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đŸ§” Is FL Gov. Ron DeSantis guilty of “mounting a ‘full-blown white supremacist’ attack on ‘fact-based history,’ as WaPo’s @JRubinBlogger claims? Not so fast.

@rickhess99 takes a close look for @thedispatch.
thedispatch.com/article/debunking-the-true-history-canard/
Who is the educator and who is the activist here?

Take AP African American studies, where critics raised concerns about units like "Intersectionality and Activism", "Black Queer Studies", and "Post-Racial Racism and Colorblindness"

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When College Board issued a revised course framework in early February, it pared back these units and introduced more substantive history through topics like "Demographic and Religious Diversity in the Black Community."

How were these changes received?

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Should educators really be taking direction from social justice activists who push dubious history and refuse to correct their mistakes? Take Ibram X. Kendi, for example:

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In his September 2020 story for The Atlantic, he wrote, “The motto of the United States is E pluribus unum—‘Out of many, one.’ The ‘one’ is the president.”

This staggeringly influential historian managed to get two historical facts wrong in the space of 19 words:

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Or take the distorted history of the 1619 Project from @nytimes, which initially explained that its aim was to displace the “mythology” of 1776 “to reframe the country’s history” and posit the 1619 arrival of slave ships “as our true founding.”

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The 1619 Project claimed the American colonies revolted “in order to ensure slavery would continue.”

As 5 eminent historians wrote to the Times, “If supportable, the allegation would be astounding—yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”

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The project also attributed modern accounting practices to antebellum slavery—although such practices actually date back to Italian banking of the late Middle Ages.

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No history can include everything. That’s a given. But those who claim to embrace “true history” are quite selective, and we can learn a great deal by what they choose to omit.

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Despite what leading progressive ideological warriors would have us believe, there’s actually more agreement than disagreement about what should be taught.

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According to @Moreincommon_, 90% of Republicans say that Americans have a responsibility to learn from the mistakes of our past and more than 70% think schools should teach the specific history of black, Hispanic, and Native Americans alongside our shared national history.

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>90% of Democrats say that all students should learn how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution advanced freedom and equality, and >80% that students should not be made to feel guilty or personally responsible for the errors of prior generations.

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To read the entire analysis from @rickhess99, click here:
thedispatch.com/article/debunking-the-true-history-canard/
And if you enjoyed this reporting, go ahead and sign up for a free membership trial of The Dispatch:
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