Should American slavery be considered an unpaid internship of sorts? That’s absurd and offensive, but it’s not an outrageous question, given Florida classroom guidelines adopted by the State Board of Education. We wish we were kidding.
Frederick Douglass, depicted in the 1850s, was 20 years a slave and nine years a fugitive until English friends raised $711.66 to buy his freedom in 1845, after he was already a famous orator, author and abolitionist. Engraving by A.H. Ritchie/Hulton Archive/Getty Images/TNS
The guidelines of the new “African American History Strand” say that classroom instruction should include ”how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
It’s just one phrase, but given the political climate in Florida, skeptics are closely monitoring every sentence, wondering why it’s in the guidelines about teaching African American history and worrying how slavery’s full story will be taught in Florida’s classrooms. And they should. The Republican leadership of the state has brought such scrutiny upon itself, and the level of trust is low.
The guidelines also say that teachers’ lessons should “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”
Fair enough. Some slaves did, in fact, perform trades and learn skills. But these guidelines deemphasize the back-breaking, life-shortening fieldwork on the cotton, rice and sugar cane plantations as “agricultural work,” just one of many “trades.” In all cases, this was forced labor required of Black people who were enslaved. That should never be downplayed.
Trying to humanize slaves and showing schoolchildren that enslaved people had inner lives is important. But teaching students that enslaved people could acquire skills doesn’t really do that or help students explore anything about their hopes, their dreams or their fears. In fact, teaching that their skills could sometimes be “applied for their personal benefit” rather misses the point. It runs the risk of making slavery seem somehow more benign than it was.
Yes, some slaves were skilled artisans who could earn wages and buy a few things of their own. But they never owned their own bodies. They belonged to the slave master.
Think of the enslaved Sam Williams, a skilled ironworker in Virginia in the mid-19th century. When he surpassed the iron production quota required of him by his owner, he earned money that he used to buy his wife a pair of buckskin gloves, a shawl, a silk handkerchief and other presents for his four daughters, his mother and father. A valued and skilled artisan, he still never learned to read and write. He was a family man with a full life. But a slave.
Much good can come of teaching details and nuances of slavery, such as Mr. Williams’ story, discovered through ledgers kept by the iron forge where he worked. An accomplished teacher could bring a slave’s humanity alive. Think of Frederick Douglass, who was 20 years a slave and nine years a fugitive until English friends raised $711.66 to buy his freedom in 1845, after he was already a famous orator, author and abolitionist. As a boy, he had seen bloody whippings of fellow slaves. He was taught to read by a woman who inherited him and had never owned a slave before. He became a strong man who helped to build sailing ships. When he had the chance to escape, he took it. Though he had learned skills as a slave that could be “applied for (his) personal benefit,” the thing he wanted most was to be a free man. Widely considered the most photographed American of the 19th century, he never smiled in a portrait because he wanted to fight the popular myth of the “happy slave.” That’s why a single phrase in Florida’s educational guidelines can be so fraught. Sensitively used, “personal benefit” might help build a more complex picture of an enslaved person’s full life. But it could easily be seen as a ham-fisted attempt to minimize the horror of slavery.
The blowback against the new teaching standards has been fierce, including from the vice president of the United States. Supporters of the new guidelines are doubling-down in defense of them, which is exactly backward. They should instead be listening to the concerns and adapting to the legitimate worries of the critics. But this is the distrusting political and cultural climate in which we live. That’s too bad.
The real truth and what should be emphasized is that slavery was an abomination that was beyond redemption. That people built their riches on the backs of people they literally owned.
Even the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson called slavery a “hideous blot” and “moral depravity.” In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, he blamed King George III for helping to perpetuate the trans-Atlantic slave trade and wrote that in supporting slavery, the king “waged cruel war against nature itself.” Today, we’d call that a crime against humanity. Jefferson, the country’s third president, who fathered children with his own slave Sally Hemings, understood that slavery was an unalloyed, corrupting evil. Florida schoolchildren should, too.
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