Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”
After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
There is a reason slavers are a common villain trope in a lot of fiction. The idea that slavery is in any way good is generally thought to be a universally rejected concept. Way to undoubtedly show your cards leadership slavers of Florida.
Is it really that hard to say our ancestors had fucked up practices? Why even suggest slavery had upsides to it?
Because the GOP is keen on bringing it back
Fits right in with the GOP’s desire to bring back child labor.
Yes. The closer labor costs are to zero, the happier the average capitalist is.
Why do you think they support FOSS so much? 😏
That’s a different topic, as they don’t own the outputs in FOSS.
They don’t want to feel bad about what their ancestors did.
They don’t want to feel bad about what their ancestors did.
I don’t think you need to feel bad about it to acknowledge it. That’s part of what makes it so infuriating. They throw around white guilt like it’s something progressives suffer from, but it’s very clearly something they cower and hide from.
My family hasn’t been here long enough to have been slave owners, but my grandfather was a little bit racist by today’s standards (and I acknowledge he may have been more racist than I realized). My dad is a boomer who always taught us to treat people equally, but he says things now (and did back then) that would be really offensive to a modern ear. I never heard the N-word from anyone in my immediate family nor grandparents, but I’m not sure it was never said out of ear shot, and I definitely heard it from a great-uncle or two.
It’s a little uncomfortable for me to say that out loud, but so what? It’s nonetheless true. It reflects on them, not me, and it would be no different if I could go back a couple more generations and find a slave owner in my family. Awful, uncomfortable, but something that does not reflect on today’s generation beyond their reluctance to admit it and what it meant and what it did and continues to do with regard to impacts on the community and the people who are descended from enslaved ancestors.
They should be feel bad about their own cowardice about admitting what happened in the past, not for the details of those past events.
If your great great grandparents did bad shit, don’t make it worse by trying to lie and whitewash it, make it better by encouraging those truths to see the light of day so society is bettered for it, or at the very least stop trying to prevent others from doing so.
But see, if someone admits that their parents/grandparents/etc were flawed, then they might come to the realization that they need to examine the ideas they grew up with, maybe change some. Maybe they themselves have behaved problematicly based on things they were taught. And what if that person starts questioning their faith/faith community’s behavior as part of this introspection? What if questioning makes a person feel as though they’re not “honoring their father and their mother”?
I’m 100% for that introspection and personal honestly, but I can see where a lot of people will be too scared of the work. More will be more scared of the “evil” of critical thought and nuance.
You’ve got a fair point, but it just makes me feel really hopeless. I think this is going to take a lot of years to turn around and fully undo the damage that’s being caused while half (or at least a third) of our country works on developing anything resembling emotional intelligence and critical thinking skills - and in the meantime they are degrading our educational system, civil rights, and the general state of public discourse. It feels like they are dragging a blade through the side of our social norms - how long is this going to take to heal?
I have a neighbor who would have just been my Republican neighbor twenty years ago, if I even knew his political leanings at all. Now he’s got handwritten signs in front of his yard proclaiming anyone who voted Biden is a moron. They rotate from time to time, and some of them are hard to read. One of them said something about “all four guns” but I couldn’t read the rest. Now is there any chance that man and I are ever going to be friends? Absolutely not, because I have no interest in ever speaking to him, and if we did have an honest conversation he’d learn I was a member of a group he’s maligned via publicly posted handwritten sign tens of times in the past few years. (Anyone who votes Democrat) I swear ever since the bud light thing Kid Rock is nearly the only artist I hear blaring from his garage when I drive by.
But maybe if things were like they were 20 years ago we’d get to know each other before we knew those things about each other, and we’d either be friends despite those things, or just never learn those things about each other at all. That’s gotta be repeated around the nation millions of times with different variations - what’s that doing to the state of our cohesiveness as a society and nation?
I really used to think people were over-reacting to how much influence Trump could really have, but I have no choice but to eat my words now. Lasting damage has been done which is surely causing people to be killed or traumatized every single day because these people are so terrified that trying to make things better will require some kind of admission of complicity regarding how shitty things are.
Sorry for my rant, has been really eating at me lately.
It’s harder to get people to return to the 1950s if they’re haunted by the realities of the 1850s. Best teach them everything was hunky-dory.
Because they want to reinstate chattel slavery, but need more of the population to fail to even try resist that.
Because they’ve benefited significantly from the results. Generational wealth for white Americans is significantly higher than black Americans because of this very thing.
They want to keep that flowing and avoid being told that they’ve had a leg up on almost half the population because of what their ancestors did.
My dad is morally superior to your dad!
Maybe? Got any cheese or good books?
To be absolutely clear, this is what all the groups demonizing “CRT” were fighting for. All the "well acshually"ing about how CRT was only a college course, etc etc, completely missed the point of the campaign. They’re not interested in facts. They want to legislate away any claims of racism by making it illegal to talk about facts.
That and, trying to create a situation where fewer people resist attempts to reinstate chattel slavery.
“developed skills”
I mean, that’s a weak argument for them to make anyway. The only ones to benefit from this new skill are the owners, not the slaves. Hard to say “I learned how to harvest cotton well” is worth being torn away from your family and brutalized repeatedly because they’ve decided a whole group of people are just property.
I’m glad the Confederacy lost the war. But I fear that it will, after all these centuries, win the peace.
Yeah. And you can also develop skills in jail - doesn’t mean we should be throwing people in jail indiscriminately and then argue it’s for their own benefit so they can learn new skills.
They lost the campaign. (And that’s not nothing, ending chattel slavery in the US was a boon to humanity.) The state of the war is still in question, however.
A headline to come: “Florida GOP to change state nickname, policies, to ‘The Sundown State’”
How? Because by coming to America they got Freedom? Florida once again bores through the bottom of the barrel.
Slaves (forcefully) developed skills to their (master’s) personal benefit! Florida could have a bright plan here to replace its immigrant workforce – imagine if the students were as skilled as slaves!
You don’t need skills like reading, mathematics, negotiating, or critical thinking!Abstract thinking? We live in the real world, not the abstract world.
So much student potential is wasted learning when it could be spent getting to the workforce sooner! You’ll have an income that never goes up, so it’s stable! You can’t count that high anyway! And you’ll have the same job for the rest of your life, so it’s stable! Who enjoys updating their resume, being interviewed, and getting rejected? Not me!
Slaves (forcefully) developed skills to their (master’s) personal benefit! Florida could have a bright plan here to replace its immigrant workforce – imagine if the students were as skilled as slaves!
You don’t need skills like reading, mathematics, negotiating, or critical thinking! Abstract thinking? We live in the real world, not the abstract world.
So much student potential is wasted learning when it could be spent getting to the workforce sooner! You’ll have an income that never goes up, so it’s stable! You can’t count that high anyway! And you’ll have the same job for the rest of your life, so it’s stable! Who enjoys updating their resume, being interviewed, and getting rejected? Not me!
Hold me back I’m gonna fedpost
I’m waiting for Floriduh GOP to whitewash the Holocaust in a similar manner - “It taught teh jewz value of manual labor.”
No way. That would piss off rich old Jewish folks who make up a lot of his constituents.
Well, since it was so beneficial why don’t we enslave white people, it really isn’t fair that they didn’t get chattel slavery too don’t you think?
DeSantis is just trying to suggest that it would benefitted white people to be slaves also.
