What is Hidden in the 2023 Florida Social Studies Standards?
Here’s my experience with the 2023 Florida Social Studies Standards in a nutshell: People who take the trouble to download and read the document will likely think, “This isn’t so bad, what are those critics talking about?”
But a closer read of the standards reveals that the appalling persistence of White cruelty that has too long been vented on Blacks is completely missing. The Standards celebrate what African Americans have done. They conveniently forget what Whites have done.
The text of the 2023 Florida Social Studies Standards is publicly available and is the basis of this essay.
At First, This Doesn’t Seem So Bad
As I skimmed the document, I kept saying to myself, “I never studied these details which the Florida teachers will need to cover. And I consider myself a student of Black history. Surely this new curriculum will pressure teachers and students to really dig into the Black experience.
I also noticed that I wasn’t finding racially insensitive statements in the Standards.
That was the first impression.
The new social studies standards are a big stack of facts. Every black history event and personality is in there. Martin Luther King is there. So is Mary McLeod Bethune, Evan B. Forde, and Bessie Coleman.
What is Not There
After I thought about how busy the teachers were going to be, I began to realize what the standards avoid. This approach to the black experience reminds me of the baseball card collections my friends and I had as kids. Our cards included hundreds of players. We would compare our card collections by their heights, which could reach 6 inches. Each card had a player’s photo on the front and a chart of statistics on the back.
But that amassed information could never capture the magic of a mid-summer baseball game.
Florida’s Social Studies Standards are a like a baseball card collection. It’s as if, “Let’s make Florida’s kids memorize a name and some information. But steer them clear of America’s terrible history of race. Tell them of Black heroes and contributors. Avoid race hatred. Make the kids memorize the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. Shield them from the White malevolence that gunned down emancipated Blacks and left them abandoned along roadways throughout the South. Tell Florida’s kids about Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells. Don’t tell them about the circumstance that made their heroism necessary.”
Mr. DeSantis and his education leaders have concocted yet one more device that will keep Florida students from assuming responsibility for their society’s long-postponed reckoning with the racial cruelty that has marred their nation’s history for centuries.
What follows are eight additional observations:
First: The Media Treatment of the Florida Standards
The news media has significantly failed the public in its analysis of this controversial document. Reporters have scanned the document for factually inaccurate statements or lapses in political correctness. And they’ve come up with one, namely the statement that enslaved persons acquired skills while in bondage and thus were better off.
This “insight” is a blank assertion. Of course, enslaved persons acquired skills. If their entire existence was in bondage, any work that they performed would have contributed to their skill set. My criticism here is that there needs to be a much more astute critique of this lengthy document, which I found to be a sly attempt to placate critics who would find no historical person or event missing, no controversial statements, and no inaccuracies. What is missing in Florida’s guidelines is the monumental effort by the dominating majority to hobble the social progress and to denigrate the humanity of the minority. This vicious and unending effort just might be the most defining characteristic of the nation. And the Standards show no inclination to introduce Florida kids to it.
Second: The Document is Difficult to Read and Study
The entire document is 215 pages long, has been distributed to the public in PDF format, which discourages searches and editing. Further, it has no table of contents. It intersperses grade level standards and topics. In other words, if parents of a senior high student wanted to scan the Florida Standards to get a sense of what their student would learn about Black History, they would have to scan the entire document to pull out the 9th grade through 12th grade guidelines which are scattered throughout the 215 pages. Then readers would need to remember what they had seen in previous paragraphs. Additionally, many of the standards repeat themselves.
How does this confusing organization have impact on how readers understand what the document says? Let’s take a topic: lynching. The word appears twice in the 215 page document. It really only appears once because it is in the same clarification sentence in two places. Here’s the text and context:
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms (e.g., the Civil Rights Cases, Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, lynchings, Columbian Exposition of 1893). Clarification 2: Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood MassacreGenesis 1.6,7
I’m imagining social studies teachers, nervous ones to be sure, scanning the document and attempting to cover mandatory topics in their lesson plans. There are many sensitive topics listed here. They’re all packaged in a list, which includes the Columbian Exposition.
Given this packaging, a teacher would have little chance of bringing out and discussing what is vitally important to understand about lynching. I’m thinking of the appalling fact that there were no less than 4000 spectacle murders of Black youths before gawking mobs.
Ironically, by confronting teachers with lists of important and unimportant events with no sense what is crucial, the standards function to obscure insight. And Florida education officials can rightly claim that not only lynching is covered, but everything is covered.
Third: The Holocaust in 20th Century is in the Standards
The Florida 2023 social studies standards include in its own section a fair amount of attention to the Holocaust in 1930’s Europe. The Holocaust unit is robust and doesn’t shy away from antisemitism and critique of Hitler’s ideas. The world, antisemitism is used 17 times in the holocaust section. In contrast, the word racism is used three times in the entire 216 page document. One of those occurrences of racism is in the holocaust section.
The word, “contribution” appears 92 times in the document. This seemingly sensible qualification for inclusion in the standards is in fact a low bar and carries subtle condescension. Jackie Robinson made a contribution. So did Martin Luther King. So did Nat Turner. So did Bill Cosby. Through these standards, Florida’s chief educators, stand above history like a cardinal blessing children. “You’ve been a good boy and you’ve been a good girl”
Fourth: The Standards Focus on Individuals
Individual biography dominates the standards. In other words, the time available to elementary classrooms for Black History could be entirely consumed celebrating the personal stories of iconic Black Americans such as Booker T. Washington, Jesse Owens, Tuskegee Airmen, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, President Barack Obama, 1st Lt. Vernon Baker, Sgt. 1st Class Melvin Morris and others.
What’s really missing from the 2023 Florida Social Studies guidelines are White people—the antagonists, the masterminds, the guardians of their own superiority, women, and religion who labor through American history to insure that whatever the national challenges, one race will always come out calling the shots.
So, Ida B. Wells made a contribution by battling lynching and Harriot Tubman guided runaways through the woods and swamps on a path to freedom. They made a contribution. Lynching, slavery, swamps—these were challenges to be overcome. And they were overcomers and have earned a place in the 2023 Florida Social Studies Standards.
But what about the leviathan behind Jim Crow and the Klan and Redlining? What about the anti-blackness that infected not only the hearts of hateful people, but the heart of a hateful society? There’s no talk in the “standards” of the animating monster behind all the challenges that called forth heroism in so many Black Americans which earned them the badge of being a contributor.
What is missing is that White America plundered the native lands in West Africa, the culture, the families, and the physical lives of millions of African descent people. Enslaved people, without acknowledgement and significantly without compensation, built America. Nowhere in the Florida standards is heartfelt acknowledgement of the appalling menace that the White Race has visited upon its Black neighbors in its centuries’ long crusade to dominate American culture.
If you drain the evil out of a 400-year struggle, the story becomes pretty saccharine. And that is what the partisans who created this document have succeeded in doing. Everything is covered, every event, every name.
Fifth: Contribution
The story of Black America can never be understood without a frank statement of what it has been up against. Granting that many Blacks have made a “contribution” doesn’t correct this fundamental omission.
James Baldwin (who apparently failed to make enough of a contribution to have earned mention in the Florida 2023 Standards) at the end of his essay, “The Fire Next Time” states that a splendor shines in the terrible history of Black and White in America. To lose this beauty, should Americans in their intransigence fail to allow history’s judgment to fall upon their wickedness, would be unthinkable.
The 2023 Florida Social Studies Standards disagree.
Sixth: What About Learning?
The 2023 Social Studies Standards identify topics to be addressed by the teachers, but fail to identify learnings to be acquired by the students. Would, for example, a public school student in Florida be aware that slavery has never been definitively banished? Slavery has had an afterlife. Following the Emancipation Proclamation slavery morphed into tenant farming, convict leasing, Jim Crow and now mass incarceration?
Would a Florida student understand that racism today is best understood as the way an entire society works to support of White privilege? Would a Florida student be able to give a plausible reason why America’s Black citizens have vastly lower personal net worth than their White peers? Curricula needs to begin with what a student is capable of understanding and what he or she needs to know to live in our time of rising White supremacy. Florida students will have to wait until college before encountering the specter of race in America.
Seventh: History as Propaganda
Nowhere does the Florida curriculum acknowledge of the vigorous way that American society has erased the true history of its oppression of Black citizens. Nowhere is there acknowledgement that the dominant point of 19th century Southern literature, notably the plantation romance novel, was to romanticize slavery-centered southern society. High School students would learn much by studying the Dunning School of history which dominated academic interpretation of post-bellum America. Dunning is responsible for planting ideas of Southern innocence and Northern guilt, that Reconstruction failed. Perhaps most destructively, Dunning minimized credit to Black Americans for its influence on American history.In 2023, students need to have a working knowledge of the importance of revisionist history. The story of Black America is rich with distortions, erasure, and lies.
There’s a deep irony in the fact that the Florida standards are the latest version of a dubious American practice, namely sanitizing its own past.
Eighth: Everybody Was Doing It
The Florida Social Studies standards of 2023 expend a surprising amount of text directing teachers to talk about slavery in other societies through history. From the 9 – 12 grade guidelines:
Instruction includes the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries (i.e., Muslim slave markets in North Africa, West Africa, Swahili Coast, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Indian Ocean slave trade). Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian cultures (e.g., Sumerian law code, Indian caste system. Instruction includes the similarities between serfdom and slavery and emergence of the term “slave” in the experience of Slavs.
This expansive history-wide, world-wide survey of slavery appears to use obfuscation that permits the US plantation system to fade into a blur of even the smartest nineth grader’s memory. What is lost in this suspiciously granular coverage of worldwide slavery are crucial generalities that every American must reckon with. For example:
First, above all else, the United States does not belong on a list of enslaving societies. America’s peer societies in Western Europe (Britain, Denmark etc.) had all banished slavery by the time of the American Civil War.
Historian Moses Finley is famous for identifying five genuine ‘slave societies’ in Western history (Ancient Greece and Rome, the US South, the Caribbean, and Brazil). This group of 5 rises above other societies because enslaved persons composed a high percentage of their countries’ population, and the enslaving society relied on the slave production.
Second, by 1850, the United States became the world’s most powerful slave society with its enslaving states agitating for all western territories to be slave states. America’s cotton output was its largest export and was a significant accelerant of the Industrial Revolution. The aggregate financial worth of enslaved persons exceeded the aggregate value of all other industrial or agricultural resources combined. It took a bloody war and all of Abraham Lincoln’s political wiles to finely outlaw slavery.
Third, the US Constitution outlawed the importation of captive Africans in 1808. Nevertheless, the growth of the America’s enslaved population, a unique part of American slavery, brought the total number of enslaved persons to a level greater than any other country in the Western Hemisphere. Unique to American slavery was the practice of enslaving all the children born to Black women. This allowed a vast practice of concubinage in the American south. Put bluntly, enslavers purchased Black women, raped them, and enslaved their (own) offspring.
The 2023 Florida Standards cover none of this, leaving social studies teachers to the understandably more comfortable task of delving into what the Sumerians were doing to secure free labor—5000 years ago. No kidding, the Florida standards spend time reviewing some Sumerian law code? Really?
What Can Be Done?
Finally, a proposal: Make the standards themselves part of the curriculum for the 9 through 12 grades as an exercise in critical thinking. Expose social studies classes to the public controversy that has followed the introduction of these guidelines. College bound 12th graders should be ready to read history and other material critically and to deconstruct not only the document that guides their teachers, but its role Florida and national politics. Why this material? Why now? What is being replaced? What is the intended result? What should students/citizens know about race? What is revisionist history? How has the history of slavery and race been conveyed in the past? How does the 2023 Standards fit into that history?
The culmination of such learning would be individual projects which would offer students an opportunity present their own learning and opinions. Project results would be shared in class discussions. Grades would be assigned on clarity of expression or writing. Quality of research. And open-mindedness to other students’ opinions.
These questions would relieve the instructor being accused of mixing ideology with objective instruction. They would also significantly save students from feeling guilt or anger about the past because the students themselves would be developing their own curriculum and researching on their own.
