Welcome to black history in America. Written for you by white republicans.
Maybe read the article next time before reacting?
“The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted. This is factual and well documented,” said Dr. William Allen and Dr. Frances Presley Rice, members of the group, before listing examples like Crispus Attucks and Booker T. Washington. “Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history. Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”
I did read the article. The issue is the wording. Personal benefit as a slave doesn’t seem like the wrong use of words to you? They were slaves. It doesn’t matter what they learned, it matters that there was no personal benefit as a slave. They may have been able to use skills after being “freed”. But there was no personal benefit to being born into bondage.
I’m not sure if this says more about the minimisation of the immorality of slavery or more about how standard modern employment practices are degrading to the point they fit the definition of slavery.
Either way, it’s not saying good things. Florida needs help badly.
Removed by mod
This is exactly their process, if their constituents swallow this as acceptable then feed them the next, slightly worse thing. Slavery was horrible and we haven’t recovered from it as a nation.
“Slavery was just an old term for on-call internships.” ~ Florida
Conservatives dehumanize life every time they share their philosophy. Boiling people and those situations down to this is sick.
Slavery as a jobs program jfc
It’s the logical extension of the idea that higher wages means less jobs.
Zero wages means no unemployment whatsoever!
And all you need to give up is human dignity, decency, and morals.
For what? Their next slavery gig??? “Now folks, there here slave can not only work the fields but they can cook and see and as such we will start the bidding higher because they’re more valuable.”
literally this. slaves with hard-to-replace skills were treated better, both individually and systemically. please don’t get me wrong, slavery was a horrid institution that represents the absolute worst humanity is capable of and there’s nothing that can happen to a person that is so awful that slave-owners don’t deserve it, but much like everything else in the western capitalist world slaves existed in a hierarchy. On an individual basis, house slaves were treated to “luxuries” that field slaves weren’t privy to, like being able to sleep indoors and even sometimes in individual chambers rather than communal housing, and greater access to the amenities of the house when they weren’t being used. On a more zoomed out level, slaves that came from areas with unique skills in their culture were granted much more leeway in preserving that culture than slaves that were used for so-called “unskilled” labor. One well-known example is that of the Gullah-Geechee people. Because they came from a people in Africa who knew how to grow rice, a process that is idiosyncratic compared to other crops and involves a lot of domain knowledge, they were mostly forced to work in rice paddies in the coastal lowlands of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. This let the Gullah-Geechee people preserve their heritage and language better than other slaves because their community wasn’t broken up at the whims of the masters. Only Gullah could work the rice paddies so the rice paddies were full of Gullah teaching other Gullah their language and culture. After slavery was reduced in America, those same rice paddies became the livelihood of those same Gullah people, who tended to form insular, rural communities that are still alive to this day.
So yeah, they’re arguing that slavery taught black people skills they could use to make slavery a bit more bearable. That’s the freedom that markets offer: slavery with amenities.
I don’t think he’s doing anything but concern trolling to benefit the right and to disinform the next generation of people. We have to reach out to the young ones they’re lying to and make sure they have access to the truth, and that they know their schools are being forced to lie to them.
They’re prepping their followers to openly support and advocate genocide. That is where that dark road leads down to.
now that they’re trying to cast slavery as on-the-job training keep that in mind when considering the rest of capitalism
Next they’ll be saying that slavery was “good exposure”.
Goddammit, Florida! Why are you so bad?! Seriously, F yourselves.
To paraphrase: Those who don’t want you to learn from history plan to repeat it.
That argument is as old as the transatlantic slave trade, possibly older. Slaves were forced into Christianity, supposedly saving them from Hell. In return, they were forced to work as slaves for their mortal lives. What skill could be more valuable than loving Jesus? The slave owners got to feel good about themselves, the slaves got Jesus and beatings and forced labor and worse, and the same twisted reasoning continues in slightly altered form here.
Gained insight into modern management practices
It’s not like anybody was learning anything in Florida schools anyway. Too busy snorting bath salts off of alligator strippers.
No slave ever learned anything beneficial by being a slave. Those skills became non beneficial simply by virtue of how they were forced on them. Even shit like farming cotton now leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths because it is tainted by that trauma. And the machinery required to render hand labor for it redundant was invented around the Civil War anyway, rendering any such skills anachronistic and obsolete.
And even if we granted that they learned some skills, exactly how were they going to apply it for their personal benefit? Does DeSantis think that slaves could just walk up to their masters and say “Hey Guy Who Owns Me Like Property, I’ve been doing this farming thing for a while and have gotten good at it. Would you mind if I left and started my own farm?”
Seriously, does DeSantis really think that slaves were set free so they could do things for themselves? Nope. They were kept at property until the day they died. This “they learned skills that they could use” is wrong on every level.
I mean, they learned one thing that was beneficial to them. “I need to get the fuck outta here…” and thankfully many did.
…Fair
It’s laughable that Ron DeSaster said “woke means war on truth” when him and his band of dumbass lunatics are pushing this garbage drivel.
