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Florida’s new education guidelines garnered widespread rebuke last week over the requirement that schools teach that some enslaved people extracted a “personal benefit” from technical skills they learned in captivity.
It’s an obviously absurd and ahistorical suggestion that fundamentally relies on racism. It falsely suggests that enslaved people had the good fortune — despite their bondage and all the horrifying abuse that came from it — to learn specialized skills, such as blacksmithing, that many Black people had long been practicing outside of American chattel slavery.
As I wrote Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris took Florida to task for the new guidelines during an impromptu trip to Jacksonville. And DeSantis did himself no favors in response.
“I didn’t do it, and I wasn’t involved in it,” he claimed before pivoting to defending it.
“I think that they’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life. But the reality is, all of that is rooted in whatever is factual. ... These were scholars who put that together. It was not anything that was done politically.”
The Florida Department of Education tried to offer examples of enslaved people benefiting from slavery — but as the Tampa Bay Times noted, “historic sources show several of the 16 individuals were never even slaves.”
University of Buffalo researcher Ndubueze Mbah’s work on the concept of “abolition forgery” shows us that oppressive (and occasionally violent) slave-like conditions were imposed on Black laborers even after slavery had officially been abolished in Europe and the United States.
During an April lecture for Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, Mbah told the story of Jampawo, an African British subject who was forced, after abolition, to comply with a contract that allowed him and other Black laborers to be punished with physical violence. A similar power dynamic occurred in the U.S. after abolition as well.
“African bodies experienced abolition as beatings and starvation,” Mbah explained. “As hanging on trees. As burning with fire. As prison confinement. As penal labor. As forced labor. And that is not the story of abolition as liberation.”
Mbah’s work on the endurance of slavery-like conditions after abolition would almost certainly not be taught in many Florida schools. But importantly, it counters any notion that the lives of Black people in the purported aftermath of chattel slavery were as self-determined as the new education guidelines might suggest.
And in the kind of anti-capitalist critique that has been targeted by Florida education officials, Mbah argues that capitalism was devised as an exploitative successor to slavery.
“Capitalism is such a broad term it doesn’t tell us exactly — doesn’t characterize a process — of reinventing the unfreedoms previously associated with slavery,” he explained in his lecture.
In other words — sure, some enslaved people may have honed technical skills under the threat of violence or death from the people who owned them. Some of these enslaved people may have even used these skills in a post-abolition world. But all of these skills were honed in an environment that prioritized and facilitated Black oppression — not Black self-improvement.
With an education system like Florida’s — that both lauds capitalism and prioritizes defending white people from guilt — the natural result is a conclusion that slavery somehow served a moral good.
And the DeSantis administration is trying to impose this absurdity on Florida schoolchildren.