There’s this thing that’s been in the news lately. It’s actually quite an interesting bit of awful, and exactly the kind of thing we would normally discuss on FtB: an educator who abhors asserting facts because some people refuse to admit the truth of those facts. Now, the right wing loves to claim that this is a common left wing practice, routinely employed to hide facts supportive of conservative opinions, religions, or ideologies. (For our purposes in this post, we’ll follow the Fox News formula and accept arguendo that anyone working in the public schools is a “lefty”.) I don’t particularly see that, and more telling still, the examples that Fox News blowhards tend to cite don’t actually show that when one returns to original sources. If this really were happening all the time, one would think that the conservatives opposing the practice could come up with at least one good example. In these cases, then, the absence of evidence is waggling its eyebrows suggestively and mouthing, “Hey! Look over there!”
But that doesn’t mean that ignoring fact in favor of opinion or “belief” is something of which we on the left are never guilty. Just recently, the news has gotten hold of a story about a principal in Boca Raton, Florida, where many of the large contributors to local taxes are Jewish. What was the story you ask, as if you didn’t both already know?
The story is that the principal asserted that as a school employee he couldn’t say that the holocaust was fact because some people don’t believe that. This was his second attempt to respond to a parent’s concern about holocaust-related education. The one that was supposed to be more thoughtful and considered and clear. Have a look at how successful that attempt turned out to be:
The clarification is that not everyone believes the Holocaust happened and you have your thoughts but we are a public school and not all of our paren’te have the same beliefs so they will react differently, my thoughts or beliefs have nothing to do with this because i am a public servant. I have the role to be. politically neutral but support all groups in the school. work to expose students to certain thinga but not all parente want their etude-hie expoeed ac they will not be and i can’t force that isaue. One must understand that. in a public school setting the school can?t take a position but provide information and allow parents to work with their students on what they want their children to understand.
i can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because i am not in a position to do so as a school district employee.
Okay. First, let’s just get the [sic] out of the way. Second, this was written by a principal for professional reasons to communicate with a concerned parent? zOMFG. If you’re a principal responding to a concerned parent, you might want to spell “parents” correctly at least 50% of the time.
But on to the particular form of awful that ended up getting this principal fired. (Yes, fired.) It’s that last bit, where he asserts that being a public school educator means never having to say “you’re wrong”:
i can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because i am not in a position to do so as a school district employee.
This is exactly the kind of indifference to truth that the aforementioned Fox News blowhards accuse lefties of displaying. Of course, in their imaginations lefties are ignoring facts inconvenient to left-wing narratives while in this case the lefty in question was ignoring facts inconvenient to anti-semitism, which is a decidedly bipartisan if not solidly right-leaning phenomenon. Now, it should go without saying that I deplore this rejection of the truth. As a jew and as a big-ol’ queerbo, I’m disappointed to see yet another example of the denial of the Holocaust as fact.
But HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE, POINDEXTER! In all the articles and articles and more articles about this incident there’s voluminous condemnation of this holocaust denial. Look at this headline and sub-head from Buzzfeed:
A Principal Who Said “Not Everyone Believes The Holocaust Happened” Has Lost His Job
In an email to a parent, William Latson said he had to be “politically neutral” about the Holocaust because “not all of our parents have the same beliefs.”
You can also look at the top three video stories and how they are headlined:
Headlines related to firing of Spanish River Principal
And yet… the principal’s e-mail didn’t stop at the end of my last quote. You haven’t forgotten the title of this post have you? You see where this is going, right? Yeah, I thought you did. Here’s more from that same e-mail that got the principal fired:
in a public school setting the school can?t take a position but provide information and allow parents to work with their students on what they want their children to understand. i can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because i am not in a position to do so as a school district employee. 1 do allow information about the Holocaust to be presented and allow students and parents to make decisions about it accordingly. i do the same with Information about slavery, I don’t take a position but allow – – for the information to be presented and parents to be parents and educate their atudente accordingly.
Now, there’s a cottage industry in fighting Holocaust denial because, unfortunately, there’s a stupidly large group of people that engage in it. There’s not a group of similar size devoted to denying the existence of slavery, instead slavery “denial” usually takes the form of denying that slave owners and slave traders were bad people and that everything was a great deal for the slaves and their decedents anyway, because didn’t they end up in the greatest country in the world, and what’s a few million murders, industrial-scale kidnapping, and utter dehumanization compared with the right to pay taxes to a state government that spends money on maintaining Stone Mountain?
So, given that context, and that the parent who initiated this conversation was primarily interested in holocaust education (and may have been jewish herself), it’s not surprising that the media were better prompted to write a story about Holocaust denial than they were to write one about slavery denial. But the lack of any sizable group engaging in outright denial that slavery happened should by all rights make worse this principal’s statement on denying that slavery is an historical fact.
There are, of course, other possible confounds. The fired principal is himself black. White reporters do not write about racism well, and they write even less well when the racism comes from people of color. They might avoid the topic for fear of handling it badly and thus being criticized.
But, and let me be clear here, I don’t give a fuck. Professional accommodation of slavery denial is more frightening than Holocaust denial, not because it is somehow inherently worse, but because of two things: 1, we are more prepared to deal with Holocaust denial and thus have more reason to believe we can successfully fight back, and 2, this is a dramatic escalation of the problem in relation to slavery whereas it is the unfortunate (and let’s not forget horrifying) status quo in relation to the Holocaust.
None of the headlines about this man’s holocaust denial are undeserved, but I didn’t search for anything more specific than “principal holocaust” to find them. When you search for “principal slavery” you get literally zero stories on this in the first page of results. This story is being portrayed as only about negligence in education enabling anti-semitism, with nothing at all about negligently enabling racism. To put it bluntly, in a story about a man who couldn’t bring himself to admit that slavery actually did exist, the media wrote their articles about the story as if slavery did not actually exist. Could there have been a worse response?
That can’t stand if we’re going to continue getting better as a country. That shouldn’t stand if we wish to act morally and compassionately. We can and must do better: slavery denial is every bit as nasty and even more frightening than Holocaust denial.
See comments #5 & 6 for details on a weird brain slip I had to fix, with credit to SonofRojBlake
I think it’s worse than that. This man seems to believe that he’s not allowed to promote anything as fact. That all beliefs and opinions on everything are open to all-sides-are-equal debate, and that we all get to create our own facts and reality without having to endure being told we’re wrong. I’m sure he’s also afraid to say evolution is true, or to assert that the earth is roundish and the sun rises in the east.
I don’t think he believes slavery didn’t happen, but he’s more afraid of the right-wing evangelical reality-denialists than he is of people demanding fact-based education. So he’s hopefully taking the coward’s way out and avoiding the hottest subjects altogether. If flat-earthers met with him, he’d fold on that in a heartbeat too.
The ultimate goal here is to do away with public education altogether, so that the evangelicals and fascists can cultivate their spawn in an environment free from facts and opposing opinions, and the oligarchs will have a permanent class of uneducated workers to exploit, just like the good old days. Anti-semitism and slavery revisionism are just the starting points because they get even educated bigots the most riled up and on board, and there are a lot of them to enlist.
For Bod’s sake be careful. You obviously didn’t get the memos, either of them. A quick precis of the acceptable narrative:
1. yeah, yeah, blah blah, slavery, Armenian genocide, Rwandan genocide, homosexuals, Roma peoples, Native Americans, Australian or even Tasmanian aboriginals, whatever. You can talk about those a bit if you absolutely must, but it is career-preservingly vital that it is acknowledged that the historical and ongoing oppression of the Jewish people is uniquely terrible and qualitatively different and more worthy of media coverage and attention from everyone than anyone else’s. Any attempt to dislodge the Jewish people from their position of primacy as the world’s most oppressed people, like, ever (by, for instance, mentioning the fact that Israel is a nuclear-armed apartheid state or that Jewish people are represented in the top echelons of the media, judiciary, legislature and academia out of all proportion to their numbers in the population) risks the unremovable toxic stain of an allegation of anti-semitism, which is much, much worse than any other kind of racism. On which subject:
2. anti-semitism IS a problem unique to the pollitical left, and an example of their dissembling hypocrisy, as they bleat on and on about how they abhor racism while simultaneously giving succour to literal Nazis within their ranks. For a demonstration of the fact of this look no further than the current state of UK politics, where the main party of the left and their “leader” Jeremy Corbyn in particular have been undergoing a shit-tsunami of media stories about their problem with anti-semitism. (e.g. from literally today in the left’s paper of record: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/14/observer-view-antisemitism-in-labour-jeremy-corbyn)
This continues even as the Conservative party are about to foist upon us as Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Wall-Spaffer Get-off-my-fucking-laptop Johnson.
It’s very important that you don’t deviate from the acceptable line on these two points.
/sarcasm, as I hope is blindingly obvious, but depressingly feel the need to clarify.
The context of the mention of slavery seems significant to me. Given his lack of facility with the English language it is difficult to tell, but it would appear that the school Principal in question was bringing up slavery as a purely rhetorical device. I read that as:
“Yes, I do have this policy on claiming that the Holocaust is a fact, which is a contentious political issue for some and could be construed as me supporting deeply bigoted narratives. But look! it’s not a politically motivated position because I apply it equally to all historical incidents – even slavery, which obviously we all agree actually did happen!”
I think he leaned on slavery because it was the most cut and dried, obviously factual equivalent issue he could think of. Perhaps as a black American, who has to live with the legacy of it every day, he was trying to draw on his own history of cultural oppression to insulate himself further from the criticism that he is doing this to perpetuate bigoted narratives. Rather than trying to support slavery denial in wider society by bringing it into parity with Holocaust denial, he is trying to minimise his apparent Holocaust denial by claiming it is really just a result of holding a perverse position on epistemology, as shown by the fact it also leads him to a very surprising position on slavery denial – a point of view that nobody is seriously promoting.
Tone deaf, certainly. And it could well play into the hands of right-wing bigots with more sinister agendas. But I think it is a little harsh to impute to this man an “inability to admit that slavery didn’t exist”. I think there is a huge difference between “I won’t admit that anything in history is true in public, because I don’t understand how education works, and here’s one surprising example of where that policy leads me” and “I won’t admit that these two specific instances of oppression – American slavery and the Holocaust – never happened, because I genuinely think there is a valid case to be made on both sides”.
Or maybe I’m being too generous here?
The USA was/is such a great place for black people that now some are immigrating to Ghana for good jobs and a life of equality and self-worth.
Non-sarcastic nitpick:
… should surely read “slavery “denial” usually takes the form of denying that slave owners and slave traders were bad people”.
@sonofrojblake, #2 and #5. First #5:
Gak! you’re right. Fixing it ASAP.
#2: The slavery was, indeed, obvious from the beginning. However, better safe than sorry.
The only explanation I can think of for that crime against the English language is he used some kind of handwriting-to-text program and didn’t do any proofreading. Can’t think how else you could try to type ‘I’ and manage to hit ‘1’
I was going to point out that classically trained typists were taught to hit 1 instead of capital ‘i’… and then I remembered, no, it’s the other way around.
The pinky finger is weak and slow, so on manual typewriters that required a lot of strength to push the keys down, typing 1 is very hard. Using the I as a substitute worked very well, kept your hands from being exhausted, was considerably faster, and was hardly noticeable with the fonts being used on those old machines. A lot of them had literally identical I and 1 results, to facilitate this.
With the rise of electronic typewriters where the keys were easily pressed, the need for this vanished, and the practice vanished into history. Only those of us old enough to have learned to type on manual typewriters still find our fingers sometimes engaging in the practice.
Am I the only one here who has had to seriously use a manual typewriter? I’m glad I work from home now, because I’m tired of being laughed at because I occasionally forget what I’m doing and my hand reaches up and pushes the carriage back manually instead of hitting enter.
But, yeah, he couldn’t even get this wrong right. You don’t substitute 1 for I, you substitute I for 1!
This trip down memory lane has been brought to you by old age. Old Age, when youth is just too exhausting to keep up any longer. Accept no substitutes.
Have two things to add.
First, I’m not getting into ranking bad things and I hope that comes across clearly. Slavery and genocide both have one thing in common: they steal away the life of someone and give nothing in return. One is quick and brutal, the other is a slow grinding cruelty. Both are utterly dehumanizing both to the people whose lives are stolen and also reflected in the inhumanity of their oppressors.
Second, there is one additional quirk about the history of these awful events that is relevant to any discussion of why it is bad that the US media chose to avoid covering the slavery denial in the letter. Simply put, the Holocaust was an act committed by other people far away. Slavery happened locally. We use Nazis as punchable bad guys in trashy fiction but that same fiction is most likely to cover slave owners as mostly genteel nobility of the south. As though they just had a few bad ideas but let’s otherwise romanticize them. Denying what historically happened allows history repeat itself. There are still forces locally that would be just fine with allowing us to move closer to slavery again and you can see that in the (at least) third wave American concentration camps we have setup (first was Native Americans, second was Japanese Americans, third is largely Hispanic asylum seekers). When a society learns lessons you don’t allow awful, dehumanizing patterns to reoccur.
I think it’s long past time the people of the United Stats of America admit that dehumanizing anyone in any way is an awful idea. Let the christians say it’s because their book talks about treating their god the same way they treat the least of their fellow human beings. Let the secularists say it’s unpredictable where it would go and they don’t want it to suddenly be aimed at them. Let the Native Americans say it’s finally time for enough to be enough. Let the family members of those fleeing violence in other countries say they don’t want their family treated like cattle. Let African Americans say it’s not right to suppress their vote. Let everyone have their own personal reasons for it. But lets do get on with it. It’s about time.