{"id":270741,"date":"2026-05-14T11:27:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T11:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/270741\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T11:27:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T11:27:11","slug":"floridas-new-history-course-whitewashes-the-founders-on-slavery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/270741\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida’s new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Florida has long been a laboratory for autocracy<\/a>. Several of the Trump administration\u2019s most extreme policies were piloted there, including aggressive immigration enforcement, the systematic rollback of civil rights and voter suppression.<\/p>\n

Now the Sunshine State is offering a new experiment: a high school history course offering a conservative interpretation of American history and a corrective to the official Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, which more than half a million students took last year, and that most historians and educators consider to be ideologically well-balanced. Florida\u2019s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and the state\u2019s education department have attacked the AP course as \u201cwoke\u201d and unpatriotic because it examines the complexities of American history<\/a> including White on Black chattel slavery, the genocide of First Nations peoples and other realities that puncture sacred civic myths such as American exceptionalism and the fantasy that America is, and has always been, the greatest country in the world.<\/p>\n

The scope of Florida\u2019s latest right-wing project is ambitious, and part of a three-year campaign, according to a recent report<\/a> by Dana Goldstein of the New York Times. The course, she revealed, \u201cfocuses on the Protestant faith of the Founders, argues that the U.S. Constitution is an antislavery document and recommends a textbook written explicitly to build patriotism.\u201d The story quotes Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, as praising the new curriculum\u2019s use of primary sources. But even he acknowledged that the new course leans not on criticism but explicitly on how America is a \u201cgood, special place.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a polite way of saying that the curriculum is nothing more than right-wing propaganda.<\/p>\n

The American right has long targeted classrooms as political spaces where the country\u2019s future can be won by socializing and indoctrinating young people into simplistic notions of \u201cpatriotism\u201d and \u201cnationalism,\u201d rather than compelling them to ask hard questions about our history.<\/p>\n

The American right has long targeted classrooms as political spaces where the country\u2019s future can be won by socializing and indoctrinating young people into simplistic notions of \u201cpatriotism\u201d and \u201cnationalism,\u201d rather than compelling them to ask hard questions about our history, which can encourage them to be responsible citizens who are intellectually and psychologically equipped to challenge the powerful.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is not an accident. Would-be authoritarians like Donald Trump<\/a> want and need a passive, compliant public that lacks the agency and tools for democratic governance, so they work very hard to create one.<\/p>\n

The impact of Florida\u2019s changes will be felt far beyond its borders. As Goldstein reported, the state has often set the pace for Republican education policy<\/a> in the Trump era. Other red states will likely administer the new course, along with others in the program of accelerated courses the state has dubbed FACT (Florida Advanced Courses and Tests), which will be, she wrote, \u201ca sort of red-state competitor to the College Board,\u201d which oversees the AP curricula.<\/p>\n

Most of the new history course reflects a boilerplate conservative view of American history and society, where cheerleading too frequently substitutes for rigor and accuracy. But it also claims that the Constitution is an antislavery document \u2014\u00a0and that the nation\u2019s founders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who both owned enslaved people, were opposed to the institution. Such pronouncements are not merely wrong. They are insidious.<\/p>\n

Mainstream contemporary historians view the Constitution as a compromise between free and slaveholding states. But there is significant and respected scholarship that goes much further and holds that the Constitution is a pro-slavery, and pro-Southern, document which protected that vile institution.<\/p>\n

The scholarly consensus is clear: The Constitution is not an antislavery document, and America\u2019s founders produced a document that protected the interests of the slaveholding class. But these facts are being buried to construct a narrative that valorizes the founders.<\/p>\n

Florida previewed this whitewashing of history<\/a> in 2022 when it passed the \u201cStop W.O.K.E. Act,\u201d which banned the teaching of so-called divisive subjects that might make white children uncomfortable because of their race. The discomfort of Black and brown children \u2014 who watch their communities\u2019 histories, experiences and reality being systematically erased and distorted \u2014 was apparently of little concern.<\/p>\n

In 2021, both the National Coalition of History and the Organization of American Historians denounced these laws and the damage they do to democratic life and freedom of thought. \u201cOur nation\u2019s history is complex,\u201d members of the organization\u2019s wrote in a joint statement<\/a>. \u201cThe study of it requires not just a celebration of our triumphs, but frank discussion of our shortcomings, indeed our divisions.\u201d Ignoring those, they said, \u201cstifles that debate and our ability to move forward as a nation,\u201d and impedes healing.<\/p>\n

The color line, slavery and the long Black Freedom Struggle are not peripheral to the American story; they are central to it.<\/p>\n

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter<\/a>, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thirteen of the 39 signers of the Constitution<\/a> were from the South, and it\u2019s estimated<\/a> that 25 delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned slaves. The document counted enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a person<\/a> for purposes of congressional representation \u2014 which meant that slaveholding states were systematically overrepresented in both Congress and the Electoral College. The Constitution barred any federal prohibition on the importation of slaves until 1808, and it included a fugitive slave clause<\/a> requiring that Black people who escaped slavery, even to free states, be returned to their owners. The federal government was given the responsibility for putting down rebellions, which in practice meant crushing slave uprisings and resistance.<\/p>\n

Black people were not citizens under this framework. They were anti-citizens, existing outside of the polity. America was a racialized democracy from its inception. It was only after the Civil War, through ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, that Black Americans were written into the Constitution as equal citizens \u2014 on paper, but rarely in daily American life.<\/p>\n

Florida\u2019s whitewashing of the Constitution and the founders\u2019 relationship to slavery is made more perfidious still by its timing. The Trump administration and its allies are working diligently to end multiracial democracy by gutting the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement<\/a> and the Long Black Freedom struggle<\/a> to build a contemporary version of Jim and Jane Crow. And the president is leading this project while hurling racist attacks<\/a> at Barack and Michelle Obama<\/a> and other Black leaders on social media.<\/p>\n

Real history is much more than just dates, facts and characters; it also encompasses how they are interpreted and contextualized.<\/p>\n

In many ways, the Florida course\u2019s more conservative view of slavery and America\u2019s past is history presented as just dueling opinions, instead of as the result of rigorous inquiry, research, theory building and advancing truth claims supported by evidence. Real history is much more than just dates, facts and characters; it also encompasses how they are interpreted and contextualized. As the historian E.H. Carr famously argued in his book \u201cWhat is History?\u201d:<\/p>\n

[History] is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past\u2026 The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger\u2019s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use \u2014 these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.<\/p>\n

Florida\u2019s history education program is not an outlier. It is a smaller version of the Trump administration\u2019s white racial authoritarian project masquerading as patriotism and American exceptionalism.<\/p>\n

As I watch the rapid collapse of American democracy in real time, I keep returning to \u201cThe Soiling of Old Glory<\/a>,\u201d the 1976 Pulitzer-winning photograph that depicts Ted Landsmark, a Black attorney and civil rights activist, being beaten by a white teenager wielding a flag pole. The image was captured during a violent protest against school desegregation in Boston, and as the assailant wields the pole against Landsmark, Old Glory streams from it mournfully.<\/p>\n

How would Florida\u2019s new history course explain this photograph? Would it even be taught? And if the Trump administration\u2019s Orwellian whitewashing of American history and public memory succeeds \u2014 what then?<\/p>\n

I know the answers. They fill me with dread.<\/p>\n

A people without history, without context, who lack the means to understand their predicament or the tools to resist it, are easy prey for authoritarians. This is why Florida\u2019s new conservative history course exists.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

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