Lewis M. Steel is senior counsel at Outten & Golden LLP and an Institute for Policy Studies board member. He's the author of The Butler's Child: White Privilege, Race, and a Lawyer's Life in Civil Rights
As this year’s Black History Month comes to a close, the struggle for racial understanding and justice in the United States hangs by a thread in many of the nation’s state houses. At the state level, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spent a year trying to burnish his standing in the Republican Party’s primaries by restricting the teaching of America’s racial history in public schools. What DeSantis is doing threatens to seriously weaken public education in other states as well.
In Florida’s public schools, all the way up to seniors in high school, DeSantis had convinced the state legislature to prohibit teaching students about the reality of slavery and its aftermath, through the post-Civil War Jim Crow era right up until now. His claimed justification: Teaching that conveys a hurtful message to white students that can make them feel “guilty” and damage them throughout their lives. But “feeling bad” about a pivotal, brutal centerpiece of U.S.
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