Whitewashing slavery in US schools will teach students anti-Blackness

At a press event in Utah on July 21, GOP presidential contender and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attempted to find the silver lining of American chattel slavery. DeSantis made these utterings while defending the Florida State Board of Education’s new standards for teaching African American history in public schools, which downplay and whitewash the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. As historian Michael W Twitty has written: “Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no knowledge of how to grow it, enslaved Africans were brought to fuel its husbandry, feeding the US’ eastern seaboard, Britain and provisioning many parts of the British Caribbean.” Elsewhere, it has been documented: “African men with iron making skills were imported to the Chesapeake to work as blacksmiths … Ironworkers were an elite group in West and West Central Africa.” There is plenty of historical evidence to disprove the ridiculous claim that the Florida State Board of Education is trying to push about slavery. All this has come after DeSantis’s campaign against “wokeness” and his success in banning “critical race theory” from Florida’s public schools, colleges and universities last year. There was a brief effort in 2022 to get the Texas State Board of Education to call slavery the “involuntary relocation of African people during colonial times” in the state’s social studies curriculum for public schools, an effort the board rejected.