Thread by @nhannahjones

There's been much gaslighting & moderate justifying of the new Florida social studies standards, people stating the "clarifications" were designed to show Black resilience, or were just "facts." So, I thought I'd compare the African-American history standards to the Holocaust's.

As you can imagine, they were quite illuminating. So, let's be clear: facts in cases such as this are rarely neutral. It's which facts are highlighted, how much emphasis they get, how are they framed, what is left out, what is diminished and what is uplifted.

I compared the Holocaust for a particular reason. We are a country with a great deal of anti-Semitism. But when it comes to the Holocaust, Americans believe we are the good guys in the story (watch Ken Burns' America & the Holocaust: NO). Slavery, however, is the sin we own.

So, shall we? Let's start here. This is the section on AFRICAN AMERICAN history. And yet, educators in Florida now must discuss the Barbary Pirates and slavery, slavery in Asia, the Slavs and what Indigenous people were doing before African or Europeans arrived. Huh.

In the Holocaust section, there's no such comparison and cataloguing of other genocides committed by and against other groups. The Holocaust stands on its own, as it should. In fact, the only reference to past times and other peoples is to describe the root of anti-Semitism.Huh.

In fact, the Holocaust is described exactly as it was: systematic state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. But the only time the word systematic occurs in reference to Black history is to describe African slave traders. Huh.

So, even though the slave trade, slavery, racial apartheid were systemic, systematic, institutionalized, the word is only used to describe African slave traders, which is actually inaccurate. The word racism occurs just twice, once in the Holocaust section, one in AA. Compare.

U.S. racism is not treated a systematic, and only apparently abridging on "individual freedoms" even though the racism was codified to deprive rights, life, liberties, due process, access to public goods, access to ballot, from an entire race.

The description of racism in the Holocaust section sounds like America, but no such paragraph exists in the African American history section, even as Nazi's looked to America's race laws for inspiration.

There's this section much discussed section on enslaved people (who worked on slave labor camps in the U.S.) gaining beneficial skills. Shockingly, no similar paragraph about Jewish people gaining skills in concentration camps.

The African American section spends section after section after section on the abolitionist movement that was always a tiny minority of white Americans, and yet no similar concentration on all the good Germans exists in the Holocaust.

The section on the Holocaust names the perpetrators: Nazis and their collaborators. But Black Americans & the good white people are apparently fighting against some nameless, faceless, race-less group of people in the quest to abolish slavery.Who were these obstacles to liberty??

I mean, we were founded on liberty & justice & white people were on this quest to end slavery, with the Continental Congress that was totally powerless to do so, and some chief justice's notes in a court case, but we really have no idea why these good white people didn't win.

With all of these white people trying to so hard to end slavery, including Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, the Continental Congress, who was this alien force that stopped them from until the Civil War? You won't find that in the standards. No perpetrator is ever named.

The Holocaust section does not broach Jewish collaborators, but the African American history sections regurgitates right-wing talking points wholesale by blaming a Black man for the beginning of racial slavery in America. I believe they got this section from a meme.

In fact, as far as I can tell, the only named enslaver in this section is, in fact, a Black man. Huh.

Here we need to focus on the white people who supported Black American's rights and were targeted. But targeted by WHOM? Who were these good white people fighting against? And, well, might we point out they were a minority because clearly these good white people didn't win?

In addressing the rampant racial terrorism that Black Americans experiences in the forms of systemic lynchings and massacres, this section clarifies that teachers must also address acts of violence by (individual) African Americans. No such qualification in the Holocaust section.

In fact, in the Holocaust section, students are expected to think about the experiences of survivors and describe the psychological and physical struggles of survivors. They are not asked to contemplate Black suffering at all.

Florida students are tasked with learning about the efforts to hold Nazi perpetrators accountable, including government officials, but there is no such expectation around slavery and the LIVING victims and perpetrators of the 100-year period of US apartheid.

The Holocaust sections calls out bystanders and collaborators, the everyday citizens who aided the Nazi regime and perpetrated gross violence. It tasks students with learning about the complicity of corporations. No such thing for U.S. slavery and apartheid.

The Holocaust sections emphasized for students why it is so important that they and future generations learn about the Holocaust. There is no "Never Again" moment in the African Americans section. No culpability.

The point of this thread, if it is not clear, is to say that the factual choices presented in the African American section, even if true, are indeed political choices. They are not reflective of an accurate accounting of history. They are not objective. They do not get us truth.

I ask every well-meaning, hand-wringing person who says, well, it is true that enslaved people could use the skills they could have learned if they were free to benefit themselves if they ever got freedom, to stop being gaslit and foolish. These are political choices.

This is curriculum that is trying to hide the crime in a state led by folks who cannot bear the truth and who want to hide the truth for political gain by diminishing what Black Americans have experienced and what white Americans have done or allowed to be done.

All one has to do is compared the treatment of these two atrocities to know you're being played. Stop being complicit in it. Here are the standards. You can read for yourselves. fldoe.org/core/fileparse…