Desantis is determined to make our schools safe for propaganda

Curse that First Amendment! What were the Founding Fathers thinking? As Ron Desantis has declared and legislated, the safety of Florida — and, yeah, the safety of the nation — isn’t a matter of gun control (or police control) but speech control, especially in public school classrooms and libraries.

We shouldn’t be teaching them the howling beast of so-called “real” history, for God’s sake, replete with words like “reparations” or “Dred Scott” or “mass incarceration” — let alone “queer” — but rather, polite history. The America we believe in is the one where people behave themselves and everyone gets along, right?

I can more or less understand the concern — the fear — of teaching real history: the divisive history of white conquest; the history of slavery, lynching, Native American genocide. Yeah, that could make some people feel uncomfortable, especially if history is taught primarily as propaganda, simplistic and unquestioned, which is what I learned in the 1950s.

In those pre-civil-rightsera days — when white was still, unquestionably, right — history essentially was a matter of “the first white man” to do whatever ... “discover America,” conquer the Wild West, teach savages about God. History was a gallery of white male heroes.

It was taught from war to war. And it was good.

The problem that Desantis and company face today is that the present moment is more racially and intellectually complex than it was seven decades ago. Jim Crow is dead and gone, but his legacy must still be examined and atoned for.

Citizenship isn’t a “whites only” thing, and American heroes of the good old days are suddenly a bit less than their legacy. America — the real America of 2023 — evolved not from its exceptionalism but its mistakes and misjudgments, which are still present today.

The real history of America is endlessly shocking. Take one of its heroes, Teddy Roosevelt, and listen to his words as they sound in the world of today: Should black Americans be allowed to vote? He once said, in 1916: “The great majority of Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for the suffrage.” Giving them the right to vote could “reduce parts of the South to the level of Haiti.”

Such words put American exceptionalism into a discomforting context. Should they, uh, not be taught? Or maybe removed from “normal” history and relegated to a separate category, such as Black history?

Black history also provides the context for teaching such historical horrors as Florida’s 1923 Rosewood Massacre, the destruction of a prosperous, mostly African American town by angry white men in search of someone who had allegedly attacked a white woman in nearby Sumner. Hundreds of white men ravaged the town, burning it to the ground, killing an unknown number of residents.

Seventy-plus years later, after scholars researched the incident and concluded that the state of Florida failed to protect Rosewood from the racially motivated massacre, the state issued $2 million in reparations to the survivors. The Rosewood story is taught in some Florida schools, but Desantis has recently mandated that the word “reparations” cannot be used in teaching.

Huh?

The would-be future president, addressing the Florida Board of Education last summer, explained himself thus: “The ‘woke class’ wants to teach kids to hate each other, rather than teaching them how to read, but we will not let them bring nonsense ideology into Florida’s schools.”

This is a man who cannot see beyond propaganda. And teaching the wrong propaganda is problematic to national security; hence, speech control is necessary. Teachers who don’t toe the line face criminal charges. Books that don’t toe the line must be removed from school libraries. Any questions?

Just a few quick thoughts, Governor. You’ve unleashed an avalanche of fear and legal absurdity into a struggling, underfunded system of public education, in the process crippling the learning process.

What are you so afraid of ? The truth?