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christopher columbus
Oklahoma Screening Teachers From California, New York for 'Radical Leftist Ideology'
"This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage," said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
Aug 20, 2025
Teachers from California and New York seeking work in Oklahoma will be required to pass an "America First Test" designed to weed out applicants espousing "radical leftist ideology," the state's public schools chief affirmed Monday.
Oklahoma—which has a severe teacher shortage, persistently high turnover, and some of the nation's worst educational outcomes—will compel prospective public school educators from the nation's two largest "blue" states to submit to the exam in a bid to combat what Superintendent for Public Instruction Ryan Walters calls "woke indoctrination."
"As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York," Walters said in a statement Monday.
Walters told USA Today that the test is necessary to vet teachers from states where educators "are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" and ensure they "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids."
However, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten warned in a statement Monday that "this MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage."
The exam will be administered by Prager University—also known as PragerU—a right-wing nonprofit group which, despite its name, is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
While all of the test's 50 questions have not been made public, the ones that have been published run the gamut from insultingly basic—such as, "What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?"—to ideologically fraught queries regarding the "biological differences between females and males."
PragerU's "educational" materials are rife with false or misleading information regarding slavery, racism, immigration, the history of fascism, and the climate emergency. Critics note that the nonprofit has received millions of dollars in funding from fossil fuel billionaires.
PragerU materials also promote creation mythology over scientific evolution and attack LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender individuals, calling lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare "barbaric" while likening its proponents to "monsters."
In one animated PragerU video, two children travel back in time to ask the genocidal explorer Christopher Columbus why he is so hated today. Columbus replies by asserting the superiority of Europeans over Indigenous "cannibals" and attempting to justify the enslavement of Native Americans by arguing that "being taken as a slave is better than being killed."
Closer to home, PragerU's curriculum aligns with so-called "white discomfort" legislation passed in Oklahoma and other Republican-controlled states that critics say prevents honest lessons on slavery, the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and enduring systemic racism.
The law has had a chilling effect on teachers' lessons on historical topics including the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white supremacist mob backed armed by city officials destroyed more than 35 city blocks of Greenwood, the "Black Wall Street," murdering hundreds of Black men, women, and children in what the US Justice Department this year called a "coordinated, military-style attack."
Responding to Oklahoma's new policy, University of Pennsylvania history professor Jonathan Zimmerman told The Associated Press that "instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system."
"There's no other way to describe it," he said, adding, "I think what we're now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers."
Oklahoma is not the only state incorporating PragerU materials into its curriculum. Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Texas have also done so to varying degrees.
Weingarten noted Walters' previous push to revise Oklahoma's curriculum standards to include baseless conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Walters also ordered all public schools to teach the Bible, a directive temporarily blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in March. The court also recently ruled against the establishment of the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school.
"His priority should be educating students, but instead, it's getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him," Weingrarten said in her statement.
Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, called the new testing requirement "a political stunt to grab attention" and a distraction "from real issues in Oklahoma."
"When political ideology plays into whether or not you can teach in any place, that might be a deterrent to quality educators attempting to get a job," she added. "We think it's intentional to make educators fearful and confused."
California Teachers' Association president David Goldberg told USA Today that "this almost seems like satire and so far removed from my research around what Oklahoma educators need and deserve."
"I can't see how this isn't some kind of hyper-political grandstanding that doesn't serve any of those needs," he added.
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Christopher Columbus: No Monuments for Murderers
The world is still sliced in two between the worthy — the owning classes, the corporate masters, the generals — and the nobodies. The invaded, the owned, the bombed, the poisoned, the silenced.
Oct 06, 2017
A New York Times article, following the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer, described the growing calls to remove monuments that celebrate the Confederacy. The article went on to cite some who balk, however, when "the symbolism is far murkier, like Christopher Columbus."
But there is nothing murky about Columbus' legacy of slavery and terrorism in the Americas. The record is clear and overwhelming. The fact that The New York Times could report this with such confidence -- adding that "most Americans learn rather innocently, in 1492 [Columbus] sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World" -- means that educators and activists still have much work to do.
In fact, Christopher Columbus launched the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1494, when he sent back at least two dozen enslaved Tainos, including children, to Spain. In February of that year, Columbus dispatched 12 of his 17 ships from the Caribbean back to Spain with a letter to be delivered to the king and queen by Antonio de Torres, captain of the returning fleet. Columbus wrote:
There are being sent in these ships some Cannibals, men and women, boys and girls, which Your Highnesses can order placed in charge of persons from whom they may be able better to learn the language while being employed in forms of service, gradually ordering that greater care be given them than to other slaves.
Here, as in so much of world history, violence and exploitation is sprinkled with a perfume of benevolence. Later in the letter, Columbus explains to the king and queen that his plans for colonizing the lands he has "discovered" could be financed by slavery:
These things could be paid for in slaves taken from among these cannibals, who are so wild and well built and with a good understanding of things that we think they will be finer than any other slaves once they are freed from their inhumanity, which they will lose as soon as they leave their own lands.
A year later, in February 1495, Columbus initiated massive slave raids, ordering his men to round up 1,600 Tainos and to bring the captives to La Isabela, on the island of Hispaniola (today's Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where the "best" 500 (some accounts say 550) men and women could be shipped to Spain. One of the colonists, Michele de Cuneo, was an eyewitness to these crimes. "Of the rest who were left," wrote Cuneo, "the announcement went around that whoever wanted them could take as many as he pleased; and this was done."
It's worth pausing to reflect on the terror the Tainos must have experienced being torn from home and families, and packed on ships bound for an uncertain destination -- that is, those who survived Columbus' slavery free-for-all. Where are the monuments to these first victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
Gold. That was the essence of Columbus' "enterprise" -- la empresa -- as he called it. Wrote Columbus: "Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever owns it is lord of all he wants. With gold it is even possible to open for souls the way to paradise." Later in 1495, to effect this gold lust, Columbus initiated the policy of forcing Tainos throughout Hispaniola to deliver tributes of gold every three months.
The Tainos resisted, of course, but were brutally suppressed by the Columbus regime. The Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas wrote that to quell the resistance, Columbus ordered his men to "spread terror among the Indians to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were." In sickening detail, Las Casas described some of what it meant for the Spaniards to "spread terror" among the Tainos:
Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians as daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying, "Go now, spread the news to your chiefs." They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs.
No, there is nothing murky about Columbus' record of cruelty in the Caribbean. One can read the horrific details even in the biography of Columbus written by his own son Ferdinand. What's murky are any remaining rationales for failing to topple monuments to this brutal exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, for keeping the Columbus Day holiday, or for failing to address a curriculum that, as The New York Times describes, allows children to learn that Columbus "sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World."
Twenty-five years ago, I wrote an article, "Once Upon a Genocide," reviewing the major children's literature about Columbus. My conclusion was that these books teach young readers that colonialism and racism are normal. Consistently, the books presented Columbus coming ashore on the lands he "discovered," planting a flag, claiming it in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and naming the island San Salvador -- erasing the rights and humanity of the original inhabitants. No book I reviewed at that time asked children to reflect on who or what gave Columbus the authority to take over other people's land. These picture books were literary monuments to white European domination, and to the subordination of non-white Others.
Through my work as curriculum editor with Rethinking Schools magazine, I have been in a number of elementary and middle schools over the past couple of years. Sadly, many of the same books I reviewed in the early 1990s still populate school libraries. The good news is that, these days, many more teachers approach the Columbus invasion from the standpoint of the Tainos. One needn't tell young children about people's hands being chopped off for them to realize that it is wrong for people to arrive at your home from far away, claim it as theirs, and demand you work for them.
In classrooms throughout the country, students are putting Columbus on trial -- along with the system of empire that animated his voyages. Instead of reading children's books and textbooks uncritically, teachers are asking students to read for the silences: What important information is missing, whose stories are not being told, whose lives are absent? In some schools, students are writing new children's books that tell a fuller, more accurate history of Columbus' arrival and the people who were here first. (Many of these activities are described at the Zinn Education Project, and in the book I co-edited, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years.)
And throughout the country, schools, school districts, and cities -- including Berkeley, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Albuquerque, and, most recently, Los Angeles -- have abandoned Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day.
Donald Trump may still -- for the moment -- be president, but he is not president of how we remember the past. Everywhere people of conscience are challenging the iconography of hate, exploitation, racism, and colonial domination. Slowly, we are toppling Confederate monuments -- and others celebrating more contemporary scoundrels like Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo.
When I lead workshops for educators critiquing how the traditional children's literature on Columbus celebrates white lives at the expense of people of color, how this literature endorses the bullying of little nations by big nations, how it teaches that there are two kinds of people in the world, the worthy and the unworthy, I end by asking participants: Why? Why is it that for such a long period of time these books have told a consistent story -- is there some publisher conspiracy to lie to children?
No doubt there are many possible explanations. But the one I find most compelling is that in fundamental ways, Columbus' world is not so different from the world we live in today. Big countries continue to dominate "lesser" nations. The quest for profit is still paramount. The world is still sliced in two between the worthy -- the owning classes, the corporate masters, the generals -- and those the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called los nadies -- the nobodies. The invaded, the owned, the bombed, the poisoned, the silenced.
So yes, let's pull down the monuments, let's make the holidays more inclusive, let's rewrite the textbooks and children's literature. But let's also challenge the fundamental structures of ownership, power, and privilege that have given us such a skewed constellation of heroes and holidays.
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As Cities Give Columbus the Boot, Indigenous Peoples Day Spreads Across US
'Knowing the facts of Columbus’s life, it seems astonishing that he is still treated with honor in many places.'
Oct 12, 2015
While the annual celebration of Christopher Columbus has fueled years of outrage, satire, and resistance, this year, an alternative holiday recognizing the original inhabitants of the United States appears to have reached the mainstream.
In the past two months alone, eight major municipalities--including Albuquerque, New Mexico; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; Bexar County, Texas; Anadarko, Oklahoma; Alpena, Michigan; Lawrence, Kansas; Carrboro, North Carolina; and Olympia, Washington--have opted to pay homage to the history and culture of the country's true native people by celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day on the second Monday in October. This wave follows recent moves in Seattle and Minneapolis, among others.
"For the Native community here, Indigenous Peoples Day means a lot," Nick Estes, who helped coordinate the city celebration after Albuquerque city council issued a declaration on the matter, told the Associated Press. "We actually have something. We understand it's just a proclamation, but at the same time, we also understand this is the beginning of something greater."
In Los Angeles on Sunday, native activists and supporters marched in protest of the holiday while a growing number of teachers are moving away from the traditional, Euro-centric curriculum on America's so-called "discovery."
The movement dates back to 1990 when South Dakota became the first state to address the controversy over Columbus Day when they renamed the holiday Native American Day. Two years later, Berkeley, California, introduced the first Indigenous Peoples Day. And while workers in 23 U.S. states enjoyed a paid day off in his honor, people across the country rallied online under the banner of #IndigenousPeoplesDay to call attention to the atrocities committed by and in the spirit of Christopher Columbus.
"Knowing the facts of Columbus's life, it seems astonishing that he is still treated with honor in many places," writer and film producer Bayard Johnson wrote in a column on Monday. "Was he elevated to hero status because nobody knew the real story about Columbus's inhumanity, his atrocities, his delusions, his failures? Or does history consider his crimes insignificant because his victims were mostly Indians?"
Detailing his many voyages and exploits, Johnson notes that while Columbus may not have "discovered the New World," he did lay the groundwork for generations of Europeans to "loot and plunder."
"He created a blueprint," Johnson continues. "Arrive uninvited. Pretend friendship. Take over. Enslave all natives who aren't slaughtered. Make money shipping slaves overseas. Keep some slaves to dig for gold and treasure. This happened again and again, following the protocol Columbus invented. This was the real discovery of Columbus--how Europe could pillage and get rich off the Americas and the rest of the world."
This legacy of colonialism, argues The Intercept's Jon Schwarz, has influenced everything from global trade deals to Israel's occupation of Palestine. "We shouldn't celebrate it," Schwarz writes. "But if we want to comprehend the world--and we should, since our lives depend on it--we have to understand it."
As Bill Bigelow, educator, curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools, and the co-director of the Zinn Education Project, wrote at Common Dreams last week, "If Indigenous peoples' lives mattered in our society, and if Black people's lives mattered in our society, it would be inconceivable that we would honor the father of the slave trade with a national holiday."
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