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Whitewashing history: Florida schools to teach slavery brought 'personal benefit' to Black people [1]
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Date: 2023-07-20
After a tense meeting, the Florida Board of Education has unanimously approved a new set of standards for how Black history will be taught in the state’s public schools, ignoring protests from educators, politicians, and civil rights advocates who said the standards whitewash African American history. What drew the most outrage at Wednesday’s meeting was part of the middle-school standards that would require instruction to include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“I am very concerned by these standards, especially … the notion that enslaved people benefited from being enslaved. It’s inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish in our educational curriculum,” Democratic Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani said.
Kevin Parker, a community member, told the Board of Education : “Please table this rule and revise it to make sure that my history, our history is being told factually and completely, and please do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial because I guarantee you it most certainly was not.”
Ron DeSantis’s Board of Education is indoctrinating Florida’s youth into ignorance. New mandated “clarifications” must be included while teaching Black history in public schools. Like that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” pic.twitter.com/O9HfmOkFN9
“Our standards are factual, objective standards that really teach the good, the bad and the ugly,” he was quoted as saying by the Florida Phoenix.
“To be discussing African American history in this moment, with no one present who has felt the pain of the infliction of harm on African Americans. It’s overtly problematic,” said former state lawmaker Dwight Bullard , pointing at the non-Black members of the board. “Part of the reason the ’94 statute exists is because the state tried to cover up the Rosewood massacre.”
There is only one person of color on the seven-member state Board of Education
In January 2023, Florida’s Department of Education rejected the College Board’s Advanced placement African American Studies course , claiming it violated the “Stop WOKE Act” because it included such topics as the Black Lives Matter and reparations movements, Black feminism, and LGBTQ+ studies. And so the battle lines were already drawn when the DOE met to approve the new standards for teaching Black history.
restricts how race is discussed in schools, colleges, and workplaces and bans any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs because of their race, color, sex, or national origin.
But then along came Gov. Ron DeSantis who used his crusade against wokeness to boost his national profile for his challenge against former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The board was mandated to come up with new standards for teaching Black history after DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act” in April 2022. It
He was referring to the Jan. 5, 1923, massacre when a white mob destroyed the Black community of Rosewood, Florida, killing more than 30 Black men, women, and children and burning the town to the ground.
In 1994, the state legislature passed a bill that created an African American History Task Force and required that the state’s K-12 curriculum include instruction on the history, culture, experiences, and contributions of African Americans.
Participants at the meeting raised other concerns about the standards which they wanted the BOE to table to allow for changes. Democratic State Sen. Geraldine Thompson was outraged that the standards said that when high school students learn about events such as the 1920 Ocoee massacre, instruction should include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” she told Florida Politics.
The Ocoee massacre is considered the deadliest Election Day violence in U.S. history. It started when a Black landowner, Moses Norman, was turned away when he attempted to vote. That night his friend, July Perry, was lynched and several dozen other Black residents were killed by a white mob. Their homes were burned, and surviving Black residents fled the town.
“When you look at the history currently, it suggests that the [Ocoee] massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans. That's blaming the victim,” Thompson said.
Genesis Robinson, political director for the advocacy group Equal Ground, told the Pensacola New Journal there were glaring omissions in the new standards which recognize racism and prejudice but fail to go into depth about who bore responsibility. She said the the curriculum does not mention that Florida seceded from the union during the Civil War. And while the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling is included, there is no reference to a 1957 resolution passed by the Florida legislature opposing the Supreme Court decision that ended segregation in schools. Elementary school students through 4th grade are only required to identify prominent Black Americans.
“When you couple these standards, with the environment, the hostility towards daring to talk about certain subjects, it creates an environment where there's going to be a complete removal of these conversations and of these lessons in the classroom because nobody wants to run afoul of all of the laws or policies that have been put in place,” Robinson said.
Carol Cleaver, an Escambia County science teacher told the board: “These new standards present only half the story and half the truth. When we name political figures who worked to end slavery but leave anyone who worked to keep slavery legal nameless, kids are forced to fill in the blanks for themselves.”
The Florida Education Association condemned the new standards as “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African-American history since 1994.”
“How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from? Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them,” Andrew Spar, the association’s president, said in a statement. “Gov. DeSantis is pursuing a political agenda guaranteed to set good people against one another, and in the process he’s cheating our kids. They deserve the full truth of American history, the good and the bad,” he added.
x In response to the adoption of the African American history standards, FEA issued the following press release.
"How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from?” @andrewsparfea pic.twitter.com/1mhzouuewo — Florida Education Association (@FloridaEA) July 19, 2023
And NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson issued a strong statement condemning the BOE’s decision to approve the new standards:
"Today's actions by the Florida state government are an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected. It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history. We refuse to go back. The NAACP has been fighting against malicious actors such as those within the DeSantis Administration for over a century, and we're prepared to continue that fight by any means necessary. Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for."
RELATED STORY: Oklahoma school head wants to leave race out of the Tulsa Race Massacre
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