national news & analysis

Schools, Statehouses continue to be frontlines of fights for freedoms, Democracy

By Michael Jones

Nicole Carr is a suburban mom.

She and her husband are responsible for shuttling their three kids from soccer to basketball to cheerleading to camp.

Normal American family stuff.

But in 2021, the “concerned mom” emerged as mostly white people took to school board meetings across the country to air their grievances about critical race theory, LGBTQ+ rights, and the books studied in classrooms and libraries.

“I was like, man, I got the memo to bring the potluck to the fall festival. I got the memo about after-school pickup,” Carr said at the Center for Democracy & Journalism’s second Democracy Summit at Howard University in Washington, DC on Tuesday. “Damn, I didn’t get the message about the school board meeting. But the message wasn’t for a concerned parent like me.”

Carr is also an investigative reporter for ProPublica and a journalism professor at Morehouse University. And so she examined the so-called parental rights movement to discover why all “concerned parents” looked identical, said the same things and were always believed when they said they were parents.

During her reporting, she discovered a man who learned about the movement on the social messaging app Telegram who made it plain for her: “He said because you start at the bottom and the bottom is the school board.”

These anti-democratic tactics aren’t new. Carr noted there were a lot of parental rights groups during desegregation. But as congressional Republicans attempt to defund public schools and disempower teachers and parents of color, this modern movement is especially dangerous. (Just this week, the House GOP planned and ultimately shelved a funding bill that would have cut billions in Title I grants to schools in low-income neighborhoods.)

“Most of us will attend public schools,” Carr said. “The way that our minds are shaped, the way we grapple with who we are in America, the way we see ourselves in this space and the way we go on to govern this space is democracy work.”

Beyond the classroom, statehouses have also emerged as hotspots for rising resentment against multiracial democracy.

The most notable recent example is in Tennessee, of course, where state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson—the two Black members of the “Tennessee Three”—were expelled by the largely white Republican supermajority for participating in a gun-regulation protest on the House floor.

But there’s also Zooey Zephyr, the first transgender woman elected to the Montana state legislature, who was banned by her GOP colleagues due to her opposition to multiple anti-LGBT bills introduced during the 2023 legislative session.

In Mississippi, the governor wants to replace elected judges in Black communities with appointed judges. 

Meanwhile, in Texas, state politicians have proposed a plan to replace libraries in heavily Black and Latino schools in Houston and replace them with detention centers. These same state leaders already led the charge in shutting down DEI programs on college campuses and banning anti-racist texts at the K-12 level.

“What I will say is that this is a warning from the South, that this is a practice drill,” Jones said during a panel discussion on anti-democracy in the states. “These southern states, these statehouses are laboratories where they test out their ideas and then try and nationalize them.”

The parental rights movement and the suppression of dissenting voices at the state level have been fueled by a broader rejection of the democratic rules of the game. 

Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University and author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, argued during a talk at the summit on the roots of the authoritarian backlash during the Trump era.

Recent widespread voter suppression efforts, violent threats against election workers and elected officials, and an attempt by the incumbent president to overturn the 2020 election are broader symptoms of the modern Republican party’s unwillingness to accept defeat.

What’s exacerbated the conservative repudiation of multiracial democracy is the right’s exploitation of several fundamental American institutions that empower minority rule, including the Electoral College, a malapportioned Senate where senators represent territories instead of people, a Senate filibuster that allows 41 senators to block progress on popular legislation, and lifetime terms for Supreme Court Justices.

“I want to suggest that these counter-majoritarian institutions are now subverting our democracy,” Levitsky said. “Minority rule is a uniquely American problem. In no other established democracy can partisan minorities routinely thwart electoral majorities as consistently or as consequentially as [in] the United States.” 

In other words: “America is exceptionally undemocratic in this sense.”

Levitsky outlined a series of reforms that you’ve probably heard of or pushed for if you’re a pro-democracy advocate to, as he put it, “democratize American democracy.”

The reforms include a constitutional right to vote, automatic voter registration, direct presidential elections, the elimination of the Senate filibuster and term limits for Supreme Court justices.

“These are not radical reforms,” Levitsky said. “They would simply bring the United States in line with other established democracies across the world.”

For Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the CFJD and Knight chair in race and journalism, whether America continues its democratic backslide or redoubles its efforts to fulfill its promise requires a free press committed to the mandate of covering truth over power.

“We have to be unafraid to just report the truth,” she said.

With America at a crossroads between whether it will be a multiracial democracy or a democracy at all, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author insisted that the moment’s urgency will require journalists to report and write with nuance beyond the stale tropes of neutrality and symmetry. Instead, what voters need from the people given the responsibility to inform the electorate is for us to embrace the fundamental tenets of fairness and accuracy.

“Despite the results of the election last year, our democracy and our democratic institutions remain under attack,” Hannah-Jones said. “Our job therefore is not just to report on democracy but to protect it. We must understand that not only does democracy require a free press, but a free press requires democracy.”

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