Florida’s guidelines distort

This is the Black history that Florida’s guidelines distort

Opinion by Peniel E. Joseph

I first learned about racial slavery in a Brooklyn apartment, from the stories my mother told me, beginning when I was a toddler, about the Haitian Revolution. By the time the television series “Roots” aired in January 1977, detailing the generational horrors of racial slavery, we had moved to the house in Jamaica, Queens neighborhood where ultimately I came of age.

In retrospect, “Roots” proved to be a sobering introduction for me to the complex relationship among Black America, slavery and the ideals of the United States.

These memories are what came to me as I pondered the consequences of Florida Board of Education’s effort to revise American history by erasing the brutality behind the nation’s original sin of racial slavery.

The board has passed new so-called standards for instruction of Black history in the state’s public schools, following the passage of legislation under Gov. Ron DeSantis that bars any teaching that suggests anyone is oppressed (or privileged) because of their skin color or race. DeSantis, now a candidate for president, has couched this erasure of teaching racism in terms of fighting “wokeness” in an effort to boost his national image among Republican voters.

These new standards require middle school students to learn about how slavery helped slaves develop skills that could benefit them. High school students must learn about some of American history’s most egregious race massacres under the guise of “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

These are perversions and lies; they are what Vice President Kamala Harris has called them: an attempt at ‘gaslighting.’ In truth, the peculiar Institution of racial slavery was foundational to America’s rise and depended entirely on classifying Black people as commodities that were both highly valued and sought after and simultaneously debased and exploited by a system of profit that denied their humanity.

Slavery was woven into the fabric of this country before its very inception. By 1770, there were around 462,000 enslaved people in the colonies, about one-fifth of the total colonial population. When the Civil War began in 1860, enslaved persons numbered around four million. Historians estimate that about 12% of enslaved Africans did not survive Middle Passage. Conditions for enslaved persons once in North America varied by circumstance, but it was a horrific existence: many were beaten, raped, sold away from their family members or subjected to other kinds of violence and psychological abuse. Inhumane living and working conditions produced a litany of painful and often fatal health outcomes, for adults and for children. (As a note: Slavery has gone on throughout ALL of human history, even in that make believe book, the bible, they don't say slavery is bad, just don't hurt your slaves to much... So slavery is not just an American thing.*)

All of this occurred against the backdrop of the enormous wealth and economic growth that enslaved labor generated, and that toxic legacy is still evident. Today’s staggering racial wealth gap persists in large measure because of slavery’s immediate and longer-term aftermath, and racial health disparities—including an alarming rate of Black maternal mortality—remain a fact of life in America.

American capitalists purchased life insurance on Black folk who they presumed to think of as legal property; they used ownership of plantations and enslaved Blacks as collateral for credit to invest in global markets. The returns on these investments were capacious, spreading wealth from sea to shining sea and implicating the entirety of the United States, including its system of higher education, and allowing its borders to grow and expand. From New York’s Wall Street to the ports of New Orleans and Mississippi to the California gold rush and the westward expansion that founded Oregon, Washington, the Dakotas and more, racial slavery proved to be the golden straw that stirred American Dreams.

The political reckoning over the consequences of this history had, until recent years, gradually become mainstream. The finale of “Roots” was the most watched episode of television of its time. It helped to spark renewed interests in racial slavery and the generational origins of Black folk that can be witnessed in the PBS series “Finding Your Roots” and the spate of DNA services promising to unveil the hidden past of Black folk whose last names remain proof of their rupture during the transatlantic slave trade.

Slavery proved to be so great a blight on America’s soul that it came to require a Civil War of Biblical proportions to eradicate. Even that calamitous conflict could not permanently elevate the cause of the enslaved to national priority. Instead, the badge of former servitude became the symbol of a racial caste system that defined Black folk as a species of property whose value in many cases dropped precipitously from the days of racial slavery. New forms of bondage—convict leasing, debt peonage, sharecropping —came to define Black life well into the 20th century.

American history also contributed to the nation’s denigration by lying about this reality. The history of (and raison d’être for) the Confederacy was rewritten through textbooks, celebrations and popular culture that turned much of America’s built landscape into a living memorial in honor of the racist fanatics who lost their lives committing generational acts of treason against the nation’s highest ideals.

Black educators and ordinary citizens have, for over a century, attempted to set the record straight. Negro History week founder and author of “The Miseducation of the Negro” Carter G. Woodson revolutionized the study of Black history as a tool to develop young minds as well as curing the now embedded anti-Black stereotypes that weaponized untrue history as justification for lynching, false imprisonment, unequal education, rampant unemployment, racial segregation and poverty.

The conservative overreaction over the last decade to works of history, film and cultural expression that amplify the human experience of racial slavery—from The 1619 Project to “Underground Railroad”— has resulted in the tragedy unfolding before the world. A political theater of the absurd has been unleashed, one wherein racial slavery is reimagined as a benign institution.

In many ways, The 1619 Project emerged as the most ambitiously imagined Black history project ever conceived precisely because, as a multimedia print and digital event that included a curriculum for educators, it offered a new way to learn and teach about the nation’s origins. For anyone who takes the time to read the first iteration of that project or expanded book anthology edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, or who views the documentary series by the same name , it would be hard to imagine even uttering the words “Slavery benefited Black people,” let alone believing and trying to teach this.

Here was what students must learn: how racial slavery and its afterlife impacted the production of not just cotton, but sugar, coffee and so many other foods and goods taken for granted in our daily lives and those of our ancestors. They should find out how the enslaved were utilized (while alive and dead) for experimentation by medical doctors and medical students who used Black cadavers without permission and even robbed the graves of the enslaved.

Instead of studying insulting distortions or untruths about what slavery did for Black people, learn about the resistance and power Black people unleashed despite it. Black people held onto their dignity, despite the peculiar institution’s inherent cruelty. They created music, innovated new food  and cooking techniques, designed homes, towns and even helped create the nation’s capital. Black Americans during racial slavery learned to read and write, although this was against the law and put their lives at risk, and produced beautiful treatises (popularly known as slave narratives) by (among many others) Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass lowered the veil to expose the violence, sexual assault and degradation of slavery that now remains too often ignored in our own time.

Amidst all this history, what stands out the most to me is Black people’s unrequited love for America, something that can be read about in virtually all histories of slavery. Black folk helped to build up America with their toil and their very real love for the families from whom they were often painfully separated.

The truth about slavery’s brutal economy is that it placed, as historian Daina Ramey Berry has illustrated, a price on Black bodies “from the womb to the tomb.” And still, enslaved people fervently believed in the ideal of American democracy. They fought in every single war between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Enslaved people became the biggest proponents of abolition-democracy, a concept devoted not simply to ending slavery, but all systems of punishment and exclusion. They worked and sacrificed in service of a nation that had once defined them as a species of property because they believed they could build a community of citizens.

This is an incredible story, one whose afterlife is still unfolding all around us. It deserves to be properly taught and told, not just for the sake of Black children and parents, but for the edification of the entire nation and all its children. We cannot allow generations of White kids and parents to learn a fake history of the nation, designed to help them feel good about themselves at the expense of an honest accountings of the horror of slavery. That story should hurt, so that those who learn it can truly understand the resilience and strength and beauty of Black folks—and Whites who stood in solidarity—who managed to dream of freedom beyond emancipation in a way that still endures.

That is the story of America and one which, like all of Black history, belongs to all of us.

*Not part of authors story