The Florida Board of Education approved a new set of standards for teaching African American history in the state.
The Florida Department of Education says the new standards don’t teach that slavery was beneficial.
However, one of the benchmarks (SS.68.AA.2.3) states students will be taught, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Anyone able to think of a good argument for explicitly requiring this? I’m having trouble thinking of why you’d call this out in the standards unless, you know, you are a fan of slavery…
Sounds like one of those things they can defend as “technically the truth” which will slowly have the context around it eroded until it looks entirely positive.
Yeah all the bullshit they’ve been up to is just trying to slowly chip away at the truth on this subject. Death by 1000 cuts and all that. It’s why they’re so batshit crazy about “CRT”.
“Slaves were given free food, housing, and job skills! They were basically treated like family.”
Obvious attempt to move the Overton Window on the topic of slavery
They want it back.
I read through the first 20 pages or so. It’s a weird document. It looks like it was drafted not so much to push the GOP narrative openly, but to PERMIT a school to run a pretty racist curriculum and get away with it. Most of what we might expect in a reasonable set of K-12 standards is there, but there are some odd choices to have made, and some really creepy prioritization and re-contextualization. Here are a few:
- Multiple references to slavery in other cultures and especially the slave trade in Africa and Barbary pirates kidnapping Europeans. Some strong “whataboutism” vibes there.
- A lot of discussion about indentured servitude. More than would be necessary I think.
- Talking about how the Continental Congress was so much more anti-slavery than King George III.
- Invoking George Washington as an example of an anti-slavery voice.
- Making sure to mention Nat Turner and John Brown in the same breath as Frederick Douglass. Sure it’s “compare”, but we couldn’t even get a “contrast” tucked in there? And again, there’s probably schools where the first two will be treated with a lot more empathy than others.
- The line in the news story about developing skills; not technically a lie, but Jesus fuckin’ Christ that’s a lot of missing context to blow by in search of a tiny thread they can view as a silver lining.
- Making sure to call out acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans when bringing up early 20th century race riots like Rosewood and Tulsa.
- Invoking Clarence Thomas as a “pioneer” and including Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele in the list of “political figures who shaped the modern Civil Rights efforts.”
I’m quite sure I’m missing some. This is a creepy-ass document, but it includes enough decent history to make it a Trojan Horse more than a battering ram. It’s not (on its own, at least) going to preclude teachers from teaching something better, but it IS going to allow Coach Bumblefuck in the exurbs to MAGA his way through the African American studies unit, or allow Principal Stonewall Jackson Beauregard in Pensacola to fire the new history teacher who doesn’t point out that a lot of slaves were treated just fine and learned new skills and became free when God willed it.
There’s a Slavery exhibit at the Atlanta History Museum that they built for the 96 Atlanta Olympics. It’s filled with this crap, the “a lot of the slaves ended up in poverty, were they really worse off?” bullshit. It makes me sick.
Boy you said it. I cannot fathom how anyone who pays even a little bit of attention and is a decent human can stomach any of this abhorrent behavior from elected officials.
So our forbears did some awful shit. Fucking deal with it, don’t try to pretend it didn’t happen.
I had a lengthy comment here, and kbin seems to have eaten it.
So I will summarize in this way:
This degree of open and shameless revision of history, because an entire party is so terrified to have the unvarnished truth of our nation told, the attempts to bend the educational institutions themselves in support of this revision, and the insistence by so many in that same party that racism and bigotry are bygone problems fills me with a rage that I cannot adequately express.
When folks try to tell me both parties are the same, this continued attempt to debase black folks and water down their history to make it more palatable for fragile white folks (am white myself) is such an affront that I struggle to react rationally to it.
I have so much anger over this, and so many other things I’ve seen online in recent years (such as the entire last half of 2020) - I just cannot believe that there are decent people left in the country who vote Republican.
“I just cannot believe that there are decent people left in the country who vote Republican.”
The problem is that the vast majority of them don’t see this in the same way we do, they get their messaging from propaganda outlets that tell them our description of what is happening is completely wrong and revisionist, taking the bite of of the accusation we lay against them as well.
They can be completely well meaning and just want “real history” to be taught, trusting their kids will be intelligent enough to sort out what was really bad or really good. They’ll also try to look elsewhere and say “see white people were slaves too, some countries enslave their own people, it’s not about racism!” They run with whatever messaging they’re given and truly think they are “good people.” They can be good people while still being mislead and spouting garbage…
I’ll never believe ALL Republicans are hot garbage terrible people. I was once a 9/11 truther, I once fell down the rabbit holes of various conspiracies, so I have “faith” that a lot of these people are well meaning and are mislead, that they may at some point finally see what they’ve been told is just a lie. It takes time and a conscious effort to pay attention. I’m an absolute complete and utter moron and if I can climb out of that hole so can others, there isn’t one single, tiny, iota of a thing that makes me special or intelligent if anything there’s more reason to believe I couldn’t escape the rabbit holes.
Then of course there are the hate filled, literal Nazis waving actual Nazi flags… There’s no defense for them lol
That’s a compassionate and rational response.
Unfortunately, I’ve not met one of these lost souls who is willing to consider anything but the dogma they have already swallowed, but I suppose there is hope.
I can’t imagine what its going to be like for kids that grow up with this. Im just old enough to have tasted of the what apparently was the height of the american society. disapointingly its the 70’s.
When we’re all in the afterlife, I hope I get to hear their wails echoing up from hell. Monsters.
