Florida Is Trying To Resurrect The Confederacy

Florida’s Board of Education put out its new standards and, lo and behold, the “happy slave” is on their way back.

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

by Justin Rosario

There are days it is unbelievably frustrating to be a liberal, especially one who writes about politics. The Republican Party is now trying to resurrect the good old days of the Confederacy without bothering to hide it. They simply announce that they plan to rig elections. Or perhaps (unsuccessfully) try to use the courts to overturn democracy. Or maybe just openly plan an authoritarian takeover of the United States in broad daylight like it’s no big deal.

Sometimes the press notices and pushes back. More often, journalists switch to their default mode, which is to pretend what they’re seeing isn’t really happening. A large component of that is to ignore the warnings. Racism from Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party? You damn hippies are idiots! Warmongering from George W. Bush’s Republican Party? You damn liberals aren’t patriotic! Fascism from Donald Trump’s Republican Party? My god, do you people ever stop whining?!

This dynamic has allowed conservatives to both tell us exactly what they’re doing and feign innocence at the same time. 

It was just two years ago that the right suddenly “discovered” the dangers of Critical Race Theory, a legal theory that has existed since the 1980s. In the blink of an eye, it was in every school, lurking behind every smartboard and under every desk, just waiting to turn your child into a white-hating socialist.

Many of us saw right through the blatant racism of the CRT farce, that it had nothing to do with protecting children or parents’ rights. And yet… the mainstream media ate it up taking the GOP at its word. Now, Republicans are doing exactly what we said they would do by pushing white supremacist indoctrination in schools. The press, naturally, is shocked that Republicans were lying about their true motives all along.

How it started

A little over two years ago, Republicans launched a coordinated propaganda campaign against Critical Race Theory, a relatively obscure legal theory found only in law schools. The campaign was based on a wild (and deliberate) misinterpretation. Republicans declared, sans evidence, that CRT was being taught to children across the country. 

Being as CRT is a fairly complex legal theory, that was clearly not even remotely true. But Republicans insisted that CRT was being used to teach children to hate white people. The mental gymnastics required to turn CRT into anti-whiteness is like saying anyone who eats beef is a cannibal because cows eat grass which is a plant. Humans eat vegetables which are also plants. Ergo, cows and humans are the same so eating a cow is the same as eating a human and you are a cannibal. It’s that strained of an argument but all parents heard was that their children were being taught icky Black stuff and they flew into a mindless rage.

Instead of asking questions and pointing out that Republicans were lying about, well, everything having to do with CRT, the press marveled at how well their messaging was working. Even as the person responsible for inventing the lie literally bragged about it, the press went into default mode and just mostly looked away:

Meanwhile, people on the left were explicitly pointing out what the actual purpose of the manufactured CRT “controversy” was:

With Covid on the wane and the economy taking off like a bat out of hell, the usual Republican narrative of “everything is terrible, elect us!” won’t work. Instead, they’re leaning, very loudly, into open racism as their defining narrative. Essentially, “Critical Race Theory'' is the new “Black Lives Matter” which was the new “Crack Babies” which was the new “Welfare Queens”. It’s an invocation used to trigger the racialized fear and rage centers of the MAGA Moron Mob, putting them into a heightened state of panic. 

Terrorizing their base is all well and good, but Republicans need to pretend they’re doing something to “fight back” against the evil libs. This is what the return of the “happy slaves” nonsense is all about. And I mean “happy slaves” literally.

That was me in May of 2021, just a few months after this CRT nonsense started. Already, Republicans were talking about changing what was being taught in schools to reflect their ideology of white supremacy and fascism. I cannot tell you next week’s lotto numbers or predict the next great stock to buy, but I certainly saw the return of the “happy slaves” into classrooms two full years in advance. But somehow, the vaunted American press could not. It was blindingly obvious what Republicans were doing, and it helped that they were literally telling us.

How it’s going

Last week, Florida’s Board of Education put out its new standards and, lo and behold, the “happy slave” is on their way back. NBC News have the grotesque details:

Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills, part of new African American history standards approved Wednesday that were blasted by a state teachers' union as a “step backward.”

The Florida State Board of Education’s new standards includes controversial language about how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to a 216-page document about the state’s 2023 standards in social studies, posted by the Florida Department of Education.

If you’re unfamiliar with the “happy slave” in American education, allow me to, ahem, educate you. Once upon a time, Virginia textbooks taught a version of history with a very, let’s say specific, point of view:

This was not back in 1901. This was from 1956 to the late 1970s. This was taught to Boomers and Gen X. And while this particular textbook was from Virginia, this kind of disgusting trash was seeded all over the country by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

The DoC and other groups like them are the racists behind the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederacy in which the South was the victim, not the aggressor, in the Civil War. They put up hundreds of Confederate statues all throughout the South to remind Black people who was still in charge and made it their mission to turn American schools into indoctrination centers for white supremacy. 

Once their poison was (mostly) purged from public schools, generations of American kids grew up free to not view Black and Brown (and other non-white) kids as less than. They eventually learned that racism was, in fact, bad and America’s history was kind of messy, as is the history of every country.

As I discussed in my original CRT article in 2021, this was catastrophic for a political party whose foundation is white supremacy. The solution, naturally, was to turn schools back into indoctrination centers for hate. The first step was to remove all that dangerous real history by pretending it was “CRT” and “anti-white.” The press was the getaway driver in this endeavor, once again failing in its role to inform the public. 

Now Republicans are forcing their revisionist history back into the classroom. Right now, it’s “mild” alterations like, “Slaves learned valuable skills!” and, almost as nauseating, “Black people did bad things during race massacres” (emphasis mine):

That language says, “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre.”

Just to be clear: Each one of those horrific moments in American history is an incident where mobs of white people attacked and killed Black Americans. Not the one or two you find in a lynching but dozens of Black people killed indiscriminately. So when a Republican-controlled Board of Education suggests that violence was perpetrated by African Americans during these monstrous acts, they are not trying to teach history, they are trying to whitewash it with bothsiderism. If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty.

Like all propaganda, this will escalate. If these first steps are normalized, next year’s standard will perhaps include mentions that slavery introduced Africans to Christianity and modern civilization and isn’t that a good thing? Then maybe we’ll see references to how Africans were the original slave traders so can we really blame Europeans for slavery? These are actual arguments Confederate apologists regularly make. Finally, the “happy slave” will return.

After all, once you sanitize slavery, you can justify the centuries of racial oppression that followed and reestablish the “natural” order of things. And wouldn’t you know it, that natural order just happens to have white men at the top, just like God intended.

The Resistance continues

While Florida is, for the moment, its own lost cause. Not every state with a Republican governor is a dystopian nightmare, regardless of how badly they want it to be one. Here in my own Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin has been hard at work emulating Ron DeSantis. He was elected by playing a “moderate” on TV and, once again, the press was shocked, shocked!, to discover that he was exactly the far-right extremist we on the Left said he was.

His latest move to appease the hateful Republican base has been to attack trans students who have been living their lives, bothering absolutely no one. He had his Dept. of Education release model policies instructing schools to stop using the preferred names and pronouns of trans students unless given explicit permission by the parents. It should be noted that in Trump country, a lot of trans kids do not tell their parents they prefer to be called a different name at school and among their friends. Why? Because MAGA parents overwhelmingly despise trans people. Why would you subject yourself to that kind of hate at home?

Unsurprisingly, Youngkin has also ordered schools to narc on trans kids. He wants schools to inform parents if their kids use different pronouns or a different name at school. Youngkin claims this is for “parental rights” but the sole purpose is to terrorize trans kids. It’s basic deductive reasoning that if a trans kid hasn’t told their parents, they’re probably doing so from a sense of self-preservation. Youngkin’s model policies will result in the death of trans kids. He and his administration know this and they want it.

Fortunately, not every school district is going to do Youngkin’s bidding and destroy the lives of children in service to a cruel and inhumane ideology. Dr. Francisco Durán, the superintendent of the Arlington Public School district, had some thoughts about Youngkins repulsive orders:

As far as I know, most, if not all, of the school districts in Northern Virginia are rejecting Youngkin’s attack on their students. In the coming weeks, we’ll find out how much of the state overall embraces hatred of its children and how much just embraces them. I suspect it will not be as much as Youngkin is hoping for but any level of divisiveness is a victory, I suppose. That’s almost the only thing he’s been trying to accomplish since being sworn in. Who has time for governing when there’s discord to be sown?

Still, even as Republicans take their new Civil War into our schools in their attempt to resurrect the past they desperately long for, it’s good to know that people of good conscience and moral fiber are fighting them tooth and nail.

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