photo courtesy of PragerU
Overtly Conservative educational content creator, PragerU, is getting rightfully bashed online for its inaccurate depiction of Black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass in its recent animated lesson. Despite the concerning content of the lesson, the content is being pushed in Florida schools.
Social media users and academics criticized the clip, which features Douglass telling kids that the founding fathers had to “compromise” on slavery while they drafted the U.S. Constitution. In the animation, Douglass urged kids to work within the system’s confines to change society, taking an under-the-table shot at modern-day civil rights activists.
In the PragerU lesson video, Douglass spoke to two seemingly modern-day kids. He began, “Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong, and they knew that it would do terrible harm to the nation. Their priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country. The Southern colonies were dependent on slave labor, and they wouldn’t have joined the union if they had banned it.”
After painting the founding fathers as making a lesser of two evils decision, instead of acknowledging the underlying current of racism, PragerU’s Douglass continued on to praise the system in the animated lesson.
“Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it. I’m certainly not OK with slavery, but the founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great, the making of the United States. It was America that began the conversation to end it.”
The animated Douglass mentioned William Lloyd Garrison, who was, in actuality, a fellow abolitionist and friend of Douglass. He called him someone who “refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.”
One of the children then said, “Sounds familiar. We’ve got that type in our time.”
Investigative journalist and academic author David Heath tweeted a response to the PragerU video. In a post that’s been viewed over a million times, he wrote, “Of all the PragerU propaganda you’ve seen, this might be the worst. Frederick Douglass takes a dig at BLM while praising the founding fathers as abolitionists and calling the Constitution a ‘glorious liberty document.'”
Heath then continued to accurately inform viewers about what Douglass actually thought about slavery.