They won’t ban Black history. They’ll just make teachers too afraid to teach it | Opinion

There is only one elementary school classmate whose name I remember almost eight decades later.

His name was Arthur.

He was Black. He and the only other Black child, a girl, sat together at the back of our third-grade classroom in Spring Valley, New York.

He dressed very neatly and almost never spoke up, but he was constantly being picked on by the others.

There came a day that I did too.

Martin Dyckman, a retired reporter and editorial writer for the Tampa Bay Times, writes editorials for the Sun Sentinel.

Something was missing and I called out, “Maybe Arthur took it.” There was no reason to say that except that Arthur seemed to get blamed for everything.

I did not know why. Now, it’s obvious.

I will take to my grave the guilty memory of the fear and hurt on his face.

I managed to stow it in the back of my mind, not thinking about it for the next dozen years or so, while I grew to flatter myself that I was free of prejudices.

What made me recall the incident was a provocative assignment from a remarkable sociology professor at Florida State University, Lewis M. Killian.

He taught a popular course on race relations. The classroom debates were, shall we say, lively. Florida was still fighting desegregation. It would be another six years before FSU enrolled any Black students.

Then it was time to write a term paper.

Killian assigned the subject. We were to describe in confidence everything we had ever felt about Blacks. All the way back.

Killian assured us that nobody but him would read those papers. He never discussed them in class.

The exercise had been, as he intended, a powerful teaching moment. At least it was for me.

It exposed the insidious influence of latent prejudice even on people who think they’re above it.

No one in my family had ever bad-mouthed Black people.

I can’t remember any of those other children doing it overtly.

And yet their latent and not-so-latent biases came out in their treatment of Arthur.

And, consequently, in mine.

I first wrote about that in 1992, in the context of a school desegregation issue.

I am writing it a second time because of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

If DeSantis’s self-styled Stop-WOKE Act had been in force then, I probably could have sued Lew Killian for making me feel badly about myself, and he would have been fired.

More likely, he would not have taught the course at all, and he would have left Florida as soon as the Legislature passed the bill.

It would have been as impossible then as it is now to teach American history, civics or race relations without mentioning the three-century history of anti-Black racism in America, how it took root as an excuse for slavery, and how it continues to affect how Americans treat each other today.

The DeSantis law is a baited trap for anyone who would try to teach any of that honestly.

Consider what the law says teachers must avoid. It applies even to the sensitivity training programs at private businesses.

No one must be made to feel that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions in which the person played no part committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.”

That draws a blurry line easily crossed, as U.S. District Judge Mark Walker recognized in his 138-page order banning its enforcement on college campuses — an order the DeSantis administration is appealing. Walker called that part of the law “positively dystopian.”

DeSantis’ alternative history and censorship are prevailing in public schools. A book about the baseball hero Roberto Clemente, who died in a plane crash on a humanitarian mission, was off Duval County’s shelves for a year because it mentioned, altogether truthfully, that he had experienced racism.

As a privileged white person, and as a patriot, I damn well should feel responsible, guilty and anguished for not having done enough to make the laws truly colorblind or to make race prejudice as taboo as profanity in a house of worship.

Killian was born and raised in Georgia with an accent to show for it. He was faculty adviser to the Kappa Alpha fraternity chapter at FSU, which I made fun of in a student newspaper column for the ways it celebrated the Confederacy. When a student in his class said that I had no right to write such things, Killian rebuked him sharply.

“Don’t you ever say in my class that someone doesn’t have a right to write something,” Killian responded.

How far backward have we marched since then?

Martin Dyckman, a retired reporter and editorial writer for the Tampa Bay Times, writes editorials for the Sun Sentinel.