MY OWN SYNTAX

Whites make up less than 60 percent of Arizona, which is apparently past the tipping point at which many of them become terrified at the prospect of losing their monopoly on power, including the power to hijack history to the service of one group: whites. One of the ways whites dominate other ethnic groups, is by denying that whites are an ethnicity, at all, but the normative form of human being. When Arizona’s legislature prohibits teaching classes that are, in the language of the new law, “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” they mean classes designed for non-whites. Of course, schools in the United States have always tailored classes to one ethnic group: whites. History has always been a white narrative, and therefore by definition, a lie and a slander against the other ethnicities. Arizona wants its white lies back. It is now forbidden to teach that which causes “resentment toward a race or class of people.” Since it is impossible to teach the truth of genocide, slavery, aggressive war and conquest, racial discrimination and all the other central facts of America’s past and present, without arousing some degree of resentment among the victims, only falsified versions of history will pass legal muster in Arizona.