WHITEWASHING THE HORRORS OF SLAVERY

On July 18 of this year, Florida officials issued new guidelines for a public school curriculum which required teachers to instruct middle school students that enslaved people actually developed skills from their situation that would later benefit them. These guidelines followed previously issued requirements mandating how to communicate a revisionist history of the Ocoee Election Day massacre in November of 1920, when a mob of white men killed an unknown number of African Americans attempting to vote in Ocoee, Fla, and ran others out of town, burning down houses. These instructions, which the state board of education approved on July 19, drew immediate backlash from educators and political leaders. The White House even sent Vice President Kamala Harris to the state two days later to issue an impassioned rebuke. Governor Ron DeSantis, who openly engineered the controversy, defended the new standards. However, his attempt to hide behind legitimate revisionist interpretations of history, implicitly claiming "alternate facts," fell flat. While professional scholars challenging orthodox views of history based on serious research is entirely legitimate, blatantly catering to the negative responses of a segment of the population to racial progress of other ethnic groups for political reasons is not. This is what social scientists refer to as "historical negationism." It is akin to propaganda. The latest effort in our enduring attempts at whitewashing the horrors of slavery. Slavery has been a hot issue since well before the establishment of our republic. While drafting our Constitution the topic was deliberately avoided. Our founding fathers understood that, if they wanted to have a chance that the slave states would help ratify the document, the only way they could really deal with the question of slavery was not to deal with it at all. The first time we see the words "slave" and "slavery" show up in official documents were, after the Civil War, in the 13th Amendment to our Constitution, which abolished slavery and which was ratified December 6, 1865. Our history is replete with apologists for slavery and the slave trade. The southern states defended slavery by using economic, historic and even biblical arguments. They were concerned that abolishing the practice would collapse their economy. Besides, they pointed out that the Greeks and the Romans possessed slaves, that Abraham had slaves and that Jesus never spoke out against slavery even though it was widespread during Roman times. They even argued that slavery was divine - that it brought Christianity to the heathen from across the ocean and was a good thing for the enslaved. John C. Calhoun, our seventh vice president (1825-1832), was adamant: "Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day attained a condition so civilized and improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually." Defenders of slavery in antebellum (pre-war) America maintained that slavery as practiced in the south was more humane than the system of wage slavery in the north. George Fitzhugh, a Virginia lawyer, in his book "Cannibals All! Or slaves without masters," argued that northern capitalists squeezed the greatest amount of work out of laborers for the least amount of pay, only to abandon them when they were no longer useful. By contrast, in the south, labor is capital. Slaves do the work, but they represent a substantial capital investment. "It is in our owners' interest to protect, not oppress them." He concluded that "the negro slaves of the south are the happiest and, in some sense the freest people in the world." Examples of similar opinions held by politicians and stakeholders inclined to comment about slavery are plentiful. Not all of these are restricted to the 18th or 19th century. The historian Donald Yacovone, in "Teaching White Supremacy," writes: "Until the mid 1960s, American history instruction from grammar school to the university relentlessly characterized slavery as a benevolent institution, an enjoyable time and a gift to those Africans who had been lucky enough to be brought to the United States." As recently as 2017, Dr. Ben Carson, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration, gave an inaugural speech in which he described slaves as "immigrants, who came here in the bottom of slave ships, but they had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons .... might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land." The application of historic negationism is by no means restricted to our continued attempts at downplaying the enormity of slavery and its defining feature, hereditary racial bondage. Holocaust denialism is still prevalent. Turkey continues to flatly deny that the Armenian genocide ever took place. Japan's educational system fails to mention heinous war crimes committed by the country during World War II. In the end, understanding history in its entirety is of paramount importance. Repudiating the events we find painful does not change the fact that they actually happened. Our present day political systems are built on historical events. In order to move effectively into the future, we must understand history in its totality - the good, the bad and the ugly included. Theo Wierdsma