In Ron DeSantis's Florida, a Textbook Publisher Deleted Any Mention of Race in the Story of Rosa Par [View all]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/ron-desantis-florida-rosa-parks-textbook

In Ron DeSantis’s Florida, a Textbook Publisher Deleted Any Mention of Race in the Story of Rosa Parks
This is the creepy, fact-free world the Florida governor wants us to live in.
By Bess Levin
March 16, 2023


As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Ron DeSantis has a dystopian vision for Florida public schools that includes pretending LGBTQ+ people don’t exist and teaching kids that white people have never done anything wrong. Because he’s a massive bully who threatens retribution against anyone with a different worldview, some organizations have felt the need to go to extreme lengths to appease him and his f--ked up perspective. For instance: a textbook publisher that deleted any reference to race in a widely known story about Rosa Parks.

Yes, The New York Times reports that Studies Weekly, whose curriculum is used in 45,000 schools throughout the country, made a disturbing update to its lesson about Parks’s historic Montgomery bus boycott. In the lesson that’s currently used, segregation is clearly defined with text that reads: “The law said African Americans had to give up their seats on the bus if a white person wanted to sit down.” But in an updated version, it’s as though race doesn’t exist at all. “She was told to move to a different seat,” it simply reads.

The company, according to the Times, made “similar changes to a fourth-grade lesson about segregation laws that arose after the Civil War.” The initial version refers to African Americans clearly and states how they were affected by Jim Crow. However, an update makes virtually no mention of race, and merely states that it was illegal for “men of certain groups” to be unemployed and for “certain groups of people” to serve on juries.

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Meanwhile, the conservative group Florida Citizens Alliance has reportedly “urged the state to reject 28 of the 38” text books its volunteers have reviewed. The group apparently found too many references to slavery in a fifth-grade text book, and felt that an eighth-grade text book spent too much time on the “negative side” of the treatment of Native Americans, without providing a robust account of the bad things Native Americans did. While it’s not clear if the state will adopt the Florida Citizens Alliance’s recommendations, it seems the group has an in with people in high places: According to the Times, the alliance’s cofounders served on DeSantis’s education advisory committee during his transition to the governor’s office.

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Earlier this year, Florida rejected an Advanced Placement African America studies course from being taught in its public high schools. And in January, DeSantis announced that his administration plans to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at every public college in the state.