Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott, who is black, rebuked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for defending Florida’s curriculum regarding slavery.  That curriculum contains a line which offends those who have not read it in context. 

Quoting from an online article at Newsmax: 

The news outlet [Politico] noted the Florida standards are backed by DeSantis. They require instructors to teach middle schoolers that "slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit." 

"There is no silver lining in slavery," Scott said. "Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans, and even raping their wives. It was just devastating." 

Of course, the radical left seized upon the “skills” line which, if taken out of context, is comparable to the myth of the plantation-owner’s wife’s compassion for a sick slave. 

While the Florida curriculum, written by black scholars, is emphatically anti-slavery (of course!), there are two things that must be said about the offending line:  First, it is definitely not presented as a “silver lining.”  

Second, and most importantly, it is a fact. 

In rare cases, some slaves did indeed learn trades that became of value to them, once they were freed.  No justification of slavery can be, or was, inferred by noting that fact.  No one would wish to be a slave no matter what they could learn while in bondage.  The curriculum, according to those who have actually read it, and spoken of it, does not pretend otherwise. 

That second part (about facts) is something that is utterly irrelevant, at best, to the Left.  Factual information to them can be just as offensive as a false slur is to the rest of us.  Tim Scott, himself the target of scurrilous attacks from the left, should have immediately recognized that. 

The real reason that the left opposes this, or many other curricula, is that it does not whole-heartedly propagandize what the left teaches—that America is inherently bad, and must be diminished or destroyed. 

The Left wishes not only to censor and cancel opinions, it seeks to censor the truth.  They are just as guilty of indoctrination as anyone else.  They are no more compassionate than were the plantation-owners who sold children. 

That fact, above all others, is the one that the Left most desperately seeks to hide.

Image: Library of Congress, via Picryl // no known restrictions