This is what an educator looks like

We pause to applaud Prof. Marvin Dunn, of Florida

While God’s Own Disappointment™ Ron DeSantis cuts a wide swath out of the education of the next generation of Floridians, Prof. Marvin Dunn, psychology professor emeritus at Florida International University, is standing firm.

Last year, amid great fanfare that stopped just short of scattering confetti on the podium, DeSantis signed the Stop WOKE (the acronym is too stupid to explore here) Act, which is best explained by this state-sponsored flyer. Check it out — or read this ham-handed press release about the legislation — and I’ll give you a doughnut for every dog whistle you spot.

The law is wicked, to say the least, and that’s not just me saying that. It has left educators outraged, particularly those in DeSantis’s woe-begotten state who must now, if they want to stay on the proper side of the law, figure out how to talk about our country’s original sin without actually — you know — talking about it.

What means “woke” when a white supremacist-led state government is doing the defining? It means whatever the supremacist wants it to mean, and you cannot trust — or believe — white supremacists farther than you can throw them. Witness the governor insisting that the American Revolution gave birth to the abolitionist movement.

Nothing could be further from the truth, but Ron cain’t read so…

Look, as a semi-Southern mostly-white woman, I get why people don’t want to study slavery and racism and segregation and inequality. It’s painful. It’s horrible. And for some of us, we might recognize a few names among the criminals who perpetuated attacks against Black, brown, and red communities. A few years ago, I called my old high school to suggest a book about lynchings in my part of the state of Missouri be included in the history curriculum. That department’s chair told me that would never happen, because the descendants of the people who threw the ropes over limbs, who dragged Black people out of jails and homes and churches, would be sitting in those classrooms. All the better, I said.

I got nowhere, but I haven’t given up.

We don’t move forward until we learn all our history — all of it, every last ugly corner of it — and DeSantis is doing his dead-level best to impede that. No justice? No peace. No history? No healing.

Prof. Dunn has spent decades researching this painful history, most particularly the Newberry Six, a epoch of Gainesville history when at least six African Americans were lynched in 1916. You can see some of Prof. Dunn’s work here and it is detailed and impressive and painful and necessary.

So this Washington Post story is inspiring. Prof. Dunn, 82, is continuing to teach American history — all of it — while the governor of Florida is seeking to turn out the lights. From the Post story:

“I can’t tell the story of the Newberry Six without expressing my disgust for the lynching of a pregnant woman,” said Dunn, 82, a professor emeritus at Florida International University. “As a teacher who has spent 30 years going from place to place in Florida where the most atrocious things have happened, I don’t know how to do that. And I don’t want the state telling me that I must.”

Amen, Prof. Dunn.