There was a good showing in Concord today of people testifying in support of HB 61 that would get rid of the Divisive Concepts Law.
The Divisive Concepts Law is part of the broader racist Republican attempt to undermine public school systems as a means of privatizing education. New Hampshire's particular Divisive Concepts Law is a piece of copycat legislation brought over from Rick DeSantis' Florida. Its the legislative part of that whole nebulous "Critical Race Theory" brouhaha that was very popular with Republicans for quite a while before they got their butts handed to them on that issue in last November's election, and in the March election before that.
It turns out that voters aren't as racist as a lot of people assumed! Maybe Republicans will take the hint and back off from this ill-advised relic of the culture war from several FOX News cycles gone by.
The purpose of the Divisive Concepts Law is to make sure that a full and honest discussion of the experiences of racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups is excluded from the American classroom. It says, for example, that white parents can sue a teacher if they feel their kid is somehow made to feel uncomfortable about being white because of a discussion about slavery in school. Or they don't like a book about Star-Bellied Sneeches.
It seems that parents who insist their kids play dodgeball will do anything to protect the poor dears from maybe feeling the least twinge of conscience over the recognition that they are the beneficiaries of a system built upon 500+ years of genocide, enslavement, and racial oppression.
Of course, many of the "parent" groups that have pushed this stuff are actually the local arms of Koch-sponsored, out of state conservative dark money organizations. Groups looking to experiment with education policy have been targeting New Hampshire because it is small, pliant, and a little money can go a long way. Last year, after this hateful and offensive bill was passed through scurrilous budget process shenanigans, some of these groups put up money to set up a hotline so that parents could inform teachers for being too woke.
I get that race is a difficult topic for a lot of my fellow white people - though far more so adults than children. In my experience, children can handle discussions of race - and Black children don't have any other choice. Sheltering white kids from these discussions means that they are being denied the tools and knowledge they will need to prosper in a multiracial society. Throwing a wet blanket over all discussion of racial issues and calling it "colorblindness" is not the way forward here.
I highly recommend watching - or listening, really - to this video testimony, which features Rep. Jodi Newell and Rep. Nicholas Germana, back-to-back. Jodi talks about the chilling effect the Divisive Concepts Law has on classroom discussion, and what divisiveness really is. Then Nick brings the history.