“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
Last November, when he won reelection by a large margin, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared that “Florida is where woke comes to die.” I still don’t know who created the term “woke”, much less why or when. But it’s become the latest toy in the diaspora of political angst. If “woke” means historically accurate or aware, then those of us with at least half a brain are more than fully “woke”. I can’t say the same for the conservative mindset.
In the latest salvo against historical accuracy, the state of Florida’s education board approved a spate of standards in teach African-American history. The new measures require lessons on race to be taught in an “objective” manner that doesn’t “indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view”. Excuse me? Objective? Indoctrinate? Only social conservatives in the Deep South would view solid history studies as indoctrination.
Not to be outdone on the ignorance scale, an Oklahoma education official, Ryan Walters, has declared that the notorious 1921 Tulsa race massacre – which resulted in the bloody deaths of some 300 African-Americans – wasn’t actually about race and that teachers should not “say that the skin color determined it”. The 1921 Tulsa event remains one of the most sanguineous racial events in U.S. history. It’s similar to a 1923 slaughter in Rosewood, Florida. But, in the eyes of social (and mostly White) conservatives, they apparently were just really bad days.
Not surprisingly, these changes in teaching regimens have generated controversy – and anger. In response to Walters’ claim, Alicia Andrews, chair of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, stated, “How are you going to talk about a race massacre as if race isn’t part of the very cause of the incident?”
In response to the recent Florida measures, the Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers union, denounced the new policy as a “big step backward.” Andrew Spar, president of the association, issued a press release asking, “How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from? Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them.”
This is why we progressives view conservatism with disdain. To us, conservative ideology is often regressive; holding onto false narratives of life’s events and who people are. It’s also an improper revision of what happened way back when. In 2015, controversy erupted when one of the biggest publishers of school textbooks, McGraw-Hill presented a tome that deemed African slaves as “immigrant workers”. The caption accompanied a map of the United States in a section about immigration and read: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”
The verbiage had gone unnoticed until the mother of a 15-year-old high school student raised hell over it. McGraw-Hill promptly recalled the book and issued a public apology.
And that is what people have to do now when they encounter something so outrageous. Ignorance is not education. Just as the truth always comes to light, so does history. Revising it to fit a particular narrative won’t change the facts.
Chief Writing Wolf 