Op-ED: A Look At The Pitiful Black ‘Scholars’ Florida Selected For New Black History Standards

Listen: We’ve already dragged Florida’s new (anti) Black history standards to death. The requirement for educators to teach middle school and high school students that enslaved people benefited from slavery and that Black people also committed acts of violence during race massacres has been denounced, debunked, condemned and ridiculed across social media, academia and by Black people everywhere. Even Black conservatives have popped their heads up from the dregs of the sunken place to ask Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: Dude, TF is this?

Speaking of Black conservatives, two of them helped develop this new Black-history-for-white-nationalists curriculum, and a look at their backgrounds shows exactly why they were selected to do so. These two “scholars,” as DeSantis called them, defended the new standards in a statement saying that the “intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted.” They also called the standards “factual and well documented,” which they proved not to be as at least half the examples they cited of slaves benefiting from slavery were of people who were not slaves.

It’s almost as if they weren’t historical “scholars” at all. But if that’s the case, why would the DeSantis administration select them for a job they’re not qualified for? Was it because they’re Black and the administration thought Black “educators” could sell the curriculum better? Is this the kind of DEI DeSantis is OK with?

Let’s just take a look at them individually to see how well they pass the white conservative “Black friend” smell test.

Meet Dr. William B. Allen.

According to the L.A. Times, in 1989, while serving as chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Allen gave a speech at an anti-gay conference titled “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?” that was anti-Black, anti-Gay, anti-minority and anti-civil rights. (It’s almost as if this man has never had a job he was qualified for.)

The focal point of Allen’s speech seemed to be that “special classes of protection for homosexuals and other minorities” are a “fatal mistake” that heightens “tensions and antagonism” within society. In other words: Y’all are making straight people and white people angry by protecting the marginalized from their bigotry. Now stop it!

Allen even suggested that protections for Black people represent “the beginning of the evil of reducing American blacks to an equality with animals and then seducing other groups to seek the same charitable treatment.” I suppose it’s really no surprise that the guy who thinks Black people are “animals” for wanting laws that protect them from anti-Black violence and discrimination also thinks enslaved people were under-glorified trade school students.

Also in ’89, Allen was charged with kidnapping a 14-year-old girl from an indigenous reservation in Arizona because she was the subject of a custody battle between her biological mother and a white couple that wanted to adopt her. Allen claimed the girl wanted to leave the reservation, and it is for that reason that he abducted her so that she could be in the moving arms of a Caucasian family that apparently wanted to appropriate an entire child from her home, family and culture.

Allen has more recently been involved with an anti-affirmative action group and “a pro-life Christian organization” that believes abortion “has been particularly harmful to black culture and communities,” which “were being targeted with abortion clinics,” as opposed to the reality that Black women were given access to facilities that allowed them to make their own decisions about what to do with their bodies.

So, yes, Allen appears to be perfectly qualified to be a Black lackey for white supremacy. Let’s move on to his sunken place cohort.

Meet Frances Presley Rice.

Rice, first and foremost, does not appear to be a scholar of Black history.

Rice is the chairwoman of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA), an organization that responded to the election of former President Barack Obama by taking it upon itself to issue white people a “White Guilt Emancipation Declaration,” which declared that “white American citizens are now, henceforth and forever more free of White Guilt” because America had elected “a socialist who does not share the values of average Americans and will use the office of the presidency to turn America into a failed socialist nation.” (I’m so distracted by the degree of wannabe-caucasity here that I almost didn’t notice anti-Black delegation’s grammar fail. What in the Amistad phrase book does “forever more free” even mean? But no—I’m sure Rice is the one we need educating the youth.)

Rice’s LinkedIn profile indicates that she holds a law degree and an MBA, that she has a background in film production and screenwriting, and that she has worked or consulted on a few right-leaning Black history productions, but there’s simply nothing there to suggest that she has any academic credentials that would qualify her to create Black historical curricula.

She does, however, have plenty of experience in being loud, wrong and/or disingenuous in her telling of history.

In 2006, she ran radio ads across the country that claimed Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, which is not true. She also ran ads that claimed Obama was associated with “unrepentant terrorists.” And she joined fellow GOPropagandists in showing she has zero understanding of historical context regarding the Democratic Party’s link to the KKK and slavery, or Nixon-era southern strategy, which she defended as an effort to end anti-Black discrimination rather than the strategy of using veiled racism to appeal to white voters that every reputable historian knows it to be.

From the Herald-Tribune:

When hearing that the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, Jim Greer, had expressed disappointment in her magazine, The Black Republican, which Greer had secured party money to publish, Rice dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

The magazine featured a picture of Ku Klux Klan members burning a cross, with the caption “Every person in this photograph was a Democrat.”

Article titles included “Democrats embrace their child molesters,” and “Top 10 Democratic sex scandals in Congress,” and “Democrats wage war on God.”

“This is the first time in my life that I have felt I am actually doing something about what the Democrats have done in the past and are doing now to black people,” Rice said. “If the Democrats had left us alone after the Republicans freed us from slavery we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. They are keeping blacks in virtual slavery.”

So, why would DeSantis and his administration select these people to help construct Florida’s new Black history education standards? Certainly, it has nothing to do with their educational backgrounds or their reputations for historical accuracy.

My guess is Allen and Rice were selected for the same reason DeSantis and the Florida Board of Education selected PragerU—an unaccredited conservative non-profit organization founded by loud and proud racist Dennis Prager—to provide classroom materials to Florida schools.

(Side note: Conservative talking head and House slave-whisperer Larry Elder once made an appearance on PragerU’s talk show, The Candace Owens Show, to suggest that descendants of white slave owners should get reparations for the money their ancestors lost when slavery was abolished. The way the sunken place, slavery whitewashing and white supremacist dots are connecting here is wild, to be honest.)

Florida put hard-right-leaning conservatives in charge of its educational standards because, despite conservatives’ claims that they’re anti-indoctrination, they’re actually all for it as long it’s the right kind of indoctrination.

“Woke” indoctrination = BAD

White nationalist-friendly indoctrination = No indoctrination at all.

Get it?

SEE ALSO:

If The Past Is Any Indication, Florida Censoring Black History Could Lead To Much Worse

Florida Approves Educational Lessons From PragerU, Which Was Founded By Suspected White Supremacist

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Op-ED: A Look At The Pitiful Black ‘Scholars’ Florida Selected For New Black History Standards  was originally published on newsone.com