Censorship is bad. Isn’t that obvious?

I didn’t want to write this story. I frankly don’t find censorship very interesting, because it’s so obviously illiberal. Where’s the argument? I was reluctant to spend a whole piece on it.

Plus, the censorship that’s been occurring lately has originated mainly with the Republican Party, and I always find it uninteresting when progressives like me criticize conservatives. Again, it’s so obvious, so trite. There are thousands of other progressive writers lambasting GOP censorship. Critiquing my own side is far more intellectually and emotionally challenging.

Nevertheless, when I told my husband — a high school teacher — about my series on recent American illiberalism, he told me I had to cover censorship if I was going to be thorough. He was of course right — and as it turns out, some aspects of this trend are quite interesting after all.

The GOP’s recent censorship has focused mainly on banning “Critical Race Theory” from schools, which you already know if you’ve been paying attention. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a 40-year-old academic theory. Here’s a little summary of it from a 2021 EdWeek article by Stephen Sawchuk:

The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies…