The racist apologism for ante-bellum slavery in Ron DeSantis Florida is part of a sordid and long US tradition
DeSantis says Black people benefited from slavery by learning skills like 'being a blacksmith'. His racism is part of a depressingly long American discourse acting as ante-bellum slavery apologism
Ordinarily I stick to my bailiwick of Scottish devolved politics, but on rare occasions a news story from further afield catch my eye and compel me to articulate a response. This is one such moment where a rebuttal to the US Republican Party hopeful Ron DeSantis is necessary.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s much vaunted ‘war on woke’ has certainly played well amid the heady din of contemporary US culture war politics. His 2022 win by 1,507,897 votes was certainly more decisive than his 2018 win by a mere 32,463 votes. And in the maelstrom of modern Florida politics, DeSantis boldly claimed his re-election signified the state’s transition into a “promised land” where “woke comes to die”.
Some of us wondered at the time what precisely this ‘war on woke’ would look like, and what specifically constituted this ‘promised land’ of Maga-Republicanism insisting on ‘taking our county back’. I guess now we have part of the answer as the Florida's 2023 Social Studies curriculum is unveiled. And it’s as deplorable as one might have imagined. Ron DeSantis thinks Floridian school children need to think more positively about slavery…
Note for the reader: In what proceeds next, I reference academic literature written by authors from a time before our own. Naturally they deployed certain terminologies which many will find uncomfortable today. But given the nature of the subject matter, and that some of these words are literally in the titles of the academic works, censoring would function as a block for proper understanding of the source material
The peculiar institution revisited?
When I was doing my Advanced Higher at Jordanhill Secondary School many moons ago, I had the assigned task of studying slavery in the ante-bellum south (1815-1861). Three books my wonderful teacher handed me to read, study and eventually keep were Kenneth M. Stampp’s ‘The Peculiar Institution: Negro Slavery in the American South’, ‘Free but not equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War’ by V. Jacque Voegeli and Ulrich Bonnell Phillips ‘American Negro slavery : a survey of the supply, employment and control of Negro labor as determined by plantation régime’. It’s a subject I also went on to lecture in China about.
The last author was typical of US slavery academic and intellectual apologism of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Ulrich Phillips works can be typified as articulating and perpetuating the false notion that slavery in the ante-bellum period was generally characterised as ‘paternalistic’, where many Southern slave owners were somehow kind to their slaves and provided well for them. The former writers such as Stampp (1950s) and Voegeli (1960s) represent the intellectual clap-back, proving empirically the falsities of the Phillips apologist creed.
Efforts the likes of Stampp is truly vital in the explosion of the later civil rights cause. After all, in his work ‘Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?’ (1967), Martin Luther King Jr. quotes extensively from ‘The Peculiar Institution’. The late great King describes Stampp's "fascinating" depiction of "the psychological indoctrination that was necessary from the master's viewpoint to make a good slave."
As I write this in 2023 you would be forgiven for thinking that this is now history, with little practical bearing on contemporary American politics, but you’d be wrong. Depressingly, thanks to Ron DeSantis and his ‘promised land’, we witness the vile spectre of pro-slavery apologist rhetoric given new flesh in legislative form.
The recent Florida 2023 Social Studies curriculum, now to be taught to more than 80% of Florida kids, has dangerous echoes of Ulrich Phillips slavery apologism. It is deplorable, wicked and urgently needs calling out.
DeSantis actually told journalists that the Curriculum of his ‘promised land’ is "probably going to show that some of the folks [slaves] that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,"
Just let that sink in. The only meaningful alternative to the insurrectionist Trump is wanting everyone to believe that slavery in the ante-bellum south was really just vocational education. I wonder if the ‘scholars’ who have put this rancid new ‘education’ curriculum together have surnames like Calhoun or Phillips? Or perhaps they just derive from that self-same deplorable pseudo-intellectual tradition?
It is as intellectually offensive as it is academically flawed to argue that the unpaid labour that slaves did somehow constitutes self-improvement. These slaves worked picking cotton, built the colonisers homes, swept their floors and all under the constant threat of beatings, starvation and death. But Florida wants us all to understand how all of these crimes against humanity were really just skills development programmes. It’s breath-takingly disgusting.
Reverberations of Ulrich Phillips is easy to spot. In 1929 Phillips attempted to argue life for slaves on the bigger plantations was somehow benign, on the basis that skills could be learnt:
“No plowing or lifting must be required of them [pregnant slaves]. Sucklers, old, infirm and pregnant receive the same allowances as full-work hands. The regular plantation midwife shall attend all women in confinement. Some other woman learning the art is usually with her during delivery. The confined woman lies up one month, and the midwife remains in constant attendance for seven days.”1
He went on to explain that the coloniser masters were actually really kind to the slave women because
“Sucklers are not required to leave their homes until sunrise, when they leave their children at the children's house before going to field. The period of suckling is twelve months. Their work lies always within half a mile of the quarter. They are required to be cool before commencing to suckle — to wait I fifteen minutes at least in summer, after reaching the children's house before nursing.”2
Phillips was in effect arguing in 1929 that slavery may have been economically inefficient, but hey it was paternalistic and benign…because skills were learnt and slaves weren’t compelled to work to death while pregnant. The lucky gals bearing the kids their masters may in the future sell off never to be seen again even got to stay indoors until sunrise!
It’s absolutely incredible - or ought to be - to modern eyes that slavery could be in any way justified on the basis that enslaved plantation midwives could train other enslaved girls the art of midwifery for example. But in walks Ron DeSantis, arguing that it’s important to teach Florida kids that slavery was in some ways benign because slaves could learn the art of blacksmithery. I really wish I were making this up, but alas we’ve descended to the absolute pits of KKK variety white nationalism in 2023 Florida.
One may have hoped that the efforts of academics like Stampp and Voegeli combined with the mass efforts of the late Dr King would have finally killed the awful ghosts of US slavery apologism, but no. The GOP, so infected by the pustulating alt-right fanaticism of Trumpism, that it is now actively legislating to relitigate this whole sorry discourse.
Voegeli in his book ‘Free but not Equal’ examined the political and social consequences of Midwesterners' “anti-Negro” attitudes during the first half of the nineteenth-century. His conclusion was that even advocates of abolitionism would often “reconcile” their reform measures with the prejudices of the area. The prejudices against African-Americans were so engrained that “equality was not considered a necessary corollary to freedom from bondage”. Voegeli argued that the racism inherent in midwestern attitudes delayed emancipation, impacted on the conduct of the fighting in the civil war and ultimately influenced the politics of emancipation and later reconstruction. He wrote about the close of the US civil war:
“At the close of the war, it was abundantly plain that the Midwest’s attitude toward the Negro race had changed in many ways, but that the white people of that region still were far from an acceptance of true equality”3
Judging by Ron DeSantis antics, not much has changed in 2023 at least in Florida.
Florida’s ‘anti-woke’ Governor in 2023 insists it isn’t enough to merely learn about the crimes of slavery, Floridian kids must also know about the “benefits”. Millions of rapes, beatings, floggings, lynching’s and crimes against humanity apparently isn’t enough to properly teach about slavery. DeSantis thinks its important that kids know (and I quote from the Social Studies Curriculum) :
“Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”4
I put it to you all that DeSantis is attempting to “reconcile” the realities of the vile history of American slavery with the prejudices of his electorate. In effect, echoing what Voegeli called out among Midwesterners during the first half of the 19th century.
In 2023 a leading candidate for the GOP Presidential nomination actually thinks its a benefit to echo Ulrich Phillips pro-slavery apologism about some sort of ‘skills development’ antebellum slavery, alongside a blatant desire to accommodate blatant racism.
This is where Trumpism has degenerated to, this is where the US sclerotic domestic culture war as declined to, a festering debate about whether slavery was somehow benevolent toward black people. It’s breath-taking, heart-breaking and should be a massive wakeup call to British folk everywhere: there are some cultural imports from America we can do without and among them ought to be the frenzied rot of post-modern identity politics and base culture war narratives.
At the constitutional convention of 1787, having failed to secure the abolition of slavery, northern states sought to make representation dependent on the size of a state’s free population. But the Southern states, where slavery was so economically ingrained and the racialism so deeply entrenched, threatened to abandon the Convention if their slaves weren’t counted. Eventually, the framers agreed on a compromise that called for representation in the House of Representatives to be apportioned on the basis of a state’s free population plus three-fifths of its enslaved population.
Today it’s obvious to all decent folk that African-Americans are not three-fifths of a person; but perhaps Ron DeSantis’s intellectual capacities only equates to three-fifths of a thinking human being?
Since posting this article, I have received a number of subscriber cancellations by people unhappy at my claims that ‘institutional racism’ exists in the US. For the record it does exist, and I’m going to keep calling it out. I have written a follow-up piece called ‘I’m shocked but doubling down’ that you can read by clicking here
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Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell, 1929, ‘American Negro slavery : a survey of the supply, employment and control of Negro labor as determined by plantation régime’, New York : Appleton, page 264, https://archive.org/details/americannegrosl04philgoog/page/264/mode/2up
ibid
Voegeli, Jacque V, 1967, ‘The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, page 182
Florida’s State Academic Standards – Social Studies, 2023, page 6, https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf