February is Black History Month. We may as well get started. In any culture, be it African American or Romani Gypsies, if they say there is pain in their lives due to others of majority, then it is so. They don't have to qualify their experience anymore than that. They are the ones aggrieved by the actions of others. They define the issue, not those that oppressed them and suppressed an expression of their adversely effected lives.
De Santis is wrong through and through. It is no different than Snyder deciding selling assets of African American cities in Michigan would solve problems. These Caucasian men do not solve problems, they exacerbate them.
By Annaliese Garcia and Andrea Toreres
Pierre Rutledge was chairing a Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board meeting (click here) on Wednesday and he applauded The College Board’s decision to review a controversial course’s curriculum.
After The Florida Department of Education announced that it would ban a new African American studies Advanced Placement course, the College Board responded Wednesday with a new 234-page framework.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said he had a legislative plan to block the state’s programs on Critical Race Theory, or CRT, which explores issues of systemic racism, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, also known as DEI.
“We can get into the weeds and try to define critical race theory and who diversity, equity, and inclusion affect,” Rutledge said. “I would say it affects everybody, Black, brown, other, gay, straight — it doesn’t matter; it affects everybody.”...
Ron DeSantis and men like him are not allowed to end these studies or fade them to a white standard. They are not qualified to pass judgement on African American studies. They did not live discrimination or hatred or racism or segregation or bussing or any other quality of life issue that Black Americans have experienced. He and men like him were never "The Help."
The only power government has in regard to any university studies program is investigate it for corruption or ethics violations. But, nowhere in the power of a governor can they shutdown a curriculum in favor of hatred.
Ron DeSantis and men like him don't trust African Americans and other people of color. They rather control the text, the lecture and the outcome to these programs. They are racist through and through and it is time to end it.
In the late 1960s, (click here) black studies became a part of American higher education. By 1971 more than 500 programs, departments, and institutes had been founded on four-year college campuses; add in black-studies initiatives in those same years at high schools and community colleges, and the number jumps to more than 1,000. Today roughly 450 colleges and universities offer graduate programs, undergraduate programs, or both. To be sure, those numbers represent an occasion to celebrate. But jubilance may be premature. It is becoming increasingly clear that before the field can move confidently into the future we need to clear up some continuing confusion about why and how what we now call African-American studies began. Clarifying that has significant implications for how we think about not just a scholarly field, but about race relations in higher education and society....
February 10, 2023
By Noliwe M. Rooks
Why did African American studies ONLY manifest in the 1960s in the USA? Why indeed. It was because it took a long time for African Americans to have graduated from colleges and universities to achieve Masters and PhDs in order to have their work taken seriously. From the end of the Civil War in 1865 African Americans have suffered methods of control by Caucasians.
It took a long time for slaves to enter school and learn higher academic skills. It wasn't automatically given to them that they were allowed an equal education. It took Black Colleges to bring their youth to the point of competition in the work place and they still had to overcome prejudice.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (click here) was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all....
Brown vs. occurred because there was a black Justice on the Supreme Court.
Thurgood Marshall lived the reality that would compel his nomination to the court and his ultimate opinion to bring equality to the American education system. No one is allowed to pass judgement on any person of color. They don't get it.
In this country, it wasn't until President Biden placed a Native American (click here) in the Interior Department did a headwind of recognition and rights take shape. Secretary Haaland knows the issues and lived them. She is an authority of the strife that has faced Native Americans. And this is 2023 and we are finally getting around to facing the truth about the way Native Americans and their tribal lands are treated. Columbus landed in 1492 and the "Mayflower" made it's voyage until 1620, yet the role of the Native American was not recognized for rights of the people until 2021.
The struggle of minority peoples in the USA is epic. They lived oppression while trying to remove stigmas and find power to change their circumstances. Unless a person has lived it, they ain't nobody.
By Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons
Fox News has mentioned “critical race theory” 1,300 times in less than four months. (click here) Why? Because critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.
To understand why CRT has become such a flash point in the culture, it is important to understand what it is and what it is not. Opponents fear that CRT admonishes all white people for being oppressors while classifying all Black people as hopelessly oppressed victims. These fears have spurred school boards and state legislatures from Tennessee to Idaho to ban teachings about racism in classrooms. However, there is a fundamental problem: these narratives about CRT are gross exaggerations of the theoretical framework. The broad brush that is being applied to CRT is puzzling to academics, including some of the scholars who coined and advanced the framework....
The only people qualified to right the wrongs of our minority populations are the minorities themselves. African Americans have come far enough now that they have their own scholars that can qualify programs and studies to reflect the truth. Ron DeSantis and his administration has no authority to erase an entire college curriculum without sound reason, except the politics is good.
...When Stowe (click here) visited Great Britain in 1853, invited by anti-slavery groups, she was rushed by excited crowds. During her five-month stay, she traveled the country. She attended numerous anti-slavery rallies and was presented with the Stafford House Address, a 26-volume leather bound petition signed by more than 563,000 British women asking their American sisters to work to abolish slavery.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first major U.S. novel with a Black main character, and the first to use regional accents. It has been translated to over 70 languages.
Public response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not all positive. Moderates praised the book for exposing slavery’s harsh realities, but abolitionists felt it was not forceful enough. Others called out some of Stowe’s characters as stereotypes. Pro-slavery advocates argued that Stowe had written an unrealistic, one-sided image of slavery. These pro-slavery responses prompted at least 29 “Anti-Tom” or proslavery books before the Civil War....
When Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," it was for an audience of Caucasians, not slaves. Slaves had no money to purchase books, yet alone the education to read them. Stowe was able to build around an understanding that Caucasians had about their understanding of slavery, but, she could not actually impart the experience of a real slave.
It is an interesting trip into an alternate reality when one thinks about slavery today. It still exists in the world in various manifestations, but, in the USA it simply is not tolerated in any way. It wasn't all that long ago that it was.
So, the sad reality of DeSantis and men like him is that he is crude in his understanding of governance and ignorant to what comprises a minority, their right to exist on their own terms and the necessity to bring forth painful history in order to be elevated to a standing of equality.
DeSantis in a populist. I don't care if he says he is Republican, that is simply where the money lies to run for office. Populists are gossipers. They like to ridicule and name call to achieve their success. The tabloid newspapers are their favorite stomping ground. We saw this with Trump and his name calling and ridicule of those running for office in 2016. This oppression by DeSantis of the curriculum the College Board finds more than acceptable is a from of name calling, but, the entity is invisible and generalized as a threat to society. There is no one person DeSantis is ridiculing, it is an entire race of people.
When DeSantis finds 300 college professors of 60 schools nationwide that will state the curriculum is full of lies and dangerous to the integrity of the USA, he might have the right to criticize. As of today, all DeSantis has is a bunch of disgruntled and misinformed voters and financial backers that embrace a strange idea of CRT.
He has no authority to carry on as he has and he certainly is not qualified to speak of an African American curriculum highly regarded by most academics.
Got that?
DESANTIS IS NOT QUALIFIED. He has power, but, it is corrupted by his desire for more power. DESANTIS IS NOT QUALIFIED to pass judgement. It is just too bad he finds the issue so uncomfortable he has to banish it from American college bookshelves.
