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As both a historian and a long-time observer of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, I take a particular interest in the controversy over the state’s new slavery curriculum. And I’m not the only one: Ron DeSantis has now gotten into a public argument with 40% of the entire Black Republican Congressional caucus over the issue. Now sure, that’s only two people(!), but it’s yet another example of how DeSantis’ strategy of trying to run on the idea of being “Trump but with more actual conservative policy” is failing. I think one thing that people often don’t get about Trump is that he’s successful precisely because he doesn’t spend much time bothering with policy. Policies are complicated, can go wrong, and give people something very concrete to attack. If your goal is to whip up the right-wing base, then tweeting your way into a fight with the media/liberals and then moving onto the next thing is much more effective than getting into a years-long legal battle with Mickey Mouse or trying to implement a new curriculum which says slavery was actually beneficial for the enslaved.
Nevertheless, here we are, and that is exactly what DeSantis’ Department of Education is trying to do. Last week, the department issued new guidelines for how to teach black history in middle schools (roughly ages 11-14) which contained at least two questionable points. The first is that students in Florida will now be taught that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit”. Secondly, they’ll also be taught that during slavery and afterwards, “acts of violence” were “perpetrated against and by African Americans”. Although the rest of the document is largely unobjectionable, these two points are very badly formulated and have driven a week-long controversy.
Slavery was bad, mmkay?
I’ll get onto the politics of all of this in a minute. But what I think is really interesting here is the larger issue of how we talk about and digest historical events, and the relationship between politics and education.
American slavery was at the same time a vast impersonal system which dehumanized, oppressed and maimed and also a collection of millions of personal stories which sometimes contained acts of resistance and resilience. Reduce it simply to one of these things and you misunderstand it. Enslaved people struggled against enormous odds to eke out life and love among the horrors that surrounded them. They made enormous cultural contributions to the United States - and to humanity - through soul food, spirituals, and the blues. And, yes, they occasionally struck back at their enslavers with violence. But they did all of these things against the backdrop of a remorseless machine of bloodletting and oppression which was designed not to lift them up but to extract their labor and grind them down into the dust.
When you tell the story of slavery, then, you face a problem. On the one hand you need to capture the complexity of the lives of the enslaved, but you also need to avoid creating the impression that slavery as a system was one with much moral complexity. So while it’s no doubt true that some individual slaves were forced to develop new skills as a result of slavery, to emphasize this point is a mistake. This isn’t just because the almost all enslaved people never had the personal freedom in which they might put these skills to use, or because the vast majority toiled doing unskilled work in the fields anyway. It’s also because compared to the crimes which made it possible, the supposed “benefit” is so minor that to call it such is a gross moral misjudgement.
The curriculum’s point about violence against and by African-Americans suffers from the same problem. The new standards actually cite a number of incidents in support of this point, including the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. Every single one of these incidents began with mass mob violence by whites against blacks. In some cases, particularly the 1919 riot in D.C., blacks fought back after the police refused to protect them and killed some white people. But to characterize this as simply inter-racial violence stemming from both sides is to ignore not just “who started it”, but also the larger historical context.
Most of the events cited in the curriculum took place in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when social and economic change caused by World War I had changed the position of African-Americans in America and prompted a white backlash. Hundreds of thousands of blacks had moved north to feed the growing demand for labor in wartime industries, and African-American soldiers returned with new aspirations for their place in American society. Meanwhile, postwar demobilization created high inflation and unemployment in northern cities, sparking economic competition between whites and blacks and fears of widespread social unrest. As the first Red Scare got underway, blacks were frequently labelled as Bolsheviks and potential agents of social chaos. That’s why when anti-black violence started in Washington, D.C. in 1919, The Washington Post joined in by calling for whites to mobilize and “clean up” the streets (the Post published a mea culpa in 2019).
This context is why the phrase “perpetrated against and by African Americans” in the new Florida teaching standards grates so badly. Yes, African-Americans did commit acts of violence in resistance to slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of systemic white supremacy in American history. But the violence was overwhelmingly, disproportionately one-sided. That reality is taught far too infrequently in American schools, and the Florida standards only make it worse.
DeSantis vs. black Republicans
As for the politics, it’s bad news all the way down for DeSantis. The controversy has kicked off an unedifying national conversation about slavery, with the pro-DeSantis camp and the broader far-right insisting on the narrow factual accuracy of the standards and ignoring their overall message. DeSantis has faced heavy criticism from many Republicans, including prominent black Republicans. Tim Scott, the black Republican senator who in some polls is catching up with DeSantis in the presidential primary, has put the boot in particularly hard, saying: “What slavery was really about was separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was just devastating.”
DeSantis has shot back, criticizing both Scott and other black Republicans for repeating what he says are left-wing talking points. But the whole episode is another example of his inability to pick his battles and focus on a message which solves his core political problem, which is how to win over a subset of Trump’s voters while also convincing anti-Trump voters he’s a safe option. Arguing about slavery doesn’t do either of those things, and is a misuse of DeSantis’ rapidly-disappearing political oxygen. If he keeps this up, he’ll flame out fast.