DeSantis Urges Floridians To Look At The Bright Side Of Enslavement
Despite what Florida’s wannabe president, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, would have you believe, slavery was not a work study program.
DeSantis commented this week on new state education requirements that children must learn that despite the rapes, beatings and murders, despite a system that was built on cruel human bondage, that human trafficking was beneficial to the abducted. The absurd claims come as part of DeSanti’s anti-woke crusade to offer a whitewashed version of the nation’s history of enslavement.
Last year, DeSantis signed legislation known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibits instruction that could make students uncomfortable about a historical event because of their race, sex or national origin. Books also have been banned which have been deemed to be too critical of the role of white people in enslavement and the continuing impacts of enslavement.
Continuing this line of revisionist history, last week the Florida Department of Education issued new standards of teaching Black history, including about how, despite the horrors of enslavement, “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
The new standards are meant to somehow show that enslavement wasn’t that bad and that if they wanted, African Americans could survive the brutality and pick themselves up to be successful in the white world. It’s like painting lipstick on a pig.
DeSantis did not note in his press conference that anti-literacy laws made it illegal for enslaved and free people of color to read or write. Southern slave states enacted anti-literacy laws between 1740 and 1834, prohibiting anyone from teaching enslaved and free people of color to read or write.
The new standards also require that teachers inform students that whites were not totally to blame and that enslaved people were not without blame and responsibility for the period of enslavement. This includes instruction on the “violence” perpetrated by African Americans, the kidnapping of Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries and how slavery of indigenous people was utilized in the Americas before European colonialization.
By saying that violence was perpetrated not just against but “by African Americans,” the standards seem to support teaching “both sides” of history. It could be applied to requiring that students should learn “both sides” of the conspiracy theory that the Nazi genocide of Jews, the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration.
In a statement, the Department of Education listed a handful of examples that it said were enslaved people who were successful in various pursuits. DeSantis said he had nothing to do with composing the list.
“The reality is, all of that is rooted in whatever is factual. They listed everything out. And if you have any questions about it, just ask the Department of Education. These were scholars who put that together. It was not anything that was done politically,” DeSantis said.
Actually, the reality is that most of the listed, so-called enslaved people who made good, were not enslaved. The list includes nine people who were never enslaved; nine are listed in the wrong industry; 13 didn’t learn their skills by being enslaved; and one was the white sister of George Washington.
All it took was a few minutes of Wikipedia research to find the facts, something the Department of Education royally and apparently, intentionally flubbed.
The state report tries to put a positive spin on enslavement, by noting “Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history.” To the millions of enslaved people, it was more than a “difficult time” but a death sentence for those who were chained and forced to labor.
The lie to the premise that people learned important trades while being enslaved comes with the fact that out of about 3.7 million people who were enslaved by 1865, only a minuscule percent were cited that used skills gained while suffering under slavery. Most enslaved people remained that way from the cradle to the grave, leaving no time to practice the so-called skills learned during their captivity.
DeSantis’s latest rant drew quick and angry responses.
Vice President Kamala Harris said that no amount of revisionist history would change the fact that “adults know what slavery really involved.”
“It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world. How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Harris, the first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president, said in a speech in Jacksonville, Fla.
Former Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, who is an African American and is a candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2024, said that “slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills. It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”
DeSantis’s premises imply that enslaved people were like uncivilized blank slates who benefited from their white masters. The fact is that the enslaved people who were shackled and brought to America had numerous skills they culled in their native lands, from ship building to agriculture.
The new education rules came on the heels of comments by the official in charge of Oklahoma’s schools that teachers should tell students that the Tulsa race massacre was not racially motivated. The Tulsa race massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre) of 1921 took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Okla. It has been called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.”
As a result of the new Florida rule, instruction also will certainly be changed when teaching high school students about events such as the 1920 Ocoee massacre, to reflect the new rules that instruction will include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” The massacre is considered the deadliest Election Day violence in U.S. history. It started when Moses Norman, a prominent Black landowner in the Ocoee, Fla., community, attempted to cast his ballot and was turned away by White poll workers.
Similar twisted standards likely will be required for lessons about other massacres, including the Atlanta race massacre and the Rosewood race massacre.
Historically, DeSantis’s plans are as patently absurd as pointing out the positive aspects of the Holocaust and the work of the Sonderkommandos. The Sonderkommandos were work units made up of mostly, Jewish German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. Perhaps many of the Sonderkommandos could have seen the sliver lining and gained important lessons in body disposal techniques that they could parlay into a career after the Holocaust, if they lived.
DeSantis might also claim that the mafia was a great developer for the Italian business model.
Or that enslaved African Americans could get invaluable first aid experience by treating the wounds inflicted on fellow slaves by the whips of their white persecutors. Native Americans could have taken advantage of learning to speak English and understanding the white culture, as Native American numbers were being brutally decimated.
The Florida Department of Education noted a number of “enslaved” people who learned important trades that they parlayed into benefits after they gained freedom. Many, however, like Ned Cobb, Lewis Latimer and James Forten were not enslaved while Booker T. Washington was born an enslaved person but only learned to read after he was freed.
Cobb was the fourth of more than 20 children of a father who had been enslaved. The father had been emotionally and physically scarred by his experiences, and responded by beating and berating his wives, children, and others he loved. Ned was 19 when he left his father’s house to begin sharecropping on his own.
In December 1932, a sheriff tried to take the home and livestock of one of Cobb’s friends. Cobb defended his friend and in turn was involved in a shootout in which he was wounded and arrested. Cobb was sentenced to 13 years in jail. He was offered parole if he would agree to give up his farm and relocate to Birmingham. Instead, he served his full sentence and after release in 1945, he returned to his farm.
Lewis Howard Latimer invented an evaporative air conditioner, an improved process for manufacturing carbon filaments for light bulbs, and an improved toilet system for railroad cars. In 1884, he joined the Edison Electric Light Company where he worked as a draftsman. Before he was born, his parents escaped from slavery in Virginia and fled to Chelsea, Mass., on Oct. 4, 1842.
While at Edison, Latimer wrote the first book on electric lighting, entitled “Incandescent Electric Lighting” and supervised the installation of public electric lights throughout New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London.
James Forten was an abolitionist and businessman in Philadelphia, Pa. A free-born African American, he became a sailmaker after the Revolutionary War. He established a highly profitable business and used his wealth and social standing to work for civil rights for African Americans in both the city and nationwide.
Henry Blair was only the second black man to receive a United States patent in 1834 for his mechanical corn planter. Enslaved people could not register patents with the United States government, indicating that Blair was never enslaved.
John Chavis, a freed African American, was an early 19th Century minister and teacher, and was the first African American to graduate from an America college or university. In his later years, Chavis was a vocal supporter of the abolitionist movement.
James P. Thomas, a noted African American barber and businessman, was born in 1827 in Nashville, Tenn. He was the son of a white, antebellum judge, John Catron, one of the justices in the Dred Scott case, and a slave mother, Sally Thomas, who purchased James’s freedom when he was 6 years old. Under Tennessee law, he remained a slave as long as he lived in the state. He was legally freed on March 6, 1851.
Thomas invested in railroad and insurance company stock and real estate in St. Louis, where he built and renovated apartments. By 1870 Thomas was one of the wealthiest men in Missouri, white or black.
Booker T. Washington was born enslaved in 1856, nine years before the emancipation. He was illiterate through the entirety of his enslavement and only after he was freed, he taught himself to read.
Washington was an educator, author, orator, and adviser to several U.S. presidents. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community. He was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants.
And then there was John Henry, an African American freedman, who is said to have worked as a “steel-driving man,” a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel.
According to legend, John Henry’s prowess as a steel driver was measured in a race against a steam-powered rock drilling machine, a race that he won only to die in victory with a hammer in hand as his heart gave out from stress. The real John Henry, according to researcher Scott Reynolds Nelson, was born in 1848 in New Jersey and died of silicosis and not due to exhaustion of work.