White Supremacy is Now Enshrined in Florida Public Education
No two ways about it
The Florida Board of Education approved a new set of standards for how history should be taught in the state’s public schools. The new standards were needed to align with Gov. Ron Desantis’s anti-woke legislation that bars any lessons that might suggest that anyone is privileged or oppressed based on their race or skin color. Never mind whether it is true or not, the law prohibits acknowledging the fact of racism in America. That includes even slavery and massacres of innocent black Americans.
According to the proposed curriculum, black people benefited from being enslaved. Middle school kids will now be taught that kindly white slave owners were doing African people a favor by enslaving them. Specifically, history classes will claim that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Is picking cotton for twelve hours a day until their fingers bleed a useful skill that slaves could apply for their personal benefit? Maybe, if “personal benefit” includes avoiding beatings from those kindly white slave owners.
The idea that black people were not harmed by being enslaved is racist enough, but even more offensive is the assumption that the people of 18th-century Africa had no skills — as if they were wild animals in need of domestication.
But let’s not be too hasty. Maybe there is some truth to the claim. In response to criticisms, the Florida Department of Education offered up sixteen examples of black Americans who supposedly benefited from being treated as property. But in doing so they only demonstrated their ignorance of history. I suppose they didn’t think their examples would be fact-checked.
Turns out that almost half of the examples they cite were never slaves at all. They also erred in many of the professions they assigned to these names. For example, the department lists James Forten as a shoemaker born into slavery who escaped in 1784 when he was eight years old and Lewis Latimer as a blacksmith who was freed from bondage in 1852, when he was only four years old. The Florida Department of Education wants us to believe that these men should be thankful to their white slave owners. Without slavery, they would not have had such successful careers.
But Forten was born to free parents. And he worked as a sailmaker, not a shoemaker. (Oh, well. Sounds similar enough.) Latimer was born to former self-liberated slaves and was an inventor. Other examples, such as Booker T. Washington, were enslaved as children but did not acquire any useful skills until after being liberated.
It seems that the Florida Department of Education simply assumed that black people could not possibly acquire useful skills on their own. So, they must have been trained by their benevolent white owners. That sounds more like white supremacist ideology than history.
But wait. It gets worse. When Florida public school students get to high school, they learn about various massacres in which armed white mobs attacked black neighborhoods, massacring residents and torching their houses. One of these events, the 1920 Ocoee massacre, happen to take place in Florida. It all started when a black man showed up to vote and was turned away by poll workers. When he returned later to exercise his voting rights, an angry white mob of about 250 chased him back to his black neighborhood, lynched his business partner, burned twenty-two homes and two churches, and killed somewhere between thirty and fifty-five innocent black people.
Now, under the new curriculum, lessons about these sorts of events must include “acts of violence perpetrated… by African Americans.” In other words, students are to be taught that the victims of these massacres somehow deserved it. I wonder what are students going to learn about Emmitt Till, the black teenager who in 1955 was beaten, tortured, and lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman? I suppose teachers will be expected to say that was disrespectful, and so he had it coming.
Alex Lanfranconi, director of communications for the Florida Department of Education, defended the new curriculum. Here is what he said.
It’s sad to see critics attempt to discredit what any unbiased observer would conclude to be in-depth and comprehensive African American History standards.
That might be one of the stupidest things I have heard in a long time. Lanfranconi seems to suggest that if I am opposed to teaching children that slavery was good for those enslaved, then it could only be because I am biased. Biased against what? Against slavery? To be “biased” means to have a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or facts. But there are many good reasons to oppose slavery. If chattel slavery is not unjust, then nothing is.
When reading about the Florida Board of Education’s new proposal on black history, I was reminded of the words of Abraham Lincoln.
Whenever I hear anyone, arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
I propose that members of the Florida Board of Education, along with Governor Desantis and the Florida legislators who voted for his anti-woke legislation, should all be enslaved themselves, under the same conditions as Africans were in antebellum America. Since they claim that slavery was not so bad, they would have no grounds on which to complain.
What about developing skills that could be applied for their personal benefit? Oh, I think they would definitely learn a thing or two.
