Two months after the Supreme Court issued a monumental decision to end affirmative action and ban any consideration of race in college admissions, people are still processing just what this all means, and many are left reeling from its repercussions.

Just yesterday, the threads of an increasingly heated discussion on this topic floated through my classroom door.

“Mrs. Perkins, why is it that you people get special privilege in college admissions?”

In our conservative corner of the country,“woke”culture has landed with a decided thud. Smaller towns and rural areas have, for the most part, been very outspoken in their rejection of “wokeness,” which Cambridge Dictionary defines as “being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made it his mission to fight back against the “liberal” ideology of woke culture. After having introduced the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act last year, things took a decided turn when DeSantis took off his gloves and threw down the gauntlet with his declaration that “freed African-Americans benefited from chattel slavery, claiming it would teach students that enslaved people ‘eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.’”