In recent years, I’ve become peculiarly sensitive to the phenomenon of misplaced deference, the move whereby I hand over to someone else my right and my ability to see and consider what’s in front of me. I’m beginning to believe that education is the the gradual overcoming of misplaced deference. Education is a life’s work.
It came to mind today when Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas expressed regret for having banned local mask mandates. Read these words carefully: “In hindsight I wish that had not become law.”
Hang there for a moment. “Had not become law” is an interesting use of the passive voice from this particular, pen-wielding man who….campaigned for the right to decide what should or shouldn’t become law in the beautiful state of Arkansas. He then swore an oath. It’s sometimes hard to tell what people really believe about all sort of things, but men like Asa Hutchinson should not be deferred to when they try to speak of themselves as bystanders around whom things happen. Their views become positions which become laws. He’s a grown man who sought and was accorded a whole lot of public trust.
In late May, Governor Bill Lee, another grown man who sought and was accorded a whole lot of public trust, signed a law banning “critical race theory” in public schools without defining it or quoting a critical race theorist or offering us a single example of what it was he wanted banned. Within days, we found out when Matthew Hawn, a tenured teacher and baseball coach in Sullivan County was fired for assigning a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay and sharing a poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey. Until he feels compelled to tell us something different, this targeting of a thoughtful man appears to have been what Governor Lee had in mind.
I don’t relish putting it this way, but I think I have to if I’m going to avoid misplaced deference. Did Bill Lee, a man endorsed by Michael W. Smith, have a public educator fired for sharing a poem and assigning an essay from The Atlantic in Tennessee? A troubling question. Think about it. Don’t defer.
I hope and pray that Bill Lee will repent over his decision to suppress his own conscience and betray his oath and baptism by turning Tennessee into a Memory Law state and take decisive action to reverse it. For now, it’s extremely important that those of us who know or employ him show more courage than he has by thinking and speaking clearly about white supremacist terror ideology, the worldview to which he has repeatedly publicly deferred in his tenure as governor. His unexamined view about critical race theory became his position and is now state law that emboldens militant victims of disinformation and targets thoughtful educators. Public educators hoping to address white supremacy now have targets on their backs. His abusive behavior, so long as he’s in office, is our responsibility.
I prepared a report which I’ve tried to share with him through a number of mutual acquaintances. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t read it, but I hope he will. Here it is. If Memory Laws are on the horizon in your context, please feel free to purloin or cut and paste anything useful in your exchanges with people who’ve succumbed to white supremacist terror ideology.
Governor Lee recently had this to say on the subject of our Memory Law: “I think that history is incredibly important, civics [are] incredibly important, teaching children that this is the most exceptional nation in the world is incredibly important. But political commentary is not something we need to teach to children. Critical race theory is un-American.”
I also think history is incredibly important. Bill Lee’s kids were in my classroom when I taught high school English, and I will say now what I believe I would’ve said at the time concerning the ideology of American exceptionalism he now voices and decrees through force of law. All commentary is political. Teaching children that America is the most exceptional nation in the world is religious indoctrination. American citizens don’t have to sit still for it. Indoctrinating children under the guise of public education is abusive. If it helps to hear it put this way, it is also idolatry. For those who are baptized in the community we call church, the nationalism Bill Lee describes is, to my mind, a spirit of antichrist.
He won’t provide us with an example of critical race theory, so it’s hard to know what he means when he says it’s un-American. This is, nevertheless, a disgraceful way to characterize scholarship (especially if you haven’t read it). I imagine the statement has more to do with what he’s been told he needs to say—and keep saying repeatedly—if he’s going to be Donald Trump’s running mate (or possibly become President of the United States himself). But to speak this way of a collection of written texts is incoherent and unprofessional. It’s worrying to me that he thinks he can speak this way publicly of other people’s thoughtfulness—How could thought be un-American?—and also imagine he should be rightfully accorded our public trust again. Here too, I earnestly hope he backtracks and acknowledges that he misspoke.
But if he does backtrack and adopts the tone of disembodied haplessness Governor Hutchinson attempted, it will be very important that none of us who are responsible for Bill Lee or care about the state of his soul let it go unchallenged.
The above image is taken from I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. Just today, it occurred me that the skit involving the hot dog car crash is an excellent illustration of one man’s attempt to draw others into a state of misplaced deference as well as an effective meditation on the Beyondist Fallacy. Feel free to apply its insights to your own context.
I want to quickly note that deferential fear remains, for me, a helpful way of getting at a horrible thing I’ve noticed in recent years, but Professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s use of the phrase “misplaced deference” has inspired me to change my game a little. Let’s overcome it every which way.
Thanks for reading, everyone.
Thanks for typing this out, David. The picture of Tim Robinson in his hotdog suit definitely drew me in (I started his new sketch show on Netflix last night).
I'm wondering what the practiced opposition to 'misplaced deference' is -- is it Public Confession and open acceptance and exhortation of the limitations of subjective experience? Is this the 'backtracking' to which you refer, and/or is it responding to challenges and taking part in a broader conversation with uncertainty as a 'feature not a flaw'?