Biden to rescind 1776 commission via executive order

Authored by edition.cnn.com and submitted by justalazygamer
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(CNN) President-elect Joe Biden will issue an executive order to dissolve the 1776 commission, a panel stood up by President Donald Trump as a rebuttal to schools applying a more accurate history curriculum around slavery in the US, Biden's transition team announced Wednesday.

The commission had been formed as an apparent counter to The New York Times' 1619 Project , a Pulitzer Prize-winning project aimed at teaching American students about slavery that Trump, speaking last fall, had called "toxic propaganda." The announcement comes just two days after the commission issued an inflammatory report on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and just hours before Biden will take over from Trump, whose time in office was marked by racist statements and actions.

In its report released Monday, the commission asserted that "the Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders," specifically criticizing affirmative action policies and arguing that identity politics are "the opposite of King's hope that his children would 'live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' "

Calling today's ideological divisions akin to those experienced during the Civil War, commission members also took aim at feminists and the widespread use of ethnic and racial identities in American life, arguing that they had been constructed by "activists."

"A radical women's liberation movement reimagined America as a patriarchal system, asserting that every woman is a victim of oppression by men. The Black Power and black nationalist movements reimagined America as a white supremacist regime. Meanwhile, other activists constructed artificial groupings to further divide Americans by race, creating new categories like 'Asian American' and 'Hispanic' to teach Americans to think of themselves in terms of group identities and to rouse various groups into politically cohesive bodies," the report stated.

PippinIRL on January 20th, 2021 at 12:59 UTC »

As a history teacher, the 1776 report is one of the most pernicious attempt at historical revisionism I think I might have ever read.

History’s utility comes from its ability to empower us to appreciate contemporary issues with clarity past our own individual biases, and to rise above our immediate interests and broaden our horizons on the scope of problems we face. We can see how far we’ve progressed but understand the issues that still remain.

As far as I can see no historians were consulted on this work. Not a single citation is referenced. It’s a political partisan hack-job by a group of lawyers and politicians hoping to legitimise their world view. Objectivity and nuance were actively avoided in favour of insane ideological revisionism, nationalistic myths and an outdated deterministic view of history as constant progress.

I would have expected this of an authoritarian regime. Authoritarians love to obscure and obfuscate history with this sort of gaslighting precisely because it leaves us disempowered and confused: how can you even begin to address problems if you don’t know what the problems are and where they came from?

NewUserF0kU2 on January 20th, 2021 at 11:20 UTC »

Excellent. Americans have been exposed to enough far-right propaganda as is, we do not need more.

I hope they also look into how biased American history is taught in some southern States and put an end to that too. No more of this ‘northern aggression’ nonsense, etc.

sedatedlife on January 20th, 2021 at 11:01 UTC »

Good its white nationalists propaganda the fact they released that garbage on MLK day is just insulting it has Stephen Miller written all over it