Teach the white men only

Florida has passed a law governing the teaching of history in public schools. What next, a law on what brand of shoes the students must buy?

The Florida State Board of Education unanimously voted to ban teaching ideas related to critical race theory Thursday, making it one of the largest public school systems to fall in line with conservative efforts across the country to regulate certain classroom instruction of American history.

What’s the betting that they even have much idea what it is?

The rule says in part: “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

That’s ludicrous. American history is a vast array of things, and “the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” doesn’t cover them all! It doesn’t begin to cover them all. The principles are very interesting, and worth learning about, but so are other aspects of the history, including that of the indigenous people and yes you’re damn right the enslaved people. Hey you know what, one of the things you can teach about is the tension between the universal principles on the one hand and the genocide of the indigenous people and enslavement of the imported from Africa people on the other.

The move was a victory for DeSantis, who has been a vocal critic of critical race theory in schools. He told board members, many of whom he appointed, by video before the vote that students should be served with fact-based curricula by teachers who should “not be trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.”

That’s so ignorant. What facts? There’s an infinite number of facts, so how do you decide which facts to teach about? You don’t just order a box of facts from Amazon and then distribute them to the students by alphabetical order. You have to organize the damn “facts,” and the process of doing that is called…brace yourselves…theory. You’re teaching a theory no matter what, so it’s idiotic to think critical race theory is some cuckoo in the nest because it’s not a bushel basket of Facts.

DeSantis added: “I think it’s going to cause a lot of divisions. I think it’ll cause people to think of themselves more as a member of a particular race based on skin color, rather than based on the content of their character and based on their hard work and what they’re trying to accomplish in life.”

He doesn’t think that. Even he’s not that stupid. What he thinks is that the “universal principles” version is more flattering to the country and especially to, yes, white people.

In short he has a bad conscience. He (and all the rest of these goons) don’t want the central importance of removal and enslavement and race to be taught because it doesn’t make us look good. That’s the point of life, right? To be made to look good? Shiny goldy hair, shiny blue suit, shiny pale skin?

Critical race theory is a concept that seeks to understand racism and inequality in the U.S. by exploring and exposing the ways it affects legal and social systems.

The horror! Why would we ever want to do that?

It can be done well or badly, as we’ve already seen. Robin DiAngelo is a damn fool. But the fact that Robin DiAngelo is a fool doesn’t translate to all proponents and scholars of critical race theory are fools or that the subject is stupid or evil.

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