Sorting Out the Florida Teaching-About-Slavery Mess
Distortions and dumbness on both sides.
LETāS START WITH THE OBVIOUS: Slavery is not a āboth sidesā or a āyes, butā question. While one may debate specific issuesāwas it an integral part of the American founding or a pernicious legacy of the British colonial system?ānone of that changes the fundamental fact: The ownership and trafficking of human beings was an atrocity, a stain on a country that proclaimed liberty to be its foundational principle.
On the other hand, the flap over the newly approved Florida school standards for the teaching of African-American history is a āboth sidesā story, and one in which neither side looks very good. Not only the left but mainstream liberalsāincluding major media outlets and Vice President Kamala Harrisājoined in a frenzy of denunciations over a line very misleadingly summarized as a claim that āenslaved people benefited from slaveryā because some of them learned useful work skills. But while the Florida curriculum doesnāt say that, or suggest that American slavery was not so bad, it does have very real problems. Whatās more, Harrisās essentially false and inflammatory accusation was matched by an incredibly ham-fisted response from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and an apparent major stumble by the standardsā principal authors.
Add to this a lot of all-around self-beclownment in the media, and itās āThe Culture Wars Make Everyone (and Everything) Dumber,ā Chapter Eleventy-Thousand Eleven.
SO WHAT DOES Floridaās new African-American history curriculum, approved by the state board of education on July 19 as part of a larger set of social studies curricular standards, actually say? (While some commentators have claimed that the disputed line has been picked out of 216 pages of text, this is the length of the entire document, including dual listings of the same items; the African-American history strand per se is about 20 pages.) Read in its entirety, this curriculum certainly doesnāt suggest slavery apologia. Some of the material that compellingly exposes racial oppression in American history may not be immediately apparent because it hides behind the dry names of laws and codes. For instance, a high school unit on the development of labor systems in colonial America has a āclarificationā noting, āInstruction includes the Virginia Code Regarding Slaves and Servants (1705).ā This code (actually named āAn act concerning Servants and Slavesā) makes starkly clear the establishment of an oppressive racial hierarchy: Indentured servants, nearly always white, have certain rights and protections as well as the prospect of eventual freedom; slaves, nearly always black, are stripped of all rights. Even the killing of a slave by a master has no consequences if itās blamed on the slave resisting ācorrection.ā
Another new curriculum unit, which focuses on āhow conditions for Africans changed in colonial North America from 1619-1776,ā includes āclarificationsā that the lessons must include the development of slave codes and āhow slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights.ā Several units focus on slave revolts and how āslave codes were strengthened in response to Africansā resistance to slavery.ā There are also discussions of the passage from Africa, of āharsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations,ā of how the Founding-era legislation and the Constitution dealt with slavery, and of nineteenth-century efforts to aid fugitives from slavery and the Southās attempts to stop these efforts. Several units focus on abolitionist narratives by former slaves, including Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglassānarratives from which no sane person could come away with the impression that there was anything benevolent about American slavery. (Sojourner Truth endured brutal beatings and rapes before she gained her freedom.)
So whatās that controversial lineāa āclarificationā requiring students to be taught about āhow slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefitāādoing in there?
It is clear that the intent of the unit in which the disputed line appears is to show the wide range of jobs performed by slaves, countering the common assumption that they were all either field hands or domestic servants. Such information is already commonly found in educational texts. The āpersonal benefitā line is presumably intended to convey that sometimes slaves also managed to use those skills for themselves: to earn a living if they gained their freedom, or even, on occasion, to free themselves. Enslaved skilled workers hired out by their owners were sometimes able to keep and save enough of their earnings to buy their freedom. While some left-leaning polemicists in the brouhaha over the Florida standards dismissed this scenario as a fantasy, it did happenāalbeit rarely, and despite formidable obstacles (more on that below).
According to a statement from two members of Floridaās all-volunteer African American History Standards WorkgroupāMichigan State University professor emeritus and former U.S. Civil Rights Commission chairman William B. Allen and lawyer/author Frances Presley Riceāthe āclarificationā is intended to underscore the āstrength, courage and resiliencyā of African Americans rather than āreduce slaves to just victim of oppression.ā Or, to put it differently, itās a way to emphasize the agency of the enslaved, the standard perspective in progressive scholarship in recent decades.
Incorporating such a framework into lessons for kids can be dicey: one has to walk a fine line between presenting slaves as just victims and implying that slavery wasnāt so bad.
Arguably, the passage in the Florida curriculum was clumsily worded. But to render it as āslaves could benefit from being enslavedā or āslavery helped slaves develop useful skillsā is an extremely tendentious reading, or even misreading: the reference is to benefiting from skills, not from slavery. (If an article says that some cancer survivors have had their lives enriched by the interests and hobbies they developed as a coping strategy during treatment, thatās not tantamount to saying that cancer enriched their lives.) Surely, the more plausible meaning is that some slaves used their resourcefulness, talent, and tenacity to make the best of a terrible, oppressive situation.
The remarkable life of abolitionist and author Moses Grandy illustrates this point. Born into slavery around 1786, he was hired out starting at the age of 10 to employers who would sometimes beat him and half-starve him. Nevertheless, Grandy managed to become a highly skilled boat navigator and eventually a captain and was able to keep a portion of his earnings. He started saving money, having been promised his freedom for $600 (about $15,000 in todayās currency)ābut after the final installment was paid, the slaveholder simply pocketed the money and reneged on his promise. (The slaveholderās sister and brother-in-law went to court to force him to honor the agreement, but their efforts were futile.) Sold to someone else, Grandy negotiated the same deal, only to be cheated again. Finally, another man who had been told about Grandyās plight bought him and set him free, and he was eventually able to purchase the freedom of his wife, several of his eleven children, and some of his siblings. By the time he gained his freedom, he had suffered unimaginable heartbreak, losing his father, his beloved first wifeāwho was literally snatched away before his eyesāand at least five children to legalized human trafficking.
To suggest that Grandy benefited from slavery would have been obscene. Had he been born at the same time and in the same place as a free man, even a free black man in early nineteenth-century America, his life would have been immeasurably better, and he could have used his skills as a navigator to become a wealthy man instead of spending thousands of dollars to ransom his family. Even so, there is no question that he used the skills he acquired while enslaved for his personal benefitānot because of but in spite of slavery.
TO A LARGE EXTENT, the outrage over that one line in the Florida curriculum rests on the knee-jerk assumption that it must be intended to justify white supremacy, because . . . well, because it comes from Ron DeSantis and the Florida Republicans.
Yet the truth is that you can easily find passages in blue-state African-American history curricula that, if taken out of context and prejudged as slavery apologetics, could trigger outrage. Take a New Jersey curriculum unit which discusses the complex dynamics of slavery and says that āits practictioners [sic] inevitably had to accommodate the basic humanity of the bondsmenā: One could, if so inclined, sum it up as āEnslavers always respected the humanity of the enslaved.ā Or think what a scandalous spin one could put on a Library of Congress classroom guide which says that slaves āput their hands to virtually every type of laborā and āplied their own specialized skillsā in a wide variety of tasks: Doesnāt this make slavery sound like a jobs program and minimize the coerciveness of slave labor?
So yes, conservatives have a point when they charge that the Florida curriculum, compiled by a 13-member workgroup that reportedly includes six black Americans, is being unfairly maligned and demonized. The Florida curriculum is not a rehash of the learning materials often used in the South until recently that portrayed American slavery as relatively benign and stressed quasi-familial devotion between slaves and masters; to the extent that it tries to be āpositive,ā its positivity chiefly resides in its heavy focus on abolitionism and on the accomplishments of free blacks. Nor is it an attempt to whitewash, as it were, Jim Crow (there are units focusing on the post-Reconstruction disenfranchisement of newly emancipated blacks and on white resistance to black equality, including the Ku Klux Klan, and African Americansā struggle against racism). The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s is celebrated to such an extent that a guidance for second graders names āRosa Parks and Thomas Jeffersonā as āindividuals who represent the United Statesāāan odd pairing, but certainly not one coming from an anti-civil-rights mindset. Itās not only conservatives who have criticized the tempest over the line about āskillsā as excessive and misplaced; such critics also include, for instance, liberal blogger Kevin Drum.
That said, the curriculum does have its issues. As Drum points out, it definitely deemphasizes the brutality of slavery; there is no mention of the wrenching and fairly common practice of family separation, of the ever-present threat of physical punishment, or of the widespread sexual exploitation of female slaves. One could counter that many of these things are covered by the materials whose study is required in the curriculum, such as the ex-slave narratives and the slave codes that prescribe punishment by whipping for various infractions (and, as previously mentioned, essentially legalize the murder of the enslaved). But itās worth noting that while the curriculum has many āclarificationsā that mention the study of specific topicsāsuch as the use of work skills for āpersonal benefitāāthere are no such items mandating discussion of sexual violence, surely an age-appropriate subject for high school students, or of the forcible disruption of families. Likewise, lynchings are mentioned in only one unit on the āemergence, growth, destruction and rebuilding of black communities during Reconstruction and beyond.ā The same unit, by the way, contains a āclarificationā line that really does legitimately raise eyebrows:
Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre.
All the events listed here are violent assaults against African Americans. Just what āagainst and byā is supposed to mean is unclear; if itās a reference to black self-defense against racial terrorism, then itās either mind-boggling sloppiness or truly appalling moral equivalency.
Blogger Josh Marshall has also noted that the curriculum strongly emphasizes what he calls āother societies that practiced slavery and other places where slavery was arguably worseāāsuch as the existence of slavery and the slave trade in Africa before the European slave trade began, as well as slavery in the Caribbean islands (where labor was much harder and mortality rates were staggering) and in Central and South America. As Marshall notes, all of this is factual. Teaching these facts is valid; many young progressives raised on modern anti-racist activism seem to believe that slavery makes the United States uniquely evil, or that white people invented slavery. Itās important to put American slavery in global perspective (in which it is sometimes less and sometimes more inhumane than other forms of enslavement). But itās also important to do so in a context that doesnāt lend itself to an āit wasnāt so badā message. One could point out, for instance, that most other slave-owning cultures did not have the same hypocrisy problem, since they did not profess to believe that āall men are created equalā and that liberty is an unalienable right.
One may add that while the Florida curriculum wants to spread the blame for slavery, it doesnāt want to spread the credit for its abolition: the British abolitionist movement and its role in ending the slave trade rate no mention, and neither does the abolition of slavery in the British colonies thirty years before the American Civil War. (The only exception: two mentions of instances in which the British offered liberation to slaves in America as a strategy in military conflicts, in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.)
In other words, while this is not a curriculum that justifies or denies slavery or white supremacy, it is definitely one that tends to accentuate the positive in African American history, and more generally American goodness: abolition, the civil rights movement, the lives of free blacks, thriving and self-sufficient black communities, African-American heroes and cultural figures. Of course those are important things to learn; but such an approach can also result in a skewed rosy picture that reduces the oppression and atrocities to ābad stuff happened, but letās look at how we got over it.ā Yes, itās pushback against a tendency on the left to treat racism and the legacy of slavery as Americaās defining features; but itās an overcorrection.
Lastly, on at least one occasion, the Florida curriculum takes a dive into blatant partisanship. In a high school unit on āthe politicians and political figures who advanced American equality and representative democracy,ā a āclarificationā on āpolitical figures who shaped the modern Civil Rights effortsā offers the following examples: āArthur Allen Fletcher, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson, President Richard Nixon, Senator Everett Dirksen, Mary McLeod Bethune, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Representative John Lewis.ā Even leaving aside the Republican/Democrat balance on this list: Iām sorry, but Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele? Both are important and interesting figures, and if they were mentioned in a unit dealing with intellectual debates and controversies related to race, they would not be out of place. But on a list of figures āwho shaped the modern Civil Rights efforts,ā their presence looks like a strange case of affirmative action for conservatives. (Is there a lot of left-wing bias in the educational system? Yes, there is. But once again, as with much of what DeSantis does, the supposed remedy promotes a different kind of bias instead of balance.)
To these problems, one can also add an apparent, stunning faux pas by Allen and Rice in their response to the critics of the curriculum. As a partial justification for the contested clause about some slaves developing skills from which they benefited, Allen and Rice listed examples of black Americans who supposedly did exactly that: used skills they learned while enslaved. Yet debunkers were quick to point out that nearly half of the people on the list had never even been slaves. (Most bizarrely, one name seems to refer to George Washingtonās sister, a white slave owner.) In several cases, the list also attributed the wrong trade to the people cited.
When asked by Megyn Kelly on Tuesday about the debunkings, Allen was dismissive: āHow many angels do dance on the head of a pin?ā To the charge that several of the figures he and Rice cited were never even enslaved, Allen asserted nonresponsively that āthe point is that people demonstrated their capacities and their accomplishments and thatās a story that must be told.ā Indeedābut surely it must be told accurately.
Neither Allen nor Rice has as yet responded to a request for comment for this article.
LASTLY, THERE IS THE ROLE played in this controversy by Ron DeSantis, who, as writer Nick Catoggio points out, is a lightning rod for a reason. Even many people who heartily dislike āwokeā progressivism cringe at his blatantly opportunistic āanti-wokeā crusade that is every bit as self-righteous, ideologically crude, and prone to bullying as a lot of āwokeā zealotry. Whatās more, the āanti-wokeā activists DeSantis champions do sometimes seem hostile to all strong critiques of past racism: see the objections to teaching the 2009 book Ruby Bridges Goes to School, written by Ruby Bridges herselfāthe woman who, back in 1960, became the first black child in a previously all-white New Orleans school. The bookās critics objected on the ground that its accurate depiction of an angry white mob was too negative and lacked āredemptionā. Thatās not the outlook of the Florida curriculum, which does mention Ruby Bridges along with other desegregation pioneers. But DeSantis, who rails at very broadly defined woke excess, has not exactly done much to distance himself from anti-woke excess; heās the guy whose campaign promoted a video touting him as a ādraconianā anti-LGBT warrior and has just fired a staffer who pushed a DeSantis video with Nazi imagery in it. Catoggio correctly points out that DeSantis hasnāt done much to earn the benefit of the doubt on culture-war issues.
DeSantisās reaction to the curriculum controversy further reinforces that point. He mocked Vice President Harris for trying to āchirp and demagogueā the issue. He blithely waved aside the debate about the āskillsā line in a dismissive comment (āTheyāre probably going to show . . . some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later, later in lifeā) without bothering to explain why the criticism was inaccurate. He could have talked about how abhorrent slavery was and how important it was to study not only its inhumanity but the humanity of people who overcame unthinkable obstacles to win their freedom. He could have, for instance, told the story of Moses Grandy. But somehow, itās hard to imagine DeSantis doing that. His combative responses may have boosted him in the eyes of hardcore āanti-wokeā voters for whom āown the libsā is the beginning and the end of conservatism, but they undoubtedly alienated mainstream voters.
Whatās more, even as he dug in, DeSantis also tried to distance himself from the curriculum by stressing that he had nothing to do with itāeliciting a scathing rebuke from former New Jersey governor and GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie. He is, in other words, a culture-war chicken hawk.
Meanwhile, down in the trenches, the stupid thickens. Progressive pundits made sarcastic comparisons to the Holocaust, mockingly saying āsome Jews also benefited from the skills they acquired shoveling other dead Jews into furnaces in Auschwitz.ā Fox News anchor Greg Gutfeld ran with the analogy, asserting that Jews survived concentration camps by being useful. And for vast numbers of Americans, this saga will merely validate their polarizing political priors: that Republicans are so racist they actually want to rehabilitate slavery; or that Democrats are lying racial demagogues. What suffers most, unfortunately, is the possibility of civilized conversation on race in American history.
