The Democrats and their neo-communist taskmasters really don’t want kids learning about slavery.
Most of the Florida curriculum under fire is fairly typical, starting with American slavery from before Christopher Columbus and ending with the Civil Rights movement. On the surface, no problems.
The complaints have centered around one particular point: “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Critics such as Vice President Kamala Harris have painted this as a justification of slavery.
Looking deeper, however, it becomes clear why the whole curriculum has Democrats panicking: It is a poison pill to the party’s racial divide-and-conquer platform for bringing totalitarianism to America.
Beginning with Harris’ main gripe: When the going gets tough, the tough get ideas. Florida will teach that despite their circumstances, slaves still managed to rise above their stations and become great orators and writers (Frederick Douglass), agronomists (George Washington Carver) or educators. Booker T. Washington worked his way from plantation slavery and coal mines to fund his education and eventually found the Tuskegee Institute.
This clashes with the constant stream of propaganda depicting black people as eternal victims of a white ruling class out to get them. Even though circumstances have improved dramatically, they are still held down, Democrats claim. The solution is lowering standards across the board, from excusing criminal behavior that creates places like Chicago and Detroit to affirmative action and quotas that cause black students to fail out of higher education due to mismatch.
But might a black child learning about how such men rose up from nothing under far worse conditions than most people face today be inspired to better his lot in life and excel? The Democrats certainly don’t want to find out. That would be bad for voter turnout.
The next few poison pills cover the enslavement of Europeans, mostly for sexual slavery, by Muslim pirates in North Africa; forced indentured servitude of Europeans in the Thirteen Colonies and the role of African kingdoms in the slave trade. The Democratic narrative is that people of European descent, particularly white Americans, bear some sort of innate guilt for the “original sin” for slavery because slave ships went out to kidnap Africans who were just minding their own business. That is the premise of the 1619 Project and fictionalized accounts such as Alex Haley’s “Roots.” But the reality is that most slaves were sold by African kingdoms looking to get their hands on European goods such as guns, iron tools and alcohol.
This nukes the reparations narrative, the idea of white people as uniquely bad and the idea that America is uniquely racist. In the dog-eats-dog world of the early modern era, many people were mistreated, some worse than others. Yet America and its Christians, white and black alike, are among the few who worked tirelessly to stop slavery. Meanwhile, the left’s paragons in Africa and the Islamic world continue the practice to this day while Alejandro Mayorkas allegedly enables child slavery at the border.
The premise of the Democratic race-war narrative is that black people are a nation within a nation who are somehow separate from America – despite having been here just as long as white people. Yet black intellectuals vehemently disagreed. Sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “[T]here are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave.”
The Florida curriculum echoes this sentiment by making black history another part of the American story rather than something separate. It is “inclusiveness” in the truest sense of the word. But for the Democrats, it risks undermining their project that elevates criminals such as George Floyd while suppressing the great men of the black experience.
Or maybe the Democrats just don’t want their constituents to find out how much the party defended slavery and Jim Crow.
Ron DeSantis has made a lot of mistakes since announcing a presidential run, but he deserves great credit for leading the fight against the College Board and creating the circumstances for the implementation of this curriculum. We will see the results of the curriculum in the thinking of young people, but one can hope that its biggest outcome is the rejection of dangerous ethno-racial justice narratives that tend to end like Yugoslavia.
Michele Gama Sosa is an opinion editor for the Daily Caller and a historian by training.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.