Claim: Speaking in a historic black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, Vice President Kamala Harris said Florida’s new standard for black history education is an effort to distort history for political purposes. Ta.
“Think of how we have seen past attempts to minimize and even deny the Holocaust. Think of those who tried to erase our dark and despicable history through We have tried to ban teaching Latino and Hispanic history, and some states are doing so. ”
Politifact’s verdict: mostly false. A spokesperson for Ms. Harris cited two examples, one of which does not support her claims.
The Texas Board of Education rejected a Mexican-American studies textbook in 2016, but it wasn’t trying to prevent people from learning its history. The book was rejected for factual errors and racist content.
A 2010 Arizona law banned all ethnic studies classes in public schools. The law grew out of efforts to end the Mexican-American Studies Program in the Tucson Unified School District. A federal court overturned that ruling in 2017.
In addition, several states have laws banning the teaching of critical race theory, and other states have introduced similar proposals. However, these bills do not explicitly prohibit teaching Latino or Hispanic studies.
discussion
Harris declined to say whether he was referring to K-12 education when he mentioned the Latino history ban, but Florida’s newly approved standards target public K-12 education. It is what I did. (Additional language about “personal interest” in slavery was included in the middle school social studies standard.)
According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are approximately 51 million students in K-12 public schools in the United States, of whom nearly 14 million are Latino.
In 2006, Chicano rights leader Dolores Huerta delivered a speech criticizing the state’s Republican-led immigration laws in an auditorium full of Tucson high school students. The Washington Post reported that then-Arizona public superintendent Tom Horn called Huerta’s remarks “hate speech” and launched a campaign to end the Mexican-American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. said to have started.
In 2010, then-Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (Republican) signed a bill banning the teaching of ethnology in public schools. This law applied to all ethnic studies, not just Latin American or Hispanic history. But in 2017, a federal court overturned the ban, concluding that it violated students’ constitutional rights.
Public schools in Arizona can teach ethnology, such as Latino and Hispanic history.
A spokesperson for Harris cited the Texas Board of Education’s unanimous rejection of the controversial Mexican-American studies textbook “Mexican-American Heritage” in 2016. However, the book was never taken from the hands of the students just because it was rejected. This book was never placed in the classroom.
The committee rejected the book after Hispanic activists and academics claimed it contained racist content, misused the term “Latin America,” and contained factual errors about Native Americans. Rejected. According to the report of the committee that reviewed the book, the book makes “a racist assumption that indigenous peoples are barbaric, barbaric, and backward or lagging behind Europeans.”
Trinidad Gonzales, a professor at the University of South Texas who was a member of that review panel, told Politifact that the rejection of the book “has nothing to do with the banning of classes, because classes didn’t exist yet.” ‘ said.
“I thought having a book would make it easier to create a class,” she said.
Texas K-12 public schools can offer ethnic studies courses without formal course approval from the state. Juan Tejeda, a former Mexican-American studies professor, said schools “have the autonomy to teach these courses.”
The Texas Board of Education approves several ethnic studies classes such as Mexican American Studies, African American Studies, Asian Studies, and American Indian/Indigenous Studies.
Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have passed legislation restricting racial equality education and white privilege in recent years, and other states have proposed similar legislation. (White privilege is a social advantage that whites benefit over nonwhites because of their race.)
While some of the bills refer to “critical race theory,” they do not explicitly prohibit teaching Hispanic or Latino studies.
Critical race theory is a collection of ideas about systemic prejudice and privilege. The researchers argue that racism is part of a broader pattern in America. Racism is embedded in the law, it shows up in who interviews for jobs, the types of mortgages offered to people, and how racism is treated by the police and other large aspects of life. and small.
In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, vetoed a bill requiring public high school students to take ethnology, saying the proposed curriculum needed revision. A year later, he signed a bill that achieved that goal.