Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday signed the ‘Stop WOKE’ act into law. The law, which allows parents to sue educators if their kids are being taught ‘Critical Race Theory’ in school, and employees to sue if they receive such training in the workplace, comes amid a high-profile showdown between DeSantis and Disney over LGBT issues.
“No one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race,” DeSantis said in a statement on Friday. “In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida.”
Under the law, teachers and employers who promote the idea that one race or sex is superior to another, that a person’s “moral character or status as privileged or oppressed is determined by race, color, national origin or sex,” or that anybody should be discriminated against to achieve “diversity, equity or inclusion,” would be participating in unlawful discrimination.
With its name an acronym for “Stop Wrongs to our Kids and Employees,” the law is aimed at the kind of teachings that have proliferated in American schools and corporate boardrooms in recent years. While Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a nebulous term that once described concepts only discussed in academia, its ideas – that race influences all human interactions and that the US is a “white supremacist” state founded on oppression – have been promulgated by teachers, corporate diversity consultants, and government-funded institutions.