Frederick Douglass has a new cartoon, but the depiction of the Black American abolitionist has been labeled as quite “misleading” as well as being “factually inaccurate.”
“Slavery was a compromise. The Black Lives Matter [BLM] movement led to more crime. Masculinity helped win World War II.” These phrases are just a few of the lessons that are included in the new PragerU Kids videos, put out by “the conservative nonprofit organization PragerU, which publishes short videos on political and international issues,” which was founded in 2009 by Dennis Prager. According to the nonprofit Media Matters for America, Prager is an anti-LGBTQ pundit and conservative talk radio show host.
In the video in question, the cartoon Douglass is depicted answering two modern-day children’s questions, saying “Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong, and they knew that it would do terrible harm to the nation.” The video continues, “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.”
Later in the video lesson, the animated Douglass says, “Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it.”
When one of the children asks if he was in agreement with the decision, cartoon Douglass states, “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.”
To add insult to injury in what is essentially a complete revision of history, “[t]he animated Douglass then mentions William Lloyd Garrison, a fellow abolitionist and friend, describing him as someone who ‘refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.’” To which one of the children responds how that “sounds familiar…We’ve got that type in our time.”
“Of all the PragerU propaganda you’ve seen, this might be the worst,” tweeted an investigative reporter and author David Heath, continuing “Frederick Douglass takes a dig at BLM while praising the founding fathers as abolitionists and calling the Constitution a ‘glorious liberty document.’”
This isn’t the only PragerU video that has been called into question. Another depicts the colonizer Christopher Columbus as saying “[s]lavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world…Even among the people I just left…Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?” continuing, “Before you judge, you must ask yourself, ‘What did the culture and society of the time treat as no big deal?’”
The controversial videos have received even more criticism after Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU made the announcement about the partnership “with the state of Florida as an education vendor to provide supplemental lessons.”
In context, this occurred a mere months after the state of Florida changed their educational standards, including the curriculum around Blacks benefiting from slavery. The state education department has said these materials “align to Florida’s revised civics and government standards.”