Did PragerU make a cartoon defending slavery?

Florida officials have chosen conservative platform PragerU to provide classroom materials to schools in the state, sparking a scandal over PragerU content, in particular a cartoon in which Frederick Douglass allegedly says slavery was a necessary evil.

NBC News ran a story headlined “Animated Frederick Douglass calls slavery a ‘compromise’ in conservative group’s video,” but this is dishonest because the video does not refer to slavery as a compromise in the regular sense, rather it refers to a package of five bills passed by Congress in 1850 known as the Compromise of 1850.

Imagine if PragerU made a video on the history of the racist Yellow Peril trope and NBC ran the headline, “PragerU calls Asians ‘yellow’ in animated video.”

The Compromise of 1850 resolved a national debate over whether slavery would expand to the new territories acquired from the Mexican-American War. California was admitted as a free state, the slave trade was banned in D.C., territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah were established without slavery restrictions and the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, requiring that slaves be returned to their enslavers and that officials and citizens in free states cooperate.

The PragerU video shows two kids, Leo and Layla, who travel back to 1852 where they meet Douglass and talk about the horrors of slavery. Then Douglass says, “Children, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong and they knew that it would do terrible harm to the nation. They wanted it to end. But their first priority was getting all thirteen colonies to unite as one country. The Southern colonies were dependent on slave labor and they wouldn’t have joined a union that had banned it.”

Layla asks, “Are you okay with that?”

Douglass replies, “I’m certainly not okay with slavery. But the founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great—the making of the United States. If they immediately outlawed slavery after winning independence, the Southern colonies would have formed their own slave-owning country. Our founders created a system they thought would have slavery end gradually.”

There is a reasonable debate to be had about whether it would have been better to abolish slavery and possibly allow it to flourish in a Southern slave nation or allow it to exist in parts of the Union with the goal of ending it everywhere. There is also a debate to be had about the degree to which ending slavery actually was the ultimate goal.

If I have a nit to pick with this video, it is definitely not that Douglass calls the Compromise of 1850 a compromise. Nor does the video show Douglass defending slavery, as others have claimed. But it does have Douglass defend the purpose of the Compromise to the kids, which he would not have done. We know this because in his address delivered at Broadway Tabernacle in New York on May 11, 1853, he said that the Compromise “reveals with great clearness the extent to which slavery has shot its leprous distilment through the lifeblood of the Nation.”

PragerU should have had Douglass weigh the pros and cons of the Compromise yet also express his personal disgust for it. But this mistake is not the same as defending slavery.

A lot of the scandal is not actually about the video itself but about the perceived politics of PragerU in general. Slate ran a story about the Douglass video with the headline, “The Quasi–White Nationalist Content Coming to Florida’s Public Schools.”

To make its case, the article notes another video in which Leo and Layla meet Booker T. Washington, who in real life was born enslaved, and who in the video says he would not prefer to have been born in another country because slavery has “been a reality everywhere in the world,” adding that he is “proud and thankful to be an American” because the U.S. was “one of the first places on earth to outlaw slavery.”

America was definitely not the first place to outlaw slavery. Xin dynasty emperor Wang Mang abolished slavery in the year 10. Bologna abolished slavery in 1256. The Philippines abolished slavery in 1574. But this proves slavery has been a reality everywhere in the world and that we should be thankful to be Americans, because whatever freedom index you use, the United States is one of the freest places on earth.

So again, Prager is historically inaccurate in the direction of making America look good. Douglass supported the Compromise. America was early to outlaw slavery. But in both cases, Prager is saying what makes America great is that it hoped to end slavery and was early to do so. Even though untrue, this clearly not defending slavery.

The Slate piece then notes, “When Layla expresses her sorrow over segregation and racism, [Booker T. Washington] reassures her: ‘You have nothing to be sorry about. You and Leo have done nothing wrong. Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.’”

That’s all we get in the article to determine whether the Washington video is “quasi-white nationalist.” And no, rejecting the doctrine of ancestral sin is not racist. Actually quite the opposite. Ascribing individual blame for transgressions committed by other members of one’s race, whether distant ancestors or living strangers, is racist.

The Slate article also cites another Prager animated program that “dwells partially on the evils of communism and socialism.” Why is this sentence in an article with a headline calling Prager content “quasi-white nationalist?” Is it quasi-white nationalist to note that during Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge targeted people wearing glasses? I have been to the Choeung Ek killing fields and wept when I saw the place where they bashed the skulls of infants against Chankiri trees before throwing their bodies into pits alongside their dead mothers and fathers. Now that I have shared that with you, is this a quasi-white nationalist essay?

To be fair, PragerU, which is not a university but an advocacy group run by talk show host Dennis Prager, does produce disinformation on topics such as climate change or the Southern strategy, which was the Republican Party’s strategy to boost support among Southern whites by appealing to their racism. As a result, many people went into this scandal with their spears already hoisted overhead.

Further, in her 2018 study “Searching for Alternative Facts,” sociologist Francesca Tripodi shows that PragerU content doesn’t have to be racist itself in order to be dangerous. PragerU can normalize racism by leveraging network effects to connect mainstream conservatives who bring Dennis Prager on their show with the likes of white supremacist Stefan Molyneux, who has been on Prager’s show.

The counter-argument is that sunlight is the best disinfectant but this only holds true when we expose such arguments for what they are. Molyneux did not sit down with Christopher Hitchens and have his arguments shredded like wet tissue paper for their absurdities to be made plain to the public. That would be constructive. Instead, the spotlight Prager shone on Molyneux was not sunlight but an LED—just as bright but without the disinfecting UV rays.

The problem is not that PragerU is openly saying racist things. The problem is that it plays footsie with certain racist talking points and does not take the time to explain the difference, leaving us to wonder why not. It also associates with racists without calling them out. What makes ancestral sin an absurd claim is that we don’t get to choose our ancestors and cannot be morally held to account for things that involve no decision. But we are liable for the choices we do make and friends are the family we choose.