Abstract

In recent years there has been a vigorous debate in American political and public life on issues related to education, primarily K-12 schools’ programs. The teaching of the Critical Race theory (CRT) in schools, which has caused a great deal of outrage among conservative Americans, has attracted particular attention and continues to do so to this day. In practice, the elements of educational programmes that have been most actively debated have little to do with the CRT per se, but in popular discourse the term has taken on a meaning that has little or nothing to do with the academic context. The result of this debate was a wave of bills proposed to the legislatures of virtually every state by conservative Republican politicians. Although not all of these bills were eventually passed, in many states the new “CTR bans” are already in place. Apart from the practical aspects of educational organization, it was the perception of history in the discussion of the CTR that became the key ideological watershed between supporters and opponents of the new legislation. The debate began in the context of a discussion of US history in general. the starting point was the reaction of President Trump’s administration to the New York Times’ publication of Project 1619, a collection of essays on the history of “black” America. From the point of view of Trump and his administration, it was an attempt of falsification of history and revisionism, and a number of measures were taken at the federal level against it. Although these measures were reversed aft er President Biden took office, the contradictions in the perception of history between conservative Republicans and Democrats have reappeared, this time at the state level in the form of attempts to legislate the prohibition of the CTR. This article examines the formation of these new laws, their common features, and the relationship of the fight against the CTR to the historical memory and memory politics in the US in general and, in particular, the development of “grassroots” conservative activism.