Florida GOP & Democrats: Ignorance Versus Education

Down in Florida where you can’t say Gay, or make certain healthcare decisions for yourself or your own child, Florida Republicans and the state Board of Education … hold for laughter, Florida and education … have approved a new set of standards for teaching Black history and it goes like this:

Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Let’s stop there … slaves benefited from slavery because they learned to tend crops and blacksmith and sew and serve white people. Slaves, who were free in their own countries until they were kidnapped, chained in the bowels of ships, and brought thousands of miles away to America where they were bought and sold; where they were beaten and raped—often to produce slave children who would grow up to “benefit” from assaults and rapes; where they were sold as property, away from their own families. Ask a white person if that sounds like a benefit.

The Board of Education points to “blacksmiths like Ned Cobb, Henry Blair, Lewis Latimer and John Henry; shoemakers like James Forten, Paul Cuffe and Betty Washington Lewis; fishing and shipping industry workers like Jupiter Hammon, John Chavis, William Whipper and Crispus Attucks; tailors like Elizabeth Keckley, James Thomas and Marietta Carter; and teachers like Betsey Stockton and Booker T. Washington” who learned something while enslaved, beaten, raped, bought, sold and tortured.

Yes, some slaves took their talents once they were freed and made lives for themselves, but that does not diminish all the suffering endured while enslaved … unless you live in Florida where it’s more, “Look, sure she was raped, but she also learned to cook and sew” and “Yeah, he was whipped so badly his skin split and his blood ran into the dirt, but he learned to plant crops, too.”

And just as disgusting, in other language that has drawn fire from educators and education advocates, these new education standards will also teach that Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres.

As in the Tulsa Race Massacre—which I have posted about HERE and HERE—which destroyed an area of Tulsa called Blac Wall Street, filled with Black-owned businesses and schools and churches and homes; as in 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. Children will be taught that Black people were also the perpetrators of these race riots.

Fuck Florida, fuck the GOP, fuck Ron DeSantis, and fuck their Board of Education for whitewashing history for future generations.

On the other hand …

Nikki Fried, the Chair of the Florida Democratic Party and state Democrat  legislators will be in Tallahassee Saturday as part of a “banned bookmobile” gambit.

Fried will be joined by Representatives Angie Nixon and Michele Rayner-Goolsby, activist Thomas Kennedy, and Jen Cousins, founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, as part of MoveOn Political Action’s first Banned Bookmobile multistate tour. MoveOn Political Action Executive Director Rahna Epting:

“DeSantis and MAGA Republicans’ vision for our country is to censor all of our diverse backgrounds and to punish those who live, love and think differently than they do. We won’t surrender to their extremism, and our Banned Bookmobile tour will give access to books that celebrate the immense diversity of perspectives that are part of the human experience and essential to our development as a society.”

It seems that while the Florida GOP is trying to rewrite history to make themselves and certain white people feel better about America’s racist past, the Democrats and trying to educate the public about what has happened, and what is happening, and what will happen, if we don’t stand up against authoritarian politics like DeSantis and the clearly racist MAGAts.

Speak up.

Stand up.