Ya can’t make it up.
In the dust-up over Florida’s Board of Education publishing new guidelines for teaching Black history, the Washington Post editorial board, without the slightest sense of irony, headlined this:
DeSantis seeks to whitewash slavery in Florida’s curriculum
The editorial said, among other things, this:
The state’s Board of Education has unveiled its newest standards for the instruction of African American history in public schools, and they include some horrendous elements.
Florida public schools will now teach students that the once constitutionally protected system under which enslavers bought and sold human beings had an apparent upside. In addition to being subjected to maiming, beatings, rape and murder, enslaved Black people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
The state’s public school curriculum developed by the administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — a 2024 presidential candidate — will now also teach that the race massacres of the 19th and 20th centuries were “perpetuated by” both Black and White Americans.
So Florida’s children will now learn that slavery was, in part, a beneficial job-training program, and that Black Americans shared the blame for the violence that White mobs inflicted upon their communities.
Without a trace of irony The Post rails against Governor DeSantis and his campaign to oppose “woke indoctrination” – when, in fact, it is The Post itself that is busy whitewashing history.
The editorial ends by saying:
Diluting the horrors of slavery does not serve or protect children. It deprives them of the liberating power of knowledge, and a comprehensive education that readies them to shape the future by understanding the past. There is no historical counterargument to the atrocities of slavery or the racial violence that resulted from its abolition. Florida’s plan to teach otherwise should alarm Americans everywhere.
Meanwhile, over there in The New York Times was this amazing whitewash from columnist Jamelle Bouie.
Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die
In his whitewash Bouie says this:
Slaves were owned as chattel by other human beings who stole their freedom, labor and bodily autonomy.
Well.
Then there is MSNBC’s Joy Reid, as noted by NewsBusters own Kevin Tober.
Kevin reported on this from Joy in a conversation with MSNBC’s Michael Steel:
…you can’t even say slavery was bad now in the Republican Party.
The irony here? The volumes of irony? Nowhere in this Post editorial, nor in Bouie’s column or from MSNBC – nowhere – does it mention exactly which American political party came into being supporting the idea – made into policy – that slaves should be owned as “chattel by other human beings who stole their freedom, labor and bodily autonomy.”
And as was clear on MSNBC, Joy Reid couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge the party she favors was founded by slaveowners and has been well on record supporting slavery and segregation. It is in fact the Party of Race – and always has been.
That would be the Democratic Party, co-founded, per historians, by slaveholders Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
Note again this from The Post:
Florida public schools will now teach students that the once constitutionally protected system under which enslavers bought and sold human beings had an apparent upside.
Ignored by The Post?
Who, exactly, was benefitting from slavery – and how?
Answer: The Democratic Party was benefitting politically from slavery. Supporting slavery – and after that segregation and Jim Crow laws – is what won Democrats elections.
Not that you would know it from reading The Post, The Times, listening to MSNBC – or especially reading the website of the Democratic National Committee. The DNC’s history section, found here, says this:
For more than 200 years, our party has led the fight for civil rights….
Not to put too fine a point on this, but the DNC history is not a whitewash but rather a bald-faced lie about the party’s history on civil rights.
Which is, perhaps, why The Post or The Times or MSNBC seem unable to remember serious history of the un-whitewashed variety. Such as:
Those six Democrat Party platforms from 1840 to 1860 that supported slavery outright.
- Those 20 Democratic Party platforms between 1868 and 1948 that supported segregation – Jim Crow laws – outright or mysteriously fell silent on the subject.
- Swept under the rug is the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, which, according to Columbia University historian Eric Foner became “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.” Or University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease’s description of the Klan as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”
- Readers would have no idea from The Post or Times or viewing MSNBC, not to mention the DNC website, that Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly opposed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth banned slavery. The Fourteenth effectively overturned the infamous 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision (made by Democrat pro-slavery Supreme Court justices) by guaranteeing due process and equal protection to former slaves. The Fifteenth gave black Americans the right to vote.
- And speaking of segregation? Not a peep from The Post that it was Democrats who segregated the federal government of the United States, specifically at the direction of Democratic Party President Woodrow Wilson upon taking office in 1913.
On and on – and on and on – goes The Post and Times and MSNBC silence on the real history of the Democratic Party. Instead, when it comes to analyzing the Florida Board of Education’s rules as supported by Governor DeSantis, they simply fall silent on the serious, indisputable history of race in America.
And yes, there is a reason. Just as slavery supporters and segregationists gained election-winning political support for the Democrats, so now are their political descendants in the Democratic Party and the broader American Left still profiting from dividing Americans by race. That would be done by using the race-dividing grandson of slavery and the son of segregation known today as “identity politics.”
In short?
What that Post editorial on the Florida education standards about Black history, not to mention the Bouie Times column or MSNBC’s Joy Reid’s remarks, leave out is a most central appalling fact. That would be that the Democrat Party is in fact the Party of Race.
Which is to say, by their silence, The Post, Times and MSNBC – not Governor DeSantis or Florida – are the real whitewashers of racial history in America.
Why?
Because their party of choice – the Democratic Party – needs to whitewash history to pretend it is something it has decidedly never been.
And still isn’t.