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It's Day 11 of Ron DeSantis defending curricular changes regarding slavery. This is PURPOSEFUL [1]
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Date: 2023-07-31
Florida is due to make changes in how its middle schools are allowed to describe slavery, in accordance with the changes in the law signed into existence by Gov. Ron DeSantis. His Orwellian “Stop WOKE” law forbids any lesson plans about race that might make a student feel uncomfortable. As a result, a key work group of the State Board of Education recommended that students learn that slavery imparted life skills that enslaved persons could cart around to other stations later in life.
The Independent reports that, when asked about this during a press conference, DeSantis denied any responsibility for this change in guidance but stressed that the changes were grounded in facts.
“You should talk to them about it,” he said about the group last week. “I didn’t do it. I wasn’t involved in it.” “What they’re doing is, they’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
Many critics of DeSantis have attempted to directly confront this charge, because it’s ridiculous on its face. Enslaved persons being able to use their time in bondage as job training? It is to laugh—or it would be, were this not such a serious subject. He’s talking about instructing young children into this belief.
And this is not an innocuous idea. It would give students the impression that slavery as an institution was itself beneficial, for all involved. This would quite likely bring about confusion when those students encountered lesson plans about the Civil War—why was the War fought, exactly? Over a job training program? Well, that all seems silly. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and for what? The War must have been a mistake.
— Because if you soften the institution of slavery, the rationale for the War dissipates.
With that in mind, many critics have pushed back with details about the institution, how excruciating it was, how unforgiving, and how few if any enslaved persons were able to parlay those handy-dandy skills into their own revenue stream—at least, not before the abolition of slavery.
The Independent:
“People were very vocal,” one group member said, questioning “how there could be a benefit to slavery”. “However, Dr [William] Allen is focusing on the few slaves who actually did learn something and keeps alluding to Frederick Douglass,” one work group member told NBC. “What he is saying is not accurate for most of the slaves.”
This is gaslighting moonlighting as policy.
What DeSantis and his board are pushing is so nonsensical that it’s dangerous in its portrayal. It’s what Elizabeth Neumann, former national security official, calls malinformation: information that is true but that is used to hurt a person, organization or nation . That at least one (very gifted, very famous) enslaved person was able to repurpose torture into on-the-job skills training is a fact distorted to make it seem as though the entire institution was benign. It’s using real information to cast a false light.
But I want to urge people to not take on DeSantis in that way.
To refute DeSantis’ stance is still to participate in his project. His project is to reintroduce the word and concept of slavery to everyday political speech; and it is by association to get people to subdivide people living today into the same social categories of yesterday.
“We’re on Day 6 or 7 of Ron DeSantis having to, in some ways, look like he’s defending slavery,” Brendan Buck, GOP consultant, told former RNC chair Michael Steele this weekend on MSNBC. Now, why is that?
Buck continued: “This is supposed to be a campaign reset. This is not hard. This should have been flushed down the toilet in a single day.”
Instead, by continuing to make these remarks, these flimsy excuses for radically altering the history of slavery as will be taught to students, Ron DeSantis has yanked back the Overton window and has held it open so that others can step into that space. Jesse Watters has picked up this baton and has run with it. Ben Shapiro assented. Greg Gutfeld answered the call. In the process, the Holocaust got mansplained.
Nothing was off-limits, and that’s the point. This is cultural accelerationism.
By getting people to argue over such absurd but trivial differences about this little bit about slavery or that, those engaged in the various debates will begin to look around them in their own environs and start categorizing others according to that terrible shorthand and rule of thumb: Black people were slaves, Whites were not.
This far-too-simplified key of social cartography automatically objectifies people; but, more than that, it trains those engaged in such categorization to keep doing it until it becomes second nature.
So to refute DeSantis on such a front is to participate in his project, his goal of teaching people to readily associate living Black people with degraded labor. This is a resocialization, a crash course in overt racism that at least three generations had heretofore escaped.
The job-training canard is not the axis by which to attack him. Instead, call him out on the refurbishing and rehabilitation of systems of subjugation.
By investing his own image, DeSantis is diverting some of his own social capital to that abhorrent and abolished system. And he has continued to do this day after day. Why? Why is he electing to do this? He should be asked directly every day why he feels the need to resurrect a positive image of human bondage.
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