Florida could shield whites from ‘discomfort’ of racist past

[Edge-]

https://apnews.com/article/business-...5acf4491813c1b

A bill pushed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort” when they teach students or train employees about discrimination in the nation’s past received its first approval Tuesday.

The Senate Education Committee approved the bill that takes aim at critical race theory — though it doesn’t mention it explicitly — on party lines, with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed.

Democrats argued the bill isn’t needed, would lead to frivolous lawsuits and said it would amount to censorship in schools. They asked, without success, for real-life examples of teachers or businesses telling students or employees that they are racist because of their race.

“This bill’s not for Blacks, this bill was not for any other race. This was directed to make whites not feel bad about what happened years ago,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, who is Black. “At no point did anyone say white people should be held responsible for what happened, but what I would ask my white counterparts is, are you an enabler of what happened or are you going to say we must talk about history?”

DeSantis held a news conference last month in which he called critical race theory “crap,” and said he would seek legislation that would allow parents to sue schools and employees to sue employers if they were subject to its teachings.

Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism. It was developed during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what scholars viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.

Conservatives reject it, saying it is a world view derived from Marxism that divides society by defining people as oppressors and oppressed based on their race. They call it an attempt to rewrite American history and make white people believe they are inherently racist.

The bill reads in part, “An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex. An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”

The bill is called “Individual Freedom.” Republican Sen. Manny Diaz, its sponsor, said it is not about ignoring the “dark” parts of American history, but rather ensuring that people are not blamed for sins of the past.

“No individual is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, solely by the virtue of his or her race or sex,” Garcia said. “No race is inherently superior to another race.”

Jones said DeSantis is playing to his conservative base by pushing the legislation, but wouldn’t go so far as to say DeSantis himself is racist.

“The governor will continue to go across the country with his racist rhetoric on critical race theory ... It’s a problem that doesn’t exist,” Jones said. “I think the governor’s policies that he continues to push are racist.”

The governor’s office didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

Now race is not a topic for discussion and that's gonna be tricky, but I'll take a stab at this without delving into race specifically.

Why would this legislation be needed? Why would modern folks feel "discomfort" learning about the sins of the past? How far does this past go back that we need to protect them from? One generation? Two? Five? Ten? Does it go on forever so that we can never teach the "dark" parts of history that make some people uncomfortable?

For the party of "small government", this seems like a very big government overreach, and like a bunch of lawmakers are meddling in the curriculum despite not having an education background, or even a history background.

Teaching the history of race in the US, the good, the bad, and the ugly, is extremely important. And once more, Republicans would rather erase and whitewash our more troubled history and keeping children ignorant so that they can, according to the apparent hopes of the Republican party, repeat them in the future.

This push from Republicans is hardly isolated to this topic, and has extended to US history writ-large from the colonial days to the modern era, and especially the Civil War. Problem for them is they lost that war, and a lot of them still seem very, very salty over it.

[Masark]

Problem for them is they lost that war, and a lot of them still seem very, very salty over it.

The problem for the rest of us is that they didn't lose it badly enough. The end of the civil war should have looked like the end of Spartacus, with Confederate ringleaders on crosses (or ropes. I'm flexible on the subject) lining the road all the way to Rome.

[Machismo]

So... they want to legislate safe spaces and hide racism...

That's about right.

[Draco-Onis]

So... they want to legislate safe spaces and hide racism...

That's about right.

That's also the whole point of all these education legislations they want a safe space to make sure their kids become as backwards and racists as they are.

[Azadina]

The problem for the rest of us is that they didn't lose it badly enough. The end of the civil war should have looked like the end of Spartacus, with Confederate ringleaders on crosses (or ropes. I'm flexible on the subject) lining the road all the way to Rome.

Pretty much, sadly. Appeasement does not work. It's been tested time and time again, and it doesn't work on hardcore assholes.

On topic, I find it ironic how Republicans desperately deny systemic racism existing, but what's this? Systemic racism being implemented yet again, by them.

[Zaydin]

Sounds blatantly unconstitutional to me given it amounts to censorship.

[Kaleredar]

A quick check in; do they call the civil war the “war of northern aggression” in schools in southern states?

[Xyonai]

All this CRT bullshit is just the newest phase of their bullshit culture war; since legislating against The Gays isn't legal anymore and they've been losing ground on the battle against Reproductive rights for decades, they've decided to rebrand their ol' tactics of dogwhistling and combined it with the persecution complex they used to only drag out to whinge about the 'War on Christmas'.

[unfilteredJW]

White Fragility as policy. Fucking snowflakes.

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A quick check in; do they call the civil war the “war of northern aggression” in schools in southern states?

I was taught creationism is high school.

Thankfully my social studies/history teacher actually taught.

[Endus]

https://apnews.com/article/business-...5acf4491813c1b



Now race is not a topic for discussion and that's gonna be tricky, but I'll take a stab at this without delving into race specifically.

Why would this legislation be needed? Why would modern folks feel "discomfort" learning about the sins of the past? How far does this past go back that we need to protect them from? One generation? Two? Five? Ten? Does it go on forever so that we can never teach the "dark" parts of history that make some people uncomfortable?

For the party of "small government", this seems like a very big government overreach, and like a bunch of lawmakers are meddling in the curriculum despite not having an education background, or even a history background.

Teaching the history of race in the US, the good, the bad, and the ugly, is extremely important. And once more, Republicans would rather erase and whitewash our more troubled history and keeping children ignorant so that they can, according to the apparent hopes of the Republican party, repeat them in the future.

This push from Republicans is hardly isolated to this topic, and has extended to US history writ-large from the colonial days to the modern era, and especially the Civil War. Problem for them is they lost that war, and a lot of them still seem very, very salty over it.

The "discomfort" comes from one of two places.

That the people in question are, themselves, racist, and don't want to get called out for it.

Or, more likely, they were sold a whole pack of jingoistic white supremacist lies when they were growing up, a wildly distorted and fundamentally, deeply racist interpretation of American history, and admitting that they were too willing to go along with those lies is embarrassing and shameful.

The people in the first group are a lost cause. All we can do is identify them publicly wherever we can and hold them up to social opprobrium until they crawl back into some deep, dark cave somewhere. We'll educate their kids out from under them.

The people in the second group can improve. But there's no path to that except through the embarrassment and shame.

The racists like to frame this as being "ashamed" of your history, but that's not the source of the shame, here. It's that you fell for the scam. It's the same embarrassment and shame that leads you to not admit, sometimes even to yourself, that there's no Nigerian prince who's going to send you millions of dollars after you sent them that $10,000 processing fee. You got taken by con artists and liars, and that's embarrassing. You should have known better.

But that was then, and you can improve now. Feel that shame, and be better. It only holds you back as long as you let it.

Take a fact like that Thomas Jefferson was a rapist, a violent brutalist slaver who whipped his slaves, who held little regard for emancipation as a principle (whatever his writings, he didn't even emancipate his own children fathered, by repeated rape, on Sally Hemings). If that fact angers you, who are you angry at? Me, for pointing out the truth? Or is it yourself, for ever believing otherwise? Or is the the likely dozens if not hundreds of people who repeated the lies to you until you got so confused you didn't even bother to check the facts?

Being angry at the facts is ridiculous. Being angry at me for pointing to them is equally ridiculous. Get angry at those who lied to you, who pushed white supremacist propaganda on you so continuously you were groomed to fall right in line with it without considering the facts.

Deprogramming isn't comfy. It hurts, and you'll feel ashamed of yourself. But if you're working to be better, that shame's for who you were, not who you're trying to be. And that's what should really matter to people.

And if you're going to rage against the facts and whine at my very historically accurate representation of a Founding Father of the USA, then I have to wonder why those lies are so important to your worldview.

You can't visit Monticello (and I have, FWIW), and see the slave pens underneath the mansion, and still think Jefferson was a good man. Nor can you any longer think he really believed half the horseshit he penned. The white supremacist propaganda lies deep in the USA's bones, and Jefferson was one of the chief architects of that.

[Stormspark]

The problem for the rest of us is that they didn't lose it badly enough. The end of the civil war should have looked like the end of Spartacus, with Confederate ringleaders on crosses (or ropes. I'm flexible on the subject) lining the road all the way to Rome.

The south should've been conquered, and treated as a territory, with no rights, until such time as they were changed enough to petition for statehood again.

[tehdang]

The bill reads in part, “An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex. An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”

Truly breathtaking stuff. It's a pretty subtle shift, moving the frame from collective ancestral guilt derived from skin color into discomfort of the racist past itself. I give them props for embedding the truth of the difference in paragraph 8 without making a huge lie of the headline. Just a little white lie, derived from the ambiguity of "psychological distress on account of his or her race."

Given that DeSantis has made this a major part of his policy platform heading into his reelection campaign in 2022, it's very much expected from him and legislative allies. His likely opponent is using Hitler comparisons for incisive criticism, if you want to know how the opposition is going.

However, it does matter how the legislation is drafted and applied legally.

[Kaleredar]

Truly breathtaking stuff. It's a pretty subtle shift, moving the frame from collective ancestral guilt derived from skin color into discomfort of the racist past itself. I give them props for embedding the truth of the difference in paragraph 8 without making a huge lie of the headline. Just a little white lie, derived from the ambiguity of "psychological distress on account of his or her race."

Given that DeSantis has made this a major part of his policy platform heading into his reelection campaign in 2022, it's very much expected from him and legislative allies. His likely opponent is using Hitler comparisons for incisive criticism, if you want to know how the opposition is going.

However, it does matter how the legislation is drafted and applied legally.

Can you point to a curriculum where white kids are being made to feel bad about white people in the past?


Teaching that white people did bad things in the past based on race is not “shaming” anyone. That’s just history. And teaching that those actions still have negative effects on minorities to this day is not a “political narrative,” that’s just the truth.

And teaching that the south fought an entire war to both preserve those bad things and then maintained subsequent decades of those negative effects? That’s all too much the truth.

[PC2]

That's good because those CRT leftists only focus on the bad things whites have done, they downplay the larger set of positive contributions that have changed the world for the better, and they dismiss all the same bad behavior of whites when it's shown that they are present in all other races.

Now race is not a topic for discussion

Race and white people are the lightning rods of this thread.

[Edge-]

That's good because those CRT leftists

Oh phew, for a second I thought we were going to be talking about things that actually exist. You had me worried there, for a second.

[Breccia]

I get that no currently living white American ever owned another human being.

But this looks like an attempt to gloss over the part of history where that happened. And that's just deplorable.

[Xyonai]

That's good because those CRT leftists only focus on the bad things whites have done, they downplay the larger set of positive contributions that have changed the world for the better, and they dismiss all the same bad behavior of whites when it's shown that they are present in all other races.

To be the first of probably many to beat a dead horse here: That's not what CRT is. It's not even close to what it is. It's not pointing at history and going 'WHITE PEOPLE BAD!' it's sorting through our history and acknowledging our fuckups so the folks can learn about the context and nuances of hundreds of years of systemic oppression that just so happens to predominantly feature a history of white people being shitty to non-white (or not white enough) people because, surprise, that's been this nation's historical power dynamic since its inception and no amount of pearl clutching will change the truth of the matter.

- - - Updated - - -

Also in general a Bill that goes 'You're legally obligated to pander to bigoted snowflakes' is fucking stupid and ripe for abuse.

[Kaleredar]

That's good because those CRT leftists only focus on the bad things whites have done, they downplay the larger set of positive contributions that have changed the world for the better, and they dismiss all the same bad behavior of whites when it's shown that they are present in all other races.

The goods things a people did does not excuse the bad things they did. And pretending that nothing bad happened is dangerous.

Moreover, the majority perpetrators of bad things from a race-perspective in the United States were white people. That is a fact. These systems of inequality, put in place by white people in the past, have lead to decades of cultural inequity continue to affect people to this day. That is also a fact.

You seem to have a problem with the fact that white peoples perpetuated slavery, as well as numerous injustices against native Americans and basically every other race. But you solution is that you don’t want to hear about it, or that you want to whataboutism it away. Both things are unacceptable and do not form a true account of US history and leave out a critical reason for the racial disparities present to this day.

Also, “the accomplishments of white people?” You mean what 95% of American history already teaches about?

[SunspotAnims]

A quick check in; do they call the civil war the “war of northern aggression” in schools in southern states?

No. I can at least attest for the schools I attended growing up that they had fairly standard curriculum for stuff like history, evolution, and sex ed.

[Dezerte]

If you feel bad out of compassion it builds your character and empathy, but if you feel bad because you feel attacked then it's time for some introspection.