By Ruth A. Sheets
Ron DeSantis, what’s with this waging a campaign in Florida to get rid of Black history classes in schools? I understand you have no problem with Italian culture classes (perhaps to raise up your heritage and your right to whiteness), French and Japanese culture classes too (Japanese I suppose to prove you’re not racist), but not Black history which is the heritage of a large number of people living and working in your own state. Well, Ron, I know just why you have a fear of white kids and adults learning about Black history and I will lay some of it out for you. However it can be stated in one sentence that will need only a little clarification. The cruelties done by white people in this country against Black Americans are horrific beyond comprehension and the ancestors of many of the white folks in good ole Florida participated as did the ancestors of white folks all over this nation.
“What are some of those horrific cruelties,” you ask. Well, this is a challenge because the cruelties were and are so many and RATHER
widespread. Do I mention the most heinous or the most common,
physical or emotional or some of each?
Governor DeSantis, I know you don’t want to know these things because you are scared of what such knowledge might do to you even though your family was only present for some of the cruelty even if they were not directly involved, something only you and they would know. It’s too bad you can’t imagine what such awareness could do for you, a white Christian man. Maybe it would help if you try for a fraction of a moment to imagine the following were happening to you or people you love. OMG! I just realized, conservative white people in power have a hard time with empathy, even in its most basic form. Well then, pretend it is a movie and you are one of the Black actors and see what you think. I probably need to begin with perhaps the most difficult first.
Africans in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries did not choose to come to America. They did not even pay for steerage tickets as your immigrant ancestors and most Italian immigrants did. They were captured and sold as commodities. That word was SOLD. Their treatment on shipboard was so horrendous, even your movie wouldn’t be able to show it believably. Then they were auctioned off the way one might auction off a painting or piece of furniture, men, women, and children, the survivors of the voyage and later the children of those survivors.
Life for those enslaved people was not sweet and pastoral as you probably were told in school; it was beyond inhumane yet the owners claimed to be Christians, followers of a man who was not violent, hateful, or a user of fellow human beings. How did they justify it, they claimed they were training savages, rescuing them from a terrible life in the jungles of Africa. They lied to themselves, and kept it up for 250 years until a war finally ended it.
The war, however, didn’t end the suffering of those Africans who over time had become Americans by virtue of their being here and the 13th and 14th Amendments to our Constitution. Southern white folks just couldn’t bear those “less-than-human” former enslaved persons being free, so worked their hardest to push as many as possible back into some form of slavery by trumped-up charges to prison: farms, mines, road-building and more, where slave labor was and is still permitted.
Then, there’s the lynching that targeted any Black person who dared to challenge a white person, talk to a white woman, or expected the rights of citizenship which were guaranteed to them in the 14th Amendment. More than 3,500 murders have been documented mostly throughout the South, but even in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois, states whose troops had fought to free the enslaved people. Oh, by the way, neither Federal nor state governments intervened to stop the violence and white officials often participated.
Then there’s the massacres of Black people while their communities were destroyed by white people who were angry that Black people might have anything white people didn’t approve of them having: Wilmington, NC, East St. Louis and Chicago, IL, Greenwood in Tulsa, OK, Rosewood in Florida your own state. The ancestors of at least some of your current supporters participated in the violence.
Over the years, Black Americans have worked to claim their rights, but white people constantly stood and stand in the way. African-Americans were/are forced to pay outrageous rents by landlords for shacks and slum housing; share-cropped where the white landowners regularly cheated them of their share of the earnings; were redlined into narrow, poor districts and were kept there by curfews and violence, often killed or injured if they happened to be caught in the white area of town. They couldn’t try on clothing in stores but were welcome to buy the clothes. They couldn’t eat at lunch counters and in most restaurants and had to pick up food in the back and take it out (maybe the model for the modern take-out restaurants). You probably also know the inhumane bathroom, water fountain, and bus ridership rules all over the former Confederacy.
If a factory was to be built, and it was guaranteed to pollute the air or water, it was built in the Black section of town, and still is and the workers were paid wages that barely supported them and their families. Segregation was everywhere and even permitted by law by the Supreme Court in 1896.
Ever since 1870 when Black men got the right to vote through Amendment to the Constitution, white people have been working to keep them from voting: poll taxes, fake literacy tests, gerrymandering, voting places too far for people to get to, ID requirements with unnecessary but costly IDs, voter roll purges, and a lot more.
During the time of enslavement, police targeted Black people even in states where slavery had been illegal for decades claiming they could be runaway slaves. The police in many places expanded that targeting and have harassed, brutalized, and murdered Black men at far higher rates than any other group and continue to do so while the police tell us how “I was scared for my life.” Police are rarely held accountable even when their actions have been recorded. Juries nearly always give the police who do the killing a free pass, well, unless the officers are themselves Black as in Memphis.
Doctors, hospitals, and other medical entities treat Black people with far less respect than they do other patients: they don’t prescribe appropriate medications in appropriate amounts; listen poorly to patients’ descriptions of their illness; do not respond as quickly when a Black patient calls for help while in the hospital; follow inaccurate protocols assuming Black people have thicker skin and feel pain less. Black infant and maternal death rates are higher than for any other group and seem to be rising, particularly in red states, you know the ones like yours that want to force Black women to stay pregnant putting them at significant risk of death.
This little bit of history I have presented here is a taste of what the African-American history class you want to ban would help students consider. The fragile little white kids of Florida wouldn’t be forced to take it, so your hype about this is disingenuous, in fact, fodder to feed the part of your base you keep stoking to be hateful and fearful of people of color, in this case, Black Americans. That is so un-Christian in case you don’t know it. Lying about a course you have not studied or even read the syllabus for should be beneath a leader, but lately, Republicans have scooped up some of the most hateful, fearful, human beings and put them on the stage to whip up more hate and fear to turn it into anger against the people you have decided you don’t like or have power you think is undeserved.
The other side of the African-American history of this country includes the men who built the Capitol in Washington, DC and most likely in the other states too, laid a lot of the rail lines and roads, carved woodwork and built furniture, wrote and published poetry, taught in schools and colleges, painted and sculpted, sang, composed, and performed incredible music, made fashionable gowns as well as everyday clothing from sheering the sheep to processing the cotton by hand, made delicious food from whatever ingredients they could grow or find. In short, they were masters of nearly every craft and skill in our country throughout history.
Black Americans fought in our war for Independence in an integrated army and navy. They also fought in all the rest of our many wars, usually in segregated units that did the construction, clean-up, burials, and cooking for the troops. Or, they were sent into the thickest of the fighting. Black troops won the highest honor bestowed by France for their bravery and persistence in saving the French people during WWI. In our volunteer military forces, Black soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Coast Guards make up a higher proportion of the troops than their percentage in our society as a whole.
Governor DeSantis, Black Americans do not deserve your scorn. They don’t deserve your dismissal either. African-Americans deserve respect and courses that deeply look at their history and contributions. The action you and your Education official have taken is racist and very childish. The adult thing to do now would be for you both to apologize to Black Floridians and approve the course, although I don’t see why you should have any say in which AP courses a district offers. Is that just another of your invasions into areas you should not have entered, right along with your insults of the LGBTQ+ communities. I am guessing you don’t care. I can’t help but think you lost your humanity somewhere. It would truly be a good idea for you to go looking for it. The apology for your bad behavior related to the African-American History course and getting out of a decision about an AP class would be a good start.
Here are a few books that could help you learn about the immense strength and persistence of the African-American community. I am sure if you had any Black assistants, they could recommend more. Even if you were to read them, I doubt they would change your perception of Black Americans, but it might awaken a tiny spark in your conscience.
Under the Skin, the Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa
At the Hands of Persons Unknown by Phillip Dray
The East St. Louis Massacre, The Greatest Outrage of the
Century, 1917 by Ida B. Wells-Barnett
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