From curricula to library books to teachers themselves, queer expression and education in U.S. public schools are being slowly but surely outlawed. One of the most severe cases of this degeneration of rights is in Florida under the rule of perennial messRon DeSantis.
The governor signed what’s likely the country’s most notorious anti-LGBTQ curriculum bill into law last year, commonly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
This week, he doubled down on his disdain for LGBTQ+ education of any sort, referring to its inclusion as “indoctrination” and “a political agenda”.
This latest denouncement came after being asked why his administration had rejected the curriculum for an advanced placement African American Studies course.
The offending material? A section on “queer theory”:
When asked about the AP African American studies course that was banned in Florida, Ron DeSantis goes in a homophobic rant that includes railing against intersectionality while doing his best Trump impression. This is about banning ideas he doesn’t like, plain and simple. pic.twitter.com/3PCVwctHPY
“This course on Black History, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory!” he exclaims. “Queer theory” is the widely accepted academic name for the field of LGBTQ+ studies, so the way he managed to make it still sound like a slur is kind of amazing.
His next question to the room proved his lack of understanding of both Black and LGBTQ+ people, ignoring the existence of a whole category of humans in one sentence:
“Now who would say that an important part of Black History is ‘queer theory’?” he asks incredulously.
Let’s think for a moment! Would Martin Luther King Jr.’s close advisor Bayard Rustin say so? How about women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith who helped create the genre of blues music? Do James Baldwin and Audre Lorde not exist in Black History to Florida?
This examination of the intersection of identities and how they interplay in culture and history is exactly the kind of knowledge DeSantis and co. want to keep from the nation’s youth.
“That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids,” he rails. “When you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons — that’s a political agenda. That’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards.”
Discussing Black history without discussing the way Black people continue to be disproportionately incarcerated seems to also be a big no-no to the governor. Makes sense coming from the governor of the state with the third highest number of inmates in the country.
“When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory,” he continues, “you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”
Throughout all this attempting to cover up historical figures and contributions, he firmly asserts that he’s still here for “cut-and-dry history”.
“You learn all the basics, you learn about the great figures,” he contradicts. “I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history. We have history of a lot of different shapes and sizes.”
He closes by very vaguely advocating for the teaching of “people that have participated to make the country great and people that have stood up when it wasn’t easy.” The unabridged facts of who stood up and against what aren’t as important to him as making sure the LGBTQ+ community isn’t among them.
How silly and thin this excuse is. Somehow it will harm kids in a advanced placement college level course to know that some black people that deserved a place in history were gay or trans. Seriously the idea that these high school teenagers knowing that gay people did some great things is harmful to the students according to the right / republicans. Michelangelo was gay. The fact is gay kids need and deserve the positive affirmations of knowing they also can achieve great things. It is about seeing representation of ones self, but the right is terrified of nearly adult teens knowing that gay people have done some incredible things. That knowledge contradicts all the right wing ideology of how bad gay / trans people are, how they are low-life scum out that never achieve anything and always look for way to assault and rape the good straight people. This is again out of the Russian playbook that outlawed anything positive about gay people while the state constantly pushes the most negative harmful narratives. There are gay people in all walks of life and their sexual orientation is part of who they are. What the right wants to do is let kids assume that all people are straight, that all people in history that did something notable were straight is total right / republican indoctrination / ideology. As for the justice system being about more than prison and punishment again other developed countries have shown that if your prisons are not punitive hellhole but having reform with rehabilitation have shown that it cuts recidivism rates. Crime goes down, and you have less prison populations. But that would interfere with the for profit prsions incomes. Hugs
DeSantis said the course was somehow being used to push a queer “agenda.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said that his state recently rejected an advanced placement (AP) African American Studies course because of the course’s “indoctrination” of the “queer” agenda.
“We have guidelines and standards in Florida: We want education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis said during a news conference. DeSantis was asked why his state Department of Education had refused the course, which is currently being offered by the College Board in a pilot program at 60 schools nationwide.
DeSantis said that when he heard that the class didn’t meet the state’s educational standards, he figured the course involved critical race theory (CRT), a college-level curriculum about the effects of institutional racism throughout history.
“It’s way more than that,” DeSantis continued. “This course on Black history, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now, who would say that an important part of Black history is ‘queer theory?’ That is someone pushing an agenda on our kids.”
Queer theory examines societal responses to non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities. It’s an essential part of Black history both because of notable Black LGBTQ+ figures and the criminalization of Black sexual identities throughout history.
Nevertheless, DeSantis also criticized the course for having a “political agenda” because its current form includes content about intersectionality and abolishing prisons. Intersectionality examines how overlapping personal identities result in social privileges or disadvantages. Prison abolitionists want restorative justice and rehabilitation programs instead of just prisons.
“We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them,” DeSantis added. “When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”
DeSantis is asked during a news conference about the state's rejection of an AP African American history class. He says "this course on Black history, what's one of the lessons about? Queer theory … that's the wrong side of the line for Florida standards." pic.twitter.com/HzKnWsyUb3
Last Friday, Florida’s Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. wrote that the state had “rejected an AP course filled with Critical Race Theory and other obvious violations of Florida law.”
Specifically, the department said it objected to “the inclusion of readings from many major African American scholars, activists and writers, who explored subjects like Black queer studies, Black feminist literary thought, the reparations movement and intersectionality,”The New York Times reported.
Florida’s education department said it objected to readings from professor Angela Davis for being a “self-avowed Communist and Marxist”; professor Kimberlé Crenshaw “the founder of intersectionality”; and bell hooks for using language like “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
Though the College Board didn’t comment on Florida’s rejection, it noted that the course is still being revised based on feedback from African American scholars, the Times reported. The final framework of the course will be publicly posted before becoming widely available in U.S. high schools.
Critics have also pointed out that Florida high schools offer AP European History courses, which reinforce a narrative of predominantly white cultures colonizing and enslaving non-white countries in order to benefit capitalist and industrialist regimes.
It’s hardly surprising that DeSantis’s administration rejected the Black history course. Last year, he signed the Individual Freedoms Act (known as the Stop WOKE Act) which limits how racial issues are taught in public schools, public universities, colleges, and workplace trainings.
Last year, he also signed the Parental Rights in Education bill (known as the Don’t Say Gay law) which restricts teachers from acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people in public schools. Heworked with far-right media outlets and book-banning groupsto help promote the law.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized Florida’s rejection of the course.
“These types of actions aren’t new… especially from Florida,” Jean-Pierre said. “Sadly, Florida currently bans teachers from talking about who they are and who they love.”
“They didn’t block AP European history. They didn’t block our music history. They didn’t block our art history. But the state chooses to block a course that is meant for high achieving high school students to learn about their history of arts and culture,” she continued. “It is incomprehensible.”
According to the College Board, the pilot version of the AP African American Studies course will expand to hundreds of additional high schools in 2024. The final course will be offered in schools that same year, with the course’s first exams being offered in Spring 2025.
Please notice the similarities of what the Nazis did with what DeathSantis and the republican leaders in red states are doing now with the don’t say gay laws. The Nazis started with getting rid of the literature and any gay positive news or newspapers. They made laws restricting and outlawing gay meeting places just like the red states are doing with drag queen shows. Also they made gay associations and gay supporting groups to disband and forbid them from existing just like in Florida where no gay straight alliance clubs can now be formed in schools supporting the gay / LGBTQ+ kids. There is so much more in the video that shows how DeathSantis and his advisors are following the Nazi play book to eliminate the LGBTQ+ community, to rid the state of the gay and trans people. Such as using thugs called Brown Shirts to attack and scare gay establishments which reminds me of the Proud Boys gangs. Arresting and stopping events claiming they were preventing crime and if they got a gay person in the arrests or anyone with any public indecency in their record they made a big deal of making an example of them, claiming the need to protect the public and the children. One of the reasons that the Nazis hated the gays was they did not produce Aryan children which was the goal of the movement. Similar to the current white nationalist / Christian nationalist that claim that same sex marriage is not a true marriage and that same sex families are not real because same sex couples can not produce offspring. In their minds there is not enough white kids being born. Please note the same things said about homosexuality then are the same things said about gays today by republicans, including what the religious evangelicals today say about same sex marriage not producting children. Hugs
Kirk is a well know republican racist bigot. So he thinks a white centered white straight history is the only history to be taught. Hugs
“I am enthusiastically behind Ron DeSantis saying that Black-centered education has no place in Florida schools, obviously. It’s bigoted from its premise.
“First of all, Western culture is better and it’s a thoughtcrime to say it out loud. Number two, Blacks were sold into slavery by other Blacks. Can’t say that out loud, Thomas Sowell wrote that in great detail.
“Number three, when Blacks were given opportunities to return home, they did not want to return home. Blacks didn’t want to leave.
“I mean obviously, slavery is reprehensible and terrible and awful, but there’s a lot more to that story than people would ever want to acknowledge and admit, which is more Blacks have come to America voluntarily than ever came in the slave trade.
“More Blacks have come to America voluntarily since the 1980s, whether it be from West Africa, from the Caribbean, than ever came in the slave trade.” – Charlie Kirk, on yesterday’s show.
It doesn’t matter who sold them into slavery, and it doesn’t make it alright if black tribes sold members of other black tribes into slavery. SLAVERY IS WRONG. Also, the history courses are pretty much WHITE-CENTRIC. Why is THAT OK? Why shouldn’t black AND white children learn about black history? It’s as much a part of our nation’s history as white history. Go pop your zits in private, Charlie, and leave the rest of us alone.
“Number three, when Blacks were given opportunities to return home, they did not want to return home. Blacks didn’t want to leave.
WTF? Charlie, were first generation slaves offered the chance to return to their homelands? I think not. If this even happened it would have been generations later. That would be like someone offering anyone of us whose families have been here for generations the opportunity to return to the motherland. Ones family and life are now here. The lunacy of these bigots drives me crazy.
It’s how Liberia was setup, but they had to be able to pay to return there. It wasn’t a ‘free’ trip. So that’s why most Black people wouldn’t have ‘wanted’ to leave. Not to mention that people don’t like forced migrations… Once moved, why move again?
If someone wanted to “return” me to Scotland, I might take them up on it. I’d love to live where it rains most of the time, everything is deep fried, and men wear skirts to special events.
But if they just wanted to “return” me to a random chunk of Europe carved out as a dumping ground for anyone of European descent, where a non-English language was spoken by the locals and all the customs were foreign, that would be a completely different matter.
And that’s the kind of “return” that was offered to African Americans after the War of Secession.
I’ve made it a rule to not listen to dropouts tell me what to be ought included or excluded from school curriculum. I only listen to dropouts talking about school when they’re talking about ways to keep people in school.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, we were taught that the way to be a good person was to swear that race didn’t matter, at least not anymore.
We had all learned the lessons of the civil rights movement — that everybody is equal, and according to the morals of the sitcoms we watched after school (Diff’rent Strokes, Webster, Saved by the Bell), what was racist was pretending that people were any different from one another. Furthermore, the most un-racist people didn’t even see race at all; they were color blind.
We now know that color blindness is a form of racial denial that took one of the aspirations of the civil rights movement — that individuals would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” — and stripped it from any consideration of power, hierarchy or structure. The moral logic and social appeal of color blindness is clear, and many well-meaning people have embraced it. But when it’s put into practice in a still-racist world, the result is more racism.
In a way, color blindness makes the civil rights movement a victim of its own success: Legal segregation is over, so now it must be up to people of color to finish the work themselves. As Bonilla-Silva puts it, if racism is no longer actively limiting the lives of people of color, then their failure to achieve parity with whites in wealth, education, employment, and other areas must mean there is something wrong with them, not with the social systems that somehow always benefit white people the most.
Social scientists look to this question — whether you believe that racism is to blame for disparities or that Black people just need to work harder — to help them determine what they call racial resentment. And racial resentment, in turn, is a predictor of opposition to policies that would improve the economic security of millions.
Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it. Denial that racism still exists; denial that, even if it does exist, it’s to blame for the situation at hand; denial that the problem is as bad as people of color say it is — these denials are the easy outs that the dominant white narrative offers to people. Wellesley College professor Jennifer Chudy’s research finds that only one in five white Americans consistently expresses high levels of sympathy about anti-Black discrimination.
Color blindness has become a powerful weapon against progress for people of color, but as a denial mindset, it doesn’t do white people any favors, either. A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps. That person is less likely to listen deeply to unexpected ideas expressed by people from other cultures or to do the research on her own to learn about her blind spots.
When that person then faces the inevitable uncomfortable racial reality — an offended coworker, a presentation about racial disparity at a PTA meeting, her inadvertent use of a stereotype — she’s caught flatfooted. Denial leaves people ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse society. It makes people less effective at collaborating with colleagues, coaching kids’ sports teams, advocating for their neighborhoods, even chatting with acquaintances at social events. Nor is denial easy to sustain.
To uphold the illusion of effortless white advantage actually requires unrelenting psychological exertion. Sociologist Dr. Jennifer Mueller explains that color blindness is a key step in “a process of knowing designed to produce not knowing surrounding white privilege, culpability and structural white supremacy.”
But it was a white poet, novelist and farmer named Wendell Berry whose words brought home to me most poignantly the moral consequences of denial. In August 2017, I traveled to Northern Kentucky to meet with a multiracial grassroots organization called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.
After a day of workshops, one of the members gave me a dog-eared copy of a book by Berry, a local hero who had grown up in rural Kentucky during the Jim Crow era. The book was called The Hidden Wound — Berry wrote it in 1968, in the midst of widespread protest and unrest — and that night in my hotel room, I read it from cover to cover.
By denying the reality of racism and their own role in it, Berry explained, white Americans have denied themselves critical self-knowledge and created a prettified and falsified version of American history for themselves to believe in, one built on the “wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.” Of course, he understood the impulse of white people — himself included — to protect themselves from “the anguish implicit in their racism.”
A few years before Berry published The Hidden Wound, James Baldwin, as keen an observer of human behavior as there’s ever been, wrote his own account of what happens when white people open their eyes to racism.
“What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it.” Baldwin went on to observe that white Americans “are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.”
Wendell Berry calls this suffering “the hidden wound.” He counsels that when “you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.” Of this wound — this psychic and emotional damage that racism does to white people — he writes, “I have borne it all my life . . . always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge it.”
As I closed Berry’s book in that Kentucky hotel room, I thought about what it must it be like to be part of the dominant group in an unfair “meritocracy” that denies its oppressions and pathologizes the oppressed.
“I think white folks are terribly invested in our own innocence,” says the scholar Catherine Orr. The belief that the United States is a meritocracy, in which anyone can succeed if only they try hard enough, also supports the notion that anyone who is financially successful is so because they’ve worked harder or are somehow more innately gifted than others.
Both ideas operate as a justification for maintaining our profoundly unjust economic system. Recent research from social psychologists at Yale and Northwestern finds that “Americans, on average, systematically overestimate the extent to which society has progressed toward racial economic equality, driven largely by overestimates of current racial equality.”
Wealthy white Americans, they find, have the most unrealistic assessment of how much progress the United States has made in terms of economic equality (and thus how fair the competition has been that they seem to have won). In a 2019 public opinion survey, majorities of both Black and white people said that being Black makes it more difficult to get ahead in America. Yet only 56 percent of white respondents believed the corollary — that being white helps you get ahead.
And of those who recognized the obstacles Black people face in terms of economic mobility, Black respondents attributed this to systemic discrimination, such as having less access to good schools and high-paying jobs. White people, on the other hand, were more likely to blame problems such as the lack of good role models and family instability — pathologies, in other words, that ultimately lay blame at the feet of Black people themselves.
Morally defending your position in a racially unequal society requires the fierce protection of your self-image as a person who earns everything you receive. From the tradition that trade unions make a place for members’ sons and legacy admissions at colleges to college students who can choose career-building but unpaid or low-paying internships because families can support them and employers who seek “a good fit” by hiring younger versions of themselves, the deck is stacked on behalf of white people in ways that are so pervasive we rarely notice them.
Within this context, many white people both resent affirmative action and imagine that it is vastly more widespread than it really is. The share of Black and brown students at selective colleges has actually declined over 35 years despite stated affirmative action policies, and the overwhelmingly white categories of children of alumni, faculty, donors or athletes made up 43 percent, for example, of students admitted to Harvard from 2010 to 2015.
Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study by Harvard Business School professor Katherine DeCelles, Black job applicants who removed any indications of their race from their résumés were significantly more likely to advance to an interview. Many other studies bear out similar findings, including an economic research paper that traced improved job prospects to whether applicants had names like “Greg” or “Emily” as opposed to “Lakisha” or “Jamal,” and a sociological study in New York City that found that “Black applicants were half as likely as equally qualified whites to receive a callback or job offer.”
Still, the idea that people of color are taking jobs from white people is another zero-sum belief that lumbers on from era to era. As Ronald, a middle-aged white man from Buffalo, New York, told the Whiteness Project, “I think affirmative action was nice. It had its time, but I think that time is over with. Are we going to keep this up another one hundred fifty years? ‘Oh, we gotta have so many Asians in the fire department, we gotta have so many Blacks in the fire department.’ . . . The white guys will never have a chance to be a fireman or a cop anymore.” Although using such numerical quotas to achieve affirmative action in employment was outlawed in 1978 by the Supreme Court, Ronald’s grievance is evergreen, as is his certainty that white guys getting all the public service jobs was the natural order of things, not its own form of white affirmative action.
Yet the right says the democrats are the ones indoctrinating students. These are upper levels of schooling, college and universities, that they are removing any talk of equality, racism, and so much more. Professors having to scrub their courses and presentations of anything that might upset the ruler / dictator DeathSantis. Imagine this country wide. Talk about the Taliban or moral / vice police. This is stunning and worse it is not getting any national attention or scrutiny. It is scary how fascist the state of Florida has become in several short years. With DeathSantis making Florida a maga white Christian paradise the state is being flooded with intolerant people who won’t accept any social advance since the 1850s. Plus notice the drive is to make a public school be just like a conservative Christian college. Hugs
Yovanna Pineda, hired more than a decade ago to teach Latin American history at the University of Central Florida, rebranded one of her signature courses last fall. Striking references to “dictatorships” and “human rights” from the title, she decided to simply call her class “History of South America.”
Pineda said many of her colleagues are making similar changes, either because they fear blowback from state leaders who say they are trying to eliminate “indoctrination” from university campuses or because they don’t want the hassle of additional scrutiny.
DeSantis continued his campaign last week, appointing far-right activist Christopher Rufo to the Board of Trustees at New College of Florida. Rufo is best known for launching a national campaign against critical race theory. Rufo told The New York Times he and his new colleagues seek to transform New College into a public version of Michigan’s Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school.
Read the full article. That’s Rufo standing appropriately on the far-right in the screenshot above.
UCF professors are renaming courses and removing phrases like “human rights”, “social justice”, “equity” and “equal” to avoid being targeted or tracked by the state.
This is happening in 2023 in the United States under the new McCarthyism of Ron DeSantis.https://t.co/Z7Xrzx8WNp
UCF professors are renaming courses and removing phrases like “human rights”, “social justice”, “equity” and “equal” to avoid being targeted or tracked by the state.
This is happening in 2023 in the United States under the new McCarthyism of Ron DeSantis.https://t.co/Z7Xrzx8WNp
“And faculty members say they’ve seen other signs that the governor has gained a foothold on their campuses, including the removal of the words “social justice” from the name of an office at UCF, which has been rebranded as the Office of Civil Discourse.“https://t.co/Z7Xrzx8oXRpic.twitter.com/VI4WkSlCWu
If you want to see true hypocrisy, look no further then Cuban Republicans in FL who scream about how evil socialism and Castro are while applauding everything DeSantis does. They hate socialism but love fascism.
Like openly gay Florida state Rep. Carlos Smith (seen above), I am a graduate of UCF, which is now the nation’s largest public university by enrollment.
So the ‘academic freedom’ they’re so loudly in favour of just means the ability of professors to use slurs and misgender their students without being talked to by HR. I mean we knew that, but nice to see it actually being confirmed in real time.
In the Fascist State of Florida, the remaking of education continues on course. Henceforth, all institutions of learning will be used to groom children into fascism and eliminate anything that does not support/agree with fascist theory.
What I don’t understand is why the ACLU or some other organization hasn’t brought suit against the governor for violation of the First Amendment. This is exactly what the amendment was designed to prohibit: governmental interference with free speech.
Why even send your children to Florida universities at this point. Soon none of the institution live up to the normal standard of operation. Moron Death Sentence is hell bend on turning Florida into a shit hole state.
And the administrations of these schools are unable to protect academic freedom for their professors because of fear of retribution and firing. DeSantis is Big Brother.
All public educators, at all grade levels, should simply walk out. There is no way Florida would be able to replace every single teacher and college professor in the state. The federal government would be forced to step in.
The popular ‘gender critical’ theory about pelvic bones is simply nonsense. (Credit: GiaPratamaMD | Twitter)
It’s a popular ‘gender critical’ argument, that if archaeologists were to dig up a skeleton in hundreds of years from now they’d be able to tell whether it was male or female.
Sadly for them, it’s total nonsense.
The belief that birth sex is identifiable through skeletal structure is entirely “misleading” according to various experts.
The myth became popularised by so-called gender-critical individuals following claims of a physical disparity between pelvic bones of those assigned male at birth and those that were assigned female.
It is routinely used as an argument by anti-trans groups to claim that the concept of gender identity is useless because of its impermanence.
You can say gender neutral, you can have many sexual orientation.
But hundreds years from now, if Archeologist find your bone, they will say you either Male or female. pic.twitter.com/tamYUUxCPF
But, according to several experts in archaeology, the claim ignores a number of fundamental steps when identifying skeletal remains.
ATSU assistant professor and biological anthropologist Caroline VanSickle told AFPthat professionals often cannot say with any certainty if an individual was male, female or other just by looking at their bones.
“We can offer a fairly educated guess, but even then we sometimes get the answer wrong or end up with inconclusive results,” VanSickle says.
She added there is currently “limited data” on how hormone replacement therapy (HRT) affects bone structure, which makes it even more tricky to define the facts about a centuries-old skeleton.
“We also lack methods to identify intersex individuals, who make up around two per cent of the population,” she added.
The pelvic bone is not reliable enough to identify a male or female skeleton
Because of this ambiguity, archaeologists often refrain from definitively identifying the sex of a skeleton unless there is further proof to corroborate the decision.
When examining a skeleton, Osteoarchaeologists often consider both the physical characteristics of the skeleton, while also considering evidence of the person’s gender identity – especially in cultures which have exhibited gender-neutral or third-gender identities.
Durham university archaeology professor Rebecca Gowland said that skeletons are often categorised as male, probable male, unknown, female, or probable female.
She said the categorisation is based “on a number of different factors… [including] poor preservation, or it could be that some of the skeletal traits used to estimate sex are ambiguous.”
Archaeologists have routinely said that a person’s skeleton isn’t enough to identify their sex, let alone their pelvic bone. (Getty)
Sexual dimorphism – the biological or physical difference between the sexes of a species – is reportedly so slight in the skeleton of a human that the margin of error can be exceptionally high.
Gowland added that professionals are aware “biological sex exists on a spectrum, of which skeletons and the sexual variation they show is only one part of a greater whole.
“They also understand that the assessment of sex using skeletons is not 100 per cent accurate and this analysis may not align with an individual’s biological sex or gender identity.”
But, as many trans activists have pointed out, the concept of being misgendered in hundreds or thousands of years from now is not exactly on the top of their anxieties list.
“I won’t be alive by then, so I don’t really care,” journalist Katelyn Burns said in response to a post using the argument.
“Oh no! I’ll be so embarrassed when my bones are dug up in several hundred years! What ever will I do!?” another sarcastically wrote.
What police states Florida and other republican states have become. Remember these are the same people who were super angry that the Dr. Seuss people decided not to publish racist books that were not selling well anymore. These are the same people angry that the Potato head toy with no gender got rid of the Mr / Mrs in the name of the toy. This is what a dictatorship looks like, the start of state sanctioned ideology forced on kids, this is the real indoctrination. I want to point out the kids were already aware of discrimination and racism. What better place to address it and try to encourage an acceptance of equality and diversity? Third grade is 8 years old and by that age the black kids are well aware of race and racism, why shouldn’t the white kids have it explained to them so they understand it is a bad thing? Hugs
The assistant director of communications for Olentangy Local School District abruptly stopped the reading of the Dr. Seuss book “The Sneetches” to a third-grade classroom during an NPR podcast after students asked about race.
Shale Meadows Elementary School third grade teacher Mandy Robek was reading “The Sneetches” to her class as part of NPR’s latest episode of “Planet Money” about the economic lessons in children’s books. During the podcast, which aired Friday, Amanda Beeman, the assistant director of communications for the school district, stopped the reading part way through the book.
NPR reporter Erika Beras spent the day in Robek’s class with Beeman for the podcast. As part of the district stipulations, politics were off limits. Six books were selected ahead of time by Beras and the district — including “The Sneetches.”
“I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the book being one of the ones featured,” Beeman is heard saying on the podcast during the middle of “The Sneetches” reading. “I just feel like this isn’t teaching anything about economics, and this is a little bit more about differences with race and everything like that.”
“The Sneetches,” published in 1961, is a book about two kinds of Sneetches: those with stars on their bellies and those without stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches are judged negatively by their appearance, so capitalist Sylvester McMonkey McBean makes money selling them stars for their bellies. Meanwhile, the Star-Bellied Sneetches don’t like associating with the Plain-Belly Sneetches, so they start paying to have a machine take their stars off.
The Seuss family has said the book was intended to teach children not to judge or discriminate against others because of their appearance and to treat people equitably.
“It’s almost like what happened back then, how people were treated … Like, disrespected … Like, white people disrespected Black people…,” a third grade student is heard saying on the podcast.
Robek keeps on reading, but it’s shortly after this student’s comment is made on the podcast that Beeman interrupts the reading.
“I just don’t think that this is going to be the discussion that we wanted around economics,” Beeman said on the podcast. “So I’m sorry. We’re going to cut this one off.”
Beras tried to tell Beeman that “The Sneetches” is about preferences, open markets and economic loss, but Beeman replied, “I just don’t think it might be appropriate for the third-grade class and for them to have a discussion around it.”
On the “Planet Money” episode, Beras reached back out to Beeman to ask about what happened. Beeman replied, “When the book began addressing racism, segregation and discriminating behaviors, this was not the conversation we had prepared Mrs. Robek, the students or parents would take place. There may be some very important economics lessons in ‘The Sneetches,’ but I did not feel that those lessons were the themes students were going to grasp at that point in the day or in the book.”
Olentangy Schools responds to The Dispatch
Beeman explained to The Dispatch on Monday that the school district agreed to be part of the “Planet Money” story “to feature the great work that Mrs. Robek does.”
“We do not ban any books,” Beeman said.
“As (‘The Sneetches’) was being read, I made a personal judgment call we shouldn’t do the reading because of some of the other themes and undertones that were unfolding that were not shared that we would be discussing with parents,” Beeman said.
The book touches on racism, segregation, and discriminatory behavior, Beeman said.
“We are really not about suppressing any viewpoints or dialogues,” Beeman said. “There were great economic lessons and the conversation wasn’t going toward (economics).”
Looking back, Beeman said she does wish she had handled the situation differently by talking to Robek separately to figure out a way to continue the Seuss book and have the discussion geared more toward economics.
Beras did not immediately respond to The Dispatch’s questions Monday afternoon.
Some of the other books that Robek’s class read when Beras visited included “Pancakes, Pancakes!” by Eric Carle; “Put Me In The Zoo” by Robert Lopshire; and a poem from “Where The Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein.
The six books are “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo,” “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”
It was one of the most elaborate mid-winter parties in human history. Fragrant boughs of fir trees decked the halls, genitalia-shaped cakes accented banquet tables overflowing with food, and rich slave owners – sometimes tarted up in elaborate drag – served their domestics the best cuts of meat while high on a combination of booze, sex, and gratitude. Social norms were paused for a whole week of December, pranks and taboos prioritized, and all workers given PTO.
It was called Saturnalia, and the church snuffed it out.
But this ancient Pagan festival honoring Saturn, Greek titan of agriculture, and not starving to death, developed beyond being a colorful end-of-the-year bash for Zeus’ Zaddy (according to mythology Saturn, aka Cronus, was father to gods Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus, among others). In the hands of the Romans, the celebration was curated to not only encourage egalitarianism, but also to appreciate working class and enslaved peoples’ contributions to functioning society.
And because all of it was rooted in Greek traditions, Saturnalia was more than a little gay.
I asked Susan Lanigan, anthropologist and bioarchaeologist, to rate how queer Saturnalia was on a scale of Nick Cannon to Harvey Fierstein.
“Somewhere in the Fierstein category, cuddled firmly between Elton John and Liberace,” Lanigan explains without hesitation. “It’s no secret Ancient Greece was super queer, but the Romans were a bit more prudish and often kept queer relationships in the taboo category. However, Saturnalia was all about emulating the social freedom integral to Greek culture. Hence, drag was openly encouraged. We have more than one record from the period describing boys running naked through the streets, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, masters of the house waiting on slaves, and an overabundance of wine, cunnilingus, and fruitcake. In that order.”
Which is the correct order. Fruitcake before cunnilingus is how infections happen.
The heyday that Lanigan references begins around 133 B.C. Saturnalia did exist before this, but as a shorter, day-long feast on December 25, and with less of the stylized shenanigans which would eventually characterize the festival’s approximate stretch from December 17-23.
One hallmark of the longer, more-involved Saturnalia festivities was the election of a Saturnalicius princeps, who became each household’s designated “King of Saturnalia.” This agent of chaos, usually plucked from the servant class, was chosen specifically to lead the home in celebratory debauchery, which could range from elaborate pranks to Friar’s Club-style roasts of guests; erotic cake bake-offs to scavenger hunts; nude choral performances to full-on orgies.
If you’ve ever been to a New Orleans Mardi Gras, or celebrated Venetian Carnival, you’re familiar with this socially playful “king for a day” concept, as well as the grace extended to Lords of Misrule for whatever they pulled before everyone sobered up.
Many elements of ancient Saturnalia are still visible in the contemporary West today. Wreaths of evergreen trees, candlelit altars and dinner tables, stacks of gifts, and seasonal songs are just a few. The combination of drag, social inversion, and bawdy jokes are hallmarks of the long holiday tradition of British pantomime pageants, as well as countless TV specials in the USA.
As the 4th century came to a close Saturnalia was systematically replaced with a party for Jesus Christ. Despite evidence that Jesus was actually a Spring baby, it was decided through a combination of politicking and purposeful cultural appropriation – shoehorning pagan traditions into Christianity made the viral religion more appealing to potential converts – that December 25th was henceforth Christ’s birthday.
Christmas rituals began to supplant centuries of Greek-style revelry. Saturnia’s admirable practice of giving working-class people a seat at the table, and repaying the lowest social castes for their struggle with gifts, was diluted over the next several centuries to sung platitudes like “peace on earth, goodwill to men,” which is a nice idea with no assimilable nutritional value.
Saturnalia’s cheery December cries of “io Saturnalia!” (“io” is pronounced “ho”) mutated into Santa’s “Ho Ho Ho” and “Merry Christmas,” and wandering choruses started wearing Puritanical robes instead of showing up buck naked. **sad trombone sounds here**
None of this means modern-day revelers can’t close their calendar year with their own Saturnalia, however. For the sake of not getting arrested some changes to the O.G. itinerary are necessary, but many parts of the ancient festival are still accessible to anyone with a little altruism and/or a decent wig collection.
“Since Saturnalia was like the lovechild of Carnival and Christmas, elaborate costumes and thoughtful gift-giving are the way to go,” Lanigan offers to anyone looking to partake. “If you happen to do both of those things while getting drunk at an orgy, well…you’re on the right track. Just make sure everyone involved is good, giving, and game, friends.”