Education in Florida, I have written before of education in Florida. I had intended taking a week off from writing but I just had to write about what is now happening in Florida.  Sometimes I just don’t believe what is happening here in Florida because I never thought that America could be like this. Under DeSantis our public schools have become a national joke. I hate to say this but it almost sounds like Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini are running our Schools. You Can’t Say Gay, no Critical Race Theory, Banning Books in Libraries, these are all just a few of the indoctrination programs that are going on in our Schools. Yes it is indoctrination. It may also be a little racist and bigoted. What it may be is playing to peoples ignorance too.

I often wonder what kind of world DeSantis thinks he is sending these students out into after they graduate. In my opinion he is not wanting to prepare them at all. Does he really think that he can just legislate the idea of racism out of our vocabulary by eliminating the teaching of real racial history in America? Is he really that stupid, or, is he really that big of a bigot. For me he is just proving that Critical Race Theory should be taught more now than at any point in our history. You can’t solve the problem of racism until you learn to understand what racism is and how it has affected the development of our nation, the problems that is facing us now, and we will face in the future. Black people are not going away, in most cases their ancestors have been here longer than most of our families. Many of their lineages go back long before the American Revolution all the way back to 1619. They did not migrate here they were captured and brought here as slaves. They are here because of Anglo Saxon greed and the need for cheap labor. You can say that they should go back to Africa but they are a bigger part of American History than most of my ancestors have been which mostly migrated here in the early 1900. This is their home and we made it their home the minute we stole them away from their families in Africa over 400 years ago and sold them here as slaves.

Now DeSantis is trying to sell the fact that slavery was useful to the slaves. That Black slaves were taught useful skills that helped them later in their lives. I can’t tell you how repulsive that sounds. What is he trying to say? Slavery was some type of vocational training system. Only the most ignorant would believe that and only the most racist would try to sell you that. Slavery was not a vocational program. It was a program for life. Slavery should never be sold as a something that taught them skills that could be used latter on in their lives. Up until 1865, almost 250 years after the first slaves were brought where they are actually set free and it took what is probably the deadliest war in the history of our country to do it. There was no slave retirement system. You were born a slave and you died a slave. The fact that you have a white politician saying that many benefited from slavery is disgusting. The fact that he wants that taught to our children in our schools is one of the most dishonest teachings of our history that I have ever heard. After being captured in Africa and loaded onto those slave ships almost 18 percent did not survive the voyage. These were not Carnival Cruises. These were boat that packed them in like they were animals, not human beings. In fact that we probably treated most animals better than we did those captured slaves while transporting them. They came here, sold and in many cases whipped into submission.  A better way to put it was that they were tortured into submission. The rest of the world knows what we have done and what we are doing. In today’s digital world there are not many secrets. They know about our Black History probably better than we do. Why? Because history is written by Historians and not by Politicians. No matter who wins the Presidential election that person will never be able to rewrite our history. In today’s digital age is pretty much impossible to undo the truths that have already been written and try to change those truth with lies. Just think about every book in every library where we can access all those books 24/7 around the entire world.

Our students that will eventually go out into the work force, whether DeSantis likes it or not, will be working in a very diverse place. The rest of the world will know our history better that students coming from the state of Florida. They could have a Black boss. Do you think that a Black Boss would like to be told that his ancestors benefited from slaver?  As the world gets smaller and smaller the more of a need to recognize the diversity of our society that fits into the bigger world. We are more and more dealing with an international market and we need to prepare these students to deal with that international market. That international market will know our history better than we do. Are so arrogant to think that the future revolves around us? China is about 3 times bigger than we are and so is India. People make up the consumer market and India’s and China’s markets are huge. Our young people have got to be trained in that very diverse world that includes many different cultures and beliefs. You can play to the White superiority all you want but that is not going to help us in the long run.