Ray Garofalo won't get to pass his shaky grasp of history down to Louisiana's students
If Louisiana Rep. Ray Garofalo, a Chalmette Republican, had been engaged in some noble purpose Tuesday — that is, if he had been putting forward a bill that would have been an actual benefit to anybody — then his statement that the state’s teachers should be made to teach “the good, the bad, the ugly” regarding slavery might legitimately be called a gaffe and treated as a no biggie.
But Garofalo wasn’t putting forward a good bill. He was offering legislation to promote the preposterous idea that a country that wiped out people who were already here and imported people who didn’t want to be here isn’t fundamentally racist and isn’t yet profiting from those great crimes.
His bill, which he withdrew, would have prohibited the state’s public school teachers and professors from teaching that either the U.S. or Louisiana “is fundamentally, institutionally, or systemically racist or sexist.” That means his bill would have shielded Louisiana’s students from lessons about the murderous invasion of Native land, lessons about America’s 350-year history of slavery and Jim Crow and lessons about how that has shaped today. So Garofalo gets no benefit of the doubt.
Why shouldn’t his fellow lawmakers believe that his remark about the good of slavery was anything but a slip of the truth, especially when that argument remains a fairly common talking point among White southerners? Why should they doubt Garofalo thinks slavery had some benefits when he drafted a bill that would block teachers from pointing out that the U.S. government not only endorsed slavery but was enriched by slavery?
Read more: https://lailluminator.com/2021/04/30/ray-garofalo-wont-get-to-pass-his-shaky-grasp-of-history-down-to-louisianas-students/
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