President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris used a signing ceremony establishing a national monument meant to commemorate the lives of Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till Mobley on Tuesday to launch fresh attacks on Florida’s new Black history curriculum.
“Our history as a nation is borne of tragedy and triumph, of struggle, and success. That is who we are,” declared Harris before continuing:
And as people who love our country, as patriots, we know that we must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful. Especially when it is painful. Today there are those in our nation who would prefer to erase, or even rewrite the ugly parts of our past. Those who attempt to teach that enslaved people benefitted from slavery, those who insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, who try to divide our nation with unnecessary debates. Let us not be seduced into believing that somehow we will be better if we forget.
Later in the ceremony, Biden weighed in on the same issue.
“At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history, we’re making it clear — crystal, crystal clear. While darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing. They can hide, but they erase nothing. We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know, we have to learn what we should know,” insisted Biden. “We should know! We should know everything about our country: The good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation.”
The pair’s comments come after Harris offered similarly scathing comments late last week, when she first asserted that “in the State of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”
Dr. William B. Allen, a longtime African American academic, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and a member of Florida’s African American History Standards Workgroup has explained that this charge is “categorically false.”
“It is the case that Africans proved resourceful, resilient and adaptive, and were able to develop skills and aptitudes which served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslaved,” said Allen during an interview with ABC. “It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans.”
This much is indisputably true. The relevant passage — one of 191 pertaining to this topic — reads: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” While this is imprecise, imperfect phrasing, it is still more easily interpreted the way Dr. Allen, rather than Vice President Harris or President Biden does.
Moreover, the surrounding context — the other 190 items in the curriculum — don’t lend themselves to the more sinister reading. In fact, while Harris and Biden cynically attempted to conflate the controversy over the curriculum with the Till family’s tragedy, the curriculum instructs educators to “examine the key people who helped shape modern civil rights movement,” explicitly listing Mamie Till Mobley as one such figure. Other mandates include:
- Instruction includes the ramifications of the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.
- Instruction includes the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms (e.g., the Civil Rights Cases, Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, lynchings, Columbian Exposition of 1893).
- Instruction includes different methods used by coalitions (e.g., white primaries, acts of violence, unjust laws such as poll taxes, literacy tests, sundown laws, anti-miscegenation laws).
If there’s an attempt to bury history in the Sunshine State, the gravediggers appear to be using a sand shovel to dig into hard, rocky ground.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the Biden administration has cynically wielded the country’s racial history as a political weapon. After declaring during his inaugural address that “We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature,” Biden went on to call a milquetoast election reform bill in Georgia “Jim Crow on steroids” just a few short months later.
Then in the process of pushing a federal takeover of elections last year, Biden suggested that those who voted against it would be remembered in history the same way that segregationists and Confederates like George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis are.
There’s no good argument against providing Americans with a full history of this country’s racial wrongs. and attempts to create a society that provides citizens of all backgrounds with equal opportunity are to be admired.
But those trying to use these laudable, shared goals — as well as national tragedies — to smear their political opponents are to be reviled.