Louisiana Voice

I’ve been on the watch for the pre-filing of bills for the upcoming legislative session that would attempt to make it illegal for teachers in Louisiana’s public schools to teach about this country’s history of slavery or of the genocide of the Native Americans.

Cade Brumley saved legislators the trouble today.

The State Superintendent of Education said there was nothing in his plans for the state’s social studies standards that would “indoctrinate” students on the nation’s radial history.

I can draw one of only two possible conclusions from that: he is either in bed with the radical Repugnantcan Party or he is scared of them and afraid of losing his job.

Either way, it was a cowardly position to take. The Civil War is the darkest chapter of our history and the cause of that war, denials in some quarters notwithstanding, was the issue of slavery.

We can close our eyes to the shameful practice of enslaving other human beings and we can ignore the fact that we at one time we considered enslaved black people as only 3/5 OF A HUMAN but we cannot erase the fact that it happened.

We cannot change the fact that an estimated 5 million to 15 million Native Americans were killed in the name of westward expansion, the so-called Manifest Destiny.

President Andrew Jackson instituted the policy of Indian removal and his successor, Martin Van Buren ordered the roundup and imprisonment of Cherokees in a similar manner in which the Nazis rounded up the Jews in the Warsaw Ghettos a century later. Some 16,000 Cherokee were marched from Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama to Oklahoma. Along the way about 3,000, nearly 20 percent of the total number, died, giving birth to the TRAIL OF TEARS.

Will there be no mention of how Japanese-Americans were rounded up and forced to live in internment camps during WWII?

That won’t be taught because, as they say, the winners write the history books. But it ain’t history, it’s propaganda.

Now since Brumley is so set against the so-called critical race theory concept, public school kids probably won’t learn about the Holocaust, either, though I’d wager the Battle of the Alamo will continue to be taught.

But never mind all that. Like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis says, we don’t want white folks to feel uncomfortable about being white – let’s just make black folks and brown folks uncomfortable about their skin tones. Jesus! DeSantis is hellbent on becoming Donald Trump 2.0 and now our spineless education superintendent is pandering to that same milquetoast mindset.

What have we become in this country, this state? Are we so feeble-minded that we are afraid to expose our foibles? Are we so shallow that we must constantly look over our shoulder to see what Big Brother is thinking of our actions? Why are we so intimidated by the likes of Ted “Cancun” Cruz, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Gym Jordan, Ron Johnson, Donald Trump, DeSantis, et al? Why wo we continue to elect people like John Kennedy, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson, and Clay Higgins?

It’s a damn shame when we cannot face ourselves in the mirror of history.

“I have been clear about this for some time that CRT would not be included in our standards,” Brumley sniffed. “[W]e would be cognizant that nothing in the standards could open the door for any form of indoctrination,”

What the hell is he talking about? Indoctrination? Seriously? This is history, man, and you cannot change history. It happened and ignoring it will not change that.

You want to really piss off African Americans? Pretend they don’t matter, that they were never beaten, whipped, and yes, enslaved.

I’m lily-white, so I don’t presume to understand how they must feel toward us. But I can say with certainty that had my ancestors been held in bondage and considered 3/5 of a human being, I might well harbor some resentment towards the ones whose ancestors enslaved them – especially if today, they ignored that part of history, if they continued to try to take away my right to vote, if they used fire hoses and attack dogs on me when I marched for my rights, if they tried to shut me out of educational opportunities, out of meaningful jobs, out of society itself.

You cannot ignore 12 percent of population. You cannot run them through the LSU football and basketball programs, cheer for them as heroes, and then discard them like yesterday’s news when their eligibility is up.

You have to treat people with some dignity whether you like it or not.

My grandfather drilled into me the conviction that you can take a lot of things from a man, but never take his dignity.

Cade Brumley, with Tuesday’s pronouncement, has thumbed his nose at the dignity of African Americans, Native Americans, and, if his moratorium extends to the Holocaust, Jews.

We should be reminded of that callousness every day because it resides in every member of our congressional delegation but one. It will be a dominant issue in this year’s legislative session, it already permeates the U.S. Congress and if allowed to fester, it will destroy this country from within like a cancer.