As if desperate to be added to the swelling ranks of the palpably dishonest, Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times has responded to my post noting that Kamala Harris is lying about Florida’s new curriculum by . . . well, by lying about it in turn. Here’s Hiltzik:
Its defenders say that’s just one item in a 216-page curriculum, so what’s the problem? Why, writes Charles C. W. Cooke of the right-wing National Review, the whole package “contains the word ‘slave’ 96 times, ‘slaves’ 23 times, and ‘slavery’ 45 times! The “skills” part, he writes, is only a “tiny (and correct)” piece of the total.
Leaving aside the stupidity of parsing a text by counting words—
Let me stop Hiltzik right there. That wasn’t my defense, was it? My defense was to post every single reference to slavery, slaves, abolitionism, civil rights, and African Americans that is in the curriculum — all 191 of them — so that readers could see everything that the course included. I didn’t argue that the course was good because it mentioned slavery a lot; I argued that the course was good on its own merits and that showing every element in full would reveal as much to any fair-minded observers. I listed the number of times that certain words appeared in the program only in the interest of explaining which items I chose to pull out of the course and reprint verbatim, and which I did not. Here’s that explanation:
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to achieve it is to list in one place all the relevant parts of the course about which she is complaining. So, below, I have copied and pasted every single reference to slavery, slaves, abolitionism, civil rights, and African Americans that is in the document.
. . .
Here’s the list. It’s 191 items strong. It contains the word “slave” 96 times, “slaves” 23 times, and “slavery” 45 times. I’ve pulled each line out in the order in which they appear, which is largely chronological. It starts with “the earliest slaves” and ends with “the integration of the University of Florida”
Hiltzik continues:
this evades the question of what the point is of placing this item into the curriculum at all. What’s the goal of teaching students that slaves may have learned skills that might have sustained them if they were lucky enough to be freed or escape?
That question has not been “evaded.” It’s been answered at length, including by the lead architect of the program. Here, for example, is an extract from my piece on this yesterday:
Asked why the course contains the one line that has been cherry-picked by critics, one of its architects, Professor William B. Allen — a black man who was born into segregation in Florida — offered up an observation that, in any other context, would be unobjectionable: While America’s millions of slaves were most certainly victims of the most abhorrent violence, domination, sexual assault, and more, they were not only victims, but people. Is this controversial now? At Oxford, I had a professor who liked to say that “Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the only man alive who had agency, you know.” His exhortation — always — was to remember that, however subjugated a man might be, he remained an individual rather than an automaton, and that to acknowledge that is not to endorse the disastrous circumstances in which he has been forced to struggle, but to recognize his humanity.
Unable — or unwilling — to grasp this, Hiltzik then offers up a profoundly stupid hypothetical:
Is it to show that subjecting human beings to rape, torture, family disruption, starvation unto death, and other brutality is only one aspect of a practice that also has, hey, its good points? That’s a bit like saying that Jewish men, women and children may have been marched into the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but at least they got a train trip to the countryside out of it.
No, it’s not like saying that at all. It’s like saying that some of the people who were marched into Auschwitz ended up displaying remarkable bravery, and insisting that, to avoid turning the victims of the Holocaust into a mass of indistinguishable numbers, those stories ought to be told. Hiltzik pretends that it is self-evident that to discuss in detail the consequences that flowed from an unquestionably evil act is in some sense to endorse that unquestionably evil act. But it’s not. Indeed, it is precisely that faulty premise that I — and the course’s architects — are pushing back against. As I wrote yesterday:
Max and Hanne Liebmann fell in love in a Nazi concentration camp. Are we to assume that, by telling their story as they do, they are endorsing the Final Solution? Our modern “triage” processes came from the Crimean War. Does this make that conflict worthwhile? The horrors of World War I revolutionized medicine. It was still the worst thing that had ever happened in the world until that point. Some of the most malicious people who ever lived — Dr. Josef Mengele, for example — have nevertheless produced work that can be of use, and that, as a result of that fact, yielded important and difficult debates over whether it should be of use. To avoid such thorny aspects of history out of fear of being demagogued or misunderstood represents the worst sort of cowardice and anti-intellectualism.
Hiltzik is engaged in that cowardice and anti-intellectualism. I hope it’s worth the clicks.