To be fair, the article has several quotes by school administrators and parents who say they know slavery is wrong, but also quotes a parent who says it “offers an accurate portrayal that is overlooked of how many slaves were treated kindly by their owners.” Yeah, because even though they bought and sold human beings, that doesn’t mean all slaveholders were bad! Why should the slaveholders get so much stick? Poor slaveholders. And these unfortunate kids, by reading so much anti-slavery “indoctrination,” are only getting one side of the story. Because, you know, there’s so many different sides when it comes to slavery. It’s such a hard moral dilemma, whether or not treating people like property is wrong. I mean THE BIBLE says it’s okay. Yeah, you can just forget all that crap about loving thy fellow human beings as thou wouldst love thyself, I’m sure Jesus would think slavery is totally awesome. After all, those slaves had such great medical care.
I’m trying to be fair to the South, and to Christians, since I know a lot of rad people who are Southern and/or Christian, but fuckit, that’s getting a lot harder to do. I only hope that enough parents will be outraged at this that they’ll yank their kids out of that crazy fucking school, but somehow I doubt that.
P.S. If you really want to be sick, read the quotes from the booklet in the sidebar.
They ought to follow it up with the PBS show where they had the forensic anthropologists discussing their finds in the slave graveyard they found in NYC about 10 years ago. In particular, the segment where they show a skull which fractured around the top of the vertibra because the woman had to carry excessively heavy loads on her head. I think she lived about three days after her skull fractured, and the anthropologist said she was in excruciating agony the whole time.
Or maybe the segment where they’re holding up a twisted femur, and describe how the man it had belonged to, had broken it, but had been forced to continue working with it broken. He lived for years with that, and was in constant pain the entire time.
Yeah, slavery, it was great, that’s why we had a war about it, and so many people died because of it. Asshats.
Quite frankly, even if slaves had been treated well, they were still slaves, and that very fact makes it an act of cruelty. If you want to treat a person well, well, you don’t try and OWN them in the first place!
Every day it seems like someone is intent on showing “the other side” of things like this. What’s next: the Japanese internees didn’t have it so bad? Those concentration camp prisoners were exaggerating?
Oh, wait a minute…That stuff has been said already.
The civil war was not just about slavery. Besides which, people in the North were not opposed to slavery on ethical grounds so much as the fact that they didn’t need it any more because of industrialization.
So then why do you support the Republicans if it means you’re helping the re-implementation of slavery? That’s like saying, “I voted for the Nazis, but it’s OK because I’m opposed to their policy of exterminating the Jews.” :rolleyes:
Southern history is not something I, as a Southerner, am very proud of but it annoys the hell out of me to see ***American ***slavery labeled as Southern. It’s disingenuous at best as the North was not especially abolitionist and Lincoln especially was not. If I remember correctly, the man was even an advocate of forced resettlement of American blacks to Africa and the vaunted Emancipation Proclamation was nothing more than a political weapon instead of a true humanitarian gesture.
If Fort Sumter had not been fired on, it would have been decades more before slavery was ended in America. Don’t kid yourself otherwise.
Indeed. It was also in large part about states’ rights but even that was tinged by slavery as the South wanted all new states to decide on the issue of slavery by itself instead of having to uphold the Missouri Compromise. As disingenuous as the “Southern slavery” label is, so is the argument that “the Civil War wasn’t only about slavery”.
I was educated in the elite liberal public school systems of Connecticut, which as a point of context is right next to Massachusetts. In learning about slavery we learned such things as:
The New England states were at the heart of the triangle trade in slaves.
The fact that slavery was not particularly profitable in New England was certainly a contributing fact behind the absence of slavery here.
The curriculum did not attempt to hide the involvement of the northeast.
Aesiron The reason slavery is associated primarily is that the history of the northeast, absent slavery, would not change terribly much. Similarly for the midwest. The antebellum south (well, the deep south certainly) was built by and on slavery. No slavery, no bellum.
Liberal Would it not be fair to say that the vast majority of slaves imported were imported on New England ships (in the uniquely miserable conditions of the middle passage)? Given the arguments made about the relatively salutory conditions of American slavery and the fact that the institution (and domestic sales) continued for fifty years after the trade ceased to be legal I would guess that the majority of sales were by southerners to southerners of slaves bred right here in these United States.