Standards and Whitewash

The controversial standards that were developed by the Florida Board of Education concerning the teaching of African American history display the remarkable ignorance of the developers of those standards. Ignorance here refers to the willful decision not to know, to voluntarily remain stupid. Teachers will now be required to instruct students “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied to their personal benefit.” To my mind this is just another attempt to absolve whites from their heinous crimes and to even aggrandize their behavior. The second dubious standard cautions teachers to include in their lessons how during the Ocoee Election Day massacre “acts of violence were perpetrated against and by African Americans.” This African American history standard, history a subject the Florida Board of Education cares little about, again whitewashes (pun intended) perpetrators of horrific acts by turning rioters into victims and casting the real victims into perpetrators. But on this day in 1920 whites massacred 30-35 African Americans to keep them from voting, and those whites destroyed almost all the African homes and Black owned businesses and expelled the surviving African Americans from the city. The history of racial prejudice in Florida and multiple states is replete with events just as ugly as the November 2, 1920 massacre and lynching. In Florida Julius Norman was hung from a telephone pole alongside a sign that read, “This is what we do to niggers who vote.” The leader of that lynch mob was soon elected mayor. But the Florida African American history standards want students to know that during the massacre African Americans defending themselves against rioters committed acts of violence! Derrick Johnson, current president of the NAACP, said that the standards “are an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected. It is imperative that we understand that … slavery and Jim Crow … represent the darkest period in American history.” These so-called standards are an obscenity.
            In American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, I read the following: Frank Oppenheimer, Robert’s brother, was an activist and Communist Party member in the 1930s. Of one campaign he said, “We tried to integrate the [Pasadena] city swimming pool. They just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.” The campaign was unsuccessful; the pool remained segregated. The legacy and history of slavery and racial prejudice in the United States is long and ugly. And so I urge us to consider this: the Florida standards argue that slaves received benefit from the “skills” that slaves under the whips of their masters were forced to learn for the benefit of the masters, and that these skills helped them after their emancipation. The conclusion from the standards could only be that, well, slavery wasn’t all bad! But the reality is that all those skills couldn’t get African Americans into a city swimming pool, or buy a house in a suburban neighborhood, or vote in elections. What benefit could any skill be to a person whose very stature as a human being is called into such question that white people wouldn’t get into the pool water after African Americans had swum in it. And the newly accepted Florida standards suggest that to defend oneself against such groups as the murderous KKK and the ignorant white population is equally as wrong as massacre perpetrated against the African American community to deny them essential rights afforded to all citizens.