Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

Because you're a LIAR!

"I'm a Professor. Florida Just Banned Everything I Teach."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/im-a-professor-florida-just-banned-everything-i-teach?ref=home?ref=home

UNFREE STATE OF FLORIDA

Gov. Ron DeSantis doesn’t want college students to learn anything but whitewashed history about racist violence in America.

Writing during the apartheid regime of Jim Crow, famed historian and founder of Black History Month Carter G. Woodson observed that “the philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching.” That system is exactly what Gov. Ron DeSantis has tried to resurrect in signing SB 266 into law, a whitewashing tactic that has historically coincided with white supremacist violence in the U.S.

The law builds on a wave of book, content, and course bans passed by Republican legislators, schools boards, and governors in 36 states over the last year. SB 266 not only forbids scholars of race, class, gender, and inequality from teaching in their areas of expertise, but also requires that general education courses indoctrinate students in the “Western canon,” drawing on a right-wing “American Birthright” curriculum organized in part by DeSantis ally Chris Rufo.

The information that college instructors like me are now forbidden by law from sharing with their adult students under SB 266 leaves them less able to understand the world around them and to critically engage Republican policy priorities like voter suppression or attacks on trans persons that promote inequality. It leaves students less informed and more vulnerable—that appears to be the whole point.

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Attacks on education and access to information like Florida’s SB 266 have never been about “protecting” students or promoting education. They are about wielding power and eliminating dissent. That is what makes this tactic so dangerous and, historically, a precursor to white supremacist violence.

William Horne is an Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Scholar at Villanova University who writes about the relationship of race to labor, freedom, and capitalism during Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217923008