Slavery: Florida’s revisionist history
“Should American slavery be considered an unpaid internship?” asked the Tampa Bay Times in an editorial. “We wish we were kidding,” but that “absurd and offensive” narrative could soon be taught in Florida classrooms. The state’s board of education passed new guidelines last week for African-American history, which include instruction in “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Not surprisingly, the claim there were “upsides to being enslaved” caused an uproar, said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com. Gov. Ron DeSantis distanced himself from the new standards, saying he “wasn’t involved” in the curriculum’s creation. But he appointed the board members and signed a law last year that bans any lesson that triggers racial “guilt, anguish, or any form of psychological distress.” On an trip to Jacksonville, Vice President Kamala Harris accused Florida authorities of trying to “replace history with lies.”
It’s Harris who’s “brazenly lying,” said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. The “single reference to slaves developing skills,” which happens to be “correct,” appears within 216 pages of comprehensive guidelines on the slave trade, the brutal conditions captives faced, and the abolitionist movement. No honest person can say this curriculum “whitewashes slavery.” The backlash against the single “skills” phrase “seems overwrought,” said Kevin Drum in Jabberwocking, but the curriculum really is riddled with right-wing spin. It focuses on slaves in skilled trades, even though most did backbreaking field labor. It devotes a third of its instruction to white abolitionists, with no mention of how white slaveholders broke up families, raped Black women, and worked slaves so hard they had a life expectancy of 22. The lessons compare American slavery to slavery on other continents, so as to imply the South’s plantations were “not so bad, comparatively speaking.”
One of my great-great-grandfathers “was indeed compelled to learn to be a blacksmith,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. But he never derived any “personal benefit” from his work, and “he was sold like a piece of livestock at least twice.” By giving slavery the “both sides” treatment, this curriculum engages in “obscene revisionism.” It even characterizes post–Civil War massacres of freed Blacks as “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African-Americans.” Students taught this nonsense will get “very wrong impressions” about “a unique historical crime.”