ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been a surge of legislation across states in the US that amends school codes to mandate instruction on human rights and genocide. These amendments place curricular emphasis on the stated need for education about the Holocaust and other mass atrocities that occur ‘abroad’ (but not ‘at home’). That most school codes do not require instruction on African American history, which could include the compelling case of legalized, slow moving genocide of persons of colour and half of states do not mention Native Americans in their K-12 curriculum at all serves as a signal that, for the US, some humans and their rights count more than others. I frame this analysis with Billig’s concept of banal nationalism. It is said that the nationalism of ‘established’ nations reveals itself through a complex dialectic of remembering and forgetting in/convenient histories that brought a nation-state into existence. Banal nationalism also presents itself under the guise of cosmopolitanism. This chapter argues that the education laws interrogated here should be understood in terms of US banal imperial nationalism.
