‘Uncertainty and chaos’: UF faculty discuss DeSantis policies at Black studies conference

When the NAACP issued a travel ban for the state of Florida, several organizations relocated their annual conferences.

The National Society of Black Engineers did. Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity did, too. So did the the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, the National Organization of Black County Officials and AnitaB.org.

Each organization cited the same reason —policies championed by Republican presidential nominee hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis. But one decided to come to Jacksonville: the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. They are in town for their annual conference that offers a series of author events, round table discussions, seminars and community forums. Started in 1915 by the father of Black history, Carter G. Woodson, ASALH specifically came to Florida to show “that we will follow our mission to promote the study of African American life and history and to demonstrate that we will not be intimidated by the policies of Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature,” ASALH president W. Marvin Dulaney said in a statement.

“ASALH choosing to come here and choosing to do things like the banned book reading is really the backing that folks here need to have,” University of Florida Africana Studies Professor Drew Brown said Friday at an ASALH session entitled A State of Censorship: University of Florida African American Studies Roundtable. “There’s not enough people here to challenge the amount of bans and the amount of things that are going on every single week it seems. There’s going to need to be some support from outside the state.”

The conference — which runs from Sept. 19 -24 and attracts educators from across the country — comes as Florida’s Republican leadership continues to wage war against teaching about racial issues and racism at the K-12 and higher education levels. Less than a month earlier, a racist gunman with swastikas etched on his assault rifle killed three Black people at a Dollar General just miles away from conference’s hotel, an action that some attribute to DeSantis creating an atmosphere where racists feel emboldened. The incident was often referenced by presenters and attendees Friday at two sessions where UF professors and alumni discussed how attempts to influence teaching about race have affected Florida’s flagship university.

“We are operating under a lot of scrutiny and uncertainty and chaos,” UF Professor Riché Barnes said at the “A State of Censorship” session that also featured African American Studies Program Director David Canton. “And I think the chaos is the part that is most frustrating because it takes you away from the work that you’re there to be doing. It takes you away from developing your courses. It takes you away from working with your students. It takes you away from your research because you’re concerned with what’s coming down the pike next.”

At a subsequent session entitled “Challenging Racism at the University of Florida during the ‘Stop WOKE’ Era,” a collection of former and current students who worked with UF’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, a social justice research center committed to documenting the past, explored how discovering parts of the institution’s history with regards to racism has shaped their current thinking.

“How do we resist these hateful ideologies and individuals? How do we help others resist?” said Robert Smalls, a student assistant at SPOHP. “We resist them by challenging racism. We make racists uncomfortable. We confront the public with facts, statistics, sources and inquiries that will allow them to have a proper intellectual ammunition to fight back against those who seek to proliferate hateful ideology, those who wrongfully engage in hateful ideology and those who profit politically and economically from making racists feel comfortable.”

The UF faculty focused more on the importance of African American Studies and the difficulties of teaching under new laws that allow for arbitrary tenure reviews and bans to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

African American Studies serves as not just a “a critique of western civilization” but also a way for Black Americans to highlight their own stories and contributions to society, Canton said. Florida’s initial rejection of the AP African American Studies course, however, has “a chilling effect” that scares away prospective students from his program. “With that course being off the books, it hurts our major because we saw that as a spring board for being introduced to that course, get a college credit and come join our major.”

“In the class room, I’ve always used the books and the concepts to speak,” Brown said, emphasizing that he’s “not just speaking from opinion in class.” He’s even more cautious now to “lean on the books, lean on the concept. I can’t let that slip because someone might be in class and go and tell on you. And from the way things are going, I could be fired for those things as someone who’s not tenured yet especially.”

Brown’s mention of tenure is especially relevant considering University of Florida doesn’t have an African American Studies department. It has an African American Studies major. It has an African American Studies minor. It has an African American Studies program, the difference being a department would allow the discipline’s leadership to hire its own faculty, grant tenure and offer a graduate degree.

‘In order to rectify the past, we have to address it’

The SPOHP representatives, however, dove deep into the history of Gainesville and UF in order to illustrate, as program director Adolfho Romero put it, how “the past repeats itself.” Old news clippings from the Gainesville Sun that poorly portrayed Black Americans and praised the Ku Klux Klan were plastered on poster boards throughout the conference room, further emphasizing Romero’s point that “racism at UF originated at the institution’s founding.”

“In order to rectify the past,” he added, “we have to address it.”

Romero provided several examples of UF’s racist past. He talked about the Buckman Act of 1905, which established UF as a higher education institution specifically for white men. He talked about how eugenics used to be taught at UF. He even talked about the murder of Anthony Goins, a child of Black washerwoman who a UF student fatally shot on campus without consequence.

“There’s so much African American history that I only learned through SPOHP,” added Ronan Hart, a student assistant at SPOHP who’s currently pursuing his master’s at UF. Educators are worried about being fired for linking that history to anti-racism ideals which ultimately shows “the state wields a lot of power.”

That power will be tested in the coming months amid growing resistance to DeSantis’ policies. But Brown issued a warning to everyone who thought the restrictions of Black history lessons — or instruction about the “benefits” of slavery as laid out in Florida’s new Black history standards — is just a Florida issue.

“This is not just going to stop in the state of Florida,” said Brown, who listed Arkansas and New Jersey as states already following Florida’s lead. “If people think they can just avoid Florida and it’s not going to hit them, they are sadly mistaken.”