Does Ron DeSantis Really Want Florida Schools Teaching Slavery Was Cool?
Is there no end to the dishonesty of the American media? Some gate they will not crash? Some falsehood they are unwilling to mouth? Judging by this recent headline from USA Oh, So Yesterday (as I prefer to call the rag), perhaps not: “College Board rejects Florida stance that slavery was beneficial for African-Americans.”
It sounds as if the State of Florida, led by presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence!) intends to teach children that slavery was a positive experience for black folks. Indeed, google “Florida slavery” and you’ll find articles implying that not only in the Washington Post but even in the more conservative New York Post.
America’s newspapers clearly want us to believe that Florida children are being taught that like granola and blueberries, chains and whips are good for the system. You know. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger! So now, when many American voters hear the name DeSantis, they think “racist.”
Cherry-Picked “Racism”
If you’ve bought that story for a second, you should be ashamed of being so gullible. The claim that Florida wants to teach children slavery was beneficial is a shameless lie. Nevertheless USA Today wrote, “We resolutely disagree with the notion that enslavement was in any way a beneficial, productive, or useful experience for African Americans. Unequivocally, slavery was an atrocity that cannot be justified by examples of African Americans’ agency and resistance during their enslavement.”
I don’t know who it is that they so “resolutely disagree with.” No one is trying to justify slavery, or denies that it is an atrocity. Here is a detailed analysis of what Florida is actually proposing to teach. Read it and you’ll see it’s a strong and searching light cast upon the evils as well of this shameful aspect of America’s past. It includes so much information, my main concern as a teacher would be, “How could I teach kids a quarter of this stuff?”
Critics combed through this exhaustive curriculum and culled out one sentence they could misrepresent to portray Ron DeSantis as a “racist” and apologist for slavery. (Even though Kamala Harris praised the same essential lessons taught by the College Board.) Here is that cherry-picked sentence:
“Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
It Simply Isn’t True
Everyone in Florida, including its governor, agrees that slavery was an “atrocity.” The idea that anyone on the contemporary political scene would try to justify it is ridiculous on the face of it.
A few Muslim countries, tutored by the slave-trader Mohammed, haven’t caught on to slavery’s evils yet. Neither have the dark corners of the sex industry. Otherwise, for reasons that trace directly to the gospel of Jesus Christ, the entire world has come to realize that the ancient and once nearly-universal institution of slavery is quite simply wrong.
And no one claims the experience as a whole was “productive” or “beneficial.” To put those words in the mouths of educators in Florida was an even more threadbare lie than the claim that an earlier law banned use of the word “gay” in Florida schools.
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Florida simply proposes to do what the College Board’s Advanced Placement course was already doing: noting that despite the horrors of slavery, some slaves learned marketable skills. And that single supposedly controversial sentence, out of hundreds in a balanced curriculum, has the inconvenient character of being historically accurate.
High school students are commonly assigned to read Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography. Douglass tells how he was hired to waterproof ships in Baltimore. He kept some of the money, paying set fees to his master, Hugh Auld. Douglass found his work as a caulker good preparation for his escape from slavery: “My knowledge of ships and sailor’s talk came much to my assistance, for I knew a ship from stem to stern, and from keelson to cross-trees, and could talk sailor like an old salt.”
Simplistic Notions of the Left
Slavery is evil, no question, yet it does not follow that all slave owners were self-harming fools. For their own interest, even the worst masters would want their slaves to learn a thing or two. For self-centered reasons they also limited that learning, allowing few slaves to learn to read, for instance.
As a history teacher, I am put off by the demand that we treat the past as a cartoon with all the bad guys with black hats stuck on permanently with Gorilla glue, and good guys (or victims) always wearing white hats.
Our media and politicians prefer we teach our children a “narrative” with no twists or turns, a steady drumbeat of ideology to make them foot-soldiers in a zombie revolution of the brain-washed. Life is complex, though, and the narrative is false. If former slaves like Douglass and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (“bless you, prison, for being in my life!”) could testify to that, who are we to argue?
Yet even Tim Scott seemed to buy the slander against Governor DeSantis. Yes, I understand some conservatives worry that arguing this point is a loser, but I disagree. We should push back, and push hard and persuasively, for at least six reasons.
Six Reasons to Push Back
- The left can and will play this game of “Tag: you’re a racist!” all century long if we let them. Race-baiting is practically the only sport they are good at. (Again, I refer you to my Letter to a “Racist” Nation.) It’s the modern version of “The Jews poisoned the wells!” or “Witches caused the crops to fail!” It is time to stand up and say, “Enough!” past timidity in pushing back against such slanders has only led to more lies, culminating in Cancel Culture and the BLM riots.
- As the African-American linguist John McWhorter shows, such paranoid rhetoric encourages bright young African American kids to see themselves as victims, and undermines their prospects.
- It hurts the nation as a whole, in part by keeping too many Blacks on the Democratic plantation. Conservative policies would actually help them, on the whole.
- It’s a missed strategic opportunity. Make the left’s dishonesty and political manipulation the issue, and conservatives can win. Who wants to be played over and over again? How many “racist incidents” must be exposed as hoaxes before you tire of the lies? Have you noticed who they’re aiming these lies at? Their whole strategy depends on trying to make fools of African Americans. And they call conservatives racist?
- What about honest history teachers? Should we be forced to teach a simple-minded stick-figure version of the past, an actually racist version in which slaves were too stupid to learn anything to their own benefit?
- And why teach kids to be dullards? American should learn to be more thoughtful than to ascribe racism to anything that moves. We should be teaching how to hold two conflicting thoughts in mind at once. (Of course, slavery is bad. Obviously slaves occasionally learned stuff.) Free them from that occult pandemic, “dog-whistle racism!“
Real Life vs. the Simplistic Left
Whenever the national media mentions race, they are probably lying. (I wish we could teach that in schools!) It happens so often, we should all take it as our duty to check the facts for ourselves.
Every generation, every race, and every person is subject to the temptation to scapegoat others to excuse their own wrong-doing. The left wants us to think the line between good and evil cuts between themselves and the “racist” right. That’s too simplistic to be real. They need to learn what Alexander Solzhenitsyn discovered in the gulag. That line passes not between races or genders or political parties, but through every human heart.
David Marshall, an educator and writer, has a doctoral degree in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.
