Steve Hinnefeld lives in Indiana. He was taken aback recently to hear anti-maskers comparing themselves to leaders of the civil rights movement. He says we know just enough history to get it wrong.
He wrote:
Last week, the Bloomington Herald-Times reported on one of the many fights that have erupted over whether students should wear face coverings to limit the spread of COVID-19. A father told the reporter that he and his fifth-grade daughter were inspired by Rosa Parks to reject wearing masks…
Maybe we should be encouraged that a 10-year-old in a rural school district that’s 95% white would be inspired by the actions of a Black seamstress 65 years ago. The problem is, we’ve learned a mostly false story about Rosa Parks. She wasn’t a simple seamstress who refused to give up her seat on a bus because she was tired. She was a quiet but committed activist who served as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP and traveled to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee for interracial activism training, a radical act at that time.
Letting her arrest be used to challenge segregation was an act of profound courage. “The white folks will kill you, Rosa,” her husband told her. He no doubt meant it literally, and with good reason.
Parks wasn’t protesting the inconvenience or discomfort of wearing a mask in order to check the spread of a deadly disease. She was striking a blow against the Jim Crow segregation that had relegated her people to second-class citizenship for 80 years.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which Parks’ arrest sparked, lasted over a year and led to a Supreme Court decision that the city’s buses had to be integrated. It launched the activist career of Martin Luther King Jr., then a 26-year-old minister. Now everyone, it seems, wants to claim King as their own.
At a central Indiana school board meeting last week, an anti-mask parent said, “This is our Martin Luther King moment to say no,” a reporter tweeted. It wasn’t clear what he meant, but it seems unlikely King would have downplayed the seriousness of a virus that’s hit Black Americans especially hard.
At the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, King famously talked about his dream that someday his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Today, Republican legislators – in Texas and elsewhere – twist those words to try to prevent students from learning hard truths about America’s racial history, which they label “critical race theory.” They say that teaching about race is “divisive” and could make white children uncomfortable.
Hinnefeld points out that Dr. King was the most divisive and controversial people of his time. He made many people feel uncomfortable. If he had not, nothing would have changed. Frankly, it’s astonishing to hear enemies of public health compare themselves to courageous fighters for justice and equality.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, your last sentence speaks volumes:
“Frankly, it’s astonishing to hear enemies of public health compare themselves to courageous fighters for justice and equality.”
YES, it is more than astonishing. It’s frightening.
the really frightening part for me is that it feels so surreal: as if we are not in reality
The truth is only provocative when the lie is preferred. This works both ways. We are lying when we get astonished by this behavior. If you live in Indiana, which I do, this is not surprising. The provincial narrative that lacks diversity, nuance and complexity breeds simple, uncomplicated idiocy. Expect this to continue until we start teaching a more nuanced, complicated and messy version of everything. The discourse around masks, Covid, religion, race, etc… is so surface level, fear-based and driven by self-protection of a curated identity, and I think shock and dismay at human beings preservation of identity and self is unhelpful. It is predictable. Public education has built this Frankenstein, and I am glad that we are discussing its shortcomings, but shock and dismay seem like their own version of naivety, and that is not traditionally what I have seen on this blog.
If only public school education could deepen “the [predictable] discourse around masks, Covid, religion, race, etc” for those whose home/ local culture leans otherwise– but sure, that would be a start.
Meanwhile, I only learned of the backstory around Rosa Parks in the last year or two. I was just starting K12 when she chose to ride up front. It apparently took 40 yrs, but by the time my three were in elemsch, there was a raft of young-reader books about famous civil-rights-era figures– needless to say, cheerful & un-nuanced, so I was still none the wiser! 😉
I think this means someone on the extreme right that is involved in the propaganda machine that spews lies and misinformation designed to destroy the United States as a democracy and Constitutional Republic came up with the idea to hijack what the Civil rights movement was really about and turn it into another weapon designed to keep spreading chaos.
Causing chaos has been Traitor Trump’s biggest weapon for decades. Causing chaos is how he has managed his family crime empire.
To achieve their goals, these fascist Trumpish monsters are even willing to weaponize a pandemic that has already killed more than 600,000 Americans and caused many more to end up with long-Covid, living with permanent physical and mental health challenges for the rest of their lives.
What is their end goal? To cause the US to collapse as a country and when that happens Traitor Trump and his mob of mindless MAGA minions are planning to step in and take over.
Someone posted: we won the fight against racial discrimination under Martin Luther King. But Obama would not let it die so he could get elected. He divided the country.
The person who posted this was parroting one of the many lines churned out by authors who sit in conservative think tanks and craft messages that spin the world around us in their direction. In a way, Hennifield gives these people too much credit. They do not know any history. They are just repeating phrases they hear. In the think tanks, authors of these spin moves know they can sound like historians just by mentioning figures from history. These think tank spinners do know the real history of Rosa Parks. But they do not care. This is the use of history as a cudgel.
The right knows about Wilmington. They know about Tulsa. They have read Twain’s savage indictment of his country called “The United States of Lyncherdom” in which he chronicles thousands of terrorist acts that were a part of the rise of Jim Crow. They know red lining was real. And they know today’s problems as well. For whatever reason, they choose to attempt to suppress real history.
Mask opposition: The Civil Rights issue of our time, led by the new MLK : Mask-Less Killer
Weird how there’s so little commentary in ed reform about the disruption of public schools by the anti-mask, anti-vaccine activists.
I thought the objective was to get kids back in school and back to work?
I guess it doesn’t involve teachers unions so it’s not politically useful to the echo chamber.
Here’s an ed reformer hoping the public abandons public schools:
“Mounting evidence suggests that parents are becoming more likely not just to say they support school choice, but to actively choose an alternative to their local public school—at least the school their kids attended when the pandemic hit.”
They must be crushed that the public seems to disagree.
Over and over and over, people tell these “experts” they value public schools and would (pretty please!) prefer to keep a public system rather than pitching it in the trash and replacing it with a voucher over and over and over the experts insist they don’t value public schools.
Biden was partly elected on his support for public schools. Doesn’t matter. He must renege on his promise and immediately join the ed reform echo chamber in dismantling and privatizing public schools.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/third-disrupted-year-can-only-strain-americans-ties-traditional-public-schools
These anti-mask, anti-vaccine nut jobs would have been amongst the people who opposed and vilified Rosa Parks and MLK if they had been alive during that era. They would have accused Parks and MLK of being commies, commies, commies, commies, commies and Leninist-Marxists. If Parks and MLK were alive today, they would be accused of being socialists, commies and enemies of the USA by these anti-mask/vaxer terrorists.
The analogy makes perfect sense:
Rosa Parks refused to give up her Constitutional right to a seat on the bus to protest discrimination against African Americans.
Anti-maskers refuse to give up their Constitutional right to spread bugs to protest discrimination against antiscience nitwits.
For whatever reason, they choose to suppress an
inconvenient truth…
It’s the SYSTEM not the THRONE.
In what election, did money lose?
In what election, did the MIC lose?
In what election, did systemic racism stop?
In what election, did women become equal, as far
as pay and say?
In what election, did Public Education become
the superior, unconstrained to do “right”.
In what election, did the APPOINTED throne
members, yeild to the “Will of the People”?
In what election, did the “Greatest Number”
encounter the “Greatest Good”?
In what election, did cultural standing,
based on the history of the victors, end?
In what election, did blaming the “right wing”
change the “system”, that seems to render the
“left wing” impotent, no matter what?
Anecdotal observations of the nature of political discourse in our country certainly leads me to the conclusion that much of the effectiveness of disinformation, from taking horse dewormer for covid to the dangers of Critical Race Theory, is the result of education priorities that focus on the process of reading and basic math skills over critical thinking about actual content. Paul Krugman addresses this in his recent piece in The NY Times called “The Buying of the American Mind”. To Krugman, the “snake oil salesmen” who hawk their wares on right wing media, along with the pundits who profit from theses sales, find fertile soil in the populations who have the least academic attainment. When the school establishment decided, particularly at the elementary level, that it was more important to spend all day on unrelated blind reading passages and letter sounds for most of the school day, then this increased later susceptibility for students who had little exposure to critical thinking. The curricular shrinkage that we have experienced due to the standards movement and efforts such as the Common Core have resulted in a 30 year shrinking of the American Mind.
“Contrary to research early in the pandemic, children are just as likely to become infected as adults [are].” –Lede to today’s CNN story on the current surge in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from Covid-19 among children.