By Donald Jeffries
Most Americans are historically illiterate. This author writes books on hidden history, and it is constantly astounding to understand how many people don’t even know the official, dishonest narratives about events, let alone the actual truth. All history now is filtered through the modern lens, with a politically correct and always distorted spin.
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No subject is more volatile in our society than slavery. Even though some 40 million slaves exist around the world today, cultural leaders ignore that and remain utterly obsessed with American slavery, which ended over 150 years ago.
New standards were approved by the Florida Department of Education recently in an effort to disengage from the predictable “woke” leftism of the college board and so many other pressure groups.
Half of the group that developed the new standards were black, including Dr. William B. Allen, professor and dean emeritus at Michigan State and former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The Florida Education Association teachers’ union predictably opposed the changes, along with the NAACP, which declared that it amounted to “an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where black life was not valued, nor our rights protected.”
Vice President Kamala Harris chirped in on cue, making the ridiculous claim that “middle school students in Florida” will now “be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery.” This was the mantra throughout the state-controlled media; that Florida was adopting a curriculum that maintains black Americans actually benefited from slavery.
As National Review noted:
This is nonsense. As our own Charles C. W. Cooke has recounted, there are 191 items in the curriculum about slavery, segregation, and racism, on required topics such as ‘how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights’ and ‘how the demand for slave labor resulted in a large, forced migration’ within the United States. There is extensive instruction on the history and economics of the development of slavery, as well as abolitionism, slave revolts, and the Underground Railroad. Many examples are offered of the resistance and accomplishments of enslaved and free black Americans during the period of colonial and American slavery.
What seems to have really aroused the ire of social justice warriors is the emphasis on the skilled trades that some blacks learned, such as painting, carpentry, and blacksmithing. Evidently, any notion that any blacks flourished to any degree while slavery existed must not be mentioned.
The claim that the standards teach that “blacks benefited from slavery” seems to have been drawn from this sentence, “How slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Kamala Harris asked, “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?” Attorney Benjamin Crump seconded by declaring, “Our children need to be taught that slavery was evil and immoral, point-blank period.”
And that, in a nutshell, is how identity politics views history, and really all information. Through a prism they control, where they create cardboard villains and heroes. It is curious how some of these same activists push largely ludicrous claims that black people invented nearly everything, much of it happening during a time in which they were enslaved.
To quote National Review again:
Telling black American history truthfully should impart a sense that, while slavery was evil and immoral, period, slaves nonetheless made choices for the benefit of themselves and their families. Indeed, until last week, progressives commonly argued that American history should include more examples of black agency in lieu of treating black Americans simply as passive victims. Reasonable minds can differ as to whether the acquisition of skills is the best example of this dynamic, but it is a well-grounded part of the historical record. Harris, instead, argues that it is an “insult” to tell that story.
Harris, ironically, has no African American roots whatsoever. Her mother was from India and her father from Jamaica. She grew up in an upper middle-class home. Her husband is Jewish.
The propaganda on the subject of American slavery often contradicts itself. Blacks were discouraged from reading and blocked from learning skilled trades. And yet, they also managed astounding achievements, according to Hollywood and “woke” activists at large. We are taught that slave masters treated their slaves horribly, as they whipped and beat down the males, and frequently raped the females. That seems like a strange way to treat what they considered valuable property. Many of the mixed-race children in this country actually came from the widespread rape of black women in the south by the invading northern troops, especially those commanded by thief and psychopath Gen. William T. Sherman.
Florida’s attempt at even-handedness in tackling a difficult subject should be commended.
Donald Jeffries is a highly respected author and researcher whose work on the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and other high crimes of the Deep State has been read by millions of people across the world. Jeffries is also the author of three books currently being sold by AFP Bookstore.
