USA Today published an opinion piece by the National Education Association’s president attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis for pushing back (successfully) against the College Board’s hard-left AP African American studies curriculum. Aside from myriad factual errors, the piece is notable for treating whites as some monolithic group comprised of identically rich, powerful people. The opposite is true.

Pringle’s essay, entitled “Black history is American history. DeSantis is stealing our students' freedom to learn it,” paints America’s racial history with a broad brush. She specifically makes the common mistake of treating the “white” racial category as a homogeneous monolith. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jewish-, Irish-, and Italian-Americans, along with several other “white” ethnicities, have a much different experience with respect to “privilege” than the archetypical white, Protestant, gentry founders our government enjoyed.

“Progressives” like Ms. Pringle apparently view all “whites” as having been born into a kind of country-club level of entitlement. An example of this viewpoint is a 1980s Saturday Night Live sketch in which Eddie Murphy disguises himself as a “white” man to experience life from that perspective. The sketch, “White Like Me,” presents a hyper-exaggerated view of so-called “white privilege” where Murphy is offered a free newspaper, free bus fare, and free champagne on the bus after the last black person leaves, simply because he’s perceived as being a ‘white’ man.

Ms. Pringle states that “we must learn about our nation’s sins.” Unfortunately, it seems that Pringle’s fellow-thinkers are only concerned with certain sins that advance their political agenda.

For example, I’m partly Italian-American (as is Gov. DeSantis) but, when I was in high school, I was never taught about the 1891 lynching of Italian-Americans in New Orleans. And that was only one of many times Italians were lynched, mostly in the South. (Other groups that the EEOC officially classifies as ethnic “whites,” such as Jewish Americans, Irish Catholic Americans, and southern Europeans, suffered similar violence in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) Regrettably, we Italian-Americans continue to be assaulted routinely with organized crime and Mafia depictions in the popular culture and media.

Image: Italian family at Ellis Island, 1905. Public domain.

I believe that these omissions about the way in which America has sometimes had difficulty accepting “white” cultural and ethnic groups may have been deliberate, furthering a political agenda advancing affirmative action. If the rationale for affirmative action programs is to “make up for past discrimination,” I submit that students would be less likely to support it if they knew that their ancestors were also subjected to racist violence at the hands of the KKK and other groups. In addition, restrictive deed covenants once forbade the selling of certain real estate properties to Jews, Catholics, Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans, and other groups which today are classified as “white” by the EEOC.

It’s a shame that educators such as NEA President Pringle would rather have a blame-game monologue on race and affirmative action (masquerading as “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) rather than an intellectually honest dialogue. But that doesn’t serve progressive goals, which of necessity, tell only part of the story that supports their position.

Progressives routinely ignore any inconvenient historical facts that are persuasive reasons against using race, gender, or anything other than merit, in college admissions, employment, or any other institutional decisions affecting an individual’s life and livelihood. Therefore, I applaud Gov. DeSantis for taking this stand.

Michael A. Bertolone, MS, of Rochester NY, is a freelance writer focusing on workplace issues. His eBook The War on Equality: How Equity is Destroying Our Society is available on Amazon.