The state of Florida requires instruction in African American history in all grades, and as you might expect it's pretty thin in the primary grades. But it picks up a bit in middle school, with 14 separate standards mandated for grades 6-8. One of them is this:
This footnote has caused an uproar in the lefty community, which seems a little overwrought to me. As a matter of historical record, it's true that slaves were occasionally allowed to earn money of their own by hiring out their services. This is hardly the biggest deal in the world.
In fact, what really gets me is that it's not even the biggest deal in Florida's set of standards. Not by a long way. The real scandal of the Florida standards comes into focus only if you read the whole document. In the high school section, for example, instruction for the antebellum period includes 28 separate standards, of which more than a third (10 of 28) are related to abolition and other efforts to restrain slavery. Only two—if I'm counting generously—have anything to say about the conditions of slavery. Only one is about conditions in America itself, and it's deliberately phrased to make it seem like Southern plantations were not so bad, comparatively speaking:
To read these standards as a whole, you'd think Black slaves were mostly a bunch of cobblers and blacksmiths, not cotton pickers, and early American history was largely a story of Quakers, abolitionists, and patriots working diligently to end slavery. Conversely, the appalling conditions of Black slavery are barely even acknowledged. There's mention of slave codes, but no mention of families broken up; brutal punishments meted out; women raped; slaves worked to death; rampant disease; miserable diets; and a life expectancy of 22. This isn't to say that individual teachers can't address these things, but for some reason there's no room to include them in the mandated standards.
That's what's wrong with the Florida standards. The skills of slaves are just a sideshow.
Are school libraries in the US allowed to have Gone with the Wind on the shelves? Its frequent references to "d**kies" and "n****rs*, along with the depiction of Blacks as either devoted if dim family retainers or primitive brutes prone to rape would be a bit of a problem in class discussions, I would think. It's astonishing to see it still high on some lists of greatest American novels.
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I don't recall ever seeing GWTW on a list of greatest American novels. I think it is generally regarded by the literary crowd as a popular romantic entertainment, maybe a little better than Barbara Cartland, but not much.
Now a truly great American novel that uses the n-word a lot is "Huckleberry Finn." That means it is not assigned in schools much anymore, which is a shame since it is such a superb novel and by no means glorifies the antebellum South or slavery. In fact a major theme of the book is how a poorly educated boy who has absorbed all of the prejudices of his time comes to finally realize the essential humanity of Jim and thus of all black people, to the point that he puts his own soul in jeopardy by committing the crime and sin of helping a slave to escape. It is a great shame if young people are no longer able to read this wonderful book in its original.
I'm not suggesting it's highly regarded by critics, but it's #15 at https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/23979.Greatest_American_Novels_of_the_20th_Century , is included in https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/106 , and is #20 on https://www.ranker.com/list/best-american-novels/ranker-books . It's also on the Library of Congress's list of '50 Books That Shaped America 1900 to 1950', which remarks that 'Margaret Mitchell’s book set in the South during the Civil War won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and it remains popular, despite charges that its author had a blind eye regarding the horrors of slavery'.
She had a blind eye to her own extraordinary racism.
Certainly it was influential (although the movie more than the book, I think), but I doubt it was ever assigned in schools much. It wasn't in the schools I attended, in any case (but then neither was "Huckleberry Finn".)
Here we are 123 years later and the so called "lost cause" still keeps rearing its ugly head. I had thought I might live to see the Union finally win the civil war, now I am not as sure. Nevertheless, I remain committed to the defeat of the traitorous successionists and their ugly immoral beliefs.
Can you explain what you mean? Why do you think the Union has not yet won the civil war?
“The past is never dead, it’s not even past” - William Faulkner
That’s your reason? A line from a novel written over 70 years ago?
It's damn good reason Atticus, it's the truth.
“The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.” -- William Faulkner
I guess the closing lines of The Sound and the Fury is also evidence that all modern southerners pine to have social orders revert to how they were 70 years ago and defy the forces of change.
Because Lee Highway still exists? Because Neo-Confederates are in control of the House of Representatives and several states?
Including the detail that slaves could learn skills they could use for personal benefit seem to be really trivial and obscure to actually be included in a standards document. I don't mind kids learning details like that, but it's such a minor footnote that the only reason to include it is to promote this idea that slavery wasn't "all bad." I'm sure there are a million other details about what slave life was like, what the slave economy was like, what exceptions there were to popular understanding of the period, any of which would be great for a deep dive into the antebellum period, but not really important as part of a high school curriculum.
Agreed. It might be technically true but if you’re only listing a handful of teaching points, including this one seems misdirected.
Shouldn't teaching slavery include the fact that slaves were not just field hands and maids but also included skilled workers?
Absolutely! But teaching that these skills could be used for personal benefit is...weird. If we are talking about the rare instances they could earn money, including a detail that obscure in a basic history class will likely create a misleading impression of slavery. If you're talking about how European influences affected slave culture, that's certainly an interesting subject. And if you're studying how oppressed people coped with their situations, that's also an interesting topic. But any frame of "these are elements of slavery that had some positive benefits" is morally bankrupt. Great things have come from all oppressed people. That's not a byproduct of the oppression, that's a testament to human endurance.
This. In a well-meaning but misguided attempt to be reflexively contrarian, Kevin Drum misses the point. This is not an isolated throwaway footnote, it's an attempt to bothsides slavery, part and parcel of the extremist right's ongoing attempts to normalize hate and whitewash US history.
Since Kevin Drum apparently cannot figure out on his own -- which is unfortunate -- maybe he should try talking to some descendents of American chattel slavery about it, find out why this footnote is intellectually dishonest and insulting, then try again.
Earning money does not seem to have been very rare and some notable African Americans actually purchased their own freedom.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/emancipation/text1/text1read.htm
IIRC the proportion of African Americans who were free during the ante bellum period runs about 10 percent. Some freed by owners and/or relatives for various reasons, some freed because they learned a trade and were able to earn enough money to buy their freedom. Phyllis Wheatley and William Ellison are interesting fringe cases. But Jefferson had slaves with skills (i.e., chef, nail maker) who were slaves all his life.
Sure. And warning children to beware of adults wanting to touch them on certain parts of their bodies should include teaching them that statutory rape does not just result in most children being traumatized by the events, but also occasionally some of the children end up marrying their abusers and live out genuinely happy lives together. See! Even though pedophilism is wrong, there sometimes is a happy ending for everyone involved!
MF: stop trying to find the silver lining in slavery. It’s like trying to find the silver lining in pedophilism - you can do it, but it morally bankrupts you.
Well, if you are going to pretend that no underage relationships result in long happy marriages kids are smart enough to know you are talking shit.
Watch "12 years a slave"
Maybe they should mention that African-American DNA is about 22% European in origin. Appears all those southern gentlemen weren’t as opposed to “race mixing” as they proclaimed.
I read somewhere, some years ago, that northern blacks average about 50% European ancestry, and perhaps that southerners averaged more like 10%.
Sally Hemings was half sister to Jefferson's wife, about 3/4 English. That particular founder was pretty enthusiastic about "mixing". Six kids!
It's also false. That's another reason lefties are pissed about it.
Slaves could not own property. American slavery was chattel slavery. Slaves had the same rights at dogs or horses, except there was more sympathy for dogs and horses. American slaves had a much lower status and fewer rights than slaves in many ancient societies. For example, in ancient Rome, slaves could own property, sell their services and buy their own freedom. The emperor Nero even allowed gave slaves standing in court so they could sue their masters. That was not possible in the Land of the Free.
There was push back against slaves competing with free tradesmen. The slave owner often had to pay for a license to sell the services of a slave in skilled professions. Slaves, off premises, had to wear coins with their owner's name on them. There were special ones for slaves working in a skilled job such as being a farrier. If you follow numismatics, these are rare collectors' items:
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/style/coins-rare-slave-badges-to-be-sold-at-auction.html?searchResultPosition=5
Slave owners often hired out gangs of slaves rather than running their own enterprises. When they built the canal system in the South, slave owners refused to hire out their slaves for the project. It would have killed too many of them for the venture to be profitable. The work was done by Irish immigrants.
Please, don't fall for this whitewashing effort. It's bogus, and there's a lot of it.
Decades ago, my girlfriend had to attend a "diversity" seminar at work. There was a discussion about why slaves didn't revolt. My girlfriend was the one who had to explain that they did, all the time. She was taught a fair bit about slavery having grown up in Virginia, but most such teaching in the US omits or simply lies about the good old days.
There were fewer revolts in denser areas where they were less likely to succeed. The local militia, still a big thing in the South, would put them down quickly followed by torture and executions. In less populous areas, they'd often succeed. The British took advantage of this and fomented slave revolts during the War of 1812, but we're too freedom loving to have ever heard much of it.
It has been my impression from varied reading that enslaved persons being hired out for their "special skills" meant income to the slave holder, not the one doing the work.
Also, that in general, the enslaved African descendents generally had a lot more skills than their owners, who were typically spoiled rich wastrels and, at best, dilletants. Africans, for example, understood agriculture.
If being a slave was such a sweet deal, why didn't poor Southern whites jump on that gravy train?
Racial quotas, obviously. Just like today, all the good jobs were reserved for blacks only. The blacks get all the breaks!
You two have, in my opinion, won today's Internets.
The problem isn't the first half of the sentence; it's the second half. The honest sentence would have stated, "Slaves developed skills to adapt to their situation."
Some slaves were allowed to use their skills to make and save money and in some notable cases bought their freedom.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_Smith
Oh, some were allowed to use their skills to in some notable cases buy their freedom, so it's all good then.
This has to be one of the most idiotic slavery apologist hot takes I've seen from you rightwing nuts.
It is not apologist.
It is acknowledging that slavery was a very complex institution (as are most real-life social institutions).
Slaves were not cattle with no mind of their own. They were real people adapting to their circumstances and often negotiating various types of arrangement with their owners.
Great. Now do it for pedophilism. “Preteen and teen victims of statutory rape were not cattle with no minds of their own. They were real people adapting to their circumstances and often negotiating various types of arrangement with their adult teachers, church workers, etc.” In some cases, the kids even end marrying their abusers once they’re released from prison and go on to live 40 or more years with them, raising families and building a happy life together, marred only by their spouse’s name on a sex registry! Why oh why is nobody teaching this part of statutory rape and pedophilism?
MF: you’re disgusting.
they were allowed
What you mean to say is some slaves were allowed to make in save money. Most were not. Slaves had no legal right to make or save money from their own work.
Can you verify that most slaves were not allowed to make or save money?
The vast majority of slaves worked on rural plantations. In cities like Charleston, slaveholders frequently rented out their slaves for labor, sometime skilled labor, so this was rare. It's cherry-picking. If the main thing you want children to know is how the institution of slavery worked, including it works against that, because it was NOT how slavery in the South worked before the Civil War.
Kevin's point still holds: If the standards emphasize exceptions that distort the overall picture of slavery in the antebellum South, that shoud be a scandal.
Fuck off and die in a fire MF.
You should study Atticus. He employs the same rhetorical dishonesties, but not as clumsily as you.
That took place in the North, on Long Island. Slavery was relatively small scale and less profitable in the North, so slaves were treated better. It was much different in the South with its cotton and sugar plantations. By the time of the Revolution, slaves were rare in the North. Massachusetts outlawed slavery completely shortly after the Revolution. Only Princeton had slave quarters for students' slaves.
I've already commented on this, but I'll recommend you read the coin collecting article linked below to get a sense of how slavery worked in the South.
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/style/coins-rare-slave-badges-to-be-sold-at-auction.html?searchResultPosition=5
I disagree a bit - slaves weren't uncommon in what were Dutch settlements in NY and NJ and the laws passed to phase out slavery in those states allowed current owners to keep their existing slaves but not acquire new ones. At the time of the Civil War there were still some elderly slaves alive in both states.
Oh for F'sake, the existence of Sidney Crosby does not mean all Canadians are hockey pros. Slavery was wrong, was a crime against humanity and a few less terrible situations plucked out of millions does not change that fact.
I'm not sure that goes far enough. To me, the original sentence is like saying there are good people on both sides. There's nothing wrong with believing there are good people on both sides, but expressing that belief publicly when only one side's behavior is abhorrent is abhorrent.
👍👍👍👍👍
Anyone who can't or won't understand this are apologists for the enslavement of millions of people. Now, that's abhorent.
Agreed.
And it goes without saying that of course Africans learned new skills. Generally, humans learn new skills to adapt to their situation.
But to my reading, the original intent, besides creating an apology (slavery bad, but new skills good) for slavery, is to subtly denigrate a race of people and their ability to learn. If you recall, there was a period where science claimed certain races had smaller brains. And even to this day, there is the common narrative (re Charles Murray, "Bell Shaped Curve") that certain races have lower intelligence.
My goal was to flip the sentence backward and state the obvious. Perhaps I wasn't successful in doing so.
And irony of all this is that the absolute number of slaves in 1860 Florida was rather small. Yes, almost 42% of the population, but only 61,000.
Florida is defending this? Or slavery in the rest of the South?
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/activities/chart-slave-population-in-1860
There were 3.95 millions slaves in 1860. Why pick Florida? To make it look like there weren't really that many slaves in the US?
We're talking about Florida's education standards.
42% sounds like slavery was actually a big part of Florida’s history.
If a foreign country “only” had 42% of its people in gulags or killed in a genocide, we’d rightfully claim that was a big part of that country’s (shameful) history. Not sure why if the 42% is “only” tens of thousands of people does it mean we can just ignore it.
I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s and have no recollection of learning about slavery or Jim Crow at all. I learned a lot about WWII and read books about it There were lots of TV shows about WWII and the holocaust also.
There wasn’t much talk of Native American wars either.
American history standards generally neglect enslavement of Native Americans, which in the West was quite common.
Native Americans were never enslaved on an industrial scale. They were too apt to rebel and too often make good their escape. In the North, the trade was pelts for guns. In the South, it was slaves, usually captured from other tribes as was the local custom, for guns. Many Native Americans were enslaved in the early days in the South, before cotton required more slaves than could be captured locally. Cotton required scale, and Native American slaves couldn't scale.
The North seems to have been about working hard to make good. The South seems to have been about making other people hard to make good. It's reflected in our politics even today.
No one said anything about "industrial scale." I said that enslavement of Native Americans in the West was quite common. I refer you to Waite's "What Slavery Looked Like in the West" in The Atlantic. California passed a law to encourage it in 1850, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. 1850 was just a year after the gold strike in CA.
I went to school in Wisconsin in the 1960s. We learned about slavery in the South, and there was no whitewashing or implicit approval of it. This was way back in the previous century, though, when Wisconsin's educational system was a progressive beacon for the nation.
People are focusing on that footnote because it perfectly encapsulates the overall problem that the standards downplay the horrors of slavery by trying to highlight the supposed benefits to the slaves.
The statement implies that slaves learned those skills BECAUSE they were slaves rather than IN SPITE OF being slaves.
In the Carolina's they'd try to buy slaves from rice growing regions in Africa to get them to grow rice here.
I grew up in rural Iowa. Farm country. That farmland was mostly settled in the 1870's and 1880's, when the Indians were firmly driven out by the US Army. That window of time is also roughly when the Great Migration occurred: hundreds of thousands of recently-freed slaves were headed north. For most of them, farming was the only trade they knew.
Yet none of them settled in Iowa to begin farming on their own. Why not? It wasn't lack of money: most of the German and Norwegian immigrants who did settle the land were near-penniless, too.
None of my school teachers ever addressed that question. They and my classmates, and myself at the time, simply accepted as normal that midwestern farmers were 99% white.
Today I assume the answer is Jim Crow-style enforcement: sundown towns, torching unwanted homesteads, etc. But that should have been documented by someone, somewhere. Where is the history?
It might relate to how land grants were administered. Though you did see that people tended to settle (somewhat) in regions that were similar to "home", especially when farming.
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_land_loss_in_the_United_States
Good question but I suspect the answer is: takes money and resources to move. The freed slaves were mostly quickly indentured servants, essentially, for their previous masters. The Great Migration occurred a few decades later really, when the KKK made life so intolerable in the South the calculus to move changed. Since they were moving away from rural discrimination, the idea was to go to industrializing cities, where factory jobs were available and there was safety in numbers living in neighborhoods full of other such refugees.
That's my superficial understanding, anyway.
The Homestead Act was explicitly white men only. It might not have been stated that way in the legal code, but that is how it was enforced. As you noted, there was other enforcement as well. It's not like someone could even hire a Black. If they did, no White would work for them.
BTW - There has been a lot of scholarship on this. The historical sources are all out there, and since racial oppression is still with us, there are contemporary sources as well. It's called Black studies, and there's a reason it's much maligned. Few are so angered as by what they see in a mirror.
FYI The Great Migration happened after reconstruction and mostly in the early 20th century when Jim Crow laws made life hell in the South. Former Slaves did attempt farming in the reconstruction era but mostly in the South. Jim Crow laws and Sundown Towns ran most Black Farmers off their lands, in the South the Sharecropper system ensured a pseduoslavery like existence.
Kidnapping and rape victims can use these sutuations to develop skills that they can use later in life. Sometimes they could even escape from the attacker.
These are complex situations and it does everyone a disservice to ignore these success stories!!
Amiright!?
I know I am naive and polly-annaish but I've always been a bit surprised the "freedom" party has not made a play for Black votes by being the anti-long-term-effects of slavery party.
Instead, they're like, "your mask mandate is an UnAmerican attack on my freedom, but slavery, not really so bad. Hey the slaves learned a lot of useful trade skills!"
It's weird, though easily explainable once you realize the GOP exists to maintain the power of older richer folks and keep their tax rates low and everything else is just marketing fog to achieve those goals.
People have been jumping on this bit about slaves supposedly learning valuable skills in the curriculum because it's a hoary, racist trope that featured prominently in pro-slavery polemics even before the Civil War. The implication is that captivity and forced servitude on American plantations "benefited" Africans by lifting them out of benighted savagery on the Dark Continent and teaching them the value of religion and work. It's *not* some neutral observation about the fact that many enslaved people did skilled labor.
Yes, and during the holocaust in addition to being provided room and board the residents were provided an opportunity to work in local factories and in the fields. They often gained favor and earned added benefits from their care-givers.
"Work sets you free"
And when you can no longer work, death sets you free, whether in a Nazi extermination camp, or in a US slave state.
I think they should teach a history of SLAVERY writ large, past and present with no varnish. Knowing what humanity has been doing to one another for millennia raises one's appreciation to those who survived it and those who fought against it. There are people fighting against slavery today.
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Kevin, you have now earned a shout-out (as a "liberal blogger") from Cathy Young in The Bulwark (https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/sorting-out-florida-teaching-about-slavery-mess). I think that's great. I've long depended on you to expose foolishness wherever it appears. It actually reinforces my confidence in my own liberal worldview to see that there is a place for critical thinking in our world, even when it bumps up against uncritical "solidarity."
It's just a shame that Kamala Harris jumped on the bandwagon.
I find it outrageous that journalists find it acceptable to say that the Florida standards require teaching that slavery was beneficial. .This seems to me simply false -- the sentence does not say that slavery was beneficial to slaves in some kind of net way. It's just an unfair paraphrase of a completely different claim. If I say someone in prison found a way to use his skills for his personal benefit while there, I would NOT be saying that *being in prison* constituted a net benefit to him. It could be true that he got some favors in prison from his skills, but would still be much better off overall if never imprisoned. Both claims use the concept of "benefit", but the similarity ends there; they are unrelated in truth value.
Many may believe that the true sentence in the standards was included for the purpose of suggesting there was a silver lining to slavery. That is an interpretation -- really a projection. It's far-fetched, and in media interview task force member William Allen, an African American descended from slaves, chuckled at the absurdity of thinking it was pushing the "slavery as net good" theory. But they key point an interpretation not good enough for a paraphrase given in indirect quotation in a journalistic headline.
In my opinion really should be a Snopes or something asking if the Florida standards require teaching that slavery was beneficial and rating it "False", the Florida standards nowhere say any such thing.
Instead we find a Politifact piece rating Kamala Harris' claim was "mostlly true" because they found experts who criticized the Florida standards. A good illustration of the folly of "fact-checking".
The claim is simply false, is the way I would put it, and it would be important for people reading these media sources to understand that it is simply false. It's not really surprising that DeSantis dismisses it as a lie. What's surprising is that my fellow liberals are believing it.