BU Historians Weigh In on Ron DeSantis’ Slavery Remarks and His Defense of Florida’s Controversial Social Studies Curriculum
Ron DeSantis has repeatedly defended a new state curriculum that would include teaching middle-schoolers that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File
BU Historians Weigh In on Ron DeSantis’ Slavery Remarks and His Defense of Florida’s Controversial Social Studies Curriculum
Paula Austin: GOP presidential hopeful has been spearheading “problematic, discriminatory, exclusionary, and dangerous policies and practices in Florida”
As Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis heads into a second week parrying blows from constituents, educators, critics, and fellow Republicans over his defense of Florida’s controversial social studies curriculum, his campaign shows signs of flagging.
The new standards, which the Florida governor has repeatedly defended, include teaching middle-schoolers that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
The curriculum, DeSantis said, is “probably going to show” that “some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
Nowhere close to the reality of enslavement, DeSantis’ comments seem instead to be a naked appeal to voters as his presidential campaign falters.
“Despite trying to distance himself from the new standards, saying ‘scholars’ came up with them, he has certainly been spearheading these kinds of problematic, discriminatory, exclusionary, and dangerous policies and practices in Florida and is surely trying to appeal nationally to voters in his presidential run who agree with teaching false (and ultimately white supremacist) historical narratives about US history,” says Paula Austin, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of history and of African American and Black Diaspora studies.
It’s not clear that the strategy is working for DeSantis. A new poll released July 31 shows him almost 40 points behind former president Donald Trump as his campaign staff continue to fight fires among a growing legion of his critics.
Almost immediately after DeSantis’ comment, Vice President Kamala Harris made a last-minute change to her itinerary, adding a stop in Florida to deliver a forceful speech that was critical of both the curriculum changes and Florida’s elected leaders.
“Come on—adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world. How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
Predictably, the notion that enslaved people benefited from their enslavement has been met with fierce backlash—not just from Democrats and progressive institutions, but from within DeSantis’ own party.
US Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) largely praised the guidelines as “good, robust and accurate,” but took issue with the idea of “personal benefit” and said that part is “wrong and needs to be adjusted.” Donalds supported DeSantis for governor, but has backed Trump in the presidential primary.
US Rep. John James (R-Mich.) went even further. “Nothing about that 400 years of evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors,” wrote James, who is Black, on Twitter. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.)—both of whom are also making a run at the Oval Office—joined the chorus of Republicans who have publicly criticized DeSantis.
Even former Vice President Mike Pence weighed in, telling reporters that DeSantis should “take another look” at the new teaching guidelines. BU Today spoke with Austin and two other University faculty—John Thornton, a CAS professor of history and of African American studies, and Takeo Rivera, a CAS assistant professor of English, who focuses on race in the United States—about DeSantis’ comments and what they represent within a broader context in the country.
Q&A
with Paula Austin, John Thornton, and Takeo Rivera
BU Today: Who is Ron DeSantis’ audience for this? Who is he trying to woo with his claims?
Rivera: DeSantis’ angle here is to play to the reactionary, revanchist side of this ongoing and exhausting “culture war” that has come to devour all terms of political discourse in this country like wildfire smoke. As Trump has proven, outspoken white supremacist beliefs can score you political points with the right-wing political base in this day and age—it’s no longer necessary to dress such beliefs up in euphemisms and political niceties, as was the case just a few decades ago.
Thornton: I think that DeSantis’ comments were his commentary on the [relatively broad curricula], and were done without any research or deeper reflection on the idea. Nor do I think he was thinking much about the nature of slavery and its relationship to the fruits of the slaves’ labor. Instead, I think he was looking for a way to deny the exploitative relationship of slavery in favor of a sort of denial of slavery’s reality.
I would say he is attempting to make slavery more tolerable for white parents (and voters) who would rather not discuss this, or to gloss it over as less exploitative than it was. These parents could press teachers or school boards, particularly through the [Fla.] WOKE Act, with its provision that talking about racism or slavery would hurt white students’ feelings. Since these hurt feelings could potentially create problems for teachers and administrators (particularly those who are political appointees), they might try to avoid dealing with the issue. But they would be hard-pressed to do so using the curriculum as it is now designed.
I think this, and a lot of what DeSantis is doing in Florida, is actually about his presidential bid and his claim to be a “rational Trump.”
BU Today: DeSantis made his remarks within the context of his efforts to de-emphasize the legacy of racism in Florida’s public-school curriculum. What is lost for students when this integral history is glossed over or outright erased?
Austin: First of all, young people don’t like being lied to. Students often show up in my [history] classrooms wondering why this is the first time they’ve heard of something or commenting that knowledge about a particular historical event or person helps to explain something in our contemporary world. So, what’s denied to students by policies and practices like this is information that can help them (and all of us) make sense of many of the issues we currently face.
What politicians and parent groups who write, support, and promote these policies also deny is an opportunity for young people to think with and through that history—looking at the ways historical problems were solved or weren’t solved, and with that information, the chance to begin to imagine new or revised/revisioned ways of addressing our current concerns.
I also think this sends a particular message about whether we think young people can be intellectuals in their own right. My research says that they are and they can. Certainly, information needs to be delivered in age-appropriate ways for all children, but that information must be truthful and based in historical fact.
Rivera: DeSantis wants to tell a propagandist, exceptionalist, triumphalist myth, and the only way to do that is completely distort the facts about past and ongoing racial oppression. What is lost for students is, literally, truth. As an Asian American studies scholar, I should also state that DeSantis’ approval of Asian American history curriculum, concurrent with suppressing Black curriculum, is absolutely abhorrent—there is no way of fully understanding Asian American history without Black history.
BU Today: Can you situate DeSantis’ remarks within a broader context of white supremacy in this country? In other words, how do we get to the point that a presidential candidate can say this and still be in the running?
Austin: The desire and attempts to control curricula about US history has a long and storied past. These shenanigans are not new. They seem particularly egregious (and they are) and worrisome (and they should be) because much of the country either thought we had put overt racism in our past (we just need to look at the reactions to the Obamas and to Barack Obama’s presidency and the aftermath of it to challenge this idea) or they continued to harbor and act on sometimes generational, white supremacist ideologies—sometimes in “small” prejudices, or residential decisions, for example, and sometimes in violent rhetorical or physical manifestations, whether interpersonally or systemically, when they could because of their positions of power.
So in this way, it is the hypervisibility that might make DeSantis seem shocking, but the Republican candidate before him was no less white supremacist and we have certainly had other white supremacist presidents in the oval office, elected by Americans. (Woodrow Wilson very famously and happily screened the racist film Birth of a Nation at the White House, for example.)
Rivera: Well, white supremacist discourse and policy have never really gone away; there have just been periods in which it was less socially acceptable to say certain things openly. Before, there were dog whistles—Nixon’s “silent majority” and Reagan’s “welfare queens,” for example—that often accompanied policies that dramatically disenfranchised or criminalized communities of color (Reagan especially). Both Republicans and Democrats quietly validate anti-Black anxieties when they pride themselves for being “tough on crime,” so contemporary Republicans don’t have a total monopoly here.
However, Trump represented a turn in allowing the space for white racial resentment to be released openly, cathartically, and DeSantis is eager to ride that wave. I do think that the rise of racist ultranationalism is a horridly misguided response to the total hegemony of global capitalism. There is a universal sense of precarity from not being able to meet basic needs under an increasingly unequal economic system, and it’s a heck of a lot easier to scapegoat otherness—the “globalists” who are seen as people of color, trans folks, feminists, and so forth, who are usually suffering even more—rather than blaming the capitalists who are actually stealing your wages and inflating prices. Open white supremacy is now perceived as a “righteous” anti-establishment position by fans of DeSantis and Trump alike, which is absurd given that white supremacy has been a crucial component to the establishment of the very economic system that is dispossessing everyone.
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