It’s not fiction: Ron DeSantis and the right’s culture war on kindness

The front line in the global culture wars has pushed its way into the heart of Florida’s education system, as Governor Ron DeSantis competes to become the leader of the Republican Party’s “boo to books” faction.

He’s accelerating a national trend that’s ripping the mask off the coded “war on woke” to reveal what it’s really about: a war on empathy, kindness and understanding. As Adam Serwer warned in The Atlantic back in 2018: “The cruelty is the point.”

Australia can expect the same action on full-bore “rinse-repeat” any day now.

We’re used to understanding rows about books in schools as history put to national mythmaking purposes. Courtesy of Geoffrey Blainey, we’ve even got our own sneeringly punning tag: “black-armband-ism”. 

In the dying days of the Morrison government, former education minister Alan Tudge tried to whip it all up again in a local culture clash with attacks on the curriculum. In his first days as opposition leader, Peter Dutton pledged to Sky after dark that he’d make the national curriculum (“the values argument,” he eye-rollingly called it) one of the big issues in the national Parliament. 

Narendra Modi’s India is travelling the same road, with schools being required, among other things, to erase the Islamic past, including “cancelling” former national heroes like Tipu Sultan.

In the US, states use market power to dictate to textbook suppliers how they write about history. The result? Publishers revert to the largest lowest common denominator — usually Texas — to decide what to leave in and out. 

But what’s happening in Florida — and across much of the United States — is something new. Now it’s fiction that’s the target: great modern writers like Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Sherman Alexie – even Australia’s own Anh Do. 

The right’s assault on fiction began in the 2021 Virginia state election when Republicans promoted a (conservative activist) mother complaining about her Year 12 son’s distress over Morrison’s Beloved. (She should have been thankful. You’d have to be a sociopath not to be shaken by Morrison’s powerful book.)

According to Pen America’s Index of School Book Bans, in the last complete school year (2021-22), 1648 titles were banned. According to PEN: “1261 different authors, 290 illustrators and 18 translators.” Expect that number to be up when we get this year’s count.

Three-quarters of the books banned were works of fiction. About 41% had LGBTQIA+ themes or characters (about a quarter of those with trans characters) and 40% had “protagonists or prominent secondary characters of colour”. About 20% addressed race or racism.

The house journal of America’s once Republican-voting managerial class, Harvard Business Review, gives us a clue of what’s going on: “reading literary fiction helps people develop empathy, theory of mind and critical thinking. When we read, we hone and strengthen several different cognitive muscles, so to speak, that are the root of the EQ [emotional intelligence].”

When business says “EQ”, the right hears “woke!”. Empathy about trans people? Critical thinking or even maybe (gasp!) theorising about racism? No way: “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

The books are being targeted under Florida’s Stop WOKE Act (capitalised as an acronym for “Wrong to our Kids and Employees”). Passed last year, the law makes it discriminatory to teach that individuals are “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” or that privilege or oppression may be based on race, gender or national origin.

Florida schools are being encouraged with an “if in doubt, take it out” sensibility, often stripping classrooms of all books. The national College Board has generated its own controversy when it rewrote its official curriculum for Year 12 Advanced Placement African American Studies, seemingly to accommodate the Florida law.

Guess who’s missing in action? America’s mainstream media, last year so hysterical about cancel culture, now lackadaisical about books in schools. The New York Times shrugged off Florida’s bans last week as just politics with a report headlined: “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand”.

Trouble is, the centrist establishment commentariat in the US media has been egging on the “war on woke”, arguing (as Nyadol Nyuon criticised it recently) “that cancel culture and political correctness pose a symmetrical threat, or an even greater threat”.

While Florida schools were taking books off the shelves, former New York Times books editor Pamela Paul (who explicitly made the case for right banning, left panning both-sides-ism last year) was cheering on Stanford University’s abandoning of its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. 

About as long as we’ve had Sky after dark, we’ve had the “war on woke”. How long until that joins the war on the empathy that fiction offers?