Insidious ‘individual freedom’ bills promote racism, not freedom

The most insidious bills in a Florida legislative session that’s cluttered with them travel under the false but beguiling flag of “individual freedom.” The “freedom” they promote is to be ignorant of racism’s enormous influence on American history and why it still matters today.

Among the many reasons why it still matters:

Politicians like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis exploit it.

There are still ghettoes everywhere that were created by government red-lining and highway routing.

Black men and boys die for being in white neighborhoods, or for encountering the wrong police officer.

Despite substantial progress since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Black people remain disadvantaged in health care and in educational and employment opportunities.

The median white household has nearly eight times as much wealth as the median Black one, the legacy of two and a half centuries in which Black slaves were allowed to own nothing.

The so-called “freedom” legislation, Senate Bill 148 and House Bill 7, would discourage the schools and universities from teaching about these things and caution employers against requiring the sensitivity training that is just good business practice these days.

That is the inevitable consequence, despite recent cosmetic changes in committee to HB 7, which attempt to distinguish between education and indoctrination.

The legislation still amends the existing state civil rights law to entitle students and employees to sue for damages for any instruction that they might claim causes them to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”

That is a blank check for litigation abuse — or, as often said in Tallahassee, a lawyers’ relief bill.

Although the rest of the bill speaks appropriately about equal rights and tolerance, the thrust is to make teachers and employers think more than twice about what they say and, to be safe, to say nothing at all.

There is no evidence that anyone has been teaching white kids to be ashamed of their race. But this is the propaganda pretext for the so-called “freedom” bills.

However, white privilege is real. It is the product of racial bias, even if unconscious, that originated 400 years ago in the excuses that slave owners invented to rationalize their barbaric mistreatment of other human beings.

They professed that Blacks were inferior, fit for nothing better. That prejudice spread nationwide, surviving the Civil War and enabling the South to win the peace with a regime of Jim Crow segregation, sharecropper peonage, vagrancy laws and convict leasing, voter disenfranchisement, more than 4,000 lynchings, and white-onBlack massacres such as the destruction of the Florida communities of Rosewood and Ocoee.

Although it was worst in the South, racial discrimination was and remains a national burden. People of Native American, Hispanic and Asian origin have been victims too.

Disinformation and denial nourished that racism. History books and popular media misrepresented “states’ rights” rather than slavery to have been the underlying issue of the Civil War; Southern schoolchildren were taught to call it the “War Between the States” or “The War of Northern Aggression.” Reconstruction was demonized in popular media as an orgy of corruption rather than as the source of the first free public schools in Florida and other Southern states. Robert E. Lee and others who had betrayed their oaths to the United States were lionized. In 1911, the University of Florida fired a professor for writing that the South had been in the wrong.

History curricula also glossed over such inconvenient truths as the genocide against Native Americans under the slogan of “manifest destiny,” how Texas and the Far West were taken at gunpoint from Mexico for the sake of expanding slavery, and how American citizens of Japanese heritage were put in concentration camps by racist assumptions of disloyalty during World War II.

We should have learned by now that no good comes from sugarcoating history. Surely no one in Florida politics would try to discourage candid teaching about the Holocaust. To the contrary, state law requires it.

One reason for that law is to counteract the Holocaust denial that persists despite overwhelming testamentary and documentary evidence of history’s greatest crime. The deniers aim to perpetuate antisemitism by denying or minimizing its consequences. Holocaust denial is intrinsically antisemitic.

Similarly, denial of racism is intrinsically racist.

HB 7 and SB 148 cater to white voters who resent the inexorable demographic and political changes around them that make them vulnerable to cynical political exploitation.

To accommodate rather than cope with their prejudices is to raise more generations of susceptible and prejudiced Americans.

Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder himself, propagated the racist rationale even though he acknowledged that slavery could destroy the infant nation he had helped to create.

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he wrote in “Notes on the State of Virginia.”

Something else he wrote bears directly on what’s happening in Tallahassee now:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.