Florida Flummoxed

Current controversies in Florida—Governor Ron DeSantis’s demolishing of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the State—have left most people I know extremely divided. Those in favor and those against.

They leave me with Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming” ringing in my ears: 

 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

 

By his definition, I am the best and I am the worst. I’ve always hated DEI in the forms directed by Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ijeoma Oluo, Rennie Edo-Lodge, among others; I’ve always shaken my head at the exclusion of a brilliant scholar like Thomas Sowell from any debates I witness among many liberal news outlets, not to mention Glenn Loury, John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes, to list some of the most vocal. A recent Twitter exchange between Hannah-Jones and Coleman Hughes suggests her complete lack of familiarity with Sowell’s work. 

 

I don’t like “teaching” beginning with the premise “the United States is a system of white supremacy.” I’d be fine with: “Is the United States a system of white supremacy? Why or why not?” I don’t like separating students into groups of “oppressed” and “oppressors,” a practice which has increased racism and a maliciously aggrieved atmosphere in many classrooms. Or insisting that one group must be singled out to atone for presumed historic guilt. These ideologies are, however, frequently taught and funded with taxpayer dollars in the millions, a fact exposed by Christopher Rufo, who obtained documents revealing amounts in Florida universities. Cathy Young’s response, that his interpretation of the significance of these facts is misleading and that governmental interference in what ought to be decided from within the universities themselves is certainly a point to consider. Nobody wants a government telling us what to think. But Rufo’s response is that given the amount of money going into DEI bureaucracies, government is already telling us what to think. I’m not so sure Cathy Young is right—Roger Kimball’s 1990 book, Tenured Radicals, rang true to me, someone who went through graduate school as a part-time student from the early eighties to 1991, when I finally finished my dissertation. I saw changes. I saw truly brilliant scholars fail to be able to talk to any other brilliant scholar not absolutely congruent with their political or theoretical framework. They wouldn't say hello to each other in the hall. I saw a department go into receivership. All that was nothing compared to the post-pandemic, post George Floyd’s murder world.

Roger Kimball made sense. Then he voted for Donald Trump. Like Glenn Loury. And I’m thinking, can’t these smart men see the gangster personality oozing from Trump’s pores? Five minutes of watching Trump speak was enough for me. It’s an enormous mistake to underestimate personality and character.

And then here we are with a bill mislabeled “Don’t say gay”—it says nothing of the kind. Watch enough YouTube videos of mothers saying they don’t like graphic textbooks of descriptions of fisting and you may sympathize. African-American history hasn’t been banned. Exactly what’s been banned is public information, recently exposed by Christopher Rufo—the documents are on the net.

Watching current versions of sex and gender instruction in schools, I wonder if children are left any privacy at all. The barrage of information about sexual techniques seems to me to force children to think about sex in particular ideological ways rather than make their own discoveries. Not to mention the policy of not informing parents about a child’s wish to adopt a new gender.

Book-banning is always bad. There are plenty of bad books out there, but the best way to make them desirable is to ban them. One might say the same for DeSantis’s bill. Except: I’ve seen too many children’s books about what “white people” think or say or do, casting all whites as oppressors and all blacks as oppressed. I wouldn’t want a teacher reading my kid those books. I’ve had plenty of time to observe what schoolchildren under Hitler learned about “the Jew” to see the potential for damage—some of my friends’ mothers remember what they learned in elementary school; now they shrug with disbelief and say, “that’s what the teacher said."

The money going into DEI bureaucracies is a problem. The books being read young children (not to mention the drag queens waltzed in to provide diversity training) are a problem. Is banning these things a problem? If my children were young, I’d be afraid of making undesirable notions more desirable. And I’d home-school.