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Lots of discussion of Floridas new African-American history curriculum, especially that line about slavery helping slaves develop skills which they might be able to use for their own benefit. Is that like representative? How is the curriculum as a whole? Well, I’ve read …
2/ the entire updated AAH curriculum just updated. By way of background, I have a PhD in American history w a focus on the colonial period but covering all of Am history. I havent been professionally engaged in the literature as a working historian for abt 25 years. But I …
3/ do generally keep up to date. Overall the text isn’t as clownish as that one sentence might suggest. But there still major problems. They tend to be ones of emphasis and omission rather than outright fabrication. I’ll focus on three points. First that line about …
4/ developing skills isn’t on its own. There’s definitely a focus on discussing the variety of work and trades slaves did. And it’s true. Slaves were engaged in a lot of skilled trades, especially in urban areas. And that may surprise some people. But the overall picture …
5/ certainly 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. Then next two are more significant. A significant part of the curriculum is focused on talking about all the …
6/ other societies that practiced slavery and other places where slavery was arguably worse. So for instance we learn that Europeans found slavery already in existence in Africa. There is a major part of the curriculum focused on how slavery was arguably worse in …
7/ the Caribbean islands and in parts of Latin America. These are not false claims in the broadest sense. I’ll note one example. The slave populations in the Caribbean sugar islands were never able to sustain themselves. They required constant importation of new …
8/ slaves because mortality was so high. This was true for many reasons, especially the brutal and deadly nature of sugar production. But the upshot of this whole part of the curriculum is definitely to soften the image of North American slavery. Everybody had slavery, the …
9/ argument goes, and slaves in North America had it better than slaves in other places. To put it in contemporary terms there’s a lot of whataboutism and blame shifting. Finally, the third point is when we get to reconstruction and the return of what was called …
10/ “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’…
11/ 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 …
12/ 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 …
13/ 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. These are by no means the only problems with this curriculum. They are just …
14/ the ones that jumped out to me on my reading. They struck me as the most foundational. So while the public conversation is focused on that one sentence I flagged above the overall picture is also distorted and incomplete just in ways that aren’t as easy to …
15/ capture in a single reference or quote.
16/ For those asking, here's the curriculum fldoe.org/core/fileparse…
17/ As I noted, the points I noted are the ones that struck me as the big picture problems. But when you read through it there are lots of choice nuggests like this lesson abt major figures in the modern civil rights era. I mean, Steele and Sowell? C'mon. 
18/ These are obviously very big people to movement conservatives. And they may be significant in their own way. But really come the fuck on.
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