..On the controversy surrounding Florida's "African American" history curriculum that has been swirling in this week's news cycle. My first thought is that this is just another opportunity to play politics over something that we really need to move on from. My second thought was that the offending potions of the curriculum, when read in context, are absolutely true and undeniably so. My third and final thought was that this was an unforced error by the DeSantis administration's Dept. of Ed., which will hang as an albatross around the neck of the governor's already struggling presidential campaign. For those who haven't heard this story yet, I'll share the gist of it.
In an effort to create and disseminate a history curriculum to students that is true, balanced, and fair, Florida had a team of educators, which included black Americans, to put together a black history curriculum. It's over 200 pages long, covering everything from the arrival of the first slaves in 1619, to the accomplishments of people such as Marva Collins and Thomas Sowell, names most Americans are unacquainted with. So far, so good.
However, tucked within those 200+ pages are a few phrases which ignited a firestorm. Specifically, this:
"Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation)."
And follows with this one-two punch:
"Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
Those words have been interpreted in the media and pontificate landscape (i.e. cable news and the Twittersphere) into a new talking point. Namely, that Florida is going to teach kids that "slaves benefited from slavery." Leaving aside for the moment the reductionist sleight of hand required for 200+ pages of instruction to boil down to "man, those slaves were lucky to have been enslaved!", let's use another example.
In the Bible, the book of Genesis tells the story of Joseph, who is sold into slavery as a young man. He suffers for many indignities over the course of several years, including a stint in an Egyptian prison, before God began to unravel and work out things in his favor. He was ultimately catapulted to a position where the lives of millions of people were saved. Does the ultimate good that resulted from Joseph's time in slavery negate the evil that was done to Joseph? Does it make his bondage and the suffering he endured any less unjust? Of course not.
Multiple things can be true at once. Joseph's brothers committed evil against him by selling him into slavery. Potiphar's wife committed evil against Joseph by lying and accusing him of attempted rape. This is unequivocally true. However, it is also unequivocally true that the aftermath of all that was the salvation of not one, but two, nations of people.
Returning to the issue of the Florida curriculum, the cultural skeptic in me immediately realized that there was more to this brouhaha than the buzz implied. The history teacher in me has always been struck by the distance between the narratives and the truth of what happened during pivotal moments of previous generations. Overwrought rhetoric, combined with our need for clearly identified black hats and white hats, has always caused us to miss the complexities of historical events.
All of this is to say that there is nothing in the Florida curriculum that is untrue nor implies that slaves benefited from being enslaved in any regard which would negate the evils of chattel slavery in America. One of the curriculum's developers, Dr. William Allen, a black American, had this to say about the study's contents:
"It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans," he noted. "What was said, and anyone who reads this will see this with clarity, it is the case that Africans proved resourceful, resilient and adaptive and were able to develop skills and aptitudes which served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslavement."
Despite my sympathetic posture towards the curriculum, and my belief that taken in the context the purported offensive content is only offensive to those whose emotional temperament meter is stuck on outrage, this was a massive political blunder which could have been avoided with little more than verbiage tweaking and shifting of the placement of a few things, this particular debacle could have been avoided.
They'd have had to come for Ron DeSantis another way.
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