The revision of the public school curriculum for teaching African American history in Florida employs relativism worthy of a former vice president of the United States, John C. Calhoun, the archpriest of secessionism and defender of the benefits of slavery as a “positive good” for the enslaved before the Civil War.
The new standards have been widely condemned for using the term “benefit” to describe what slaves derived from being chattels, and the recommendation that “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” receive equivalent consideration — justified by the Florida Department of Education as a goal to provide “a true and accurate instruction in African American history.” Senior politicians, opinion writers, and some professional associations have slammed the effort to “distort” what children are taught about the past. At a ceremony on July 25 to establish a monument remembering Emmett Till and his mother, President Biden added that “while darkness and denial can hide much, they erase nothing.”
The revision also should be called out for what it is: institutionalized racism. The fact that the offending words are buried in a document that provides a broad historical survey of Black history should not obscure their centrality and intent.
Florida’s measure, like the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in higher education, is a harbinger of a changing attitude toward minorities in education in the United States. The justices who ruled against Harvard and the University of North Carolina are part of that shift.
The sophistry of the Florida Board of Education and that of the Supreme Court are similar. In addition to the offending clause on “benefit,” Florida’s State Academic Standards for teaching African American history introduce the concept of equivalency throughout, to include a “benchmark clarification” recommending a comparative review of indentured servitude with slavery. They are not remotely equivalent, and there is no academic rationale for comparing the two experiences other than to suggest that whites suffered too.
The Board’s arguments in favor of its changes parallel the way Chief Justice John Roberts used language in the affirmative action decision. There may be reasons to find other mechanisms to advance educational equality in the United States today; they do not include the rationales that the majority court opinion offered in ending affirmative action.
The Supreme Court majority opinion was written by a justice who long has opposed using race criteria in education and electoral redistricting. Roberts vaguely, but authoritatively, declared that Harvard and UNC “employ race in a negative manner, involving racial stereotyping and lack of meaningful end points.”
However, Roberts did not define what “employing race in a positive manner” might look like, other than to permit universities to consider race through the diluted prism of how “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life” — without allowing that to determine admission. In effect, Roberts established equivalence between experiencing racism and other forms of delineation to include legacy and faculty connections and sports skills, which are now likely to be challenged in lawsuits. Except that breaking down racial prejudice and providing advantage to different forms of privilege are not equivalent.
As I wrote when addressing the issue of racism in my former place of employment, the State Department, there is the issue of mindsets on race on the Supreme Court to consider. Take former Justice Antonin Scalia — a formidable influence on today’s court — whose comments in 2015 during a hearing on affirmative action at the University of Texas suggested that Black Americans had a better chance of success if they “attend lesser schools where … they do not feel that they’re being pushed” and “maybe it [UT] ought to have fewer” African American students.
Or consider Justice Samuel Alito, in 2022, seeming to disparage both self-identification and the role of race in history when he questioned the value of a student saying “I’m Hispanic, I’m African American, I’m Asian.” Or examine the Orwellian unwillingness of justices to question a “color-blind Constitution,” which enshrined the principle of Black lives being worth less than white ones, or their own court’s history of discrimination in the name of “color-blind” justice.
Roberts separately has offered the novel opinion that “we did fight a civil war to eliminate racial discrimination” — hardly the most apt term to describe slavery, and suggesting a lack of understanding of what racism is and how skin color affects equality in this country.
The rebuttal to Roberts’ wordplays from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was to the point: “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion underscored that the decision imposes “a superficial rule of race blindness on the nation.”
The Florida and Supreme Court actions do reflect a mindset which is not truly “color-blind” and is being fed by a white backlash against critical race theory (CRT), diversity, equity and inclusion training (DEI), and immigrants. At least 18 states have banned the teaching of CRT, although there is scant evidence of it being on school curriculums. Political attacks on DEI are multiplying at schools and beyond. Some corporations are concerned about sustaining their diversity programs. Racist comments by public figures about immigrants are seemingly becoming normalized in our political discourse.
Vice President Kamala Harris noted on July 21 that “[t]his is not only about the state of Florida; there is a national agenda afoot.” The racism that often drives this agenda must be openly confronted before it is mainstreamed with spurious legal and academic rationales into our educational institutions.
P. Michael McKinley is a nonresident senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During his 37-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, he was a four-time ambassador: Peru (2007-2010), Colombia (2010-2013), Afghanistan (2014-2016) and Brazil (2017-2018).