A DeSantis Speech Too Dangerous to Teach in Florida

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does not often find himself attempting to deliver a unifying message, but in the aftermath of the killing of three Black Floridians by an alleged white supremacist in Jacksonville last week, he tried.

“What he did is totally unacceptable in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said during a speech at a vigil for the three victims, A.J. Laguerre, Angela Michelle Carr, and Jerrald Gallion, last Sunday. “We are not going to let people be targeted based on their race.”

That’s a welcome message, but it didn’t go over well. The Associated Press reported that DeSantis “was loudly booed” as he addressed the vigil. Among the potential reasons is that DeSantis has spent much of his time in office cracking down on “wokeness,” to the delight of his conservative fans. The state has passed laws censoring classroom instruction that might lead students to conclude that racial discrimination, against Black Americans in particular, persists into the present, even as it engages in such discrimination in broad daylight.

One of those laws is the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits any instruction that, as the Miami Herald reported, “could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, ethnicity, sex or national origin.” In fact, one could argue that Florida law now prohibits DeSantis’s speech itself from being discussed in Florida schools.

Jacksonville Sheriff T. K. Waters was clear that the shooter was a “madman” who “hated Blacks, and I think he hated just about everyone that wasn’t white.” The gunman was also the latest white supremacist to leave behind a manifesto, which the police have not released.

If Florida teachers allowed their students to read DeSantis’s speech, they might ask about the motive for the attack. A teacher who explained that the shooter was motivated by white-supremacist hatred would risk making a white student feel discomfort, “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress,” as the law itself puts it. If the teacher tried to put the speech in context, and attempted to explain the ideological tenets, origins, and history of white supremacy in the United States, they would increase that risk. A teacher could not explain why someone would, as DeSantis put it, target people “based on their race,” because it would lead to answers about the history of Florida and America that the governor and other Republicans would prefer students not learn, lest they have nonconservative thoughts.

The teacher could not mention that Florida had one of the highest rates of lynching per capita during the Jim Crow era, more than 300 such killings from 1877 to 1950. They could not discuss that the purpose of such killings was to terrorize Black Floridians into accepting segregation and subjugation. They would be unable to mention Harry T. Moore, Willie James Howard, or the Newberry Six. Under the law, teachers who did so could end up in conversations that would put them at risk of losing their teaching certificate. After all, discussing such subjects might hurt someone’s feelings. In short, the safest thing would be not to discuss the speech at all.

That a Florida governor might have made it illegal for an educator to explain the context of his own speech may sound ridiculous, but these are legal considerations that educators have to take into account when laws ban certain ideas from being discussed. Such prohibitions have a chilling effect, and most institutions are risk-averse when it comes to litigation. Indeed, that is the idea behind these gag measures, to chill left-wing or “woke” speech about topics such as racial discrimination, gender, and sexual orientation. There’s no explicit exception for “when the governor wants to try to be magnanimous in the aftermath of a racist massacre” in the text of the law.

If this still seems improbable, the Herald has already documented similarly absurd exchanges over the state’s curriculum. The report illustrates how state officials objected to the idea that enslaved people “had no wages to pass down to descendants, no legal right to accumulate property, and individual exceptions depended on their enslavers’ whims,” because it might be “promoting the critical race theory idea of reparations.” Primary source documents from Black antislavery activists were described as including “content prohibited under Florida law.” They worried that a unit on the abolitionist movement was not “factually inclusive or balanced”; a “nonwoke” curriculum, I suppose, places antislavery and proslavery principles on the same moral plane. Officials also complained that material explaining that the growth of the Black middle class was hampered by mid-century discrimination ran afoul of state rules, because “it failed to offer other reasons outside of systemic racism and discrimination for the wealth disparity between Black Americans and other racial groups.”

These education gag laws are intended to render the American past illegible, because of the risk that someone might reach the conclusion that racial discrimination continues to be a problem in the present that Americans are obliged to confront. They make education impossible by censoring the historical record in favor of the political conclusions their authors want students to draw. They make it illegal to teach facts if conservatives find those facts offensive.

It is a small irony that these laws also arguably bar teachers from talking about a speech in which DeSantis was trying to condemn racial discrimination rather than hide it behind a veil of superficial patriotism. For those who argue that the law was not intended to do this, well, an entire academic discipline explores how laws written one way can be enforced in another. I won’t bring it up here, though, because it’s illegal to teach in the “free state” of Florida.