Move to ban The 1619 Project from SC classrooms will only harm future generations
It’s a truism that teenagers will do the opposite of what they’re told.
Imagine, then, teachers across the state telling high school students “the legislature thinks The 1619 Project is too dangerous for you.”
Students will fall all over themselves to get a hold of it.
In fact, book bans routinely — and spectacularly — fail to suppress books, instead turning them into major cultural events.
The same is happening with The 1619 Project, and advocates of H. 4343 (a bill before the South Carolina legislature ironically dubbed the “South Carolina Academic Integrity Act”) are undermining their own efforts by drawing a lot of public attention to what they’re hoping to bury.
There are good reasons to oppose H. 4343: it seeks to solve a nonexistent problem, it rests on outdated racial politics, and it politicizes our state’s schools, which already struggle to retain talented educators.
Lots of qualified people have made those arguments, but there’s another good reason to oppose the bill: it’s censorship.
No matter what you think of the underlying issues, free-thinking people of all political stripes should reject the bill because banning books and hiding from uncomfortable truths is detrimental to a thriving republic.
In 1957, the Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment is meant to protect “All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion.”
Thomas Jefferson explained nearly 170 years earlier that “Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” The free exchange of ideas is necessary because the people in charge of public affairs—in a democracy that’s you and me—must be able to consider all views.
The reasons are clear: the best ideas and the brightest insights emerge when truths are tested and falsehoods are exposed to the light of reason.
Moreover, as John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”
That is, censorship reflects the arrogant assumption that our views are always right.
For these reasons, it has become a guiding American ideal that government cannot dictate what a free people should read and consider. Limiting the free exchange of ideas would produce ignorance on the part of the governed while reflecting arrogance on the part of the government.
In any case, keeping content like this away from students is short-sighted.
If The 1619 Project and critical race theory are truly threats to kids (they aren’t) or if they are merely challenging (they are), then we ought to help students confront them thoughtfully alongside informed adults, not pretend they don’t exist.
That’s true because one day those students will be the citizen-leaders of our democracy. If we stunt their intellectual growth because we fear to trust them with difficult ideas, then we forfeit the legacy of independent thought which we owe to the next generation.
In 1783, George Washington addressed his officers regarding an incipient mutiny among the rank and file.
Washington supported the soldiers’ right to air their grievances, declaring “if men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter … the freedom of speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”
I don’t want to exaggerate. I only remind readers that the founders valued informed discussion as a linchpin of self-government.
We do not hide from difficult ideas, but rather seek to understand, alter, or reject them—and even, sometimes, to adopt them.
This is what free people do; this is what a free country does; this is what the legislature and all South Carolinians should do.
Patrick Lawrence is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster, and the author of Obscene Gestures: Counter-Narratives of Sex and Race in the Twentieth Century
This story was originally published January 30, 2022 at 6:00 AM.