opinion | A Florida school banned a Disney movie about Ruby bridges. Here’s what that really means.

This month, an elementary school in St. Petersburg, Fla., stopped showing a 1998 Disney film about Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old Black girl who was integrated into a New Orleans public elementary school in 1960, for a complaint Sent in by a single parent who said she was afraid the movie might teach her kids that white people hate black people.

The school banned the film until it could be reviewed. So I decided to re-watch the movie myself.

First, here’s additional information about Ruby: When she joined that school, she had to be escorted by federal police. She met a lot of racist white people – adults! – mocking, throwing stones, spitting at her and threatening her life. Parents withdraw their children.

There is only one teacher, so every day the 6-year-old girl has to go to class alone, save for her teacher, and eat lunch alone.

Ruby became afraid to eat because one of the protesters threatened to poison her. Her father lost his job and the local grocery store asked her family not to return to the store.

All of this was endured by a black first-grader, but now a Florida parent worries that second-graders have too much to hear, see, and learn.

Furthermore, of all the ways that Ruby’s story can be portrayed, the Disney version is the most extensive, including storylines developed for Ruby’s white teacher and white psychiatrist. treat her. And in the end, another white teacher and a white student come to some form of acceptance.

The movie is exactly what you’d expect: an unfortunate tale of a deplorable chapter in our history, told in earnest, with some of the sharpest edges blunted, helping children more easily receptive.

But in Florida, it’s not about protecting children, it’s about deceiving them. It is to combat the so-called indoctrination that has awakened with a historical vindication.

And the state gave each parent special powers as infantrymen in this campaign: In this case, a single protesting parent seemed enough to get a lesson in history. our very recent history is questionable or even forbidden. Remember: Bridges isn’t some archaic figure out of a dusty textbook, she’s alive and well to this day. She is 12 years younger than my mother.

Earlier this year, in the same district, Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” was banned from all high schools in the district because a parent complained about a rape scene in the book.

Also this month, a principal in Florida forced to resign after students were shown Michelangelo’s statue of David, a biblical figure no more, and three parents complained.

Giving too few parents too much power to deprive other parents and children of educational choices goes against the spirit of democracy and freedom of inquiry, and glorifies a form of tyranny. parents to those who are overly sensitive, those who suffer inexplicably, and those who are maliciously oppressive.

It heralds an era of turmoil in Florida’s schools, all helped by radical state legislators and Governor Ron DeSantis’ quintessential battle for sanity.

What if this glove was turned upside down and minority parents started complaining about teaching other aspects of American history and culture?

What if they refused Thomas Jefferson lessons or books because he raped a teenage girl he enslaved, Sally Hemings, and fathered her children, in which at least one child was born when she herself was young. (For the record, I consider all sex between slaves and the people they enslaved to be rape, because slaves could not consent.)

What if a parent objected to the school celebrating Columbus Day because Christopher Columbus was a colonial madman who sold young girls as sex slaves?

What if parents objected to books about and celebrating Thanksgiving because of the standard depiction of the first Thanksgiving as a meeting between friends who shared the bounty and crossed paths with each other? Cross the difference is a fairy tale?

What if they oppose the Bible itself, which includes rape, incest, torture, and murder?

History is full of horrors. We make ourselves and our children unsupportive of pretending otherwise.

Learning about human cruelty is necessarily unpleasant. It is in that discomfort that our empathy is revealed and our cause is awakened.

These debates continue to focus on the discomfort of white children, but seem to ignore the feelings of black children, discomfort or otherwise.

When watching the movie, I was extremely annoyed, sometimes angry, sometimes almost in tears when reviewing Ruby’s story.

How did that happen? How do we honor that moment, condemn the cruelty of the racists and praise her bravery? And how do we address the effect of racism on the American experience?

If accurate depiction of racism and white cruelty is the yardstick for banning educational materials and guides, how can authentic American history be taught? and fully?

Maybe the distortion is the point. It’s a revival of the Lost Cause moment, in which revisionist history was created to reinvigorate the racists of the South.

For me, the wave of censorship we are witnessing also requires, The Bible “Slave”, a shortened text used in the 1800s in the West Indies to try to appease slaves. Paragraphs suggestive of emancipation were cut and pro-slavery passages kept. It is a psychological warfare tool disguised as a sacred text.

DeSantis’s Florida is also engaged in similar psychological warfare. Its battlegrounds are race, gender, and sexuality, and it’s napalming stories.

The state’s strict censors are choosing the comfort of ignorance over the inconvenience of truth.