The risk of a political platform seeking to appeal to extremist groups is that it must abandon logic and sow division. This is what happened to Florida Governor and Republican presidential hopeful, Ron DeSantis, who defended the controversial new rules in his state, requiring educators to teach that enslaved Afro-descendants “benefited” from slavery.
Politicians seeking to change history with fiction
Following an extremist agenda, DeSantis is absurdly trying to rewrite history to downplay one of the darkest episodes in the United States: slavery, which was legal in this country before its founding until the mid-19th century.
There is an abundance of historical evidence that leaves no doubt about the cruel conditions endured by slaves brought from the African continent and their descendants, who were not considered human beings but mere possessions of their masters, who could dispose of them, sell them, separate them from their families, punish, or even kill them.
This historical reality is painful, but far from learning from this period and growing as a nation, there are some misguided individuals who seek to create a parallel reality free of white guilt. Under this premise, an educational reform was made in Florida seeking to rewrite history, claiming that slavery “wasn't that bad.”
The new educational guidelines in Florida have been widely criticized by historians due to the requirement to teach in schools that some slaves benefited from the technical skills they learned during their captivity. This suggestion is absurd, ahistorical, and fundamentally racist.
Governor DeSantis attempted to defend the measure by claiming that some slaves may have used their skills, such as blacksmithing, to prosper later in life, stating in a thoughtless manner that they “developed skills that, in some cases, could benefit them personally.”
Was slavery “beneficial” for slaves?
Historical reality shows that Africans already possessed skills and knowledge before being enslaved, and in many cases, slave owners sought and bought individuals from specific African societies because of their skills in areas like blacksmithing, shipbuilding, or herding.
On the other hand, after the emancipation of slaves and the Civil War, oppressive and violent conditions continued to affect African American workers.
Research by Ndubueze L. Mbah, a professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo, highlights the existence of conditions similar to slavery after abolition, contradicting the notion that the lives of Afro-descendants in the post-slavery period were self-determined.
Do we want an extremist in the presidency?
Sadly, historical denialism is not new among some leaders of the Republican Party. Recently, former member of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Larry G. Pittman, compared President Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler on his Facebook account. Donald Trump continues to chant that he won the 2020 elections (although no court in the country believed him) and claims he had nothing to do with the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, despite videos showing that he called for and incited it.
It is clear that figures like DeSantis and Trump cannot unite the country; they seek to divide it further. Electing one of these extremist figures as president would be a new serious historical mistake.