DeSantis needs an American history lesson
Gov. Ron DeSantis went on a tear last week against allowing “critical race theory” in schools.
He called it “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.”
He’s wrong. What he makes sound terrible is simply an honest approach to American history.
As explained in an American Bar Association publication three months ago, critical race theory is not at all sinister. It looks at how racism “perpetuates a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom caste,” and how its legacy affects Blacks, Asians and other minorities in America today.
In other words, it’s about the whole truth, including slavery, rather than some sanitized version. This is a truth that can set an entire nation free. But to overcome the past, we have to know how it led to the present.
Suppose the year is 1830 and your family’s prosperity depends on owning and exploiting other human beings as if they were plow mules. They have no rights even to their children, whose birth enhances your wealth.
How does a “good person” rationalize that even to oneself ?
You say, as the slaveowners did, that God approved slavery and destined Blacks for inferiority. That they are fit for no better. That, as Thomas Jefferson explained to a visiting Englishman, they were “made to carry burthens.” In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he wrote that his Black slaves were “inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination.” To free them would be like “abandoning children,” he wrote in a 1789 letter.
“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically,” Robert E. Lee wrote five years before choosing to fight for slavery.
“To be a slaveholder meant one had to believe that the worst white man was better than the best black man. If you did not believe these things, you could not justify yourself to yourself,” wrote the historian Stephen Ambrose in the November 2002 Smithsonian Magazine.
The racism of white supremacy was the pretext for the moral cancer of slavery and endures in America. Concocted out of ancient myths of Anglo-Saxon and Aryan superiority, racism was the foundation of a caste system and countless laws and regulations.
That caste system persists, as the news reminds us almost daily. Its pernicious legacy includes the indifference, even if unconscious, that condemns Blacks to lower life expectancies and higher mortality from COVID-19. It is a Black man dying with a white policeman’s knee on his neck. It is the racial segregation of neighborhoods and schools owing to redlining practiced by banks and government agencies. It is the cycles of poverty begun when Southern politicians swindled Black farmers out of their land with confiscatory taxes, when white trade unions denied membership to Black workers, and when the original Social Security law excluded farm and domestic labor.
It is the criminalization of race with mandatory minimum sentences, draconian drug laws and unchecked prosecutorial discretion. It is Republican legislators in 45 states designing voter suppression bills with “almost surgical precision” against Black voters, as a court described one of North Carolina’s.
It is the history of Jim Crow and secondclass citizenship that persisted for a century after the South lost the Civil War but won the peace, and in more than 4,000 lynchings, mostly of Blacks.
It is the forgotten history of white riots such as the ones that obliterated the Florida settlement of Rosewood, left as many as 60 dead in the Orange County town of Ocoee and destroyed 35 square blocks of Tulsa, Oklahoma, 100 years ago, leaving hundreds dead.
It is always bad news when a politician undertakes to politicize the curriculum, as by a current attempt in the Florida Legislature to revive the “Americanism vs. Communism” course requirement that made our state an academic laughingstock until it was shelved some years ago.
As is his custom, DeSantis is echoing the culture war tropes of his mentor Donald Trump, whose “1776 Report” was a clumsy attempt at rewriting history to counter the Black Lives Matter movement and steer American schools away from referencing the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”
The newspaper’s project was a comprehensive account of the origins and effects of racism in America. The title refers to the arrival of the first African slaves at Jamestown, 12 years after the political history of our nation began with the English settlement there. Legal slavery persisted for 246 years, longer than the nation has been without it.
Nine presidents owned slaves; only George Washington freed his. Slave labor went into the Capitol and the White House. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence did not really believe that all men are created equal. But if taught in proper context, those facts can help school children learn how even great people can do bad things and should be judged by the totality of their lives.
As Ambrose wrote, “Few of us escape our times and places.”
How can we properly honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., without fully understanding what he gave his life to fight? How can we appreciate the right to vote without knowing why John Lewis suffered a skull fracture at Selma? How can we make the cases for criminal justice reform and better policing without realizing that the needs were evident long, long before George Floyd died in Minneapolis? We can’t break the cycles of poverty without knowing what created and sustains them.
Knowing history does not mean erasing it, like the San Francisco Board of Education did in voting to strike famous names, including Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, from 44 of its schools. That is as extreme as anything Trump and DeSantis have advocated. The board blames Lincoln for allowing 38 Native Americans to be hanged for attacking whites, never mind that he spared more than 200 on account of weak evidence. He also saved the Union and destroyed slavery. More than any other man of his time, Washington built the nation and pioneered a responsible presidency. Feinstein’s “crime” is as trivial as allowing a vandalized Confederate flag to be replaced while she was mayor long ago.
Monuments to people who built and saved our nation deserve to endure, unlike those of Confederates who tried to destroy it. That is a critical difference.
That is why American history, properly and fully taught, is a service to the nation and is patriotism in the fullest sense.