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Key points
- Recent headlines claimed Florida's new educational standards teach slavery was good for slaves.
- In fact, Florida's educational standards make clear that slavery and racism were brutal and cruel.
- Left-wing revisionist history is now distorting the truth at least as much as historical conservative efforts.
A recent post on Twitter caused quite a stir for allegedly trivializing the suicide death of Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto principal who was bullied for questioning anti-racism training. For disagreeing that Canada is an inherently racist state, Bilkszto was publicly shamed and humiliated, labeled a white supremacist, and suffered significant mental health consequences. Suicide is a complicated phenomenon, and tying any death to a single event is fraught, but these circumstances were certainly a contributing factor.
I don’t blame someone on Twitter for repeating stuff he’d heard in national news media. Indeed, we all need to practice more forgiveness. Nor will I focus on Bilkszto’s death, which has been well-publicized. Rather, I will focus on a comment made in that video. Drawing tenuous connections from Bilkszto to Florida’s recent standards on teaching the history of racism and slavery, the video made a reference to: “Now in Florida, you have to say slavery is a good thing.”
Except that’s not Florida policy at all. Nonetheless, this false claim has been festooned across much of the news media and even repeated by Vice President Kamala Harris. Hell, I fell for it initially myself. It’s worth considering why this misinformation is occurring. HistoryBoomer (a blog written by a progressive history professor I respect), has covered this controversy fairly.
In fact, the Florida standards very clearly indicate slavery was brutal and cruel. The standards mandate teaching of Jim Crow, race massacres such as in Tulsa, as well as Black abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman, the Civil Rights movement, and historical White opposition to racial integration. It’s tough to make a case for the whitewashing of history if one bothers to read the standards.
The clause that has everyone in conniption is one sentence that, when covering various trades slaves were forced to perform (blacksmithing, carpentry, and so on), suggests, “Instructions on how slaves developed skills, which in some cases, could be applied to their personal benefit.” All the clothes rending and teeth gnashing basically amounts to catastrophizing one sentence.
Florida should have been aware it entered a minefield in which clumsy wording would be seized upon catastrophically and performatively. It’s entirely possible to note that slavery was brutal, cruel, inhumane, and entirely unjustifiable while also noting “in some cases” slaves learned skills they were able to benefit from once emancipated. The latter does not justify the former in any way.
Historically, we did have very real problems with conservatives whitewashing the uglier aspects of history, but Florida doesn’t appear to be doing this. Conversely, at present, I think we have a bigger problem with progressive revisionist history. Based on the history of Howard Zinn, the US (and Europe) is always wrong, always evil, always racist, sexist and oppressive, and incapable of any good. Thus, we end up with people seriously arguing Japan was the victim in WW2, or believing that indigenous or African people lived in some kind of pastoral, peaceful, matriarchal, gender-fluid utopia before Europeans arrived like Satan in Eden.
Evidence suggests that this kind of history is now permeating schools in both the US and UK (contrary to claims by teachers’ unions and national media that this was a conservative fever dream). Worse, as indicated in the graph below, such teaching is associated with increased teen suicides (though to be clear, such data is correlational, and causal attributions cannot be made, though some evidence does suggest mental health problems are more common among youth raised in progressive families).
Put simply, the far-left is at this point pushing a revisionist history that can only be described as anti-American and is at least correlated with worsening teen wellness. What can we do to fix this? A few brief thoughts.
1) We need to be better at teaching basic civics, including issues related to free speech and due process.
2) We should definitely teach shameful aspects of US history including the brutality of slavery, the racism of Jim Crow, and so on.
3) We need to put this into context for students, however. Slavery, genocide, and ethnocentrism-racism are human universals and were not inventions of the West.
4) People in Africa (and the rest of the world) kept slaves, sold slaves and, in North Africa, enslaved and sold Europeans. All slavery is brutal and immoral, no matter who did it to who.
5) The U.S. and Europe were at the forefront of eliminating legal slavery as a worldwide institution, though as many as 40 million people remain enslaved across the world today.
6) Racism in the U.S. and Europe is now at historic lows for any point in history. We should celebrate the good as well as the bad.
7) Just as we should talk about the good and bad of US history, any ethnic history should do the same for the groups they cover. Shedding light on different cultures is a wonderful idea, but no one were angels, and we must fairly apply the principle of honesty to all cultures, lest ethnic studies devolve into propaganda.
We can do better for our students. There are always reasonable debates about how best to teach history. But we need to stop misrepresenting and making stuff up to score morality points with our in-groups whether on the left or right.
(note: The Toronto principal's name was corrected in an edit to this story).
