‘Black Lives Matter’ story removed from 5th grade books in Florida School District
A school district in Florida has removed a passage “Black Lives Matter” from textbooks for fifth-grade students.
Sarasota County Schools told parents the text “contained content that could be controversial and in conflict with” the state’s ban on critical race theory, the WFLA reported Tuesday.
Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic framework for examining how race and racism cross culture, law, and politics. The theory became prominent in 2020 in the midst of a nationwide inventory of issues of racial injustice.
The State Department of Education announced the ban in June when it enacted new rules that classroom teaching cannot “suppress or distort significant historical events” and that teachers should not share personal views or try to “persuade” students to a particular point in view.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis supported the ban. He said at the time that he would prevent instructors and administrators from “teaching children to hate their country.”
A school principal said it was discovered that a small portion of the text in a fifth-grade vocabulary had information that “in accordance with the instructional planning requirements of the state” was consistent with the CRT.
The WFLA reported that the exercise was titled “Personal Narrative” and told the story of a father and child who participated in a “Black Lives Matter” demonstration in June 2020. Some of the vocabulary words in the passage were “dissent,” “redemption,” and “anecdotes.”
The same words now appear in a new passage about friends who marched in protest during the civil rights movement in 1963.
Stephen Maturen / Getty Images
Lawmakers in several Republican-led states have tried to ban teachers from discussing CRT in schools. According to the Brookings Institute, eight states in August — Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and South Carolina — had enacted anti-CRT legislation.
The Brookings Institute noted that with the exception of Idaho, none of the states’ laws mention the theory by name. Instead, they largely ban discussions of conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression.
Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump perceived the school’s removal of the Black Lives Matter narrative as “unacceptable”.
“Banning education at important milestones in our nation’s history is a DETRIMENT for our children and does them a BIG disservice,” Crump tweeted in response to a news segment about the situation. “By replacing the history that was put under the protests in 2020, it is clear that this district is trying to change the history of our nation. Unacceptable!”
Newsweek contacted the Florida Department of Education and Sarasota County Schools for comment, but did not receive a response prior to publication.
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