Ron DeSantis: slavery had its upside

You may have heard by now that Florida’s new standards for teaching history include a reference to slaves learning skills that they were able to market for their own benefit. Not only is this a twisted logic — “hey, you became property, but you learned how to do fine embroidery! It’s a win-win!” — but as Josh Marshall points out most slaves were field hands. They did not learn a skilled trade.

(Nor, to cite an older argument, did they get “free room and board” — they earned it every day of their life in chains).

While the right-wing designers of this material offered a list of slaves who learned skills they could use in Reconstruction, most of them were not slaves, or learned their skills after they became free. This distorted history is right on-brand for Frances Rice, one of the conservatives who designed the standards. Kevin M. Kruse points out they get a lot of other stuff wrong.

Why pick this as a hill to die on? For some conservatives (and some people who aren’t conservatives), I suspect it’s uncomfortable to imagine this ugly side of American history. People want to be proud of their country and slavery is nothing to be proud of. It’s much easier to imagine that yes, it was ugly but it had an upside — or like Josh Hawley, pretend we were on the cutting edge of abolishing it (we weren’t). Or right-wing pastor Jack Hibbs insisting that the Founding Fathers couldn’t free their slaves for um, reasons, but treated them so awesome!

I suspect it’s also, partly, that lots of white parents hate the thought of their kids coming home realizing that racism and discrimination aren’t just whining by black Americans for special privileges (“Mom, remember when you said slavery wasn’t that bad for black people? You were wrong, it was horrible!”).

It’s worth remembering that nobody back in the antebellum days thought slavery was so wonderful that they fought for the privilege. No white people lined up to get that free food and board or to get a shot at learning a trade. Neither did free blacks. Any pretense slavery was a good deal is a steaming pile of bullshit.