Florida officials sought 'opposing viewpoints' blaming slavery on Africans: leaked documents

Florida education officials demanded changes to an Advanced Placement course on African American Studies because the curriculum focused on the negative aspects of slavery without presenting "opposing viewpoints."

State officials rejected the course, saying they objected to studying concepts such as reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory,” but a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state commentary found that officials tried to sanitize the horrors of slavery and the challenges African Americans had faced throughout history.

"For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced," the journalists reported. "The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach 'may lead to a viewpoint of an "oppressor vs. oppressed" based solely on race or ethnicity.'"

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State officials objected to another another lesson on the origins of the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation economy because the material “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject," adding that the course “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and that it “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.”

“There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University. “It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come. There is no other side to that in African American studies. If there’s another side, it may be in some other field. I don’t know what field that is because I would argue there is no other side to that in higher education."

The review showed how much Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had changed the state's education system to root out what he calls "wokeism" in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that sprung up around the nation during the pandemic after the police murder of George Floyd.

“It’s not really about the course right? It’s kind of about putting down Black struggles for equality and freedom that have been going on for centuries at this point in time and making them into something that they are not through this kind of distorted rightist lens,” said Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor at Brown University, who added that the evaluator comments were “complete distortion” and “whitewashing” of history.

The documents were provided to journalists for review by the left-leaning organization American Oversight, which sued the state Department of Education for the records.

“We sued the Florida Department of Education to shed light on the DeSantis administration’s efforts to whitewash American history and turn classrooms into political battlegrounds,” said American Oversight deputy executive director Chioma Chukwu in a statement. “The records obtained by American Oversight from Florida’s internal review of the AP African American Studies course expose the dangers of Gov. DeSantis’ sweeping changes to public education in Florida, including preventing students from learning history free from partisan spin.”