Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is on a crusade. He’s banning African-American studies from public schools, claiming they impose a political agenda on school kids.
This is a brazen case of projection. DeSantis is ensuring schools indoctrinate kids with a white-supremacist version of US history
Rev. Al Sharpton led a march on Wednesday on Florida’s state capitol to protest Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to bar schools from teaching an advanced African-American studies course.
The veteran New York civil rights leader joined clergy members from across the Sunshine State in the rally that demanded DeSantis and his Republican allies stop interfering in teaching Black history.
(The New York Daily News, February 15, 2023)
DeSantis bans African-American studies
Sharpton has damned DeSantis as Trump’s most popular demon spawn. But DeSantis makes Trump look like a choir boy. No doubt he’s championing Trump’s MAGA agenda. But DeSantis is executing it in racist and Orwellian ways Trump is not even smart enough to imagine.
Foremost, he has his Ministry of Education (Mini-ed) propagating the term “Wokeism.” It defines the imaginary political agenda he’s crusading against.
But anti-wokeism has become the Republican Party’s raison d’etre, if not its casus belli. Except that Trump probably thinks it has something to do with insomnia.
Trump’s propagandist, Kellyanne Conway, popularized the dystopian scourge of “alternative facts.” Yet, DeSantis goes further by one-upping alternative facts. He’s censoring curricula and banning books. His mission is to indoctrinate kids with White-supremacist ideology masquerading as education.
DeSantis is empowering White Parents by suppressing Black ones
His frontline missionaries are not school teachers, but White parents – moms, to be exact. He has brainwashed them with his Orwellian rhetoric. Now, they’re insisting that all school lessons portray Whites in a favorable light.
That means no lessons about the cruel and inhumane things Whites have done to Blacks. Slavery? Jim Crow? Oh nooo! These are snowflake White kids, after all. So they must be spared emotional or social discomfort – by any means necessary.
Of course, the fact is that African-American studies would do far more than cause discomfort. They would also teach kids about the pioneering contributions of Black folks. That is, contributions they have made across all fields of human endeavor throughout US history. Learning that is bound to help them grow into less-prejudiced adults.
Frankly, anti-wokeism reeks of White privilege. And it would be laughable if it were not so racist.
This approach blatantly ignores the significantly greater discomfort Black students must endure. Because learning these historical facts must be discomforting enough for them. But they see monuments to the Whites who perpetrated that cruelty and inhumanity every day. What could be more triggering than that?
How Colleges should deal with DeSantis
While I respect Sharpton, protest marches will only embolden DeSantis. They might even make him feel vindicated. Instead, civil rights leaders should join forces with academics. Together, they should prevail upon colleges to reject all student applications from Florida.
After all, DeSantis has schools whitewashing the history and culture of Black folks, and he has them banning so-called woke books. His infamous book ban includes,
- The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron,
- The Bluest Eye by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison,
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates,
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (because this one hits too close to the “Gilead” home he’s trying to turn America into), and
- Any book that even hints at “critical race theory” and social-emotional learning.
Any institution would have cause to reject any student so systematically unprepared. After all, those books are critical to children’s education. Because they are as canonical as books by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Ernest Hemingway. Any professor worth their salt would tell you that.
So, the onus should be on DeSantis. Let him explain to Florida moms why reputable colleges are rejecting their children. That would teach them the truth and consequences of a whitewashed education. That is, if they want to live in the real world outside their MAGA bubble.
I assure you those parents will learn their lesson in short order. Which is that the high-school education DeSantis is championing is fundamentally flawed. And, when they do, they will be the ones marching to protest his ban on African-American studies.
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