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It can not be emphasized enough that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his state’s board of miseducation are waging a war on Black studies that goes far beyond standards that require teaching that enslaved people benefited from slavery. In fact, it’s more than just a war on Black history, or even a war on what white people call “wokeness.” Florida is engaged in a war where its goal is to implement right-wing indoctrination (or what Black people call “white supremacy”) in schools—and they’re doing so while blindly and hypocritically characterizing every idea that doesn’t fit into their narrow, ultra-conservative bubble as “indoctrination.”
Last month, we reported that Florida officials selected PragerU—an unaccredited conservative non-profit organization—to provide classroom materials to Florida schools.
Here’s what we reported about PragerU’s founder, Dennis Prager:
Prager once claimed falsely and without evidence that Black students commit the “overwhelming” majority of on-campus hate crimes and that if any racist and/or anti-Black graffiti is found on campuses “it was Black kids that did it” as a race hoax.
Prager also appears to be very upset that white people can’t use anti-Black racial slurs anymore.
“How many names have Blacks gone through in my lifetime?…What was wrong with Negro? What was wrong with colored? None of them, there’s no problem with any of them,” Prager once whitesplained on his talk show, according to NY Daily News.
He also told a caller on his show that “the left has made it impossible to say the N-word any longer” and that “is idiotic that you cannot say the N-word.” (This was his justification for using “the k-word” in reference to Jewish people, by the way.)
Now that you have an idea of what kind of man the people in charge of educating Florida chose to accept “educational” materials from, it won’t surprise you that PragerU is reaching deep into its caucasity bag to whitewash Frederick Douglass and America’s choice to prioritize white supremacy over ending slavery.
“Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong, and they knew that it would do terrible harm to the nation,” an alternate white supremacy-verse variant of Douglass told two modern-day children in an animated video produced by PragerU. “Their priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country. The Southern colonies were dependent on slave labor, and they wouldn’t have joined the union if they had banned it.”
Conservatives really do stretch themselves into noose-knots trying to whitesplain that the Founding Fathers were anti-slavery despite the fact that 14 out of the 21 prominent founders—*checks notes*—owned slaves.
But let’s say the virtual blackface version of Fredrick Douglass was telling the truth. Even if you accept it at face value, PragerU’s whitewashed version of history admits that white people decided it was OK for Black people to continue living and dying as the physical property of white people, having their future generations born into life-long servitude, having their heritage stripped away from them, being torn away from their families, and being brutalized, tortured, raped and lynched throughout their lives—all so white Americans could preserve the colonies they formed on land that they stole.
Black people had to live in constant pain and terror for roughly two and a half centuries so America could be great. But no—this country wasn’t founded on white supremacy and we should absolutely make America great again.
“I’m certainly not OK with slavery, but the founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great, the making of the United States,” white fragility-approved Fredrick Douglass told the children. “It was America that began the conversation to end it.” (America was one of the last participating countries in the transatlantic slave trade to actually “end it,” but OK.)
“Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document,” Cauca-ganda Fred says later on in the video. “We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it.”
Obviously, PragerU’s video featuring a Nazi wet-dream version of Douglass doesn’t include the real-life abolitionist’s iconic statement in the form of a question: “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July.”
“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” Douglass famously said. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
But none of that matters, because accuracy isn’t the point.
PragerU also recently partnered with conservative commentator and live-action sambo figurine Candace Owens so the sunken place’s HOA president could explain that slavery was OK because everybody was doing it and “white people didn’t invent” it.
PragerU also produced a watered-down animated version of iconic explorer, “discoverer,” genocider, rapist and tyrant Christopher Columbus, who explained to children that slavery was “no big deal” because “being taken as a slave is better than being killed.”
Again, it’s not about “wokeness,” historical accuracy, or thwarting critical race theory, and it certainly isn’t about education.
It’s about indoctrination—as long as it’s the right kind.
SEE ALSO:
Florida Approves Educational Lessons From PragerU, Which Was Founded By Suspected White Supremacist
Op-ED: A Look At The Pitiful Black ‘Scholars’ Florida Selected For New Black History Standards
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PragerU Curriculum Teaches That Frederick Douglass Agreed That Slavery Was A Necessary Evil was originally published on newsone.com
