The Whitewash of History, on DeSantis' Orders

Update: Thank you Batocchio for including this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Everyone visiting, please leave a comment below, or Tweet me at... at... oh, right. Twitter's dead.

This past week bore witness to the next stage of Ron DeSantis' open war against Woke (or Critical Race Theory, or Thou Shalt Not Shame our White Boys): The utter disassembly of American/Florida History when it comes to talking about race-based slavery in our nation's development. 

What DeSantis wants to impose - through his hand-picked Board of Education - grade school class studies teaching that "slavery helped the slaves develop work skills" as a "personal benefit" for gainful employment. You're not reading that wrong, that's how the regional and national media are reporting it (this link via CBS News):

Florida's 2023 Social Studies curriculum will include lessons on how "slaves developed skills" that could be used for "personal benefit," according to a copy of the state's academic standards reviewed by CBS News. 

The lessons in question fall under the social studies curriculum's African-American studies section, and be taught to students in sixth through eighth grade, according to the state standards. 

The lessons for that grade level will include teachings on understanding the "causes, courses and consequences of the slave trade in the colonies," and instruction on the differences and similarities between serfdom and slavery, the curriculum says. Students will also be asked to describe "the contact of European explorers with systematic slave trading in Africa" and look at the history and evolution of slave codes. 

The line about "personal benefit" is included as a "benchmark clarification" to a lesson that asks students to "examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves," such as agricultural work, domestic service, blacksmithing and household tasks like tailoring and painting. 

My first reaction hearing the news: THIS IS DESANTIS' AND THE FAR RIGHT REPUBLICANS IDEA OF PUTTING A POSITIVE SPIN ON HUMAN CHATTEL SLAVERY, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.  (yes it was all internal CAPS LOCK screaming)

My following reaction was a bit calmer and more of an earnest question: "Will these classes also detail the physical and emotional traumas that slavery inflicted on the men, women, and CHILDREN who were chained up, collared like animals, and whipped for the sadistic enjoyment of the masters?" 

Will the study materials include the photographs of the scars on their backs?

Say hello to the BENEFITS of slavery.
"Whipped Peter" - photo from the National Gallery

Here is DeSantis - here is the WHOLE OF THE MODERN REPUBLICAN PARTY, finally proving themselves the Party of John C. Calhoun and not the Party of Lincoln - trying to make it sound like slavery were career opportunities for the tens of the thousands of captured Africans dragged to America's shores, that all those long sweating days in the cotton fields and in the smith shops and in the rape cages were "work skills" they could put on their resumes when they go job hunting down the road.

Except in slavery there WAS no "down the road," no freedom to go find your own work, you were either worked to death on the plantation where they bought you from the auction blocks, or you were traded off to another plantation - oft-times without your family and loved ones - to pay off the debts of your overseers / masters and worked to death there.

The nation is littered with gravesites of tens of thousands of slaves who died in chains. Claiming all that work was a "BENEFIT" is an obscenity that should never be taught.

But that's what DeSantis and the other Far Right Republicans want to teach. They WANT future generations of White kids to grow up to the "comforting myth" that slavery was a benefit to the slaves, they WANT to convince Black kids that there was no difference between the horrors of antebellum chattel slavery and the current-day failures of fair treatment in education and workplaces.

This is the American Conservative gaslighting effort to set the stage, to twist the "debate" on slavery in their long-term goal to make it okay to bring back race-based slavery in some form. We've already seen - I have, as far back as 2010 - the Far Right push to undo their legacy of the 14th Amendment Citizenship clause so they can deny the rights of any class of people they want. How easy would it be for them to deny the constitutionality of the 13th Amendment and create the excuse of "slavery" as a "vocational skill program"?

This is a nightmare.

Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice is a fellow Floridian, and she's as angry about this whitewash as I am. She's livid that DeSantis and his GOP lackeys are trying to rewrite the horrors of Rosewood and Ocoee Massacres as "both siderisms": 

I think the Ocoee Massacre remains the most deadly election-related race massacre in U.S. history to this day. So how did black people perpetrate violence? At Ocoee, in self defense, a black man named July Perry shot and killed two members of the KKK lynch mob that had surrounded his house because a friend was thought to have taken refuge there after attempting to vote in Florida while black (Note: this was in 1920, the friend was a WWI veteran who had been told by a local judge he did qualify to vote even in that Jim Crow era). 

The mob eventually lynched Perry anyway, killed more than 30 other black people, burned their houses and businesses to the ground, and established Ocoee as an all-white “sundown town.” But it’s important to know that both sides acted violently and had violence perpetrated upon them (Note: Betty is being sarcastic, by the by).

In this instance, DeSantis has layered on plausible deniability by enlisting crackpot people of color to do the dirty work, including Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. and the department’s African American history task force. Trump had to hand out “Blacks for Trump” shirts to white people. DeSantis is building a diverse coalition of right-wing cranks to whitewash black history and enact a far-right agenda...

DeSantis is doing all of this to win over Far Right Republicans on the national level as he campaigns for 2024, desperate to outdo the overt racism that trump spews by passing laws and breaking protocols that sinks to the deepest needs of the "deplorable" MAGA base. In the process, he's going against entire centuries' worth of facts, against the truth of how damaging human chattel slavery was - and still is - to all of humanity across the board.

Slavery has no benefit. None. Slavery not only brutalized the Black Americans who suffered under the chain and whip, slavery also turned White Americans into brutes, broken monsters who got drunk and violent on the power they wielded over other lives. Even the non-owning Whites both North and South in the pre-Civil War era profited from the physical and emotional damage that slavery caused, and it still created the "White Privilege" class system that skews our legal system and social norms to this day.

For all the problems we have today, trying to forge a stronger system of justice and equality, the modern Republican Party is trying to revert our nation's long arc of history back to the 1850s. They WANT us to accept slavery, they WANT us to dehumanize the Black (and in the process the Latino and Asians who are "foreigners" to the eyes of the White Man, and then the Woman whose rights back in those days were just as non-existent) to where they have no rights at all.

Goddamn them, Goddamn DeSantis for shoving down our throats his political agenda of lies and deceit and race-driven fear.

Hey, Republicans: If Slavery was so great at teaching "work skills," why didn't they offer those "work skills" to the poor Whites who wanted to get ahead in their career paths? Hmm? Anyone of Anglo-Euro origins willing to put a collar on their neck and chains on their wrists to work 12 straight hours in the fields? Anyone?

For the LOVE OF GOD, Humanity, stop voting Republican.