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Cancel Culture for Dummies

Let’s just cancel American history and replace it with a cartoon show

And they say liberals are indoctrinating children…

A Wisconsin school board decided against allowing high school students to read a book about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in the US during World War II.

Julie Otsuka’s 2002 book, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” was set to be part of an advanced 10th-grade English curriculum at Muskego High School, located in Muskego, Wisconsin, and a part of the Muskego-Norway School District.

The historical fiction book — based in part on the author’s own family history — highlights a Japanese internment camp in Utah.

After Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans were forcibly placed in internment camps amid national racial discrimination so the US could prevent spying, according to a post by The Washington Post. While no spies were ever found, some of the prisoners who survived the camps returned to damaged homes.

Anti-Asian hate persists today, with hate crimes skyrocketing against the Asian community throughout the pandemic.

The book is among a number of other pieces of literature on race and sexuality that conservatives have pushed to remove from schools and libraries.

Nearly 200 community members, including teachers, parents, and students of the high school, signed a petition urging board members to allow the book to be taught.

“I’ve never felt so under attack for just doing my job or doing my duty to teach kids about others and their world. At one time this would have been college and career readiness; now it’s ‘indoctrination,'” an anonymous teacher wrote in the petition.

“The anti-diversity sentiment that the school board is supporting leaves me feeling scared and uncomfortable teaching. It is my ethical responsibility to grow global citizens–I cannot do that without exposing them to a diverse populace,” another anonymous teacher wrote.

The board denied pushing forward with adding the book from the curriculum at a meeting on June 13, but the meeting was not recorded and its minutes were not published, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Ann Zielke, a parent of a student in the district, told NBC News that School Board Vice President Terri Boyer claimed the book offered an “unbalanced” account of historical events.

“What she said to me was that we actually need an ‘American’ perspective,'” Zielke said, adding that the people in the internment camps were Americans. 

“She clarified and said that she felt that we needed the perspective of the American government, and why Japanese internment happened,” Zielke added. “And so then again, we had raised voices at this point. I told her specifically, I said, ‘The other side is racism.'”

Otsuka’s editor Jordan Pavlin wrote a letter to the Muskego-Norway board saying that “When the Emperor Was Divine” has been “course adopted in hundreds of schools throughout the country, where it has become a staple of high school English classes.” 

Do school boards require that members be educated? At all?

Here’s another one, you might have already heard about:

A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction, but board members have asked them to reconsider the phrasing, according to the state board’s chair.

“The board — with unanimous consent — directed the work group to revisit that specific language,” Keven Ellis, chair of the Texas State Board of Education said in a statement issued late Thursday.

The working group of nine educators, including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is one of many such groups advising the state education board to make curriculum changes. This summer, the board will consider updates to social studies instruction a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms. The board will have a final vote on the curriculum in November.

The suggested change surfaced late during its June 15 meeting that lasted more than 12 hours. Board member Aicha Davis, a Democrat who represents Dallas and Fort Worth, brought up concerns to the board saying that wording is not a “fair representation” of the slave trade. The board, upon reading the language in the suggested curriculum, sent the working draft back for revision.

“For K-2, carefully examine the language used to describe events, specifically the term ‘involuntary relocation,’” the state board wrote in its guidance to the work group.

“I can’t say what their intention was, but that’s not going to be acceptable,” Davis told The Texas Tribune on Thursday. In 2015, Texas attracted attention when it was discovered a social studies textbook approved for use in the state called African slaves who were brought to the United States, “workers

In this case, the group proposing these second grade curriculum revisions was given a copy of Senate Bill 3, Texas’ law that dictates how slavery and issues of race are taught in Texas. The law states that slavery can’t be taught as part of the true founding of the United States and that slavery was nothing more than a deviation from American values.

We don’t want little white Johnnie and little white Janie to feel any “discomfort” about slavery. But their little Black classmates will just have to learn to endure it. As usual.

I don’t have to point out how pernicious this is. It’s obvious. And it’s happening in red states all over the country. Look to Florida to see it at its most aggressive.

Teachers and parents are fighting back. But in some of these states they are hitting a very strong headwind.

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