Reverse CRT: Florida Upstages Texas In History Class Teaching About Slavery

First of all, I am sure he is obviously telling the truth that he wasn't involved with developing that curriculum. He is responding to the outrage machine, albeit in a clumsy way.

Secondly, the right thing for him to say if he had been prepped better would have been that slavery was obviously terrible and that part of the curriculum is to teach how some black people to some extent overcame the horrible situation they had been put into by developing extraordinary skills despite the horrific circumstances they had been forced into.

That's really the only way to read that part of the curriculum in context. It's about showing examples of humans developing agency despite incredibly unfair hardship. It's about praising the willpower of these black people, not about saying that slavery was in any way a good thing.

The spin of "they are saying slavery wasn't so bad because some slaves developed some skills" is actually disgusting, because that's clearly not what that curriculum teaches. This spin comes from the leftist outrage machine and is deliberately defamatory.

Too bad that you are buying it. You should be smarter than that.

 

The D measuring in this thread is hysterical. Such incompetence galore. Anyone trying to push a political agenda on this topic is literally incapable of forming an “opinion” without false narrative.

 

Here is a review from an American historian, a professor of history who specifically focuses on the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.

I was wrong in my initial naive assessment that the curriculum looked comprehensive, with the two problematic areas I mentioned. And I'm sadly not surprised that upon deeper review by a historian it is much worse - the curriculum presents a whitewashed narrative of American history. As a non-historian, I only glanced through it quickly, so it's not surprising my first take was mistaken. But as an expert professor of history focusing on the Civil War and Reconstruction notes, the curriculum misrepresents key events and time periods to downplay oppression and the struggles of marginalized groups. It's disappointing but unsurprising that the curriculum promotes this selective nationalist whitewashed narrative, following a pattern emerging in FL.


July 22, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson's impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

—

Notes:

https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf

 

Deleted.

 

Basically it's the narrative...

The world was an evil place, and slavery was everywhere. But white Christian Americans were good people. Some taught their slaves useful skills. ANd it was white people who freed the slaves and changed the world. Who gave them liberty and civil rights. Even though they committed violence and lacked educations. Even though other people in the world were worse. White Americans are awesome!!!!

 

Yes many slaves had great will power and developed skills. They didn’t have agency though because that is what it means to be a slave. You have no agency in your choices. That a slave might become a blacksmith wasn’t because they chose that it was because a master decided that for them. For that matter we don’t know if actually given free will how many field slaves would’ve chosen to become blacksmiths or other trades but were denied the opportunity.

That is the fundamental problem with the argument put forward but his curricula and whether you, DeSantis is denying it it is putting a beneficial qualification on the institution of slavery. That ignores that any benefit to the slaves was an afterthought to the primary befit to their masters.

you recognize that this is problematic. Your recognize that DeSantis’ rhetoric is flawed. Yet you choose to blame the Left and say it’s spring rather than recognize how fundamentally flawed this is put a veneer of Sauk some slaves “benefitted” by learning trades. When the benefit was to make things better for their masters.

 

you, @Deckard, @Sweet Lou 4 2, and @rocketsjudoka all seem to lack the ability to place the highlighted portion in the images above into the context of the material which surrounds it, even less into the context of the curriculum as a whole.

Perhaps you'd all benefit from some remedial instruction in the Florida school system.

 

It's because their narrative is fixed. They want to assume the worst so they can try to accuse others of racism and make themselves feel more virtuous. That's literally the M.O. of the left.

 

You saying the same dumb **** for consecutive posts doesn't make your point any stronger. You deflect. You explain what you read. You write a detailed analysis that would make Os blush. Do it. Even make up a pseudonym alter ego when writing. You can call yourself Jonathan Turdley.

 

Look how hateful they are.

 

that much hate can't be good for the soul.

 

Seems to me you are the one firing off insults.


I get that white-washing the evils of slavery and racism feels good, but that doesn't make it right.

 

And what context could a slave provide a skill learned to personal benefit?

 

Yes I’m hateful because I’m pointing out that slaves learning skills was because the master didn’t give them a choice and it was for the benefit of the master.

Yes I’m hateful because I hate slavery.

 

please link to where I've insulted you.

 

Accusing slavers and supporters of slavery of racism doesn't seem out of line or bad fixed position to take. That's literally the M.O. of the left.

Is the M.O. of the right to try wash away the faults of slavers and those that supported slavery?

If not we should all agree these ideas are a ridiculous attempt to whitewash slavery with falsehoods.

 

No it isn't. Just because it lists the topics to be covered, it doesn't say how those will be taught.

 

After they were freed. Booker T. Washington, for example, used skills he developed while enslaved upon gaining his freedom. The fact that some slaves learned skills (why this would be surprising to anyone is beyond me, everyone learns some sort of skills), and some of them used those skills after they were no longer slaves, in no way lessens the horrors of slavery. It wasn't a lack of skills learned that made slavery bad, it was the deprivation of freedom, humanity, and dignity. This seems like such a weird thing to cause so much outrage.

 

So it was only the slaves that were freed by force of arms after a devastating war that got the benefits? I’m sure thats what the slave masters had in mind when they were forcing them to be blacksmiths.

Yes it is exactly that slaves were denied the lack of freedom and humanity dignity to chose their own path. That is why it so weird to qualify slavery by saying they learned skills to their benefit.

The only context you can cite is the only after the forcible end of slavery. Not when they were actually slaves.