“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.” — James Baldwin
Beth L Matterson is a long-time teacher at an unidentified Florida University. The name is an alias. And she (or he, or they? — for the sake of this diary, I will use she/her) cannot say which university. Out of concern that Ron DeSantis’s academic watchdogs will jackboot their way into her classroom and throw her out on her ass for contravening the rules of Florida HB7 Amendment — aka the ‘Stop WOKE Act’.
The full name of this travesty is “The Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act.” Big Brother is not dead. He has a place in Florida.
She has written an essay for Huff Po — “Florida Has An Outrageous New Law Targeting Teachers. Here's Why I'll Be Breaking It”. In it, she says she will ignore the strictures of this god-awful piece of fearful political pandering. In her words,
“I won’t be adjusting my syllabi to remove readings or discussions that make students ‘uncomfortable,’ and I won’t pretend that systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and other forms of oppression do not exist. I will not ‘whitewash’ our country’s history or minimize the challenges and oppression that so many still experience, especially those who are women and/or members of the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities.
Good for her.
Conservatives tell parents of Florida school children that their precious angels cannot handle the truth. But Masterson knows — as does every parent of every child, raised to face the world as it is, knows — kids can accept a lot. As she says,
"My students aren’t the snowflakes Gov. DeSantis assumes they are... and neither am I."
She continues,
“I will select the creative work of writers who belong to all sorts of communities, and I will require students to read their stories and discuss the work and their themes. Some of those themes are difficult and may make many of us uncomfortable, no matter how we identify or what community we’re in.”
And here she gets to the crux of the matter. She will expose all her students to the variegation of human experiences. And that they “no matter how we identify or what community we’re in,” might feel uncomfortable.
The Florida school laws — “Stop Woke” and “Don’t Say Gay” only address the discomfort of straight white kids. It demands that teachers shield only those children from experiences that are not theirs. The government will ban schools from teaching minority kids their unsanitized history. And LGBTQ+ students will be barred from learning about the experiences of their peers & predecessors. An education that would allow them to understand that they are not alone. They are not ‘broken.' They are not sinners. And they can have complete and meaningful lives.
Florida is the eighth most diverse state in the US. Whites account for a bare majority of the population (51.5%). But if you subtract whites that are LGBTQ+ — currently estimated at 5.6% of the population — that leaves straight whites as a minority (48.6%). And that number will shrink. And the more it shrinks, the more Florida conservatives will do to restrict the vote and bowdlerize school curriculums. Anything to keep straight whites supreme and everyone else in their place.
I pity all the kids in the system — including the white ones. Can you imagine if Florida banned non-traditional European food? You would have no barbeque, Mexican, Chinese, Tex-Mex, Thai, Indian, or Japanese - nor salsa or hummus. Can you imagine a European-only Thanksgiving Dinner? There would be no turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, green beans, or corn. Essentially, nothing but gravy.
A diverse education is like having a 65-inch flatscreen TV instead of an old-time 27-inch tube. Learning the uncomfortable stuff is like sports practice. Sure it can hurt, but it will make you a better player. Ignorance is not bliss. It promotes fear. It leaves sufferers unable to think for themselves and causes self-destructive political choices. And it replicates in the next generation.
On a personal note, although American, I was educated in England — for ten years in all-white, all-boy, all-Anglican boarding schools. Then, after university, which was co-ed and non-religious — although still lacking in minorities — I moved back to the US. My first job there was to manage a book store that supplied the universities in Newark NJ — a town with a majority-minority population.
The store’s literature section stocked books by Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Octavia Butler. And my sentiment favorite — Nathan Heard — because his seminal book, Howard Street, was an unsparing dissection of life in Newark, my new town. What an eye-opener. Had I been denied the experience, my life would have been immeasurably shallower.
Watching frightened white parents denying their children the tough richness of a comprehensive education reminds me of the classic UNCF slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but a wonderful thing to invest in.” Florida is not investing in children’s minds.