1984 In 2022

Newspeak was proposed for the State Board of Education but the Board decided to can the proposal. A motion was made to the State Board of Education to not use the word “slavery” and instead use “forced relocation” for elementary school classes up to grade 2.

Texas board of education strikes down proposal to call slavery ‘involuntary relocation’
The Hill
By Cheyanne M. Daniels
July 1, 2022


A proposal by Texas state educators to call slavery “involuntary relocation” in second grade classes has been rejected by the State Board of Education. 

The proposal, first reported by the Texas Tribune, was introduced at the board’s June 15 meeting. Throughout the summer, the board will consider several curriculum updates to comply with lawmakers’ requirements to keep subjects that make students uncomfortable out of schools. 

Nine educators, including a professor from University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, were behind the suggested language change. 

The Tribune reported the proposal was struck down by the board unanimously. 

This smacks of the authoritarian government of of George Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak…

In other words, Newspeak isn’t just a set of buzzwords, but the deliberate replacement of one set of words in the language for another. The transition is still in progress in the fictional 1984, but is expected to be completed “by about the year 2050.” Students of history and linguistics will recognize that this is a ludicrously accelerated pace for the complete replacement of one vocabulary and syntax by another. (We might call Orwell’s English Socialists “accelerationsts.”) Newspeak appears not through history or social change but through the will of the Party.

The article goes on to say,

While involuntary relocation isn’t an entirely unknown term in social studies, it often “has relationships to refugees and forced displacement due to violence or ethnic cleansing,” said Neil Shanks, clinical assistant professor of middle and secondary education at Baylor University. 

In this case, Shanks added, the term appeared to be “intended to water down the issue of slavery.”

Is this an offshoot of the ban on “Critical Race Theory” a one-upmanship to CRT?