The War on Context Comes for Florida’s History Curriculum

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, July 24, 2023

 

A few years ago, I started writing about a political phenomenon that I termed “Ctrl+F politics.” The rise of the internet, I observed, had led to the rise of actors and institutions whose explicit role in our civic life was to scour the debates that it generates in search of words or phrases that can be stripped of their mitigating context and weaponized against the unsuspecting. As an illustrative example of this behavior, I pointed to the novel Huckleberry Finn, which, to a dim-witted computer charged with discovering instances of the N-word, could well seem like a racist novel, but which, to a human being who has read and understood all of it, is exactly the opposite. The future, I predicted, would consist of a great deal of this “Ctrl+F” behavior, until, eventually, it rendered nuance impossible, made clarity and brevity unattainable, and turned politics, academia, and journalism into a Hobbesian disaster area.

 

Last week brought with it the most brazen example of this trend that I have ever seen, when Vice President Kamala Harris decided to demagogue the entirety of Florida’s new school curriculum on the basis of a single contorted line. Having assiduously explored the program’s text for words that she could extract from their rightful berth, Harris found one that suited her purpose and proceeded summarily to the outrage stage. Pointing to an instructional provision that aimed to show “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” Harris charged that Florida had “decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery.” “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us,” Harris insisted, “and we will not stand for it.”

 

This is preposterous. There is nothing wrong with that line — either on its own terms or when set in context — and to accept the charge that there is something wrong with it would be to allow political expedience to take precedence over historical comprehension. Since I objected to Harris’s lie last week, I have been told that, by highlighting her critique, I am playing into her hands. I reject this premise. Indeed, I must invert it. The only “gaslighting” being performed here is by Harris and by those who have endorsed her mendacity. The only “insult” being thrown is at Florida. And it is those who built the course, not its critics, who must refuse to “stand for” this ploy. The inclusion of the word “benefit” within one line of a course that contains 190 other curriculum items in no way serves to detract from Florida’s moral imperative to convey to schoolchildren the raw evils of slavery, and to pretend otherwise is bizarre.

 

As its full text confirms, the program establishes “the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free)”; highlights “the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease)”; notes the “overwhelming death rates” that were caused by the practice; records that there were many ways in which “Africans resisted slavery”; and reports that Florida, like the entire “South[,] tried to prevent slaves from escaping.” There is not a person in America who, when trying to convince children that a given practice was good, lists “harsh conditions,” “undernourishment,” “mortality,” “poor nutrition,” “disease,” or “overwhelming death rates” as its consequences. The idea is absurd.

 

Asked why the course contains the one line that has been cherry-picked by critics, one of its architects, Professor William B. Allen — a black man who was born into segregation in Florida — offered up an observation that, in any other context, would be unobjectionable: While America’s millions of slaves were most certainly victims of the most abhorrent violence, domination, sexual assault, and more, they were not only victims, but people. Is this controversial now? At Oxford, I had a professor who liked to say that “Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the only man alive who had agency, you know.” His exhortation — always — was to remember that, however subjugated a man might be, he remained an individual rather than an automaton, and that to acknowledge that is not to endorse the disastrous circumstances in which he has been forced to struggle, but to recognize his humanity.

 

Pace Arnold Toynbee, history often is, in fact, “just one damned thing after another.” And much of that history — though not all — is the story of one thing leading to another. Max and Hanne Liebmann fell in love in a Nazi concentration camp. Are we to assume that, by telling their story as they do, they are endorsing the Final Solution? Our modern “triage” processes came from the Crimean War. Does this make that conflict worthwhile? The horrors of World War I revolutionized medicine. It was still the worst thing that had ever happened in the world until that point. Some of the most malicious people who ever lived — Dr. Josef Mengele, for example — have nevertheless produced work that can be of use, and that, as a result of that fact, yielded important and difficult debates over whether it should be of use. To avoid such thorny aspects of history out of fear of being demagogued or misunderstood represents the worst sort of cowardice and anti-intellectualism.

 

Absent the political desire to bash Florida, this would be abundantly obvious. One of the academic works on which Florida’s slavery course has been based — a book that notes the connection between “the rapid growth of marketable skills among slaves” in the 18th century and those slaves’ ability to run away — is titled “African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals.” If one wished to, one could Ctrl+F this book, too, and thereby do to its author, Brandeis University’s David Hackett Fischer, what is being done to the architects of Florida’s curriculum. “Recently,” one might say, “an author named David Hackett Fischer wrote that slavery was good because it benefited American ideals.” Such a claim would be the result of the same logical fallacy that is being applied to Florida: (1) David Hackett Fischer argues that “enslaved people expanded American ideals”; (2) expanding American ideals is a good thing; (3) the expansion of those ideas was the product of slavery; ergo, (4) David Hackett Fischer must think that slavery was good.

 

Is this a reasonable inference? Of course it is not. It is a ridiculous non sequitur that deserves to be treated with contempt. While undoubtedly appealing to those who share the vice president’s politics, Harris’s attack on Florida’s curriculum warrants precisely the same treatment.