On 28 August, hours after PEN America and PEN International published its joint submission, “Rights to education, free expression, opinion, and non-discrimination” (Rights to Education), which was highly critical of the United States, to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR), President Donald J Trump’s State Department informed the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that America was withdrawing from the audit of its human rights record.

Following a resolution passed by the UN General Assembly in 2006, every four-and-a-half years, member states of the UN undergo such an audit and receive a report with recommendations on how they can improve human rights in their country.

“Engagement in UPRs implies endorsement of the [Human Rights] Council’s mandate and activities and ignores its persistent failure to condemn the most egregious human rights violators,” a State Department official told Reuters.

The official added that the US would not stand for being “lectured [to] about our human rights record by the likes of HRC members such as Venezuela, China or Sudan”.

America’s unprecedented withdrawal from the process was not unexpected. On 4 February Trump ordered that the US withdraw from the UNHCR as well as UNESCO and UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), saying three UN agencies had drifted from their mission of “prevent[ing] future global conflicts and promot[ing] international peace and security” and of “act[ing] contrary to the interests of the United States while attacking our allies and propagating anti-Semitism”.

Another reason America’s withdrawal was not unexpected was that it had failed to submit its National Report by the scheduled date of 4 August. This prompted the UPR Academic Network, a watchdog group based at Birmingham City University (UK), to mount a petition, calling on the US to participate in the process as it had in 2010, 2015 and 2020. The first countries called on to complete UPR reports submitted them in 2008.

A ‘devastating precedent’

PEN America responded to America’s withdrawal from the UPR process with a biting press release.

“This action sets a devastating precedent for universal review of human rights norms and suggests a blatant disregard for the US’ international human rights obligations. It also signals to other countries like Russia, Iran and China that they do not need to be accountable for protecting the human rights of their people, including writers and journalists who seek to tell important stories in their society.

“This is a misguided retreat from US leadership in the international community. Whereas the US has led participation and engagement in the past, it is now leading a potential retreat from this process.

“PEN America condemns the decision to withdraw and strongly urges the administration to reconsider,” said Hadar Harris, managing director of the free expression and writers’ organisation’s Washington, DC office, in the statement.

In an interview with University World News, Harris added: “This withdrawal also signals that the United States is not open to examination of its own conduct – something which has been an important principle undergirding the United States’ promotion of rule of law, freedom of expression and human rights around the world.

As the Trump administration reconsiders its multilateral engagement on human rights and other issues, we strongly urge the US to remain actively engaged and be a constructive force for freedom of expression and all other human rights at home and abroad,” said Harris.

In a statement, Uzra Zeya, president and CEO of the New York-based NGO Human Rights First, alluded to the US’ decades-long claim to the leader of the Free World. “Showing up and explaining your record on human rights is the bare minimum for any government that purports to exercise international leadership and uphold democratic norms,” she said.

“The United States isn’t being singled out – every UN member takes its turn having its human rights record assessed. Running away from scrutiny doesn’t just show weakness and a lack of confidence; it will give rights-abusing governments cover to do the same themselves,” said Zeya, who had been Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights during the presidency of Joe Biden.

Trump has boasted about being a strong president and that under him the US is respected as it never has been before, and Zeya’s statement turns that rhetoric on its head.

Limits on what is taught

The “Rights to Education” report details a number of US state- and federal-level laws and policies, as well as executive orders that “restrict access to education and infringe on the rights of free expression and non-discrimination” that “disproportionately impact marginalised communities”.

Between 2021 and 2024, 372 “educational gag orders” were introduced into legislatures in 46 of America’s 50 states that targeted K-12 and-or college classrooms: 46 were passed into law in 23 states.

A number of bills name what cannot be taught: critical race theory, that systemic racism is part and parcel of American history, that there is “structural racism”, and issues relating to gender identity and sexual orientation.

For example, in Alabama, PEN America told the UPR about a bill that became law in March 2024 and which applies to both K-12 and universities prevents teachers from requiring students to “participate in coursework in which certain ideas related to race, colour, religion, sex, ethnicity or national origin are promoted”.

PEN explained to the Geneva-based organisation that is about a short drive from the German border that the law, which also prevents the assigning of “any readings whose authors describe feelings of guilt for historical wrongs … would in effect ban a reading from a German citizen who expressed guilt over the country’s role in the Holocaust”.

Referring to a similar law in Florida, PEN America’s analysis highlights how it “ [n]ot only… limits the educational rights of students enrolled in teacher training programmes, it ensures downstream consequences, embedding ignorance of history of racial and gender-based discrimination in the US into the curriculum for generations to come”.

Students who attend high school in, for example, Florida, as these pages have detailed, do not learn that slavery is the cause of the American Civil War – despite the fact that Confederate politicians stated that they seceded from the Union to defend their, so-called, “peculiar intuition” and the fact that the Confederate Constitution itself defends slavery.

Nor do these students learn about the brutality of slavery. Rather, their curriculum teaches that enslaved people “developed skills” for “personal benefit”.

“If students can’t be exposed to ideas about a slew of ‘divisive topics’ that are central to understanding our country and our uneven social fabric, it isn’t just about high school students coming [into college] with half-baked ideas about history – it’s about how a generation of students will have only a CliffsNotes version of things… with the controversial parts edited out,” Amy Reid, senior manager for PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Programme, wrote to University World News from Geneva, where she was representing PEN America, one of the civil society groups meeting with the UNHCR in preparation for what was planned as the review of the United States.

The ‘Balkanisation’ of US education

In previous reports, PEN America has listed the books banned in school districts across the United States. Among these books are George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, which are banned in half of Florida’s 67 school districts.

Also banned in many districts in Florida are Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, as well as Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, these last two being classic works of Black American literature.

This intellectual Balkanisation of America’s students will create more than classroom management problems for professors in, for example, Illinois, California, New York or Massachusetts, where the history of slavery is taught and where these and other banned works are part of the high school curriculum and, thus, form the foundation upon which the university curriculum rests.

“It’s a huge problem, because part of what is happening in trying to restrict certain books, concepts and ideas from public education,” Harris told University World News, “is to undermine public education as a whole.

“And by doing that, this will create a situation where people don’t have common reference points for literature or history. They also don’t have civics education, and they won’t have the fundamental critical thinking skills, which are an essential part of education as a whole,” she said.

In his email response to University World News, Peter C Herman, a professor of English at San Diego State University who has taught 1984 many times and is editor of Terrorism and Literature, began by reaching for Orwell.

“Banning students from reading books that challenge authority puts into practice a key line from 1984 (one of the banned books): ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ That’s what’s happening here: Republicans want to control the past so they can control the future, so they can hold power forever. This is how the kind of tyranny depicted in 1984 happens in reality,” he said.

Herman then set the issue in the divide between America’s Red (Republican) and Blue (Democratic) states, albeit with an important twist.

“The radical difference between what kids in California and Florida can read will only further deepen the polarisation between Red and Blue states. It’s no longer a matter of tax policy, but of two opposing views of reality.

“The old saying, ‘you’re entitled to your opinion, but not your own facts’; doesn’t work anymore because nobody agrees on what’s a ‘fact’. If kids in one state are taught that slavery was basically okay, and kids in another state are taught that slavery was an abomination, how can they agree on anything? This will not end well.”

America’s psych-history

Shawn O Utsey, distinguished professor of counselling psychology and African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, Virginia), discussed the censorship regimen that PEN America explicates in “Rights to Education” in terms of what can be called American’s psych-history.

People, he began, work very hard to guard against, control or regulate their anxiety, including, he explained by way of example, regarding events in the political and historical world.

“Think about how we regulate or modulate much of the very disturbing narrative of American history. We have already rewritten history with regard to the narrative of Columbus and the role of Native Americans, and the lack of involvement by the enslaved Africans in building this country,” said Utsey.

Then, referring to Trump, both as a political figure and as what amounts to an avatar of a stream of American politics, Utsey told University World News, Trump “recognised that there was still room to help Americans with their anxiety about the past and the shame and guilt they were feeling” following what white Americans see as “the encroachment of various people from outside of America and, even in America, who are not considered to be American by virtue of their phenotypical traits”.

He explained this term with a thought experiment: “When we think of Americans and close our eyes, most people, white, Black, Asian or Latino, will probably think of a white person.” This analysis, applies too, Utsey explained, to the backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in education, which PEN America anatomises for the UNHRC.

The vague language in many of the bills banning DEI offices and programmes, PEN America told the UNHCR, “coupled with provisions that levy financial or other penalties on institutions that fail to comply, have resulted in egregious examples of institutional overcompliance that further chill the climate for free expression”.

Iowa’s DEI ban is particularly broad, requiring the state’s public universities to “remain neutral on almost any topic related to social dynamics” including “unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgender ideology, microaggressions, group marginalisation, anti-racism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neo-pronouns, gender theory, racial privilege, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts.”

So what will be the psychological impact on students from, for example, Florida, who find themselves in history or English literature courses and realise that the standard story of history they learnt in high school was false and that they have huge (and politically engineered) gaps in their knowledge of literature?

According to Utsey, their first reaction is likely to be to feel threatened by the unknown because it jeopardises their sense of identity.

Utsey sketched a moment when students realise that the categorical structure that defines ‘Whiteness’, as opposed to ‘Blackness’ (of enslaved Africans or, later, the Irish or Italian immigrants who were at first considered ‘Black’), at the heart of America is akin to “a psychological Jedi mind trick”.

The phrase comes from Star Wars and denotes the ability of Jedi knights to implant a suggestion in a (weaker) person’s mind. In Star Wars, the Jedi’s use of the “mind trick” is bound by ethical limits that are, perforce, absent from the legislators and curriculum designers that formulated a curriculum divorced from the realities of American history but, nevertheless, was internally consistent, he said.

The mind trick at the heart of the curriculum designed by those who would ban books and create a mythical American history is, Utsey averred, the psychodynamics of racism that in 1960 then Vice President Lyndon Johnson explained to his assistant (and later famed broadcaster) Bill Moyers.

“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you,” said Johnson.

In other words, the aim of the exercise is to make students defend the identity they established through their high school curricula because it works to elevate them above Blacks or others, such as LGBTQ+ people deemed inferior.

The type of censorship regimen described by PEN America is an indication, Utsey explained, that “we’re in a battle for the narrative of truth and reality”.

Borrowing from the African American philosopher Wade Nobles (emeritus professor of Africana Studies and Black Psychology at San Francisco State University), Utsey said that “power is the ability to define your own reality and to convince other people that your reality is their reality. That’s what’s happening now”, as a result of school censorship.

“A new reality is being carved out. And the ultimate goal is to convince everyone that this [for instance, the benign view of slavery] is, in fact, the truth. That’s the scary part,” said Utsey.

At this writing, whether the UNHCR can issue a report without the participation of the United States is unclear.

On 28 August, the online Washington, DC-based news website The Hill.com quoted a spokesperson for the UNHRC saying: “The Bureau of the Human Rights Council (its president and four vice-presidents) will discuss this matter at its earliest convenience. This is a matter for the 47 member states of the Human Rights Council to consider at a later stage.”