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?
Yes. The closer labor costs are to zero, the happier the average capitalist is.
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.
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.
