Steve Jonas on BuzzFlash: The DeSantistization of Public Education
(Image by Gage Skidmore)
February 23, 2023
By Steve Jonas
As is by now well-known, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has successfully engaged in a widespread censorship operation on what may, and may not, be taught to students in the Florida school/college/university system. There is irony in the fact that the formal announcement that U.S. College Board has acceded to the DeSantis' demands for cutting a significant chunk of the meat of Afro-American history from the Board's advanced placement course on the subject came on the same day as the funeral of the latest Black victim of U.S. police brutality, in Memphis. That irony cannot be understated. Furthermore, the DeSantis-outrage just happened to come at the beginning of African History Month, 2023.
There are several different speculations that can be made about why DeSantis did this. One is that he is a genuine racist and that while as such, given the modern climate, he has to accede to certain demands made for increasing recognition of the importance of the Black experience, positive and negative, in the track of (North) American history since 1619. But, the thinking would go, based on his personal racism, given his political power in his state he can draw a series of lines around the subject(s).
On the other hand, he may simply be a political racist, wanting simply to stir up the subject to help him achieve his political goals and programmatic ends. First and foremost, of course, that would be helping him to gain the Republican Presidential nomination.
But whatever the case, DeSantis is cranking up government intervention in the matter of what and cannot be taught in Florida schools, colleges, and universities to heights not seen in the South since the formal censorship days of Jim Crow. And because College Board Advanced Placement courses are used all around the country, his intervention will have a very negative effect even in liberal states. This censorship operates at two levels.
The first is the formal one achieved by the political censoring of course content. The second is the climate of fear created in Florida among school teachers and higher education faculty about what might happen to them if they were to slip up and make a mention of or a referral to one of the pieces of forbidden fruit and get reported to some authority for it.
For example, in this day-and-age, in the United States of America: "Florida Teachers Hide Their Books to Avoid Felonies: Panicky teachers in Florida are emptying their bookshelves, afraid of a five-year jail term for having an unapproved book in the classroom." Take a look at that once again folks, and just imagine what might be following it down the pike. If a teacher simply displays an "unapproved book" on a class-room shelf, under this Florida legal DeSantis-monstrosity they would not simply be asked/ordered to remove it. They could go to prison for up to five years!
What books might be included? Well: "In Duval County, which comprises Jacksonville, PEN America found that 176 titles had already been banned, including at least one Berenstain Bears book; biographies of Henry Aaron, Harriet Tubman, Celia Cruz, Rosa Parks, and Malala; a preponderance of books about non-white children and families; as well as those dealing with sexual themes. Weirdly, many focus on stories centered around ethnic foods: Dim Sum, Dim Sum For Everyone!, Dumpling Soup, and Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story are all verboten in Duval." (A biography of Henry Aaron!?! Oh my.)
Further, quoting from Mother Jones: "The revised curriculum expunges discussion of modern initiatives for equality or racial justice, including Black Lives Matter, Queer social movements, affirmative action, and the push for reparations. The new curriculum no longer features seminal figures in modern Black thought, including Kimberle' Crenshaw, a law professor whose work is foundational to critical race theory and intersectionality and who had been included before." (So ironically this summary was published in Mother Jones on the first day of Black History Month, 2023. [Purposely or coincidentally, Es macht kein unterscheidung.])
And what about the prohibition of certain authors from the reading list of the College Placement course other than Prof. Crenshaw. Well, that would include such U.S. authors as the Nobel Prize winning Toni Morrison. What writing of hers, for example, might be found objectionable under the Doctrine of DeSantistization? Well consider this excerpt from an article by Ms. Morrison in "The Nation magazine, 'Racism and Fascism' (May 29, 1995, p. 760):"
"Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:
"1. Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
"2. Isolate and demonize the enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of covert and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
"3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
"4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
"5. Subvert and malign all representatives of sympathizers with this con structed enemy.
"6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
"7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
"8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding areas for the enemy especially its males and absolutely its children.
"9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudo-success; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
"10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.
"In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that sup ports its own health: fear, denial and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight."
I have to tell you that in the writing of the earlier column from which Ms. Morrison's text above is excerpted, I of course at the time had re-read it very closely. And then for this column, I read it again. Indeed, Ms. Morrison, who died in 2019, might have been describing just what DeSantis and his collaborators are doing right now in Florida ---- and elsewhere, all around the country. As I said then in the column I wrote at the time: "Wow. Did she get it right." Unfortunately, her words are right on the money again.
Folks, we have a major problem on our hands, and the sooner we recognize it the better will we be equipped to fight it. Historically, the Republican Party has been a home for xenophobia and racism since the xenophobic "American Party" of the 1850s was one of its founding components. The modern adoption of open anti-Black racism in the Party began with the development of the "Southern Strategy" by Richard Nixon in 1968. But as in its name, it was focused on winning over to the Republican side the formerly Democratic, racist, "Solid South." Donald Trump began expanding Republican racism to the national scene with his involvement in the anti-Obama "birtherism movement" of 2011-12. But Trump, going back to his early days in real estate with his racist father, was more of an emotional/personal-interests racist than a serious intellectual one, as in my view, is DeSantis.
DeSantis' racism is even more dangerous because it is intellectual (Right-wing intellectual, to be sure) and because he is injecting it into much more than pure politics, that is directly into governing. (Education regulation will be only the first step.) Trump used his brand of "emotional racism," and still will if he becomes a serious candidate for President in 2024. (Of course I think that he won't be one, because in my view he will be out of the country before the race, even the one for the Republican nomination, gets serious, but that is another matter.) Whether or not DeSantis is a personal racist (and I have no way of knowing whether he is or not), in policy he is a serious, intellectual, racist, and in so being one, he is even more dangerous for the future of our nation than is Trump.
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An earlier version of this column was published at: https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-DeSantistization-of-Pub-Education_Education-Curriculum_Education-Funding_Education-Higher-230202-164.html
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Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at StonyBrookMedicine (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 35 books. In addition to his position on OpEdNews.com as a “Trusted Author,” he is a regular contributor to BuzzFlash.com. His own political website, stevenjonaspolitics.com, is an archive of the 1000 or so political columns he has published since 2004, with the current columns being added to it as they appear. He was also a career triathlete, 36 seasons, 256 multi-sport races, and writer on the sport (books and articles). He now is officially retired from racing.
Among Dr. Jonas’ books of note on political science and history are: Ending the ‘Drug War’; Solving the Drug Problem: The Public Health Approach, Brewster, NY: Punto Press Publishing, (Brewster, NY, 2016, available on Kindle from Amazon, and also in hardcover from Amazon); a “future history” of the United States (originally published in 1996) entitled The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022 (Third Version published by Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, Brewster, NY, and available on Amazon).
His most recent book-set is Trump's Presidential Years: As They Happened, 2015-2021. It is in six volumes, consisting of the 191 columns Dr. Jonas published on Trump, primarily on OpEdNews.com and BuzzFlash.com, from “Hair Trump or Herr Trump?” (10-6-15) to “Xenophobia and Racism: They're in the Republican Party's DNA” (3-19-21). The six volumes are each available separately on Kindle (2022), under “Trump’s Presidential Years: As they happened, 2015-2021.”
Dr. Jonas has a blind-copy distribution list for his columns. If you would like to be added to it, please send him an email at sjtpj@aol.com.