How Florida’s new education standards are resurrecting old racist tropes

On Friday afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris urged a crowd of supporters at Jacksonville, Florida’s Ritz Theatre to guard against politicians who want us to forget this country’s history — especially its darkest moments. 

“Let us not be seduced into believing that somehow we will be better if we forget,” she said to the packed theater. “We will be better if we remember. We will be stronger if we remember.” 

Her remarks joined a chorus of criticism in response to the Florida Board of Education’s new standards for teaching Black history in public schools. The 216-page document, approved last Wednesday, details Black history lessons that selectively omit or obscure facts about America’s history of anti-Black violence. The standards, for example, require middle school students to learn “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

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Harris rips Florida going soft on slavery; DeSantis seeks GOP favor, attacks black history July 21, 2023 / 05:55

Criticizing this latest prong of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to whitewash black history, Harris said Friday, “They want to replace history with lies.” 

The NAACP and 10 other organizations have also written a letter to Ben Gibson, a member of the Florida Board of Education, criticizing the new standards for removing or rewriting “the full unvarnished history of this state and country.” 

Part of that “unvarnished truth” includes the fact that we have been here before. We have stomached the argument that slavery somehow benefited the enslaved before. 

See, for example, the story of a man named John Brown. Brown was enslaved in the mid-1800s and subjected to excruciating experiments by a Georgia doctor named Thomas Hamilton. Hamilton believed there were physiological differences between Black and white people. And he used Brown’s body to prove it. 

After he escaped slavery, Brown described what happened to him in an autobiography: “[Dr. Hamilton] set to work to ascertain how deep my black skin went. This he did by applying blisters to my hands, legs and feet, which bear the scars to this day.” 

That happened because Hamilton, a slave owner, was trying to scientifically bolster the prevailing ideology that Black people were mentally and physically inferior to white people and, therefore, benefited from enslavement. 

That thinking was so pervasive at the time it spawned propaganda like this print from slavery apologists, who pushed a narrative that enslaved Black people in America were better off than white factory workers in Britain. And it provided material for slaveholders like South Carolina Sen. John Calhoun, who in an 1837 speech argued that slavery was a boon to Black people: “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually,” he said.

This kind of thinking gave rise to junk science like “Drapetomania,” which translates to “runaway madness.” It was a clinical term coined during the 1850s and based on the belief that slavery so vastly improved the lives of the enslaved they would have to be mentally ill to run away. The term was not removed from all medical textbooks until after 1914. 

Human experiments, racist propaganda and fake science were used to push ideology we all know now is false. Black people did not benefit from slavery, obviously. And yet, the old racist tropes from the 1850s — that slavery benefited the enslaved — are now being resurrected in Florida. And middle schoolers in Florida may soon be required to learn about them. 

In addition, high schoolers in the Florida’s public school system will now be taught that race massacres, like the brutal Ocoee riot of 1920, also included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” In reality, a white mob killed dozens of people in Ocoee after a Black man tried to vote and register others to vote. 

Those guidelines in the Florida Board of Education’s new standards downplay America’s history of anti-Black violence. And, as part of their campaign to Make America Florida, state officials want to export those standards nationally. 

This is an adapted excerpt from the July 20 episode of “Alex Wagner Tonight.”