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The American Sociological Association condemned the move as "a failure of Florida's commitment to providing high-quality civics education and workforce readiness."
Despite opposition by sociologists and educators, the State University System of Florida on Wednesday cut sociology from core course requirements, continuing Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' assault on academic freedom, intellectual pursuit, and knowledge.
The system's Board of Governors, which is full of DeSantis appointees and oversees a dozen public universities, approved replacing Principles of Sociology with a U.S. history course. It followed the State Board of Education's vote last week to do the same for 28 Florida colleges.
While the university system's chancellor, Ray Rodrigues, said he was "proud" of the decision, sociology educators and groups across the country sharply condemned both boards' moves as right-wing attacks on Florida's higher education, just one aspect of what DeSantis has termed his "war on woke."
Echoing its comments last week, the American Sociological Association (ASA) said that it was "outraged" by Wednesday's vote and urged the university board to reverse course.
"This decision seems to be coming not from an informed perspective, but rather from a gross misunderstanding of sociology as an illegitimate discipline driven by 'radical' and 'woke' ideology."
"There was no evidentiary basis for making this decision. In fact, the board rejected a proposal from one of the governors to table the vote while relevant data could be gathered," the ASA continued. "This decision seems to be coming not from an informed perspective, but rather from a gross misunderstanding of sociology as an illegitimate discipline driven by 'radical' and 'woke' ideology."
"To the contrary, sociology is the scientific study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior, which are at the core of civic literacy and are essential to a broad range of careers," the association added. "Failure to prioritize the scientific study of the causes and consequences of human behavior is a failure of Florida's commitment to providing high-quality civics education and workforce readiness."
While efforts to "Save Sociology" in Florida have been mounting since November, some in the field have fueled the attacks. For example, Jukka Savolainen, a sociology professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, wrote for The Wall Street Journal last month that "I have watched my discipline morph from a scientific study of social reality into academic advocacy for left-wing causes."
Following the Wednesday vote, Heather Gautney, a sociology professor at Fordham University in New York City, told Common Dreams, "It's not surprising that people in power would actively suppress efforts to question their power and expose the dynamics underlying it."
"What's surprising is the ease through which that suppression is happening today, apparently with the help of sociologists themselves in cities like Detroit," she added, noting that such attacks on the crucial field come at a time when society is "in such dire need of what sociology has to bring—systematic analysis, understanding, and policy solutions."
Teresa M. Hodge, president of United Faculty of Florida, a union representing educators at the system's 12 universities and beyond, similarly said Wednesday that "we are disappointed in this decision... but unfortunately, we are not surprised," given that both boards "have made it abundantly clear that they do not care about the robust education of our students, and instead only care about political games."
After the State Board of Education's unanimous vote, Florida State University sociology professor Anne Barrett warned that such policies "are devastating for sociology in Florida. Enrollments will plummet. The opportunity to recruit majors will almost disappear. Weakened sociology departments are ripe for elimination and, ultimately, faculty layoffs."
"The costs to society are higher still," Barrett wrote in a blog post on the National Education Association website. "Sociology students learn how to use empirical research and logic to assess the accuracy of claims made about the social world. They also gain skills to critique how power is distributed. In short, they are positioned to be engaged citizens, armed with the power to destabilize right-wing policymakers' agendas—and this is the threat these regulations seek to neutralize."
Florida Education Association president Andrew Spar stressed last week that "the removal of sociology courses as a core general education requirement is part of a continued attack on our state's education system. We've seen it in our K-12 programs—first, they banned books, then classroom libraries, and now they are removing dictionaries from shelves because of their content. Then they attacked curriculum for being too 'woke' because it taught the truth about slavery."
Led by DeSantis—who on Sunday dropped out of the 2024 presidential contest—decision-makers in the state have also taken aim at Advanced Placement African American Studies and AP Psychology, and LGBTQ+ people in classrooms. As a White House hopeful, the governor took his right-wing education policies to the national stage, offering a model to other GOP-controlled states and Republicans in Congress.
"By stripping them of their ability to learn about diverse topics from diverse teachers all because some state leaders deem learning too controversial, Florida is taking away precious opportunities for students," said Spar. "We must continue to fight back against measures that seek to put special interests over the needs and outcomes of students."
In the 1950s “communist” was the slur of choice to attack those focused on equity, particularly for people of color.
Over half of Republicans agree that “fighting woke ideology in our schools and businesses” is more important than protecting Social Security and Medicare, finds a recent Wall Street Journalsurvey.
“Florida is where woke comes to die,” brags the state’s governor Ron DeSantis, “woke” is “basically a war on the truth.” Under the banner of anti-woke, he enacted sweeping limitations on what can be taught in public schools, a six-week abortion ban, and America’s cruelest anti-trans policies.
For DeSantis, the “woke” are “cultural Marxists” who are to blame for what’s broken in America.
We’ve endured a long history of labels that mislead, divide, and hinder us. So, let’s stop the name calling, listen to the actual agenda of those with whom we think we differ, and engage in real conversation.
Merriam-Webster defines “woke” first as being “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” The term took off in 2014 after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, and then came to be used in the Black Lives Matter movement.
Today, “woke” is a sweeping, ill-defined insult making it harder to find common ground essential to reforms benefiting most Americans, such as lifting the minimum wage.
For those who lived through the 1950s it rings painful bells. Back then, “communist” was the slur of choice to attack those focused on equity, particularly for people of color. The McCarthy-era witch hunt caused as many as 12,000 people to lose their jobs.
Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the early ’50s my parents helped found the first Unitarian church and to integrate it. The FBI took notice. I’ll never forget an agent knocking on our door as part of the agency’s investigation of our church. The inquiry was scary enough to shrink our membership. It didn’t shut us down but did lead to several members being fired from their jobs.
As a kid, I thought that we were suspect in the eyes of the FBI because Unitarians were seen as atheists, and atheism was associated with communism. Only recently did I learn my storyline was wrong.
With access to church archives, I discovered a letter from someone in our congregation to J. Edgar Hoover complaining that a member of our church had been questioned by two FBI agents at his home. The letter stated that “Among other questions, this man was asked what he thought of racial equality for Negroes, would he marry a Negro, and whether or not he attended the Unitarian Church.” He added: “I think you will agree these questions are completely out of line.”
Hoover’s response? “No questions were asked by representatives of this Bureau such as are alleged in your letter.”
At about the same time I uncovered these documents, someone in my extended family shared with me his related experience with the FBI. During the Korean War, the army had called him to serve. But when the recruiter learned he was a member of the NAACP, my relative was told that he was no longer qualified because that affiliation meant he was likely a communist.
Today, “woke” as a put down is similarly worrying. The term is derived from African American Vernacular English, meaning to be “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” It could have become a rallying cry for a better America. Especially now, as the Supreme Court has rejected affirmative action, facing racism’s deep and painful harm becomes even more urgent.
We’ve endured a long history of labels that mislead, divide, and hinder us. So, let’s stop the name calling, listen to the actual agenda of those with whom we think we differ, and engage in real conversation. We might discover common ground on which we can all advance.
We would then be able to tackle the long-standing, anti-democratic economic and political rules that generate income inequality more extreme than in 109 countries—including all of the Western, industrial world—and wealth so tightly held that the top 1% control almost as much as the bottom 90%. Such unequal economic power harms us all, as it is linked to poorer health and education, greater violence, and other social ills. Its effects also infuse our political lives, twisting policies to further favor the few and undermining democracy itself.
Together we could in fact wake up to what truly harms us and thus become eager to join hands for the benefit of all.
In very simple terms, the word "woke" means being aware of discrimination and social crises and wanting to repair them in order to make a more happy, loving, and egalitarian society.
Ron DeSantis says he’s going to save America from “wokeness,” proclaiming to a Los Angeles fundraiser:
“So in Florida, we say very clearly, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”
Nikki Haley declares:
“Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”
Donald Trump is more nuanced, preferring to simply say racist things aloud without using the DeSantis shorthand.
“I don’t like the term ‘woke,” Trump told an Iowa audience, “because I hear the term ‘woke woke woke’ — it’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”
Trump notwithstanding, their competitors for the GOP nomination for president — along with Republican politicians across the country seeking their own re-election this year and next — are falling all over themselves to condemn “woke” and promise to be even tougher on “wokeness” than the last guy.
But what do they mean?
In 1938, Lead Belly sang a song about the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of young Black men and boys who were falsely charged with rape and sentenced to the death penalty in Alabama in 1931. In the song, he talks about meeting the Scottsboro defendants, saying:
“I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep your eyes open.”
Republican politicians across the country seeking their own re-election this year and next... are falling all over themselves to condemn “woke” and promise to be even tougher on “wokeness” than the last guy. But what do they mean?
The phrase had a major revival in the Black community, as NBC News notes, in 2014 after Michael Brown was murdered by Ferguson, Missouri white police officer Darren Wilson.
“Stay woke” meant “keep an eye out for white cops who want to kill you” and to stay alert to and aware of other aspects of structural racism in American society. More recently, the term has expanded to being aware of and trying to do something about homophobia, misogyny, and our nation’s social ills.
Woke, in other words, means being aware of these social crises and wanting to repair them, to make a more happy, loving, egalitarian society.
Which is exactly why Republicans are using “woke” as their latest hate-filled dog whistle.
While these shout-outs to white racists, fascists, and haters go all the way back to the founding of the republic, most people are familiar with their more recent incarnations.
In the 1968 election and for his 1972 re-election, for example, Nixon rolled out his “War on Drugs” and talked constantly about “law and order” to signal to white people that he was going to come down hard on the Black community.
It was integral to his successful Southern Strategy to bring disaffected Dixiecrats — racist white Southern Democrats pissed off that LBJ had signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts into law in 1964/1965 — over to the GOP.
As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“
And it worked:
Source: adapted from Wikipedia on US Incarceration rates
Nixon, as you can see, had considerable success in his generation’s version of today’s “war on woke.” Literally millions of careers were disrupted, people imprisoned, and lives brutally ended by his campaign to seize and hold political power. It echoes to this day, particularly in Red states where a joint can still get you years in prison.
Republican use of language to demonize people who aren’t straight white men have bridged America’s modern political history.
— Reagan referred to “welfare queens” and “young bucks buying steak” with food stamps.
— George HW Bush had Willie Horton, the “unrepentant rapist and killer” of white women.
— George W. Bush handily lumped all Muslims into the “radical terrorist” category as he ran illegal torture sites around the world.
— Donald Trump referred to “Mexican murderers and rapists” while throwing a sop to “good people on both sides.”
— And now the GOP has settled on the word woke as their way of shouting out to racists, Nazis, and hate-filled bigots.
The simple reality that every demagogue in history has known is that it’s more powerful to declare revenge and war against an enemy than to proclaim a positive vision for the future. It’s why Trump recently told his followers that he is “your retribution.”
Words have the meaning that culture and repetition give them, which gives us the key to using “woke” against Republicans.
While the openly Nazi and racist Republican base knows well how attacking woke is shorthand for hating on Black people, queer folk, and progressive allies, the word has a much more amorphous meaning for most of the rest of America.
And therein lies the opportunity for Democrats.
A week before the 1988 election, the front page of The New York Times carried a story headlined:
“Dukakis Asserts He Is a ‘Liberal,’ But in Old Tradition of His Party.”
Rush Limbaugh had started his show — and his relentless demonization of the word liberal — just four months earlier.
At its core, their effort to turn woke into a pejorative is about the politics of elimination, about erasing large swaths of American history, about pushing queer people back into the closet, about turning schools into indoctrination factories.
By the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton won, in part, by running away from the word. The New York Times headline for September 26, 1992 told the entire story:
“Clinton Says He’s Not Leaning Left but Taking a New ‘Third Way.’”
Running for re-election in 1996, The Washington Post’s headline highlighted Clinton’s continuity: “Clinton Says He Is No Liberal.”
It would be thirty years before a Democratic nominee for president could safely assert that he was a liberal (and Hillary continued to avoid the word right up to the day she lost in 2016).
Joe Biden, in 2020, came right out and said it:
“I was always labeled as one of the most liberal members of the United States Congress. … All during my career as a senator and as vice president — the things that we did in the United States — as president and vice president of the United States, I thought they were pretty progressive.”
Meet, in other words, the power of reframing a word.
Progressives and Democrats need to take a page from the old Limbaugh playbook and pound on the GOP’s use of the word “woke” as a slur.
Make it as simple as possible, whenever Republicans invoke the word:
Republicans attack woke, in addition to shouting out to the racist base, because they’re trying to hide how deeply they’re in the pockets of fringe groups from the white supremacist movement to rightwing billionaires who disdain democracy.
— They don’t want voters to think they’re owned by the fossil fuel and weapons industries.
— It’s embarrassing to them when we point out that nine of the last ten recessions happened during Republican presidencies, or that their abortion bans are really about controlling the bodies and lives of women and have nothing to do with “saving the children” they’ll deny food or healthcare to the moment they’re born.
— They want their book bans framed as anti-pornography campaigns rather than what they really are: anti-intellectualism, attempts to whitewash history, and a fear of modernity.
Which is why they constantly talk about “woke.”
It’s a word that, at this moment, means different things to different people.
But, at its core, their effort to turn woke into a pejorative is about the politics of elimination, about erasing large swaths of American history, about pushing queer people back into the closet, about turning schools into indoctrination factories.
Rhetoric like this rarely turns out good. Hitler villainized Jews for years before he started killing them; Rwandan Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches” before the slaughter began; Pinochet called union organizers “communists and parasites,” then started pushing them out of helicopters.
As we saw so vividly with Richard Nixon’s War On Drugs, language has meaning, impact, and the ability to transform societies.
Therefore, job one for Democrats must be to strip the GOP anti-woke message of its ambiguity. To call out their dog whistle of hate and bigotry for what it is. To do so in political campaigns and letters to the editor; in calls into talk shows and C-SPAN; in conversations with friends, neighbors, and even random strangers.
Turn on a light, the old saying goes, and the cockroaches will scatter. It’s time to bring honest and unflinching light to the Republican Party’s misuse of the word “woke.”