On Thursday, the Florida Board of Education approved Gov. Ron DeSantis’ rule to effectively ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools.

As Fox News reported, the rule states the following: “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

This is a great move.

If the goal is to prevent children from being indoctrinated with racist ideology, Florida and the other dozen or so states to ban or consider banning critical race theory from their public schools are ahead of the curve.

Naturally, leftists are unhappy.

Ben Frazier, president of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, accused DeSantis of wanting to lie about American history: “It’s an effort to white-wash, cover-up and candy coat history. Allow teachers to speak the truth.”

In a statement, Florida Education Association president Andrew Spar accused the rule of not “giving [students] a true picture of their world and our shared history as Americans,” adding, “Hiding facts doesn’t change them.”

This sort of stuff is complete nonsense.

Critical race theory is not a truthful, though painful, recounting of American history. Nobody believes that we should lie to children about history in the classroom. They should absolutely learn about the evils of slavery and the horrors of Jim Crow.

But that is not what critical race theory is.

The aim of this ideology is to treat the evils of American history as though they were the norm. In other words, to whitewash the good of our past.

It also pushes the 1619 Project lie that the United States was founded by white supremacists to uphold slavery and protect their racist interests.

Anybody who was taught actual American history before this nonsense became mainstream knows that this is not true. And anybody who knows anything about the civil rights movement knows that Martin Luther King, Jr. did not believe this garbage either.

The idea from King and his supporters was that America was founded on the eternally good principle that all men were created equal and deserving of equal rights and protection under the law. He argued not that America was an irredeemably racist country that needed to be torn down but that we simply needed to fulfill the promise made in the Declaration of Independence.

The civil rights activists didn’t burn property and assault law enforcement officers like Black Lives Matter. They didn’t argue that American institutions needed to be razed but simply redeemed. And they never suggested that white Americans were inherently evil but instead encouraged them to act morally in fulfillment of the nation’s great founding philosophy.

Perhaps most importantly, they fought tooth and nail to defeat the idea that character judgements could be made about people based on their skin color – and they were not after retribution for past wrongs but genuine equality of opportunity.

Critical race theory rejects the tenets of the civil rights movement and aims not at equality but at a reversal of power – for the supposedly oppressed to get to become the oppressors.

Suffice it to say that public schools should not be teaching that whites are inherently evil and non-whites inherently victimized based on skin color. They should not be pushing the lie that freedom of speech and equality of opportunity are tools used by white supremacists to maintain their oppression. And they should never teach that our shared values and symbols – like the American flag – stand for oppression and white supremacy rather than freedom and hope.

The critical race theorists should not be permitted to indoctrinate children while the American taxpayer subsidizes it. And their nasty ideology can and should be relegated to the ash heap of history, which is exactly where sinister dogmas of division and outright hatred belong.

Kevin Catapano graduated from the University of Connecticut in May 2021 with a B.A. in political science. While studying, he wrote a weekly column for the student newspaper and served as a staff writer for the UConn Undergraduate Political Review. He is currently a contributor to The Western Journal.

(Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Heroes Media Group