NPR’s Morning Edition had an interview the other day … and not a sweet kind of interview about some local farmer’s market or the pig that won the county fair. No, instead, they had a man named William Allen on the show, the guy who’s turning the Florida education system into a festering swamp with the help of Governor Ron DeSantis. I really don’t think Florida needs any more festering swamps; they’ve really got enough already in the Everglades. But from what I understand, William Allen filled this particular educational swamp with worse things than alligators. He filled it with justifications for chattel slavery.
And NPR just put him on the air.
Now, it’s not a problem to interview the guy. It’s a problem not to fact check him during said interview, just letting him spout off his inane and antihistorical notions of American history, rewritten to better serve Floridian conservative identity politics. Giving a man like that a platform and not checking him while he’s spouting nonsense on that platform seems, to listeners, like an endorsement of the things he says. And what makes things even worse is when you don’t do your own research beforehand and actually agree with some of the horsesh*t that Allen treats as fact.
For example, William Allen has said verbatim that Florida’s curriculum will teach “how slaves developed skills, which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” We’re all really curious about the mental gymnastics that Allen had to perform to somehow justify chattel slavery as beneficial to anyone but slave owners, but NPR host Steve Inskeep decided to bite. After Allen told Inskeep that “the facts sustain” the ludicrous notion that slaves somehow profited from their time in bondage, Inskeep backed that statement up, saying:
“I think you’re correct. You could even look at the movie ’12 Years A Slave,’ which is a true story of a man who was enslaved who knew how to play the fiddle. People had different skills and used them in different ways and sometimes were able to make money for themselves while enslaved. That seems to be factually true.”
Steve seems to be forgetting one fairly important thing: Solomon Northup didn’t learn violin while he was enslaved. And the men who were enslaving him sure as hell didn’t teach him. Northup was a violinist before he was enslaved. In fact, slavers used his ability to play the violin in order to fool him into showing up for a bogus job opportunity in Washington D.C. and then jumped and kidnapped him and then sold him in to slavery. If anything, slavery was a detriment to Northup pursing his skills, because I highly doubt that this captors provided him with a violin and practice time while he was enslaved.
That interview was BAD, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Professor of History & African American Studies Tera Hunter weighed in on Twitter by retweeting a user saying that Steve Inskeep’s statement was a “hard cringe.” Rock hard. Diamond hard. 10 out of 10 on Moh’s Hardness Scale.
She followed up with a tweet condemning the fact that Allen was able to spout his nonsense and defend his laughable education standards without any sort of fact checking whatsoever. Allen went on to make the bogus claim that Booker T. Washington somehow benefitted from slavery due to the fact that he named his autobiography “Up From Slavery” rather than “Down in Slavery.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Washington’s success came despite the fact that he was enslaved rather than because of it.
Similarly, Allen said that Fredrick Douglass’ slave owners were able to “inspire” him into to pursing his own education after his “slave mistress” briefly taught him how to read. Allen then sabotaged his own point by bringing up the fact that Douglas’ “owner” eventually “put a stop to” the woman’s efforts in educating Douglass. Once again, Douglass made the best of his life despite the efforts of the people who trafficked him, who would have much rather kept him in intellectual darkness.
This anti-historical stance of painting institutionalized racism and the slave trade as a boon to Black people needs to end. NPR should know that by now.
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