The Culture Wars: Book banning and History hiding

Get the Point!

Back in 1978, my very first job—at the age of six—was as a library aide at Apple Grove Elementary School in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Every afternoon, I would spend an hour or more helping to place returned books to the shelves and once finished, I was free to lie down on one of the bean bags with a book and read until it was time to go home. 

Current teachers at my very first school, Apple Grove Elementary, dressed up in 1980's era fashions earlier this year…

While I didn't quite understand why, I remember that the library was in the center of the school and when we passed by it daily to go to the cafeteria for lunch or out to recess, that very few students would be seated at the desks or lying on the bean bags reading. Even then it occurred to me that my job of reshelving books was easy because there were few returned books to shelve. Still, for those who did love to read, the shelves were stacked with texts covering every subject imaginable.

Those long ago memories have weighed heavily on me over the past year as my home state since 1980, Florida, has become ground zero of the book banning campaigns of the never ending culture wars. Specifically, many Republicans, fearful of the growing population of non White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) in America, are openly hostile towards people of color, non-Christians, and the LGBTQ community through their political rhetoric and policies. Their illogical reasoning, it seems, is that if they whitewash the history, and legislate ways to restrict how people worship their god or express love, that they can create a society that aligns with their values. 

At the center of Florida's intolerance movement is Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, an acolyte of former President Donald Trump who has drawn the ire of his mentor as he flirts with running against him for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

A grinning Ron Desantis, the suppressor of academic freedom, behind a podium that reads “Freedom Lives Here.” 

During the early days of the pandemic, Desantis gambled on criticizing quarantine efforts and pushing to keep Florida open for its lucrative tourism business, a gamble that, when coupled with his aversion to mandatory Covid vaccinations, has drawn the interest of many “Never Trump” Republicans who seem to have forgotten that arguably Trump's greatest achievement during his single term was pushing to remove the red tape to help with the speedy development of Covid combating medicines. 

Where Desantis and Trump are similar is in their facility with the culture wars in general, and their penchant to insult Black people and Black history—all the while securing the approval of far right idiots who spew vitriol towards Blacks and other people of color. 

Do not be deceived: Desantis and Trump share the same ideology with regards to race and Critical Race Theory…

Desantis pushed past his asinine "anti-woke" rhetoric when HB 1467 became law in Florida last year and in the time since, books in Florida schools have been boxed up or covered up until they are "cleared" by so-called "media specialists."

HB 1467 provides in pertinent part that, books are "age-appropriate, free from pornography and suited to student needs.” As a result, far too many Florida educators fear losing their jobs, as some already have for speaking out, or being arrested for violating this wholly subjective standard. Subjective in that what one person considers "age appropriate" or "pornographic" may be totally acceptable to the next—and that lack of objectivity is not only problematic, but likely in violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that was designed to prevent government actors like Ron Desantis and Donald Trump from controlling the free expression of ideas. 

To illustrate the enormity of Florida's book bans, Tracey Price of the Duval County (Jacksonville) Public Schools recently said that"there are approximately 1.6 million titles in our classroom and media center libraries that need to be reviewed by a certified media specialist." (Nota Bene: Duval County is just one of Florida's 67 counties).

Among the titles removed from Duval County Schools were biographies on the lives of Black baseball greats Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente—books removed to avoid offending white students or "making kids hate America," according to Desantis. 

My first thought when I saw that the Aaron and Clementine books had been removed was that if overcoming all odds stories of those two figures are offensive, I suppose that Clotel, or The President's Daughter, a fictional account of the lives of President Thomas Jefferson's enslaved biracial daughters that was written by William Wells Brown in 1853, has ZERO chance of being checked out and read in Desantis' Florida. Ditto for Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, and Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, each of which will surely become educational contraband in a state that prefers melting pot fiction to the sobering truths about the horrific legacy of white supremacy and systemic racism. 

As I often mention, Ron Desantis was a history major at Yale University and because of that, I know that he knows good and well that generally speaking, literature, along with newspaper and magazine articles, provide piercing insight into historical people, places, and events. Specifically, literature provides a snapshot of times past that helps us to understand where America has been, where America is now, and where America is heading in the future.  

In 1933, upon becoming Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler encouraged his Nazi minions to burn books throughout Germany that were written by Jewish authors, or were inconsistent with his anti-Semitic views.

But again, the culture war cynics want a homogenized society, one in which group think replaces individual forms of expression. This was clear a few weeks back when Desantis, defending his indefensible attacks on Black history, tried to explain his dastardly deeds by claiming that his opposition to the AP Black History course was because it joined LGBTQ history with the other lessons. Desantis asked, "now, who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids.”

Actually, Mr. Desantis, Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin, writer/philosopher Langston Hughes, writer/philosopher James Baldwin, and choreographer Alvin Ailey—the legendary gay Black men depicted above—are but a few gay Blacks whose lives are remembered each year in history courses across America because of what they contributed to the culture—not because of their sexual preferences!

While the culture wars will continue in the courts of law and courts of public opinion, I submit that it is critically important that people of all demographic backgrounds who understand the problem with suppressing the teaching of real history do all that they can to push back against men like Ron Desantis and Donald Trump, and women like Nimrata Randawha "Nikki" Haley and Marjorie Taylor Green, and remind them that when we study the past in all of its great, good, bad, and ugly forms, that we are equipped with the knowledge to avoid repeating those bad and ugly mistakes!