Squires: The same people who pushed the 'don't say gay' fraud are back with 'don't say slave'

“As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly." —Proverbs 26:11

If ever there was a Bible verse to sum up the recent controversy in Florida, this is it. The same people who pushed the “Don’t Say Gay” media laundering operation are back with more misinformation in the Sunshine State. This time, progressives are claiming Florida is trying to erase black history by whitewashing America’s original sin.

The contrived “Don’t Say Slave” albatross around the neck of Governor Ron DeSantis is based on the notion that Florida’s students will be taught that “enslaved people benefited from slavery.” It is easy to see how a statement like this, taken in isolation, would upset people like Vice President Kamala Harris. But times like this remind me of a former pastor’s wise words: “A text taken out of context is just a con.”

The left’s most recent con job is based on a 216-page document that contains Florida’s social studies standards for 2023. It covers everything from the U.S. Constitution to monetary policy. The African-American history sections include slave revolts and abolitionist societies. It also mentions Oscar Micheaux – America’s first black filmmaker – as well as Thomas Sowell. It looks at key figures in both the civil rights and black power movements. But there is also a short section that says the following: "Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation)."

This is the immediate context of the next line that sparked wall-to-wall coverage from corporate media: "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."

That’s it. Claiming that a state is trying to erase history based on those two sections is quite the reach. Such an accusation may be satisfying to progressives or people who dislike DeSantis. Fortunately, history is under no obligation to contort itself for the sake of today’s political narratives. One essay entitled “The Negro as a Laborer” – published in 1902 – puts the complexity of slavery on full display:

There is a town in the northern part of Virginia in which the entire brickmaking business is in the hands of a colored man, a freedman, who bought his own and his family's freedom, purchased his master's estate, and eventually hired his master to work for him. He owns a thousand acres or more of land and considerable town property. In his brickyard he hires about fifteen hands, mostly boys from sixteen to twenty years of age, and runs five or six months a year, making from 200,000 to 300,000 brick. Probably over one-half the brick houses of the place are built of brick made in his establishment, and he has repeatedly driven white competitors out of business.

Only a person committed to ignorance – or politics – would argue that reading something like this in history class would be an endorsement of slavery.

Another common response to “Don’t Say Slave” was the claim that whatever technical knowledge slaves used to build things in America came with them from West Africa. The transatlantic slave trade took place at a time when everything people had — including their food, homes, and clothes – had to be cultivated or constructed. So the men and women brought here in chains undoubtedly came with skills and knowledge of farming, carpentry, metalworking, weaving, and textiles. But the notion that none of the people enslaved in America developed their trades in this country is unsupported by historical records.

For example, the White House Historical Association acknowledges the role slave labor played in constructing the president’s official residence.

Stonemason Collen Williamson trained enslaved people on the spot at the government's quarry at Aquia, Virginia. Enslaved people quarried and cut the rough stone that was later dressed and laid by Scottish masons to erect the walls of the President's House. The slaves joined a work force that included local white laborers and artisans from Maryland and Virginia, as well as immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and other European nations.

The website for Monticello, the historical site that was Thomas Jefferson’s home and plantation, also acknowledges what life was like for people who didn’t control their own labor on a page called “Skills.”

Jefferson hired a number of free white craftspeople to pass their skills on to apprenticed slaves. The German immigrant Jacob Silknitter trained Frank in the art of charcoal-burning; after Silknitter’s departure from Monticello, Frank carried on the periodic charcoal-burning that fueled many of the Mulberry Row workshops. The Irish house joiner James Dinsmore schooled both Lewis and John Hemmings in the art of fine joined and turned woodwork.

The irony of the “Don’t Say Slave” outrage is that the same people who claim Florida is trying to hide the history of slavery go into an apoplectic fit when presented with the reality of slavery. Only in America can someone proudly declare, “My ancestors helped build the White House,” then feign outrage when someone suggests those same ancestors used the same skills to build their own houses.

Those types of responses demonstrate the failure of our education system and corruption of our political culture. People have lost the ability to listen to an argument, critically engage it, and debate it on the merits. This is how one line about whether slaves developed skills while in bondage that they used in freedom gets twisted into accusations of claiming slavery “benefited” the enslaved. Worse were the people who cynically twisted discussions about an enslaved carpenter’s skills into accusations that conservatives think slave masters were benevolent white men running a national workforce development program for Africans.

These are not just bad-faith arguments. They are bad-faith arguments being pushed by the most untrustworthy people in the country. These include the journalists, politicians, and pundits who are always ready and willing to heap coals in the political outrage furnace. These are the people who support having "Gender Queer" in school libraries, believe drag queens are literacy experts, and criticize parents for attempting to restrict the promotion of gender ideology in schools. Their only interest in education is as a vehicle for political indoctrination.

Politics also lies at the heart of another glaring inconsistency in the response to “Don’t Say Slave.” Some of the same people expressing outrage over Florida’s education standards put up a black power fist when Colin Kaepernick compared the NFL Combine to a slave auction. They did the same when Brian Flores, the former coach of the Miami Dolphins, compared the NFL to a plantation in a discrimination lawsuit.

The left doesn’t stop with slavery, either. Democrats have no problem linking policies and positions they don’t like – from voting laws to abortion restrictions — to white supremacy. They scare black voters by saying that Jim Crow is making a comeback and that he’s bringing his relatives – James Crow, Esq., Jim Eagle, and Jimmy Crow. The self-appointed progressive guardians of black America have no problem manipulating our nation’s bloody racial history for the sake of political gain — a phenomenon I call the “Selma syndrome.”

The truth is that nothing diminishes historical injustice more than ripping it out of context and casually invoking it for personal or political gain. It is shameful, despicable behavior. Black politicians and pundits who treat the history of their ancestors as a trump card in political fights do much more damage to how we understand the past than conservatives accused of erasing slavery.

If critics have a problem with its accuracy, they should do what people did when Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York times released the 1619 Project. Yes, many conservatives were outraged by attempts to rewrite America’s founding narrative. But others got down to the work of analyzing one of the project’s central claims – that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Historians responded with facts and arguments, not emotions and accusations. It was an uphill battle, but the New York Times eventually issued a “clarification” that took some of the air out of the project. Nikole Hannah-Jones, in a now-deleted tweet, even stated, “In attempting to summarize and streamline, journalists can sometimes lose important context and nuance. I did that here.”

That is how you win on the battlefield of ideas. You engage, criticize, and refute. Pouting, name-calling, stomping, and crying is fit for the day care, not people who want to be taken seriously as thinkers.

Acknowledging the complexity of history is not an endorsement of its worst parts. Most people know this, but logic and reason are often sacrificed on the altar of emotion. If anything, the last week has provided a useful lesson about our cultural anatomy: boiling blood rarely ever reaches the brain.