On Potato Heads and Power
Issue 2: How conservatives used the culture war to lay the groundwork to dismantle and undermine popular early childhood policy proposals and practices in the United States.
Important note: The only views here are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
On Friday, April 21st, the news rocked the early childhood world that Barbara Cooper, head of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education and renowned for her leadership of Alabama’s pre-k program, had been forced to resign. Governor Kay Ivey, who has repeatedly, extensively demonstrated the depths of her own racism, stated:
“Let me be crystal clear: Woke concepts that have zero to do with a proper education and that are divisive at the core have no place in Alabama classrooms at any age level, let alone with our youngest learners."
Since Friday, I have seen many of my fellow white women early childhood colleagues assert that this is a shocking new low. To those who have been paying attention, and especially those who have been harmed by actions like these for years, this is an obvious and natural extension of white supremacist, Christian nationalist power asserting itself to harm all of those it seeks to subordinate.
In 2021, the most tedious, annoying elements of the culture war came to early childhood. These seemingly-trivial pop culture blips happened almost simultaneously with the rejection of federal preschool funding by Idaho on culture war grounds. I argue that moments like these – where grievance is divorced from reality but tied strongly to highly emotional, nostalgic associations of white American childhood – primed propagandized white Americans to cheer on the political acts that followed while also persuading moderate and liberal white Americans that the way to get through it is to stay under the radar and wait for it to pass. I believe this instinct to stay quiet and get through is not only morally inadequate, but also bad strategy.
While we quickly forgot about flash in the pan controversies, large and influential early childhood organizations choosing to quietly weather the storm on more serious “temporary” moments of scrutiny – reacting only by urging a few outside voices to politely correct inaccuracies – has created a vacuum in which those seeking to impose their white supremacist goals on our children and families are able to do so unchallenged.
The Backdrop of Toxic Nostalgia
Every time I go to an antique store, I become acutely aware of my privilege. As I browse for cheap vintage paperbacks, cute clothes, and art, I am not directly harmed by the racist imagery that pops up in many forms, mixed in amongst typewriters and glassware. There are no indications that I am not welcome. Two years ago, the often-racist heart of antiquing presented itself to me in a uniquely 2020s manifestation — an old copy of Put Me In the Zoo behind glass for $35. Underneath the exorbitant price, the tag helpfully adds “(BANNED?).” Friends, you may already know this, but this book is not and was never banned.
Anyone interested in this book as an artifact of cancel culture could easily see the Cat in the Hat illustration in the corner, fly into a rage, and demand that they must own this precious rare book, cost be damned. Or they could use their phone to find out that Put Me in the Zoo is still currently in production and incredibly cheap to buy, even for a vintage copy. The similarly titled Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo is no longer in publication due to its racist imagery, but this book about an animal with multicolored spots wanting to live in the zoo is not going anywhere.
Of course, none of the “banned” Dr. Seuss books are actually banned. A company choosing to discontinue printing a book is not censorship. It happens all of the time.
Finally, a painfully obvious thing I did not notice until it was pointed out to me: the book isn’t even by Dr. Seuss. I have owned this book for 30 years and never noticed that it’s by Robert Lopshire. Oops.
The question mark following the word “banned” implies that the seller knows at least some of this, but hopes you don’t. Maybe they were just hoping to make easy money off of the outrage.
So if this book is not banned, not worth 35 entire dollars, and not even by Dr. Seuss and all of this information is easy to find with a brief google search (or just like... looking at the cover), what’s going on here? When easily disproved cultural grievances are repeated often enough and felt strongly enough, conservatives profit. These grievances become the stage dressing that successfully allows Republican lawmakers to chip away at overwhelmingly popular ideas and policies while propping up rich, white donors and their racist ideals and harming marginalized children, families, and educators in the process.
It’s All in the Vibes (And They Are Atrocious)
A few days before the news broke about the six Dr. Seuss books that no one loved or cared about, Hasbro announced it was dropping “Mr.” from the “Mr. Potato Head” brand line. True to form, bad faith outrage gripped conservative Twitter. The Dr. Seuss and Potato Head controversy felt like all anyone was talking about and mocking. Glenn Beck called it “the end of freedom in America,” which is something I’m sure he’s said about ten thousand things prior to this and will say ten thousand more times in the coming years. If Mr. Potato Head is not a cisgender heterosexual Potato Man, then we must fear the erosion of the white nuclear family!
Just like with the Dr. Seuss books, the success of the outrage cycle hinged on its audience having incomplete information. Much to my own personal confusion, Mr. Potato Head remains a cisgender male potato toy. The title of the line of toys was supposedly changed to be more inclusive. To me, this reads like marketing spin. Over the past decade or so, branded Potato Heads have become more prevalent. A more neutral name for the toy line reflects not changing norms around the gender binary, but the fact that there are a number of corporate franchise potatoes. The three genders, if you will: Mr. Potato Head, Mrs. Potato Head, and Spudtrooper.
It is tempting to see conservative media personalities mobilizing behind this as a distraction. However, this pattern of harkening back to the toys and books treasured by white Baby Boomers seems more like a deliberate, albeit obscured, tactic. The perceived threat to an idealized version of their childhood escalates the intensity of the psychic pain felt when other, rose-tinted facets of their childhoods are challenged. Evoking the destruction of these tangible artifacts of childhood makes it easier to exert power over policies and practices that reflect changing childhoods, changing families, and changing understandings of whose norms should be centered in our culture.
Between the manufactured gender crisis of Potato Head toys and the manufactured racial crisis of Dr. Seuss publications, a backdrop is set wherein policies and practices can be contested as a part of this erosion in order to dramatically chip away at their support within our polarized population. Amplifying fear of change and uncertainty while pushing the myth of stability in structural white supremacist patriarchy is the name of the game.
Yes, it Really is That Deep
Rather than adapting to their constituents’ views, as one might naively but nobly expect politicians to do, Republican politicians, media, and think tanks mobilize to change their voters’ opinions. Their desired antidotes to any societal problem are to regress to an imagined better time, to “limit” government, and to enrich the ultra-wealthy. When these ideas don’t seem to appeal to voters on a given issue, they pivot, usually to attacking marginalized identities, rather than defend their own positions.
You can’t successfully take on paid leave, child care and pre-k on the old terms anymore. Assertions about traditional families are seen as irrelevant, out of touch, and easily dismissed. These arguments are the realm of old men who did not care for their own children and certainly don’t understand what it’s like for you to take care of your own in 2023.
During a manufactured controversy in 2021 over accepting federal preschool funds awarded to Idaho by the Trump administration the previous year, one legislator stated “I don’t think anybody does a better job than mothers in the home, and any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going,” He later apologized for his sexist statements, stating that they were harmful towards “hardworking” (read: white, heterosexual, Christian, married, middle class) moms.
Ultimately, when the traditional family argument failed, conservatives tried two rhetorical tactics to undermine the chance of funding for child care and early education during COVID relief and Build Back Better negotiations. One flopped and was subject to mockery. The other worked and is still being used today.
Communism. As someone who was born a few days before the fall of the Berlin wall, the intense Red Scare fear of communism as an ideology by average Americans has never made much sense to me. I can obviously understand the fear of imminent danger from nuclear threats, but somehow, the remnants of the Cold War that still permeated early 90s media for children just went right over my head. At the time of writing, I am 33 years old. Most parents of very young children are probably within ten years of me in either direction. Young Americans prefer socialism to capitalism in numerous polls, or at the very least are equally supportive of each.
Yet Senator Marsha Blackburn was brave enough to think “Hmm, I wonder if an anti-communist argument circa 1974 might be a good angle to attack President Biden’s proposed child care and pre-k investments?” As a result, she was thoroughly mocked, with 2,400 quote tweets dunking on her. Similarly, then-Senate candidate JD Vance stated that “Universal day care' is class war against normal people.” Everyone told him this was ridiculous.
Anyone with at least one family member under 65 years old that still speaks to them could see that this was going to fail as a strategy. Perhaps this argument appealed to the hardline retired Fox News viewers that are their base, but it was not going to move public opinion of those who are most in need of child care. So this strategy disappeared as they took a look around and turned up the bigotry dial.
I have witnessed firsthand how riled up “apolitical” white women who teach young children can get when you suggest that it’s time to stop celebrating Dr. Seuss’ birthday in the classroom. This is a discussion that predated the 2021 culture war, taking place in early childhood spaces for years. The “woke left is canceling Dr. Seuss” controversy was particularly insidious because even while it was patently ridiculous and overblown, it fed into multigenerational fears from within the early childhood field that the stories that meant a lot to educators growing up are no longer appropriate to share with children today. It isn’t silly to feel sad about that. It is, however, dangerous to internalize that fear and let it impact your politics subconsciously rather than inspecting it, challenging it, and finding new ways to build memories with the children you care about.
With these temporarily consuming culture wars, the right mobilizes to set the cultural context that enables them to enact authoritarianism with little opposition. Meanwhile, conservative dark money groups astroturfed the “organic” local opposition to critical race theory and are doing it again with transgender people. When the general public moves on and accepts the controversy as a hum of white noise in the background, bad actors no longer have to put work into maintaining the veneer of new cultural grievances within this policy area anymore. They have manufactured enough seemingly superficial pop culture controversies in early childhood to enact their real goals. Now they’ve moved onto using light beer to stoke violent threats in order to silence positive trans representation for young people on social media.
Idaho and Alabama
While Tucker Carlson sputtered angrily for days on end about Mr. Potato Head, the Idaho legislature rejected millions in federal funding for preschool. I hope I have convinced you that the Potato Head controversy was not a mere distraction, but rather that these two things happened as parallel attempts to undermine confidence in our government’s ability to make things better for families at a time when people felt like it was a real possibility. In 2021, we were on the verge of creating and funding much-needed social safety nets like paid leave, expanded child care, and universal preschool. Because there was a distinct possibility that new investments would help families flourish after decades of imposed austerity, they needed to act to assert that good things are actually dangerous to the family that exists in the white, Christian nostalgic imagination.
A few choice excerpts from the debate that preceded the vote to reject this funding:
“I think we need to talk about social justice ideology — that’s what you’re voting for, you’re voting for social justice ideology to be given, through grant money, to our little ones.” – Rep. Priscilla Giddings
“The goal in the long run is to be able to take our children from birth and to be able to start indoctrinating them and teaching them to be activists.” – Rep. Tammy Nichols
“We’re indoctrinating our children at a younger level here… There’s no escaping it when the book’s already written, the curriculum’s is already written, there’s social justice in it.” – Rep. Heather Scott
Unlike the aforementioned Idaho lawmaker who apologized for his sexist statements in this same debate, you can guess that none of the representatives quoted above apologized for any of their remarks. Rather, their arguments were the crux of the debate and stated reason for the subsequent rejection of funds.
Similarly, the positive impacts of pre-k – especially Alabama’s program, which has been touted by NIEER as a “national leader” – cannot be successfully attacked on the merits (though that doesn’t stop certain right wing think tankers from trying). So step one of dismantling a celebrated pre-k program is using the culture war to do it, and as a bonus removing a lauded expert in the process.
In a statement, Governor Ivey’s spokeswoman stated that she was “concerned” that:
…the book tells teachers there are “larger systemic forces that perpetuate systems of White privilege” and that “the United States is built on systemic and structural racism.” She was concerned, too… with the directions that “LGBTQIA+ need to hear and see messages that promote equality, dignity and worth.”
It is important to note that Governor Ivey and all three Idaho legislators quoted above are white women. They are perpetuating the longstanding tradition of upholding white supremacist patriarchy that places them in the position of both victims of sexism (when it is convenient) and oppressors of everyone else. Their dishonest “think of the children” angle certainly isn’t new. The time of white male legislators openly parroting tired lines about women staying home may be dead for now, but it lives on in the attacks on critical race theory, abortion, and the very existence of trans children and adults by middle class and wealthy white women in positions of power.
Together these actions can be understood as an attempt to exert power where they perceive themselves as having lost control: over the reproduction of white married women and the fear of non-white children becoming the majority, over the bodies and minds of those same children, and ultimately over a future that will be determined by adults who might learn to embrace difference with love from a young age.
You have no doubt noticed that both of these attacks directly cite NAEYC standards, including the Advancing Equity in Early Childhood Education Position Statement and the Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) Position Statement. I want to close by urging that if you believe in this work and in a future for our children where they are loved for who they are and have everything they need to thrive, you have an obligation to not sit back and hope this blows over like a flash in the pan culture war controversy. It is a fundamental attack on our vision for what children and families deserve and it needs to be treated accordingly. It’s time for our organizations in DC and state capitals across the country to be at least as brave as our educators, children, and families in these states have to be.
It’s unfathomable to me that anyone could read that a governor is “concerned” that a book expresses that children “need to hear and see messages that promote equality, dignity and worth” and think it’s appropriate to respond with something along the lines of, “Actually, Developmentally Appropriate Practice is not a curriculum book, but a resource for educators based on evidence-based approaches informed by decades of early childhood research,” instead of saying “Yes, of course they do. What’s wrong with you?”
As a member of NAEYC, I don’t think it is acceptable to expect a pre-k teacher in Alabama who earns $10.29 an hour to be braver than a multi-million dollar national organization that refuses to openly affirm its own statement of values when they come under attack by political bad actors.
So, that’s what we’re talking about next time.
Up next: Who are we trying to persuade, who are we trying to protect? White supremacy isn’t going to stop attacking early childhood policies, programs, and communities and PR speak isn’t helping anybody.
(After that, I will circle back to the promised piece on for-profit child care chains and private equity)