Abstract
This Article argues that today’s anti-CRT statutes, book bans, and “divisive concepts” laws are not isolated culture-war skirmishes but the latest chapter in a long campaign—dating back to the Lost Cause and the United Daughters of the Confederacy—to legislate white innocence as national identity. By sanitizing slavery, suppressing discussions of systemic racism, and threatening educators with punitive ambiguity, these laws flatten historical truth and convert classrooms into zones of anticipatory obedience. The result is a state-engineered amnesia that undermines the core First and Fourteenth Amendment protections the Supreme Court has recognized for more than a century, from Meyer and Barnette to Tinker and Pico.
Building on this doctrinal lineage, the Article advances a constitutional “right to truth” in public education—a substantive due process safeguard rooted in the nation’s history, philosophical commitments to intellectual liberty, and long-standing First Amendment principles. Recognizing such a right is essential to preserving students’ ability to access accurate historical narratives, engage in democratic reasoning, and resist state-mandated orthodoxy. At a moment when public education is being weaponized to construct a sanitized national myth, the right to truth offers a necessary constitutional framework to confront these censorship regimes and protect the democratic project itself.
