Fahrenheit 2021: The newest form of political correctness targeting books about race, racism
Banning and burning books is nothing new.
What’s new are the targets: books about race and racism.
In Tennessee, zealots want to get rid of a picture book by Ruby Bridges, who became the first Black student at an all-white New Orleans school when she was just 6 years old. Among the supposedly objectionable material in “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story” are photos that show white people holding signs that say, “We want segragation (sic)” and “We don’t want to Integrate,” as well as another showing a young boy with a sign that reads, “We wont (sic) go to school with Negroes.”
These unacceptable images are real, historical photos illustrating a true story about a young Black girl breaking the barriers of racial segregation in the Deep South.
People of goodwill can make reasonable arguments about what should and should not be on public school reading lists and library shelves. Some material is too sexually explicit or too violent for some ages. Surely we can at least agree on that.
But the objections raised in Tennessee and other states, including Florida, are more about manipulating history than anything else.
In Tennessee, the objections to Ruby Bridges’ book, made by the right-leaning group Moms For Liberty, are objectively preposterous. Moms For Liberty, which has roots in Florida, told the Tennessee Education Department that “Ruby Bridges Goes to School” — as well as a book about Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington — run afoul of a new Tennessee law that restricts the way racism can be taught in public schools to ensure no one’s feelings get hurt.
“The narrow and slanted obsession on historical mistakes reveals a heavily biased agenda,” the complaint reads, “one that makes children hate their country, each other and/or themselves.”
Historical mistakes, as if an era of forced segregation of Blacks from whites in America was the equivalent of a bad haircut.
Tennessee was among the states that
got caught up in the panic over critical race theory, the idea that racism is deeply embedded in our society, not just in the hearts of individuals.
Florida’s Legislature is hot on Tennessee’s heels.
The Florida Department of Education handed down a muddled and confusing rule last summer that bans teaching critical race theory. And Brevard County state Rep. Randy Fine has followed up with proposed law — House Bill 57 — that’s a virtual carbon copy of Tennessee’s.
The Tennessee experience with a picture book for kids provides just a taste of what Florida schools are in for should Fine’s bill pass.
Imagine if a teacher asks their students to read Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Devil in the Grove,” an account of the young Black men known as the Groveland Four and their unjust treatment at
the hands of Lake County’s longtime racist sheriff, Willis McCall. But Fine’s bill states that a public school may not teach “divisive concepts,” a handy catchall phrase that a parent could use to keep King’s book out of the classroom.
In New Hampshire, a similarly vague anti-CRT law passed earlier this year has spawned a bounty hunt led by the state’s Moms For Liberty chapter.
The chapter is offering a $500 reward to anyone who successfully turns in a teacher for violating the state’s breathtakingly vague statute, which can end with a teacher losing their license and job. It’s not difficult to imagine a Moms For Liberty chapter in Florida pulling the same stunt.
Texas’ new anti-CRT law may have provided the most absurd example of the new political correctness when a Texas school district near Dallas told teachers they needed to provide students with an opposing view of the Holocaust, whatever that is.
More news from Texas: A Republican state lawmaker has demanded that school districts across the state scour their libraries for 850 book titles. Most of them are about sex and gender, but the lawmaker’s jihad includes works focusing on the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an 1831 slave revolt, “The Confessions of Nat Turner.”
In Sarasota County recently, a fifth-grade vocabulary exercise was deemed unacceptable because it centered on a Black boy and his father attending a Black Lives Matter event in Atlanta.
Sarasota curriculum officials worried the passage might cause trouble because of the state CRT edict handed down last summer. Rather than risk the wrath of Florida’s Education Department clerics, Sarasota changed the story so its setting was 1963 Atlanta instead of 2020 Atlanta.
Because, absurd as it might seem, Florida’s rapidly adopting the official view that racism is a relic of the past.
This is going to get worse before it gets better.
The extreme right is targeting school boards throughout the nation and in Florida. We’re likely to see more crackpots than normal people trying to get elected so they can do their part to erase our nation’s racial history.
We understand the GOP Legislature’s desire to prolong culture wars. But it needs to end this anti-history feeding frenzy and reject Fine’s bill.
Don’t give bad-faith actors the ability to ban a book about a brave little girl who broke the segregation barrier.