Project 2025 Attacks Racial Progress
Juneteenth Is a Reminder of How Far We Have to Go, Not Just How Far We've Come
For a long time, “woke” was a word the Black community used to describe a white person who understands the struggle of being Black in America.
But like most things, white conservatives have co-opted and bastardized that definition. Several years ago, they began using the word to describe a person who promotes progressive values.
And of course, to conservatives, that wasn’t a good thing. Concepts like fairness, equality, and justice are dirty words in the Republican dictionary. Woke is used negatively 25 times throughout Project 2025, right-winger’s manual for a new United States under a Trump presidency. Throughout the 920-page document, they lob it as an insult. “Woke culture wars.” “Woke progressivism.” “Woke bureaucrats.”
They are against children learning about manifest destiny, the Christian justification of taking land through slaughter.
They are against acknowledging the sordid history of white colonists.
They are against teaching about the evils of slavery.
They are against sanctions against corporations that fire employees based on discriminatory practices.
They are against affirmative action, DEI initiatives, fair housing laws, labor unions, and anything that threatens white supremacy.
On Page 9 of Project 2025 they claim they will “defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.”
Woke culture wars like, you know, addressing the obvious systemic injustices you’d have to have been blinded by an eclipse to miss.
Today is Juneteenth, the day all Black Americans were officially liberated from slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, but white masters tried to keep that information from slaves for as long as possible. According to the Smithsonian, “Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree.”
This date has always been sad to me. I grieve the greed and desperation of Texas slave owners who knew the truth but kept it from slaves, an act that feels like the dying gasp of wickedness and corruption. Had slaves known their freedom was backed by their federal government, they could have added 36 months of liberation to their lives. Instead that was stolen from them through omission.
Not much has changed. White supremacists like the ones who authored Project 2025 are still trying to control people through the omission of critical information. Project 2025 wants to eliminate the Department of Education completely and do away with federal civil rights protections in schools. It calls social lessons about race and ethnicity, “racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda.”
Even if Project 2025 doesn’t come to pass, conservatives are still attacking and undermining racial progress and whitewashing history.
The conservative education nonprofit PragerU (which does not stand for University by the way), stirred up controversy in its kids education videos after creating a character of abolitionist Frederick Douglass who calls another abolitionist “radical” for his activism to end slavery.
“We’ve got that type in our time,” the kids in the video respond.
Despite the obvious cherry-picking and revisionist history, red states like Florida, Oklahoma, and Montana quickly adopted the curriculum, making me question what version of history my own children will learn in their Montana classrooms.
Conservatives want to rewind racial progress. We still have a long way to go.
When the word “woke” comes out of the mouth of a white conservative, it’s a dog whistle, or a hint about a hidden meaning that isn’t necessarily visible from the surface. A dog whistle emits a sound at a pitch that can't be heard with the human ear, but dogs can hear it. During slavery, slave owners sent dogs out in packs to retrieve runaway slaves and used whistles to signal to them. The slaves couldn't hear the whistles and didn't know they were being hunted. Even in post-Civil War, dog whistles were used to harass Black Americans, and they’re still being used in a metaphorical sense.
A dog whistle indicates the control and intimidation white people wish to have over Black Americans. It is white supremacy incarnate.
Sundown towns are another somber reminder. Today in the United States in the year of our lord 2024, certain places are blatantly unsafe for Black Americans. We saw a stark reminder of this last summer when country singer Jason Aldean released the song, Try that in a Small Town.
In it Aldean doesn’t overtly reference racial tensions, but his music video does. The video was filmed at the site of a well known lynching in Tennesseee. Footage interspersed with the video seems to show footage of tense racial protests without providing commentary about the injustices that led to those moments.
Like the song, sundown towns use threats of violence to keep people of color, especially Black people, from living or spending time there. Sundown towns threatened people with signs using the phrase, “You better not let the sun go down on you in this town.” The implied meaning was that they would be met with violence if they did more than pass through.
Most sundown towns hid the means by which they became and remained all white, relying on gruesome reputations and horrific stories to keep Black people away. In Salt of the Earth: Rhetoric, Preservation, and White Supremacy, author James Chase Sanchez details his hometown’s sordid history as a sundown town. A portion of Grand Saline, TX, was known as Poletown because it was rumored that Black people caught in the town after sunset were hung there. To this day few Black people are willing to take up permanent residence in Grand Saline.
Try that in a Small Town accomplished the same things a sundown town did. The song romanticizes violence toward outsiders. “You cross that line, it won’t take long for you to find out. I recommend you don’t.”
Sundown towns are not a distant memory. They are as recent as your parents, your grandparents. It’s past time we join the Black community to acknowledge, lament, and repent of the pain white supremacy has caused, rather than to deny it like Project 2025 does — or worse, romanticize it like Jason Aldean.
So this Juneteenth, let’s focus on how far we still have to go rather than how far we’ve come.