The front line in the global culture wars has pushed its way into the heart of Florida’s education system, as Governor Ron DeSantis competes to become the leader of the Republican Party’s “boo to books” faction.
He’s accelerating a national trend that’s ripping the mask off the coded “war on woke” to reveal what it’s really about: a war on empathy, kindness and understanding. As Adam Serwer warned in The Atlantic back in 2018: “The cruelty is the point.”
Australia can expect the same action on full-bore “rinse-repeat” any day now.
We’re used to understanding rows about books in schools as history put to national mythmaking purposes. Courtesy of Geoffrey Blainey, we’ve even got our own sneeringly punning tag: “black-armband-ism”.
In the dying days of the Morrison government, former education minister Alan Tudge tried to whip it all up again in a local culture clash with attacks on the curriculum. In his first days as opposition leader, Peter Dutton pledged to Sky after dark that he’d make the national curriculum (“the values argument,” he eye-rollingly called it) one of the big issues in the national Parliament.
Narendra Modi’s India is travelling the same road, with schools being required, among other things, to erase the Islamic past, including “cancelling” former national heroes like Tipu Sultan.
In the US, states use market power to dictate to textbook suppliers how they write about history. The result? Publishers revert to the largest lowest common denominator — usually Texas — to decide what to leave in and out.
But what’s happening in Florida — and across much of the United States — is something new. Now it’s fiction that’s the target: great modern writers like Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Sherman Alexie – even Australia’s own Anh Do.
The right’s assault on fiction began in the 2021 Virginia state election when Republicans promoted a (conservative activist) mother complaining about her Year 12 son’s distress over Morrison’s Beloved. (She should have been thankful. You’d have to be a sociopath not to be shaken by Morrison’s powerful book.)
According to Pen America’s Index of School Book Bans, in the last complete school year (2021-22), 1648 titles were banned. According to PEN: “1261 different authors, 290 illustrators and 18 translators.” Expect that number to be up when we get this year’s count.
Three-quarters of the books banned were works of fiction. About 41% had LGBTQIA+ themes or characters (about a quarter of those with trans characters) and 40% had “protagonists or prominent secondary characters of colour”. About 20% addressed race or racism.
The house journal of America’s once Republican-voting managerial class, Harvard Business Review, gives us a clue of what’s going on: “reading literary fiction helps people develop empathy, theory of mind and critical thinking. When we read, we hone and strengthen several different cognitive muscles, so to speak, that are the root of the EQ [emotional intelligence].”
When business says “EQ”, the right hears “woke!”. Empathy about trans people? Critical thinking or even maybe (gasp!) theorising about racism? No way: “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
The books are being targeted under Florida’s Stop WOKE Act (capitalised as an acronym for “Wrong to our Kids and Employees”). Passed last year, the law makes it discriminatory to teach that individuals are “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” or that privilege or oppression may be based on race, gender or national origin.
Florida schools are being encouraged with an “if in doubt, take it out” sensibility, often stripping classrooms of all books. The national College Board has generated its own controversy when it rewrote its official curriculum for Year 12 Advanced Placement African American Studies, seemingly to accommodate the Florida law.
Guess who’s missing in action? America’s mainstream media, last year so hysterical about cancel culture, now lackadaisical about books in schools. The New York Times shrugged off Florida’s bans last week as just politics with a report headlined: “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand”.
Trouble is, the centrist establishment commentariat in the US media has been egging on the “war on woke”, arguing (as Nyadol Nyuon criticised it recently) “that cancel culture and political correctness pose a symmetrical threat, or an even greater threat”.
While Florida schools were taking books off the shelves, former New York Times books editor Pamela Paul (who explicitly made the case for right banning, left panning both-sides-ism last year) was cheering on Stanford University’s abandoning of its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.
About as long as we’ve had Sky after dark, we’ve had the “war on woke”. How long until that joins the war on the empathy that fiction offers?
Hearing Anh Do being banned – that hits hard. Anh Do is a national treasure – he writes illustrated children books that are both positive and funny. My daughter likes them, and I like reading them to her at bedtime. There’s nothing even anything upsetting about them. That’s just… off.
Makes a mockery of Freedom of Speech – looks like the tired ‘Old South’ tilting at another Lost Cause.
Peculiar Institutions abound in the slowly drowning retirement Mecca of Florida – the launching place of high technology and low culture.
Contradictions, on one level libertarian demanding freedom of speech to denigrate others, but then demanding regulation of others’ freedom of speech.
There’s logic in the contradiction, i.e. need to develop and maintain ageing ‘conservative Christian’ cohorts to vote then give power to the GOP, it can then pass unpalatable libertarian &/or ‘segregation’ economics.
Related to the latter, the ‘anti-woke’ with other issues, are entryism or ‘Trojan horses’ being used to disrupt education curricula, learning, science and empowered citizens….
Libertarians…this bears repeating….Kim Stanley Robinson addresses such succinctly.
“Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you have to argue point by point.
Especially since the minimalists want to keep the economic and police system that keeps them privileged.
That’s libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
No! If you want to make the minimum-state case, you have to argue it from the ground up.”
Chapter: What is to be Done
Green Mars
Book 2 of Mars Trilogy : Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam Books, New York, NY: 1994.
ISBN: 0553096400
LC: PS3568.O2893 G7 1994
It’s quite wishy washy or unclear what they actually stand for, vs. what they are against, and modern manifestations of libertarian can be even worse.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money) described the Koch’s preferred ‘radical right libertarian socioeconomics’, as being influenced by their muse Buchanan of both the Chicago School and ‘segregation economics’; deep south eugenics masquerading as socioeconomic theory.
Further, Buchanan also developed ‘public choice theory’ i.e. ‘Public choice theory assumes that people are mainly guided by self-interest, including politicians, bureaucrats, and government officials. Public choice theory focuses on democratic decision-making process within the political realm.’
Translation? Corruption of politicians, bureaucrats, and government officials who can be bought and manipulated through their own self interest to implement anti-social policies.
Thanks, for the Buchanan reminder.
A man who visited Chile under the Pinochet Junta, advising Pinochet himself concerning “economic and political” matters!
That’s correct, according to Mayer, Buchanan and his ideological views had to be masked by more moderate Friedman, Rand, Hayek et al.; may explain why the Libs and a former IPA grad Senator have been deflecting by misinterpreting and extolling the virtues of Adam Smith (was more centrist).
Who would have thought a country founded by Puritans could act in such a way? It’s the hypocrisy that slays me though.
Puritans believed that the state was obligated to protect society from heresy, and it was empowered to use corporal punishment, banishment, and execution. New England magistrates did not investigate private views, but they did take action against public dissent from the religious establishment.
To them there was no separation of Church and State, does that not sound similar to some ravings out of the GOP now in the USA?
Such sentiments were expressed Nathaniel Ward in The Simple Cobbler of Agawam: “all Familists, Antinominians, Anabaptists and Enthusiasts shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come [shall have liberty] to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better.”
That period of Puritan rule, 1658–1692 saw the execution of Quakers in Boston as well as imprisonment of Baptists. Quakers being initially banished by colonial courts, but they often returned in defiance of authorities.
I can’t think of a more certain way to get American kids reading again.
Ray Bradbury would be having a grim laugh if he was still alive.
‘Fahrenheit 451’ – the temperature at which common sense is consumed by stupidity and ignorance I presume..
Thank heavens for E books – kids are smarter than most ‘adults’ and will track down banned books .
My last 15 years or so was working Document Supply/ILL at an academic library.
e books are okay for fiction and what might be called light reading.
Also if a book with a lot of technical material that can be searched by topic.
However unless platforms have improved a great deal I found that no ebook platform could beat a hardcopy of a book and the finger.
For in a book with both a large number of topics listed and a correspondingly large index it was faster have a hard copy than an e book. if it was necessary to go back and forth in bost topics and index.
Farenheit 451 was amazing, even down to predicting that people would live with a shell in their ear (social media – tied to your mobile phone).