As part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to make public schools safe for racist white people’s children who might be offended by history, the Florida Board of Education voted yesterday to approve a new curriculum for African-American history for use in kindergarten though the 12th grade. The standards leave out a few minor details, like the fact that Florida seceded from the Union to preserve slavery. And while it does at least say that racism and prejudice are bad, it carefully avoids suggesting that the Black people were oppressed for any particular reason, just that bigots were mean to them out of bigotry.
While it’s at it, the curriculum uses outdated language, referring to people as “slaves” instead of the more common academic term “enslaved people,” which emphasizes that slavery wasn’t an inherent status but a condition forced on human beings by those who enslaved them.
The new history curriculum comes months after DeSantis banned the College Board’s Advanced Placement course on African American Studies from Florida high schools because he believed it was too “divisive” because he thought it made white people look bad for having instituted slavery and Jim Crow, and because it included dangerous ideas like the existence of LGBTQ+ Black people.
Previously:
Ron DeSantis's Drunk Black History
Florida Will Shrink Black History Until It's Small Enough To Drown In Ron DeSantis's Bathtub
Ron DeSantis Cancels 'Un-American' African American Studies AP Classes, F*ck You Is Why
Ron DeSantis Fights For Free Speech By Banning Teachers Mentioning Slavery And Gay People
Not surprisingly, the new whitewashed curriculum doesn’t sit well with either civil rights or education leaders, which no doubt proves to DeSantis just how excellent it is. If teachers and Black people are protesting it, it must be perfect. The Tallahassee Democrat reports,
In a letter to board member Ben Gibson, a group of 11 organizations, including the NAACP and the Florida Education Association, criticized the state for omitting or rewriting “key historical facts about the Black experience.”
“We owe the next generation of scholars the opportunity to know the full unvarnished history of this state and country and all who contributed to it – good and bad,” the letter reads.
DeSantis’s appointee to the state board, MaryLynn Magar, said at the meeting yesterday that the curriculum was just what DeSantis ordered, which is that you must never ever think anything bad about American history, even the sad parts that are unfortunate departures from the nation’s founding principles of equality and opportunity for all, amen.
“Everything is there. […] The darkest parts of our history are addressed, and I’m very proud of the task force. I can confidently say that the DOE and the task force believe that African American history is American history, and that’s represented in those standards.”
There do seem to be just one or two itsy-bitsy oversights in the curriculum. For starters, in elementary and middle school classes, African American history literally ends with Reconstruction, so Jim Crow and even the Civil Rights movement are left for high school.
We’ll also note that — apparently with not a lot of historical context — third graders will learn about African Americans who “demonstrated heroism and patriotism” like Booker T Washington, the Tuskegee Airmen, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks, presumably as long as they were brave against individual bad people, not anything systemic. Fourth graders will learn about Black people who “made positive contributions in the state of Florida, including Zora Neale Hurston, and other figures who are so very Florida that I’m afraid I didn’t recognize them apart from Bessie Coleman, the pioneering Black and Native American woman aviatrix, who lived in Orlando in the 1920s and died in a horrific plane crash in Jacksonville in 1926.
Bizarrely, the middle school benchmarks also include a requirement that students learn about “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” so weren’t they the Lucky Duckies.
Even worse, the high school standards blame the Black victims for the 1920 Ocoee massacre, in which white mobs lynched between 30 and 35 Black people for the crime of wanting to vote, then burned down the Black part of town, forcing most Black residents to flee Ocoee for good. The town remained all-white until 1981.
The benchmarks for the Ocoee massacre and other post-Reconstruction massacres of Black communities emphasize “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms,” but with no mention of white supremacy — it was just bad individuals who were racist in their bad hearts. As for the massacres themselves, students are to learn about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” (emphasis added), because there were undoubtedly violent troublemakers and very fine people on either side.
To be sure, the standards are at least fairly detailed in their discussion of the Civil Rights movement, once kids finally get to it in high school, and in painfully tortured phrasing cooked up to avoid mentioning white supremacy, direct that instruction include “the immediate and lasting effects of organizations that sought to resist achieving American equality (e.g., state legislatures, Ku Klux Klan [KKK], White Citizens’ Councils [WCC], law enforcement agencies…” and the like. Why, it almost seems like those people with individual prejudices in their hearts were involved in some systems, but kids will have to figure that out for themselves.
Elsewhere, as the Tallahassee Democrat points out, the standards cover the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended segregation, but they don’t mention that “in 1957, the Florida Legislature passed a resolution in opposition of the decision that ended legal segregation in schools.” Well that’s no longer operative, so why dwell on it at all?
In conclusion, Florida is a happy place where maybe some bad people made poor decisions in the past, but everything is fine and equal now, and all citizens are equal in their rights to seek higher ground as the sea level keeps rising for some reason that can’t be discussed because that would be politicizing the weather, the end.
[Tallahassee Democrat / Florida Academic Standards, Social Studies / Image: Smithsonian Ocean, public domain]
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Let’s not argue and bicker about who massacred who
I cannot help but think of Kimberly Jones' comment that "they are lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge".