Florida must repeal racist school curricula and focus on researched history

Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die:

Opinion echo by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times.

Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was, along with his state’s Board of Education, embroiled in a controversy over a new curriculum for student instruction in African American history.

Most of the coverage, and much of the outrage, focused on a quote from the state’s guidelines for the history of slavery, in which students are expected to learn that “Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

DeSantis defended the curriculum language, telling reporters that teachers are “probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” In a statement, two members of Florida’s African American history standards work group defended the language in question, citing 16 individuals who, they say, developed valuable skills while in bondage.

Unfortunately for the Florida Department of Education, several of the people cited weren’t ever enslaved, and there’s little evidence that those who were learned any relevant skills for their “personal benefit” in slavery.

The good-faith explanation for this language, if you’re inclined to be generous, is that the authors wanted to emphasize the agency and skill of the enslaved, whose labor fueled large parts of the American economy in the decades before Emancipation. 

It’s an important point that you can also find in the College Board’s Advanced Placement class in African American studies. “In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians and healers in the North and South,” the A.P. guidelines state. “Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”

Similar points, yes, but the language isn’t quite the same. In addition to using the term “enslaved” rather than “slave” — a linguistic shift that continues to be a subject of real debate — the language for the A.P. curriculum emphasizes that Black Americans could use these skills only after Emancipation.

This is key. Slaves were owned as chattel by other human beings who stole their freedom, labor and bodily autonomy. To say that any more than a fortunate few could “parlay” their skills into anything that might improve their lives is to spin a fiction. Just as important is the fact that a large majority of the Africans enslaved in North America, whether under the British Crown for the better part of two centuries or under the American Constitution for eight decades after the revolution, died in bondage. For them, there was no point after slavery where they could use their skills.

You might say that these are minor, semantic differences. But in history the same ideas can be used to very different effect. And it is exactly these questions of wording and emphasis that mark one of the differences between a modern, more truthful depiction of American slavery and an older, tendentious approach that either de-emphasized or ignored outright the basic injustice of human bondage in favor of a gloss that placed a more pleasant sheen on an otherwise horrific institution.

“Until the mid-1960s,” the historian Donald Yacovone writes in “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity,” “American history instruction from grammar school to the university relentlessly characterized slavery as a benevolent institution, an enjoyable time and a gift to those Africans who had been lucky enough to be brought to the United States.”

As Yacovone notes, an American student in 1903, reading a textbook written for pupils enrolled in secondary school, might learn of antebellum slavery, for example, that the “systematic training bestowed upon him during his period of servitude and his contact with higher intelligence have given to the Negro an impulse to civilization that neither his inherent inclinations nor his native environment would of themselves bestowed.”

A different student, flipping through his grammar school textbook in 1923, might read in a section on slavery that the typical plantation was a “self-supporting community” where “the great majority of Negroes remained quietly and faithfully at work” as laborers and artisans.

A student in 1943, reading a similar textbook, might learn that “the slaves loved the people of the plantation and stood by them even after slavery was ended.” 

And a student in 1963, would have read in his history book that slavery “made it possible for Negroes to come to America and to make contacts with civilized life.” 

Other authors emphasized, in Yacovone’s words, that “slaves learned valuable trades such as sewing, weaving, carpentry and nursing.”

This wasn’t just bad history and false information. It also served an ideological purpose. “As the history of textbooks reveal,” Yacovone writes, “Americans came to see a path to national reconciliation through their shared devotion to white supremacy.”

Or, as the historian David Blight observes in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”: “A segregated society demanded a segregated historical memory. The many myths and legends fashioned out of the reconciliationist vision provided the superstructure of Civil War memory, but its base was white supremacy in both its moderate and virulent forms.” The point of teaching fictions about slavery was both to inscribe racist ideologies into the nation’s identity and to justify the renewed subjugation of an entire class of Americans.

It is worth mentioning a few other elements of the new Florida history curriculum. Florida wants students to learn how “trading in slaves developed in African lands” and about the “practice of the Barbary pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries.” And in its guidelines on Black history after the Civil War, the state wants students to study “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Read together, these guidelines seem like an exercise in equivocation and blame shifting — an attempt to downplay the enormity of American slavery and its defining feature, hereditary racial bondage. This is bad enough. But then consider, as well, the political context of Florida under DeSantis.

Florida, says the Republican presidential hopeful, is where “woke goes to die.” It’s where state officials refused to offer students a class in African American studies on the grounds that it “significantly lacks educational value.” And it’s where DeSantis, as governor, has vetoed spending on Black history celebrations, actively worked to reduce the representation of Black voters in the state and promised, if elected president, to change back the name of an Army base in North Carolina from Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg, as in the Confederate general Braxton Bragg.

It is possible (although, given their response to criticism, unlikely) that the Florida curriculum authors didn’t mean anything by their characterization of American slavery. But when the board that approved the language was handpicked by DeSantis — as part of his crusade against so-called wokeness — it’s hard not to see this new instruction on the history of slavery as yet another part of the Florida governor’s larger ideological project.

This is why the history of textbooks past is particularly relevant. The history we teach to students in the present is as much about the country we hope to be as it is a record of the country we once were. A curriculum that distorts the truth of past injustice is meant, ultimately, for a country that excludes in the present.

Jim Jordan thinks with his ass

Echo opinion published in The Washington Post by Jennifer Rubin: 

Political commentator who writes opinion columns for The Washington Post.

"Following DeSantis’s lead, Georgia lawmakers proposed a law that would allow a body they largely control to fire locally elected prosecutors."

MAGA Republicans, devoid of policy solutions and addicted to performance politics, act as if their House majority invests them with the power to rove the landscape to spot MAGA victims, skewer their enemies and defend their political allies. That’s not their job! 

Moreover, as we are seeing with their attempt to intimidate Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in his investigation of defeated former president Donald Trump, it’s a gross abuse of congressional power.

For starters, Congress has no business meddling with any ongoing investigation at any level. In response to an outrageous letter from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) demanding Bragg testify about a case under consideration by a New York grand jury concerning New York law, Bragg’s office wrote, “Consistent with these constitutional obligations, the DA’s Office is cognizant of the Justice Department’s consistence policy ‘of not providing Congress with non-public information about investigations.’ ”

Jim Jordan desecration: "First, they came for your guns. Then, your gas stoves. Then, your gas cars. What’s next?" Stephen King: "You!"

Bragg’s office made the constitutional case succinctly:

Congress is not the appropriate branch to review pending criminal matters. As the Supreme Court noted in Watkins, “Congress [is not] a law enforcement or trial agency. These are functions of the executive and judicial departments of government.” 354 U.S. at 187. “[T]he power [of Congress] to investigate must not be confused with any of the powers of law enforcement; those powers are assigned under our Constitution to the Executive and the Judiciary.” Quinn v. United States, 349 U.S. 155, 161 (1955).

Congress is not a supercharged prosecutorial supervisor. In our system of separation of powers, the duty to investigate and prosecute rests with the executive branch, either at the state or federal level. Attempts to politicize prosecutions and turn prosecutors into lackeys of right-wing legislatures is a dangerous trend that strikes at the heart of the impartial administration of justice and the rule of law.

But it’s not only Congress that is seeking to abuse prosecutorial independence.

In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) removed Hillsborough County prosecutor Andrew Warren for, among other reasons, decrying abortion restrictions and bans on gender-affirming care. (Warren won on the merits but was denied reinstatement in federal court on 11th Amendment grounds; he has appealed to the Florida state Supreme Court and to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.)

Following DeSantis’s lead, Georgia lawmakers proposed a law that would allow a body they largely control to fire locally elected prosecutors. As the Center for Constitutional Litigation’s Robert Peck wrote in a Bloomberg Law post, “The new law would render blanket statements about a prosecutor’s unwillingness to prosecute certain crimes to be a form of misconduct. A primary concern of the bill’s proponents is opposition to criminal prosecutions under Georgia’s so-called fetal heartbeat law that restricts abortions to approximately six weeks.” Again, this attempted legislative infringement on the executive branch violates the separation of powers and tramples on the right of voters to select district attorneys who adopt the priorities they think are important.

Just as Georgia prosecutors and Florida prosecutors have every right to prioritize cases the voters want prosecuted (e.g., violent crime), Bragg and the people who elected him can choose to pursue public corruption and other white-collar crime free from interference from lawmakers.

Jordan’s attempted power grab not only violates the separation of legislative and executive power, but also runs roughshod over the 10th Amendment, which Republicans invoke at the drop of the hat to shield states from federal regulation and interferences. Jordan’s letter is a blatant violation of New York sovereignty (and the interests of Manhattan voters who elected Bragg).

The reply from Bragg’s office to Jordan’s letter aptly made this point. “The Letter’s requests are an unlawful incursion into New York’s sovereignty. Congress’s investigative jurisdiction is derived from and limited by its power to legislate concerning federal matters. … The Constitution limits Congress’s powers to those specifically enumerated; and the Tenth Amendment ensures that any unenumerated powers are reserved to the States.” Moreover, Bragg’s office argued, “To preserve the Constitution’s federalist principles, the District Attorney is duty bound by his constitutional oath to New York’s sovereign interest in the exercise of police powers reserved to the States under the Tenth Amendment.”

If Bragg oversteps his authority, New York courts and juries will protect the interest of defendants, be they the former president or not. And if his priorities don’t address the concerns of the voters who sent him there, they can vote him out.

Would there ever be a time to bring a local prosecutor into testify under oath to Congress? Certainly, but not on a pending matter and not on an issue of state law.

Congress first would need a valid legislative purpose. 

In Trump v. Mazars USA, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Congress had a “valid legislative purpose” in demanding tax documents from Trump’s accountants:

Congress has no enumerated constitutional power to conduct investigations or issue subpoenas, but we have held that each House has power “to secure needed information” in order to legislate. … Most importantly, a congressional subpoena is valid only if it is “related to, and in furtherance of, a legitimate task of the Congress.” … Furthermore, Congress may not issue a subpoena for the purpose of “law enforcement,” because “those powers are assigned under our Constitution to the Executive and the Judiciary.”

Valid legislative purposes for a hearing at which local prosecutors might testify could include, for example, amendment of federal voting rights laws (e.g., testifying about threats to voters and poll workers), police reform (e.g., testifying about police abuse in their jurisdiction) and revision of drug laws or funding of anti-addiction programs (e.g., testifying to the strain on courts posed by nonviolent drug abusers). In other words, local prosecutors can assist Congress as fact finders and experts in policy matters over which Congress has jurisdiction.

If a local prosecutor arrests President Biden after leaving office for spurious reasons? If a U.S. attorney indicts Hunter Biden without probable cause? Congress would have no authority to investigate, haul the prosecutors into a hearing room and demand answers. Those matters would get resolved by other branches and levels of government.

It doesn’t matter if Jordan and his cohorts actually believe Bragg is abusing his office. It doesn’t matter if Bragg actually were using poor judgment in exercise of his prosecutorial discretion. It is not Congress’s job to “fix” these things. Congress is confined to its limited constitutional role. 

That, too, is what we call the “rule of law.”

P.S. on Twitter:  Jon Stewart totally rejects the notion Trump shouldn't be indicted because doing so would make him a 'martyr': We either have the rule of law' or we don't. https://