Voters who only read headlines might think Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is teaching children that slavery was a good thing, but there are lies, damn lies, and Democratic media talking points.
Florida’s history standards would be uncontroversial if they had been produced by anyone other than former President Donald Trump’s top rival for the presidential nomination. The liberal media are, in this as in many other things, proving themselves to be nothing more than lap dogs for the Democratic Party.
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Vice President Kamala Harris, who once falsely claimed DeSantis had banned teaching about slavery entirely, started the latest round of mendacious attacks on DeSantis with a speech in Indiana in which she falsely claimed, “In the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”
Instead of reading what the standards actually say and comparing that with the truth, the liberal media parroted Harris’s grotesque deliberate deception. “New Florida standards teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery,” blared NBC News. “New Florida teaching standards say African Americans received some personal benefit from slavery,” read Politico. The Washington Post editorial board even weighed in with, “DeSantis seeks to whitewash slavery in Florida curriculum.”
All of these stories are completely false. Here are the two sentences in question out of Florida’s 216-page social studies standards: “Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation). Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Nowhere in those two sentences does it say that black people benefited from slavery. What it does say is that some slaves were taught professional skills and were allowed to benefit from this training. This is 100% true and, in contexts other than DeSantis’s Florida, wouldn’t be controversial.
For example, take this from the Library of Congress: “It is important to remember, however, that while some enslaved people worked on large cotton plantations, others worked in other types of agriculture, including tobacco, hemp (for rope-making), corn, and livestock. In Southern cities, many worked at a variety of skilled trades as well as common laborers. It was not unusual for those working in the cities to put away enough money to buy their freedom.”
This is from the National Park Service: “During this period, slave owners hired out enslaved artisans and tradesmen and some enslaved African Americans even managed to hire themselves out. This was one means of making money to buy themselves and their families out of slavery.”
This is from the National Humanities Center: “Planters expected enslaved people to perform a wide range of jobs that included carpenter, cooper, boatman, cook, seamstress, and blacksmith, to mention only a few of the skilled functions required around plantations. … Of course, the possession of skills gave slaves leverage because planters desired to keep them at home and at work rather than, by bad treatment, encouraging them to flee.”
The Florida standards don’t whitewash the reality of slavery. The acquisition of skills by some slaves does not extenuate the great evil of slavery, nor exculpate slave owners or traders. Florida students are taught “what life was like for the earliest slaves,” including “undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free.”
If anything, it honors slaves who bettered themselves through hard skilled work. Students are taught about “how slave codes were strengthened in response to Africans’ resistance to slavery,” including the Stono rebellion and the Igbo Landing mass suicide. If Florida school children are being taught that some people chose resistance over bondage, how is that whitewashing slavery?
The left-wing news media are desperate to help reelect President Joe Biden, and they know that the best way to do that is to sink any threat to Trump winning the Republican nomination. If journalists want to know why their profession has lost so much credibility, it is because of stories like this. The Washington Post et al. should be ashamed of spreading such lies.
