Unnecessary Outrage Stirred By Florida’s African American History Curriculum

Authored by Richard Trzupek via The Epoch Times,

Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that center college college students in Florida will “be taught that enslaved folks benefited from slavery.”

Ms. Harris was referring to one among virtually 200 focal factors of instruction that the Florida Board of Education has adopted for instructors instructing African American historical past.

The passage in query says (pdf):

“Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Besides being demonstrably true, that sentence is hardly a blanket endorsement of what used to be called “the Peculiar Institution” in antebellum America.

It’s clear that Florida middle schoolers will be taught that slavery was and is cruel and morally reprehensible. In that context, they will also learn that some slaves learned new skills like farming, smithing, carpentry, etc. during their servitude.

Repeating that truth hardly removes even one speck of the stain on our national soul that’s tied to slavery in America.

Some news outlets called VP Harris out for misrepresenting Florida’s curriculum.

Among those, the hosts on Fox News’s “The Five” discussed the issue, which led to Fox personality Greg Gutfeld making the following comment:

“Did you ever read ‘Man’s Search for Meaning?’ Vic Frankl talks about how you have to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive.”

A number of left-leaning news outlets and politicians were horrified, having decided that Gutfeld was defending the Nazi extermination camps for supposedly providing educational opportunities for prisoners. “Let’s get something straight that the American people understand full well and that is not complicated: there was nothing good about slavery; there was nothing good about the Holocaust,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said. “Full stop.”

There was much more of the same sort of outrage spread far and wide. Reading the vitriol directed at Gutfeld, who combines thoughtful and witty about as well as any pundit going since P.J. O’Rourke passed away, was a depressing exercise. Depressing because this incident is yet another example of how many Americans have gone deliberately tone-deaf, attributing the worst possible motivations to anyone considered an enemy. What is said isn’t nearly as important as who said it. One can attribute any meaning one wants to words they don’t understand.

Clearly, the point of Florida’s guidance isn’t to glorify the practice of slavery, it’s to pay homage to the human spirit that can find a way to survive even in the worst of conditions. Clearly, that was Frankl’s point, and in referencing him, Gutfeld’s as well. Heroes aren’t created in cesspools like slavery and genocide. Heroes are forged in the fires of adversity. Just as no Israelite wanted to be under Pharoah’s thumb, no African-American wished to feel the boot-heal of the slave master on his or her neck. When freedom finally came, each would find they not only survived, but—for some—they even grew.

Recall the moment in “The Shawshank Redemption” when Captain Hadley is holding Andy Dufresne precariously on the fringe of the roof, maybe a second away from letting him fall to his demise. Dufresne explains to Hadley how he can get out of paying taxes on a $35,000 inheritance. It’s a turning level within the film, the second Dufresne stops being perpetually abused meat and begins to grow to be a helpful, and subsequently considerably revered, human being of types. Shawshank is not going to grow to be heaven, however no less than it’ll not be hell.

I used to be current on the memorial service recognizing the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau in 1995. The camps, positioned close to my household’s ancestral house of Krakow, have all the time made an enormous impression on me each for what they inform us about man’s cruelty and for what they inform us about man’s resiliency. I had the privilege to talk to some survivors, and the message I took away was this: In that horror, each prisoner had a selection: hand over or attempt to discover a strategy to maintain going. I did not get a way that anybody begrudged or belittled those that gave up. It was comprehensible, I suppose. But for those who tried to maintain going, there was little you wouldn’t attempt.

That was Frankl’s level. If you’re Andy Dufresne and you’ve got nice accounting expertise, you then attempt to leverage these expertise to make your life rather less laborious. If you’re an inmate of an extermination camp and are an knowledgeable carpenter, you attempt to leverage these expertise to get an additional ration, or a superb blanket, or the rest that can maintain you alive for one more day. So no, in pointing this out, Greg Gutfeld wasn’t being outrageous. But the outraged? They’re being ridiculous.