It’s amazing what you can learn about American history if you sublimate your intellect to the schoolmarms of DeSantistan.
For instance, I had no idea that slavery was actually a vocational program where people deemed to be subhuman were afforded the opportunity, during their unpaid toil, to learn valuable job skills! Or, as page six of Florida’s new academic standards succinctly puts it, “Instruction (in public schools) includes how slaves developed skills which in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit.” The white enslavers generously offered “agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation.” And the Sultan of DeSantistan is bullish about this version of history; while campaigning ineptly for the presidency the other day, he said that some slaves “eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
Gee, I guess everything I’ve long thought to be accurate about slavery was all wrong. Like the fact (former fact?) that most slaves picked cotton and that whatever vocational skills they may have acquired were financially exploited by their owners; that skilled slaves sold for more money when their flesh was peddled at the slave markets; that slaves, rather than being wowed by the vocational opportunities, routinely sought to escape captivity – by 1860, an estimated 400,000 had succeeded – and that, if captured, they were routinely whipped or worse; that skilled slaves rarely “parlayed” their expertise “later in life,” because racism and Jim Crow violence in places like Florida continued to oppress them.
Jesse Watters, one of the new dolts on Fox News, has tried to pitch in on Florida’s behalf: “This is historical fact that slaves did develop skills while they were enslaved and then used those skills as blacksmiths, in agriculture, tailoring, in the shipping business, to benefit themselves and their families.” Yeah, right, their families. The same families that were torn apart when spouses and children were auctioned off to disparate buyers at the slave markets. That common practice was ultimately blessed by Article I of the Confederate constitution, which decreed that no law shall ever be enacted “impairing the right of property in negro slaves.”
What Florida is peddling – what Ron DeSantis is feeding to the white Republican base – is the old racist myth of the happy “negro” who liked captivity. They’re trying to normalize something that only nutcase conservatives used to say out loud – people like Roy Moore, the accused Alabama child molester who ran for the Senate a few years ago; he said during his campaign that America’s last era of greatness was when we “had slavery,” because “families were united, they cared for one another…Our country had a direction.”
And perhaps you remember Cliven Bundy, the deadbeat Nevada rancher who refused to pay two decades’ worth of required federal grazing fees. Circa 2014, he became a hero of the radical right. At one point, speaking on video to a reporter, he said stuff about slavery that would sync nicely with the new DeSantistan standards: “I want to tell you one more thing about the negro…I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?” (Gosh, that’s a tough one: Is it better to be a free person, with help when needed from a government that helps people in need – or is it “better off” to be picking cotton, whipped and chained, without any prospects of being helped by anyone?)
So, with Florida seeking to make its kids as stupid as the likes of Moore and Bundy, you may well be wondering what this is really all about. Why try so hard to whitewash the past? Gary Abernathy, a former Republican activist, has an answer:
“I’m bewildered about why some on the right think too much knowledge is a dangerous thing…Is it because they fear that by acquiring such information, the next generation of White Americans might gain a fuller understanding of why racial equality has yet to be achieved, as well as why remedies such as affirmative action and reparations for descendants of enslaved people are not so unreasonable?”
Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere.