Slaves Were More Than Mere Victims
with John McWhorter
The Florida Board of Education’s new guidelines for teaching African American history have caused an unjustified stir. This piece by Robert Cherry from last Sunday’s edition of the newsletter explains just how misplaced critiques of the curriculum are, and in this clip John McWhorter and I offer our own read on the situation.
This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.
I ran the entire curriculum by a distinguished black historian who is a friend. Not a "conservative" by the way. It was a private communication, so I am not giving his name here. Not only did he see no problem with the offending phrase, and not only was he impressed by how much was covered--he also looked through the REST of the history curriculum and was very pleased and surprised to see much of African American history conveyed in the OTHER history sections too. As he has long believed it should be. I commented on this on your earlier piece Glenn, but it bears repeating because it was buried in the comments. I have not seen this reported by anybody, and you should be aware of it if you didn't read the entire document either (I didn't!). African American history is American history and not all of it should be siloed.
Imagine bringing up who sold the slaves to westerners in the first place. That will quadrangle the woke's head. They likely believe white people stormed the beaches of West Africa and ripped babies from mothers arms.
This is the problem with this Marxist ideology, this oppressed and oppressor view of the world, this delineation of race as the governing factor in social affairs.
It renders the believer incapable of viewing reality and history and society as it is, rather it is broken down into a simple equation that relies quite heavily on scapegoat politics.
The world is complex, but many people are simple, they want a pill to fix everything, not a new routine that is healthy.