What Ron DeSantis doesn’t understand about slavery

Story precedes fact. That may seem counterintuitive, given that stories themselves are built on facts, but it is an important lesson that I teach my students in law school courses on advocacy and persuasion. The essential insight is that new facts are never received in a vacuum. Every listener, voter or juror interprets information in the context of their past experiences, assumptions, preferences, preconceptions and, yes, biases — almost always harmonizing the new facts with their preexisting mental image of the world.

Thus, a familiar or available story – often about the nature of social interactions or relationships – precedes the introduction of new facts by providing the necessary framework for valuing or understanding them. (This observation is not original with me, although I cannot remember where I first encountered it.)

Talented political figures exploit this phenomenon by fashioning stories that appeal to their targeted voters, which will then establish the backdrop for accepting or rejecting newly offered information.

Consider Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-Fla.) campaign against critical race theory (CRT). Although CRT – a graduate school discipline exploring the role of structural racism in American society – has never been part of Florida’s public school curriculums, DeSantis has repeatedly claimed that he is “taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.” In DeSantis’s story, Florida’s children were in danger of being taught a false version of American history, imbued with racial antagonism and that only his Stop WOKE Act could save them from learning “to hate our country or to hate each other.” 

DeSantis’s story was compelling because it appealed to his voters’ background sense of fairness and patriotism. For those who heeded DeSantis’s warning – evidently including every Republican in the state legislature – discrete facts were far less important than the global narrative of imminent racial provocation in the schools.

Thus, there was hardly a ripple from DeSantis’s supporters when he bragged that the Stop WOKE Act would empower students with “more historically accurate knowledge,” including the claim that “It was the American Revolution that caused people to question slavery. No one had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights.” 

The absurdity of DeSantis’s assertion should have been apparent to anyone who had ever taken a college level American history course. But it was calmly defended as at most a slight “overstatement” by those who accepted his story about the dangers of CRT.

There are two possible ways to rebut DeSantis’s false account. The first approach, although less effective, would be simply to provide contradictory facts, pointing out the many prominent American and British figures who questioned slavery before 1776. It is a long list, including:

• In 1689, John Locke developed the concept of natural and unalienable rights in “Two Treatises of Government,” calling slavery “vile and miserable.”  Nonetheless, Locke, like the framers of the Declaration of Independence, did not argue that natural rights prohibited slavery.
• In 1700, Boston’s Samuel Sewell published “The Selling of Joseph,” the first American pamphlet challenging slavery.
• In 1758, Quaker meetings in Pennsylvania and New Jersey ended their participation in slavery, followed by the London yearly meeting in 1761.
• In 1765, Granville Sharp published a major anti-slavery tract in London.
• In 1772, the British Court of King’s Bench ruled in Somerset v. Stewart that slavery was so “odious” that it was “not allowed by the law of England,” although the decision did not apply to the colonies.
• In 1775, the British essayist Samuel Johnson famously asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Those indisputable facts flatly contradict DeSantis, but they are probably meaningful only to those who already reject his idealized version of American history. To DeSantis’s supporters, however, the conflicting information will suggest only that he got his chronology somewhat wrong, without undermining either his credibility or his contrived narrative that the American Revolution “caused people to question slavery.”

A second and much more compelling approach was taken by the liberal political commentator Van Jones in an interview on CNN. After watching a clip of DeSantis’s statement that “no one had questioned slavery” before the American Revolution, Jones chuckled disarmingly, showing exasperation rather than anger or resentment. Then he said:

“You reveal a lot when you’re speaking about something you don’t know anything about,” Jones said.

“You know who questioned it? The enslaved people questioned it the whole time. And that’s the thing,” he continued. “It’s like you have a world view that so centers and so privileges a particular ideological agenda [and] a particular set of people that you say things that are just patently ridiculous. He’s the governor of a state, and there are kids in that state of all colors, all faiths, all hues, and he’s got to do a better job of representing all of them.”

Without a single reference to history books, Jones’s story effectively characterized DeSantis as someone unable to recognize enslaved people as human beings capable of questioning, much less resisting, their enslavement. DeSantis was not simply mistaken on the facts. Jones showed that he was blind to or dismissive of the true history of racial subjugation.

One story isn’t going to convince DeSantis’s hard-core backers to abandon him. But his exposure as racially obtuse (to put it mildly) may move some voters at the margins. It certainly shows that educational standards should not be determined by politicians, and that DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act is unlikely to improve Florida’s schools.

Jones’s cutting response to DeSantis was more devastating than any list of contrary facts because he powerfully contrasted the governor’s ignorance with the story of American slavery and its searing images of whippings, family separation and sexual abuse. The lesson is clear: Story precedes fact.

Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the author of “Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial” and many other books.