Curriculum gag laws function to ban empathy by banning troubling history.

Evidence

Consider President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13950, issued on September 20, 2020, which forbids training or teaching government employees (and federal contractors) about “divisive concepts.” That includes those where “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” In other words, this campaign is attempting to ban empathy through banning books. Can you read Part II as a white person (or as a member of any other race or ethnicity) and not feel some discomfort? I barely survived writing it. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 505

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the genre argument in Whiteness of Wealth and to the broader clash between structural diagnosis and individualist frames — also relevant to current school-curriculum battles.
• SEED: Angle: ‘banning empathy’ as a precise characterization of gag-law intent — reframes curriculum restrictions from information control to emotional-capacity suppression.