The4PM

Check out the difference between Florida’s bill to ban teaching “critical race theory” in public schools and The Associated Press’ coverage of the legislation.

SO WHAT

When it comes to the anti-CRT movement, the media is either incompetent or lying.

WHAT HAPPENED

The “Individual Freedom” bill, backed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was approved Tuesday by the state’s Senate Education Committee.

This is the relevant section. At no point does it even mention white people; and it's basically telling instructors not to single out students or employees based on their race. https://t.co/AyiArefG4E pic.twitter.com/0acmHsSoNe

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) January 19, 2022

The AP reported on the bill’s progress under the headline “Florida could shield whites from ‘discomfort’ of racist past.”

• The report suggested the legislation was motivated by white people’s unwillingness to confront painful facts about American history, such as slavery and Jim Crow.

But, as progressive journalist Zaid Jilani noted in a Twitter thread Tuesday, The AP’s description of the bill was “pretty bad.”

• The text does not actually mention whites and only prohibits instructions from making people feel “discomfort” specifically based on their “race, color, sex or national origin.”
• “If someone thinks this is bad they probably don’t like the [Civil Rights Act] and [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] either,” Jilani said.

SAME ENERGY

Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — who issued an executive order Saturday barring the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools — has been similarly accused of attempting to shield white people from uncomfortable truths, or worse.

• But the language of Youngkin’s order explicitly advocates a full picture of American history, “good and bad.”
• “From the horrors of American slavery and segregation, and our country’s treatment of Native Americans, to the triumph of America’s Greatest Generation against the Nazi Empire, the heroic efforts of Americans in the Civil Rights Movement, and our country’s defeat of the Soviet Union and the ills of Communism, we must provide our students with the facts and context necessary to understand these important events,” the order reads.
• “Only then will we realize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that our children ‘will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.'”

THE BIG PICTURE

The picture has been much the same nationwide, as more than 30 states have enacted or considered regulations on the teaching of CRT, and the media reaction has generally been disbelief and outrage.

• National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote last July that such criticisms are “either woefully misinformed or willfully dishonest.”
• “It is reasonable to object to the drafting of some of these laws as vague and overly broad,” Lowry wrote, “but it’s hard to see how any fair-minded person could object to the goal of preventing children from being taught — in the public schools! — that one race is superior to another or that people should be discriminated against on the basis of their race.”