In this instance, a small town in Alabama had an archaic and byzantine executive political system that meant mayors were rarely actually elected. A Black resident decided to run for mayor, a challenging process that required outside help, but he did it and won the election. The white majority council subsequently lawlessly prevented him from taking office and doing his job. A few years after being elected, he still hasn’t actually been able to take office.
In this instance, Florida presents new education standards. There are many objectionable pieces to this one, but I want to focus on a particularly egregious one. The Ocoee massacre in 1920 involved a Black man who tried to vote, a White mob chasing him to take refuge in another Black man’s home. The mob surrounded the man’s house and tried to break in. The homeowner chased off the house-breaking mob with a gun, killing 2. The White mob gathered reinforcements and attacked the Black part of town, murdering at least 30 Black civilians, including women and children.
The new standards want to assign blame for this massacre to both parties.
Please use this thread to track, discuss, and criticize other instances of modern Jim Crow in America.
I just read the article on the new Florida education standards and “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”. Sort of like how the holocaust provided an immersive learning experience on thermal and combustion properties, chemistry, medicine, and team-building under stress.
One of their own newspapers earlier this year detailed how badly the school system is doing. 4th graders in Florida consistently rank around the top 5 states in math performance, but by the time they hit 8th grade they’re down to 30th and lower, easily good for worst 4th-to-8th performance in the country.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from what little I can find, it looks like “slavery benefitted black people” is a serious mischaracterization of what they’re actually supposed to be teaching.
I guess I’m a victim on not having a Florida high school education. But I find it hard to categorize learning, for example, to be a wood worker as a slave as having much personal benefit for the slave, who remains a slave, just with a skill.
Well, after a 12-hour day repairing wagons in the cotton field, and after having been whipped or watched another enslaved person being whipped, the woodworker could build their own house, sell it, take that money and buy the materials to build a bigger house, sell that, and sooner or later, they will be billionaires, just like Trump!
I’m not sure what I’m missing either. But to say that they were, in some instances, allowed to use the skills they developed as slaves for their own personal benefit means something quite different in my mind from an assertion that they benefitted from being slaves.
It may not be the case that enslaved workers “learned the skill on their own” so much as “were taught to perform different duties as slaves.”
No one doubts that different kinds of labour on plantations may have been better or worse or that some skills exploited by the enslaver might be used by people after their enforced labour was done. Or that enslaved people exercised some agency. The real question is one of emphasis. Sort of like saying “Okay, Columbus engendered genocide, but wow! What a navigator” or “Columbus was a good navigator, but he participated in the genocide of thousands.”
This is infuriating, but I think it’s too late for the majority of kids. Secret’s out. Most of us have learned BS about the past in school. I hope things change, though.
