Black Americans are roughly 14% of the U.S. population. Yet, especially since the late 1950s — when then-Senator Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) described newly emerging Black voters as uppity — Black Americans have arguably been the most politically targeted demographic. Nowhere is this battle more evident than in the field of public education.
Dr. William Allen and Dr. Frances Presley Rice are the co-creators of Florida’s new African American History Standards and members of the AAHS workgroup. Over the past week, their work has been in the news as multiple media outlets as well as Vice President Kamala Harris have misrepresented portions of the curriculum. One of the false claims? Florida’s AAHS teaches students that slavery was a benefit to Black people. Amber Jo Cooper writing for Florida’s Voice states:
The creators said it is “disappointing,” but “nevertheless unsurprising, that critics would reduce months of work to create Florida’s first ever stand-alone strand of African American History Standards to a few isolated expressions without context.”
“The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted,” the creators said. “This is factual and well documented.”
Dr. Allen recently appeared on FoxNews Prime Time and was asked by the host to surmise why Kamala Harris (and others) are, “being dishonest about what’s being taught about slavery?” Dr. Allen replied:
Permit me not to give you Kamala Harris’ motives. They’re invisible. I don’t know them. We can all have suspicions that there’s a dishonest purpose afoot. But what's more important than that dishonest purpose is the truth. And this curriculum is devoted to telling the truth whereas Kamala Harris has retelled a lie. Now, it may have only been a falsehood the first time she stated it. But when you repeat a falsehood, it becomes a lie.
When the host asked Dr. Allen to, “tell [Kamala Harris]…what this component of the slavery course teaches,” Dr. Allen answered:
Permit me to have Frederick Douglass tell her. He wrote an autobiography (My Bondage My Freedom) in which he described how the mistress of his slave owner began to teach him to read. She pulls back the curtain through which a glimmer of light shone before the master forced her to close it. But that glimmer of light was enough for Frederick Douglass to illumine a bright flame that he exploited to his benefit and his country’s benefit thereafter.
I reference Frederick Douglass among other stalwart Black Americans, and the importance of authentic Black History in my book Zionism & the Black Church. Interestingly, Frederick Douglass is also the focus of this week’s episode (No. 5) of a new video series entitled The SuperHeroes Show. (Booker T. Washington, another famous former slave who learned to read as a slave, is featured in Episode No. 3).
Why this consistent, decades-long, media and politically-driven effort to deceive Black Americans and the world about Black History? In the spirit of Dr. Allen, permit me to quote Dr. Carter Woodson, author of The Miseducation of the Negro (1933):
If you can control a man's thinking you don't have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.
Stripping a people — any people — of their history and heritage is one of the most effective ways of controlling those people. Once sufficiently controlled, those people could possibly be made to believe about themselves whatever those in power want them to believe. It is not only true that some Black slaves developed skills that they were able to use for themselves and their community; it venerates Black Americans and their many incredible achievements despite centuries of slavery and subjugation. Imagine Jewish families gathered around a Seder table at Passover who had never been told that their ancestors left Egypt a free people. Imagine the Seder being transformed from a celebration of liberation to a lamentation about bondage, humiliation, and the slaughtering of your babies — every year — for millennia. The result would no doubt be the anger, dispossession, and even self-hatred we see in the most neglected, poor, disenfranchised Black neighborhoods in America.
What is even more frustrating is that exposing these politically-motivated lies about Black Americans is often denounced as partisanship. Sadly, the partisan attacks on people like Dr. Allen and Dr. Pressley Rice are not given equal scrutiny. That said, and at the risk of being labeled a partisan, I must say that it is bitterly ironic that Vice President Kamala Harris, a descendant of slave owners (according to her father), is defaming two Black professors as she intentionally misrepresents their work on Florida's Black History curriculum. It is even more ironic that Vice President Harris does this on behalf of the Democratic Party, the Party that precipitated the Civil War in order to preserve slavery.
British journalist Melanie Phillips was asked by host John Anderson how the progressive-biased BBC (and The Guardian, for whom she worked for two decades) might return to objectivity. In her lengthy reply, Phillips stated, “Truth has become a right-wing concept.” There is a growing list of people, from both sides of the aisle, who would agree with Ms. Phillips. Imagine being considered a tool of white supremacy for accurately portraying Black American history; for not being enveloped in the Marxist, self-sabotage of wealthy, exploitive groups like Black Lives Matter. Black forefathers like James Weldon Johnson and Booker T. Washington foresaw these evil distractions over a century ago. It was Washington who, in 1911, warned about the modern, profiteering anti-racists when he stated:
There is another class of…people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
In Lift Every Voice and Sing, it was Johnson who in 1899 prayed on behalf of all free Black Americans:
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in Thy path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Forgetting God is how a people can forget their path. Forgetting their path (and past) is how a people can be redefined. There is a battle for the true heritage of Black Americans which is at the heart of the battle for this nation. This has been the case since 1861 and it is as crucial today as it ever was.
Why in your view do so many around the world who are not of African ancestry de facto attempt to colonize the minds of African ancestry peoples with inferiority complex and damage self confidence and keep African ancestry people down?
What is wrong with being awed and inspired by the spiritual, musical, artistical, moral, energetic powers and indescribable unlimited potential of African ancestry peoples? To learn from African Ancestry peoples as friends from a position of equality?