By gregory wickencamp, Iowa City
“Separate accommodations are not inherently unequal,” according to a new Iowa bill targeting trans people. Read that again. If those words sound familiar, they should. The same language was used to legally justify Jim Crow era abuses until 1954. That’s when the Supreme Court ruled that separate conditions are inherently unequal.
Did Iowa Republicans forget the last 100 years of civil rights history? Of course not. In fact, in using the same language used by white supremacists of the 1800s, Iowa Republicans are giving a wink and nod toward where they want to go. To get there requires active work to erase the past. Nationally, Republicans continue doubling down on governance that offers only scapegoating and hate politics.
Iowa, with its outsized role in deciding presidential candidates and veneer of niceness, provides a perfect case study in how hate politics depend on creating historical amnesia.
Modern conservatism depends on creating an alternate reality with a counterfactual history. There is “no such thing as book banning,” according to Iowa Republicans who passed legislation effectively banning books. Under the guise of protecting children, the state legislature has outlawed books, especially targeting those featuring critical histories, Black and brown people, or LGBTQ characters.
Book bans and doublespeak aren’t new. Neither are authoritarian threats to democracy. Still, both are troubling. Because a rise in authoritarian politics is always intimately connected to disremembering the past, to undo one, we must undo the other. But how did we get here?
How we got here became especially clear to me in my 10th year of teaching. In the fall of 2021 I was reviewing with students what the eighth grade social studies class would look like for them. Accustomed to the offbeat responses and questions middle school students sometimes ask, nothing prepared me for that fall. A student raised their hand and said with confusion, “I heard we can’t learn about Black people this year.”
Iowa’s version of the anti-truth law had just gone into effect. Through a concerted propaganda effort, these laws made a bogeyman out of a useful scholarly theory, Critical Race Theory, and suppressed education that touches on systemic oppression. Iowa’s law cribbed language directly from an executive order by Donald Trump.
Despite outcry from the public and professional historians, Iowa Republicans were undeterred in codifying their unethical decrees. Moneyed, far-right networks invested in circumventing democracy soon pushed the majority of states to pass similar legislation.
By the end of that school year, extremist politicians, and school administrators unwilling to stand up to them, pushed me out of the classroom. My experiences were devastating, but not unique. While my story made national news, many stories went unreported, like my Latina colleague who was openly disrespected by our white administration until she too was driven from the classroom. Educator friends received death threats, and students were, and remain, shortchanged. In one rural Iowa school, I heard how a trans student was beat by transphobic parents after being outed by school administration.
Iowa, like other conservative states, continues doubling down. When public protest stopped a bill threatening to strip trans people of civil rights protections, state lawmakers immediately proposed the “separate but equal” bill aiming to do the same. School privatization schemes, legislation aimed at “dumbing down” curriculum, and banning books are now a nationwide threat.
Students know they’re being abandoned. Like Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law, Iowa passed laws restricting healthcare access for LGBTQ+ students. New bills go even further, codifying bullying by offering protections for teachers who continually deadname and misgender students. At a rally I attended last summer, one queer student said it was representation and supportive teachers that literally saved their life.
Republicans’ work dismantling the public sector has not stopped at the schoolhouse door. In Iowa, child labor laws have been rolled back. Workers’ rights and protections have been repeatedly beaten down, and the state is slated to spend millions to deny SNAP benefits to families and children. There is even a bill now to defund public libraries.
Passing harmful legislation like Iowa’s depends on us not knowing our past. Child labor once led to death, disfigurement, and abuses. It took many decades of struggle, including the bloodiest labor battles of any industrialized country, to finally ban child labor in 1938. When we understand that inequality today has not been seen since the Gilded Age, we can appreciate the crucial importance of social programs like SNAP.
Efforts scapegoating marginalized students, censoring history, and banning books are part of larger conservative efforts. Repressive regimes must, per scholar and activist Aurora Levins Morales, “attack the sense of history of those they wish to dominate by attempting to take over and control their relationships to their own past.” This is what’s happening in Iowa and so many conservative states. Today’s inequality is not natural. It comes from specific policies like those enacted in the 1970s: anti-union efforts, deregulation of the financial sector, and plummeting tax rates for the ultra rich to rates not seen since the 1920s.
In the same way that civil rights activists of the 1960s were dismissed as unpatriotic communists, students and teachers who are marginalized and demanding justice today are scapegoated as naïve, groomers, troubled, or in the words of one Iowa politician, a “cancer.”
Schools and history classrooms have long been a crucial site where the past can be revealed or obscured. Because honest histories have incredible power, they are often contested by those benefiting from the status quo. As the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, Ella Baker, said, “In order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we’ve been, but we must understand where we have been.”
Long before today’s manufactured moral panic over CRT, or scapegoating of LGBTQ+ students, classrooms have been sites of struggle. The gains of the Reconstruction era were undone not by denying the Civil War, but by creating misunderstanding around it, imagining the Confederacy had been fighting for some noble “Lost Cause.” One hundred years later, when history textbooks in the 1960s finally began to challenge this Lost Cause myth, far-right groups like the John Birch Society attempted to ban them.
Today, Moms for Liberty, the ideological descendants of conservative conspiracists like the John Birch Society, surround governors like Reynolds as they successfully ban books, demonize educators, and enact legislative violence against Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ students. Just as Confederates were willing to create a mythical past in order to excuse and continue their harmful actions, so today do Republicans bury historical understanding beneath nationalistic imaginaries in order to continue policies that support racist and undemocratic outcomes.
Sociologists William Darity and Kirsten Mullen have a term for this. In their book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, they call these projects works of “dismemory,” defining them as the “organized and systematic efforts to manipulate and distort the nation’s history.”
In Iowa and other Republican-led states, we see these dismemory campaigns not just in the book bans and history censorship laws, but in small ways. In nearly a dozen states, for example, Republican lawmakers tried to take credit for federal programs they voted against. It’s not the book bans we should worry about, they say, but the pornography they pretend is flooding school classrooms.
But there are ways forward. In conservative states, one step is undoing legislation that harms people and restricts students’ access to honest history. In Iowa, we see this pressure coming largely from students, who, during the 2022-2023 school year, led walkouts at nearly 50 schools throughout the state. The student-led organization behind many of these walkouts aptly calls themselves IowaWTF.
This is not the only strategy. There’s a lawsuit working through the courts now against the state of Iowa, which challenges the state’s book bans. The suit is led by authors, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, and seven Iowa students.
The protests at our state capitol building recently stopped one anti-trans law, even as more entered the pipeline.
Rather than just fight unjust laws, people can also demand laws that actually serve the public, like one recently enacted in California. In stark contrast to Iowa’s laws expanding child labor, the Golden State now requires students to be taught how to defend themselves against workplace abuses.
Modern conservatives behind book bans and anti-youth legislation, like the angry white mobs protesting school integration, are not bound to win, but neither are those of us who want a more just and inclusive society. For those wanting something better, there are many ways forward. Any path forward requires building on the work of those who came before us, those brave enough to confront the authoritarianism before them. If we are to undo today’s rising authoritarianism, we must start by understanding what led us here.
Editor’s note: Lower-case name formatting by request of the author.
