Florida's Black History Standards Are A Feel Good Story

Oh, those feel good stories. 

An 8-year-old raises money to pay off classmates lunch debt. Boy raises money to buy friend a wheelchair. Celebrities help teachers clear their wish lists. The Today show highlights a company donating computers to a school. A periodic story about how a GoFundMe brings hope to some ailing person. 

These are all versions of the same story:

Look at how this person overcame these obstacles! No, let's absolutely NOT talk about the obstacles and why they shouldn't have been there in the first place, and let's absolutely NOT talk about the individuals and systems that create and maintain those obstacles. How the heck does it happen that elementary school children accumulate $4,000 of debt just because they want to eat lunch? Is that child making up for some choice that adults ought to feel ashamed of and then fix? Shhhh! 

It's a variation on the Undercover Boss phenomenon, that show where a boss would find out that one of his employees wasn't making enough money to live, so he gives a raise to that employee and draws absolutely no conclusion about all his other employees. It's about the rich folks being praised for their philanthropy and helping the less fortunate-- as long as that "giving" doesn't involve looking at how their vast wealth is a result of the same systems that create the inequity they're throwing a feel good bandaid toward.

The moral of all these stories is that we don't need to pay any attention to the factors that made all this pluck and hard work and initiative necessary in the first place. The moral of these stories is that as long as deserving people loaded with grit and resilience can find a way to overcome the forces arrayed against them, we don't need to look at, think about, or address those forces ever.

For some folks, the Feel Good Story template also applies to issues of race in this country.

The line in Florida's Black History standards about how enslaved people picked up some useful job skills during their enslavement has rightfully drawn a great deal of scorn and criticism (even from some Black conservatives). But it's just a piece of the larger argument made by the standards. As Michael Harriot points out in The Grio, there are plenty of other pieces of the standards that minimize slavery, including this idea:

Floridians will not learn about segregation and Jim Crow when they reach the eighth grade. Even then, those government-backed regulations are only taught as a policy that Black people overcame, not something that still impacts the country today.

This is a recurring theme in right-tilted approaches to the history of race and enslavement and racism in the US-- why keep talking about how oppressive people and systems were and are, when we can instead focus on the triumphs of those Blacks who rose above it? It's in projects like Trump/Hillsdale's 1776 curriculum, and it's in the defense of the standards offered by Black standards committee member William Allen and Frances Presley Rice (who may have done a disproportionate amount of the deciding for the committee). Here's an excerpt from their joint statement:

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.

Let's not talk about the "difficult time,' or what caused it or who was oppressive or enslaving Black persons. Let's not talk about the patterns and institutions involved with an eye toward spotting similar patterns of racism today. 

Let's take the history of race in this country and frame it as a Feel Good story about how (some) people used grit and hard work and personal responsibility to overcome a bunch of obstacles that we are definitely NOT going to talk about, because that might make us feel bad, and feeling bad is, of course, the exact opposite of what a Feel Good story is supposed to do.

Florida's Black History standards are an attempt to reduce a complex and complicated story filled with both great triumph and tremendous evil, to boil it down to something that would fit on a Hallmark card. The standards are a lie of omission based on the presumption that children somehow can't handle the whole truth (or, perhaps, that certain adults don't want to). 

Feel Good stories are a type of toxic positivity. You don't fix things that need fixing by pretending they're just fine. And there's an unpleasant subtext here--these Feel Good people escaped the bad thing through grit and gumption, so maybe the people who didn't escape just weren't trying hard enough. Feel Good stories are another face of the old "if you're poor, it's your own fault." Or, in this case, "if slavery and racism messed up your life, maybe that's your fault for not being strong and gritty enough."

We should certainly celebrate the heroism and hard work of the people who accomplish these things, but you don't really celebrate the heroism of people who overcome big odds without fully understanding what they were up against. Nor do you make progress when you insist that racist people and racists systems are just like the weather--sometimes inconvenient, but outside of anyone's control. Good feelings based on denial of reality never last, and it's hard to navigate a world that you don't actually see.