The Distorted Story of Florida's African American History Curriculum

“‘Do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial’”

Um, what? According to the Florida Phoenix, Ron DeSantis’s Board of Education wants to teach that slavery was good! I saw this insanity posted on Facebook by an acquaintance, who called it proof that Ron DeSantis was a “racist fascist.” It was just the first in a stream of articles, posts, and tweets grabbing my attention that claimed Florida plans to horribly distort black history.¹

And the headlines were lies.

It didn’t stop with the media. This blatant falsehood was passed along by political leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris, who tweeted this to her 14 million followers:

Tweeted on July 20 from a Harris speech at the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority National Convention earlier in the day. (Full transcript here.)

Harris continued to harp on the false claim in follow-up tweets.

Many others joined her, like Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, who retweeted a Mother Jones article making the same claim.

On the face of it, the allegation seemed absurd. It didn’t pass the smell test. How could any state school system in today’s America claim that slavery was good? On the other hand, would mainstream media organizations and the Vice President of the United States lie? Hmmm, tough call. So I went and looked at the Florida standards myself.

Florida’s State Academic Standards — Social Studies, 2023

Don’t trust me; take a look yourself. There are many pages on black history, but nothing in them claims slavery was a net good.

Instead, there are sections covering black notables and heroes.

Extensive sections on the horrors of slavery and black resistance to it.

Later units cover the brutal repression black people faced during Jim Crow, including the Tulsa Massacre (1921) and Rosewood Massacre (1923).

And more on the successes of the black community despite these hardships.

Coverage of the ways in which whites tried to stop the Civil Rights Movement and stop black people from voting.

There’s much much more, but buried in it, there was also the one sentence that attracted almost all of the media’s attention.

That’s it. One short line says that slaves got skills “which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” This is a fact of slavery worth discussing. There was a status system even within slavery, and slaves with skills—blacksmiths, carpenters—had higher status than those without—those working in the fields.

A bland, heavily qualified, and accurate statement that some skills could personally benefit some slaves is translated by the Florida Phoenix into the distortion that Florida’s standards describe “slavery as beneficial.”

The Phoenix was not alone.

The Daily Beast opens with, “Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.””

NBC’s headline reads, “New Florida standards teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills,” leading readers to think that this is the core lesson of the section on black history.

Even the careful New York Times put the claim in a subhead.

All of this attention is given to one tiny note amid a sea of pages covering all the ugliness of black oppression in America. In no sane world can anyone see briefly mentioning that some slaves sometimes got some benefits from the skills they learned as being equivalent to arguing that slavery as a whole was beneficial to black people. Of course, because we live in a clown world, and nothing matters except scoring points on your enemies, that’s just what reams of journalists did. This kind of cherry-picked gaslighting is one more reason why trust in media is at a generational low.

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EDIT 7/27/2023

I came across the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies Official Course Framework (2023-2024), and their framing is similar to the Florida Standards’ framing.

The AP guidelines are expressed better and avoid that hot-button word “benefit,” but they largely say the same thing. They do add the important idea that slaves came to America with useful skills, which the Florida standards should have mentioned.

Still, nobody is calling the AP framework racist, probably because they don’t include the hot-button word “Florida.”

End edit.

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To avoid being as deceptive as the media, I should add that there were other points mentioned in a number of the articles critical of the new Florida teaching standards, although they received far less attention than the “slavery was beneficial” claim.

In the section on Reconstruction (that I displayed earlier), Florida’s standards say, “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans…” [Emphasis added.] This framing, critics said, is abhorrent because it says that black people were also being violent.

Other language that has drawn the ire of some educators and education advocates includes teaching about how Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres.
—NBC

What the news reports never mentioned was that this statement was correct. Sometimes black people did use violence. Black people were the targets of Jim Crow, of course, and when white people were killed during riots, it was a result of black people standing up for themselves, but sometimes black people picked up guns and fought back against their white oppressors. A bunch of white men started the Washington Race Riot of 1919, but black people fought back against their racist attacks, and it was one of the rare clashes where more white people (10) died than black people (5). The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 began with a confrontation where armed black men tried to defend their community against white attackers. In Tulsa, far more black people than whites were killed (although the exact numbers remain debated), but the violence was not all in one direction.

It would be historically wrong to suggest that black people were not brutally oppressed, but it would also be inaccurate (and demeaning) to say they never fought back.

None of this is to say that Florida’s education standards are perfect. If I were in charge, I would rewrite that section on riots to make it clear that when black people used violence, it was in self-defense. Some critics have also pointed out that in places, the standards merely ask students to “identify” famous African American figures rather than read more deeply about them. If that’s all the teachers did, that would indeed be bad, but I suspect that most teachers will go further than just having kids memorize names and faces (I certainly would). Still, making that obligation clear in the standards would have been a better choice.

But the screaming headlines that claimed Florida was teaching kids that slavery benefited black people were nonsense. And given that far too many people get their facts from scanning headlines, this will further warp Americans’ understanding of what is going on in Florida’s schools. “Florida teaches slavery is good” will become the battle cry that launches a thousand more Facebook threads, another “fact” that liberals know is true about conservatives.

And so the culture wars continue. The Right shows a video of a pink-haired young teacher spouting woke jargon, the Left counters with DeSantis and his “fascist” teaching standards. Accuracy is tossed in the trash in the name of feeding that sweet outrage that garners clicks, donations, and votes.

Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

Samuel Johnson (1758)

1. I prefer the label “black history,” but Florida’s standards use “African American history.”