A Little Context Please

A radio interview the other day confirmed my suspicion that the outrage over the State of Florida's recently published history standards for K-12 public schools, needs a little more examination.

The interviewee, William Allen, was one of the contributors to the state's recently published list of standard guidelines regarding the teaching of history, in his case, the section on black American history.

Most of the outrage generated by this outline of study that otherwise reads like standard issue thought on black history from slavery through the Civil Rights movement, comes from one line.

The line in question is classified as a "benchmark clarification" and it is part of this item of study, (for reference, number SS.68.AA.2):

Analyze events that involved or affected Africans from the founding of the nation through Reconstruction.

 One of the sub-categories of the item is the following:

Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural
work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing,
transportation).

Which is followed by this benchmark clarification, the subject of all the controversy:

Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be
applied for their personal benefit. (emphasis mine)

Now that you hear it in its proper context, doesn't it sound a little better?

I didn't think so either.

Dr. Allen insists that what he and his fellow contributors to the new curriculum were trying to convey is NOT that black Americans have the institution of chattel slavery to thank for the skills their ancestors learned, but rather pointing out that after emancipation, former enslaved people, despite the tremendous odds against them, took their destiny into their own hands. Some of the skills they learned while under bondage, helped them survive their ordeal of life in the Post-Reconstruction South. In his words:

It is the case that Africans proved resourceful, resilient, and adaptive, and were able to develop skills and aptitudes which served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslaved... It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans.

Dr. Allen said he and his co-authors chose to emphasize the story of black people in the United States as being an example of the triumph of the human spirit, rather than merely a story of oppressors and victims. He then went on to use Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells as prime examples of his argument.

I'll take Dr. Allen's word on his and his colleagues' intentions. Nevertheless, that doesn't change the fact that as written, the clarification itself is tone deaf. 

The line which has come to define the entirety of Florida's new set of standards for the majority of Americans, has been condemned by both the left and the right. Upon release of the document, Vice President Harris before flying down to Florida to lambast the new standards in person, said:

Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery... 

They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.

Also focusing on that one line, Republican senator and presidential candidate Tim Scott from South Carolina who like Dr. Allen is a black conservative, said this:

There is no silver lining ... What slavery was really about [was] separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives,.. So, I would hope that every person in our country — and certainly [those] running for president — would appreciate that.

It seems the one politician who stands by the wording of the sentence, is the guy who deemed that re-evaluating history standards was necessary in the first place, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. True to form, when first confronted by the questionable statement. DeSantis became defensive. Like a child caught red-handed with a note making fun of the teacher, the first words out of his mouth were " I didn't write that."

Then he attacked the VP, the "woke mob", and even fellow Republicans who objected to the line, for spreading lies about the standards.

It's all very silly because there was a simple fix DeSantis could have employed that would have avoided the mess in the first place. He could have responded that in no way is anyone hinting at a silver lining to slavery, that the confusion stems from a poor choice of words, that these standards are still a work in progress, and that the misleading line will be struck and re-written.

DeSantis could also have brought up truthfully that his state is one of only twelve states in the nation that has mandated the teaching of black history in its public schools. He could also have correctly pointed out that he is personally responsible for signing a bill that required the teaching of The Ocoee Election Day Massacre in Florida schools (see below).

But he didn't bring any of that up.

The idea that former enslaved people used some of the skills they learned while under bondage in order to survive life as free people under an extraordinarily difficult situation, is not controversial nor debatable. It is in fact so obvious that it hardly needs mentioning. Despite that, it is a part of existing standard curricula around the country, including the one preceding this one in Florida. The objectionable part boils down to the use of two words, "personal benefit." The choice of those words in this context implies (although does not necessarily mean) that lives of people were improved from having been enslaved. It also implies the laughable idea that before they were enslaved, the African people who were brought to this country in chains had no discernible skills of their own.

As we live in an age of sound bites, the message that black people in this country personally benefited from being enslaved is now the takeaway from these new Florida standards in the minds of most Americans. The obvious conclusion is that the whole point of this exercise is to lessen the immorality and injustice of slavery, to make white enslavers look not so bad, and their descendants several generations removed, to feel not so guilty. With the words "personal benefit" in place, any explanation attempting to prove otherwise falls upon deaf ears.

Unfortunately, his insistence on being a culture warrior makes DeSantis go to great lengths to avoid being perceived as having said or done anything "woke". One of those lengths is being on the wrong side of history. This is not the first time. In this case, by not insisting the new standards be re-worded to avoid sounding as if they had been written by the Klan, he handed an easy bone of contention, gift wrapped to his opponents. 

Democrats and Independents alike, as well the Republicans who are running against him in his party's nomination for the 2024 presidential race, all will personally benefit from DeSantis's boneheaded intransigence.

Oh well, that's his problem not mine. 

But I do have a bone to pick with the Left of MAGA crowd, my own tribe, who keep dwelling on the personal benefit theme.

It isn't because the idea is not horrible and disgusting on its own, but because there are other issues with this new set of standards.

Let's begin with the Ocoee Massacre mentioned above, and the other atrocities mentioned below, found  in Section SS.912.AA.3.6 of the standards:

Describe the emergence, growth, destruction and rebuilding of black communities during Reconstruction and beyond. 

Benchmark Clarifications:
...
Clarification 2: Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921, Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre.

Again the emphasis is mine. Once more, the questionable nature of this clarification comes down to two words, in this case, "and by". The examples given in Clarification 2, all involve the massacre of dozens of black people. In each case there was indeed violence perpetrated by black people but by any reasonable standard, that violence was either in self-defense, or defending the justice of others (i.e.: preventing people from being lynched). As written, the authors are conflating the racist vigilante mob violence of one group with the other group reacting to it in self-defense, implying that both sides are equally responsible for the atrocities. I invite you to look up these tragic events to arrive at your own conclusions.

My main objection to the new standards however is the motivation to create them in the first place.

This is what DeSantis had to say in a press release announcing his signing of what has become known as the 2022 "Anti-Woke Act."

No one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race. In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida.

I might be a little dense here but doesn't singling out "the far-left woke agenda" imply some indoctrination on the part of the Governor? 

Enter The 1619 Project.

The brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist for the New York Times, The 1619 Project is a substantive look at American history, bringing the institution of slavery to the forefront of issues that shaped this country. The initial publication of the work was in the August 19, 2019 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, marking the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the White Lion, a ship carrying what many regard to be the first group of African people to these shores to be sold as slaves. So intertwined is slavery to American history according to Hannah-Jones, she uses that date to mark what she considers to be the true origin date of this nation.  

Since its original publication, The 1619 Project has been distributed as a podcast, a book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a film, and a curriculum distributed to schools around the country.

The work has received numerous accolades and awards including the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

1619 has also been roundly criticized for its historical inaccuracies. Shortly after its first publication in the magazine, The Times received a letter written by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz and co-signed by four other eminent historians, James McPherson, the author of the influential Civil War history The Battle Cry of Freedom, Gordon Wood, Pullizer Prize winner for his book: The Radicalization of the Revolution, Victoria Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies, and James Oakes, author of Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. 

The letter accuses the author of among other things: a "displacement of historical understanding by ideology." The signees contend that 1619 gives the impression that slavery was a uniquely American phenomenon, that it is intrinsically tied to Capitalism, and that the project is unfairly dismissive of Abraham Lincoln and his role in emancipation. But chiefly the authors object to this line from Hannah-Jones's introductory text: 

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology, is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.

It should be noted that several other notable historians were approached to sign the letter but refused on the grounds that they felt the importance of reframing "our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative" in words taken from a promo for the book, outweighs the inaccuracies. 

One of those historians is Leslie M. Harris, professor of history at Northwestern University, and author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. In an article for Politico, Professor Harris writes about her work with the New York Times, verifying some of the details of 1619 before it went to press. Professor Harris in her words, "vigorously disputed the claim" that the preservation of slavery was central to American Independence, but to no avail, they went with it anyway.

Dr. Harris's Politico piece titled I Helped Fact-Check The 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me, is well worth reading. You can find it here.

Also worth reading is New York Times Sunday Magazine editor Jake Silverstein's response to Professor Wilentz's letter here. Silverstein makes an eloquent, if not all together convincing argument for refusing the letter's request to correct the factual errors in 1619 save for one. They grudgingly agreed to change the part in the introductory text that reads: "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was..." to "one of the reasons some of the colonists..."

As for the rest of the inaccuracies well, they're still there.

That's a shame because in my opinion, the lack of attention to getting things right in any historical work, runs the risk of invalidating the entire work. 

In his piece, Silverstein quotes our friend Ron DeSantis:

...the folks who created [The 1619 Project] said that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery. Now, that is factually false. That is something that you can look at the historical record. You want to know why they revolted against Britain? They told us. They wrote pamphlets, they did committees of correspondence, they did a Declaration of Independence. ... I think it’s really important that when we’re doing history, when we’re doing things like civics, that it is grounded in actual fact, and I think we’ve got to have an education system that is preferring fact over narratives.

Silverstein then goes on to refute the Governor:

A curious feature (editor's emphasis) of this argument on behalf of the historical record is how ahistorical it is. In privileging “actual fact” over “narrative,” the governor, and many others, seem to proceed from the premise that history is a fixed thing; that somehow, long ago, the nation’s historians identified the relevant set of facts about our past, and it is the job of subsequent generations to simply protect and disseminate them.

I couldn't agree more that history is not a fixed thing, or that once history is written, it should forever be a closed book. 

The following may be a little hard to decipher but I think the exPOTUS and I differ on this issue:

I just look at—I look at school. I watch, I read, look at the stuff. Now they want to change—1492, Columbus discovered America. You know, we grew up, you grew up, we all did, that's what we learned. Now they want to make it the 1619 project. Where did that come from? What does it represent? I don't even know.

But facts are facts and Nikole Hannah-Jones is no more entitled to her own facts than Donald Trump. As much as I hate to say this, DeSantis is right here, at least to some extent. The "Founding Fathers" themselves (not the historians), left us all sorts of evidence of reasons why they demanded independence, including the Declaration of Independence itself. 

Well you say: "of course they're not going to openly demand the right to enslave people as even in the late eighteenth century that was a contentious issue." And it is a fact that many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, including its author, were enslavers who certainly had a personal stake in the matter. But it's also true that many of the signers were opposed to slavery and would not have put their personal stamp on such a document if maintaining slavery was indeed one of the main arguments for independence. 

But the proof in the pudding that Hannah-Jones's position on the matter is a non-starter is that there is scant evidence that Britain in the 1770s had any inclination of eliminating slavery in the American colonies. The fact is the British themselves personally benefitted quite nicely from slavery in the American colonies even after their independence, as is pointed out in one of the episodes of The 1619 Project. Therefore, while the idea of protecting slavery might have been on the minds of some of these men, the premise that preservation of that dreadful institution was one of the main causes for independence is a wild stretch at best.

But is it a deal killer as far as The 1619 Project goes?

Well, it is for the folks who let it define the entire work, just as the part about people benefiting from the skills they learned as slaves is a deal killer to the people who let it define the new Florida outline.

It certainly is a deal killer to DeSantis who has banned the 1619 curriculum from being taught in Florida public schools. The new Florida curriculum outline in fact owes its very existence to The1619 Project and the strong backlash to it. Florida is not alone as several other states have done the same.

It may be likely that even without the historical inaccuracies those states would have still banned the 1619 curriculum for its central theme of race and racism. The inaccuracies just give them legitimate justification. That is unfortunate. It is also unnecessary. Even though Hannah-Jones's idea of slavery being central to the American Revolution fits perfectly into her thesis, her thesis doesn't suffer one bit from dropping the idea which more than likely is not true.

It doesn't change the fact pointed out by Jake Silverstein that "Enslavement is not marginal to the history of the United States; it is inextricable." 

It doesn't change the idea that rings so true, the title of Nikole Hannah-Jones introductory essay: "Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true." 

If you don't believe that, read my previous post.

And it doesn't change what I consider the most valuable aspect of The1619 Project, giving a voice to the people who were up until now voiceless, enslaved people themselves. 

Despite its faults, The1619 Project is a valuable addition to the canon of works dealing with American history. Just like any historical text, it should never be considered the final word on its subject. Perhaps the silver lining to its drawbacks is that as a study tool, students can learn to judge for themselves, discerning fact from narrative and ideology, thereby developing their own critical thinking skills.

Now that's something from which we can all personally benefit.