Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has joined his Republican colleagues in calling for the ban of the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones.
To commemorate the 400th year since enslaved African people were brought to what is now the United States, Hannah-Jones created the 1619 Project to give an in-depth look at America’s history of slavery and its lasting impact on Black Americans.
Her and other educational programs, McConnell said in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, “re-orient” American history “away from their intended purposes toward a politicized and divisive agenda,” as reported by CNN.
McConnell called on Cardona to ban the project from curriculums from federally-funded education settings, even though the US government has not instructed or mandated schools to use it. Some states, including California, have used the 1619 Project in their education plans, but most curriculum decisions are made by state-level governments.
McConnell, the outlets reported, made claims that historians have “debunked” Hannah-Jones’ work, stating that her work has “many factual and historical errors.”
McConnell, like his Republican colleagues, think that works like the 1619 Project are being used to indoctrinate American children with liberal ideals.
“Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” McConnell wrote.
Republican lawmakers, in the midst of claiming to want to avoid indoctrinating children, have pushed for a civil education curriculum that promotes “patriotic” education. In some states, they’ve also recently come against teaching critical race theory in classrooms, even at the collegiate level.
Hannah-Jones is set to join the faculty of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill journalism school as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism later this year.
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