Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was considered the great white Never Trump hope, but he’s been hemorrhaging support among college-educated Republican primary voters and is now a distant second in most polls. We’re all blissfully waiting for the day he slips behind Vivek Ramaswamy.
DeSantis is a lot like Ted Cruz in 2016 — a charmless weasel who thinks he can win the Republican nomination and the White House on a puritanical “dad from Footloose” platform. Of course, even Cruz repudiated David Duke and the KKK during the 2016 primary. DeSantis is doubling down on his “slavery was like negro trade school” position.
Friday, DeSantis defended Florida’s new history curriculum standards that grossly teach that enslaved people picked up helpful skills during their endless and brutal subjugation.
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said, alienating most of the non-slaveholding electorate, which is considerable even among today’s Republican Party.
DeSantis is operating under the mistaken impression that enslaved people could retire. It’s also revealing that he mentions blacksmiths, as they were often forced to make handcuffs, shackles and jail bars for other enslaved people. The geniuses behind Florida’s African American history standards list Ned Cobb as a blacksmith who somehow benefitted from slavery, but he was actually born 20 years after slavery ended.
Blacksmith David Davis was born into slavery in Maryland around 1787, but he didn’t learn his craft from gracious white people interested in his personal and professional development. He was likely taught how to blacksmith from an older Black man, most likely someone born in west Africa, where iron working was an elite craft. Africans possessed a knowledge and mastery of metalwork well before they were enslaved. Portuguese explorers in the 15th Century saw blacksmiths’ art at the mouth of the Congo River.
It is convenient for white people to believe the enslaved were an unskilled labor force, but that’s not true. Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote, “All that fancy iron work people love in Charleston? Came from African iron working knowledge and skill. The rice coast came from Africans selected for their rice production knowledge. First inoculation in the US? Came from an enslaved African who brought that science with him.”
According to the National Parks Service, Africans with iron making skills were imported to the Chesapeake to work as blacksmiths on plantations and in the developing iron industry.
Blacksmithing was grueling and dangerous work, and by the time Davis was 24, his arm was battered and broken. He’d also lost part of a forefinger. These marks didn’t just scar his body, they made it easier for white people to identify him when he attempted to escape from slavery, which he did often.
Reverend James Pennington published his memoir, The Fugitive Blacksmith, in 1849. As a child, he was once brutally beaten by a slave overseer and later sold to a stonemason when he was nine.
We had an overseer, named Blackstone; he was an extremely cruel man to the working hands. He always carried a long hickory whip, a kind of pole. He kept three or four of these in order, that he might not at any time be without one.
I once found one of these hickories lying in the yard, and supposing that he had thrown it away, I picked it up, and boy-like, was using it for a horse; he came along from the field, and seeing me with it, fell upon me with the one he then had in his hand, and flogged me most cruelly. From that, I lived in constant dread of that man; and he would show how much he delighted in cruelty by chasing me from my play with threats and imprecations. I have lain for hours in a wood, or behind a fence, to hide from his eye.
At this time my days were extremely dreary.
There was no tolerance for “idle hands” of even a true childhood among the enslaved. When DeSantis talks about the enslaved “learning skills for their personal benefit,” he’s talking about vicious and inhumane child exploitation. Pennington did learn the blacksmith trade but also from another enslaved Black man.
Enslaved blacksmiths did “enjoy” more relative freedom of movement than enslaved farm workers, but that only exacerbated their yearning for true freedom. Even the more “privileged” Black artisans and mechanics would escape at their first opportunity, even risking death, because slavery was objectively terrible. This obvious fact is still hard for people like DeSantis to grasp.
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