I’m sorry, this isn’t going to be gentle, but I’ve had it. On Tonight with Alex Wagner, she just went through the genesis of a very famous event of the civil rights era, Rosa Parks heroic refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a bus.

The original textbook, used in Florida for years, and a standard text in US public schools, gave an accurate capsulized description of the event, Parks was arrested and charged for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on an Alabama bus.

After that was found to be just a wee too straightforward and honest for the oh so ever delicate fee-fees of delicate snowflake white redneck kids in Florida, the language was softened in the next edition, minimizing the racial aspect, and not mentioning Parks arrest.

But after Pissantis’ Shit Ribbon Panel still found this too provocative for dissemination to anyone who wasn’t lily white, the notation was rewritten with no mention of race at all. Mission accomplished! In Florida textbooks, Rosa Parks heroic stand has become nothing more than an everyday pissing contest over a bus seat!

And it isn’t just Pissantis and Florida who are pulling this shit. Greg Abbott in Texas already has a statewide campaign underway that would erase k-12 schoolbooks of any history of racial injustice in this country that paints white people as being any part of the problem. And it’s being mirrored all over deep red states.

Enough of this bullshit! After all, history isn’t history if it doesn’t have some factual basis for the events that it is describing. And red states, the GOP, and the racist MAGA base is on a mission to erase any portion of American history what would make children even possibly feel that their ancestors were assholes. And it would be one thing if all it were was an attempt to coddle white kids from their past. But the GOP is going a step further, and trying do deny black children of their tragic heritage.

Fortunately, there is a way to stop this, right in its tracks. Every poll shows that the 10 poorest states, the ones that take more federal money out than they put in, are all GOP states, mostly in the south. Blue states like California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts are all making survival in poor, mostly white, mostly southern states possible.

And that’s where the solution lies. The federal government controls the purse strings that keep the poor white southern states afloat. And that includes the United States Department of Education. 

The federal government has all kinds of departments and agencies that create national standards. For instance, it is federal law that requires that anybody driving a car have insurance on that vehicle. The Environmental Protection Agency puts out national mandates concerning air and water safety levels, along with corporate pollution levels. The list goes on and on.

And this is where the government can drop the hammer and put this bullshit to a stop most riki-tik. The Department of Education can simply  come out with a mandate that any state receiving federal education funds use use nationally recognized standard textbooks for K-12 education.

Because these fuckers aren’t doing that. What they’re doing is using racist couture textbooks that preach a white ideology that are used in private schools that are not subject to some Education Department regulations.

Don’t let them get away with it. Does anybody with 12 functioning brain cells think that states like Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma, or Arkansas could even keep a k-12 education system running in their states without that federal funding? I don’t think so.

The road to totalitarianism begins when the government begins to rewrite history to their own choosing. The salvation here is that these seditionist GOP states aren’t the government. And the current government has the opportunity to tale steps to ensure that the far right ideology the GOP is trying to push can’t get a toehold. We know the warning signs. And we know the solution. It’s time to put the brakes on turning history into a revisionist version of this country’s heritage.

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19 COMMENTS

  1. Agree totally Joe! Funny thing about bloodstained history…only the perpetrators believe they can erase it. I’ve been married to a black woman. I have a black adopted daughter, and have become the surrogate father for six years of a seven year old black girl. I’ve lived with a black woman from Alabama for 16 years and been part of her family. I have three young black women who are essentially my stepdaughters. All of this doesn’t make me an expert, but the black folks I know aren’t ever going to accept this horseshit. Never ever.

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    • Thank you Scott!!! I now happily have another hero in my life, and will keep on fighting the goiod fight…Thanks so much for sharing!!!

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    • Samuel I commend you. You represent American people and values. Murfs wife Teri. Thanks. best hugs to all your family.

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    • We need people like you, Scott, and your family to stand firm in your shared experience and knowledge to make people like Ron DeSantis disappear from the legislative landscape. We can’t keep giving these racist idiots the keys to the car and believe they won’t drive it right off a cliff, with all of their MAGAt followers on board, to get what they want. History is HISTORY. It needs to be shared responsibly and not rewritten to serve their racist ideology.

  2. I agree totally, thanks for saying it. Whatever needs to be done to curb this trend of homogenizing history in order to make it more palatable for racists in America needs to be done, asap! I kind of think this is all designed to ultimately result in confrontation of some kind whether in be in the courts, or on the streets. I’m no legal scholar but one might think a legal challenge to what we’re seeing in Florida, going all the way to the SCOTUS, would put someone like Desanctimonious in his place. But as we know, there’s no guarantee this court would actually uphold the law.

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  3. Thanks Teresa & Joe. Although I’m from rural NC, Mt Airy,(mayberry), my family of small farms/textile/odd jobs working class folks
    taught me three things: no one is better than you, you are no better than anyone else, and always tell the truth. My grandma’s best friend was black. After all these years, I often forget about the whole race thing. When you love people for who they are and they love you back, the entire thing just seems silly. I still cry everytime I see pictures of black children in slavery imagining the horror they experienced. The reason we need to know and experience what actually happened isn’t to condemn the white folks today, it’s to stir compassion for those in the past, and also for those still suffering from this kind of human ignorance and, in some cases, human evil. Maybe one day we’ll live up to Dr. King’s dream. All of our children would be better off when we do.

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    • I love it! Those are the exact words my parents said to us – “you are no better and no worse than anyone else”. i was raised up the road from you out in the country outside Greensboro.

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  4. Trina
    March 17, 2023 At 8:09 am

    Had friends of many races and cultures. Not being raised in an environment of hatred, find racism & prejudice to be unnecessary and taught from fear and generational beliefs. Break the cycle. #TeachTrueHistory
    We lived it. Gen Z can/ should read about it.
    #RosaParksRefusedToGiveUpSeatOnBus. It was a
    HUGE, exciting piece of History.

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  5. History is perhaps the only subject that if you major it in college, you will have to unlearn everything you knew about it. One of the great fires of the 1960’s was a revision of the American History that people believed to be true, such as Columbus was a great hero. The fuel was started by the GI Bill after WW2 when veterans went to college and created a large pool of skeptical scholars.

    Unfortunately, the GOP’s War on Education has many victories. Not too many people can afford to go to college anymore to “learn to think”. When it’s $80,000+ for tuition for a 4 year history degree with few prospects to gain work that might pay a bit above chump change vs a degree in accounting with lots of opportunities to count rich people’s money and get on the ground floor of tax fraud to make big money, the search for the truth loses. It’s learn to be a modest compliant cog in the big machine. THEIR MACHINE, not yours.

    The kids growing up in the “new” education system won’t question the lies they learned by rote. Or at least until the next revolution.

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  6. Those red states you mention, Murf, actually want to destroy public education, so cuts in federal funding would only serve their agenda. Parents would be forced to home-school their kids, or send them to “state-approved” private schools that teach junk science, sanitized history, and “America First” nationalism. What better way to introduce fascism to young minds?

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    • I agree. Cutting education funding would play into their plan since we’ve seen how little education means to these jerks, so I don’t think it would hurt them much, but I’d go further. Make it hurt. Cut ALL federal funding to these fascist states. See how long they can exist without tapping the rest of us to maintain their ugly, ignorant, racist, misogynist crap. There’s no reason we should be funding this minority who wants to take us back to the dark ages. It’s these same (pro-life???) cretins who are calling for the murder of women who have abortions. When are we going to return to burning these harlots and witches at the stake? When do we return to thinking lynchings are a social occasion? These people have a lot of hate and fear and they are destroying our country. We can’t let them. I’m alarmed at how much damage Desatan is getting away with, and more alarmed that I don’t hear much outrage or protest from Floridians or Americans in general. Book banning for God’s sake??? What century IS this?

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  7. Too Old. I went to HS at East Forsyth. Greensboro, home of the AT&T student sit in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960 that sparked sit ins across the south. One of the students was John McCain. His son Wendell, along with 2 others, formed one of the only black owned private equity firms based in chapel hill. My ex was involved in assisting them. I met John. One of my oldest friends, whom I worked with at Duke, also went to Carolina in the late 60s/early seventies. We still get together. His grandmother, a white lady from Greensboro, was a founding member of the NAACP. There’s a photo of her hugging John McCain in the midst of the protest while surrounded by a mob of angry white folks. It’s weird how things get connected in this life.

  8. This is the real deal. Can it happen? How can we spread the word about this? Biden has been pretty gutsy so far, but would he really up his game and take a truly radical, effective step like this? I dare to hope!

    I’m fed up with feeling helpless and exploited by the reich wing loonies. Bullies don’t respect those of us with a desire for a better world.

    May I quote you?

  9. Gotta wonder if they will also censor the way white non-WASP immigrants weren’t treated. I am Irish-American,and the only family member in the U.S. was a blacksmith with the Union Army. Any immigrant who wasn’t Protest an and English-speaking got the shitty end of the stick. We lived in ghettos, could get jobs, saw signs that read “No Irish Need Apply.”The Italians,Poles,,Germans,,Scandinavian s were all.relegated to second class citizenship. America has never been kind to.immigrants who weren’t ” our kind.

    And that is even before you look.at the treatment of Jewish immigrants (I have some of those in my family tree too.).

    I guess once you start hiding the terrible truth of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation, it becomes much easier to.ignore how ordinary immigrants and indentured servants were treated (although a lot of the indentured servants were actually political prisoners from Ireland and Scotland and CATHOLIC).

    • And it is pretty funny to me that nobody has yet reminded DeSatan that he is part of the group that had no rights not so long ago !!!

  10. Well I don’t remember actually seeing this in school. Would have been fairly fresh for me. Probably hadn’t made it to textbooks yet. Anyway I didn’t know she actually got arrested. I thought they just kicked her off the bus. Anyway I was in a northerner state. These clowns are getting down right ridiculous with their rascist bullshit. What needs to happen is for Democrats to get their heads out of their asses and get out there and get these republicans out of the office. There ain’t a state in the union where republicans outnumber Democrats. Why the hell do we keep let the sonsofbitches keep wining and screwing our lives up.

  11. Actually Rosa wasn’t the first. There was a black teenager, I forget her name at the moment,(see how history works?), who also refused, and didn’t go quietly. She was also taken to jail earlier than Rosa’s bravery led her to the cell. The movement leaders decided Rosa, a respectable, polite, employed, lady made a better cause. Evidently, they were right, although the teenager should get some credit. Sometimes dissent is individual, passionate, unpredictable, and messy. We all forget the hordes of children packed into the jails at Birmingham, who, in their anonymity, gave the movement power, and made the nation listen to a preacher, who didn’t just preach the good news, he walked the walk. I’ve found the deeper dive into history, the more interesting, complex, and mysterious it seems. Of course the nazi in Florida wants to turn it into sliced white bread.

    • And what really moved the needle was that the entire black community BOYCOTTED the bus company after her arrest. They lost beaucoup money, that was more than half their ridership.

  12. The truth is always the first casualty in war and racists and Republicans have been distorting the truth and lying about it for years and years. I grew up in the McCarthy era and in a John Birch Society community. I went to their bookstore and read some of their books and realized what patent horseshit it was and still is. Luckily, we had a community library that had a good selection of books and a system in place that would bring to me any book that I wanted. The librarians did not censor me or my books. And my education continued apace. I read about everything, the Holocaust, WWII, racism, sexism, etc. I would take out 5 -15 books every two weeks for years. It was my real education. Luckily, I found a way to pay for college and was able to get a good liberal education and it has served me well. I have always had a sarcastic wit and a tell it like it is kind of personality. My mother, frustrated by my sarcasm asked my why I had to be such a smart ass. I promptly asked would she rather I be a dumbass. We only had that discussion once. My folks were poor whites from the South. Of course, they had black friends which I never met and the N word was regularly used in our household. It took a long time for me to educate myself out of my heritage. I left home at 16 to find out who I was and it really helped. I started college at 17 which really expanded my worldview. Suffice to say, I developed an abiding interest in the truth and an abhorrence of the lies told by politicians and religious zealots. Nowadays, we see those combined with Republicans and fundamentalist Christians. I can think of no worse combination. I call them idiots on parade. I am appalled at how stupid we have become as a nation.

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