How to understand Florida’s ban on teaching Advanced Placed African American History? By seeing it in the context of other campaigns to enforce ignorance.
Way back in the 1950’s, when the cigarette manufacturers realized that their product was definitely killing people, they immediately began a propaganda campaign to discredit the science, to convince people that it was “debatable” instead of factual. They even made it a political issue with “I Smoke and I Vote!” bumper stickers.
Similarly, when the coal, oil, and natural gas companies realized that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was, in fact, creating a massive climate crisis, they, too, immediately began a propaganda campaign. They hired ad agencies and fringe researchers to convince people that the existence of climate change was debatable. Then, when that became an untenable position, they pretended that it “wasn’t clear” whether it was caused by fossil-fuel burning instead of some as-yet-unknown “natural” process.
This highly-developed propaganda tactic relies on journalists’ professional obligation to present both sides of a story in order to spread ignorance instead of understanding. The problem is that there are no “two sides” to - for example - the existence of gravity or to the fact that the earth orbits the sun. There are also no “two sides” to whether cigarettes cause cancer or whether burning fossils fuels is causing our obvious climate crisis. These were conscious (and selfish) campaigns to promote ignorance of things that were already known in order to protect profits.
Now we see states passing laws to criminalize teaching in their schools. You read that right: criminalize teaching in schools. Among the best known are Florida’s Stop WOKE Act and Parental Rights Act. The first outlaws teaching that people in this country have been discriminated against because of their race, national origin, or gender! That is not my characterization; that is the language of the law itself. What adult doesn’t know that discrimination is a simple fact of the history of this country? But it is now illegal to teach that fact in Florida, and the law offers bounties to parents who turn their children’s teachers in for teaching that fact.
The second is popularly know as the “Don’t-Say-Gay" Act because it bans any discussion of gender or sexuality in the lower grades. It also forbids counselors and teachers in the upper grades from having conversations in confidence with individual students who want to talk about their sexuality or gender identity. It, too, offers bounties to parents who turn in their children’s teachers.
These Florida laws, and those like them in other states, go well beyond pretending that the existence of racism in the US (and the existence of different sexual orientations among human beings, always and everywhere) is controversial instead of factual. These laws criminalize teaching those facts. They represent an effort to outlaw the study of history and humanity. They say that the teaching of simple truth represents indoctrination and (that new favorite word of homophobes) “grooming.”
If there is anything positive about this horror it is the desperation it reveals. White supremacy tells on itself when frightened white parents say that don’t want their children to be traumatized by merely hearing about the dangers and indignities Black, Indigenous, Asian, and other historically-colonized people actually experience to this day. When Florida bans an advanced placement course from ETS they are working to keep information from the privileged children who are most likely to take those classes. The legislators aren’t just suppressing knowledge from the children of poor and working people; they are aggressively keeping it from their own children and the children of their wealthy donors. Hidden in this desperation is the fear that even the children of wealthy white families, recipients of all the privileges of racial capitalism, may turn against this oppressive and exploitive system if they learn how it works.
We have to fight for the truth and fight for the obligation to teach the truth in the schools. We have to teach the truth to generations of teachers who never learned it when they were students and who suspect that it is historical “revisionism,” another of their scare words. And we have to challenge ourselves to learn it, too, instead of just treating the Stop WOKE and “Don’t-Say-Gay” Acts as just two more Florida Man jokes.
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