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Let's Be Clear: Slavery Provided No Benefit to the Enslaved [1]

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Date: 2023-07-31  

Some years back a student in my course on early American history, genuinely perplexed, posed this question: “If Black people knew they were going to be turned into slaves, why did they come here?” Well, the good folks at the Florida Board of Education have provided the answer. It was for the skills they could develop. Because apparently no one in Africa possessed skills. And what better way to improve your life than to accept the yoke of chattel slavery.

It is not fair to say that Florida’s History education standards are appalling in their entirety. There is much to appreciate in them, particularly the emphasis on contributions made by African Americans in all areas of American life and culture. But the standards were updated specifically to comply with a new law that limits how racism and other difficult topics can be taught. The state’s insistence on stamping out “wokeness” (or as I think of it, an enlightened viewpoint on matters of diversity, equity and inclusion) is nothing more than a glaringly heavy-handed attempt to “revise” American history to suit a conservative agenda and appease a white audience. Bills passed by multiple state legislatures effectively outlaw teaching any content that might make a student feel uncomfortable. Florida’s Stop Woke Act specifically prohibits content that might make students feel “guilt or discomfort for historic wrongs.” Here’s the truth: no one need feel guilt or shame over the grotesque moral failings of the past. What they need to feel is righteous anger and moral outrage that too many of us (and not just in Florida) are willing to ignore those failings, make excuses for them, or tell outright lies in an attempt to obscure them.

Much has been written about Florida’s instructional standard for middle school students who are to be taught, essentially, that slavery held some positive outcomes for the enslaved, providing them opportunities to develop skills from which they could personally benefit. What possible purpose could this learning outcome provide other than to diminish the horrors of slavery? Any new skills the enslaved developed, most likely learned from others within the slave community, were of material benefit to their masters, not themselves. As many others have pointed out, what personal benefit could an enslaved person enjoy from such skills? Many of the enslaved were bought (and sold at great profit) because of skills they already possessed. No skillset could shield an enslaved person from the heartbreaking hardships of chattel slavery – unending toil, family separation, violence, denial of one’s very personhood – or make their condition somehow more palatable.

Those responsible for the new standards have defended them by arguing that the aim is to present a fuller, more accurate historical narrative; that African Americans were not simply the oppressed victims of slavery and racism. The standards were meant to portray enslaved people as “resourceful, resilient and adaptive.” They most certainly were. Black men and women were astonishingly resilient in the face of unimaginable suffering. And the standards for grades 9 through 12 call for students to consider the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms for African Americans. But the standards also insist that any discussion of violence against African Americans must be countered by evidence of violence perpetrated by African Americans. The addition of this “bothsidesism” reads as nothing more than an exoneration of the white people responsible for the implementation of slavery and white supremacy. Both sides are not equal here. Nowhere in the standards is there a place for a discussion of the torments (such as lynching) to which Black men and women, both enslaved and free, were subjected. And crucial context is missing here. Violence by African Americans derived from the horrors to which they were subjected. Acts of revenge, retaliation and rebellion were acts of desperation for which many paid with their lives. Enslaved men and women resisted effectively in myriad covert ways that struck at the heart of the institution of slavery – its profitability. Devoid of that context the standards’ insistence on a false equivalence (both Black and White people engaged in acts of violence) is particularly troublesome. Students should not be shielded from the fact that violence against African Americans was a key tool employed in the establishment and maintenance of white supremacy.

While there is opportunity for instructors to address the establishment of race-based chattel slavery in the American colonies, the standards emphasize efforts undertaken to block its implementation or once established, to abolish it. There is language about examining organizational approaches to resisting equality in America (the Ku Klux Klan is called out by name) but nowhere do the standards address the deliberate, self-conscious dehumanization and objectification of Africans and African Americans and the open, aggressive resistance to abolition undertaken by wealthy white men in positions of political power, or the ways in which the states and the federal government deliberately limited the rights of African Americans, rendering them literally unequal. Again, to what end? Very simply, to sanitize our national narrative and to appease white fragility. And that is as untruthful as it is unjust. We must ask ourselves this question: Who is harmed by telling the truth about our past? And who is harmed when we refuse to do so?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/31/2184408/-Let-s-Be-Clear-Slavery-Provided-No-Benefit-to-the-Enslaved

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