The Patriot Post® · The Mendacious Assault on Florida's New Curriculum

The latest left-wing indictment of Governor Ron DeSantis is that his administration, through its new Social Studies curriculum standards, is actively seeking to downplay the evil that was slavery. If you haven’t examined the standards, or if you are easily swayed by tendentious headlines, you may be tempted to assume the accusation is true. In fact, the accusation is idiotic.

The new academic standards, approved Wednesday by the state board of education, is 216 pages long. The document covers a wide array of classroom subjects, including economics, geography, financial literacy, and Holocaust education. Considerable attention is devoted to African American History in general and to slavery and its impact in particular.

In fact, there are nearly 200 specific lessons related to slavery, racism, civil rights, and the persecution of Black Americans that Florida teachers are expected to cover. To mention just a few:

• “how the South tried to prevent slaves from escaping and their efforts to end the Underground Railroad”;
• “how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights”;
• “how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates”;
• “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms (e.g., the Civil Rights Cases, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, lynchings)”;
• “the shift in attitude toward Africans as Colonial America transitioned from indentured servitude to race-based, hereditary slavery”; and
• “the immediate and lasting effects of organizations that sought to resist achieving American equality (e.g., state legislatures, Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens’ Councils, [and] law enforcement agencies.)”

On page 71, the curriculum guidelines call for students to be taught about “the various duties and trades” that enslaved people were compelled to labor at, including “agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation.” Within that context, the standards note that instructors can exlain “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

That single line — hardly more than a footnote in a remarkably detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive survey of Black history — has triggered the current explosion of hyperventilating outrage.

“Kamala Harris condemns Florida over curriculum claim of slavery ‘benefit’,” a Guardian story is headlined. Reports the Miami Herald: “Teachers enraged that Florida’s new Black history standards say slaves could ‘benefit.’” Former US Representative Will Hurd tweeted: “[S]lavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills. It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”

Anyone who didn’t know better would assume that the whole point of the new curriculum standards is to whitewash slavery. In their eagerness to bash DeSantis, progressives and their media allies have reduced a sweeping academic outline — one that thoroughly explores slavery’s wickedness and brutality — to just one sentence.

“They want to replace history with lies,” Vice President Harris said in Jacksonville on Friday, having flown down from Washington specifically to rail against DeSantis and the new curriculum. “How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”

When DeSantis was asked about the attacks at a press conference, he said that the point of the instruction was “to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed — you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Whereupon The Washington Post declared that DeSantis was “intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved.”

The whole thing is so foul and mendacious — one more illustration of how political discourse and news coverage in America is dominated by partisan fanaticism and utter disregard for fairness and objectivity.

And also, in this case, simple historical accuracy.

The eminent historian John Hope Franklin, who in 1995 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, writes in his authoritative work “From Slavery to Freedom” that in some of the South’s biggest cities, enslaved Black artisans were a dominant segment of the workforce.

“In the Charleston census of 1848, for example, there were more slave carpenters than there were free Black and white carpenters,” Franklin notes. “The same was true of slave coopers. In addition, there were slave tailors, shoemakers, cabinetmakers, painters, plasterers, seamstresses, and the like.” With the coming of emancipation, many white Southerners demanded legislation barring freedmen from certain trades. When that didn’t work, they resorted to “intimidation and violence to eliminate the competition of free Blacks.”

Nevertheless, Franklin writes, “thanks to … the practice of training many slaves as artisans, a considerable number of free Blacks possessed skills that enabled them to achieve a degree of economic independence.”

The critics slamming the Florida curriculum might consider the testimony of Booker T. Washington, the great 19th-century educator and civil rights leader. Though he was born into slavery and wrote eloquently of its bitterness, Washington was likewise of the view that “notwithstanding the cruel wrongs inflicted upon us,” plantation life had left formerly enslaved people with one advantage: a degree of “self-reliance and self-help” that many white people lacked. “My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, ever mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry,” Washington wrote. “All of this was left to the slaves.”

Consequently, when freedom came,

the slave owner and his sons had mastered no special industry. They unconsciously had imbibed the feeling that manual labor was not the proper thing for them. On the other hand, the slaves, in many cases, had mastered some handicraft, and none were ashamed, and few unwilling, to labor.

It isn’t necessary to accept this as the last word on the subject. But it is sheer poisonous demagoguery to claim, as Harris does, that making students aware of the range of skills many Black people mastered while enslaved is “replac[ing] history with lies.” There is no shortage of legitimate reasons to criticize DeSantis — I am far from a fan of the Florida governor — but this doesn’t come close to being one of them.