A couple of comments on Florida’s new history standards. I use the word “standards” loosely, of course.
But first a tweet that I give my highest compliment. I wish I had written it.
Larry Sabato: “So far Ron DeSantis has run a failing campaign. But here’s the good news: DeSantis has developed skills which, in some instances, can be applied for his personal benefit.”
Brilliant!
O.k. Now a bit of background.
There has been a great deal of scholarship over the past, really half century, demonstrating how slaves pushed back against their masters. They engaged in work slowdowns, they stole food, they stole booze, they stole themselves, and, at times, they took up arms. And they worked very very hard to keep some semblance of family life under the most horrible of conditions.
And, perhaps most remarkably, they took the religion of their masters and created something remarkably new! A vital black church that has been the most important institution in black culture ever since. They stole away at night into the fields and forests to worship. Their brightest young men learned to read on the side so they could read the Bible. And they did this at the risk of their lives.
And they discovered in their masters’ Scriptures a God who was on the side of the slave, the poor, the persecuted, the downtrodden. In a sense they renewed Christianity, returned it to its original vision. They discovered a Moses who led slaves to freedom. They discovered a Jesus who spent his time with the likes of them. They discovered a gospel that was genuinely good news. For them. Not just for the powerful and privileged.
So, yes, it’s remarkable what African slaves achieved under the most horrible of conditions.
So now we come to the Florida “standard.” The standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Here’s the deal. Suppose California or New York had undergone a reassessment of their middle school curriculum, and this statement had been included in the new standards. We would be appalled, of course, but we would, at least initially, give them the benefit of the doubt. We would trust that in those states the folks who created the curriculum wanted to teach genuine history. Even more, we would trust that such folks really had their black students’ best interests at heart, that they wanted to teach them a history that empowered.
So, we would question the standard, and we would expect that there would be immediate apologies, questions of how such a statement got through committee, a rewording and refocus of the chapter on slavery.
And we’d move on.
The problem in Florida is that we do not give DeSantis and his crew the benefit of the doubt. And rightfully so. We have seen enough of them to know that they have no desire to teach genuine history. And they certainly do not have the best interests of their black students at heart. They have no desire to create a curriculum that empowers the state’s minorities. In fact, we have abundant evidence that the intent is to appeal to the dark heart of Florida’s aging whites, folks who believe that whites suffer under racism more than blacks, folks who want to be assured that they bear no responsibility for righting the wrongs of the past.
It’s the same way I think about what Netanyahu is doing in Israel. Some of the reforms limiting the power of the courts are actually quite appealing in our context. The problem is that we know damn well why Netanyahu is doing it. So, he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt that he’s genuinely interested in judicial reform. He simply wants to stay out of jail. And to hang onto power by appeasing his far-right religious allies.
And so, we find conservatives doing what they so often do. They find some small evidence pointing in the direction they prefer … hey, lookee here, a black blacksmith … and they give it prominence despite the overwhelming majority of the evidence pointing the other way.
They do the same thing with climate science. They find the one guy who thinks it’s a hoax and parade him around against the thousands of scientists with evidence pointing the other direction. They do the same thing with vaccines. With voter fraud. The Biden crime family. Etc. Etc. Etc.
And this is all before we get to the “standard” for high school students, who, we read, should learn about “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” during race massacres of the early 20th century. Justification requires only two letters. “B” and “y.” Whataboutism at its finest. They did it too.
Soon they’ll be arguing that of course white plantation owners had to keep their slaves in chains because otherwise they’d steal away, literally stealing property from their owners. I mean, you have to keep thieves locked up.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, the damn Ukrainians fought back. They’re killing people too. Make sure you get that into the history books.
Conservatives, even ones we didn’t care for, didn’t use to so obviously attempt to whitewash the sins of their past and present.
I’ll close with a speech George W. Bush gave to the NAACP in 2006.
My faith tells me that we’re all children of God, equally loved, equally cherished, equally entitled to the rights He grants us all.
For nearly 200 years, our nation failed the test of extending the blessings of liberty to African Americans. Slavery was legal for nearly a hundred years, and discrimination legal in many places for nearly a hundred years more. Taken together, the record placed a stain on America’s founding, a stain that we have not yet wiped clean.
When people talk about America’s founders they mention the likes of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Adams. Too often they ignore another group of founders — men and women and children who did not come to America of their free will, but in chains. These founders literally helped build our country. They chopped the wood, they built the homes, they tilled the fields, and they reaped the harvest. They raised children of others, even though their own children had been ripped away and sold to strangers. These founders were denied the most basic birthright, and that’s freedom.
Yet, through captivity and oppression, they kept the faith. They carved a great nation out of the wilderness, and later, their descendants led a people out of the wilderness of bigotry. Nearly 200 years into our history as a nation, America experienced a second founding: the Civil Rights movement. Some of those leaders are here. These second founders, led by the likes of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in the constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality. They trusted fellow Americans to join them in doing the right thing. They were leaders. They toppled Jim Crow through simple deeds: boarding a bus, walking along the road, showing up peacefully at courthouses or joining in prayer and song. Despite the sheriff’s dogs, and the jailer’s scorn, and the hangman’s noose, and the assassin’s bullets, they prevailed.
Now there’s a history we should all be able to get behind …