“How we think about the past matters because it can set the agenda for what citizens demand now”

Emily Bingham is a historian who lives in Louisville. She is the author of several books, including an excellent account of the history of the song “My Old Kentucky Home.” (I interviewed her about the book last year.) 

We had an email exchange this week about the very controversial standards for teaching black history that were recently enacted by the state of Florida. 

Perry: It seems like we are having an extended argument in America about the role and power of history, particularly black history. I know that's not necessarily new. But as a historian, I wanted to ask you about the power of history. Even if I disagree with their approach, Republican politicians are smart to care about how America’s history is taught, right? How you tell the story matters, right? 

Emily: Florida’s 2023 State Academic Standards attack generations of historical scholarship and deny slavery’s fundamental moral indefensibility. How we think about the past matters because it can set the agenda for what citizens demand now.

Children are dry tinder for societal fear. By legislating what teachers must do in class, the Right panders to conservative and older voters terrified by social inclusivity and who crave a triumphalist American past. Rhetorically, they elide the dream of national innocence with the fabled innocence of children.

There is a whole lot of “teaching” to do to show kids the purity of our nation’s impulses and the heroism of its record when it comes to Black people. The peculiar horror of this nation’s practice of perpetual, inherited slavery must be buried. One way is to compare it neutrally with other historical tribulations, such as the suffering of Jamestown settlers (who willingly undertook their migration), the challenges of indentured servitude (a relatively short-lived practice) and the kidnapping of white “Europeans” by Barbary Pirates (which Right-wingers decontextualize to absolve American slavery).

Telling students “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” (6) restores the repulsive view, widely promoted in textbooks of Joe Biden’s generation and earlier, that slavery was a benevolent if at times regrettable system.

Another tactic is to pretend that white people—individuals inaccurately made to stand in for the whole race—labored continually toward the liberation of Black Americans, who are referred to as “Africans” until after the Civil War. The guidelines never mention that white Americans and the governing bodies they led fought that liberation because they benefited from the continued exploitation of Black people. To know such things is to be on the lookout for them and for remedies to the damage they have caused, exactly what the standards want to snuff out.

Pitting parents, teachers, and even students against one another will suppress free speech because teachers and administrators risk their careers when they are dragged into public battles. Children cannot vote and they struggle to organize politically. If they stand, Florida’s make-believe tales will embitter the state’s youth when they learn how wrong they were to listen to what their teachers taught them. In whitewashing American history, Ron De Santis and his cohort sow the cynicism that leads reasonable people to give up on government. Which the Right, to its shame, welcomes.

Other notes 

Kentucky Education Commissioner Jason Glass is leaving his post for a job in Michigan. He has been under constant attack from Republicans in the state legislature. I don’t know all the details of his departure. But this is something I’m really worried about—the effects of Kentucky’s political climate.

Gov. Beshear has restored the voting rights of tens of thousands of people who were convicted of crimes but served their sentences. Daniel Cameron might end that policy, per an excellent story in Bolts.