- DeSantis faces bashing from Ken Burns referring to Bill that bans CRT.
- The bill shall re-write the history at dangerous levels warns Ken.
Ken Burns renowned history and culture filmmaker calls DeSantis’ education policy an attempt to block dangerously re-writing history.
While in a CNN interview in the morning, Burns spoke about America saying that it is not a suppression of ideas but the US is an opportunity to investigate who we are as a country.
“All these bills that DeSantis and others are doing limit our ability to understand who we are,” he said. “They are not inclusive, they are exclusive. They’re narrowing the focus of what is and isn’t American history.”
Ken blasted the policies of DeSantis by comparing them with “Soviet system” of re-writing history of nation at dangerous level.
“It’s a huge threat to our Republic,” Burns added, saying the Founding Fathers would be “rolling in their graves.”
“The guy who wrote that owned hundreds of human beings and didn’t see the contradiction in that,” he said. “Our whole history is based in a discussion of race along with the meaning of freedom, and that’s complicated too.”
Florida Bill 999 a bill that aims at eliminating Critical Race Theory (CRT) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from the university was condemned in frustration by Burns through twitter.
It would revise the general education core courses and would allow reviewing of faculty members by Florida state university board of trustees. Further, it will provide directions for removing Critical Race Theory, Gender studies or Intersectionality of major or minor nature by board of trustees.
One section of the bill reads that general education courses “may not suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”
Calling the bill an assault on very liberties articulated by the Founders Burns appeals to Americans to speak about it.
Critical Race Theory is a theory that examines a shaping of social, political systems in America which adversely affect the non-white Americans with the help of race and ethnicity as per American Bar Association.
The concept is reserved only till higher education and steps have been taken by the Florida Republicans that it won’t be taught in primary or secondary.
There are further steps to be taken to ban such institutions which promote divisive concepts instead of ideological indoctrination. DeSantis plans on making such reforms
According to him other aspects of Black history like slavery and racial discrimination should also be taught.
“Critical race theory is basically saying some are oppressors, some are oppressed, so what kind of a message is that sending to these very young kids?” he recently said in a Fox News interview.
“Black history is American history. African Americans are so central to the journey of America,” he said at a Black History Month event in Palm Beach, Florida last month. “The pain, the tribulations but also the successes of exceptionalism.”
“This bill is an extreme version of radical legislation in many states that prohibits the teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ in history education,” AHA Executive Director James Grossman told Newsweek in a statement.
“These bills attempt to forge national unity by denying division rather than healing it.By refusing to acknowledge and understand the centrality of racism in the evolution of American institutions, culture, and structures, these prohibitions actually perpetuate division. It is not possible to heal a disease without full medical history. That history must be discussed and understood.”
