A lie agreed upon

Florida is defending slavery – and insisting it isn’t – for a reason

Office of the Florida Governor.

At alicublog I briefly covered the new Florida social studies standards that talk about how slavery taught slaves useful skills and how, when whites instigated racist pogroms against black people such the Tulsa riots, white people suffered too (that is, black people fought back and hurt them).

I also talked about the perhaps inevitable follow-up: Conservatives insisting the Florida standards said nothing of the kind.

Now, these statements are right there in the documents: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” and instruction on Tulsa, Rosewood, etc. “includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans [emphasis added]…” It’s not debatable.

Nonetheless conservatives have come back with the frankly childish hair-splitting responses that I made fun of — like the Washington Examiner’s Hudson Crozier scoffing, “Are we supposed to believe that whites were never among the casualties [at Tulsa etc.]? Again, these are just relevant, neutral pieces of information.”

“Just relevant, neutral pieces of information” is, like Just Asking Questions, the lowest form of whataboutism — literally like saying, “didn’t the torturer suffer from the shrillness of his victim’s screams?” Anyone who’s really reading what Florida wrote will see it.

But Crozier and the Examiner pretend they can’t. “Florida does not teach students that slavery was good,” the paper headlines Crozier’s essay — and look, show me where in the standards it says “slavery is good”! You can’t, can you? Case closed, libtard!

Another specimen is Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke at National Review. When the Vice-President was (smartly) dispatched to tell DeSantis off, Cooke, under the snarling headline “Kamala Harris Is Brazenly Lying about Florida’s Slavery Curriculum,” keeps repeating the l-word — “This is a brazen lie. It’s an astonishing lie. It’s an evil lie….” This comports with Cooke’s typically insufferable toffee-nosed tone; one gets the impression that, at the wingnut salons where his British accent is taken for a sign of intelligence, Cooke really leans into the word – “LLLL-AYE-eeeee.”

After a series of synonyms (“I have been trying to work out how best to illustrate the sheer scale of Harris’s falsehood…”), Cooke announces that “I have copied and pasted every single reference to slavery, slaves, abolitionism, civil rights, and African Americans that is in the document” — and lists many references to how bad slavery is are in the standards. Case closed, libtard!

Some days later Cooke, amazingly, came back at it. He starts with some dudgeon about white liberals who think Huckleberry Finn is racist because it has the n-word in it (have you ever met anyone who thought that? I haven’t), then goes after his real target, the black lady, whom Cooke claims “decided to demagogue the entirety of Florida’s new school curriculum on the basis of a single contorted line…”

So now it’s “LLLL-AYE-eeeeen” rather than “LLLL-AYE-eeeee,” eh? And “contorted,” you say? Cooke seems to have acquired some awareness that the jig is up; one can tell by his wounded, defensive, agitated tone, and by the enormous length at which he exhibits it:

Since I objected to Harris’s lie last week, I have been told that, by highlighting her critique, I am playing into her hands. I reject this premise. Indeed, I must invert it. The only “gaslighting” being performed here is by Harris and by those who have endorsed her mendacity. The only “insult” being thrown is at Florida. And it is those who built the course, not its critics, who must refuse to “stand for” this ploy. The inclusion of the word “benefit” within one line of a course that contains 190 other curriculum items in no way serves to detract…

Ah shaddap, limesucker. You can see what’s up here. The standards say what they say; Cooke’s, and all his colleagues’, “where does it say slavery is good?” bit hasn’t fooled anyone; the obvious solution is to filibuster, dishing out long skeins of rage that obfuscate the point but emphasize the outrage, thus inspiring all the little Twitter shits who invade any discussion of the Florida outrage to yell YOUR A LIAR.

It's worth mentioning that these weird bits, which have been the center of the present controversy, are not all that’s ominous about these standards.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, a trained historian, gave a good account of some of the weirdness in a Twitter thread (unrolled here). For one thing, Marshall says, the emphasis on skills “seems geared to deemphasize the backbreaking agricultural labor which was the lot of the vast majority of slaves during the 200 plus years of slavery.” (I would add here that the rejoinder by DeSantis’ factota, Dr. William Allen and Dr. Frances Presley Rice, that objectors to the standards “attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression” is simply and obviously a cruel joke on the “we freed ourselves” slavery narrative, very much like the old “you say ‘colored people’ is offensive, how come it’s called the NAACP” bullshit.)

Marshall also notes:

…there are still major problems. They tend to be ones of emphasis and omission rather than outright fabrication…

…[a problem emerges] when we get to reconstruction and the return of what was called “home rule” in the South, which we’d call the Jim Crow system. Or rather we never quite get to them. If you do word searches you’ll find some of the words. But this whole part of the story is pretty radically DE-emphasized. The curriculum notes the first ‘Civil Rights Era’ and then the second Civil Rights Era. But if you’re new to the topic you might be scratching your head wondering why the second one was necessary.

Needless to say this is a pretty big part of the story, the violent reimposition of white rule in the South and how it was sustained by a system of discriminatory laws and organized violence for between 70 and 90 years depending on one’s definitions and precisely which parts of the country you’re talking about.

Again, these topics aren’t totally ignored. The curriculum’s defenders will be able to pull out quotes referencing them to try to refute what I’m saying. But read the curriculum yourself and I don’t think any fair minded reader would be able to dispute these points.

Of course, the “curriculum’s defenders” aren’t talking to or looking for “any fair minded reader.” They’re just looking for co-conspirators.

Many of these will be conservative hustlers like Cooke and Crozier who know racism is — along with misogyny, trans panic, and other such pig-eyed bigotries — all that their moldy cause has left with which to attract voters.

But others will be full-on racists who know enough — though just barely — to not out themselves as such by screaming racist epithets. That would be harmful to The Cause (and besides, they have burner social media accounts for that!).

They know the smart play is rather to say they’re not racist while pushing racist stories — to actual schoolchildren, in this case — that, for instance, slavery is a two-sided issue, and both sides did wrong when white people massacred black people, and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s just sorta came out of nowhere because the Civil War settled everything, and so on.

And when people point out that this is crazy, these guys know enough to stick to their story: just stonewall, however ridiculous it looks, while the standards, which their opponents can’t dislodge, do their work. (You know — like the Alabama Republicans who won’t follow the SCOTUS ruling and redraw their electoral map.)

Their hope is that after a while, whenever black people get their customary raw deal from the cops, legislation, landlords etc., the citizens who’ve been properly educated to their standards won’t even suspect racism — for hadn’t that problem been solved long go, when the slaves learned skills and ceased to be “just victims of oppression”?

The smarter conservative hustlers may dream bigger still — of a time when the message that slavery wasn’t so bad is so well-internalized that the kind of complaints now regularly expressed about greedy bosses and poor working conditions and inequity will, like racism, be rendered incomprehensible, even among white people. Then, what will their donors not be able to get them to do! But one thing at a time.