Myth Making

Regarding the manufactured controversy over the Florida public school curriculum on African-American history there were a couple of points that I haven't seen addressed.

As to the substance of the criticism, it is nonsense.  For more detail read Charles Cooke's recent pieces, Kamala Harris Is Brazenly Lying About Florida's Slavery Curriculum and The War On Context Comes For Florida's History Curriculum. 

By the way, this is the AP African American History reference to the same subject that caused the current controversy.

The comeback to this has been that the sentence in the new Florida curriculum uses the word "benefited" and does not say "Once free".  I think anyone should be open to whether the wording in the sentence in the Florida curriculum could be improved upon, and I noticed a few other things I might have approached differently, but that is not what this controversy is about.  Those who raised it want the public to believe the curriculum is intended for students to come away with the belief that slavery was a positive good.  This is nonsense, as Cooke demonstrates in his article exhaustively going through the curriculum.  No one is going to come out of the Florida curriculum thinking that slavery, racism, and segregation were good things, and I'm confident that those pushing this nonsense don't actually believe it either.

The concept of agency is important here.  In the hands of progressives and the New Racists it is a malleable concept, deployed when useful in advancing their agenda, and denied when not helpful to that end.  I discussed this in a 2017 post:

The first is the concept of agency, which in the social sciences refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices, a concept that becomes particularly tricky in Progressive terms as it can be turned on and off as best aligns with Progressive political theory.  One example is that of African-Americans.  During the recent decades many historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction have rightfully emphasized the agency of slaves and of recently freed slaves.  Prior to this period, slaves had primarily been portrayed as passive recipients of freedom.  Modern historians have emphasized the actions many slaves took to achieve their freedom and fought as soldiers in support of the Federal cause, though like many such revisions some historians have now gone too far in ignoring non-black actions in this regard.  However, at the same time, in a Ta-Naheisi Coates' world of white privilege and Black Lives Matter we are assured by academics that African-Americans in the 21st century have far more circumscribed agency than slaves in the 1860s, a bizarre and ahistorical take on reality.

In the case of the AP and Florida curriculum's the intent is to portray slaves as not just passive victims.  It is not about justifying slavery, it is about how individuals gained skills that, at the time, and later, could be used to their benefit.  It was their triumph against those who degraded and enslaved them.  I referenced one of those individuals, Robert Smalls, in the post, The Petition:

One of those who met the president [Lincoln] was Robert Smalls, a young man who escaped slavery by seizing a Confederate warship in Charleston Harbor and sailing it out to the blockading Union fleet.  Smalls eventually became the first black commander in the Union navy and, after the war, served five terms in Congress as a South Carolina representative.  His incredible saga is told in Be Free or Die by Cate Lineberry. 

Smalls was able to pull off his remarkable and daring feat because of the experience he'd gain working on the docks and on ships in Charleston Harbor.

And, as Cooke notes in his War on Context article, historian David Hackett Fisher's recent book, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, could be subject to the same criticism.

The 1619 Project crowd loves agency when it fits their needs.  As economist Phil Magness points out, Ed Baptist, a leader in the progressive New History of Capitalism movement and consultant to the 1619 Project, wrote this on the subject:

In Chesapeake and Carolinas, enslaved men rose in status by learning trades.  They might be blacksmiths or coopers, teamsters or house servants.  Women could become servants, cooks, or weavers.  Such skills could gain one respite from incessant field labor, or even give hired out slaves the possibility of keeping some of the earnings.

The Museum Management Program of the United States Park Service has an online Teaching With Museum Collections Lessons Plan on "From Slavery to Freedom: Different Journeys to Liberty", which includes:

Lesson Two - A House Slave: Acquiring Skills

Students analyze objects to determine what skills a house slave needed to complete assigned tasks.  Students explore the potential marketability of these skills.  This lesson also introduces students into 19th century foodways.

No one thinks Baptist or the National Park Service take the position that slavery was a net benefit.  This whole mess is a created controversy.

The most important aspect of this controversy is not what it pretends to be about, but rather what it is really about.  On one level, it is pure politics, an attack by Democrats and opponents of Ron DeSantis, who they desperately do not want to win the Republican presidential nomination, preferring Donald Trump who they believe is easily beatable and know, even if he were to win, would be ineffectual.

On the political side it is just another of a long list of manufactured nonsense, amplified by the media.  Most notably, just two years ago we were told that Florida had passed a law banning teaching about slavery!  Now we find out that no, they are teaching about slavery, but the real issue is one sentence in that curriculum.  Of course, we are being told this by the same people who told us two years ago that slavery couldn't be taught in Florida classrooms.  They aren't even embarrassed by this, they act like it never happened and they expect their audience to fall for another load of garbage.  Remember, the "Don't Say Gay" law, which didn't actually include that language and was not about gay people?  Same deal.  And we had Jim Crow 2.0, and the Jim Crow Filibuster - it's most notable recent deployment by Senate Democrats to block a vote on a 2021 Republican resolution urging the Biden Administration to block the Nordstream 2 pipeline.  The list goes on and on.  What they've discovered is there is no price to pay for doing this over and over again.  The media and institutions just move on from old invented narratives to new invented narratives, without any need for reflection. 

But this is about more than just presidential politics.  This is about who controls our history.  Those attacking the Florida curriculum reject the legitimacy of the American founding. The history they insist upon is a flattened tale of good and evil, lacking any nuance and rejecting the actual complexity and context of human history.  It is an approach that avoids any context that interferes with its narrative, and is intended to disable students ability to think for themselves (for a presidential example of this technique read Rhetorical Tricks: It's Always About America).  It is the 1619 Project and New York Times version they wish to impose - that this country was immorally founded on the basis of slavery and is irredeemable until it is reformed in such as way as to reject the liberal assumptions of its founding, assumptions that for many remain valid today.   Those assumptions include a mixture of legal and cultural aspects from rule of law, due process and equal rights, a sense of fairness and how we should treat people as individuals.  The New Racists reject all of those proposition because they see them as a guise for the perpetuation of white supremacy (a term that includes Jews(1)).  It is especially odd to see the charge led by Kamala Harris; whose high caste Brahmin mother voluntarily came to America; whose high caste mixed race Jamaican father voluntarily came to America; who found it to her advantage with her mixed race heritage to attend an HBCU; and who got her political start under the tutelage (heh) of the most powerful politician in the most populous state in this country, a politician who happened to be black.  How could all that happen in this racist hellhole?

Who would have predicted that the 21st century would see a revival of the views of John C Calhoun and of King Cotton theory (2) and that it would come at the hands of progressives and the New Racists (including the Biden Administration, see Xi And Biden Agree On America ), as I pointed out in Are The Parties Over?, back in December 2020.

(UPDATE 8/20) At this link you can find the entire 216 page 2023 Florida Academic Standards for Social Studies.  You can find the relevant material on slavery, reconstruction, and civil rights on the first 21 pages.  Those claiming these standards provide a positive view of slavery are simply lying.  This is not a matter of interpretation - they are lying.  And moving beyond the period of slavery, here are some excerpts from the Jim Crow era:

SS.912.AA.3.4 Evaluate the relationship of various ethnic groups to African Americans’
access to rights, privileges and liberties in the United States.
Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes landmark United States Supreme Court Cases affecting African
Americans (e.g., the Slaughter House cases, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, Plessy v. Ferguson).
Clarification 2: Instruction includes the influence of white and black political leaders who fought on
behalf of African Americans in state and national legislatures and courts.
Clarification 3: Instruction includes how organizations, individuals, legislation and literature contributed
to the movement for equal rights in the United States (e.g., Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Carter
G. Woodson, Henry Beard Delany, Emma Beard Delaney, Hiram Rhodes Revels).
Clarification 4: Instruction includes how whites who supported Reconstruction policies for freed blacks
after the Civil War (white southerners being called scalawags and white northerners being called
carpetbaggers) were targeted

SS.912.AA.3.6
Describe the emergence, growth, destruction and rebuilding of black
communities during Reconstruction and beyond.
Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on
individual freedoms (e.g., the Civil Rights Cases, Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, lynchings, Columbian
Exposition of 1893).
Clarification 2: 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.
Clarification 3: Instruction includes communities such as: Lincolnville (FL), Tullahassee (OK),
Eatonville (FL).

SS.912.AA.3.9
Examine the various factors that led to and the consequences of the Great
Migration.
Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes the push and pull factors of the Great Migration. (e.g., race riots,
socio-economic factors, political rights, how African Americans suffered infringement of rights through
racial oppression, segregation, discrimination).
Clarification 2: Instruction includes the Great Migration and its influence on American culture (e.g.,
political realignment and dealignment).
Clarification 3: Instruction includes how the transition from rural to urban led to opportunities and
challenges. (e.g., Emmett J. Scott: Letters of Negro Migrants, Jacob Lawrence: The Migration of the
Negro, red-lining, 1935 Harlem Race Riot, broad increase in economic competition)

I guess this really sums up the benefits of slavery and racism quite well!  (Sarcasm alert)   For how ridiculous the assault on the Florida guidelines is read An Academic Footnote for Florida's Slavery Curriculum.

What the groups behind this smear campaign are advocating for is the teaching of history along the lines discussed below and of which I wrote about it 2020:

George Packer is a writer for many prestigious liberal publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine and a standard issue progressive so his October 2019 piece in The Atlantic, When The Culture War Comes For The Kids, must have startled some of his regular readers.  Living in New York City, Packer and his wife fell into the educational pressure cooker regarding their children but ultimately forsook private school for public education in city schools.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.

He sees what is wrong with the focus on identity:

In politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.

It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

Packer regrets the civics is no longer taught:

By age 10 [his son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic.” 

And he understands that what is going on is indoctrination, not education.

The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

Finally, Packer's son revolted against this mockery of an education:

“Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” 

This is what the Democratic Party and the teachers unions are pushing as to how American history should be taught.  I know what I prefer.  I know which alternative is divisive and which is not.

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(1)  For White Nationalists who believe white is the epitome of good, Jews cannot therefore be white.  For the New Racists, the very fact that Jews have seen disproportionate success in America proves they are racists and white.  It's why the new ethnic studies curriculum in places like California and Seattle, designed to encourage suspicion, fear, and resentment between races and ethnic groups, treat Jews as privileged and white.  When I was growing up my parents, liberal Democrats and proponents of civil rights laws and who, by their personal example showed me how to treat people fairly, often told me, with pride, that America was the best country in the world for Jews, citing how it provided us an opportunity to succeed.  Today, their statements are taken as confirmation Jews are racist white supremacists.

(2) The King Cotton thesis, held by proponents of slavery, was that cotton was such an important economic engine for the United States and the world, that it could be used as leverage against the free states, and failing that, would cause England and France to support secession.  It's also behind the faulty calculation in the 1619 Project that cotton was half of the U.S. GDP (in reality it was 6-8%, the same as railroads), and ignores that while cotton made some plantation owners rich, it was an impediment to growth in the South, as well as for the United States as a whole.