There’s a subtler message there also. Notice how they said "acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans”. They didn’t say "acts of violence perpetrated against and by whites” or "acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans and by whites” even though all of these phrasings are factually equivalent. But the description was presented in a way that explicitly linked African Americans and acts of violence together while the presence of white people was only indirectly implied.
Will always have the enlightened centrists who wedge themselves into middle to let the window keep shifting.
Oh sure they’ll claim to be sad after the fact, but for them it’s all an academic exercise anyway. They have the privilege of knowing they won’t be directly effected.
…affected.
God-damn-it. Yes I new that.
Not sure how much of that is directed at me or people like me. But I’ll counter that while there’s an element of truth in what you say (and by doing so, prove your point) there are also enlightened leftists who stand out on the fringe, loudly stating their opposition to what’s occurring rather than doing anything to prevent it from occurring. And they’re equally free of feeling the consequences.
Heh. I see what you did there.
From Jim Wright on Facebook:
The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was just north of Berlin. Outside its fence was a Brotfabrik (bread factory), where prisoners who were literally starving to death toiled to make bread to feed the SS.
The Nazis did this as a form of torture.
If they survived the war, Florida textbooks under Ron DeSantis might say those Jews learned valuable baking skills.
So, they just looked for successful Black people in history and assumed they had been slaves? Interesting view into their mental processes.
Here’s what I find insidious.
Kids grow up in a world where they see that a disproportionate number of Black Americans are poor, or in jail. They aren’t blind to that, and they have a natural curiously that is likely to lead them to wonder why.
There’s one way to answer the question: teach the long and deeply entrenched legacy of racism against Black people in America, much of which was formalized and is systemic. It’s a clear answer, it makes sense, and it comports with the facts. Kids will certainly be able to draw a conclusion, but it’s likely that conclusion will lean towards “there’s still more work to be done.”
This type of educational curriculum undermines that. Instead, it seems meant to teach that racism was a problem that used to exist, held all ethnicities and races back, and was fortunately solved in America’s ever constant march towards enlightenment.
And what does that do to these kids’ observations about crime and poverty? Perhaps it leads to a conclusion that some people just don’t have the qualities necessary to succeed. This kind of teaching not only fails to answer the obvious race question in modern society (why are some races less successful than others?), I believe that makes it harder for people to get to the right answers by confusing their understanding of how we arrived at the present day.
The Florida board of education is learning from the best. Original photo caption, Nazi propaganda poster, 1945: “A 14-year-old youth from Ukraine repairs damaged motor vehicles in a Berlin workshop of the German Wehrmacht. January 1945.”
Those 15 million Zwangsarbeit (forced laborers) the Nazis imported into Germany during WWII learned valuable skills like how to repair motor vehicles for the German Army. Why are people so focused on the fact that they were kidnapped from their home countries to slave for the war economy of the Thousand Year Reich? They learned skills! A good 80% or so weren’t worked to death!
Are Pox Noise hosts born this stupid, or do they take some kind of special training to get that way?
“No one is arguing slaves benefited from slavery,” [Fox News host Jesse] Watters said Friday on his prime time show. “No one is saying that. It’s not true. They are teaching how Black people develop skills during slavery in some instances that can be applied for their own personal benefit.”
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Yes, and yes.
I grew up in the South. Perhaps some other Dopers who also grew up heard this as youngsters, too:
Blacks shouldn’t complain. They’re better off in America than they’d be in Africa.
Mind you, the first word sometimes was the N-word. And I see Florida’s governor, quite possibly representing his state’s people very well (being a bigoted jackass, like many of them, sadly, are), has managed to get that particular sentiment I heard as a youth actually made part of the school curriculum. Good job, Guv!
And people wonder why I migrated out of Dixe.
Unsurprisingly, DeFuhrer’s time as a high school teacher was taken up by filibusters about how slaveowners were just hard-working small business proprietors and the North was wrong to interfere with their economic model.
But that is exactly what conservative orthodoxy demands. They believe in a hierarchy of intelligence/capability/lawfulness based on race.
I find it really interesting that slave narratives focused on family separation as much or more than beatings. Family separation was the true horror of slavery . . Your children taken away, probably to pain and abuse, but you’d never know. It was truly the unique element of slavery.
But we still don’t talk about it. It has always been downplayed by white writers, especially slavery apologists. And it is because in general there has always been this low key syereotype that black parents don’t love their kids like white parents. More like taking kittens from a cat. And that incredibly convenient belief has justified all sorts of racism.
A very good point.
That isn’t actually giving slaves enough credit
Many did manage to assert agency, often at great personal risk. Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl has a lot of examples of this. Slaves would run off for a week when their master did something beyond what was considered reasonable within slaveowner society. Sometimes it got them beaten or killed, but sometimes they got what they wanted. Sometimes they got beaten, but the master was still more circumspect next time, as he still bore the cost of a week’s loss of labor.
These sort of high risk strikes were incredibly brave, and over time they did result in an expansion of slave agency in generally. There were other ways slaves used social pressure to control outcomes. This worked much better in communities than out on plantations.
So I wouldn’t want to say slaves had no agency. There are many examples of innovative and determined individuals and communities leveraging their slight capital to improve their situation. And even in elementary school, something of that should be conveyed. Slaves as utterly helpless and passive is no better than slavery as mutually beneficial.
But the new Florida standards are clearly pushing the latter, not the former.
Well lets at least give Mr. Ron credit where credit is due. He’s right, they had property. In the form of, you know, people. And businesses. That they made and ran with those people they owned.
What good does do people to learn skills that they could use for their personal benefit if they’re not allowed to use them for their own benefit? Slavery was not trade school. Slaves were not interns. Any skills they learned, they were forced to use exclusively for the benefit of their owners.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Abraham Lincoln