DeSantis’ attack on CRT makes even less sense than usual
When I first heard about the Stop WOKV Act, I was peeved, perturbed, and positively punch-drunk from the alarming implications of this legislation. Talk radio has been an essential part of American culture since the early post-war era, and WOKV has carried the torch for this genre for decades. It’s doubly curious that DeSantis would move against a radio outlet that is virtually synonymous with the coo-coo conservative right that he rightly (or wrongly) relies on to reign. None of this makes any sense, but that’s nothing new.
Wait, what? What’s that, you say? Ohhhhhh, oh, OK, whoops, my bad…
It’s not “Stop WOKV”. I was just being funny, early on, while I can, because there’s really nothing funny about the governor’s current infatuation with inveighing against Critical Race Theory. It appears to be part of his long-term gimmick of making non-issues into issues, and using the resulting drama to boost his Q rating in sympathetic media outlets–like Newsmax, Fox News and the Daily Caller, all of which have allotted outsized oxygen stores to help the governor flame on, before he flames out in 2022.
Actually, the strategy is working just fine, and he’s looking fairly solid for reelection next year. He has a strong, but weird, array of challengers on the Democratic side, but no one really lined up for a primary challenge in August. So, he will probably cruise into November with a cushion of dark money, ready to face a Democratic nominee that will hopefully not be already compromised by internal party conflict (always a possibility with them folk).
In this bold foray into what often looks like performance art, DeSantis has had no shortage of material to “work” with. First, there was the global pandemic, which he effectively monetized by minimizing efforts to fight it, which cost many innocent Floridians their lives, but also did wonders for the state’s economy. The population grew, and now we have hundreds of thousands of new residents who think that all of this is normal. Sadly, they are right. He followed up by signing legislation banning trans girls from amateur athletics in this state; the courts will be weighing in on the legality of that next year. And now this CRT kerfuffle.
Critical Race Theory, in essence, is a catch-all term for the effort to systematize teaching of the Black Experience in America. This has been an ongoing process for generations–a people robbed of their self-identity have crafted their own, a process that played out throughout the 20th century. Presently, a huge proportion of the cultural and intellectual product in this country, and around the world, is derived from the results of that particular process; we see this most strongly in music and sports, but also in aspects of film, theater, literature, painting, business, the military and politics. Of course, there is also academia.
CRT, in a sense, represents an intersection of all these things, and it is one of the most wholesome and harmless things to come along in quite some time. It’s weird that conservatives are so uncomfortable being depicted as villains in the media, when they blatantly pursue such characterization with seemingly every word and deed. For example, DeSantis and his allies have taken something that is firmly patriotic–the effort to help Black students better understand a whole bunch of crazy shit that, in many cases, they are just hearing about for the first time–and going after it in ways that Stalin and Mao might appreciate.
The “Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act”, aka the “Stop WOKE Act” is so incredibly weird and silly that I still don’t really believe it’s real, even though I’m already 600 words into writing about it. I’ve almost had my fill, but let me just ask how, exactly, one expects to scrub the curriculum of documented history? How will students in Florida, and America in general, compete effectively in the global economy when they are operating on an incomplete, and often wholly false, grasp of the world’s collective knowledge?
I have no idea, but perhaps we’ll find out.
