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Elizabeth Hummel's avatar

As someone interested in how the media (both left and right) slant stories to produce outrage, clicks, and sell stuff, I resonated with this essay. I looked through the standards too, and like John McWhorter and others saw much that was about the brutality of slavery, presented in what seemed to me to be age-appropriate ways. So much more than I ever learned in school. I found myself wanting these lesson plans for adults. I'm not an educator or a historian, but it does seem that there is a tension between victimhood narratives and agency narratives, as you point out. It is sad to me that this issue, like so many is polarized. When we could just learn and grow. Enslaved people WERE victims of unspeakable brutality. And enslaved people also were amazing, inventive, creative, and resilient people. People with agency and self-determination. I was just reading about how Merle Travis learned his remarkable and famous "travispicking" guitar style indirectly from Arnold Shulz, a black musician and son of a slave. No white people taught that style to him, it was created by Shulz's family, despite slavery and in a beautiful response to terrible conditions. A "skill" indeed. The importance of music to enslaved people should be part of any curriculum, whether in the "African American" slot or not. It's part of our history as Americans.

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Jonathan E Burack's avatar

Robert Cherry's remarks are terrific. Once again, I am at odds with John McWhorter, who I believe lets his dislike of DeSantis cloud his usually astute understanding. That one sentence at issue from the Florida standards is not "inelegant" and certainly not "inaccurate." Slaves simply DID develop and use skills, and often to their own advantage, and not simply AFTER slavery but during it. What the Florida sentence points to, as Cherry's comments detail, is that slaves never gave up their basic humanity, even in the face of the effort to dehumanize them as well as exploit their labor.

In fact, the current attack on this one sentence mimics the ideology of the slave OWNERS, not the slaves. That ideology depicted the slave as "property," pure and simple, property such as domesticated livestock. In fact, however, the owners never for a single minute could afford to actually treat the slaves as mere property. Even in whipping them, they undercut their own ideology by confronting in this way the humanity of the disobedient slave. The daily plantation routines required a continual negotiation in which the owner had to give way on his desire to view his slave as chattel and instead do what it took to make the best use of the slave's human capacities. In the course of this negotiation, as Cherry points out, slaves found ways to produce extra food for themselves and their families, earn wages to supplement their meager goods or even in a few cases buy their freedom -- and do a million other things daily and continually to alleviate the misery inflicted on them. To recognize this is NOT to diminish the misery slaves endured. In fact, stressing this only make slavery's cruelty all the more apparent. It is vital to see to it that the critics of slave agency in this debate are routed and the defense of this honoring of black agency triumphs. Even if it helps DeSantis.

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