DeSantis signs bill limiting tenure at Florida public universities

[freeloader]

The problem is that this bill has nothing to do with ensuring Florida has good or effective teachers in the classroom. The goal is to ensure that Florida has teachers who present a specific, triumphalist and celebratory version of history and society.

I used to teach history at the college level while I was working on my PhD. Apparently, I was part of the problem. I did not think it was wrong to teach that many white people became wealthy at the expense of enslaved people. I did not think it was wrong to teach that many of those same families were, are, and will continue to be wealthy for years to come. I did not think it was wrong to teach that white families and the broader white community accumulated wealth, built universities, businesses, hospitals, and other facilities using the unpaid labor of black people, black people who up until quite recently were not able to use those facilities. I did not think it was wrong to teach that the people in generations as recent as that of my parents and grandparents had used their positions in business, government, and education to systemically limit or exclude non-whites from the best paying jobs, the best neighborhoods, the best schools, the best hospitals, and so forth.

I did not think it was wrong, because those are all facts. I did not think it was wrong, because my role as an educator was to help my students develop the ability to read, understand, discuss, and write about the world around them.

It turns out, I was wrong after all, at least in the eyes of the state of Florida. Unbeknownst to me, I was part of a woke mob, trying to indoctrinate my students.

Slavery, evidently, wasn't too bad. Slaves weren't whipped and sometimes beaten to death, they weren't sold with no regard to family bonds, they weren't systematically denied education. The systematic extermination of the native peoples of North America didn't happen. Asian-Americans were not rounded up and interned during World War II. The violence against Muslims and Sikhs after 9/11 didn't happen. To say those things, and to say that white people were responsible for any of that, might make a white child in 2022 feel bad. In the state of Florida, that will now violate their civil rights.

So, its best that I left teaching and its certainly for the best that I didn't end up in Florida. I certainly wouldn't want kids there to have any understanding as to why black kids are more likely than white kids to live in poor urban areas, why their families have less money on average than white families, of why their family members don't live as long as white families. I certainly wouldn't want black kids to think that subpar schools that they attend are the result of anything other than their laziness and stupidity. I certainly wouldn't want a white kid who grows up in a gated community to understand that their parents positions as doctors/lawyers/corporate executives/etc resulted from anything other than the hard work of their parents.

It turns out, I should have been teaching that America was wonderful and perfect, at least if I wanted to have a teaching job.