Posted on 07/28/2023 8:27:47 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It appears the battle over Florida’s black history curriculum has entered into a new phase. A fiery debate was ignited over parts of the state’s educational standards on chattel slavery. Now, the discussion has continued to rage on the airwaves and interwebs.
The debate centers on a line in Florida’s standards which reads: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some cases, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Democrats in Congress are now taking a questionable step in response to Florida’s curriculum. The Congressional Black Caucus is now calling on the Biden administration to use federal power to possibly compel the state’s government to alter its standards:
The Congressional Black Caucus is pushing the White House, Justice Department and the Department of Education to adopt an “aggressive legal strategy” to scrutinize recent changes to Florida’s Black history curriculum.
The caucus wants the federal agencies to examine whether Florida school districts are violating federal discrimination law following changes to the curriculum in the state — from banning books covering racial themes to a recent decision to add language about the positive impacts of slavery.
Caucus Chairman, Nevada Rep. Steven Horsford said at a Thursday press conference he met with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona this week to discuss actions that might be taken. He added that “we have discussed with the White House the need to have a very aggressive legal strategy to want to uphold the law.”
However, lawmakers did not lay out the specifics on how the departments might use their resources.
The departments have a number of tools. In June, the Madison County, Kentucky school district reached a settlement with Justice to resolve complaints of widespread harassment of Black and multiracial students. Earlier this week, the Education Department launched an investigation of Harvard University’s policies on legacy admissions.
Horsford and others castigated Florida Republicans for the curriculum, accusing them of attacking the black community and trying to water down America’s history. He cited other issues like Alabama’s Republican-dominated legislature refusing to observe a Supreme Court decision requiring the state to redistrict its congressional map that would create two predominantly black areas.
“The attacks against black people and blackness are coordinated, well funded, coming from every side and they are about race,” Horford said. “We need to be clear about who we are up against and what we must do to win. There is so much at stake.”
If Democrats plan to go the discrimination route, they might be on shaky ground. While people can argue over how much freed slaves benefitted from the skills they learned in bondage, one can hardly claim that this constitutes treating people differently because of their skin color. The fact that other states include something to this effect in their curricula might make this even more difficult.
But ultimately, it should never be up to the federal government to determine how states handle education.
It is one thing to criticize Florida’s new curriculum. But the notion that Democrats would leverage the federal government to compel the state to alter its educational standards is absurd on its face. It would be like Republicans trying to convince a conservative president to force New York to embrace Lost Cause history in its school system.
Regardless of what people think of Florida’s educational standards, this is a state and local matter that should not involve the federal government. The people of each state are supposed to have the authority to determine how their children are educated – not members of the D.C. ruling class.
Apart from that, we all know how authoritarians work. If you give them a foothold in one area, they will only work to amass more. If the Congressional Black Caucus gets its way, what would keep them from continuing to use federal agencies to force states to adopt their ideas of education? They are already working to indoctrinate children into progressive ideology using the educational system. How much worse will it be if they manage to bring about a federal takeover of education?
Florida’s standards, as with many other issues pertaining to education, will continue to be debated. But hopefully, Democrats will not be allowed to bring the feds into the equation.
So they lie about Floridas standards and then want the justice department to illegally enforce whatever a tiny minority in the house wants taught their way?
F off.
Ron Desantis, like so many other Republicans, believes that the tactics the MSM-Democrats have used against Trump was a one-off, a special case, an isolated event.
They will soon find out how wrong they are.
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You sure can tell who the tyrants in politics are these days.
I think DeSantis knows that very well by now, considering the heat he took over his Covid handling and the so called “Don’t Say Gay” bill plus his fight with Disney.
Personally, I think not only does he know what to expect, he looks forward to it.
What’s really disappointing is Republicans using the same tactics against him and other Republicans.
Why do whites put up with this crap? The Black Caucus is racist to its core. How could it not be? Either whites need their own caucus or the Black Caucus needs to be disbanded. It is in essence a government sponsored anti-white group.
In keeping with the Democrats’ view that the Justice Department is a political tool.
This kertuffle is one to remember because it is a classic example of the left’s habit of manufacturing a fake “issue” out of absolutely nothing. Less than nothing. A lie.
Slaves did all manner of work in slave societies throughout history, including the antebellum South. The very people who are straining their miniscule brains trying to inflate one sentence plucked out of Florida’s standards document into an attack line will turn around at a moment’s notice and insist on recognition of the fact, for example, that slave labor helped build the U.S. Capitol, with slaves performing a lot of highly skilled work. And the U.S. Capitol is just one highly visible example. Slaves were a third of the southern population. They provided a major share of the labor, including skilled labor, in every field that did not involve high levels of formal education.
Were the majority of slaves consigned to plantation labor? Yes. But large plantations were sophisticated complexes dependent on myriad skilled trades, mostly performed by slaves.
Which brings me to a perhaps useful suggestion. Perhaps someone with the necessary skills can go to the websites for the prominent historical sites that are open as an historical attraction: Colonial Willliamsburg, Mount Vernon, Monticello ... and on and on and on, ad nauseum. Virtually all of them emphasize the role of slave labor, not only for drudge labor in the fields but for myriad sophisticated tasks. The era in which the tour guides and docents largely backgrounded the slave labor and referred quaintly to “servants” once you stepped inside the big house is long gone. In fact, the larger, more developed, and more visited the site — the top tier tourist destinations — the likelier it is that the contributions of slave labor will be a major point of emphasis. The activist tribe has been doing tap dances for decades now insisting that this very point be increasingly highlighted.
So: how about rounding up these living history talks, supplemented by a few site visits and recorded chats with the interpreters, supplemented by lecture clips from lefty historians when they touch on the subject, and putting these into a five minute piece on the critical role of slave labor in the skilled trades?
Are the lefties now insisting that the interpretation at all antebellum historical sites now be systematically falsified to conceal the contributions of slave labor?
No, of course not. The lefties want to manufacture a hate filled attack line out of a lie, and to surround it with enough venom that people are warned to suspend all higher thought processes for the duration of the latest two minute hate. The initial goal was to torpedo the DeSantis campaign, which at the time appeared to have some potential of becoming a threat. The broader goal is to reassert hard left control over the development of Florida’s educational standards — and to that end, the lefties want to ignore the fact that, on this point, the evil DeSantis standards say exactly the same thing as the lefty-approved AP standards. But that doesn’t matter when the left is running a two minute hate. The mob is being indoctrinated to howl lies on command.
The Congressional Black Caucus: the most useless institution in Washington, DC.
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