Next Florida will mandate yellow WOKE badges
Woke is a four-letter word, a conservative all-purpose epithet as meaningless as the f-word.
“You woking wokers get that woking thing out of my woking sight!”
Meaningless or not, it serves Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s purposes: to divide and inflame. Republican politicians, conservative pundits, and Fox News anchors attach their slur to anyone to the left of submitting to them on their knees.
Writing in Roll Call, Mary C. Curtis believes the term’s vagueness in Florida’s “Stop Woke Act” is deliberate. DeSantis means to erase Black history without expressly erasing Black history.
A federal judge ruling on the act in November stated that Florida’s actions strike “at the heart of ‘open-mindedness and critical inquiry.’” By so doing, “the State of Florida has taken over the ‘marketplace of ideas’ to suppress disfavored viewpoints.”
If you have to ask, “disfavored by whom?” you might be part of the problem.
The Florida Department of Education rejected the College Board’s AP African American studies course as “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” Its use of “inexplicably” is telling. Florida has no idea what’s objectionable about it. Vagueness in the “Stop Woke Act” is a feature, not a bug. DeSantis “has mastered this dark art.”
The vagueness of rules enforced by his “election integrity” task force in the wake of an amendment voters passed to restore voting rights to ex-felons is also deliberate. Even law enforcement officers are “puzzled about the details of the law the terrified, targeted citizens were supposed to have broken,” Curtis explains:
Charges may have been dropped in most cases, but do you think minority folks with a former brush with the law would risk another by voting?
Call it a pattern of intimidation by obfuscation.
First it was non-white voters. Now it is teachers. DeSantis is banning books in schools; teachers are covering up or removing classroom libraries. Which books will earn teachers death threats? Or “up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine“? Who can say?
Now, many school librarians who stuck it out are confused about which books and magazines they are allowed to order, especially when lawmakers, citizen panels, school board members, loud parents and occasionally people without a child in the school or community have the final say.
So, they’ve stopped. No new books for school libraries that need them, for students who present lists of titles they are eager to read. Will discouraged young people give up on reading altogether when they can’t see themselves in literature, when they are denied anything that might excite them or introduce them to something surprising?
Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), writes in the New York Times:
Mr. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law relegates the study of the experiences of Black people to a prohibited category. The canceling of any students’ access to accurate, truthful education that reflects their diverse identities and that of their country should chill every American. Not only do these laws offend First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression; to the extent they harm certain groups on the basis of race, gender or other protected status, they also violate principles of equal protection. And they are a chilling precursor to state-sponsored dehumanization of an entire race of people.
That is just what DeSantis is selling, and white supporters love him for it. He’s running for president on it.
The commissars are in charge now in Florida, writes Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.
Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”
As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.
Education itself is now in the right’s crosshairs. Florida could pass a constitutional amendment tomorrow to abolish state universities. “There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.” But the “Sovietization of the New College” is about more:
Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.
GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.
The world is complex. Its problems complex. Its history more nuanced than Bible stories and fables. Right-wing distrust of “experts” and elites stems from an inability to cope with that complexity. A bonfire is simpler. Burn it all down and start over.
First books. Then democracy.
UPDATE: It’s not just Florida.
“The board doesn’t have any ability to propose a class, to propose a degree, or — for God’s sake — to propose a school,” Holden Thorp, who served as UNC’s chancellor from 2008 to 2013, said.
He said the BOT’s resolution is an example of the “worst governance” he thinks he’s ever seen.
Mimi Chapman, chairperson of faculty, said she was “flabbergasted” in response to the exclusion of faculty input in the decision, which she said she considers to be an attack on shared University governance.
[…]
Chapman said she thinks the School is opportunity for donors to fund programs against what they perceive is the indoctrination of liberal ideology at the University — a phenomenon that Chapman said she doesn’t believe exists.
The “dogma” that higher education is submitting to progressive politics is unfounded, Chapman said.
“I absolutely disagree with that,” Chapman said. “I do not think that is true in any way, shape or form.”
This would be the same outfit that denied tenure to UNC alum Nikole Hannah-Jones who won a Pulitzer for the “1619 Project,” now a docuseries on Hulu:
In April 2021, Ms. Hannah-Jones was announced as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She was offered a five-year contract as a professor instead of the usual tenured position, and her appointment drew criticism from conservatives who took issue with her involvement in The Times’s 1619 Project, which re-examined slavery in the United States.
The university’s failure to approve Ms. Hannah-Jones’s tenure drew intense backlash from faculty and students, as well as academics and journalists outside the school. Ms. Hannah-Jones said she was considering legal action on claims of discrimination. Under pressure, the board of trustees backtracked and granted her tenure a month later.
Ms. Hannah-Jones, who received a master’s degree at U.N.C. in 2003, then announced that she would no longer be joining the university and would instead join the faculty of Howard University.