“Malinformation,” a term coined by Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, describes information disseminated with alleged malicious intent but which is not false. Unlike “misinformation,” which refers to the dissemination of false and harmful information spread without the intention of causing harm, and “disinformation,” which involves the purposeful dissemination of deceptive content with the aim of causing harm to individuals, groups, organizations, or society as a whole, malinformation is accurate and truthful information that undermines the agendas or interests of some individuals or groups. To be sure, there is malinformation that does unjustifiably inflict harm on persons or groups, such as doxing or swatting, but that isn’t what I am talking about here; I will be using the term in the spirit Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. did when he appeared before the House Committee on the Weaponization of Government. “Malinformation is info that is true but inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear,” Kennedy said.
This appears to be the problem progressives have with Florida’s public school curriculum. The content is not false but inconvenient. It malinforms the students by teaching them that whites are not responsible for the situation of black America. Progressives don’t want children exposed to that information—and there are parts of the curriculum progressives don’t want adults exposed to, either.
Democrats, most noisily Vice-President Kamala Harris, who called one of the lesson plans an attempt to “gaslight” students, are suggesting that the curriculum, which can be found here, is an instantiation of white supremacy. Others didn’t hold back. “This is fascism at its best,” Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of the union that represents teachers in Miami-Dade public schools, said. “This is exactly what fascist governments do when they censor teachers, when they go after education, when they try and suppress content from being taught.” Crystal Etienne, a seventh-grade civics teacher in Miami-Dade County, said, “It’s disgusting to use children as pawns in their adult scheme.” She called the changes “indoctrination” in “white, Christian nationalism,” the latest smear category progressives use to demonize those who dissent from the woke agenda. “They feel like if you’re teaching the bad, it somehow takes away from the good and it doesn’t,” she added ironically. Outside Florida, LaGarrett J. King, director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo, said the updates to the Florida curriculum were “anti-Black.”
Dwight Bullard, a former high school history teacher (now the senior political advisor of Florida Rising, a voting rights group in Florida), said in an interview with the Miami Herald that he couldn’t fathom telling his students that there’s a “silver lining in slavery.” He is referring to the lesson plan that has enjoyed the most publicity, which reviews the wide range of habits and skills Africans learned during slavery that they applied to their lives after Emancipation. Like Hernandez-Mats, Bullard reaches for the fascism smear: “Imagine the blowback of the same teacher trying to give you the upside of Nazi Germany,” said Bullard. “Not only would it not be allowed, there would be bipartisan outrage over the idea that any teacher, a teacher or a curriculum trying to give the sunny side of Adolf Hitler. Yet we now have an African American history statute that is supposed to now give you this notion of the benevolent master, or the upside or benefit of being enslaved in America. It’s crazy.” Bullard makes explicit, inverts, and leans into Etienne’s irony: if you’re teaching the good, this takes away from the bad.
Pushing back against the hyperbolic rhetoric are two members of the working group that established the curriculum standards, Dr. William Allen and Dr. Frances Presley Rice. They put the matter well when they told CBS News, “Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history. Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.” They added, “It is disappointing, but nevertheless unsurprising, that critics would reduce months of work to create Florida’s first ever stand-alone strand of African American History Standards to a few isolated expressions without context.”
I need to briefly explain the benchmark coding scheme established by Florida’s State Academic Standards before moving on. The standards are associated by what educators call strands. “SS” refers to the subject area “Social Studies.” “AA” refers to the “African American History” strand (there are several, including American History, Civics and Government, Holocaust Education, and Sociology, to name a few). For example, the code “SS.678.AA.1.1” represents “Social Studies.sixth seventh eighth grade.African American History.standard one.benchmark one.” I know this type of coding can make one feel like he’s trapped in Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, but it’s necessary to organize the amount of information contained in the document.
As noted, the item that appears to have especially triggered Democrats is the requirement for instruction on, to provide the exact language, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The standard comes from section SS.68.AA.2.3, which contains a benchmark clarification “Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”
I am suspicious of this emphasis on this standard. It feels as if the development of consciousness and the application of skills learned to resistance and survival, in the development of a free and autonomous man, is not really what is eating at progressives. To be sure, I think progressives desire that black people believe that there is nothing they did or could learn from Western culture and that most can and should expect a life of dependency on the state. But there are things in this document that must truly terrify progressives more than noting skill development under slavery. Indeed, it feels as if the focus on this section is a move to dismiss the curriculum without telling the public what the curriculum is really doing; doing so would have white children and black children alike discovering that the plight of black America since the end of segregation is really not the fault of white people. In the post-affirmative action era, this can be a liberating piece of good news.
Progressives must really find triggering section SS.68.AA.1.1, which asks instructors to “IdentifyAfro-Eurasian trade routes and methods prior to the development of the Atlantic slave trade.” This standard contains several benchmark clarifications, including instruction on “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures”; “the similarities and differences between serfdom and slavery”; and the “use of maps to identify trade routes.” Additionally, SS.68.AA.1.2, instructs teachers to “Describe the contact of European explorers with systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then there is SS.912.AA.1.
This standard opens students’ minds to the complex ways in which segmented societies are organized and the character of different forms of exploitation and oppression. They learn that slavery is not always race based. Blacks owned slaves—in Africa and the Americas. In America, blacks owned black slaves from at least the mid-17th century right up until the Civil War. In Africa they still do. Blacks bought, owned, and sold black people for thousands of years. American Indians owned black slaves in North America. The Cherokee were particularly prolific in this regard. White Europeans were enslaved. Barbary Pirates (Arabs and Berbers) kidnapped Europeans and sold them into slavery in Muslim countries. There were Muslim slave markets in North Africa, West Africa, Swahili Coast, Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and eastward. The global slave trade was established by the Islamic world system when Europeans were living in the Dark Ages (if we date that period to the fifteenth century). Africans sold Africans to Muslims who enslaved them—and castrated them by the millions.
If you want to see more, follow the link above or in the citations below the image captures. It’s all there. The curriculum instructs teachers to cover such subjects as the development of labor systems using indentured servitude contracts with English settlers and Africans, the reasons behind the transition from indentured servitude to race-based hereditary slavery, slave trading routes and the horrors of Middle Passage, the use of convict labor, and kidnapping the harsh conditions labor suffered in the colonies, as well as in the Caribbean, Central and South America, including detailing conditions: disease, infant and child morality rates, and malnourishment. As students progress through their education they learn very complex historical facts about such matters as the history and development of slave codes, judicial and legislative actions, African resistance to slavery, and so on.
As you can see, all this lays the ground for a great deal of malformation. It was the United Kingdom and the United States that, in a period of only a few years, abolished the transatlantic slave trade. It was the United States that abolished chattel slavery and spread the ethic of abolitionism across the planet, liberating tens of millions of humans from slavery. Slavery was a legacy institution that had existed for thousands of years before the founding of the United States, the founders of the nation inherited it—and abolished it. (See Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project: The United States and the West Did Not Establish Slavery—They Abolished It.) These facts interfere with the project to make white people solely responsible for all of the misery in the world to reinforce racial resentment and push for reparations and other income and wealth transfers. That’s why these facts—the whole story—are not taught to young people. What progressives want to “teach” young people is not actual history, or how to critically think about the past or the present, but to indoctrinate them in race resentment and ethnic self-loathing. Why doesn’t Africa pay reparations? Why don’t the Arabs pay reparations? Why should any nation or people pay reparations? Blood guilt is primitive and immoral.(See Reparations and Blood Guilt; A specter is haunting America—the specter of reparations; Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment.)
* * *
I know without having to ask that the vast majority of the critics of Jason Aldean and his song “Try that in a Small Town” did not know that the video contains footage performed in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, less than an hour from my home town of Murfreesboro, or that this is the site of the 1927 lynching of a black teenager named Henry Choate. Do they know that many lynchings took place in town squares across the South following Reconstruction? I know this because I’m the scholar who coded the Tuskegee lynching data in machine readable form and published papers on it (see Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide). But is this common knowledge? If the rule now is that you can’t use as settings for country music videos town squares where lynching happened, then there are some beautiful historic locations where many great things also happened that are going to have to avoided.
But why does it matter for a country music video? Choate was killed nearly a hundred years ago. Is anybody who was alive at the time still alive? If so, they would have been a very small child. Reflecting on the fate of Choate, besides noting the terrible history of lynching (something that is obviously important to me), might be useful if there was consideration given to the fact that progressive and powerful presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt did nothing to stop the epidemic of lynching that occurred on their watch. Is that in Florida’s new standards? Does the curriculum include the fact that the Democratic Party was the party of the slavocracy and afterwards the part of Jim Crow?
President Biden has just announced his plans to name a new national monument next week after Emmett Till honoring the black teenager who, in 1955, was beaten, tortured, and shot to death by two white men who threw his body into the Tallahatchie River, his disfigured body discovered days later, an event that helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The monument will also honor his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. The murderers believed they could kill Till without any repercussions due to the deeply entrenched racial prejudice and the prevailing culture of impunity for crimes against blacks in the segregated South. Will Biden dwell on the fact that the Democratic Party had a long-standing and dominant presence in the state of Mississippi at that time, that it held considerable control over the political and social landscape of Mississippi during the era of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws? Is this why he is doing this? Don’t kid yourself.
Folks do realize how much woke progressives loathe small towns and the common man, right? That’s what this is really about. Remember Barack Obama’s comment about “bitter” voters who cling to guns and religion during the 2008 presidential campaign? Perhaps it’s fitting that the comment was made during a private fundraising event in San Francisco. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Note how the very things that created that situation of frustration for small town Americans, namely immigration and globalization, are portrayed as rationalizations that explain away a situation that could have no other explanation than that people who cling to god and guns are backwards and bigoted (Obama and Marx On Religion).
Believe me. I have heard this sentiment many times in the academy. Small town people and the fly-over states are not supposed to play a role in American politics. So when they speak up in defense of their children in public school or against crime and violence and the culture that drives it, they’re smeared as bigots, fascists, and racists. When they ask why our borders are not being defended, they’re smeared as nativists and xenophobes. Good thing the Department of Homeland Security is watching them. (See MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin; Democrats Have Declared Parents Who Care About Their Children “Fascist”; The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males. What’s This All About?; Cancelling Half the Nation: Progressives Reach for One-Party Rule.)
The condemnation of Aldean is a symbolic condemnation of small-town America, where people take care of each other and follow the law. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “Try that in a small town”—and hoped that force would be in back of sentiment. Aldean is channeling the spirit of the people, the dozens of millions of people who live outside the big cities where homelessness, poverty, crime, deviance, decadance, and violence are rampant. Shall I once more point out that the most crime ridden and violent cities in the United States are run by progressives? It is often the case that more black men are killed every year in progressive-run cities that were lynched by whites in the entire history of America. (See America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame; How Progressive Criminal Justice Policy Puts Black Lives at Risk; Race and Violent Death in America) What will solve this problem? Dwelling on a one-side narrative about slavery? Banning guns? (See Is It Guns?) Or focusing on all the ways America has delivered on its promise, all the paths to success that are as much there for black youth as they are for white youth, and criticizing the dysfunctional culture, broken family system, and the welfare state that lies at the heart of the problems confronting black America. (See Poor Mothers, Cash Support, and the Custodial State.)
freedom and reason 