By Rich
Lowry
Sunday,
January 29, 2023
It’s a
struggle to remain shocked by things that are outrageous but inevitable and
routine in our political culture — yet it’s still worth the effort.
Falling
firmly in that category are the reflexive smears against Florida governor Ron
DeSantis as a “white supremacist” for the offense of rejecting a pilot AP
course in African-American studies as originally written.
Everyone
on the right knows that these kinds of attacks are the price of doing business,
and DeSantis must have realized that they’d be lodged against him early and
often. This doesn’t make them any less poisonous or deranged, though.
If it is
taken remotely seriously, the charge against DeSantis in the curriculum
controversy is a libel, an attack not just on his political beliefs and
priorities but his character and his status as a Christian believer.
The
civility cops who purport to police our discourse should be whistling down this
calumny as clearly out of bounds and worse than, say, any of the attack ads
aired against Nancy Pelosi. Instead, it is tolerated by polite society as part
of the debate and, worse, accepted as having some force and legitimacy.
According
to the National Urban League, “Gov. DeSantis
Has Charted A Course To The White House That Cuts Straight Through The Swamp Of
White Supremacy.”
Given
the governor’s support for the Everglades, it might have been more apt to say
that his path cuts through “the subtropical wilderness” of white supremacy, but
the wordsmiths at the Urban League can be forgiven for not carefully thinking
through their rote defamation of conservative politicians and policies.
A column
in the Boston Globe maintained, “Florida
Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to ban an African American studies course from
Florida schools carries the stench of white slaveowners who fought to keep
those they enslaved from learning to read and write English.”
Yes,
it’s all but impossible to tell the difference between DeSantis, the governor
of a state with high-quality public schools and extensive measures to allow the
parents of poor children to choose their school, and, say, Hugh Auld.
“Crucial
to sustaining white supremacy,” the column continued, “is the erasure not only
of Black trauma inflicted by systemic and institutional racism but Black
accomplishment, triumph, and contributions.”
As with
so much of this sort of commentary, there is no effort to show how Florida is
erasing black trauma or black accomplishment, besides rejecting a version of a
pilot course that isn’t yet permanently part of the curriculum anywhere in the
United States.
No
worries — DeSantis is still deemed “white
supremacy’s helicopter parent.”
Jennifer
Rubin, not to be outdone by anyone hurling tendentious charges born of
motivated reasoning and partisan malice, wrote that DeSantis has now “gone
full-blown white supremacist.”
This is
a smear-within-a-smear because nestled within it is the idea that DeSantis
already must have been “partially” white supremacist before embracing his inner
Lester Maddox by demanding revisions to an AP course.
It is
also among the DeSantis administration’s “most
explicitly racist actions.”
The use
of “white supremacy” in this context stretches the already-flexible term
to a new level of meaninglessness.
If it
can refer both to the Dred Scott decision and Florida’s
decision to reject an AP course as currently written, refer both to the idea
that blacks have no rights that the white man is bound to respect and the
idea that maybe a curriculum covering Black Queer Studies doesn’t belong in a
public high school — well, then, it might as well refer to nothing.
The
phrase long ago became woke jabberwocky.
If there
were any doubt about that, the instant attempt to blame the brutal treatment of
Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black cops on “white supremacy” should remove
it.
The
argument here, if you can call it that, is not particularly intuitive.
In fact,
we need the politicized African-American studies course to explain how this
works:
Of
course, the strict meaning of the phrase has never been the point; it is the
use that can be made of it as a tool of political and social intimidation and
manipulation.
That this is an ingrained part of our political debate doesn’t make it any less disgraceful.
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