Heads up— Florida Scoured Math Textbooks for ‘Prohibited Topics.’ Next Up: Social Studies.

• Grandmaster : Revolution? How did this happen?
• Topaz : Don’t know. But the Arena’s mainframe for the Obedience Disks have been deactivated and the slaves have armed themselves.
• Grandmaster : Ohhh! I don’t like that word!
• Topaz : Mainframe?
• Grandmaster : No. Why would I not like “mainframe?” No, the “S” word!
• Topaz : Sorry, the “prisoners with jobs” have armed themselves.
• Grandmaster : Okay, that’s better.

Because state approval can be lucrative, publishers have often quietly catered to the biggest markets, adjusting content for their local needs and political leanings.

Florida — along with California and Texas — is a major market for school textbook publishing, a $4.8 billion industry….

And in a sign of how fraught the political landscape has become, one publisher created multiple versions of its social studies material, softening or eliminating references to race — even in the story of Rosa Parks — as it sought to gain approval in Florida.

In the current lesson on Rosa Parks, segregation is clearly explained: “The law said African Americans had to give up their seats on the bus if a white person wanted to sit down.”

But in the initial version created for the textbook review, race is mentioned indirectly.

“She was told to move to a different seat because of the color of her skin,” the lesson said….

Studies Weekly made similar changes to a fourth-grade lesson about segregation laws that arose after the Civil War.

In the initial version for the textbook review, the text routinely refers to African Americans, explaining how they were affected by the laws. The second version eliminates nearly all direct mentions of race, saying that it was illegal for “men of certain groups” to be unemployed and that “certain groups of people” were prevented from serving on a jury.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/florida-textbooks-african-american-history.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Men, women and children of a certain group were kidnapped from a certain continent and transported to a certain country where they labored in perpetuity—and for free!—for certain unnamed people while subject to sexual abuse, torture and the arbitrary sale of family members. For two and a half centuries.