Truth? You can't handle the truth!:The never-ending task of rewriting history in Florida | Cerabino

There’s a trend in Florida education to rewrite history by putting the lives of oppressed people in a rosy light.

You may remember last summer when the Florida Board of Education adopted new teaching standards that recast slavery in the United States as an opportunity.

“Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” the new standard read.

It instructed teachers to highlight “various duties” of slaves as “agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation.”

No need for white students to feel uncomfortable in this formulation of slavery as a vast deferred-compensation outdoor trade school.

Lucky you, your ancestors got to learn crafts free of charge.

“In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis, pledging that no student should be “shamed because of their race.”

To that end, public school teachers in Florida were also encouraged to use history videos supplied by PragerU, which is not a university but an unaccredited organization founded by a right-wing radio talk show host.

The Florida Department of Education said the PragerU instruction “aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards.”

One of the PragerU videos features a cartoon Christopher Columbus offering a defense of slavery.

“Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?” the back-from-the-dead Columbus tells students. “Before you judge you must ask yourself, ‘What did the culture and society of the time treat as no big deal?’”

Another video features a cartoon Frederick Douglass, the famous escaped slave and abolitionist, striking a very conciliatory outlook on the system he devoted his life to ending.

“I’m certainly not OK with slavery, but the Founding Fathers made a compromise to achieve something great, the making of the United States,” are the words put in Douglasses mouth in the PragerU video.

But the real Douglass had this to say about slavery:  “The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.”

And when asked about his country in 1847, Douglass said: “I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not recognize me as a man.”

Notice, there was nothing in those sentiments about slavery being tolerable collateral damage for “achieving something great.”

The whitewash of history is marching on in Florida schools, where it has recently metastasized to the college level.

New College of Florida, the smallest school in Florida’s public university system, has been under ideological siege since DeSantis installed conservative activist Christopher Rufo on the new board of trustees and dismantled what used to be one of the state’s most academically-prized schools.

Rufo has characterized the mass exodus of faculty members and recasting of the school’s mission as “an essential step in recapturing democratic institutions.”

“One thing is certain,” Rufo wrote. “The takeover of New College has changed the dynamic of America’s culture war and, if successful, will provide a model for conservatives across the nation.”

Apparently, part of that model is to rewrite history.

New College announced last week that the new “presidential scholar in residence” will be Bruce Gilley, an academic who became nationally known after the publication of his piece, “The Case for Colonialism” in 2017.

Gilley argued that the colonial rule of European countries in Africa had advantages for the oppressed and exploited Africans, and those advantages outweighed the downsides.

Gilley’s paper was published and later retracted from the Third World Quarterly, which saw 15 of the journal’s board members resign as a protest to the article’s publication.

Gilley said the retraction was due to threats of violence, but other academics complained that his research was shoddy and ideologically-driven.

More: Cerabino: DeSantis says telling "the good message" a fix to abortion rights issue

More: Cerabino: "Waiting for DeSantis," a presidential campaign tragicomedy

The piece was later published in another academic journal. Gilley defended his piece in an open letter to his critics.

“Without ‘exploitation’ and ‘profits’, there can be no employment, wages, markets, and improvements in organization and technology,” Gilley wrote. “As the English economist Joan Robinson famously quipped, ‘the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.’”

I've got a hunch that Gilley is going to fit in just fine with Florida’s new efforts to make oppression, exploitation and racism great again.

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post and part of the Gannett Newspapers chain.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida education: Rewriting history, new teachings on slavery