Michael Hiltzik: Ron DeSantis and the whitewashing of slavery's horrors
With the news in recent days so irremediably grim — what with the mainstreaming of antisemitic drivel by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the record heat wave traceable to global warming — I found myself looking desperately for a comic interlude to lift my mood.
That brought me inevitably to the Ron DeSantis clown show. He offers dark comedy, to be sure, but comedy nonetheless. Over the last week, it has featured a ham-fisted attempt to whitewash the horrors of slavery in America.
That slavery thing is actually divided into two scenes. We'll take them in order.
Scene One is last Wednesday's approval by the Florida Board of Education of in the state's K-12 schools. What caught the attention of educators and other close readers was a provision that the curriculum cover "how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal
