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Donald Koller's avatar

I am starting to get PTSD from reading about the Florida anti-woke agenda because ALL THAT was my K-12 education—private, fundamentalist, Christian, and white. I was taught that all of this - male domination over women, whites dominating Blacks, LGB people being unredeemable in the eyes of God - that it is not only according to Scripture but the Constitution as well.

That education left me and continues to leave me, with blind spots. If I had graduated in 2015 instead of 1989, I would have voted for Trump. No question in my mind. It took real life and college to straighten me out, and I have always been a voracious reader.

Here is what I learned and what apparently Florida aims to bring to public education:

We beneficent, manifest-destiny whites who founded the country graciously brought Blacks to our shores. See, their tribal chiefs had discovered capitalism and were looking to sell off some of their excess people. At a minimum, we were saving them from a short life filled with running around barefoot killing one another. It was also heavily emphasized that the U.S. was not close to leading the world in slave labor (which is true, but beside the point). Once here on our shores, we gave Blacks something to do worthy of their time. We taught them the importance of hard work, and the masters were mostly kind, though some were not. I did not get to see pictures of whipped and beaten human beings.

The Founders were especially nice to their slaves, and treated them better than most. But each master and every slave knew their place and accepted it. Everyone was happy until the Civil War, when the North decided they were going to tell everyone how to live and trample on State's rights.

From there, I learned next to nothing about Jim Crow, but learned that we decided to live segregated because Blacks still have a bit of the savage in them. Other than being taught that MLK Jr might be a communist, I knew nothing about the man. I learned of Malcolm X’s existence around the age of 30. The KKK were white folk expressing their displeasure with integration. I never heard a story or saw a picture about anyone getting lynched.

It's so much worse than people think. Indoctrination is real because it happened to me. Escaping it is very hard and requires a lot of introspection, education, and hard work that for me will never end. If we allow them to teach these things to children 6, 7, 10, or even 13 years old, the children will believe what they are taught.

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Davis's avatar

I have always believed that Blacks follow politics more closely than the average American because they are directly affected by election outcomes.

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