Recall that the Trump/conservative/white Christian nationalist administration has declared that there are many areas of academic research that are forbidden.
If one of the dangerous words below is found in a grant proposal, that grant proposal can be cancelled:
activism activists advocacy advocate barrier barriers biased bias BIPOC Black and Latinx community diversity community equity cultural differences cultural heritage culturally responsive disabilities discrimination discriminatory backgrounds groups diversified diversify enhancing equal opportunity equality equitable ethnicity excluded female fostering gender hate speech Hispanic minority historically implicit bias inclusion inclusive increase indigenous community inequalities inequities institutional LGBTQ marginalize minorities multicultural polarization political prejudice privileges promoting race racial justice sense of belonging sexual preferences social justice sociocultural socioeconomic status stereotypes systemic trauma underappreciated underrepresented underserved victim women
When research discovers things about the world that conservatives don't like, the response isn't to update one's mental model of the world or adjust one's beliefs, it's to suppress the research that generated the cognitive dissonance in the first place.
What's the motivation behind banning words and research, effectively closing one's eyes to reality in such crude fashion? In brief:
- Christian conservative anti-science and anti-intellectualism. One evangelical, historian Mark Noll, even wrote a book called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994). Countless examples exist of this tendency to reject reason and evidence in favor of faith, tradition and local prejudice.
- Cultish Christian conservative epistemic arrogance: The belief that there's a foundation for a good society, its values, beliefs, metaphysics and practices - a set of timeless truths - that conservatives are uniquely equipped to appreciate. As such, any social research that doesn't reaffirm what conservatives already believe is a potential or likely source of subversion. Social science research is a wildcard to these cultural reactionaries in that it generates empirical findings about the world that all too often contradict what conservatives want to believe is true.
- Small government conservatism: If there's evidence of a problem, especially one that only government could effectively address (homelessness or lack of medical help for substance abuse, or example) then this poses a problem for conservatives. Since they're axiomatically committed to the belief that small government is the best foundation for a good society, they have a make a moral choice: either neglect the problem and let it rot (shifting blame from structural problems onto individuals), or agree to spend money to solve the problem. Since social research continually reveals problems that lack adequate attention and resources, the conservative defaults to ignoring the problem. Christian conservatives have landed on a solution: Effectively ban social research they don't like. This not only undercuts the basis for expanding government, it salves their consciences in the face of the accusation that they're callous and morally depraved.
