GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it

Almost 75 years after it was published, George Orwell’s novel 1984 has nothing on today’s Republican Party when it comes to language.  The novel features such ideological practices as “newspeak” and “doublethink” that conform language to the needs of a society’s authoritarian leadership to maintain control of its population.  Newspeak is a minimalist language designed to make the utterance of heretical thoughts–those that challenge central authority–impossible.   Doublethink refers to the ability to believe and say that black is white, in contradiction of plain facts, in order to uphold the regime.

Does any of this sound familiar today?  Since the rise of “Trumpism” in the Republican Party, we have seen the explosion not only of blatant lies, but also the creation of “alternative” facts to support law-free rule.  We have seen “Don’t say gay” restrictions for the early grades of schools in Florida, and the deletion of critical race theory from curriculums ranging up to college level.  Lately we’ve seen an apparently new development in the distortion of language in the service of ideological manipulation:  the notion that one can speak of things without mentioning what they are about.

This rang a bell for me, one that rings back half a century in my work life and that I have always since associated with the most destructive elements of conservative politics in the U.S.  Perhaps it is no small coincidence that Orwell’s book was published on my mother’s birthday in the year that I was born.

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But first to the recent manifestation of this linguistic humbug.

Last week at a public forum on education, the Oklahoma superintendent of public instruction asserted that the 1921 Tulsa race massacre was not about race.  Ryan Walters had been asked how teaching about this historic massacre of black Tulsans by white vigilantes would not violate the state’s recent law banning aspects of critical race theory from the state’s classrooms.

In 2021 Governor Kevin Stitt had signed the ban into law exactly 100 years to the month after the massacre, which killed 300 black citizens, wounded more than 800, and destroyed more than 1200 buildings, leaving homeless tens of thousands in the black Greenwood area of the city.  Almost all of the area’s citizens were arrested following the massacre, to be released from jail only on the petition of a white person.

The Oklahoma law does not amount to an outright ban on critical race theory–which comprises arguments and evidence that racism and discrimination in the U.S. have historically been built into our major institutions–the economy, law, education–and continue to operate in them today.  Instead, among other things the law bans the teaching of facts or ideas that may cause any individual to feel discomfort, guilt or psychological distress because of their race or sex.  In sum, the law means to protect white school children from any difficult feelings that could arise from learning such things as that racial fears and hatred caused the city’s white ancestors to murder black ones and level their neighborhood.

The idea that one could teach about the 1921 massacre in Oklahoma’s schools without mentioning the causal role of race pretzelled Superintendent Walters’ reasoning well beyond recognition.  He began by saying that, “I would never tell a kid that because of your race . . . you are less of a person or are inherently racist . . . That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals (emphasis mine). Oh, you can.  Absolutely, historically, you should . . .

“But to say (the massacre) was inherent . . . because of their skin is where I say that is critical race theory.  You’re saying that race defines a person . . . Let’s not tie it to the skin color and say the skin color determined it.”

This, of course, is both a specious argument and historical nonsense.  At all appearances Walters wants Oklahomans to believe that critical race theory accounts of the Tulsa massacre amount to claiming that the assault on the people of Greenwood was caused by white people’s genes, that white racial hatred and violence are encoded in DNA, and that therefore white children are inherently racist.  He argues this way out of either ignorance or mendacity, or both.

Either way, he is working to shield today’s typically white power holders from any moral responsibility for addressing the racial inequities  and injustices that remain rooted in the routine operations of our institutions.  And left unaddressed, this institutional racism continues to maintain the nation’s caste system and the existing system of racial domination.  These realities are precisely and properly the focus of critical race theory, which could as easily be called common sense race theory.

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Postscript:  This example of Orwellian doublethink took me back to a similar episode in my work as a young journalist in Minneapolis in 1972.  While not involving nearly as serious a matter as race in America, it caught me wildly off-guard back then.

I was a young newspaper reporter just out of college that year, working for a large chain of newspapers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.  I worked largely for the chain’s urban paper, the Minneapolis Argus-Sun, which covered the Northeast and Southeast areas of the city.  That May students at the University of Minnesota mounted another antiwar protest after President Nixon decided to mine the harbors of North Vietnam.  As the University, from which I had graduated the previous December, was in my coverage area, I proposed to my news editor that I visit the protest to write a story about it.

My first surprise was that my editor said he would have to check with his superiors as to whether they would agree to the proposal.  But I wasn’t shocked.  The chain of papers was owned and managed by a wealthy and conservative Republican, and campus protests against the war in Vietnam were not popular among his set of folks.  So I waited.

A few days later I called into the office to report from a criminal trial I was covering in Minneapolis.  Since the protest on campus would not last indefinitely, I also asked my editor whether my idea to visit the campus and write an article on it had been approved.  He hesitated before answering, then in a subdued voice he said this:  “They said you could write about the campus protest so long as you do not mention the war.”

Although I was at a public telephone in a hallway of the courthouse, I all but exploded–immediately.  Reflexively I shouted into the phone, “What are they talking about?  Writing about a protest without mentioning what it is about?  That’s just lunatic!”  My editor tried to settle me down and said he would look further into the matter.

The next day he came back with a revised reply from corporate leadership.  I could publish my report free of censorship under an odd combination of conditions:  (1) that it be published on the Opinions page of the paper rather than in the news columns; (2) that the piece be redundantly labeled an “opinion” essay, and (3) that a photograph of me be included with the published piece.  Clearly the powers-that-were in the company wanted to make it as clear as possible to readers that whatever I wrote had nothing to do with the corporation’s position on the war in Vietnam.

The oddest of these requirements was that my picture be published.  I had written many news stories about controversial matters, and even editorials in which I was free to determine the “company’s” views on these subjects, and a photo had never been required. But since, in those days long ago, my 22-year-old look was more Che than Nixon, the publisher wanted it included now, presumably to signal readers how large a chunk of salt they should take with anything someone like me might write about the war.

Che

My May 1972 photo published with my report

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So what did I write in that report?  I arrived at the campus protest on the Wednesday evening of the day violence had earlier broken out between the protestors and the Minneapolis police.  Teargas and riot batons from the police met sailing rocks from the protestors.  People on both sides of the barricades had been injured.  As I walked the campus that evening, both sides waited anxiously at their separate camps for any future confrontations.

And just as my employers had feared, I took a radical stance in my report.  With Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, I advocated for nonviolent protest by the antiwar group rather than violent engagement.  I wrote that to target the police was to abandon the necessary focus of their efforts: irrational war-making and its destructiveness.  I said that it made no sense to demonstrate against war by using violence.

And, to myself, I wondered whether my sort of idealism would be offensive to my bosses.