Florida’s History Curriculum Is Better Than the Lies about It

National Review Online

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

 

When the government’s schools teach the nation’s history, politics is unavoidable. In a democracy, it is healthy to have such debates openly. What is not helpful is lying to the public about what is taught in schools. That is what Vice President Kamala Harris and others have been doing about Florida’s new curriculum standards for teaching African-American history, including the history of American slavery.

 

The new standards were approved by the Florida Department of Education last week as part of the state’s effort to free itself from the dictates of the College Board and other national groups pushing left-wing agitprop. They were developed in a series of public meetings by a diverse 13-member working group with six African-American members. These included distinguished scholars such as Dr. William B. Allen, professor and dean emeritus at Michigan State and former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The standards were predictably opposed by the teachers’ union (the Florida Education Association) and the NAACP, which hyperbolically branded the standards “an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected.”

 

Harris, apparently taking her cues from the NAACP’s press release, went into full-demagoguery mode, claiming that “middle school students in Florida” are now required “to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery.” Numerous supposedly respectable media outlets ran with headlines suggesting that Florida was attempting to teach that slavery was actually good for slaves.

 

This is nonsense. As our own Charles C. W. Cooke has recounted, there are 191 items in the curriculum about slavery, segregation, and racism, on required topics such as “how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights” and “how the demand for slave labor resulted in a large, forced migration” within the United States. There is extensive instruction on the history and economics of the development of slavery, as well as abolitionism, slave revolts, and the Underground Railroad. Many examples are offered of the resistance and accomplishments of enslaved and free black Americans during the period of colonial and American slavery.

 

One of these 191 items instructs junior-high-school classrooms to “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation),” and an appended “Clarification” adds that this should include considering “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

 

That one sentence is the entire basis for the claim that Florida is somehow teaching that slavery benefited slaves. This is a dishonest smear, and it has nothing to do with promoting an accurate education.

 

One of the choices to be made in teaching about a large, complex, and traumatic human event such as American slavery is whether to flatten it into a simple just-so story or provide the detail and context necessary to bring it to life. Just-so stories are fine for introducing history to very young children, but a full education goes further.

 

One such form of context is to teach how all the participants in major events experienced them and made their own choices. Human beings are remarkably resilient and resourceful. Throughout history, from the plantation to the trenches to the gulag, they have found ways to endure, create, and even flourish under the worst forms of oppression and brutality. It would be hard to tell the story of black, Jewish, Irish, or Polish culture and achievement — to pick a few examples, though one can find them among any culture — without stories of making the best of atrocious situations. Where does Kamala Harris think the blues came from?

 

Harris and her allies speak as if this is a foreign concept. “How is it,” she asked, “that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Attorney Benjamin Crump argued that “our children need to be taught that slavery was evil and immoral point blank period.” That would make for a pretty short lesson.

 

Telling black American history truthfully should impart a sense that, while slavery was evil and immoral, period, slaves nonetheless made choices for the benefit of themselves and their families. Indeed, until last week, progressives commonly argued that American history should include more examples of black agency in lieu of treating black Americans simply as passive victims. Reasonable minds can differ as to whether the acquisition of skills is the best example of this dynamic, but it is a well-grounded part of the historical record. Harris, instead, argues that it is an “insult” to tell that story.

 

In fact, permitting slaves to learn skills was deeply controversial in the antebellum South precisely because it promoted dignity and independence. Skilled laborers were more likely to learn to read, and often had more freedom to travel and meet with other black Americans, both free and enslaved. They were thus more likely to escape, revolt, or spread news that slave masters wanted suppressed. A major revolt in Virginia in 1800 was led by Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved blacksmith who had been taught his craft by the man who owned him as property. The alleged leader of a conspiracy to revolt in South Carolina in 1822 was Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter. So great was South Carolina’s fear of skilled black laborers after the Vesey rebellion that it passed the Negro Seamen Acts, which required even free black sailors to be imprisoned while their ships were in port.

 

Until last week, Democrats and progressives claimed that Florida was some sort of book-banning dystopia. Now, they’re the ones arguing that truthful history should be purged from the curriculum. Nobody benefits from that.