I know politics when I see it.

I also know stupid when I see it.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, in an overt and ridiculous bid to keep archconservatives in his fold, has signed a law that makes it illegal to teach about race in a way that will “make students feel guilt or shame” about their race because of historical events.

That is stupid.

Beyond the obvious fact that teachers can’t control how students feel and the difficulty in teaching about our society without mentioning ugly facts about race, it’s a very snowflake-like law passed by a bunch of politicians who would cringe at the label.

But wait; there’s more.  This bit of stupidity has more to it that the spectacle of right-wing law makers doing exactly what they have accused liberals of doing for years. It’s also dishonest, unhealthy and un-American — to say nothing of perhaps being unconstitutional.

One book publisher — either keen for a contract or possessed of a keen sense of humor — rewrote the story of Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama, without mentioning race.  The failed attempt is as laughable as it is an impossible approach to a central fact of the 20th century.

The civil rights movement — and our society’s response to it — was and remains a defining conflict over who we are and who we should be.

DeSantis and the Florida Legislature want to recast America’s racial struggles as something they were not and are not. He crows that he stands for “education, not indoctrination.” But that’s stupid, and it’s dishonest.

More than six centuries ago, observers of natural history, as science was called back then, used newfangled telescopes and sophisticated mathematics to determine that the Earth revolved around the sun and that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system.

The Catholic Church called that heresy. In the 1990s, the church finally and formally acknowledged that it had been wrong and Galileo had been right, but not before many years of punishing people who taught things that were contrary to its teachings.

The notion of academic freedom springs from that source, and has been held out as an important American value. In a 1967 opinion, the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan noted: “Our nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom as a transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.”

The aim of DeSantis and his ilk is not to protect impressionable little white children from being reminded that within the last 100 years, several hundred black people were lynched by white people in Florida and that his state has the dubious honor of having more lynchings per capita than any other state.

The purpose of the legislation is to rally conservative voters. It’s not to educate or protect anybody.

Truth must be painstakingly uncovered; and in the process, we sometimes learn that things we thought were true aren’t true after all. As much as Earth is not the center of the solar system, enslaved black people were not happy, hard-working field hands who were glad to have Massa’s kind largess.

The black-and-white news footage showing black children in Birmingham being mowed down by white men with firehoses depicts actual events. If it makes you wonder, “Why would people do such things?”, it should.

Easy truths are rarely true. Myth and ignorance are easy.

When I was a college girl, my campus held “Old South Week” every year, in which certain fraternity members and their girlfriends would don Confederate uniforms and hoop skirts, respectively. They thought it was good, clean fun, and were outraged one year when some black students appeared in rags and fake chains, crying, “Don’t beat me, Massa!”

Was it uncomfortable for the faux Confederate soldiers and their Southern belles? Sure. And it should have been.

Truth, learning and real education are about pushing your boundaries. They are not and cannot be about making people comfortable with their prejudices.

Throwing away dialogue on race, religion, economics, class, gender, sex and all those other things on which we disagree is a terrible disservice to society.

We can’t reconcile ourselves to the role of racial hatred in our society if we don’t talk about it. Should a state refuse to teach about the history of race — including lynching? No. Should a white kid be shamed for things that happened decades before he or she was born? Should black kids feel entitled to punish white kids — mentally or otherwise — for those misdeeds?

No.

What we should do, what we must do, is to learn the lessons of history — and understanding history is the key.

We can’t allow a bunch of goons like Ron DeSantis to take that away from us because they want a big turnout on Election Day. We’re better than that and, I pray to God, we’re smarter than that.

Offensive ideas are the ones most deserving of protection. If they hurt your or my feelings, so be it. We need to learn the truth — good or bad — and deal with it. It’s the only way we move forward.

The Earth is not the center of the universe, and neither is any one of us.  We can bear offensive lessons.

In fact, we won’t learn any other way.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.