Fox News contributor defends Florida curriculum changes on slavery
Johnny “Joey” Jones: “The point of the Emancipation Proclamation was politics. And politics is the root to all evil.”
Published
Citation From the July 24, 2023, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered
GERRI WILLIS (FOX NATION HOST): Right, and you absolutely quoted the curriculum correctly on this idea of slaves getting skills during that period that they used later. That is in the curriculum, it absolutely is, but it is much more than that. And I didn't read all 260 pages of this, but I did read some of it and let me just tell give you an example of what is possibly more even-handed. There's an entire study module entitled “Resiliency, contributions, and influence of African American from the colonial era through the westward expansion.” Look, this curriculum is more than one talking point, there's a whole lot more going on here. I feel like we have to tell the story from various points of view. If you study history at all, you know it is complicated, you know it is nuanced. You have to tell everybody's point of view and make it clear that there was a lot going on. It's not just one story, one meme. There is more to it than that.
JOHNNY “JOEY” JONES (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Yeah, I tend to agree. I guess what bothers me most about this is if you ask a gen-Zer today if they knew that there were members of Congress in 1870 that had been slaves for 40 years, they probably would say, “What? There's no way. Didn't the South just lock them all up on plantations and keep them there?” In the pushback here you have to tell the full story. The idea that Reconstruction was as terrible as it was, not just because the South treated former slaves badly, but because the North treated who was left in the South badly. And I'm not saying they were victims, I'm saying that bad stuff rolls downhill and the politics influenced how the people were treated. And so you have to tell the entire story of Reconstruction, the entire story.
What liberals would have us believe is that we went from fighting the Civil War to we didn't start recovering until the 1960s. They would not have us believe that for 100 years, we were moving in the right direction. Not in the right place, but moving in the right direction. I know this because I grew up in Georgia and had to learn things like the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free slaves. Because the point of the Emancipation Proclamation was politics. And politics is the root to all evil. This entire curriculum shows you that there was slave trade in the Caribbean, there was slave trade in Africa, there was slave trade in Asia, there was slave trade in Europe, and there was slave trade in South America at the same time there was slave trade in the U.S., and I believe that liberals would have our youngest believe that we were so evil from our inception, we were the only ones doing evil. It's not to excuse our evil, and by all means slavery is evil. Treating people like cattle is beyond evil, it's the worst thing I could imagine. Because then you have to dive into what that really means, and this curriculum from the bullet points I read, dives into that. The specific point she pulls out of I think about 94 curriculum points, from my understanding, was pointed toward saying this is what slaves had to work with once they were freed.