July 22, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 22, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON JUL 23 The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous. But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.  Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154). The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system. In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it. This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people. Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement. Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence. Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118). It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson's impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).  That’s quite a tall order.  But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience”  (pp. 116–117). Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109). All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”  The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.  And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.  — Notes: https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf

FOCUS: Secret Talks to Return Ukrainian Children Taken by Russia

 

 

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FOCUS: Secret Talks to Return Ukrainian Children Taken by Russia
Max Seddon and Anastasia Stognei, Financial Times
Excerpt: "Saudi Arabia and Turkey are seeking to broker a deal to repatriate Ukrainian children taken to Russia and held in children's homes or adopted by Russian families, according to four people familiar with the talks."

Saudi Arabia and Turkey are brokering a deal to repatriate thousands of children displaced by Vladimir Putin’s invasion

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest War in Ukraine news every morning.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey are seeking to broker a deal to repatriate Ukrainian children taken to Russia and held in children’s homes or adopted by Russian families, according to four people familiar with the talks.

Officials in Kyiv and Moscow are compiling lists of the thousands of children moved to Russia since President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as part of the mediation process, which has not been previously reported.

The highly sensitive talks, which have been ongoing for several months, indicate third parties are still looking for ways to agree compromises between Ukraine and Russia in the hope they can evolve into channels for potential peace talks aimed at ending the war.

Former Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, who has previously mediated with Ukraine with Putin’s blessing in peace negotiations, prisoner exchanges and a grain deal, is also involved in the discussions, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The need for mediators highlights the complexity of repatriating the relocated Ukrainian children, an issue that led the International Criminal Court to charge Putin with war crimes in March, along with his children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova.

The issue is so contentious that Ukrainian and Russian officials have refused to speak to each other directly, unlike for some past prisoner swaps or ceasefire negotiations.

“There is no [direct] communication with the Russian side,” said Daria Herasymchuk, children’s rights commissioner in president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office. “Moreover, we are convinced that there can be no talks in this direction, because it is not a question of exchange of prisoners of war, these are civilians, these are children.”

Saudi Arabia raised displaced children at a meeting of officials from selected G20 members in Copenhagen in June as part of broader discussions about the need for third parties to talk to both Ukraine and Russia, according to a diplomat briefed on the talks.

The western countries gave Riyadh their blessing to continue mediating on the children and other issues including the grain deal, fears over contamination at a Russian-held nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, and potential nuclear escalation, the diplomat said.

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sought to carve out a role as a peacemaker by brokering the failed talks on an end to the war last year, as well as the grain deal and several prisoner exchanges.

Spokespeople for Putin, Zelenskyy, the Turkish government, and Abramovich did not respond to requests for comment. The Saudi government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ukraine alleges Russia arranged the abductions of as many as 20,000 children with the explicit intent of erasing their Ukrainian identity. Yale’s Humanitarian Lab says at least 6,000 Ukrainian children have been moved to Russia, while Russia’s official figures count fewer still.

Neither side has kept centralised records of how many Ukrainian children have been relocated to Russia, while the differing circumstances in which they were taken make drawing up a full tally or working out where to send them difficult, the people said.

“There’s one situation when mom and dad are on Ukrainian territory. There’s another where there’s no mom and dad but there’s an aunt in Voronezh [southern Russia],” a person briefed on the talks said. “The goal is to count all the children to understand how many there are and then find the best solution for each child.”

Russia has used children in Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine as propaganda tools to justify its invasion.

Some children brought to Russia have been enrolled in “patriotic” classes where they sing the Russian national anthem, are taught the Ukrainian nation never existed, and are told Moscow is fighting a war against “Nazism”.

Ukraine claims Russia is trying to eradicate the children’s Ukrainian identity, which Kyiv says is a form of genocide. “We are well aware that their actions are not chaotic, but they had a well-planned genocide policy towards us,” Herasymchuk said. “They are kidnapping children to replenish their dying nation.”

Another factor complicating the talks is the different ways the children arrived in Russia.

While some were forcibly taken in the early weeks of the invasion by Russian soldiers and publicly paraded, others were brought there by pro-Russian relatives or sent to Russian summer camps, then separated from their families when Ukraine retook their hometowns.

Though Russia has said it will let any child return to Ukraine if a legal guardian can physically reclaim them, parents have to do so on their own as Kyiv and Moscow refuse to engage directly on the issue.

Many of the Ukrainian parents lacked passports or the money to travel, making the roundabout route into Russia via Poland and Belarus or the Baltic States even more challenging. About 370 children — a small fraction of the total number that Kyiv says are stranded in Russia — have returned to Ukraine since being displaced.

The mediators hope Ukraine and Russia can both agree on a tally of the children so their families can reclaim them.

“This is too sensitive, no one trusts anyone. They need an independent body that will have the data of all the children and will be accepted by both countries,” a person involved in the talks said.

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Teach The Truth Ominous lessons from Florida DAN RATHER AND ELLIOT KIRSCHNER JUL 22 Kwame Akoto-Bamfo‘s “Nkyinkim” sculpture, dedicated in memory of victims of the Transatlantic slave trade, at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama (Photo credit: Raymond Boyd) I was born 66 years after slavery was legally abolished by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Not exactly ancient history. Today, that’s how long ago the Eisenhower administration was, or Elvis Presley’s first number one hit.  And the legacies of slavery — lynchings, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement — were woven tightly into the American tapestry of my youth. They still echo with us. Loudly and persistently. No matter how much some would want us to ignore the clamor of justice. As much as we wish American history were different, tragedy is part of our reality. We do a grave disservice to future generations if we sanitize the truth. People can behave horribly. Societies that profess noble values can countenance violent bigotry. We can either look back from whence we have come with clarity, or we can try to muddy the roots of the present and weaken ourselves in the process.  This week, the Florida State Board of Education reworked its standards for teaching Black history. The changes come in response to the state’s so-called “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.” Passed last year, it limits training and education around issues of race, sex, and other criteria for systemic injustice. At its heart is a core belief that has animated right-wing culture warriors: that people alive today should not be made to feel bad or even uncomfortable by the sins of the past. The thinking goes, that was a long time ago.  But of course it really wasn’t. And the legacies of the past live on. And if we don’t learn from history, we are bound to repeat it.  Proponents of these new standards, especially their biggest cheerleader, Governor Ron DeSantis, say they promote teaching positive achievements of Black Americans in history. No problem there. It’s when it comes to the other side of the coin that we have a big issue — the new lessons seem intent on downplaying the horrors of the Black experience. In other words, once again, the truth. The truth revealed by hard facts.  One passage that has gotten a lot of attention is for middle schoolers. It states they should learn that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The danger of this narrative is striking. A system that brutalized, raped, and killed human beings while stealing their freedom and denying their humanity is rotten to its core. That enslaved people were able to find resilience and build lives in some form is a testament to their courage and spirit. There is no “other side” to the story of slavery.  It is true that these new standards, as horrific as they are, would have been a great improvement over what I learned in my segregated middle school. We have come a long way. But that was because of the bravery of civil rights leaders and activists who fought, sometimes with their lives, for a full realization of American values. Any receding from progress — as this surely is — represents a threat to our democracy. We have been strengthened as a nation, all of us, by a national movement to right the wrongs of our past.  It is tempting to try to ignore DeSantis. He is a bully. He wants a reaction. He uses cruelty and disingenuity to garner headlines. He feeds off the anger of his adversaries.  But he also has power. And the lessons of history tell us that we should not ignore would-be autocrats.  The generation that lived through the fights over civil rights in the 1950s and ‘60s is passing away, much as the generation that remembered the Civil War did during my own youth. The loss of the earned knowledge of living through and fighting for change is profound.  This makes it all the more important that when we teach history, we teach the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Or as close to it as is humanly possible.

7/21/2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

 

As renegade states flout its rulings, the illegitimate Roberts Court reaps the disastrous but predictable consequences of its assault on our Constitution.

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“On June 8, the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a lower court blocking the congressional districting map Alabama put into place after the 2020 census, agreeing that the map likely violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act and ordering Alabama to redraw the map to include two majority-Black congressional districts.

“Today the Alabama legislature passed a new congressional map that openly violates the Supreme Court’s order. By a vote of 75–28 in the House and 24–6 in the Senate, the legislature approved a map that includes only one Black-majority district.

“Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and many of the other members of Alabama’s congressional delegation had spoken to the Republicans in the state legislature about the map. Editor of the Alabama Reflector Brian Lyman reported that the map’s sponsor said he had spoken to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) too: “It was quite simple,” the sponsor said. McCarthy “said ‘I’m interested in keeping my majority.’ That was basically his conversation.”

“Alabama governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed the bill into law.

“Today, assistant U.S. attorney general Todd Kim and U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas Jaime Esparza wrote to Texas governor Greg Abbott and Texas interim attorney general Angela Colmenero warning that the actions of Texas in constructing a barrier in the Rio Grande between the U.S. and Mexico “violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties.”

“The floating barrier violates the Rivers and Harbors Act, which prohibits the construction of any obstructions to navigation in U.S. waters and requires permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before constructing any structure in such waters. Abbott ignored that law to construct a barrier that includes inflatable buoys and razor wire.

“Mexico has also noted that barrier buoys that block the flow of water violate treaties between the U.S. and Mexico dating from 1944 and 1970, and has asked for the barriers to be removed. So has the owner of a Texas canoe and kayaking company, who says the buoys prevent him from conducting his business. And so have more than 80 House Democrats, who have noted Abbott’s “complete disregard for federal authority over immigration enforcement.”

“Unless Texas promises by 2:00 Tuesday afternoon to remove the barrier immediately, the U.S. will sue.

“Abbott has made fear of immigration central to his political messaging. He is now faced with the reality that Biden’s parole process for migrants at the southern border has dropped unlawful entries by almost 70% since it went into effect in early May, meaning that border agents have more time to patrol and are making it harder to enter the U.S. unlawfully.

“Abbott’s barrier seems designed to keep his messaging amped up, accompanied as it is by allegations that troops from the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety have been ordered to push migrants, including children, back into the river and to withhold water from those suffering in the heat. There are also reports that migrants have been hurt by razor wire installed along the barrier.

“Abbott responded to the DOJ’s letter: “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.”

“Yesterday, on the same day that Shawn Boburg, Emma Brown, and Ann E. Marimow added to all the recent stories of Supreme Court corruption an exclusive story showing how then-leader of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo funded a “a coordinated and sophisticated public relations campaign to defend and celebrate” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to advance a bill that would require the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of ethics.

“We wouldn’t tolerate this [behavior] from a city council member or an alderman," committee chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) said. “It falls short of ethical standards we expect of any public servant in America. And yet the Supreme Court won't even acknowledge it’s a problem.” “The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act,” Durbin said, “would bring the Supreme Court Justices’ ethics requirement in line with every other federal judge and restore confidence in the Court.”

“Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) disagreed that Congress could force the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code. “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” he said, although he agreed that the justices need “to get their house in order.”

“Today, Dahlia Lithwick and Anat Shenker-Osorio noted in Slate that voters of both parties strongly support cleaning up the Supreme Court.

“As signs of an indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election grow stronger, Trump has taken to threats . When asked about incarceration, Trump said earlier this week: “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters, much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016. I think it would be very dangerous.”

“His loyalists are working to undermine the law enforcement agencies that are supporting the rule of law. On July 11, 2023, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to chair of the Committee on Appropriations Kay Granger (R-TX) asking her to defund Biden’s immigration policies as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which investigates crime.

“It is notable that, for all their talk about law and order, the Republican-dominated legislature of Alabama and the state’s Republican governor have just openly defied the U.S. Supreme Court, which is hardly an ideological enemy after Trump stacked it to swing to the far right.

“The Republican governor of Texas is defying both federal law and international treaties. After rampant scandals, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court refuses to adopt an ethics system that might restore some confidence in their decisions. And, aided by his loyalists, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is threatening mob violence if he is held legally accountable for his behavior.

“The genius of the American rebels in 1776 was their belief that a nation could be based not in the hereditary rights of a king but in a body of laws. “Where…is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense. “I'll tell you Friend…that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

“Democracy is based on the rule of law. Undermining the rule of law destroys the central feature of democracy and replaces that system of government with something else.”

— Heather Cox Richardson, 7/21/2023.