Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is making it clear his state has no plans to include critical race theory in its curriculum.
“Florida civics curriculum will incorporate foundational concepts with the best materials, and it will expressly exclude unsanctioned narratives like critical race theory and other unsubstantiated theories,” DeSantis said during a press conference Wednesday.
He continued, “Let me be clear there is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money. So we will invest in actual, solid true curriculum and we will be a leader in development and implementation of a world-class civics education.”
Watch his comments below:
Gov. @RonDeSantisFL announces Florida's curriculum will "expressly exclude…Critical Race Theory."
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 17, 2021
“There's no room in our classrooms for things like Critical Race Theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.” pic.twitter.com/7y2b40GqDk
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor at UCLA and Columbia universities, defined critical race theory as a “practice.”
She explained, “It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.”
Crenshaw added, “Critical race theory attends not only to law’s transformative role which is often celebrated, but also to its role in establishing the very rights and privileges that legal reform was set to dismantle. Like American history itself, a proper understanding of the ground upon which we stand requires a balanced assessment, not a simplistic commitment to jingoistic accounts of our nation’s past and current dynamics.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in November of 2020 to establish his “Advisory 1776 Commission,” an educational committee designed to “better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776.”
The commission was characterized as a “patriotic education.”
The executive order came after Trump called critical race theory, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and the “crusade against” the history of America “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison.”
The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” the website reads.
