly a week and the death toll of Palestinian civilians already exceeded the number of Israeli citizens who were killed by Hamas.
Our school serves many Palestinian families who have been in the Gulf for decades and, thanks to the Abraham Accords, a smattering of Israeli students have joined the school community. In the lead-up to our return to school, there was much conversation among faculty in group chats and email threads about how to approach events.
That weekend, I made a brief note for each of my classes that said something along the lines of “I support the rights of the people from both nations to be free and safe in independent states. I also desire for both peoples to have full sovereignty, recognition, and self-determination over their affairs.” I closed with “I affirm the humanity of both Israeli and Palestinian people and all students—regardless of nationality are welcome and will be cared for in my classroom.”
Nothing in my note was controversial in the room but I know many people, particularly in the US would have found it objectionable or overly political. But they’re mistaken. There’s nothing political about saying people have the right to safety and self-determination.
I think the distinction between moral and political is (intentionally) blurred in our popular discourse. I would describe politics as “the debates regarding governing and efforts to push lawmakers (or the public) to implement policy.” Conversely, I would describe morality as “the broad principles we believe in, live by, and that help society congeal.” I don’t preach my politics in class but we do talk about moral thinking and choices.
For too many people politics or political just means “stuff I don't like” or “stuff I don't want to see.” Speech they like isn’t political and must be celebrated and affirmed by society. But the stuff they don’t agree with is an affront and gots to go. I reckon we saw this most clearly during the Colin Kaepernick affair. People who loudly applauded the playing of the US national anthem before professional sporting events, a uniquely American tradition, decried Kaepernick's “politicization” of their beloved sport. In their parsing, the national anthem, flyovers from US military aircraft, and US flag patches on uniforms did not count as political. They demanded, unironically, fealty to mandatory displays of patriotism in the name of keeping sports “apolitical.”
This foolishness has now crept into the mainstream of US politics and is playing out in efforts to silence teachers and students in schools. After a decade-long moral panic on the political right over freedom of speech on campus, we are awash in conservative calls for book bans. This week we saw student groups supportive of Palestinian independence suspended at Columbia University. Also this week, we saw a forced recasting of a high school play in Texas because of the gender-identity of a lead actor. These are just a few of the dozens of attempts being made to censor educators and those they educate in the name of “keeping politics out of school.”
When I learned about McCarthyism in US History, the gist of the lesson was that this was a period of collective madness that we’ve moved beyond and are ashamed of. However, as an adult, I am watching wide swaths of the population who see McCarthy’s abuses of power and witch hunts as a blueprint. They don’t want schooling to be less political. They want to use the mechanisms of the state to silence speech they don’t like.
For our youngest readers, here’s a quick lesson on Senator Joe McCarthy.
I am not calling for teachers to use their classrooms as soapboxes to preach their politics. I had teachers do that to me and I deeply resented them for it. At the same time, we must protect academic freedom and the ability of educators to help students contextualize what’s happening in the world and the moral questions of our time.
If I were a teacher (and free) in the antebellum period, I would like to think I would have talked about abolition, not because of politics, but because all people deserve to be born free. If I was a teacher in 1942, I hope I would have had the courage to support welcoming Jewish refugees from Europe, rather than turning them away (as the US did).
We ask a lot from classroom teachers and academics. We ask them to guide students, as emerging intellectuals through the process of learning. We also ask them to assess copious student artifacts of learning, providing constructive feedback to further their understanding. We further ask them to serve as emotional counselors when their students are in distress. We ask them to build a curriculum that is engaging and offers points of entry for diverse communities of learners. We often ask them to serve as emotional first responders when the worst happens. To be an educator is to wear many hats—we all knew that going into the profession. But now factions of society want us to also wear gags and Habibi, let me tell you, I didn’t go into teaching—the process of molding the minds of the next generation—to remain silent on the great moral issues of our time.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share Takes & Typos with their friends.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.