Florida has a sordid history of racism but Governor DeSantis wants that history to be literally whitewashed so that no white students feels “uncomfortable” learning the truth. DeSantis opposes “woke” history that others call telling the truth.
Alan Singer of Hostra University explains here why it is so hard to sanitize Florida’s history of racism.
He writes:
On Twitter, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted that “In Florida, we require the truth about American history to be taught in our classrooms. We will not allow schools to twist history to align with an ideological agenda.”
As part of Florida’s campaign against undefined “wokeness,” the Department of Education banned the teaching of a new African American Studies Advanced Placement course. It rejected the course as lacking “educational value and historical accuracy” and for violating Florida law.
Last week, the Florida State Board of Education unanimously approved new standards for how Black history should be taught in the state. The standards are designed to define “anti-woke” education. In its response, the Florida Education Association (FEA) branded the standards “a disservice to Florida’s students” and “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.” Eleven Florida civil rights and education organizations including the FEA and the NAACP sent a letter to Florida Board of Education that it ignored. The letter charged that “these standards purposely omit or rewrite key historical facts about the Black experience.” Vice-President Kamala Harris called the Florida standards “an attempt to gaslight us.”
Two of the most controversial clarifications in the social studies standards include a statement in the 6-8 grade guidelines that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and that instruction in high school on events like the 1920 Ocoee Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre that occurred in Florida should include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” acts of violence by African Americans that did not occur.
The major problems here are that Africans in Africa were agrarian people who had skills that were robbed from them when they were enslaved, and that enslaved Africans were considered property and any benefit from their skills accrued to their supposed owners. The Ocoee riots and murders occurred when African Americans attempted to vote in the Presidential election. In Rosewood, a mob of hundreds of whites murdered Black people they randomly caught and burned the town.
I found other statements and missing statements in the Florida social studies standards equally disturbing. The two places that refer to the Confederate states and the Civil War don’t mention which side Florida was on and which side African Americans fought for. Segregation is mentioned three times and the Klan is mentioned four times, but student do not learn what role they played in Florida.
But for me as a historian and a teacher the most disturbing part of the standards is the way slavery, and the slave trade are explained. It is intended to take responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery off the European countries that conquered and settled the Americas. “Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures,” “how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey),” and “how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.” Students “[e]xamine the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619.”
The lesson being taught in the Florida standards is that everybody had slavery and it was the same all over the world. But it wasn’t. Only the European colonies in the Americas and the new countries including the United States had race-based chattel slavery where enslaved people were no longer considered human, and their status was inherited by their children. Even after slavery ended as a result of the Civil War, Florida and the other states in the former Confederacy instituted laws to keep African Americans in virtual bondage and white Southerners enforced those laws through vigilante groups like the Klan.
Florida has many reasons to want to bury its sordid racial history. In the first have of the 19th century white settlers massacred and expelled Florida’s Native Americans. Between 1870 and 1950, 311 African Americans were lynched in Florida. Three Florida counties, Lafayette, Taylor, and Baker were especially notorious. Florida had some of the strictest Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1881, it banned interracial marriage and in 1885 it mandated racially segregated schools. The interracial marriage ban was added to the Florida State Constitution in 1944. Starting in 1927, it was a criminal offense for a teacher to teach someone of a different race. At least 50 African Americans were murdered in Ocoee, Florida on November 2, 1920, after local Blacks attempted to vote. On January 1, 1923, white rioters stormed through the African American community of Rosewood, Florida, burning the town to the ground, killing six people, and driving the rest of the population into the forest and swamps to escape. On August 27, 1960, peaceful Black students conducting a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Jacksonville were attacked by a mob of over 200 whites armed with baseball bats and ax handles. No African American student was permitted to earn a bachelor’s degree from the formerly segregated University of Florida until 1965.
Solomon Northup was a free Black man living in New York State who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northup’s memoir, published after he escaped from slavery, was made into movies in 1984 and 2013. There is a scene in the 1984 PBS version of Solomon Northup’s Odyssey where Master Epps and friends are sitting on the veranda arguing with a Canadian carpenter named Bass about the legitimacy of slavery. Northup is near by trimming hedges and overhears the debate. Bass tells the story of a runaway who was captured and brought to court. The judge is puzzled why the enslaved African attempted to escape when he was fed and not beaten. The African replied “That job’s still there if you want to go ask for it.”
Maybe, with his Presidential campaign flailing, Ron DeSantis should apply for a job like that and get some skills.
Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies
Teaching Learning Technology
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“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We’ve read about Hillsdale in the context of conservative changes to K-12 curriculum.
A school superintendent in Idaho, Branden Durst, is working with others to create the first Christian charter school. Durst describes the planned use of Hillsdale curriculum in his Dec. 2022, Facebook page.
Oklahoma has the first Catholic charter school. Frederick Hess identified Nicole Stelle Garnett (a professor at Notre Dame and a Senior Fellow at the Koch’s Manhattan Institute) as “the legal scholar probably the most responsible for advancing the notion of religious charter schools.” She clerked for Clarence Thomas. It seems likely that for her, similar to Barrett, “the dogma runs loudly within,” (Diane Feinstein’s characterization of Barrett’s religious sect beliefs).
In reference to Branden Durst, new school superintendent, he is the subject of a Washington State Standard article reproduced at Raw Story today.
Durst selected as a hire of the school system, the wife of Dave Reilly. Dave Reilly self identifies as a Christian nationalist. WUNC reported last year in an article titled, “Idaho’s Fight Against the Far Right”, that Dave Reilly, “led a Catholic rosary prayer in opposition to a (gay) Pride event.” Media report Dave Reilly is a groper and an acolyte of Nick Fuentes (right wing Catholic). Dave Reilly is quoted by media as saying repeatedly, “Jews were and continue to be the enemy of Christ.”
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Thank you for this post. The right is trying to normalize slavery. Florida does not want to reflect on its violent, racist past. DeSantis and company want to continue the tradition of racism by teaching fake history. They want to indoctrinate young people into accepting injustice. BTW, Florida just approved the use of Prager University materials in its public schools. It’s pure propaganda. Thanks for pointing out the difference between US slavery and that of other cultures.
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Thanks to Mr Singer for taking on all 216 pp of the revised FL social studies standards. I tried, but gave up before getting to high school level, so I entirely missed the gem inserted in connection with Ocoee and Rosewood massacres. (Hadn’t seen that one quoted in MSM articles.) Nor had I grasped that the thrust of revisions is to distract from FL’s worst-than-most history by placing it as a speck in the global history of slavery.
I wonder if the standards include the Seminole wars and other circumstances leading to the ceding of FL to US by Spain. Murky and interesting stuff. Partly about appeasing GA [as the Spanish accepted runaway slaves, & Seminoles accepted them into the tribe].
FWIW: American history taught in the ‘60s (at least in NYS curriculum) included neither Ocoee, nor Rosewood, nor the destruction and massacre at Black Wall St in OK.
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Florida teacher here. Everyone I work with is going to keep giving the same lessons on slavery as years past. No one is using PragerU crap, and we’re going to keep on teaching the truth. Someone tell Comrade Christine Pushaw we’re sending her one finger salutes every day as I hear she reads the comments on this blog. Also her boss just needs to come out of the closet already, it’s ok, we all know.
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@Saying Gay Just keep doing what you’re doing! Everyone needs to move beyond the shock and fear and intimidation reactions and into the solidarity, pissed off, and do-what-is-right action.
I’ll say it again and again: these idiots cannot possibly fire everybody. Think about it. It’s impossible. Teachers in Florida (and every state) have the numbers to affect change. More often than not, however, they don’t. They are content with “having a seat at the table”, which is essentially just teachers gaslighting themselves.
Either do something about it – in this case, reject the false slavery narratives and simply teach The Truth – or accept your fate and just keep quiet. The time for complaining is over.
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Please tell me how DeSantis wants the teachers in Florida to explain the Kingsley Plantation State Park on Fort George Island off the St. Johns River north of Mayport, Fla? It was a Slave Breeding Plantation. I’m sure old DeSantis doesn’t want the white kids learning about the cruelty of their forefathers (Mine weren’t here. They came in 1865 from the Netherlands after the war.
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Kingsley is an interesting and well presented historical park. The tabby construction of some of the slave housing is a lingering look at the methods of construction of that day, preserving some of the history of the common man (slaves being in that group). I recall Kingsley particularly because it was a slave breeding plantation.
Of the group that was transported across the Atlantic in the slave trade, only about 5% came to the North American continent. The reason for this is that tropical climate sugar plantations tried to kill off the individual slave in five years to tamp down the possibility of insurrection. It was only in North America that slaves produced a surplus population during slavery, and this was precisely why over a million people who by 1810 could be described as African American were forced marched west on what one author called the African Trail of Tears as cotton land opened.
The point is that slavery was a varied institution. These variations have often been used to justify slavery as an institution. This is, of course, an illegitimate use of history. That did not keep generations of slave holders and their philosophical apologists from attempting to justify the peculiar institution. They are still at it
Preserving the history of slavery and the Age of White Supremacy is vital to our development as a free society, wherein the people may aspire to greatness and their children may dream.
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This wannabe despot (my governor, sadly) is a character right out of George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984. Pathetic.
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