Conservatives fight with ‘woke’ history leads to a nation of imbecilic citizens | Opinion

While teaching American history survey courses at Fresno State, I handed out questionnaires on the first day of class. Three key questions were:

▪ How do you view historical events (conservatively, liberally, or radically) and why?

▪ What do you think was the most important event in your lifetime and why?

▪ Who were Jackie Robinson, Kennesaw “Mountain” Landis, and Margaret Sanger as historical figures?

After collecting the questionnaires, I gave this short but important commentary: “We are going to study our national history and the stories within it. And it is critical that each of you not place yourself in the chaotic or the inspirational past we are going to study. None of you were there, and so you should not identify with either the inspirational stories or the non-inspirational stories. Be objective in your study and research, and do not bring emotion into your attempt to make sense of the nation’s past.”

At present, there is a cultural war over the ingredients of history. Which facts should be taught, and which ignored? Selected facts of African American history have been deemed too dangerous for the hearts and minds of young people to intellectually ingest. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has called these historical ingredients “woke,” which means for him and many conservative Republicans something morbidly obese intellectually. This term has been co-opted from its positive meaning within Black culture that defined “woke” as being informed and hip to the real world in which they live, e.g., racial inequality, sexism, ageism, and the plight of family members who cannot find a decent “slave,” which means, in the hood, a decent job.

DeSantis was concerned with the new Advanced Placement course focusing on African American history. The dialectic or clash between how DeSantis and other conservatives want to cherry pick history and the truth that should be taught, as argued by the Black intellectual community or what W.E.B. DuBois called “The Talented Tenth,” rages on with the cultural wars. These Black thinkers label Nat Turner as a Black freedom fighter, whereas DeSantis and his crew of like conservatives label Turner as a “menace to society” who should be deleted from the AP course. The struggle over the historical past between the forces of light and darkness has been real since the NAACP organized a 1915 boycott of the racist, ahistorical film, “Birth of a Nation.”

One should keep in mind the ignorance visited upon American students when the historical truth is hidden from them and let history be their guide. In the 1960s, the young white students of the “counter-culture” movement became angry when they learned about the poverty in what author Michael Harrington called, “The Other America.” The students, isolated in the new 1950s “vanilla suburbs” of endless whiteness, became “awoke” to Harrington’s description of poverty on the other side of the proverbial tracks. Coupled with the awokeness resulting from the glaring war in Vietnam and the King-led Civil Rights movement, this awoke generation demanded a relevant education system that would advance their minds.

I see this today after I peruse decades of answers on my questionnaires. Students tend to think differently depending on time, place, and our political culture. In the 1970s, students tended to answer that they are more liberal, whereas in the age of Nixon, Ford, Wallace, Reagan and the two Bushes, students tend to answer that question as they are more conservative.

What is interesting, no matter what decade, is that students overall did not know the three famous individuals. Most students answered the most important event in their lifetime was either the civil rights movement, the war against terrorism, or climate change. Only a few students answered police brutality, Black Lives Matter, or gender-identity concerns.

DeSantis and others want American students not to be awake to these issues, but asleep in “La La Land.” However, the American people should be aware or awoke to this sleeping bear of ignorance that abounds in dark curriculum today— thus, the counter-proposal of lightness, the Advanced Placement course.

If AP in African American history is stopped, then America will continue to “educate” a nation of ahistorical, imbecilic citizens who live in fear of the truths of the past.

Malik Simba is professor emeritus of Africana studies and history at Fresno State.