Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is tripling down on his state’s newly approved social studies curriculum guidelines that erroneously teach students that enslaved people “developed skills” that they could use for “personal benefit.”
I've had enough of this. There are plenty of problems with Florida's Black history curriculum,¹ but the "skills" passage isn't one of them. It is:
- A single footnote to a single standard in the curriculum.
- True. (In fact, not even controversial.)
- In no way minimizes the evil of slavery.
This is an example of the way liberals spend way too much time focusing on the wrong stuff whenever race is in play. We are still claiming that cops shot a defenseless Michael Brown in Ferguson even though this was debunked years ago. We insist that police kill lots of unarmed Black suspects even though the actual rate is extremely low and declining (a grand total of seven in 2022). We blame standardized tests for low Black admittance to selective high schools instead of accepting the fact that we do a lousy job of educating them. We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men.
Conservatives are so horrific on race that it's only natural for liberals to feel that they can never cede even the slightest ground to them. I get pissed off all the time at the fact that conservatives virtually never even acknowledge racism aside from the occasional pro forma "Of course...." As in: "Of course racism is still around, but ________ is not the right way to deal with it [followed by 3,000 words on why we shouldn't do anything]." In these kinds of constructions, _______ is every single racial remedy ever proposed in American history.
But spending time on ridiculous stuff does nothing but give right-wing apologists more ammunition. We really need to be more serious about where we focus our energy.
¹Among them: (a) It spends too much time telling kids that American slavery was unexceptional because everyone did it; (b) It spends too little time describing the actual conditions of North American slavery; and (c) It significantly overplays the virtue of white abolitionism.
It feeds into the narrative conservatives push that black people are better because they were slaves because they got to come to the US. Somehow you dont hear many of them making the claim that Jews are better off because of the Holocaust because many came to the US to escape it.
Steve
"Somehow you dont hear many of them making the claim that Jews are better off because of the Holocaust because many came to the US to escape it."
Sure, but that's just because so many conservatives and their tiki-torched fellow travellers are busy spreading lies about how it never actually happened.
At least right now there are obviously far fewer Jews than there would have been out the Nazis had not killed 6 million of them and those that remain are generally poorer than they would have been because so many list everything..
For enslaved blacks who came to America I suppose you would need to compare the number of black Americans today with the number transported and estimate the number of descendants those people would have had if they had stayed in Africa.
For material well-being, American blacks are obviously far better off than their counterparts in Africa. If the two measures disagree then you would need to decide how much increase in material well-being compensates for how much a decrease in the number of descendants. That is a value judgement with no single right answer.
"For material well-being, American blacks are obviously far better off than their counterparts in Africa. If the two measures disagree then you would need to decide how much increase in material well-being compensates for how much a decrease in the number of descendants. That is a value judgement with no single right answer."
Bizarre sophistry and an asinine apologia. You're assuming both that somebody's well-being ought to be compared to both (a) a hypothetical version of themself in an alternate timeline and (b) the relative numbers of hypothetical *other* people who may exist in that imaginary alternate timeline. That's ridiculous. You might as well conclude that we're all so fantastically better off than the poor sods in an imaginary timeline in which an asteroid impact wiped out humanity in 10,000 BCE that anybody complaining of mistreatment is simply whining about minor distinctions in material well-being.
You need to compare well-being based on *actual* metrics and causal factors that we collectively more-or-less agree are relevant. For example: some Americans are better off than others. Some of that is for reasons that we are collectively ok with (person X worked hard in school and got a good degree and a better job, whereas person Y goofed off and shoplifted) or collectively tolerate (person X and person Y worked equally hard in school and while they both founded businesses, X's was a big success and Y's was less so), but there are others that we really ought not to be ok with (person X is wealthier than person Y and it sure seems to have a lot to do with person X having a lighter skin color than person Y).
Put another way: it's really incredibly toxic to say "well, that guy may have it rough *here in America* but it's better that he's here than in some developing country I have a dim understanding of" because (1) the same thing would be true of you, buddy, and (2) that guy actually IS IN AMERICA and the why of how that happened isn't particularly mutable.
I'm not sure I understand your point.
If you want to answer the question of whether black people benefited from slavery don't you have to compare the situation of slaves and their descendants with that of the people who were never enslaved? How else would you approach this problem?
BTW, you also have to realize that the answer can be different for different generations. For example, it is completely possible that black slaves pre-Emancipation were worse off than their former compatriots who were never enslaved and never left Africa but that their descendants were better off. The median black American is obviously far better off than the median black African. I do not see anything contradictory about saying "I am obviously far better off because my umpteen great grandparents were enslaved, but they were treated abominably."
These questions are hard to answer precisely. For example, I would not be at all surprised if black infant and child mortality increased post-Emancipation. Pre-emancipation slave owners had large incentives to help keep babies and children alive - they were capital assets. How much does that count for vs the benefit of being free? It obviously counts for something. On the other hand, given the apparent strong desire of slaves to escape or be emancipated in the antebellum South it was not enough to outweigh the downsides of slavery.
"The median black American is obviously far better off than the median black African."
There's the rub--you are deliberately making the wrong comparison. A slave born in America (and even more so somebody born in America generations and generations later) is an American, not some displaced African. So yeah, to the extent that the median black (or any other sort of) American is "better off" than the median black African really isn't relevant.
That's even before you get into the nonsense of assuming that, absent slavery, some specific black American would exist as a black person in Africa. That's not how history works (as but one minor example, who's to say that, absent centuries of enslavement of people of color, maybe there would have been immigration from Africa to the Americas in greater numbers?). You only have the people who exist, and arguing that some other hypothetical people would have been worse off absent slavery is the worst sort of sophistry in service of minimizing how truly awful slavery was.
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How frequently do you hear conservatives making this point? If you choose any crackpot theory you can find some people that endorse it.
"We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men."
We refuse to come to grips with the fact that White men really do commit white collar crimes at many many multiple of the rate of black men.
FIFY
I don't see anything you fixed.
(a) We already knew "white collar crime" is well identified as white.
(b) My wife's fear of walking alone through the city is not stoked by reports of massive accounting fraud on the thirtieth floor. But it is stoked by newspapers and TV stations shouting about every time some black kid commits a mugging, but reports the white kids on page 6, with the note that the parents came and bailed him out and promised he'll never do that again.
Throughout most of the United States, if you are killed or injured by a stranger, that stranger will most likely be wielding a steering wheel, not a gun or knife.
So you don't see anything I fixed. [1] What's your point?
[1] Ironically, you're first sentence of (b) is exactly what I fixed. But if you don't want to get it, you're not going to get it.
Your inner 12 year old must feel so special and smart. Talk about not getting it. Jeebus.
White collar crime is not defined as racially white, but in reference to the shirts that used to be worn by office workers.
And your wife may not fear the white collar crime on the thirteenth floor, but she is far more likely to lose a few thousand dollars to white collar crime (in savings, investments, or even prices of goods) than from being mugged.
I completely disagree. Depending on where you live, I think you're much more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than a white collar crime. And, I don't think there are many people that would prefer losing some money to being assaulted, raped, or murdered.
1. Please provide your evidence that US media emphasizes crime committed by blacks over that committed by whites.
2. You seem to be ignoring the fact that crimes are disproportionately committed by young black men.
Get lost, troll.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that stats are showing that Black Men are arrested MORE OFTEN for crime than their white counterparts, whites are getting away with crimes they are not arrested for.
What? Where is your proof for that? You don't think arrests have a direct correlation to crimes committed?
@ScentOfViolets
DOJ (2021) estimates value of white collar crime to be $400 billion to $1.7 trillion per year.
Stats on blue-collar property crime show about $15 to $20 billion in losses per year, a little less than half being car theft.
It’s mind-boggling. Imagine spending all the time talking about “crime” and ignoring 95% of the problem.
What about violent crime? Still much more committed by whites. Whites do have a lower rate, but are also disproportionately less likely to be victims of violent crime.
I can’t believe we’re having this conversation in 2023.
Same people most worried about crime also most likely to think Trump did nothing criminal.
I am remiss for not mentioning Kevin’s headline, which takes the controversial Florida footnote and claims it’s true. What’s the problem? Liberals, he says.
The learning-skills benefit of slavery is minuscule. Many of the examples in recent coverage are in fact wrong. If there may be a few examples that are factual, they are facts that do nothing but obscure the greater truth of the evils perpetrated under slavery.
Critical thinking is a rare thing in American political discourse. When you say a benefit occurred under slavery, the way that gets interpreted is that slavery was responsible for that benefit. Ergo, slavery was good for Blacks in some ways. That’s how it’s getting played on TV now and in FL classrooms soon.
Maybe you believe it.8 Maybe you’re a racist. Maybe you should think again. Imagine there’s a choice. You can have slavery or no slavery. Do you think Blacks would have developed skills that could earn them money at a greater rate under slavery or as free people? If you wanted to frame the issue for teaching the children of Florida, what might be more educational: a) ignoring the “benefits” of slavery, since they’re hardly relevant; b) comparing the benefits of being enslaved vs. being free; or teaching one “benefit” a few of the enslaved may have received?
Most propaganda uses facts but in deceptive ways. That’s what Florida is doing and what Kevin is doing.
Education is not about teaching and learning facts designed to obscure larger truths. It should be about the relevance and context of those facts told in a way students have a fuller understanding of the subject.
If you look at white writers or leaders of the past talk about race in America, it’s not long before you find passages that are blatantly racist to the modern sensibility. Even among those who were considered the most progressive for their time. Time does not improve the racial attitudes prevalent in society.
One lesson from that might be a humility in how we talk about race today. What we say today is likely to sound “dated” (to put a kind word to it) before long. At the very least, it’s wise never to defend the most racist elements (like DeSantis) even if you think a minor point they made is valid.
Kevin does it on a regular basis. The word “dated” isn’t strong enough because his type of thinking was dated several decades ago. Which leaves the reader to come up with their own word to describe his backward thinking on many matters of race.
I'm a huge Kevin Drum fan, but I'm with Joseph on this. Why defend DeSantis' appeals to racism? What is gained? Membership in the "both sider" club?
Kevin's point was not strictly about this curriculum issue. Rather, it's a broader point that liberals often, and to their detriment, refuse to acknowledge some basic facts and instead cry racism at every turn.
Agreed
Anyhow; all we know for sure is that Black men are more often arrested and convicted for violent crimes. We don't know what percentage of Black vs. white men got away with murder, we don't know how many of those convicted Black men are in fact innocent--my bet would be many, since we keep having people released from death row because they were wrongfully convicted. We don't know how many of the unresolved cases were committed by Black men.
What we know too is that the cops, even Black cops, are looking to Black people as the most likely suspects, correctly or, quite possibly, incorrectly.
Agreed
"What we know too is that the cops, even Black cops, are looking to Black people as the most likely suspects..."
What makes you say that? Your feelings?
I'm not really in fear of of being the victim of tax fraud when I'm walking down the street. There's a huge difference between being financial and other white collar crimes and those that involve physical violence. But you know this.
On the other hand you getting mugged isn’t going to bring down the entire economy. During 2007 just about every real estate transaction involved some level of fraud.
Comes across a bit strong but the part about no WPA program for black education is correct for sure. Also, https://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/08/enraged-by-kids-today.html
It most assuredly IS ONE OF THEM. First off, I think you are mistaking Florida's official black history curriculum with some sort of a contract negotiation where the patently ridiculous statement that slavery allowed slaves to develop skills is traded off for -- I don't know what -- getting conservatives to agree elsewhere in the curriculum that the slaves weren't "asking for it?"
What the f-ing F? I haven't been following this with rabbit hole detail, but how in the world did a statement that slavery allowed slaves to develop skills (that what? they wouldn't have developed if they were not slaves?) get any where near a history curriculum?
Its like saying that a history of WWII would mention that yes, the Holocaust was "bad" bud if you survived you picked up some good dieting skills while in the camps?
There are plenty of other situations to invoke Kevin's "we ought not to push issue X as it is impeding our ability to achieve issue Y" recurring theme than this one. Its a poor example.
I don't agree with you; I think it's a pretty darned good example. I totally agree with Kevin's closing sentence, plus his footnote.
You? Who are you?
I don't know about who he is, but I think we all know what he is.
Same question.
If you're paid by the reply -- and you are -- you're going to have to do a lot better than that.
Right, this is the crux of the issue. The whole "developed beneficial skills" thing is part a concerted effort on the part of the curriculum to downplay the horrors and evil of slavery. They use this true but rare fact in hopes of leaving students with the impression that slavery = not so bad.
You know, it's incontrovertibly true that people do survive from falling great heights out of an airplane. So why the pushback when airline sources say this when asked why they want to par down safety regs?
If your father survived the holocaust but his wife died. And then he came to America, met and married your mother and had a good life. Then, I guess the holocaust wasn’t so bad after all. Right?
We live in the best of all possible worlds!!!
Optimists believe we live in the best of all possible worlds. Pessimists fear that the optimists are right.
Well played, sir! There are a host of aphorisms I could answer with, but I'll reply with the classic oldie:
I'd close with the also-classic last line, but while it's sound advice, but it's yet another one of those prescriptives that are honored more in the breach than the observance.
Seems to me Mike Brown almost overpowered the Officer getting the gun to fire in the car, then the Officer lost it and emptied his pistol into his back. The St. Louis County prosecutor had a long history of being cop friendly. And I have never seen these witnesses explained away: https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2014/09/10/ac-dnt-kaye-new-michael-brown-witness.cnn
Did you ever bother to read the DOJ report? The two contractors in the video are witness 130 and 122. Their accounts don’t match up to any of the other witnesses. Their accounts don’t match up to the physical evidence. 122 claimed there were three police officers at the scene when the shooting occurred. None of his descriptions of the those three officers matched officer Wilson the police officer that shot Brown. If you are really interested in the matter, you can read their accounts on pages 56-60.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf
This post is actually an example of how the Democratic party is way to analytical for its own good.
We are in the situation we are in today, with Donald F ing Trump as, incredibly, the ex president of this country, because not only do Republicans "not let anything go" the actually make up stuff to keep their base enraged.
If California put in its curriculum about reproductive rights, a footnote that said "... and, as to aborted fetuses, most, if not all, are actually better off dead" it would be on Fox News, every night, all night, all year, all decade!!!!!
No, the smart move is to (a) no passes on anything, and (b) if they say something officially ridiculous, like this, endless repetition.
And by repetition, every elected Republican ought to be asked whether they think slavery allowed slaves to develop beneficial skills. Starting with Kevin Traitor McCarthey and all the way down the line.
"No, the smart move is to (a) no passes on anything, and (b) if they say something officially ridiculous, like this, endless repetition."
This is what Fox News does every day. They find the most rediculous thing said by a leftie somewhere and then they write a feature news story around it. Being like Fox News doesn't sound like a good goal for liberals.
This. The equivalent of “some slaves benefited from slavery by learning skills while enslaved” footnote is the same as “lots of fetuses are better off being aborted rather than living in immense pain for a few days or suffering under abusive parents who didn’t want them” footnote. The latter is undoubtedly true, yet it’s horribly offensive. Not sure why the former possibly being true isn’t also considered horribly offensive by the Kevin Drums of the world.
Exceptional individuals did exceptional things, whether Phyllis Wheatley, Fred erick Douglass, or William Ellison (see wikipedia). That was true for individuals before the Civil War and individuals today.
Those enslaved experienced dreadful conditions. Those who survived learned different things than they had already learned, or would have learned, in their native country.
Also, who were these slaves who parlayed their "skills" later in life? Until 1870 or so it was EXTREMELY rare that an enslaved person to get out except through escape or death, and escape usually resulted in recapture.
"Those who survived learned different things than they had already learned, or would have learned, in their native country."
I don't mean to be a jerk, but it is a really, really fucking important point that for every single slave born here, THIS was their native country.
This is such a good point.
As well as the fact that only a very few slaves who learned skills could actually even use them after they became free people. The so called throw away footnote is the meat of the Florida plan to subvert the truth about slavery.
Cotton wasn't grown in sub-Saharan Africa, so the slaves certainly learned at least one skill they wouldn't have learned at "home"; how to pick cotton. That skill continued to be useful after emancipation, when the freed field hands became employees instead of slaves; they actually got paid (as little as possible) to pick cotton.
For the benefit of the humor deprived, the foregoing was an exercise in cynical literalism; I do not intend to imply that slaves actually benefited from learning how to pick cotton.
Great point. Very easy to fall into that trap. Native blacks had very different contexts for learning than did their ancestors who were born in a country in Africa.
"
We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men.
"
Adjusted for socio-economic status??
Also, who's that 'we', kemosabe? Name names, numbers, and what positions of authority they hold in whatever public sphere.
Kevin, being Kevin, really should adjust for socio-economic status.
That and inflation. Got to adjust for inflation.
The assertion that slaves learned skills to their personal benefit happens to be an issue that Black Republicans are openly disputing, however.
Which points to different issues: You need to learn to accommodate the concerns of others rather than diminish them, and with a popular blog, you have responsibilities towards others, regardless of whether or not you accept it.
"This is an example of the way liberals spend way too much time" eating their own.
It's not just a footnote, but yet another example of the right wing trying to minimize slavery and the horrors of the Civil War. While an aside on a curricula, it is indicative of statues to Confederate Generals and slaveowners, Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, and states flying the Confederate flag over statehouses 150 years after the traitors were defeated.
Calling out this NEW example of the century and a half old effort to whitewash the horrors of slavery is not a waste of time, but putting a marker in the ground and saying, NO MORE.
And, not for nothing, THIS GOT PEOPLE'S ATTENTION. Maybe it's not a huge example, but it is a valid and indicative example that illuminates the entire effort.
But too often center-left pundits and pols and voters decide that rather than make a strong point that is heard and understood, it's better to be technically accurate and to admit every flaw or caveat before even making the point you want to make.
The MAGA can lie effortlessly -- BIDEN CRIME FAMILY, BENGHAZI, BUTTERY MALES! -- and get press and tear the Democrats to pieces and it's expected.
But the Democrats tell a truth -- DeSantis is using school curricula standards to present false impressions of history to young students -- and for some reason people who generally support the goals, platform, and ideals of Democrats decide to piss on the effort.
And we wonder why "we" have such a problem getting our messages out.
"But the Democrats tell a truth -- DeSantis is using school curricula standards to present false impressions of history to young students -- and for some reason people who generally support the goals, platform, and ideals of Democrats decide to piss on the effort.
And we wonder why "we" have such a problem getting our messages out."
Well, trying to get people who care about accuracy to agree on a detailed message can be difficult. Republicans don't have that problem.
Republicans don't have that problem because they support each other and understand that a single speech cannot be an entire century of PhD dissertations on a subject. (They also lie horribly, and have no shame, not something I want to mimic.)
Amazingly, though, in this case there is no inaccuracy. They did publish that this was part of the curriculum, even if a small part. This is part of a 150 year long effort to whitewash slavery and the stain of racism from American history.
There is nuance, but there's always nuance and it goes all ways. White on White murder rates are comparable to Black on Black murder rates, but Drum didn't choose that "fact" over crime rates because it doesn't back his point that "libs have their heads in the sand".
My point is you can ALWAYS find bits and bobs that are not perfect in everything but a tautology or definitional like "a line segment is bounded between two points on a line". Doing so is often just sophistry and gets us no nearer to the truth, and usually farther away from the truth, that the political statement being reviewed.
I agree with your sentiment that certain arguments and narratives are unhelpful. However, I don't agree in this particulary case. What should not be lost in the conversation is that these were skills they were forced to learn. It should not be looked at like skills they were fortunate enought to gain out of a bad situation.
The problem with this is the assumption that the enslaved wouldn't have rather stayed where they were even if that meant a life with less skills. It plays into the whole "white savior" trope that they were rescued from a life of ingnorance and backward culture, they just had to put up with a life of servatude in exchange. We shouldn't even listen to an argument that there were any benefits to the enslaved. The loss of self determination is a violation that cannot be recompensed.
It absolutely should be removed from the curriculum and we need to keep talking about this until it is.
"We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men."
Nicely done framing things from the right wing perspective. We understand, and acknowledge, that there is more violent crime per population in African American communities than in "White" communities.
But we also understand and acknowledge that AA communities have higher poverty rates,, fewer support systems, worse educational opportunities, higher police contact rates, worse housing, higher lead levels in paint and water pipes, fewer grocery and food stores, worse air and water quality, fewer job opportunities, etc. etc. etc.
Any disparity in the crime rates -- or poverty, or wage, or pollution -- is not because they're ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa or any collective failure of a population with certain genetic similarities.
It is a collective failure of our society and our culture, and in no small measure it is due to the original US sin of slavery and the subsequent sin or whitewashing slavery and the antebellum South coupled with Jim Crow and mass murders and abuse of descendants of slaves -- and in particular those who succeeded financially or didn't "know their place" -- for more than a century after the 14th Amendment.
This line from the Florida curricula may not be the hugest slight, the most egregious example, a massive wound in the heart of African Americans, but it DOES break through the media noise to demonstrate to people that the MAGA GOP wants to continue to whitewash our past, and that the last time they succeeded in that we got not just statues and Gone With the Wind but a century of destruction of large populations of American citizens.
Like literally all things, this should be examined in context.
Kevin seems determined to strip this out of context and argue about it in isolation. This is incredibly naive and wrongheaded.
👍👍👍👍👍
“We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men.”
There was a fight in Montgomery Alabama which is getting some news coverage with all the associated accusations of racism and hate crimes. Fair enough. No one died. In Dadeville, Alabama last April, 4 people at a birthday party were killed and 25+ others were injured. In the end, it seems like the creeps at the Dadeville party are far more creepy than the drunks in Montgomery. But… you’ll never get much admission of that in public from anyone. Oh well. There isn’t anything I can do about either one. Racial politics are pretty bad these days. Better than in 1860 though!
SOME JEWS REALLY DID BENEFIT FROM THE HOLOCAUST!!
If you disagree with teaching this FACT!! in school, you are spending your time on the wrong things! Because after all, black people really do commit a lot of crime!!
GAME SET MATCH LIBZ!!
Lol, such a dumb argument. Very Fox Newsish.
And cancer has killed people who deserved to die.
Do you really want to play this ridiculous fucking game again? Christ, you're smarter than this and more than old enough to know better.
Stupid fucking bullshit, is what this is.
Well, yes, enslaved people did, in fact, learn skills that they were able to carry forward into emancipated life. Of course they did. Slaves weren't brainless automatons that performed work and promptly forgot all about it. Slaves learned and they also did all the things all humans do: love, create families, think, speak, live, and die.
Learning is a mundane function of being human. So why did Florida go out of its way to add this unremarkable fact to what it teaches about slavery? As others point out here, it's not farfetched to conclude they're trying to portray slavery as beneficial to its victims.
+1
I do agree with Kevin that pushing back on the attainment of skills through slavery is weak, the real issue is what is the intent of that statement of fact? It's to make the oppression more plateable.
Whose pushing back on the bare fact that (some) slaves learned (some) skills that turned out to be to their financial benefit? Name names. Because I litterally don't see anyone who refuses to acknowldege that this was the case. If you can't can any names ...
It is usually what is missing from history curriculum frameworks that is the problem; Kevin is right on that. For instance, there was literally nothing about eugenics in the Massachusetts US history frameworks until it was recently revised. Florida frameworks leave it out now, too, except in a specific reference to Nazi ideology: "Clarification 4: Students will explain how eugenics, scientific racism and Social Darwinism provided a foundation for Nazi racial beliefs."
Eugenics was the "scientific" foundation for Social Darwinism in Germany AND in the US. Eugenics was widely popular with conservatives and progressives alike in the early 20th century, and it led to Buck v Bell, the SCOTUS case upholding the right of the state to forcibly sterilize "feeble-minded" citizens. None of that is in the FL frameworks, nor is the mass incarceration of the feeble-minded. These are no longer omitted from the MA frameworks.
Doing hard history is... hard. Florida needs to confront its racist (and its ableist) past. Progressives are right to be angry about what it missing from FL history standards.
John McWhorter had a nuanced take on the Florida footnote, which incidentally was written by a conservative African American professor. New York Times, John McWhorter, “One Sentence Does Not Define a Curriculum” Aug. 3, 2023.
Sample passage:
“The passage is certainly ungainly, and it bears editing at least, and probably deletion. My colleague Jamelle Bouie has usefully outlined that any real evidence of slaves “benefiting” from their work skills took place after emancipation, not during it. Moreover, the idea of any kind of benefit gained amid the pitiless horror of slavery is highly strained, creative and almost certainly unnecessary in a curriculum instructing students about this stain on the nation’s past.
However, from the tone of coverage of this passage, one might suppose that it was a central plank in the curriculum. Instead, it was but one passage amid hundreds of others, which constitute an almost exhaustive coverage of the gruesomeness of slavery in the United States. Taken together, they are such an informed recitation of our racist past that it is almost surprising DeSantis would approve them.”
Why not just cut that one passage which, after all, is just a statement of a blindingly obvoius fact? Why does something so trivially true deserve a mention?
Speaking of liberals spending way too much time focusing on the wrong stuff whenever race is in play, it is the footnote to two standards, one in middle school and one in high school.
The usual leftist orthodox folks flying off the handle whenever Kevin says anything critical of them. The thing I like about Kevin is that he is more about actually being correct and accurate than following orthodoxy. His honesty in following the data gives him credibility and makes him worth reading.
This is an interesting take as there is no data here. Its just Kevin criticizing liberals because he doesnt like their approach and priorities....there is no 'correct' on either side, just opinions.
The commenter identifies that he likes Kevin because he criticizes liberals and criticizing liberals is the 'correct' opinion.
The throw-in on 'orthodoxy' is a bit humerous as Kevin is a pretty orthodox centrist
@Jdubs: you have truly missed the point.
The commenter above criticizes "leftist orthodox folks,"
Yet you claim that he has criticized "Liberals."
Clearly, "leftist orthodox folks" and "Liberals" are not the same thing. They may be conflated constantly on Faux news, but that just doesn't make it so in reality.
You'd be a more effective troll if your reading comprehension wasn't so laughably subpar.
Thanks @Leo1008. You got it right.
Lol, poor Leo. He demands that we argue over the semantic differences between 'liberal' and 'left orthodox'.
Not because its relevant and not because I mixed up the two..... but because STRAWMAN!
Lazy troll is lazy.
You know, after all these years -- decades! -- I find that I loathe the troll tribe chiefly for their laziness. They seldom stray far from their hoary old bag of rhetorical dishonesties and logical fallacies; at the very least could they please, please please invent new ones?
Considering that he was reading my words, which he interpreted accurately, @jdubs, your attacks on him are unfounded and frankly distressingly personal. A fine-illustration of the difference between "left orthodox" and "liberal" is that Kevin, myself, and from what I have seen @jdubs are liberals. You and apparently @scentofviolets are "left orthodox," enforcing your further-to-the-left version of things with sometimes nasty attacks on people who largely share your ideas of what a better society would be.
The comments of folks like you make are losing us normie liberals elections and helping elect our shared political opponents.
You don't get it, Kevin. This was put in there precisely to present a more benign view of slavery. It's in combination with book banning and teacher intimidation/indoctrination and any other stick they can jam into the spokes of a truthful telling of race history. It's not any one thing, but counting on flacid Dems like yourself saying "hey, I think they have a point." You are gullible but also not helpful. Kind of a West Coast Joe Lieberman.
Yet another way of putting it: there are only so many column-inches (or rather, their textbook equivalent). Does anyone truly believe that the space that little factoid occupies couldn't have been filled with something more germane to the course being taught instead?
This is Kevin being his contrarian self. That's one reason I read this blog, so I don't find it annoying, even when I think a post is flawed, as I do here. I agree with commenters that while the curriculum writers didn't technically say anything false with the notorious footnote, the motive for including that footnote deserves to be questioned.
I also think more context is needed for Kevin's observation that, "We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men."
A group of Americans that is statistically more likely to grow up in, and live in, crime-ridden neighborhoods is also statistically more likely to commit violent crimes. No kidding. This is hardly a surprising fact. The key question is why Americans are willing to allow so many fellow citizens to be consigned to such neighborhoods.
RE: Michael Brown. I'm kind of tired of the whole "Hands Up" was debunked. I actually read the grand jury transcripts, cover to cover. And yes, there were no credible descriptions of Brown turning around and being shot with his hands up. But what the heck really happened?
I have a suspicion of what happened, but will fully admit that based upon reading those transcripts, I don't see how any case could have been brought that was going to prove anything "beyond a reasonable doubt".
But Brown was getting away from the cop, and for some reason stopped and turned around. Why?
Completely consistent with the forensics and testimony, my guess would be that the as he was running, the cop shot from behind him, missed (or maybe grazed -- one of the wounds was plausibly consistent, but not definitively consistent), at which point Brown stopped and turned around. I just don't see any other reason for him to have turned to the cop, if he was already getting away. Being shot at is a pretty good one. And there was lots of confusion from the witnesses and captured audio as to whether any shots were fired while Brown was running away from the cop.
Would I convict the cop based upon what I read? No way. Would I have gone for it with "preponderance of evidence" standard in a civil case? Not if the cop had a really good lawyer to poke holes in my belief. If told that there is a tape with definitive proof of what happened, would I take a low wager bet that the cop shot at him from behind and that's why Brown stopped and turned around? Yes, yes I would.
One thing that was obvious from the transcripts, the DA did *not* want to challenge the cop, and did *not* want to aggressively dig for the truth. Was that because he knew that even if he got aggressive he was never going to get to "probable cause" for an indictment, so better not to go there at all? That's the most generous reading I can make. The whole testimony from the cop was essentially "I'm super cop. I heard and completely understood the radio call about cigars being stolen from a convenience store, and immediately recognized Brown was 100% likely to be the suspect, and I approached him calmly and professionally, and he, realizing he was cornered, immediately went wild." There were so many points in the testimony that someone who really wanted to know what happened should have pushed back, but no one did.
Yeah, there's no evidence that "Hands Up" happened, but plausibly, and consistent with the evidence, the cop shot at Brown while Brown's back was turned. And even if that's *not* what happened, there was no reason to take Brown down at that distance, even with Brown's hands down. He should have been given the chance to get them up, and he wasn't.
Black people have to be perfect in their interactions with the police. The Kevin Drums of the world will never understand how awful this expectation/requirement is in real life situations.
Good points:
"This is an example of the way liberals spend way too much time focusing on the wrong stuff whenever race is in play. We are still claiming that cops shot a defenseless Michael Brown ... We insist that police kill lots of unarmed Black suspects even though the actual rate is extremely low and declining ... We blame standardized tests for low Black admittance to selective high schools instead of accepting the fact that we do a lousy job of educating them. We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men."
The Left in general is in more dire need of a reality check than at any other time in my life. Is the same true of the Right? Of course it is! They elected Trump and attempted a coup! But playing a game of whataboutism won't help us to fix our own problems on the Left, and the longer we put off a very necessary scrutiny of our own ideology, the worse of an electoral reckoning we risk in the future.
And of all the important points that Kevin raises in the valuable quote above, I would pick this one for further elaboration:
"We blame standardized tests for low Black admittance to selective high schools instead of accepting the fact that we do a lousy job of educating them."
I cannot, of course, read Kevin's mind, but, when I read this statement, the implicit meaning that I perceive is a critique of the Left's current obsession with equity of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. That is, in my opinion, the worst wrong turn the Left has taken in modern history. It is perhaps best summed up in Ibram Kendi's (How to be an Anti-Racist) infamous statement:
"The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination" (2019).
In other words, if the results aren't equal for all races, mandate more equal results. And of all the ways that the Left spends "focusing on the wrong stuff," as Kevin describes it, I don't think it gets any worse, any less popular, or any less counter productive than that statement from Kendi. That perspective underlies the urge for discarding standardized tests (getting rid of standards and grades makes equity easier) instead of promoting quality education for all (thereby aiming to provide as much equality of opportunity as we can).
The typical Lefty responses I see to the promotion of equality of opportunity are that our society is a joke, everything is hopeless, inequality is only stoppable with a Marxist style revolution, there is no such thing as a meritocracy and only fools believe in it, and other similar expressions of an utterly stunning nihilism.
I remember a Liberalism that believed in finding and promoting solutions and in slowly but surely building a better society for all rather than a Leftism that wants to tear everything down:
“I believe we can keep the promise of our founding -- the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or where you love -- it doesn’t matter whether you're black or white, or Hispanic or Asian, or Native American, or young or old, or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight -- you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.”
We abandon this American Creed, so well stated in this utterly anti-Kendian quote from Barack Obama (2012), at out enormous peril. Giving up on a project because it's hard simply makes us look like cynics. By doing so, we self-isolate ourselves away from the rest of the country and much of the developed western world. And finally we will go politically extinct. The overwhelming majority of Americans are on board with Obama's statement, and they want to see the country improve for all. If we turn our backs on them we will more or less abandon any hope of competing with Republicans in the future.
No, idiot, Kevin is not saying, as you are, that the fault with Black education is from "the Left's current obsession with equity of outcome rather than equality of opportunity". He's talking about the discussion, not the education.
In fact, the problem with Black education is that selfish jerks like you refuse to spend money on it. And, yes, some of that money does need to be spent on protection for the kids. But MOST needs to be spent training excellent teachers who are willing and able to reach minority kids. And that frequently means minority teachers.
Your comment doesn't make sense to me:
"In fact, the problem with Black education is that selfish jerks like you refuse to spend money on it."
My post is all about doing whatever it takes to promote as much equality of opportunity as possible. Obviously, that will entail, among other things, spending lots more money on education.
"And, yes, some of that money does need to be spent on protection for the kids. But MOST needs to be spent training excellent teachers who are willing and able to reach minority kids."
Sounds great. As best as I can tell, we are in agreement. It's completely unclear to me, from your reply, why you are attacking me or what points in my post you disagree with.
You seem to agree, for example, with my statement regarding "promoting quality education for all."
You also seem to agree with my statement that "I remember a Liberalism that believed in finding and promoting solutions and in slowly but surely building a better society for all"
So, why are you attacking a potential ally?
The liberals that pretend-liberal Leo punches down on are of course in favor of both opportunity and outcome.
Pretending to care about equality of opportunity while objecting to outcome based metrics is the key con job that most pretend-liberals focus on.
@Jdubs: your reference to outcome based metrics sounds like a straw man. By all means, study the extent to which various races, ethnicities, political affiliations, religions, and other demographic groups are dispersed through society. Sounds cool. We’ll no doubt gain insight that way.
But that has little if anything to do with the discussion at hand.
When Kevin points out that we’re not actually doing enough to simply help all students pass standardized tests, he’s referring to a misguided form of Leftism.
And that brings us to my complaints about modern anti-racism. I don’t dislike it because of its purported goals, I dislike it because of its means.
Ibram Kendi-style anti racism is indisputably illiberal. And anyone who cares about living in a free society, conservative or liberal, needs to loudly and consistently state that fact.
Anti racism calls for achieving a “fair” society, but it then insists on mandating one. Rather than build a better world, as Liberalism strives to do, it wants to enforce its own vision of a better world.
It isn’t interested in teaching kids to pass the standardized tests that Kevin talks about, it’s interested in either destroying all standards or in mandating equal results.
And it explicitly and unambiguously states that the means to its end is race based discrimination in perpetuity.
How an ideology like that continues to hold any sway will forever be a wonder and a subject for historians to study, but a first step to combatting it is for all of us to pull ourselves out of Leftist groupthink and acknowledge the problems on our own side.
Florida schools should also acknowledge that slaves got free food and water and from time to time a free Slave Bible.
well.........
I suppose the blacks have a continued propensity for education.
since everyone here it seems - believes that blacks commit more crimes than white. then why is it they dont pick up new skills in prison? welding, metal fab, carpentry, laundry services all taught in prison.
I think DeSantis and Republicans in general are twisting an oddball case or two and are now saying blacks have benefitted from slavery.
why not say the same for prison?
No, I’m sure that no slave, on net, made money from being a slave. Pretty surprised that one of my favorite thinkers, Kevin “I specialize in looking at the whole picture others miss” Drum would fall for that kind of conservative “slavery was great for the Blacks!” thinking.
I agree that Kevin is way off base talking about slaves getting anything positive from being slaves. They obviously didn't.
But to think, " Drum would fall for that kind of conservative “slavery was great for the Blacks!” thinking." is equally off base. He didn't say or imply this.
Nah. Disagree. Anyone as well read as Kevin Drum knows that this is a standard belief on the right...
Slavery was GOOD for the blacks! Gave them discipline they need!
Blacks made money from the skills they were taught is, admittedly, a new twist, but a new twist on an old story. There was lots of good stuff for the Blacks in slavery! I have to admit it's pretty devious of them to put this old wine in new bottles. The lazy shiftless Blacks learned work skills they used!
Kinda reminds me that just a few days ago KD posted a cherry picked chart from the WSJ (I think it was, could have been NYT) regarding the split in beliefs between Democrats and Republicans. He showed that when you look over time it's bog standard for this split to switch with the presidential administration. Same deal here. Sure, slaves made some money after being freed using skills they had learned while slaves. Who doesn't use skills when they need to earn money? But I'm 100% sure if you looked at the life of a slave economically if you stole their income for 30 years, and then allowed them to earn money for 1 year, that, again, on net, they did not "win" from being enslaved. That's a chart I'd like to see.
For the fucking last time: pointing out that slaves learned working skills or whatever during their time enslaved is NEVER a neutral observation about how clever they were or something. It's always - and has ALWAYS been -- a vicious, racist trope used to imply that importing enslaved Africans somehow "improved" their living conditions or something because they had previously been a bunch of barely-descended apes floundering around with rocks and bones like the hominids in 2001 A Space Odyssey before the benifiecent Christians on boats brought them to the promised land where, sure work was hard and the days were long, but hey, they learned to shuck corn and shoe a horse or something.
Fuck that shit. Kevin, be better.
Also, Liberal Fascism.