The Racism That SCOTUS Just Allowed

Knew this day was coming ever since Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat away from Barack Obama. One of the driving missions of the Far Right lawyers and judges of the last 30 years has been to overturn the use of Affirmative Action in college applications, and today the heavily Far Right Supreme Court pretty much nuked that system from orbit. Via Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog: 

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that college admissions programs can consider race merely to allow an applicant to explain how their race influenced their character in a way that would have a concrete effect on the university. But a student “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote. The majority effectively, though not explicitly, overruled its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s consideration of race “as one factor among many, in an effort to assemble a student body that is diverse in ways broader than race.” Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the Roberts opinion.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor – a graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School who once called herself “the perfect affirmative action baby” – dissented, in an opinion that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor emphasized that the majority’s decision had rolled “back decades of precedent and momentous progress” and “cement[ed] a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society.”

The reason race-based college admission practices existed in the first place was to confront the near century-long period of segregation in the American workplace, something determined by our educational backgrounds. Young people getting hired to the best jobs tend to graduate from the better-ranked universities. Having Harvard or Yale on your resume - or depending on your region, the University of Texas in that state or University of Florida in that one - opens doors that having Florida Poly or Middle Tennessee VoTech couldn't.

Even well-established Black colleges like Howard, Florida A&M, or Morehouse can't compete if someone with a Juris Doctorate from Stanford or a medical degree from Duke stepped through the door looking for a job.

It's also a question of diversity, of getting the demographics of the nation - if not the state that university was in - to reflect the communities these college students were going to join as adults. Given how the state of Mississippi is roughly 37 percent Black, would it make sense that Ole Miss or Southern Miss or Mississippi State be so segregated that the White students never meet a single Black student? That sort of segregation before the 1960s in our schools made it easier to maintain that segregation in our societies since the post-Reconstruction Era.

And yet, here comes Roberts' conservative court, declaring "race-neutral" should be in effect when deciding who gets to enter our higher education. Like as though other factors like gender, income, and family connections aren't as problematic. Hell, the worst thing in college enrollments are the Legacy applicants: Students who get in not because they're at the top of the class but because their parents or grandparents are alumni, especially the alums who donate million-dollar building projects as a quid pro quo.

When I got into the University of Florida back in 1988, I wasn't a Legacy (my mom was Auburn, and was sore disappoint none of her sons went War Eagle), nor was I disadvantaged. Affirmative Action had no discernable affect on me. I was White, yes, but I graduated in the top two percent of my high school and scored in the top five percent of the SATs that year and I had sufficient AP and dual enrollment credits to appease the registrar's office.

The thing for Affirmation Action was that it gave disadvantaged students - often poor, and in this systemic racist nation often ethnic minority - an equal opportunity that I had to apply and enroll at what was - and hopefully still is in spite of DeSantis' recent sabotage - the top university in the state, as well as one of the top universities when it came to business, education, medicine (major pharmacy program if I recall), and journalism (the reason I applied). As a result, I attended classes with several Black students, socially interacted with them on occasion - I was to my personal shame something of an introvert, which haunts me to this day - and had no negative experiences sharing the campus with them. The biggest negative experience I got was from a white graduate student who yelled at me for biking on the wrong side of the road.

With this ruling, the Supreme Court isn't exactly banning colleges from considering race when reviewing their applicants, but they can sure as hell ignore race when rejecting those disadvantaged kids in favor of more Legacy (read: White and Wealthy) students whose parents can pay into school endowment coffers more readily. 

Elie Mystal at the Nation has a more thorough and bitter debunking of the Supreme Court's moves today (paywalled):

It has been a long goodbye. The Supreme Court declared race consciousness in college admissions, also known as affirmative action, unconstitutional today. The vote was predictable, 6-3, with all the justices appointed by Republican presidents standing together to revoke the policy. The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts himself, who ruled that affirmative action violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was, of course, written explicitly to revoke the racism practiced by whites against Blacks through their slaver’s Constitution, but Roberts doesn’t care about all that. His opinion attempts to capture the 14th Amendment and redeploy it to justify a white version of “color blindness” that just so happens to lock in a status quo that benefits whites...

But the death of affirmative action was not achieved merely through the machinations of Republican lawyers. While conservatives on the Supreme Court delivered the fatal blow, the policy has long been made vulnerable by the soft bigotry of parents, whose commitment to integration and equality turns cold the moment their little cherubs fail to get into their first choice of college or university. If you want to see a white liberal drop the pretense that they care about systemic racism and injustice, just tell them that their privately tutored kid didn’t get into whatever “elite” school they were hoping for... Some of the most horribly racist claptrap folks have felt comfortable saying to my face has been said in the context of people telling me why they don’t like affirmative action, or why my credentials are somehow “unearned” because they were “given” to me by affirmative action.

That last bit is in some ways the most devastating: Black people are attacked and shamed simply because the policy exists, regardless of whether it benefited them or not. I’ve had white folks whom I could standardize-test into a goddamn coma tell me that I got into school only because of affirmative action. I once talked to a white guy—whose parents’ name was on one of the buildings on campus—who asked me how it felt to know I got “extra help” to get in. The sheer nerve of white folks is sometimes jaw-dropping...

The actual cases decided today involve lawsuits brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group of AAPI (Asian American/Pacific Islander) students organized by white conservative legal gadfly Ed Blum. Blum has made it his life’s work to destroy affirmative action, and in this case, he found plaintiffs eager to argue that affirmative action policies discriminate against AAPI students who don’t get into elite schools despite competitive grades and standardized test scores.

On the facts, Blum and SFFA are simply wrong. The district court (the finder of fact in our federal system) found that the universities do not intentionally discriminate against AAPI students—and, more specifically, that there is no evidence that affirmative action is hurting them. (I have written that I think Harvard does discriminate against AAPI applicants, but that discrimination has nothing to do with affirmative action.) What this means is the entire argument against affirmative action is based on the feelings of some students (and their parents) that they would have gotten into these schools if the schools admitted fewer Black people, but that too is a thin argument. Getting rid of affirmative action will neither require schools to admit more AAPI students nor force them to weigh so-called “merit-based” factors more heavily. In California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities...

Policies like affirmative action, as I mentioned above, were first enacted in this country during Reconstruction. Any good-faith “originalist” argument would have to acknowledge that the authors of the 14th Amendment contemplated the use of affirmative action, and we know that because affirmative action was used in their own lifetimes, after the ratification of the amendment.

But the conservatives did not adopt originalism for its good-faith arguments. They’re not ending affirmative action to help Asian American students get into Harvard or UNC. The conservative majority is ending affirmative action because college admissions are maybe the only place in American life where being white isn’t an automatic benefit to the possessor of precious white skin...

To wit, historically, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white women. Women held only 35 percent of bachelor degrees before affirmative action policies were reintroduced; now, women’s enrollment in college outpaces men, and has for some time. Now, elite colleges and universities are giving men a boost in admissions considerations, because their grades and scores are not keeping pace with women’s.

Yet you’ll note that the Supreme Court did not ban gender consciousness in college admissions. Nor did it ban legacy consciousness, wealth consciousness, geographic consciousness, or athletic consciousness. Race, and only race, is the thing the conservatives don’t want colleges and universities to look at. Because race is the card white people use that never gets declined. It is their most powerful characteristic, the one through which all else is possible.

Even with what Mystal says, the response to today's end of Affirmative Action won't make it easier for White kids to enroll in the colleges of their choice. It's going to make it easier for mediocre RICH White kids who didn't earn the privilege to enroll in the top universities and force everyone else - even poor Whites with great grades - into lesser-valued schools.

The elitism is going to get worse.

Fuck Harvard and Yale. Fuck the Ivies. Fuck my alma mater UF if they dare decide to segregate again.

Start hiring more college grads from the universities that still push for student diversity in spite of the conservative outrage against them.

There has to be other ways to ensure diversity and merit in our educational system, if only to work towards ensuring that diversity and merit in our whole society. Access to higher education is one of the few equalizers we have in American society to undo the damage of centuries of racism, and this Supreme Court just took that away. There is nothing neutral or color-blind in the United States, conservative judges, stop pretending there is.

DeSantis Can't Read the Snowflakes

Posted on social media over the weekend, we have proof that Republicans are idiots and that Ron DeSantis is a moron (via Ellen E Clarke at Tampa Bay Times (paywalled)):

In Iowa on Friday to promote his new book, Gov. Ron DeSantis posed with a gift from a supposed supporter.

The gift, a framed cutout of an intricate snowflake, features the word “fascist.” Steven Goffman, whose profile says that he works for the Washington Post, tweeted that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, also a Republican, posed with a copy of the gift, too.

DeSantis was visiting Iowa, introducing himself to expectant audiences of Republicans ahead of a likely 2024 presidential bid...

Lemme get a copy of the photo:

 

pulled from Twitter

The second I saw the photo of the snowflake, I spotted the "asci" part of the word immediately. It quickly became a puzzle-solving matter of figuring out the rest of the word (The "F" is done with a cursive flourish in order to tie the mirror shape of the snowflake together). Considering DeSantis' public behavior - of bullying and censoring his critics, his hostile takeover of Florida politics, and eager willingness to use these methods to move upward in politics to the Presidency - the only word it could have been is "Fascist".

The symbolism of the snowflake - as a political insult - can't be overlooked.

That Ron DeSantis - he with the Ivy League education going to both Harvard and Yale - failed to notice the hidden word in the snowflake, and that he failed to recognize the deliberate insult given to him, tells me that DeSantis is unaware, that he's unthinking, that he can't perceive words or symbolic images that any intelligent person can. In short, he can't read.

I went to both Universities of Florida (which was a top-flight institution until DeSantis showed up to ruin the state's higher education) and South Florida (commuter college, but not shabby), but I could see it where he couldn't.

This makes some sense for all of DeSantis' recent attempts to raze Florida's public university system to turn them into broken-down partisan cesspools. For all the prestige he got from attending the top universities in the nation, DeSantis does not respect education at all because he personally remains uneducated and ignorant. And he desires to drag the rest of our state - our children and future generations - down into the cesspool with him and his fellow wingnut hacks. 

I seriously call on Yale and Harvard to rescind his college degrees and release his transcripts for public transparency. DeSantis' current disdain for higher education - and his clear lack of comprehension skills - proves he didn't learn a goddamn thing from your institutions.

This is what the Republican punditry and leadership wants as their standard bearer going into 2024.

Gods help us.

DeSantis as Bully and Panderer to Hate

Update: Many thanks to Driftglass for adding this article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Please do me a favor and help me figure out which blog pieces I should submit to the FWA Royal Palm Literary Awards, thank ye.

There was a time I felt there was no way any human being could be worse as Florida Governor than Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott, who bought and bullied his way into office back in 2010 and immediately mismanaged the state through ignorance and greed.

And then Ron DeSantis showed up.

This week alone revealed how bullying, callous, sadistic, and craven DeSantis can be.

First, DeSantis openly called to permanently block any pandemic prevention efforts that the federal government may mandate in the future (via Steve Contorno, Kit Maher and Chris Boyette at CNN):

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called on state lawmakers to make permanent existing penalties for companies that require all employees get the Covid-19 vaccination, his latest move to curtail pandemic mitigation efforts.

The proposal would extend indefinitely measures DeSantis signed in 2021 that made Florida the first state in the country to threaten businesses with fines if they required workers to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Those measures pitted DeSantis and Florida against the federal government over President Joe Biden’s efforts to get the country’s workforce inoculated – a standoff that helped boost the Republican governor’s popularity among conservatives.

Now, as DeSantis considers running for president, he is re-instigating that battle.

This time, DeSantis has encouraged skepticism of Covid-19 vaccines altogether, staking out a position far to the right of his top potential rival for the GOP nomination, former President Donald Trump, who continues to count the development of the vaccines as one of his administration’s chief accomplishments...

In addition to proposing permanent prohibitions on strict mask and vaccine mandates, DeSantis also wants to prevent doctors from losing their medical license if they stake out positions that contradict medical consensus. During Tuesday’s event in Panama City Beach, DeSantis welcomed to the stage a local dermatologist who has spread unsubstantiated Covid-19 conspiracies on Twitter...

In other words, DeSantis wants to allow uncertified, decertified, and unqualified "medical experts" to shill anti-vaccination conspiracy bullshit to scare the uninformed away from Covid vaccines that honestly work. This is how DeSantis hopes to win over the QAnon audience away from trump. In the process, he's willing to spread bad information that can get people killed.

Then, DeSantis issued an order to cancel high school programs offering AP African-American classes, claiming they offered no "educational value," all part of DeSantis' attacks on anything teaching our teens about racism as "Woke". From Abene Clayton at the Guardian:

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, has rejected a new advanced placement course in African American studies from being taught on high school campuses. He argues that the course violates state law and “lacks educational value”.

This move is the latest in a series of actions to keep conversations and lessons about race, sexuality and gender identity off the state’s school campuses.

DeSantis officially banned the course in a letter from the state education department to the College Board, the organization that administers college readiness exams like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). They also oversee advanced placement (AP) courses, which allow students to earn college credits in subjects like English and chemistry.

In the summer of 2022, the College Board announced a pilot program to “offer high school students an evidence-based introduction to African American studies” would be launching in 60 high schools across the country during the 2022-23 school year and will be set to expand to other campuses the following year.

“Like all new AP courses, AP African American Studies is undergoing a rigorous, multiyear pilot phase, collecting feedback from teachers, students, scholars and policymakers,” the College Board said in a statement.

DeSantis, a one-time Donald Trump ally, plays an active role in stoking social and political anxieties, primarily among white Americans, that stem from conversations about race and gender that occur on K-12 public school campuses. In April 2022, he signed the Stop Woke Act, which severely limits “race-based” discussions at schools...

If DeSantis wants to shut down any AP program - which has educational value by encouraging student research, debates on topics, and college-level study that all earns high schoolers college credit for passing the tests - he better be ready to shut down AP American History. When I took that in high school, AP American covered the factual history of slavery, racism, the causes of the Civil War, the rise of Jim Crow segregation, and the Civil Rights movement. 

This is Republican DeSantis: Refusing to let history be real about the damage racism has done to America, and relying on hitting us all over the head with comforting White Affluence lies.

And this afternoon, it's reported that DeSantis is demanding the public universities give him information on which college students are transitioning genders (AP News via the NBCNews website):

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking state universities for the number and ages of their students who sought or received gender dysphoria treatment, including sex reassignment surgery and hormone prescriptions, according to a survey released Wednesday.

Why he’s conducting the survey wasn’t completely clear. DeSantis has been criticized by LGBTQ advocates for policies seen as discriminatory, including banning instruction on sexual and gender identity in early grades and making it easier for parents to remove books related to the topic in public schools.

The survey is similar to one the governor is forcing state universities to complete regarding spending on diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory programs.

The current memo asks universities to “provide the number of encounters for sex-reassignment treatment or where such treatment was sought” as well as data for students referred to other facilities. It says to protect students’ identities when completing the information.

The survey requires a breakdown by age, regardless of whether the student is age 18 or older, of people prescribed hormones or hormone antagonists or who underwent a medical procedures like mastectomies, breast augmentation or removal and reconstruction of genitals...

One would think that there are federal laws in place - such as HIPAA - that protects individuals' privacy rights regarding their health care treatment.

But this is DeSantis as bully, running roughshod over the rules and regulations in order to score political points with a rabid religious Republican voting base eager to expose, embarrass, and even arrest trans and gay people for simply existing.

If these universities want to curry favor - and not lose any state funds - they will find ways to disclose the information DeSantis wants, and then those poor adults - college students are 18 and thus adults - are going to suffer harassment, discrimination, or worse. Considering most of the college boards and presidents are political appointees, they are beholden to DeSantis and the Far Right already.

This is all happening because the Republicans are obsessed with Culture War bullshit. All because DeSantis wants to out-pander trump in the 2024 Republican Race to prove who can be more sadistic.

Cruelty is not only the point with DeSantis, it's his goddamn campaign strategy.

Floriduh Republicans Earning the Dunce Cap

In the "Yes, Florida Is This Crazy and Stupid Category," let us take a look at the latest mad idea from our state's Republican leaders: Allowing uncertified unqualified military veterans and their spouses fill in as teachers to cover the expanding void of classrooms lacking actual teachers.

I am not the only one who sees how ridiculous this is: Frank Cerabino at the Palm Beach Post is skewering the whole thing (paywalled):

It’s part of a new state law that directs the Florida Department of Education to provide teaching jobs in schools to former military members who have served a minimum of four years of service, do not have bachelor’s degrees, but have a 2.5 or higher grade point average in at least 60 college credits.

So, if you were a C+ student with the equivalent of a community college education and you’ve managed to get through a single enlistment in the military without getting a dishonorable discharge, you can bypass the certification requirements to be a new breed of Florida classroom teachers.

Seriously.

It’s hard to tell with Florida whether the aim of Gov. DeSantis and the state lawmakers is to come up with yet another way to degrade public education, or to pander shamelessly to the 1.5 million military veterans in the state...

Considering how Republicans across the board sneer at public education - and are constantly searching for ways to either privatize schools into bankruptcy, or take away actual learning in order to turn future generations into cabbages - I'm betting on the first reason. Cerabino seems to think so as well:

Don’t get me wrong. Encouraging former military members to consider a career as a teacher after they leave the service is laudable. But not if the way you do it is by degrading the teaching profession...

So forgive me, if I figure Florida’s slap-dash effort to offer teaching jobs to veterans with as little as 48 months of military service is little more than something designed to provide an applause line in an upcoming DeSantis campaign speech, and little else...

The new state law seems to acknowledge its shortcomings by requiring schools to provide chaperones to the unqualified veterans for the first two years they are teaching. The law says these assigned “teacher mentors”, must be an existing teacher at the school who is certified, has three years teaching experience, and has earned an effective or highly effective rating on the prior year’s performance evaluation.

Oh, so certification is important after all.

This cockamamie new law is another unfunded mandate on public schools that is more of a new burden on them, not a help...

One can see a long-term effect here is DeSantis and other Republicans using this as an argument years down the line that teaching shouldn't require higher education credentials at all, and basically open the schools to get filled by the most unqualified hacks in the state. Hacks who are more interested in converting young minds to their quack science, bunk history, and religious bullshit.

What's missing in all of this Republican push to fill hiring gaps among teacher ranks is the reason WHY good education requires qualified teachers. If you're teaching, (and you want to do it well) you not only have to be an expert in the subjects you're teaching you also have to be an expert in HOW to teach those subjects. Mental skill is one thing, but psychological preparation and effective temperament matters as well. You have to have the patience to teach. These are things they teach the teachers, through those Education colleges earning those Masters and Bachelors on your way to the classrooms.

Lemme ask you this: Do you think a veteran - not exactly one with battlefield experience in the first place - is going to be able to handle 30 to 35 preteens in a classroom? Do you remember what it was like when YOU were a Sixth grader, and how much of a punk you were (even if you were a straight-A student) to certain teachers you couldn't respect?

How do you think these vets are going to handle a classroom - no matter if they're kindergarteners or high school seniors - the second the kids realize those vets have no idea what they're teaching and no idea HOW they're going to teach it? If we're lucky, half of them will quit before they cross the wrong line. And given how unlucky this whole situation reeks, we're bound to get horror stories of vets - some of them coping with Post-Traumatic Stress to begin with - getting triggered and getting physical against a kid who needles them the wrong way.

Part of me dreads how this will affect our public schools across the whole state, but I particularly dread the likelihood how DeSantis and some of the school boards are going to manipulate staffing at the schools by packing certified teachers into the privileged suburban (White) districts and shipping the unprepared veteran teachers into the poorer (Black/Latino) districts. Not only creating an economic and racial divide between the haves/have-nots but now an educational divide. The poor kids that need better teachers will instead get the ones who aren't really teachers at all, just glorified babysitters. The failure to educate all our children equally will bring us back to the bad days of segregation and dashing any merit-driven chances for kids from poor communities to rise up and flourish.

DeSantis' plan isn't going to save our schools: It's going to abandon our children.

Goddamn him and his fellow Republican elites. Sacrificing the best and brightest kids before they can even learn.

DeSantis vs. The Right To Think

It's been awhile since I've discussed how bad things are here in Florida so let's check in on what damage Ron DeSantis is dropping on our citizenry lately. 

Let's look at DeSantis' push of an "intellectual freedom survey" that doesn't really do a thing for freedom (via USA Today/Tallahassee Democrat (paywall)):

The questionnaire to survey students and faculty was required by a bill (HB 233) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last June. 

The bill was promoted as a way to safeguard open inquiry and intellectual diversity on state campuses. Opponents of the survey filed a federal suit in Tallahassee over it...

The email that went out reads as follows:

Dear Employee: 

You are invited to participate in a survey on Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity. This survey is designed to assess the extent to which you feel free to express your beliefs and viewpoints on campus. This survey is being conducted by the Florida Board of Governors as part of implementation of House Bill 233, which passed during the 2021 legislative session.  

Please follow this link (or copy and paste the link into your web browser) to complete the brief survey, which should take 5-10 minutes: [The link to the survey was here]

Your participation in this survey is completely voluntary. You are free to not answer any question or withdraw from the survey at any time. No personally identifiable information will be associated with your responses. This survey is anonymous, and responses will only be reported at the group level, not at the individual level.  

Should you have any questions, please contact the Florida Board of Governors.    

Thank you for your time and consideration...

So why are people opposed to this seemingly harmless survey (from another USA Today/Tallahassee Democrat article by James Call in October 2021)?

The United Faculty of Florida, the labor union representing faculty and graduate assistants at the state's public and private colleges and universities, argues in federal court that the measure will gather those facts and data in an unconstitutional manner.

In papers filed Aug. 4 (2021) in Tallahassee, UFF lists numerous violations of free speech protections and rights of assembly in just the law’s anti-shielding provision. A student who finds they have been shielded from what they perceived is speech that is offensive to others may file suit to “vindicate” their rights.

“We cannot imagine a scenario where the survey will go well,” said J. Andrew Gothard, the UFF president. The state has submitted a motion to dismiss the suit, and UFF has filed a rebuttal...

This survey and the bill supporting it raises more conflict over "offensive" speech than it claims to prevent. For example a Proud Boy / Oath Keeper student on a college campus could claim his "speech" about Replacement Theory was wrongly suppressed, and file suit to have his racist Anti-Semitic hate speech shoved down the throats of everyone offended by it.

DeSantis' office may claim the survey is "voluntary" and unenforceable, and the Governor's office already has the ability to cut funding to any universities giving DeSantis the power to punish those schools he feels are not performing how he sees fit: 

The survey provisions neither explain nor put any limitations on how the governor, Florida Legislature or boards might use the results of the survey... Remarks by Gov. DeSantis in support of HB 233 indicate that results will be used to cut funding from public colleges and universities if survey results suggest that a given school has not done enough to foster "intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity..."

If anybody lived through the era of Loyalty Oaths and political witch hunts (called the Johns Committee) here in Florida, welcome to the sequel.

I know a number of academic librarians at the state universities, and I sent out a message this week inquiring if they'd received those surveys as they are faculty (I also asked if I could see one, but no one shared). Some replied back that they got the 2021 survey which they agreed was meager but filled with "leading questions" (questions phrased in such a way that a biased response in the positive was the only way to answer it and still feel clean). They haven't gotten this year's survey but they've heard it's going to be more detailed. My fellow librarians are being told by the teachers' unions not to answer the surveys at all, but you know political pressure will come down if no one does fill them.

And that's what DeSantis is doing to higher education. Wanna see what he's doing to our K-12 schools? (via Ana Ceballos and Sommer Brugal at the Tampa Bay Times (paywall)):

Several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics initiative designed to prepare students to be “virtuous citizens” is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology after a three-day training session in Broward County last week.

Teachers who spoke to the Times/Herald said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught.

“It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School. “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning.”

The civics training, which is part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative, underscores the tension that has been building around education, making classrooms into battlegrounds for politically contentious issues. In Florida, DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature have pushed policies that limit what schools can teach about race, gender identity and certain aspects of history...

Those dynamics came into full view last week, when trainers told Broward teachers the nation’s founders did not desire a strict separation of state and church, downplayed the role the colonies and later the United States had in the history of slavery in America and pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document, according to three educators who attended the training...

Just to point out how wrong DeSantis' trainers are: They are ignoring the Founders' "No Religious Test" provision written into the Constitution itself; they are ignoring how slavery dominated our political debates in the 1800s to where we had a freaking CIVIL WAR about it; and they are pushing an "Originalist" interpretation of the Constitution that ignores the reality it can be amended and evolve under the guidance of current and future generations. Back to the article:

The civics training is the latest effort in a long line of education policies that aims to fight what DeSantis and conservative education reformers say are “woke ideologies” in public schools.

It also provides a snapshot of how national groups, including Hillsdale College, a politically influential private Christian college in southern Michigan, are working with the DeSantis administration to reshape education in the state. The goal is to put a greater emphasis on civics than on socially divisive issues such as race and gender identity, which DeSantis has said is an effort to reorient teaching away from “indoctrination and back towards education.” But to several educators who went through the state’s training, it felt like a broader effort to impose a conservative view on historical events...

This is essentially the next stage in DeSantis' and the Far Right Conservatives ongoing war on Facts. It doesn't help that their main source of "historical facts" happens to be a Hillsdale College accused of racism and religious extremism (via at Kathryn Joyce at Salon.com):

In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular. It has featured lectures describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a hoax and Vladimir Putin as a "hero to populist conservatives around the world."

Quick interruption: THIS COLLEGE IS PROMOTING A WARMONGERING, SEXIST/RACIST SON OF A BITCH IN PUTIN. They are on the side of an Imperialist Russia monster responsible for war, famine, rape, and death.

And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale has become a key resource. Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale's proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the "patriotic education" premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools...

These linked trends amount to a vision of things to come if Republicans win their current war on public education. And war is how they see it. As one Republican leader promised at Hillsdale last spring, if conservatives can "get education right," they'll "win" the country "back." Or as Hillsdale's president himself likes to say, "Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon." 

This isn't about education, this isn't about the facts, this isn't about civics or accuracy in history. This is about war that the Far Right are waging against the rest of the world that doesn't believe the same bullshit they believe. It's about promoting a mythology of "racial harmony" where things would be so much better if Whites kept their privilege, (White) Men were allowed to be manly, the feminists stayed in the kitchen, everyone knew their place and it would all be 1850 again.

DeSantis has been screaming about "Critical Race Theory" and "Wokeism" but he's using that as an excuse to indoctrinate the next generation into religious/racist ignorant extremism.

Our schools are now battlegrounds, and the Republicans want scorched earth to be our national legacy.

Don't let them win.

The Stupidity Plus Racism Plus Fearmongering Divided By Republicans, It All Adds Up In Florida

I am waking up to THIS STUPIDITY from my state's Department of Education:

Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students

Yes, our Republican-controlled state government led by Uber-Panderer DeSantis is going after Critical Race Theory again, even WITHOUT evidence that CRT was getting taught in our primary schools in the first.

And the Republicans are so afraid of CRT, so afraid of white students learning about how systemic racism has been throughout our history at the national and state levels, that these wise learned assholes are going after MATHEMATICS as though Florida's pre-Algebra classes are full of race theory.

...

Yes. Republicans are going after MATH now.

You know, I'm 50-something now, it's been ages since I studied mathematics, but I'm pretty sure when I took Algebra I in the Ninth Grade at Tarpon Springs High that there was no racism being discussed in the class.

I mean, I can recall we studied stuff like 2x + 3y = z, or the emphasis on parenthesis in equations, and I vaguely recall word problems like "If Monique goes shopping and finds that cereal boxes of Lucky Charms are selling two for $4.00, how much would it cost if Monique buys 9 boxes of Lucky Charms?" At some point we learned IF = THEN calculations for variables, and then we learned about fractions and percentages, but we NEVER learned about the Rosewood Massacre and its effects on early 20th Century population trends in our state, and we never learned about the economic effects of Redlining and the Ghetto as Financial Policy.

These Far Right wingnut Republicans are so intent on finding "reverse racism" or anything that would make White folk uncomfortable about the long tragic reality of systemic racism in our nation's existence that they will wipe out entire sections of learning to root out such fears.

DeSantis and his lackeys will be going after Biology (because God trump forbid Darwinian Evolution will make religious White folk worry they evolved from apes) and Physics (because God trump forbid learning about potential and kinetic energies might teach kids about passive political resistance used in Black Lives Matters protests) next. Maybe after Chemistry (because trump forbid that our kids learn about mixing things like interracial dates) as well. 

The stupidity of all this is excuse for Florida Republicans to degrade and demolish enough of our public education system to where our public schools are broken, useless, and incapable of preparing our children to higher education or well-paid jobs that require actual learned skills.

The madness of all this is that too many of my fellow state residents aren't paying attention to how Republicans are driving this state right over the cliffs and into the sharp pointy rocks below.

If only there was a mathematical equation that would explain the damage that happens when our entire state crashes into those rocks.

DeSantis Just Declared Hunting Season In Florida's Public Schools

Welp. Nothing was stopping Florida Governor DeSantis from signing the odious "Don't Say Gay" bill, and by Gawd he signed it today (via Kirby Wilson and Jeffrey S. Solochek at the Tampa Bay Times):

On Monday, surrounded by Republican legislators, the governor signed House Bill 1557, called the “Parental Rights in Education” bill.

Critics have dubbed the measure Florida’s “don’t say gay” legislation because, although the bill does not mention the word “gay,” it prohibits instruction related to gender identity or sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade and potentially restricts such instruction for older kids.

The measure allows parents who believe a teacher is violating the rules to sue a school district for damages and attorneys fees. It takes effect July 1...

This is essentially a bounty program for angry Far Right parents to file lawsuit after lawsuit against every school and every teacher, an long-term attempt to bankrupt our educational districts and drive our teachers out of the classrooms before they lose their wallets.

DeSantis signed the bill at Classical Preparatory School in Spring Hill. The charter school was started in 2014 by the wife of education commissioner Richard Corcoran. The governor has signed several education measures this spring at charter schools, despite the fact that the bills do not apply to charters...

So, guess what Florida: Private schools are protected but the public schools - where the lower-income families have to send their kids - are not. While these Republicans push for more children to get enrolled into charter schools - which have little regulatory protection and are not proven to offer the best education - they are doing nothing to hold those charters equal in accountability, which screws our legally mandated public schools even more.

In short: This is now hunting season and our teachers are the targets.

But it's not only the teachers who are going to suffer here.

By signing this into law, DeSantis is signaling that the very idea of homosexuality or differences in gender identity is illegal. We dare not talk about it, it is verboten now: Thus anybody who IS gay, or lesbian, or trans, or genderfluid, or still trying to figure themselves out, they are verboten as well. As the Times article summarizes:

When it was originally filed, the legislation restricted “classroom discussion” about gender identity and sexual orientation. The bill’s language later changed to prohibit “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties” about those topics in K-3 — or in older grades in a way that is not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards...”

The law may say it affects only elementary grade levels, but this law is still vague enough about age-appropriate that ANY grade level discussion is subject to lawsuit. 

That opens up the likelihood of wingnut parents suing well up into middle-school and high-school grade levels. This opens up the likelihood that these parents are going to push their children to "set the issue" and trick as many teachers and students as possible to make sure someone somewhere does say something about their sexual identity, or what sexual identity even means.

What is going to happen now is the likelihood of these wingnut kids taunting and bullying all the other kids to trigger them into saying something they'll regret. And then making the schools over-react into something the administration regrets.

Do YOU remember what it was like to survive middle school? Those awkward years when puberty kicked in and your hormones were on overdrive? Remember how a lot of the taunts and accusations you endured from the other kids were if you were "gay" or not?

It happened to me, among all the other bullying - the use of my back for spitting practice, the head slaps on the bus, getting pushed while walking the stairs, the unwanted nicknames - was the occasional confrontation if I was gay or not. I wasn't, but there wasn't much I could say or do - other than date a girl or two, which I wasn't good at doing alas - to convince the other kids. The taunting subsided when I got to high school, but a number of them kept asking me if I was gay well into my senior year.

It's awkward when you're hetero, but what if you are really gay, or lesbian, or realizing your gender should be different, or that your gender isn't set in a box? What happens to those kids.

There are studies that show how the suicide rates for gay/lebsian/trans teens are higher than normal because they are emotionally traumatized by the social stigma they face, and that was even after gay marriage and being gay in public became more accepted for adults.

By making it impossible for teachers or school counselors to talk to teens about this, DeSantis and the Florida Republicans are making it more likely these teens will not get the help they need to grow up. This is horrifying.

By monetizing attacks on teachers and schools over which kids are gay or lesbian or trans, DeSantis is encouraging bad behavior to flare up so that the gay/lesbian/trans kids are forced to fight back and the wingnuts can feast on the prize rewards. That means you're going to see more kids get encouraged to bully the other kids, start the whisper campaigns and back-stabbings and hallway fights that will trigger an incident that would ruin lives.

In short: DeSantis just signed a bill allowing bullies free reign to attack all the other kids in schools.

How many lives will DeSantis and Florida Republicans ruin all to pander to their fear and their hate?

You know what? Screw the law.

Every kid should walk out of schools in protest. Every kid should wear rainbow colors every day in class. Every kid should shout "Say Gay!" every chance they get.

Force the Republicans and the goddamned wingnuts to face the reality that their hate laws suck. That it will all collapse and they'll be forced to scramble to repair the damage they caused, that the bills for this won't fall on the rest of us.

#SayGay Florida.

The Book Burners Are Back, 2022 Edition (w/ Update)

First they came for the books about Critical Race Theory, except that Critical Race Theory wasn't taught in the public schools and they were just going after the books that made them "uncomfortable" having White folks depicted as racists.

NOW, they're coming for everything else in the libraries. I am not joking.

They're banning the graphic novel Maus in East Tennessee (via AP News):

A Tennessee school district has voted to ban a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust due to “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman, according to minutes from a board meeting.

The McMinn County School Board decided Jan. 10 to remove “Maus” from its curriculum, news outlets reported.

Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the work that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland and depicts him interviewing his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

In an interview, Spiegelman told CNBC he was “baffled” by the school board’s decision and called the action “Orwellian...”

The excuses this school board are making - that it contains "language" and nudity (which is non-sexual) - ignores the reality that as a memoir the book is documenting events as they happened, documenting the human suffering and cruelty and coarseness, with no sugarcoating. And there is no GODDAMN WAY you can sugercoat something as horrifying as the Holocaust.

The decision comes as conservative officials across the country have increasingly tried to limit the type of books that children are exposed to, including books that address structural racism and LGBTQ issues. The Republican governors in South Carolina and Texas have called on superintendents to perform a systemic review of “inappropriate” materials in their states’ schools...

This is happening in every Red state, every Republican-controlled school district, and I am not joking.

This is happening in Texas (via Ja'han Jones for NBC News):

In the last year, conservative lawmakers, school officials and parents across the country have embarked on a crusade against school lesson plans focused on social inequality. 

Laws and bans, ostensibly introduced to protect students from these allegedly “obscene” materials, have actually been crafted to coddle white parents — and by extension, their children —  who don’t want to be reminded of the ways they benefit from oppression. But we’ve rarely heard from students themselves about how they view the conservative assault on school lesson plans. 

High school students in Granbury, Texas, helped solve that problem Monday. Several of them teed off on education officials during a public meeting about their school district's efforts to review and potentially ban hundreds of books from school libraries...

“No government — and public school is an extension of government — has ever banned books and banned information from its public and been remembered in history as the good guys,” one student said.

Another student demanded the school district "stop the censorship."

“It’s plain and simple: If you don’t like it, put the book down,” another student said. “No one is forcing you to read it."

"Wake up to the reality that we are all different and we should all embrace each other with love — not blatant hate," she added...

This is happening in my own backyard (via Kimberly C. Moore at the Lakeland Ledger):

Polk County Public Schools Regional Assistant Superintendent John Hill and several of his colleagues spent Tuesday morning going to area middle and high schools to gather 16 books out of media centers after County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative political group, complained to Superintendent Frederick Heid that the novels, graphic novels, autobiographies, and sex education books contain pornographic material harmful to children...

PCPS spokesman Jason Geary said in an email that the books have been placed “in quarantine” and will not be available for checkout at this time.  

“It is important to note that these 16 books have NOT been censored or banned at this time,” Geary said. “They have been removed so a thorough, thoughtful review of their content can take place...”

Bullshit. This is censorship, and bending backwards for a partisan group desperate to convert the world around them to their hateful ways of thinking. That County Citizens group has also been protesting against mask mandates for schools, and complained about biology textbooks that depicted the human body as though our kids can't handle the reality we have anuses.

This is happening everywhere the wingnuts are terrified of people reading about different races, different religions, different identities. And not just in the high schools: They are going after public libraries to stop even the adults from our own reading choices. (via Nick Judan with the Mississippi Free Press): 

Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System allegedly on the basis of his personal religious beliefs, with library officials stating that he has demanded that the system initiate a purge of LGBTQ+ books before his office releases the money.

Tonja Johnson, executive director for the Madison County Library System, told the Mississippi Free Press in an afternoon interview that she first reached out to Mayor McGee after failing to receive the City of Ridgeland’s first quarterly payment of 2022.

Johnson said the mayor informed her that no payment was forthcoming. “He explained his opposition to what he called ‘homosexual materials’ in the library, that it went against his Christian beliefs, and that he would not release the money as the long as the materials were there,” the library director said.

The director then explained to the mayor that the library system, as a public entity, was not a religious institution. “I explained that we are a public library and we serve the entire community. I told him our collection reflects the diversity of our community,” Johnson said.

Apparently, the mayor was unmoved. “He told me that the library can serve whoever we wanted, but that he only serves the great Lord above,” she finished...

That goddamned mayor (yes, he is) is putting HIS religious beliefs over everyone else's in that community. Straight-up First Amendment violation: We're not stopping him from praying to his Lord, but he's stopping the rest of us.

McGee’s office did not respond to several requests for an interview from the Mississippi Free Press before press time, though he did speak with this reporter on Wednesday morning, acknowledging that he was withholding the funds from the library system. Nor did he attend a Tuesday board meeting at 5 p.m. at Ridgeland Library, which addressed the matter firmly in defense of the library system’s current collection. The board voted unanimously to bring the issue to the board of aldermen before seeking legal remedies.

At the meeting, attendees asked Bob Sanders, counsel for the library board, if the mayor had any legal authority to override the contract with the library system and the decision of the aldermen.

“Uh, no.” Sanders said flatly...

Whatever authority the mayor intends to serve, it’s unclear as of press time if his action is legally defensible.

“This is taxpayer money that was already approved by the board of aldermen,” Johnson explained. “It was included in the city budget for 2021-2022. It’s the general-fund appropriation that the City of Ridgeland sends every year for daily operation of the library. That money goes to everything from purchasing materials to supporting programs and staff salaries.”

While the city’s aldermen may have approved the funds, Johnson said it was the mayor alone who is withholding it. “I asked the mayor specifically on the phone call if this had been decided by the board of aldermen. And he told me no, but (that) he could have them make that decision,” she said.

That $110,000 represents roughly 5% of the annual budget of the entire Madison County Library System, the removal of which could have far-reaching consequences beyond the City of Ridgeland itself.

“It would definitely impact services,” Johnson said. “I can tell you that there’s a potential for staff members to lose their positions if the board is not able to move funding from something else to keep those positions open...”

That mayor is intentionally sabotaging a public service to serve his private faith. Again, GODDAMN him.

But that's how the haters roll, isn't it? Their fear of the Dread Other - by skin color, by faith, by gender, by identity - drives that hate to make the world around them bend to their fears.

These haters want to hide the reality that there are people of difference walking among us, they want to hide the history of the crimes our ancestors committed against those who were different - be they Native tribes, be they African slaves, be they Chinese laborers, be they Japanese families demonized after Pearl Harbor, be they Arabs and Hindi and Middle Easterners and Muslims after 9/11, be they Jews, be they agnostics or atheists, be they women, be they gay and lesbian, be they transgender. They want to cover up the sins of the past to excuse the sins of the present and justify the persecutions of the future.

Only Nazis would presume to ban something like Maus. https://t.co/RsRxxIQ5HZ

— Joseph Brassey (@JosephBrassey) January 27, 2022

This is where we are at, America. We've been through this before. Earlier generations had to cope with the holier-than-thou judgmental mobs, screeching against what they deemed unholy and communist, seeking to whitewash - literally - the dark history and dirty little truths about our Manifest Destiny and our Christian bullying.

They're not banning the books out of any sense of Christian "decency" or modesty.

They're banning books to make it easier to convince others later on to ban the people these books speak for and reach out to.

Never fall for these lies, America.

Support your libraries, support your schools.

And for the LOVE OF GOD, vote out of power the hypocrites and haters who are destroying our institutions over the power of the book.

(Update: 2/3/22) It is official, the book burners are in Tennessee and exposing their viciousness to the world (via Alejandro Ramirez at the Nashville Scene):

Last night, Mt. Juliet pastor and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Greg Locke decided to turn it up a notch by organizing an old-fashioned book burning. The books included millennial staples like Harry Potter and Twilight — hits of the early Aughts that were targeted by Christian book burnings back in the day.

In a sermon preceding the bonfire, Locke described beefing with "Free Mason devils" and said "I ain't gonna be 'suiciding myself' no time soon." Locke also said people aren't mad that they were burning books, but mad because of the books they were burning — implying that his critics, even other pastors, were devil and witchcraft supporters...

Everyone not of the Flock are the Other, everyone in Locke's world must either stand with him or burn forever. This is how far into extremism the Far Right has fallen.

America MUST Learn From Its Flaws

I've already said my thoughts about the Republican attacks on teaching history - their fear about how racist our past has been and how that racism defines us now - but it helps to hear from another voice like Rude Pundit, who spells things out in a more blunt but effective manner: 

When I was applying for jobs in academia years ago, I figured that, depending where I was applying, my whiteness and maleness would work against me or in my favor. It never occurred to me to resent the idea that I might lose out to an equally qualified non-white person or a woman because I believe that diversity in education is an imperative to maybe, perhaps one day overcoming or at least ameliorating the effects of racism and sexism. On more than one occasion, some other white guy would ask me if I was upset that I might lose out on a dream job because of affirmative action or diversity hiring. 

And my answer was always the same: "I'm not angry at people today for getting jobs. I'm not angry at people today for considering race and sex as factors. I am pissed off as hell at all the stupid, racist, sexist white men in the past who fucked it all up." 

See, what gets me, time and again, is trying to conceive of all the people whose genius, whose talent, whose abilities were never even given a chance because of the actual laws and the unspoken rules of white male domination and oppression. If you really think about it, that loss is overwhelming. It's incalculable. And it is frankly entirely rational, entirely normal, entirely expected that trying to wrap your head around it is going to make a white person feel like shit. 

Frankly, we white people should feel shame. We should feel anger. And rather than deny those feelings, rather than repress them and revolt against them, we should embrace them, learn from them, and grow from them. Otherwise, we'll just keep doing all the things that make future whites ashamed and angry, perpetuating the very system that we're pretending we've defeated... 

History is not some distant memory, some tale to be told over dinner or a campfire like a fable of old. History is living, reaching from the past affecting the actions we take today as we attempt to redefine our futures.

If what you get from that is that white people are bad and that you don't want to feel bad, that's on you. For chrissake, as a white person, why wouldn't I feel like shit about the fact that the country wouldn't exist without the enslavement of one race and the genocide of another, both done by white people? Why wouldn't I feel like shit that the white-run government didn't enforce the very laws that it created to bring about equality between the races? Why in the world wouldn't I feel like shit about lynching and terrorism by whites against Black people? As someone who grew up white in the south, why wouldn't I feel like shit about the Supreme Court-endorsed apartheid that prevented Black people from prospering for a hundred years after slavery? Why wouldn't I feel like shit about policies like red-lining and banking discrimination and environmental ghettoes? We're now talking about things white people have done in my lifetime, not 400 years ago. 

Goddamn, you'd have to be so deep in denial, so delusional, so sociopathic to not think that whiteness has been used as a weapon against non-white people. Don't tell me not to feel like hell. Tell me how you agree that we need to accept it, teach it, learn it, and change it...

The Republicans - driven by their cultural conservativism and their religious puritanism and their greed - dare not confront that past because it exposes the sins they are committing now in their pursuit of permanent political power. They cannot share that power with others they deem inferior by race and by gender and by creed. So they wage war on our nation's own history, to purge it of our sins like Rosewood and Tulsa and Sand Creek and Camp Logan and Port Chicago and the Trail of Tears.

Rather than learn from those horrors, the wingnut Right would have us all forget it... so they can repeat those mistakes in the here and now.

We're seeing the results already of the conservative witch hunt against teachers exposing racism: A Tennessee school board fired a teacher for quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates' works. Say hello to the modern update of Jim Crow, America. You're not reading this in your history books, you're reading this on today's Twitter feed.

Republicans don't want us to learn, Republicans don't want America to reform and refocus and improve. They don't want to do the smart, simple thing that Rude Pundit and I agree our nation needs to do:

A truly great country doesn't have to keep saying it's great. A truly great country can handle more than one idea about itself. A truly great country is one that recognizes its mistakes and treats them as the chance to become, what's the phrase, "a more perfect union," as our flawed, racist, but, yes, wise founders said.

Imposing Silence Against Racism And Our Nation's White Boy Sins (w/ Update)

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this article on Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment - I know the security is a hassle but I need to filter out the Chinese spammers...)

Saying this up front: The Republicans are doing this out of fear.

It's been an issue simmering for some time but ever since the George Floyd verdict and the ongoing struggle of the Far Right to rail against anything that paints them in a bad light, the Republicans have declared WAR on Critical Race Theory and are banning its teachings in public schools. Especially here in goddamned Florida under the faint-hearted eye of Gov. DeSantis (via Julia Craven at Slate (paywall warning)):

On Thursday, Florida’s State Board of Education voted unanimously, at the behest of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, to ban lessons that employ critical race theory (CRT) or the New York Times’ 1619 Project from schools. The vote aligns with initiatives in several other states such as Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Iowa. 

Florida’s amendment takes an existing rule saying instruction “may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holcaust” and adds “slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country...”

While that reads as though the Board is protecting teachers to teach on those matters, the ruling actually bans them from using any materials from the award-winning 1619 Project, which had studied the impact of racial slavery since the British colonial era.

Even as it bans specific themes and texts, though, Florida’s amendment doesn’t define exactly which historical or factual claims are off-limits.

CRT is a decades-old set of ideas from the legal academy, which began to be a low-grade source of right-wing panic about racism during the Obama administration. Since the anti-racism protests of 2020 and the end of the Trump administration, though, it has rapidly become an all-purpose term to attack any sort of discussion of the history or current conditions of racial inequity in America.

Nothing academically recognizable as critical race theory is currently being taught anywhere in Florida, according to officials who spoke with the Miami Herald. Yet DeSantis has continued his campaign against it anyway, telling reporters last month: “You teach the facts. You teach everything that has happened. But critical race theory is basically race essentialism. It teaches people to view that as the most important characteristic and obviously, if you are of certain races—Caucasian or whatnot—they view that in a negative light.”

It's not even being taught at the public school level - it's primarily discussed in law schools - but DeSantis and other Republicans are still acting terrified that something like it will trickle down into the regular history classes as more studies on racism's impact on our history become commonplace.

As the Florida law demonstrates, the goal of the anti-CRT effort is put the analysis of ongoing racism out of bounds—to treat any inquiry into the material inequities that define the color line in America as something equivalent to Holocaust denial, and to reframe discussion of ongoing injustice as an insult to “white persons.” Other campaigners go as far to equate CRT with Marxism, as if a true accounting of racism in America were somehow going to upend capitalism. Such intentional misreadings allow conservatives to create a dichotomy where considering how racism shaped the country is unpatriotic and anti-American...

What is REALLY happening here is that DeSantis - by forcing the state to impose these restrictions on our schools - is setting the foundation for ANY parent aggrieved and upset about Whites being labeled "racist" can sue to stop ANY class discussion about racism in our nation's (and Florida's) history. The matter may not directly be Critical Race Theory, but if the parent gets one whiff of "oh my God this makes my White ancestors look bad" they will go ballistic and use this ruling to shut it down.

What DeSantis is doing is literally whitewashing our history to make it look clean and happy and "oh, don't you mind about the decades of lynchings and centuries of abuse" and every other thing Proud White Boys don't want to worry about. The excuse that "making Whites look racist is a Marxist attack on THE GOOD OLE USA" just also happens to be the same damn excuse throughout the 20th Century for racists - from the Dixiecrats of yesteryear to the trumpian GOP of today - to ignore the damage they've done and are still doing. 

If you follow my blog, you got to have read Ta-Nehisi Coates at some point. His tenure at The Atlantic covered a lot of ground in researching the impact racism had to our history well into the modern era. His articles on redlining - the push by banks and realtors to undervalue Black housing and overvalue White neighborhoods - and his argument in favor of reparations to redress that damage are must-reads of the last twenty years. This is the kind of thing DeSantis and other Republicans would be terrified of seeing taught or discussed in our schools, because GOD FORBID Coates' work highlighted how racism was actual policy pushed by Whites in political and financial power.

If you grew up in Florida, you may have heard about Rosewood. Most likely you hadn't, because it's not often taught in our schools here. I didn't learn about it in the state history book I read back in third grade: I read about it in the 1982 St. Pete Times articles instead. It was through the newspapers I learned about the white riot that burned an entire Black town down, killed dozens and drove the survivors to flee halfway across the state... all because a White woman lied about getting assaulted by a Black man.

Do you think if a teacher started teaching Rosewood in a Clearwater high school classroom that DeSantis is going to allow that to even be discussed? It could all bring up stuff about RACISM that will offend the overly sensitive Whites...

Note: Yes, I am White myself. I'm just not a goddamn whiny bitch about it. I know racism exists and I've seen the damage being done right now and we ought to be FIXING THESE DAMN PROBLEMS instead of sweeping it all under the goddamn rug like we've done the last 150 years.

If you watch the history of how history is taught in the United States, you will notice a pattern: the Far Right - the ultra-religious, the ultra-patriotic, the ultra-assholes - will insist that history ALWAYS preach to the greatness of our nation and the proud heritage of what being an American should be. You'll notice those same people will quickly ignore, denounce, decry, or embellish any of the dirtier parts of our nation's start and growth - the chattel slavery of Blacks, the Trail of Tears and other forced relocations of Native tribes into harsh reservations, the anti-Chinese riots, the anti-Mexican animosity - because they don't want to be reminded that their cozy wonderful lives were all built on the pain and suffering of others who just happened to be Black/Latino/Asian/Other.

These are the same people who tried to shut down AP History exams in 2014 because they feared those classes would teach kids to be "Un-American" due to all the racism being discussed. 

The Far Right - the ignorant and ill-informed Republican Party from the lowest member to the fearful Governors right up to trump and Mitch and the Fox Not-News propagandists - don't want anyone to really see the warts and bruises of our American History: Because that might compel our nation to seek repairs, resolve old issues, heal old wounds... the same issues and wounds the Far Right twists into self-victimization of themselves in order to fearmonger to their audiences.

The goddamned Far Right would rather preach mythology than cope with the facts. They would impose silence where they cannot convince, and they will enforce their character by the sword of liars instead of the facts of history.

And that plays into that goddamned adage: Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. But the Republicans WANT that, they want us to repeat the same mistakes because it keeps them in power. They want us to stay racist and broken, because it profits them to leave our nation that way.

We need to learn from our mistakes, we need to learn how racism hurt our nation, we need to comprehend how that racism keeps us weak not proud. We need to rebuild and become the stronger just nation our history bends toward.

We need to tell DeSantis and his fearmongering kind to go away. They're not protecting America, they're defending the soft weak worries of racists. Go away, you hypocrites and ignorant. We got better work to do.

There Is Only One Safe Place In America Right Now: Home

We are eight months into 2020 and we are still coping with a Coronavirus pandemic that shows no sign of slowing, all because our national political leadership remains unfocused on fighting it to the point where trump and his handlers behave like it's still not real.

The scary thing is we are closing in on the traditional start of our national education system returning from summer breaks, where classrooms open in August through December for Christmas/New Years holidays. trump is insisting the schools open. Coronavirus is telling us differently (via Adrianne LeFrance at The Atlantic):

“This push to open schools is guaranteed to fail,” says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and molecular virologist, and the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. I’ve been corresponding with Hotez, and with several epidemiologists, over the course of the pandemic, and have noticed a starkness in their views in recent weeks. “The social-distancing expectations and mask requirements for the lower grades are unrealistic,” Hotez told me. “In communities with high transmission, it’s inevitable that COVID-19 will enter the schools. Within two weeks of opening schools in communities with high virus transmission, teachers will become ill. All it will take is for a single teacher to become hospitalized with COVID and everything will shut down.”

Hotez has good reason to be pessimistic. There were 68,605 new cases in the United States yesterday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The seven-day average has stayed above 60,000 new cases per day since July 13. Reaching 100,000 cases per day, once seen as an apocalyptic, worst-case-scenario warning from Anthony Fauci, is no longer difficult to imagine. Indeed, my conversations with epidemiologists in recent days were all strikingly dark. They agreed: Schools should not risk reopening, probably not even for the youngest children, in the coming weeks. “We can’t pretend like everything’s fine,” said Gary Simon, the director of the infectious diseases division at George Washington University. “If I had a school-age kid, I wouldn’t want to send him to school.”

The evidence is all around us. There is the summer camp in Georgia where hundreds of kids and counselors—nearly half the camp—got infected after only a few days together. Then there’s the school in Indiana where, just hours after reopening last week, a student tested positive for the coronavirus. (“We knew it was a when, not if,” the superintendent told The New York Times, but officials were “very shocked it was on Day 1.”)

We had months to prepare, ever since the official shutdown in March. We needed extensive testing in place, enough labs to generate results in days so we could quarantine fast enough. We needed more hospital beds and supplies, overflow facilities to handle the waves of infected we're still trying to heal. We needed to plan for home child care, providing workplaces the means to redirect work from office to home so parents could keep an eye on their families. We needed the funding to set up virtual schooling, mobile WiFi hotspots to families in rural areas, free Internet to suburbs and cities, and loaner laptops so that kids could get classes and submit work to and from home, where they'd be safe.

None of that happened. The scope and size of such endeavors can't be done state by state. It had to be done at the federal level. Yet trump and his Republican allies in the Senate are DOING NOTHING except give orders to the states and to school systems that can't even begin to solve the problems they're being told to fix. Back to LeFrance:

“The problem is the White House and the task force could never organize themselves to lead a federal response and bring virus transmission down to containment levels,” said Hotez, who has argued for the necessity of a federal containment plan that, if executed effectively, might allow the nation to reopen comprehensively as soon as October. “Instead they took a lazy and careless route, claiming schools are important, as we all know, and the teachers and principals need to figure it out. What they did was deliberately set up the teachers, staff, and parents to fail. It’s one of the most careless, incompetent, and heartless actions I’ve ever seen promoted by the executive branch of the federal government.”

All of this disaster gets laid at the feet of the trump family. Like every other crisis, trump handed this off to his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who proceeded like all his previous endeavors to mismanage the situation to where we're screwed now. As pointed out in this article in Vanity Fair by Katherine Eban:

Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control...

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science—or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”

The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. “I was beyond optimistic,” said one participant. “My understanding was that the final document would make its way to the president over that weekend” and would result in a “significant announcement.”

But no nationally coordinated testing strategy was ever announced. The plan, according to the participant, “just went poof into thin air.”

In a statement, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “The premise of this article is completely false...”

By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said...
On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states...

We saw the results of that: A number of Republican-controlled states - Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona above all - decided to push for quick re-openings, acting as though COVID was under control when it was merely waiting for super-spreader events to cause a second wave. Those Red states - no longer the Blue states (save California) - are now the hot spots threatening our citizenry to the detriment of REPUBLICAN governors who are now the ones to blame.

The means to track and isolate carriers through testing fell apart: Not enough funding and help from the federal level where it had usually been. We're at a point where people are waiting more than 7 days for results... during which time they're infecting everyone else as asymptomatic victims of the Coronavirus.

In the meanwhile, trump's Far Right fan base and media allies pushed against EVERY tool of combating the pandemic as though the fight itself offended their "freedoms", especially waging a war against mask-wearing in public places even though months of evidence demonstrated here and elsewhere that masks reduce the spread of COVID. Unless trump himself comes out and repudiates his earlier stances, we are not going to see an end to that fearmongering over masks (it may already be too late if trump tries).

There are no good solutions except the hard choice of going back to Shut Down like we did in March. The hard choice for the U.S. Senate - which is FAILING to pass much-needed extensions of financial aid to the unemployed and renters in dire need of paychecks - to continue federal support that most conservatives despise. These hard choices may be unpalatable to the Far Right... but without those decisions, we are facing both an expansion of a lethal pandemic killing more Americans and a worsening economic situation that can't repair itself without yet another massive bailout.

First things first, Americans.

Keep our kids and families safe as possible. Keep them home. Give them the tools to study in safe places and learn as best they can without the exposure to death they'll be facing in the close quarters of classrooms.

Stay At Home, America.

Stay Safe.

Highest Risk

It's behind a firewall, but the New York Times has an article from yesterday pretty much saying "JESUS, THE SCHOOLS ARE THE HIGHEST RISK FACTOR IN GETTING COVID, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T REOPEN THEM."

If we can quote from the CNN article that quotes the Times (written for CNN by Veronica Stracqualursi):

Internal documents from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that fully reopening K-12 schools and universities would be the "highest risk" for the spread of coronavirus, according to a New York Times report, as President Donald Trump and his administration push for students and teachers to return in-person to classrooms.

The 69-page document obtained by the Times marked "For Internal Use Only" was among materials for federal public health response teams deployed to coronavirus hotspots to help local public health officials handle the outbreak, the newspaper reported.

The document was circulated this week, the Times reported, as Trump slammed the CDC guidelines around reopening schools and he, Vice President Mike Pence and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos increased their pressure on schools to fully reopen by the fall.

It is unclear whether the President viewed the CDC document, according to the Times.

This is, again, why we shouldn't elect to the White House a bankrupt moronic con artist who refuses to read. Back to the article:

The document, mostly comprised of CDC documents already publicly available, mentions reopening plans from states, districts, and individual schools and universities, identifying some proposals as consistent with CDC guidance and criticizing the "noticeable gaps" in other plans, the Times reported.

Not every state is ready to re-open anything (cough, Florida, cough, and for 2,000 of us a day THIS IS NOT A JOKE). As I've blogged earlier and as others are blogging (and screaming), our schools are a gathering place of far too many humans into far too many indoor locations incapable of social distancing nor keeping everything sanitized.

You think bars and restaurants and Disney theme parks are super spreaders? Your local middle school will be just as effective in spreading COVID, and in a more horrifying way.

Jesus, America.

Reopening the schools right now is a bad idea.