In my senior Southern Literature class, I’m about to teach Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner’s great novel about how racism has warped America. I ask my students to think about the stories Faulkner tells: the dispossession of the Chickasaw people, the enslaved woman who drowns herself in despair, and the white family struggling to accept that the admired patriarch who built their Mississippi cotton kingdom also raped his own daughter. Here at Florida State University, in the capital city of the third state to join the Confederacy, I ask them to consider the ways our troubled past haunts our precarious present. I start writing dates on the board—1619, 1830, 1863—and I wonder if somebody will accuse me of breaking Florida law.
“I teach anecdotal stories as history and ignore the greater reality of history”. 1619 solidifies “Black people” AS THE CAUSE of slavery being legalized in “America”, do you “teach” that?
Do you teach that it was Jefferson (the “racist” who has been slandered by the left for completely false claims of having “jungle fever”) who ended the transatlantic slave trade?
Governor Ron DeSantis sees Florida’s colleges and universities as hotbeds of trendy theories, where professors delight in propagating Marxism, pushing anti-racism, and undermining traditional gender identity. He likes to say he puts on “the full armor of God” to fight “wokeism” and create a “patriotic” education system. To that end, Florida has banned the teaching of what DeSantis declares erroneous doctrine, especially critical race theory and “The 1619 Project.” Both challenge our happier myths: that the Founding Fathers hated slavery even though they owned slaves, or that rugged individualism enables anyone to succeed if they just work hard enough.
The 1619 project is literal fiction. Critical race theory is literal fiction. Both are fabricated history that does not “challenge myths” as the narrative states but instead cherry picks unrelated topics in the worst context to cry victim. I could make black people look like the bane of humanity just going over the North African slavery and teaching how they would castrate young men who has a 11% survival rate from said castration as they were also forced to march hundreds of miles to their destination with the wound.
The syllabus for a fall 2022 University of Florida seminar on how Black artists use the Gothic to explore racial oppression states, “No lesson is intended to espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel a particular feeling, perception, or belief.” I remind students that I do not judge them on their opinions, only on how they support those opinions with facts and evidence.
You couldn’t even make an opening statement without blindly chasing opinions over facts and evidence. Sorry but “shouting your truth” isn’t factual based or objective.
Whatever happens in the courts, academic liberty in the state that DeSantis calls the “freest” in America has already been damaged. Professors now add careful, lawyerly language to our course descriptions.
Funny how you had no qualms added “careful, lawyerly language” when it came to gender identity and the isms studies to begin with.
“I teach anecdotal stories as history and ignore the greater reality of history”. 1619 solidifies “Black people” AS THE CAUSE of slavery being legalized in “America”, do you “teach” that?
Do you teach that it was Jefferson (the “racist” who has been slandered by the left for completely false claims of having “jungle fever”) who ended the transatlantic slave trade?
The 1619 project is literal fiction. Critical race theory is literal fiction. Both are fabricated history that does not “challenge myths” as the narrative states but instead cherry picks unrelated topics in the worst context to cry victim. I could make black people look like the bane of humanity just going over the North African slavery and teaching how they would castrate young men who has a 11% survival rate from said castration as they were also forced to march hundreds of miles to their destination with the wound.
You couldn’t even make an opening statement without blindly chasing opinions over facts and evidence. Sorry but “shouting your truth” isn’t factual based or objective.
Funny how you had no qualms added “careful, lawyerly language” when it came to gender identity and the isms studies to begin with.