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Standing his ground, even as it turns into political quicksand beneath his feet, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has dug in his heels to defend a barely defensible passage in his state’s new slavery education curriculum.
The GOP governor’s African American History Standards panel proposed a new social studies and African American curriculum plan that drew fire from critics across party lines for a single sentence.
The passage directed that, “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Uh, say what? Slavery had benefits?
Under closer examination, the awkwardly phrased declaration of “slavery benefits” begs for a rewrite. It would be controversial in any year for an aspiring presidential candidate — and especially as DeSantis is running a distant second place in polls to Donald Trump.
Curious for another perspective, I called a friend for whom the title of “founding father” has special meaning: Gayle Jessup White, a descendant of our country’s third president, Thomas Jefferson — and one of his younger slaves, Sally Hemings.
Studying her family genealogy led her to Jefferson and two families that were enslaved at Monticello, his Virginia estate on the edge of Charlottesville.
How does she feel about the notion that enslaved people found significant ways to benefit from their slavery?
“I think it’s insulting,” she said without hesitation.
Now head of public relations and community engagement at Monticello, the former newspaper and television news reporter and anchor described how most of the estimated four 4 million enslaved Americans in that period “worked for the complete benefit of their owners.”
Yes, it is well known that owners sometimes would lend out slaves who gained valuable skills as craftsmen — blacksmiths, shoemakers, bricklayers and joiners.
“Cooks, they generally weren’t lent out,” she said. “They were busy all the time. But, occasionally they too were allowed to work and make money for themselves.
“And once those 4 million people were freed in 1865 (the end of the Civil War), they used those skills to make their way in the world,” White added.
“Unfortunately,” she continued, “discrimination did not allow them to establish their trades and to profit from those skills as much as they could have if this were a society that was free and open and full of opportunities for us all.”
Indeed, I came to White to retell a story she had told me on an earlier occasion.
James Hemings, Sally Hemings’ brother and a four-times-great-uncle to White, as a teenager accompanied Jefferson when he was named ambassador to France.
In Paris, James learned the skill of French cooking. When he returned to the new United States, James negotiated with Jefferson for freedom for himself under Jefferson’s condition that James teach skills of French cooking to someone else to replace him.
The chosen replacement was James’ brother, Peter, Gayle’s three-times-great-grandfather.
Peter became the main cook at Monticello, Gayle points out, even though despite his reputation for producing magnificent recipes, “he did not really enjoy cooking.”
Ironically, he really wanted to be a brewer, another important skill in those days when beer and ale were widely preferred to water, which was not always very clean. So he became a skilled brewer, and also a tailor.
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“So this is a good example of someone who eventually was freed — a relative bought his freedom years later when he was an old man — and he became a tailor,” said White.
“So it’s really important to make note that, yes, these people might have learned skills for the benefit of their owner but, once freed they might not have wanted to practice those skills,” she said. “Instead, they were forced to do jobs they didn’t want to do.”
They did not have freedom of choice. People spent their entire lives doing something they hated because their owner insisted on it.
So, for someone like DeSantis or his education advisers to say slaves “benefited from slavery” is, indeed, insulting, as if agency and freedom of choice are trivial rights.
As White noted, “I’m sure a man as well educated as DeSantis knows better.”
Twitter @cptime