Fear, Florida, and The 1619 Project

It's Been a Minute

NPR

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🗓️ 24 February 2023

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

How should U.S history be told, and who gets to tell it? Debate over these questions has raged for years – but nowhere is it more pronounced right now than in Florida. This week, Brittany Luse chats with NPR's Giulia Heyward to get the download on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' recent efforts to ban AP African American studies in his state. Then, Brittany sits down with Dorothy Roberts, a legal scholar and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Leslie Alexander, a historian at Rutgers University. In line with their work on The 1619 Project – now a Hulu documentary series –they make the case that slavery led to some of our biggest political fissures today, and discuss why it's important for all Americans to understand those connections.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, hey, you're listening to It's Been a Minute From NPR.
0:04.4	I'm Brittany Loose.
0:05.6	The war over history is raging in our schools.
0:09.7	And one of the fiercest battles can be found in the classroom.
0:14.0	Last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that his state would block a new AP African-American
0:19.5	Studies class.
0:20.9	It was developed by the college board and early versions of the course included lessons
0:25.0	on social movements, Black Lives Matter, intersectionality, reparations, prison abolition, and more.
0:32.1	Which, to DeSantis, sounded a lot like indoctrination.
0:36.5	When you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality abolishing prisons, that's
0:41.7	a political agenda.
0:43.6	Since he's declared himself the education governor, DeSantis has been on a mission to ban schools
0:49.2	from teaching anything that would make people feel, quote,
0:53.0	guilt, anguish, or any form of psychological distress.
0:57.6	Because of their race, gender, sex, or national origin.
1:01.4	And of course, if we're touching on slavery, white guilt might be on the table.
1:07.3	Because it's making white students, white parents, white people in general feel responsible
1:14.4	for something that none of them were alive for in essence.
1:18.1	That's Julia Hayward, an NPR reporter who has been covering this story.
1:22.5	It's really about how we as a country contend with some of the uglier parts of our past.
1:30.5	Is it something that we shy away from and choose not to discuss in classrooms or that we
1:35.1	only discuss with a specific age group?
	...

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