DeSantis Keeps Telling Us Who He Is
Doubling down on state standards on slavery.
Via WaPo: DeSantis doubles down on claim that some Blacks benefited from slavery.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday in response to reporters’ questions while standing in front of a nearly all-White crowd of supporters.
Again, the whole point of this is to muddle contemporary debates on race by making slavery look good even if in some small way. This is not about accuracy in history. This is about giving some level of excuse to clearly evil practices that have had long-term implications for contemporary socio-economic structures.
And it is Ron DeSantis, yet again, trying to capitalize on racism and bigotry.
DeSantis issued a statement Friday saying, “Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children.” His campaign did not respond to an email on Saturday requesting comment.
This is just getting so very tiresome (but I know that it works).
Will Hurd provides a corrective:
“Slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”
I must confess that I continue to wonder why Hurd remains in the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, on Fox News:
Some on the right defended DeSantis, including Fox News host Jesse Watters.
“No one is arguing slaves benefited from slavery,” Watters said Friday on his prime time show. “No one is saying that. It’s not true. They are teaching how Black people develop skills during slavery in some instances that can be applied for their own personal benefit.”
I continue to note: the reason is to soften views of slavery.
And Watters third sentence directly contracts his first from the quote.
Interesting isn’t it that DeSantis and the MAGAts all profess to be Christians, and central to their faith is confession, repentance and redemption. They refuse to confess, they refuse to repent and they cannot be redeemed because they just keep digging the hole deeper.
At a guess the percentage of Christians who are flaming fascist assholes exceeds the percentage of Muslims who support Al Qaeda or ISIS.
Apparently I need to pull the covers back over my head.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
@Michael Reynolds:
It’d be nice if they could remember who they’re supposed to be. But that’s too much to ask, innt?
Actually Jesse, yes, yes they are arguing exactly that.
Maybe all of this was coming. Maybe it was inevitable that we’d reach this point of degredation and dysfunction. But it was Donald Trump and his voters who got us here in a hurry.
Every time I here DeSantis I am amazed that a man with that voice and demeanor was somehow given money to run for President. He sounds like an annoying psycho, and his campaign is following suit.
And apparently the historians who created these standards listed a bunch of black people who benefitted from slavery, none of whom were slaves.
Also, one historian, William Allen, wrote a book titled Rethinking Uncle Tom.
From the marketing copy: Rethinking Uncle Tom provides readers both better familiarity with the moral discourse of abolition and nineteenth-century reformism, and, more importantly, a glimpse of an America envisioned as producing that nobility of soul that Uncle Tom represented, the human model of surpassing excellence.
This is not in any way the historian you chose to create anything standard for others. Uncle Tom, the noble hero, is connected with actual slavery in a very tenuous and controversial way, some of which is a white myth. It’s a subject of actual study for students.
I’ve never liked the Stowe novel. Some people do like it. or love it. But if you’re going to have to a course of study about black history you have to be teaching the reasons why James Baldwin was able to end the book’s existence as a serious look at racism and slavery. I’m guessing the ideologues behind Florida’s curriculum want the opposite.
How many stories have we read about some tourist at Monticello or other plantation house complaining about being shown the slave quarters? How many people watched Roots or Twelve Years a Slave and said they hadn’t realized slavery was bad? There’s a market for this minimization.
DeUseless seems to be a true believer, but even so, this is not about “making slavery look good”. It’s about getting the GOP prez nomination by performatively owning the libs. It’s utterly cynical and self-serving. It’s of a piece with making FL school board elections partisan, which is intended to nationalize the elections and push local GOP activism. Blood and soil nationalism has always been a reliable tool of the elites.
@Modulo Myself: Whenever you’re amazed at what DeSatanist has accomplished, remember that he is one of the “examples” from last year who was going to “behave as a normal partisan” (as opposed to a wanaTrump) who would move the party away from the dangerous shoal that is…
…well, to be honest, the GOP. It’s the power of delusionally wishful thinking.
The more telling thing about the present world is that DeSantis makes an acceptable choice for maybe 40 or so % of the electorate in a post-Trump world* and is a not completely unacceptable choice for maybe as much as 20% more–including many people who would classify themselves as moderate to liberal.
Finally, the “well duh” answer to why Hurd stays in the GOP is because he wants to win and lives in Texas. Excluding that factor, I have no idea.
* (ETA:) My suggestion of a post-Trump world is in no way a remove or shift from my usual position that there isn’t any “pre-Trump world.” It is simply a concession to the current “conventional wisdom” (or lack thereof). Trump still simply identified the party that would gravitate toward his particular brand of sociopathy. He created nothing. He is a catalyst and no more.
ETA 2: “But if you’re going to have to a course of study about black history you have to be teaching the reasons why James Baldwin was able to end the book’s existence as a serious look at racism and slavery.”–Sorry, but that would be CRT, so I’ma have to disallow it.
Hey Ron? If you think slavery was so beneficial, why don’t you sign up to be one?
I’m sure you’ll be first in line for the beatings.
DeFascist: “Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children.”
O rly?
Indoctrinating students is what Republican-affiliated
Moms For LibertyKlanned Karenhood is doing with its anti-American book-banning agenda that seeks to control what all students can and cannot read.Pushing sexual topics onto children is what longest-serving Republican House Speaker Denny Hastert was doing when he was raping boys, and what the right’s favorite son Donald Trump was doing when repeatedly making gross comments about wanting to bang his own daughter.
Pointing out that American chattel slavery’s amoral forced labor was brutally abusive — and not a skill-development program — neither indoctrinates nor corrupts the young. But Florida’s shrill, unlikeable governor and his unhinged party have nothing to offer but hate, lies, and extremism.
Will the real conservatives please stand up? We are yet waiting.
In all this “benefitted from slavery” talk is buried the assumption that enslaved people arrived without skills or that they needed their enslavers to teach them anything. I would bet that some of those newly enslaved contributed some skills to their enslavers and that may of those multigenerational enslaved learned every skill they had from their fellow enslaved and, yet again, shared some of those skills with their enslavers. It was almost certainly not the white teach, black learn situation generation after generation that this argument implies.
Next week in DeSantis’ PR campaign: Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ to be banned because Ebenezer Scrooge became woke after listening to too many SJW ghosts. Also, in a rebuttal to a question from a reporter, we can expect to hear from Ron: “Sure, but on the other hand, Hitler’s crematoriums were as carbon neutral as possible”. Remarkably that will cause DeSantis’ poll numbers to drop 5% but only because MAGAs will fear that he’s gone too woke on ‘so called “air pollution”‘. In response to his numbers dropping, DeSantis’ will have the Florida Environmental Agency void all emissions regulations for crematorium smokestacks.
The sad thing is that as crazy as all that sounds, I think we can bank on Ron doing something even worse.
For people who say they hate identity politics Republicans sure seem to do a lot of it.
@gVOR10:
That’s all they have left.
There isn’t even the Chamber of Commerce economic libertarianism any more.
In the Republican ideal world, every law, every institution, every organ of state is bent to exact retribution upon their hated enemies, and install them at the top of a social pyramid.
So the guy hired to a good position at a great salary whose grandfather was the only survivor of the Holocaust should be happy all of his other family was killed and his grandfather had to flee here? Maybe someone like Tori Amos should be happy that 90%-95% of her ancestors were killed but the end result is she gets to be a singing star? I think it’s a tribute to human resiliency that some people can survive and even thrive after great wrongs but that doesn’t mean we should justify mass killings and slavery.
Steve
“DeSantis Keeps Telling Us Who He Is”
And yet there is a whole lot of people who are doing their best not to believe him.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
As I’ve been saying since 2015, Trump IS the Republican Party. He didn’t bring them anywhere, but rather he is the perfect embodiment of who the Republican base is, and given the rule changes over the years, to get the nomination all you need is the base. Nothing else matters.
@Modulo Myself:
I’m not sure that’s the same William Allen.
Forty acres, a mule, and free trade training! And still they weren’t grateful!
@Kurtz:
I thought it was this William Allen. Maybe I’m wrong, but he seems connected to the conservative world. Looks like he’s a political scientist rather than historian though.
@Modulo Myself:
It may very well be him. His name is tough to google, because it’s generic. He seemed mostly connected to Michigan. The Florida DOE document I found that explained their preferences for candidates for the Workgroup didn’t rule him out, but seemed to point elsewhere. But since I posted, I found a little more about him and concluded that it may be the same guy.
Neither here nor there, but his daughter teaches at Harvard and at one point launched a gubernatorial bid in Mass. as a Dem.
I find one thing interesting, but unsurprising. I tried to find a list of members of the workgroup that formulated these standards. I don’t think it has been made public. The closest thing I could find was the document I linked above. Florida’s Sunshine Laws seem to only apply to people who are inconvenient to DeSantis and those connected to him. I recall reading a long report a while back about the being used to harass a local government official. I’ll see if I can find it, it was a good read.
Most of the Florida curriculum is bog-standard and unobjectionable. It deals extensively with the history and horror of slavery. I have no idea why the GOP has decided to rally behind this specific point other than their contrarianism that if D’s object to it, they have to support it.
I mean, yeah, technically, some slaved developed skills. But that’s like saying running from a mob got you exercise. Technically true, but you’re missing the point.
Kevin Drum has weighed in on this. He often bends over backwards to be reasonable and fair to the other side. He feels this bit about slaves learning skills is kind of a nothingburger. Compared to the rest of the FL standard.
@DK:
For the win. Thank you.
@Modulo Myself: It appears to be. He gets credit for the book on Wikipedia and Amazon (tho he’s provided no bio to their site).
@gVOR10:
In a well-meaning but misguided attempt to be reflexively contrarian, Kevin Drum misses the point. This is not an isolated throwaway footnote, it’s an attempt to bothsides slavery, part and parcel of the extremist right’s ongoing attempts to normalize hate and whitewash US history.
Since Kevin Drum apparently cannot figure out on his own — which is unfortunate — maybe he should try talking to some descendents of American chattel slavery about it, find out why this footnote is intellectually dishonest, then try again.
@DrDaveT: Anytime lol
Somehow it seems to me that all of this culture war resurgence and other dog whistles is just an attempt to cater to the trump base. But nobody else is trump, and his base is only loyal to him. What about “personality cult” don’t they understand?
@DK:
This.
Honestly, DeSantis isn’t the only one telling us who they are right now (at least on this particular issue). See also the number of professional heterodox pundits who have been rushing to defend the National Review’s critique of Kamala Harris’ critique of the law (and in particular this passage). You would think that realizing they are writing “of course slavery was bad, but…” might cause them to reexamine their views, but oh no… they just dive right into this topic and twist themselves into knots to prove their heterodox bonafides (including why they, as typically white people, are able to look at this topic with the necessary detached scientific objectivism to lecture all those people of color* who repeatedly say “no… this is bad”).
To some degree Drum’s “you’re worrying about the wrong thing” falls into that category as well. For the love of Pete, it’s ok just to let people be upset at what they are upset at some times!
* – Equally telling are all the people whose core defense of this curriculum was that there were at least two Black Academics involved in its creation. Of course, when you point out that there is footage of one of those Academics literally thanking god for slavery… well the topic gets changed.
@mattbernius: Yup. Our pundit class is out of its depth trying to treat such a subject academically.
A deep dive into the potential complexities and differences in skillset and labor roles among enslaved Americans may well be an interestimg topic for a dissertation or advanced-collegiate guided study. For example, examining resiliency factors among American chattel slaves or some such: do we know what percentage of the enslaved who developed higher labor skills in captivity? Did enslaved persons ever arrive with such skills? What did that mean for them? What happened to them in the postwar period? Do we know whether certain slaves in certain roles fared better economically or socially during Reconstruction? And what of their descendants? Etc etc.
That’s not what DeSaster and Co. in Tallahassee are trying to do, and the press should not project their good faith onto his bigoted governance.
When a state already seeking to whitewash demographic discrimination’s outsized and deleterious role in American history tosses a line implying ‘slavery had its benefits’ into a throwaway footnote re: education standards for minor kids, Florida’s obvious intention is to continue its gaslighting campaign to minimize racist brutality. Kamala and Biden et al are right to call out this extremism.
I’m disappointed to hear there are legacy media pundits again being manipulated by right wing gaslighting, but having observed 2016’s Emailghazigatepalooza b*tch hunt and other less-disastrous journalistic failures since (that have, btw, sometimes played to liberal wishcasting, though more often to MAGA fever dreams), I’m not surprised.
@EdB:
I’ve concluded Casey DeSantis and his super PAC know nothing can stop Trump winning the nomination short of his death or forced withdrawal from the race. Therefore they’re positioning Ron as the natural inheritor of his legacy should the vacancy open up, in the hope his base would grudgingly turn out for the governor.
Whether Ron shares this gloomy view is unclear.