A few weeks ago Florida schools started temporarily removing books from their libraries so they could check them individually to make sure they complied with a new bill that restricts content for kids. Among the one million titles that have been removed from shelves in Duval County is Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Here is Gov. Ron DeSantis answering a reporter's question about this:
DeSantis on a FL district removing a Roberto Clemente children's book because it talks about racism: "That's politics, though. To be honest with you. C'mon. I mean, we know. Roberto Clemente? I mean, seriously. That's politics. I think the school unions are involved with this." pic.twitter.com/s3zu8DGa8X
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 14, 2023
I wrote a whole post about how obnoxious this was, but then realized that I had misunderstood DeSantis. After listening to the full clip, I think he's saying that a kids book about Roberto Clemente is obviously fine and there's no way that Duval County should take months to figure this out. The manufactured fuss over it is ridiculous, and is probably the work of political actors, including school unions.
Agree or disagree, I think that was DeSantis's meaning—not that a book about Clemente was obviously a political manifesto. And since I would have published the post slamming DeSantis based on my incorrect initial interpretation, it's only fair that I publish a post that shows him in a better light.
Don't worry, I doubt that it will happen often.
POSTSCRIPT: All this said, DeSantis really does need to improve his extemporaneous speaking. It's often very unclear what he's referring to or what he means, and I don't think he'll get the pass on this that Donald Trump often does.
ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: Just in case you're interested, here's the sole reference (aside from a single sentence a little later) to racism in the Clemente book.
I’m not ready to give DeSantis a pass. This is the guy who set up his own police force to arrest potential voting fraudsters, based on limited evidence. So, it isn’t hard to imagine him hammering a middle school librarian for some perceived wokeness.
I agree. Republicans pass vague or broad laws or issue vague or broad executive orders or issue vague or overly broad court decisions. They want the inconsistency of application because it adds to the mistrust of institutions. And they can sit back and say "Oh, well, if people want to be [ridiculous, intolerant, insensitive, unempathetic} it's because they misunderstood me/us."
This sh*t is intentional at worst, bad governance at best, but everybody suffers except the nazis.
Eating your cake and still having it too.
And hasn't used his voting police to arrest any of the white Republicans in The Villages who voted twice.
You don't owe him anything. Ron DeSantis created the regulations that pretty much allow any yahoo in a district to cause a book to be banned until it can be reviewed with a long delay in giving any guidance to compliance. The law is trap for school districts and teachers.
Given the environment around education in Florida, it's easy to see why a district would choose not to re-instate a book.
I am actually offended that you are giving Death Santis a pass on this. He and his GOP henchmen (and henchwomen) wrote and enacted those laws, and the education community are simply scared shitless that they are going to be prosecuted under one of those absurd laws, or sued by the MAGA morons in their school district.
👍👍👍👍👍
Banned in Duval County, Florida, public schools. A children's book about a kitten who shares sushi with her classmates.
h/t Digby
Duval is really southern Georgia in its thinking.
It's very ordinary for honest regulators to maintain uncertainty over what is actually permitted and what is forbidden. (The IRS and SEC are two obvious examples of this.) This has the salutary effect, for underfunded enforcers, of making people nervous about stepping too close to the line. This is what DeSantis is doing here. Is he going to punish anybody for applying this vague law too broadly? Of course not.
John Kenneth Galbraith responding to poor harvest being attributed to adverse weather: "Don't blame the Almighty while Richard Nixon is in the White House." Galbraith would have reacted similarly to Ron DeSantis in the governor's mansion.
Racism was and is a problem in America. DeSantis is the George Wallace of the current age.
Except Wallace eventually saw the error of his ways. I'm not sure DeSantis has that capability.
From Wikipedia: "In the late 1970s, Wallace announced that he became a born-again Christian, and moderated his views on race, renouncing his past support for segregation."
But you didn’t publish the first impression. So why follow up with a second impression that amounts to a wild over correction. Neither is true.
The truth is that DeSantis wants to be POTUS and in order to have a viable path through the nutty side of the two party system, he has to posture as the new alpha male of Dumbfuckistan. So he attack-dogs whatever Dumbfuckistan News decides is the hottest new chew toy…..be it Mickey Mouse, M&M’s, or elementary school books.
If a vague law he requested and then signed into law causes countless taxpayer dollars to be spent sifting through millions of children’s books to find imaginary boogeymen, then he doesn’t get an attaboy for insisting “unions” are just trying to make him look bad because a book that mentions racism got caught up in this ridiculous PR stunt. Indeed, was the Florida law not to meant keep books just like this off the school shelves? I guess only Fox News can say for sure.
Maybe Kevin thinks he’s the College Board? They seem to love going back and forth too between sucking up to bigots and expressing outrage that anyone would think they sucked up to bigots.
I don’t know. A single kid (or more likely their parent) gets offended by something and suddenly the school and the teacher/librarian has to lawyer up to defend themselves against criminal and financial penalties. Facing that kind of law, I’d pull everything off the shelves too, and wait until an authoritative third party (that I can point to in my court hearing) says that particular book is ok.
It’s the same thing happening with women’s healthcare now. Don’t touch anything in the abdomen until (1) you’re sure there isn’t a fetus in there and (2) if there is a fetus, stop everything and seek legal advice before proceeding. Nobody is going to just risk jail time and tens of thousands in legal fees, even if they’re 99.99% sure whatever they’re doing won’t result in a lawsuit or arrest.
That Kevin cannot see this just speaks to how sheltered and privileged he is in California. I mean literally just a few months ago, 19 people were arrested and had their lives upended because they voted as ex felons… after *government election officials* said they could vote.
This is like the third or fourth time KD has decided to get duped by RDS, weird behavior pattern.
It’s because people can’t really accept most Republicans actually are evil and/or mentally-sick fcks. Like when focus groups are shown actual Republican policies or talking points, and they just disbelieve any human being could’ve said/written that. Apparently, Kevin - despite writing about this phenomenon - is susceptible to it too. (I suspect it’s because Kevin still has Republicans in his life. I cut most out the minute they exhibit evil or mentally-sick views.)
Why do so many bend into pretzels to give bad-faith politicians the benefit of the doubt when everyone knows exactly what they mean? Call racism racism and racists racists!
Yeah, DeSantis created this morass and doesn't get any credit when he has to chastise people for making him have to defend it. Hey Ron, you know how you could avoid this kind of thing? Don't pass dumbass laws like this.
He thinks the school unions are trying to make him look bad? Nature beat them to the punch.
From what I can tell, the process works this way: having a book that violates the law will get you in huge trouble, so teachers/librarians/administrators are taking anything and everything off the shelves as a precautionary measure. To be deemed acceptable, a person trained in the new law has to evaluate the book and determine that it is acceptable according to the new standards.
The end result of all this is that many, many acceptable books are going to be permanently removed from the shelves because it is simply too onerous to evaluate them all. The Roberto Clemente book is a prime example of this in practice: the book was published over a decade ago, so it will be low on the priority list for evaluation.
Thus is not unprecedented. About a decade ago the ERIC database realized that some of its ERIC documents (items hosted by the database, but not formally published by a known publisher) might have personal information about study participants in them. So ERIC took every single document down overnight and spent ages upon ages evaluating them before reposting them. They did this even though many of the documents were available freely from other websites.
ERIC had the capability to eventually evaluate everything. Small Florida school districts will not, and many, many books will therefore disappear off the shelves forever.
Exactly so. Given a prohibition law of large and vaguely-defined extent, and harsh penalties for not following it, the only safe course is to take out everything and then evaluate them one by one. If you let them sit on the shelf while you were doing this, something toxic might continue to sit there for quite a while until you got to it, and then you'd get slammed for that.
The fault lies with those who made the law this way, so that extreme oversensitive caution is the only safe way to respond.
"The mainly white newsmen" is going to offend someone and be cited as a reason why they now feel bad about being white so they need tens of millions in emotional damages and their teacher thrown in jail to rectify the situation.
No, thanks. Wouldn't recommend anyone go into teaching in Florida right now, and wouldn't recommend anyone already teaching there to take any chances with reading material. Any mention whatsoever of race, better toss the book out, cause any mention of race offends a small-but-extremely-loud contingent of "I don't see color or race" self-righteous bad-faith argumentative assholes in our society.
My wife is a teacher in Florida and we have several friends that are also teachers. We also have two school-aged kids. There has been zero activity or discussion in their schools (all in the same district) regarding books. Teacher's still have their own personal libraries in their rooms, kids bring their own books from home for independent reading time, no instructions from the superintendent or principals to limit or eliminate any books or access to books.
There's lots of reasons to question starting a career in teaching (especially in Florida) but this current issue with book doesn't factor in. At least not in our part of the state. I was talking to my wife about it and many of her co-workers didn't even know there was a new law. It's just a non-issue.
"All this said, DeSantis really does need to improve his extemporaneous speaking."
This is what people who think DeSantis is a shoo-in to be the Republican nominee and President don't get about him but that anyone in Florida already knows. He has the personality of a limp dishrag and is a terrible speaker and an even worse debater. He barely won in 2018 against a virtual unknown candidate and yeah he won last year but against Charlie Crist who was a terrible candidate, and also FL has just become more right wing over the past 10 years.
Trump will eat DeSantis for lunch, and frankly, so would Biden.
He's like the Nazi Dukakis.
Ron DeSanity is trying to blame Democrats for taking down this book to make him look bad.
Maybe it's reviewing over a million titles to make sure they don't offend Nazis is what makes him look bad?
+1
This post will not age well. Already missing the point of why they left the law perfectly vague so this can happen. "Oh, it's not my fault, it's the unions."
Meanwhile the people they've riled up will be looking through every book in the library for any mention of something they can call indoctrinating, woke or white racism and filing complaints. Who will DeSantis back up then? After all, parents must have complete control over their kids education.
And he also casually mentioned dropping the state out of all AP programs today. This stuff isn't rhetoric anymore.
Woman attacks her own lawyer after judge delays her dismemberment trial,
https://www.rawstory.com/wisconsin-woman-her-own-lawyer-after-judge-delays-her-dismemberment-trial/
How dare teachers' unions engage in publicity stunts to make political points! Don't they know only Republicans are allowed to do that?
"After listening to the full clip, I think he's saying that a kids book about Roberto Clemente is obviously fine and there's no way that Duval County should take months to figure this out."
That's exactly how I took it when I read the quote, and frankly I despise the man.
However, I will say that whatever he thinks, that awful law he pushed through really is that stupidly broad, and he should own that he personally wants an ideological veto over what kids are allowed to earn.
He's fine with Roberto Clemente not because it doesn't run a foul of the text of his law, but because *that's* not what he meant when he said no books about race, gender, or sexuality. He's a crummy little dictator.
He never said " no books about race, gender, or sexuality". And, more importantly, that is not what the law states.
You really like defending the despicable don't you? Wonder why.
1) We have different definitions on despicable
2) There's plenty about DeSantis I don't like and have expressed my disagreement with him on numerous occasions
3) I was pointing out to a different commenter that they completely mischaracterized the STOP WOKE law. What is wrong with that? The fact that I corrected another commenter regarding what the law actually does is reason for you to criticize me?
Stop Woke is code because they can't call it the Pro Racism, Bigotry, Sexism, and Homophobe Act.
Ok. So does that mean anything anyone wants to say about what the law does is ok and accepted as the truth? Or is there merit in pointing out what the law in fact does and does not stipulate?