Rewriting history

February is Black History Month. I wonder if public observances are banned in Florida and other places where white people find that sort of thing threatening.

Florida seems to be the epicenter of this sentiment, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who wants to be president. He wants to ban books that present ideas that might make anyone (meaning conservative white people) uncomfortable.

DeSantis supports prohibiting age-appropriate discussion of sensitive topics in public schools, even though these discussions offer significant learning opportunities as well as practice in disagreeing in a civil manner. He recently rejected a national AP black history class.

Honest American history is “woke” indoctrination, he says. Let’s not be teaching students to be independent thinkers. Just train them to believe what they are told. Indoctrination.

So I’m proposing a black history that DeSantis might find acceptable (heads up, I’m being sarcastic):

Back in the 1600s, European ships arrived on the African coast. Native Africans quickly felt a desire to leave their ancestral homes and cultures to something new and wondrous. They lined up in droves to get places on these ships, which transported them in comfort to new homes in America.

There, they presented themselves for employment and fanned out through the colonies, especially in the South. Kindly white plantation owners provided jobs and training in all sorts of skills, such as hoeing and picking cotton, and helping plantation owner family members with day-to-day chores. The Africans loved their employers and the work they got to do.

But Northern troublemakers put out propaganda about the Africans existing in horrible conditions. The result was the Civil War. The propaganda continued, including President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that freed the alleged slaves.

The “freed” Africans, suddenly separated from their homes and jobs with their beloved white employers, showed themselves unable to function on their own as responsible community members. Regretfully, whites had to step back in to set things right in the 1880s and 1890s all the way to Tulsa in 1921.

Ever since then, troublemakers have been putting out propaganda about lynchings, KKK terror attacks, real estate redlining, black soldiers being treated like crap when they came home from fighting in WWII, more redlining and other exclusionary housing policies, discriminatory mortgage lending practices that continue to this day, and repeated instances of black people summarily executed by police after minor traffic stops or no violation at all.

Gov. DeSantis is just trying to stop the spread of this socialist propaganda embodied in Black History Month and Black history classes. He doesn’t want any fragile white people to feel uncomfortable. He wants them to vote for him. He wants us to believe his sanitized version of history and not ask any “annoying questions.” 

– Carole McWilliams, Bayfield