graphic by isa de leon
A few weeks ago, a guy I know sent me a meme on Instagram of a muscular guy wearing a t-shirt that read, “A black woman is speaking, listen and learn.” I knew that him sending me the post was a good-natured reference to the fact that I often find myself going on tangents about all of my different intellectual pursuits, but the comments I read under the post were anything but good-natured. Most of them were white internet trolls saying disparaging things about black women. Luckily — or maybe unluckily, depending on how you look at it — I’ve been a black woman on the internet for a while and have developed a digital thick skin, protecting me from the insensitivities and absurdities of white America’s racism that runs rampant on the internet. So, it takes a lot for something I see on the internet to make me genuinely angry.
However, like most things in this life, a video I saw on TikTok tested my patience. My undoing came at the hands of clips of “Leo and Layla’s History Adventures,” a children’s show distributed by conservative news outlet PragerU. Leo and Layla and other PragerU programming have made headlines after being approved for use in K-12 classrooms in the Florida public school system. Contrary to what the name implies, PragerU has no connection to any sort of educational institution. Rather, it is a non-profit organization that specifically intends to create content combatting messages from the so-called “liberal media.”
It doesn’t shy away from its lack of academic accreditation. In fact, the company’s CEO Marissa Streit addressed it head on in a commentary video saying, “We’re not an accredited institution. These days, accreditation is synonymous with controlled … if we actually get an accreditation will we be controlled by political elites, the department of education … so we actually decided to have education freedom.” Someone should probably tell her that accreditation actually exists so that institutions are accountable for releasing academic information that is actually, you know, accurate. The PragerU website features programming like The Candace Owens Show — an interview-based talk show featuring the GOP’s favorite heat damage warrior and conservative mouthpiece — Candace Owens, and How To, a series that provides “life skills and character development for tweens and teens.” The series features videos titled “How to be a Rational Patriot,” “How to Embrace Your Masculinity” and (hilariously) “How to Be Reasonably Green.” The videos are about what can be expected from a media outlet that was founded by a person who famously decried “The Left” for making it impossible for white people to say the N-word on TV anymore.
But back to Leo and Layla. The show follows brother-sister duo Leo and Layla as they use an app (?) to time travel to meet historical figures and glean insight into modern-day problems. Despite its seemingly innocuous premise, the show is really a thinly veiled attempt by PragerU to plant the seeds of conservative propaganda into young and developing minds. For example, in one episode titled “Leo and Layla Meet George Washington,” Leo and Layla jump around time to see George Washington in the midst of battle during the American Revolution. In another, Leo and Layla help mediate an argument between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams by reminding them of their shared love of America. Although the details may differ, the regurgitated motif remains the same: THESE ARE THE GREATEST HEROES OF ALL TIME AND WE SHOULD ALL STRIVE TO BE JUST LIKE THEM. Forget about them pillaging Native American land, or engaging in sexual relationships with teenage slave girls as grown men. These men are our founding fathers.
Tired nationalism aside, the true horror is the show’s continuous effort to justify America’s history of racism and oppression by distancing white Americans from its implications. There are a few different episodes of Leo and Layla during which they meet black activists and thinkers, and in every single one of them, PragerU uses their images, likenesses and histories to push a narrative that is in direct opposition to what these pivotal leaders stood for. The most obvious and disgusting case of this is in the episode “Leo and Layla Meet Frederick Douglass.” Leo and Layla travel back in time after watching news coverage of Black Lives Matter protestors advocating for police abolition to speak with Frederick Douglass, an escaped enslaved person and avid social reformer and abolitionist. Puppet!Douglass — aka PragerU’s propagandist version of Douglass that I refuse to conflate with the words and actions of the actual Frederick Douglass — begins with his take on his experience as an enslaved person, “It was very hard, and I was often sad.” Wow, PragerU! That’s definitely not a huge understatement at all! The rest of the video is more of the same, creating a sinister narrative in which Puppet!Douglass continuously reinforces to the children that while change and equality should be pursued — it should always be done within the confines of the Constitution, and it should never be violent. When Leo asks how he feels about the founding fathers being slave owners, Puppet!Douglass reconciles the institution of slavery by answering, “Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong … but they made a compromise to achieve something great … the making of the United States.”
Later in the episode, when abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison is referenced, Leo and Layla share that they have never heard of him. Puppet!Douglass explains that Garrison was a radical who “refuses all compromises, demands immediate changes and burns things down when he does not get his way.” In allusion to the BLM protestors from the start of the episode who were using violence to prompt change, the kids share a knowing glance, saying that they have people like that in the modern day. They tell Puppet!Douglass that his way — the nonviolent law-abiding good American way — is the right way to prompt change. The children also use this morality argument to justify why William Lloyd Garrison is not as well known as Frederick Douglass. He is violent and thus cannot be an American hero. The crux of the entire video hinges on this point — but the problem is that this simply isn’t true.
Firstly, Frederick Douglass did not support a wholly non-violent approach to abolition. He often voiced support and admiration for the efforts of the formerly enslaved people who used violence to liberate themselves from their French oppressors during the famously bloody Haitian Revolution. In 1854, when James Batchedler — a marshal who was tasked with guarding an enslaved person who had attempted liberation — was murdered by a group of anti-slavery protesters, Douglass supported his murder, saying, “His slaughter was as innocent, in the sight of God, as would be the slaughter of a ravenous wolf in the act of throttling an infant.” Although Douglass is known for his oration and non-fiction writings, his sole work of fiction sheds great clarity on his opinion on violent resistance. The “Heroic Slave” tells the story of a rebellion on the slave ship Creole, in which over one hundred slaves take control of the shop that has abducted them. Obviously, this is not a person who thinks that pacifism is the end-all-be-all path to liberation.
On top of all of that misinformation, Douglass certainly did not see the actions of the founding fathers as a necessary compromise. In his stirring public address “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”, delivered to an audience at the White House on July 5th, 1852, he completely lambasts the notion of American nationalism. Douglass asks the audience — which included Franklin Pierce, the President at the time — “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license.” Douglass was never complacent in the institution of slavery, and PragerU’s bastardization of his message not only insults his name but also completely destroys any credibility that Leo and Layla’s History Adventures could have as an educational tool.
Of course, that’s not the video’s only inaccuracy. William Lloyd Garrison has most definitely not been forgotten by history. His anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, was immensely popular during its time of publication because of Garrison’s rejection of the gradualist approach to abolition. I can think of a lot of reasons why PragerU would target Garrison to push this false narrative. For starters, he famously publicly burned a copy of the Constitution as a part of a demonstration of the corruption of the American republic. But the clearest motivation is that Garrison was a white man whose rhetoric approached the institution of slavery in the United States as an issue of morality. While the characters who talk about slavery in any given episode of Leo and Layla regard slavery with a negative connotation, they are always quick to write it off as a “blemish in American history” that has no implications on the character of the Founding Fathers or the greatness of America. The rhetorical underplaying of the severity of the institution of slavery distances it from what Garrison’s advocacy recognized it as — an abominable display of human cruelty.
PragerU is not interested in teaching history. They are interested in spreading a revisionist narrative. This is also reinforced in other episodes — in “Leo and Layla Meet Christopher Columbus,” Leo and Layla confront Christopher Columbus for owning slaves. He essentially explains that while it’s great that people are against slavery in the future, it does not make sense to judge people for participating in slavery in the past because it was the norm back then. The reality of the situation is that slavery was a violent, morally abhorrent and unnecessary institution, and any person who has ever owned a slave is a bad person and not a hero or someone who people should look up to no matter what. Recognizing this truth is not a modern convention, either. In an 1854 speech, Garrison said, “Every slave is a stolen man; every slaveholder is a man stealer. By no precedent, no example, no law, no compact, no purchase, no bequest, no inheritance, no combination of circumstances, is slaveholding right or justifiable.” So no, PragerU, Christopher Columbus can’t get a pass on owning slaves because “everyone was doing it” — everyone was NOT doing it.
If white America keeps distancing itself from the legacy of slavery like the conservatives at PragerU want them to, then they will lack the ability to think critically about the intersection between race, the law and the socioeconomic systems that exist in our country — which will only make it harder for people of color to see any sort of equity in the American system. If white American children are being taught to distance themselves from the legacy of slavery before they can even truly conceive what slavery is, it practically guarantees that the cycle of white supremacy will continue to flow on and on with no way of stopping it. PragerU’s content has already started making its way into schools, and a quick look at its website clarifies that Florida is only the beginning.
The GOP keeps making it more and more disturbingly clear that part of their agenda is an attack on the marginalized groups in America. It’s one thing to have to wade through alt-right TikToks and racist Instagram infographics, but it is an entirely different thing to have to combat this ideology when it seeps into schools. As more and more damning legislation passes, it is important that we who know the truth keep standing up to tell it. We must educate those who are younger than us, especially in the face of the revisionist narrative of history that the Republican party keeps trying to push on to America’s youth. Things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better, but we can not be discouraged by this. Instead, we must keep standing up to tell the truth.