Old lies don’t die. Politicians like Republican presidential wanna-be Ron DeSantis are making it their mission to keep them alive and kicking.
DeSantis proved the point last month. Faced with painfully obvious questions about why his state’s new school curriculum on Black history included a directive to teach the upside of slavery, he embraced the virtues of the Old South’s peculiar institution. Wherever the Dixiecrat segregationists who jumped from the Democratic to the Republican Party back in the day may be in Dante’s Inferno, Ron surely has made them proud.
Race is unsubtly woven into all the Florida governor’s campaign themes. Mimicking the 20th Century’s Leninists who turned Marx’s complexities into slogans to mobilize the masses, DeSantis since taking office has saturated the Sunshine State with acronyms that even his most dull witted fans couldn’t miss if they tried. His anti-CRT, anti-ESG, anti-DEI mantras all feature race as a subtext. Indeed, what else his 2020 anti-Woke agenda involves isn’t nearly as clear. Like communists who had a hard time explaining “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” Ron seems to struggle when asked what “Woke” actually means.
Regressive rhetoric on race isn’t the only right wing runway DeSantis hopes will launch him into the White House, but he is distinguishing himself on the subject. In asserting the benefits of slavery, DeSantis has championed a historical revisionism that goes well beyond the wink and nod Donald Trump gave to white supremacists, among “the good people on both sides” Trump acknowledged after the extremists’ Charlottesville riot in 2017. In fact, in promoting his new Florida school curriculum, DeSantis is doing Trump one better by breaking some very old ground.
The new Florida teaching guidelines call for classes in which students learn enslaved people “developed skills which…could be applied for their personal benefit.” When asked what the historical nonsense meant, DeSantis explained that the curriculum would make clear enslaved people were able to "parlay" the skills they were forced to learn—he cited blacksmithing—to improve their lots in life. DeSantis then simultaneously disowned any connection to, or political motives behind the new teaching diktat while praising the so-called scholars who wrote it.
What DeSantis dished up as his answer, of course, was exactly the same commodity legions of enslaved people had to shovel out of plantation stables during their 12-hour-days. His pandering to appeal to aggrieved whites goes without saying. More to the point, his remarks as well as the new Florida teaching curriculum underscores an ugly cynicism that ignores the real scholarship on what slavery bequeathed to Black Americans after the Civil War: more of the same.
Douglas Blackmon lays out what slavery’s aftermath in the post-Civil War South did to Black Americans in excruciating as well as heart-breaking detail. A winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, Slavery by Another Name—The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II puts the lie not only to DeSantis’ risible assertion about slavery’s benefits; it chronicles the Jim Crow South’s subsequent legal, economic, and political repression that denied Black Americans their most basic rights, much less any opportunity freely to apply their skills.
As the book’s New York Times reviewer put it, “Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren's most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. (He) unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century.… not simply…the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers…but free men and women forced into industrial servitude, bound by chains, faced with subhuman living conditions and subject to physical torture. That plight was horrific. But until 1951, it was not outside the law.”
According to DeSantis, the scholars who produced his state’s new education curriculum on Black history created standards that are “rooted in whatever is factual,” adding “these guys did a good job.” If that’s true, the Florida governor might ask them if they happened to read Blackmon’s book and why they missed a few details.
Take Black life in slavery’s old heartland. Thirty miles wide and 300 miles long, the Black Belt, a fertile agricultural region in the plantation economy before the Civil War, stretches across central Alabama and northeast Mississippi. Blackmon described the region 65 years after the Civil War ended this way. “Roughly half of all African Americans—or roughly 4.8 million—lived in the Black Belt region of the South in 1930, the great majority of whom were almost certainly trapped in some form of coerced labor…”
Surely, a hundred years ago there must have been blacksmiths in Mississippi or Alabama who had parlayed their skills from slavery into the good life for themselves, their offspring, and their families, right? That’s what Florida’s new Black history curriculum and its governor say.
If you’re a Florida high school history student with a research project on the subject, just don’t hold your breath looking for them.