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antirasism
To Save Our Democracy, Stop DeSantis’ Racist Education Crusade
A personal reflection on the counterrevolution against Black history from a civil rights attorney.
Feb 27, 2024
As this year’s Black History Month comes to a close, the struggle for racial understanding and justice in the United States hangs by a thread in many of the nation’s state houses.
At the state level, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spent a year trying to burnish his standing in the Republican Party’s primaries by restricting the teaching of America’s racial history in public schools. What DeSantis is doing threatens to seriously weaken public education in other states as well. This only cements racism deeper into American culture and degrades our democracy.
Just because this struggle is no longer front-page news, and just because DeSantis dropped out of the race, doesn’t signal that its importance has diminished. To the contrary, those opposed to racial justice have often achieved their objectives when the spotlight shifts away from their efforts. That is my fear regarding public education right now.
In essence, DeSantis is demanding that public schools teach that whatever problems Black students face in schools, in jobs, in the streets, or with the police have nothing to do with racial discrimination.
In Florida’s public schools, all the way up to seniors in high school, DeSantis had convinced the state legislature to prohibit teaching students about the reality of slavery and its aftermath, through the post-Civil War Jim Crow era right up until now.
His claimed justification: Teaching that conveys a hurtful message to white students that can make them feel “guilty” and damage them throughout their lives. But “feeling bad” about a pivotal, brutal centerpiece of U.S. history should be a growth experience for everyone.
In essence, DeSantis is demanding that public schools teach that whatever problems Black students face in schools, in jobs, in the streets, or with the police have nothing to do with racial discrimination. Rather than “blaming whites,” they should look to themselves and their family structure.
Whatever racial discrimination has existed since slavery, according to DeSantis, was wiped away by the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s, which he claims leveled the playing field.
Not content to strip away how racism’s destructive impact on Black people continues to this day, the governor pressured the Florida State Board of Education to recommend that public universities include in their courses the “benefits” of slavery. For example, slavery trained enslaved people to become blacksmiths, butlers, maids and cooks, and other functions their owners demanded slaves to perform—leaving out the horrors of being whipped, beaten, or killed at the whim of their masters.
“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”
When I think about the law that DeSantis got his rubber stamp legislature to pass, my mind shifts back to my parents taking me at 13 to see Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s hit Broadway musical South Pacific.
Set on a base in the Pacific islands where American forces were fighting the Japanese during World War II, a second lieutenant fell in love with a beautiful Polynesian woman from a neighboring island.
Thinking of taking her back to the United States, he realized that the Jim Crow South would make that impossible. The officer sang a lament entitled “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.”
Living in a closed off white world and rarely hearing of Black people except those who were athletes or performers—or those who were arrested and made the newspapers—was teaching enough.
Its lyrics spelled out clearly how children had to be taught by the age of six, seven, or eight to hate people their parents hated and to rule over people whose skin was a different shade than their white skin, and he despaired about any future for their relationship.
At that time, up North where my family lived in New York City, our family employed Black workers in our apartment. But contrary to the Rodgers and Hammerstein song, I didn’t remember being taught anything about them. They were just there.
So, did that mean I had escaped a racist education? No—it just looked different up North.
My parents called these workers by their first names, while they called my parents Mr. and Mrs. Our butler, William Rutherford, and his wife, Loraina, had a warm spot for me and I liked both of them, which was perfectly fine with my parents. Yet I had no understanding of what their lives were like outside of our apartment. They always seemed to be working and living in the tiny back room and bath in our home, where I sometimes spent hours with them when my parents were out.
With Bill and Loraina in the apartment, my parents could come and go as they pleased and even travel. Our family needs were provided by them, and they also provided companionship and friendly supervision. My friends and I, growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, had no sense that we had been carefully taught—through the silence that left us in the dark—to view Black people as inferior like that lieutenant in the South Pacific musical sang.
But we did become aware as we grew up that in the South, laws required segregation and limited where Black people could go—even whether they could be outside after dark. We became aware that Black people could be thrown into jail or lynched if they did not obey.
Yet the reality was that our Northern public schools were also segregated—not by rigid law, but by our housing, economics, and way of life. Once, when William Rutherford was driving me to my grandfather’s country club in Westchester when I was 17, I asked Bill about his experience during World War II in the Navy as a SeaBee, knowing that his unit was all Black. It was constant drudgery, he said. Boiling hot. They treated us like dirt.
Never again did I broach the subject, leaving our conversation, as usual, all about me.
After the passage of the groundbreaking Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, at a time when I became a civil rights lawyer working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Black people continued to live in a rigid second-class environment, North as well as South.
To be sure, most of our teaching up North was silent. As white Northerners, the world we lived in was almost all white. This included all the people working in the banks, the doctors’ offices, the stores, the restaurants, and theaters. My parents’ friends were white, as were all the cops, the firemen, the elevator operators and doormen in our building.
Living in a closed off white world and rarely hearing of Black people except those who were athletes or performers—or those who were arrested and made the newspapers—was teaching enough.
Now, decades later, many things have outwardly changed. There are successful Black businessmen and women, lawyers, and doctors working in what were all white firms and hospitals, as well as Black cops and firemen. Even a president of the United States as well as across the spectrum of elected and appointed government officials.
To create that very different world, it has taken many years of demonstrations and lawsuits and the deaths of civil rights workers along the way. But progressive whites as well as Blacks know there is much work still to be done. Many cities still have segregated, barely functional public schools, and there are zoning laws and regulations that serve to segregate many suburban areas, locking out all but the wealthy.
Tragically, there are still employers who reject those who seek employment with “Black” sounding names or criminal records, and our prisons are overcrowded, with too few rehabilitation programs. The statistics are there for all to see.
Don’t Let Our History Slip Away
In many ways, we are being pushed backward by a counterrevolution made worse by trade policies that outsourced millions of often white working class jobs, opening these white workers to a racist opportunist like Donald Trump.
Enter another man with his Harvard and Yale credentials, aping Trump, named DeSantis. Attempting to push Black Americans back further into second class status, DeSantis grabbed onto education as his hook. His approach to education pulls us back to the Rogers and Hammerstein song that helped awaken me as a child.
To do this, he has promoted two new twists to what would be his perversion of how to teach about racism. First, don’t teach either Black or white children the country’s terrible racial history, DeSantis says. Instead, he wants Florida’s teachers to quickly pass over the subject and be silent about its continuing existence and impact.
As long as DeSantis and the politicians that follow his attempt to stop our teachers from teaching our children about racism and its long American history, we must work to stop him and those who follow his example.
Now, however, DeSantis adds an addition to his heavily censored version. He claims that slavery had its good side because it taught a few slaves to have some basic craft skills like shoeing a horse for the master to ride.
Disgusting, many of us lament. But what is new about this? We have lived through racist governors and racists senators and racist presidents, too many to count them with their names on universities, institutes, and fellowships. Oh well, we say, that happened in a different age.
But it is not. As long as DeSantis and the politicians that follow his attempt to stop our teachers from teaching our children about racism and its long American history, we must work to stop him and those who follow his example.
We can stop him if we are diligent in fighting back. We must organize across race. We can write articles for our local newspapers and send letters to the editor, and we can ask our friends to do the same. We can demand that the leaders of our elite institutions, like the ones DeSantis graduated from, and the publishers of grade school and high school textbooks, refuse to surrender to falsehoods.
Our democracy depends upon this.
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The Social Immune System
May 22, 2014
Never Forget. To Vote. | A Nazi-free Europe, feat. Rainer Höss | SSUWatch Rainer Höss, grandchild of Nazi-commandant Rudolf Höss, tell Europe to never forget our dark past. Please share and ...
Europe has a special worry about a broken, uncaring economy.
Things rip apart. More and more people fall into desperation. Some of them decide it's the fault of immigrants. Or homosexuals. Or . . .
"Today, Nazi influences are growing in Europe for the same reasons they did back then. The social safety nets have been torn, and people are left behind. Left alone. The hopelessness is what comes first, then the hatred. It's never the other way around."
A campaign led by Sweden's Social Democratic Party (quoted above), in the run-up to the European Union elections on May 25 -- which features Rainer Hoess, grandson of the commandant of Auschwitz, warning people that democracy and human rights can never be taken for granted -- is called: NEVER FORGET. TO VOTE. Its point is that far right politics, including a blatant neo-Nazism bent on rekindling the old agenda of "blood purity," racial solidarity and loyalty to the homeland, is spreading across the EU just as unemployment and austerity are spreading and Europe's economy comes to resemble, more and more, the economy of the 1930s.
In other words, malignant racism combined with a bad economy can still foment social poison. Hatred seeks power and power seeks hatred, and they sometimes find each other. And what we call the "social safety net" might better, perhaps, be called the social immune system -- because society is a living organism.
Europe's history informs the whole planet that social caring isn't simply an abstract principle.
In Greece, for instance, Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi party, shocked the country by winning 18 parliamentary seats in 2012. This is a group with a serious us-vs.-them agenda, organizing itself around the scapegoats of the moment.
According to Guardian/UK: "Members of Greece's gay community and dark-skinned immigrants have been singled out for attack by Golden Dawn hit squads. The paramilitary units roamed the streets with seeming impunity until a government crackdown against the group spurred by the murder last September of the Greek musician and anti-fascist activist Pavlos Fyssas."
Such organizations are active throughout Europe, including Germany, even though they are illegal there. One of them, called German Youth Faithful to the Homeland, attempted to instill Nazi values in young people through camp holidays. As Der Spiegel reported, shortly after the group was banned in 2009: "The interior ministry said children were put through military-style drills and were taught that foreigners were 'enemies of the people.' There were training courses in 'racial science' where children were taught about the need to 'restore blood purity.'"
"Banning" the return of Nazism is hardly the answer and, if conditions begin making the ideology of hatred seem like salvation to large numbers of people, such a tactic will quickly turn counterproductive. The Swedish Social Democrats' campaign not only links Holocaust remembrance with active citizenship, but makes the point that economic hopelessness is a precondition for the scapegoating frenzy that is Nazism. We have a crucially abiding need to build the best of who we are into our social structure; if we don't, the worst of who we are becomes inevitable.
In the U.S., the concept of the social safety net is not discussed with the sort of historical urgency it garners in Europe; unfortunately, that has left it stagnating, at least since the Reagan era, in "political controversy," condemned as socialism, belittled as welfare. Even such solid social values as free public education are tottering on the brink of political abandonment. The entirety of the political debate, as conveyed by the media, amounts to: What can we afford? This is a condition seldom placed on military spending.
Social spending, when not condemned as harmful or wasteful, winds up being relegated to the category of luxury, as though the physical, emotional and spiritual health of our fellow citizens and, especially, their children, has no far-reaching social consequences. Socially, we're stuck in a system of profit (private prisons, for instance) and waste (human lives). We're stuck in a society with a defective immune system, and reaping the consequences.
Nevertheless, there's plenty of evidence that the social safety net, when it is functioning, works. For instance, discussing (at SpotlightOnPoverty.org) the results of their research examining the long-term value of the food stamp program, Hilary W. Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach note that it's been an important factor in helping people pull themselves out of poverty.
"Our results suggest rather than the Food Stamp program creating an inter-generational 'welfare trap,' the reverse is more likely true," they write. "Providing benefits to children at important stages of their development allows them to grow in ways that may help enable them to escape poverty when they reach adulthood. . . .
"In the context of the current congressional debate, our findings suggest SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits that go to children are better thought of as an investment than as charity."
Without such investments, social hopelessness has no bottom.
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