DeSantis laundered a racist alt-right obsession into Florida's school curriculum

Slavery? Uh, everybody did it?

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

Today, we have an exclusive on the racist alt-right obsession that Ron DeSantis’s hand-picked Florida Board of Education slipped into this coming year’s school curriculum.

We’ll also look at how the mainstream political media’s misplaced priorities will continue to enable right-wing fanatics continue their fundamentalist rewrite of society with little pushback.

By the way: In this weekend’s edition of the newsletter, we’ll have a much more hopeful and uplifting story about the ongoing shifts in our politics and power structure.

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On Tuesday evening, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis earned national headlines for an interview he gave to CNN. What he said during the sitdown with Jake Tapper was largely treated as irrelevant; the real story, for so many savvy Beltway brains, was simply the fact that the truculent governor was willing to step out of his echo chamber of sycophantic bloggers and sympathetic right-wing media networks.

For the pundit class, DeSantis’s sudden willingness to speak with CNN was confirmation that his floundering campaign for president is in the midst of a serious “reset,” or a tacitly agreed upon artificial inflection point that allows a major candidate the opportunity to escape their failures and start fresh. Much of the conversation was a meta inquiry into why DeSantis is failing so hard, which counts as the greatest sin a politician can make. DeSantis fumbled a question on abortion and another on his obsession with the word “woke,” but those were just side notes.

Almost all of the conversation that followed was about how DeSantis looked and sounded, which granted him a normalcy that he could not deserve less. Tapper found no found time to ask DeSantis about his hand-picked Board of Education’s nightmarish rewrite of school curriculum, especially in the social studies lessons about Black history. Just a little research, which I’ve done myself and published below, reveals just how deeply tied DeSantis’s education policy is to radical alt-right lunatics.

Instead, the Board of Education meeting kicked off in Orlando with a confident, bigoted, overly political, and seriously obnoxious speech by Manny Diaz Jr., the Florida Secretary of Education.

I’ve clipped the worst parts for you, including his transphobic riffs, frequent displays of contempt for teachers and teachers unions, and defense of unbelievably racist new curriculum.

Defensive out the gate, Diaz pushed back at an open letter released by opponents to the changes in curriculum without ever naming the critical organizations. In all likelihood he was referring to a letter put out by a coalition of educators and progressive advocacy groups that included Florida Education Association, the state NAACP, The Black History Project, Inc., and Equal Ground.

His suggestion that some critical organizations were included at some point in the development of the standards is a red herring; an obligatory invitation doesn’t necessarily mean that they had any influence over the outcome. And clearly, had any civil rights group or serious educators had anything to do with the standards, they’d look a lot different than what the Board of Education approved on Wednesday.

The standard that has gotten the most attention, and with good reason, is the requirement that teachers explain that slaves “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” This was one of the main talking points of slaveholders and Southern politicians in the 1840s, when they were defending the massive plantation slavery system.

It’s also just the tip of the iceberg here.

For elementary school, the standards almost ignore history altogether, mandating only that students up through fourth grade learn about famous African Americans. Maybe there will be a bit of context offered for some of the figures included in class lessons, but in accordance with the “divisive concepts” law signed by DeSantis, it won’t be until fifth grade that there’s any focus on the violence, subjugation, and halting liberation that have defined the Black experience in this country. And even then, the lessons will mostly focus on the Underground Railroad and abolition movements, with explicit instruction to include how white people helped transport slaves to the north.

Many of the standards from there on up require the foregrounding of white people as heroes in the slavery narrative. Middle school standards demand coverage of the Quakers and their opposition to slavery and again require focus on the white abolitionists and churches that assisted on the Underground Railroad. It isn’t really until high school that lessons about brutal plight of slaves become standard, far later than anywhere else.

This is where things get especially vicious and white Christofascist.

The unit on the colonial era is heavy on references to indentured servitude, a form of labor exploitation that Europeans would often accede to as a means of getting a ride to the New World. The ninth grade standards are very specific about the need to teach kids about how white Europeans during the 17th and 18th centuries were kidnapped and sold as slaves on the north coast of Africa.

The Barbary Slave Trade isn’t American history, but it has been a fixation of certain figures on the right since the publication of a 2004 book by an Ohio State history professor. The professor, Robert J. Davis, is no racist or ideologue, but his work has been twisted to fuel pernicious narratives, even as he’s long avoided the unexpected rabid fan base that his scholarship developed.

“[Soon after the book’s publication,] I started being contacted by various right-wing broadcasters and conservative pundits who believed the book or the news release supported their own take on racial history,” Davis recalled in a 2020 interview about the rise of the alt-right and its obsession with his book. Some have specifically used it to back their claims that the slavery suffered by white European Christians somehow lessens or even negates the great historical horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas.”

Sales of the book skyrocketed a few years ago thanks to interest from the alt-right, whose theories and politics Davis thoroughly rejected.

“As time has passed and mainstream interest in my findings unsurprisingly began to fade, the commitment to this racialist interpretation seems to have only intensified, as especially people of the alt-right have taken to using my book – or at least the news release – for their own, unrelated purposes. And while I’d really like to distance myself from such use, or rather misuse, there’s not a lot I can do at this point,” Davis said.

The unit on African-American history again requires an examination of slavery from all around the world and various points in time, and when taught side by side with the American slave trade, it clearly is designed to make the domestic slavery and plantation systems seem less extraordinary and instead just one piece of a larger puzzle. These lessons suggest an “everybody did it” attitude toward the buying, selling, and exploitation of humans.

Further down the line, in units about Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, Florida’s board has added a different kind of exoneration for white people. Schools are asked to teach about “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” during various race riots, including the Ocoee Massacre of 1920, when at least 30 Black people were murdered by a mob of whites, including members of the KKK. Here, white people are to be treated like victims.

The event was a textbook expression of Jim Crow bigotry, voter suppression, and pure violence. It was initiated when a Black businessman and farmer named Moses Norman was turned away from the voting booth for not paying a non-existent poll tax. He consulted a judge and returned to assert his right to vote, which brought him additional harassment. Sensing trouble brewing, he left town soon after, and that evening, a white mob laid siege to the home of his business partner. A night of terror commenced, as they lynched his partner and burned down 22 homes and every Black church in the neighborhood. Black residents fought back but were ultimately driven out of the town.

It took years of work for a local museum in Orlando to piece together the history for a new exhibit that essentially revealed the story to the rest of the world, and when it opened in 2020, DeSantis signed a bill that required schools to figure out how to teach students about the massacre.

Two years later, however, he vetoed the funding for a documentary on the subject, and now his school board is dictating that the Ocoee Massacre will be taught with a “both sides” framework, while DeSantis’s “election police” have shown a willingness to act much in the same way that the marauding white racists did back in 1920.

Finally, I have no idea what this means, but considering the above, I can’t imagine it’s a good thing.

The new standards are also filled with anti-LGBTQ+ rules, largely expansions of what has already been codified through rule and previous board rulings, which we’ve covered extensively. More on that in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.

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