It’s depressing that something like that is needed in the first place.
Yeah it is. I’ve actually heard people make this argument too. How stupid do you have to be to believe that?
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Ol’ Pudding Fingers, himself, king of the Go-Go boots! The meatball-iest of Rons!
At the Atlanta History museum there’s a whole “both sides” exhibit on the civil war that makes this argument (and makes me vomit).
They put it in just in time for the '96 Atlanta Olympics and it’s been there ever since.
Atlanta has a bunch of traitors carved into a big rock on the side of a mountain too.
It’s annoying that the confederacy is viewed so closely to slavery that the only people that support them are people that want slaves (I mean there’s no other reason to support it now but it’s because of how they are viewed by dumb people)
The war wasn’t about slavery, the union had slave states but people without high school educations don’t know that
No one talks about Egypt taking over the cotton market or the parallels to today
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When did I say slavery didn’t exist?
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That doesn’t say slavery doesn’t exist, I know the American school system sucks but learn to read
The war wasn’t about slavery
The confederate states themselves said otherwise at the time.
The war wasn’t about slavery
This is both the most ignorant thing I’ve read today, and also ironic considering it’s followed by complaining about ignorant people
Way to show your ignorance and inability to learn from history. It’s about voting power and the same thing is happening today
Let’s take a group of states and for this example we will call them “red states” now imagine their policies lack broad appeal but they keep winning. Hard to imagine right? Hopefully you can fathom it
Now let’s come to an obstacle where they think it can either destroy their ensure they always win. Let’s say that obstacle is voting maps. Technically if the voting maps are fair then they always lose so what should they do? Rig the maps of course
Now let’s pretend another part of the country is blue, they have popular opinions and stand to benefit from fair voting. Let’s pretend they pass a law requiring voting be fair, well what can the red states do at that point? They have to rebel, it’s the only way to stay in power. Maybe they will attempt to avoid certifying an election or maybe they will storm that capital. If all else fails then they might attempt to form their own union
Now that you’ve seen a hypothetical, imagine if instead of red states and blue states it was slave states and non-slaves states. Now imagine if the blue/non-slave states wanted to bring in a bunch more states but they could only be blue (non-slave). Well then you would never have a red government
And that is what happened, the slave states were worried that they wouldn’t be able to control the country so they rebelled
I hope this entry level civil war education showed you how saying it was about slavery is dangerous and it fails to teach people the lessons from it that we are currently going through again
It was about the southern states wanting to own slaves. They said so themselves in their secession letters.
The northern states, not being complete monsters or wanting to treat fellow human beings like property, refused to let anyone join their side who wanted slaves.
Like come on
I know you’re wrong but you don’t have to lie
Should probably change your name to ILikeDownvotes
I think it’s more like not explaining it in terms of the economic conditions for which slavery really provided the basis for. Like the northern merchant economy vs the south planter class. When anyone could essentially get free real estate, convincing people to work the land to generate profit required coercion. Indentured servants since colonization were used, “white” slaves even preferred, but the existing trade networks like the Dutch were really instrumental in providing the means to extract profit from the land. Racism and white supremacy didn’t cause this, they developed out of this arrangement, the purpose of which was to produce cotton, corn, etc.
Slavery was crucial though because the public campaign against chattel slavery in the north was very real and a major contributor to the public acceptance and motivation for the war. The US as it exists today was essentially built between the Civil War and WW1, and reducing it to just slavery is really not explaining everything, but also it really was “about” slavery in many ways. So I just say yes it was about slavery, but also everything around slavery, and the things that made slavery “necessary” for that economic system to function.
So I just say yes it was about slavery
This leads to history repeating itself as people never learn past that
Having read the standards, possibly the worst part about them is that it’s not written such that you have to teach that racist bs, but it’s obviously written to give cover to those who do. So it’s not so much that it’s supporting a bullshit way of looking at slavery as an institution in the past. It’s really supporting the horrible people who continue to think that way today, and enabling them to pass it on to a new generation.
They’re not stupid, but they’re trying to ensure the next generation is.
Ugh… yeah you’re probably right
Alright I’ll bite. Why did it help?
IIRC, the common argument is that modern Black Americans have great opportunities by virtue of being in America. Without slavery, they would have been born in Africa.
This is ludicrous for a variety of reasons. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads to people saying your relative died “because of God’s plan”, as if suffering always has a good reason to it.
They overlook the destabilization of Africa that went on during colonialism that led to its current state
The lesson Florida is teaching is that slaves learned ‘useful skills.’ They don’t say who those skills were useful to though.
Yeah this argument fails because it subverts the context slavery existed in with a modern notion of American exceptionalism, and applies it in a transhistorical fashion to events in the past.
I could make a half hearted Devil’s advocate argument about it, but ultimately it’s a major detriment to the people living under slavery. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=evi_i7R0SFQ& just listen to the words of this letter and tell me that it was a benefit.
Even with the Devil’s Advocate argument, sure they may have learned skills that could have benefit them after they were freed, BUT THEY WERE SLAVES.
Also, it ignores the fact that society exists in Africa, so its not like they’d all be in loincloths or w/e the racist caricature of Africans they have is.
Also, how about all the slaves that were never freed because they died before emancipation? How did they benefit?
It’s like suggesting the holocaust benefitted Jews because they got Israel. How do you even apply this logic… that it’s okay to do evil because eventually something good is determined to happen that makes up for it? Do future generations getting a good thing justify the system that perpetrates oppression in the present day? Something good happening isn’t determined, and calling the post-war existence of freed slaves “good” is also a stretch.
They don’t. It’s just bullshit they made up to distract and confuse you. It’s a congress of baboons throwing shit at the wall to see what will stick.
The only good thing about Florida is eventually climate change will destroy it
hopefully, we can wall Florida off before that happens. you know. and make them pay for it.
Let me out first!
maybe we can figure something out… I jest, mostly. It just really pisses me off that as a whole Floridians are going against climate change- and immigration/refugees as hard as they are, despite a simple fact that they’re about become internally displaced refugees themselves. (okay, so ‘about’ is maybe a decade away? or three.)
kind of like how certain people were voting against aid for hurricane victims, then demanding FEMA aid when it hit them.
The problem is that Florida is actually fairly purple, but gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. are altering the outcomes of our elections.
I could see that.
Fuck Gerry and his mandering ways.
Our government is broken.
We shouldn’t need to pass a bill to prevent lies and irrational theories from being taught. Honestly, I can’t think of a reason why government should be telling teachers what they should be discussing at all (just like telling mothers how to deal with their health) - other than ensuring that children be given the best opportunities in the real world.
new standards published by the Florida State Board of Education earlier this year, which included language on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
How the hell does a school board even exist that could adopt this? This should never have passed in the first place. There’s too many bandaids in government resolving things that shouldn’t have ever been passed by idiots in the first place.
How the hell can anyone (DeSantis) continue being a government leader while claiming that slavery is beneficial?
This is what happens when people have little choice in elections but to vote for the candidates they dislike the least. We don’t get to vote for people we like, for people we believe to represent our values. We’re screwed by a two party system that’s funded by corporations and legislated by lobbyists. Ranked. Choice. Voting.
I had a sociology professor who taught us about Harriett Jacobs as a counter to racist claims like this (because apparently students now have to have evidence to back up why slavery was bad. That’s where we are.)
Harriet Jacobs lived in a crawl space for seven years after escaping her enslavers until she could make it to the north. I wish I could find the video we watched, but it basically said it was so small she couldn’t even stand up. That would be considered torture in other circumstances. And imagine living in a crawl space with no heat in the winter or AC in the summer, in the South? But it was still preferable to being property.
How the hell does a school board even exist that could adopt this?
Florida is a retirement state full of old white people. They are the last vestiges of racism in its old form. Of course those old assholes are pushing back against the idea that it was their families that caused racial inequality in America.
It’s like when descendants of Nazis try to say that their own grandpappy didn’t do any of the killing, he just had the swastika on his uniform he wasn’t that bad.
How does a retirement state of old people impact the school boards?
How does 45 year old Ron DeSantis qualify as “those old assholes”?People are likely to vote in someone who enacts policies they want. Politicians pander to voting blocks by introducing policy that appeals to them.
It’s not hard to connect the dots?
We shouldn’t need to pass a bill to prevent lies and irrational theories from being taught. Honestly, I can’t think of a reason why government should be telling teachers what they should be discussing at all (just like telling mothers how to deal with their health) - other than ensuring that children be given the best opportunities in the real world.
We have a public school system, and you very much want that public school system regulated. You cannot ensure that students have opportunities without regulating education.
What you don’t want is fucking lunatics in your legislature, saying things like “slavery good.”
This is what happens when people have little choice in elections but to vote for the candidates they dislike the least.
Their candidates ran on exactly this. This was their campaign promise. Their voters got exactly what they wanted.
Government isn’t broken. People are.
How the hell does a school board even exist that could adopt this? This should never have passed in the first place.
Because Republicans aren’t like Democrats when it comes to strategy (that is to say, awful). This is happening at school boards across the country. It’s a concerted effort to pack these boards with Christian nationalist lunatics. And they’ve been quite successful so far, there hasn’t been much push back until recently, but by now they already have a lot of control.
Yes it is. You guys are due to overthrow it.
Even with a lobotomy i wouldnt come up with such braindead takes as “black people benefited from slavery”. As sane as saying homeless people benefit from fentanyl addiction or that african people benefit from hunger.
It’s white man’s burden BS slipping back in, where people (like Robert E. Lee) would say “We don’t want to enslave these people, it’s just our duty to civilize them.”
I assume it’s some kind of mechanism for maintaining their cognitive dissonance.
Homeless people should clearly all be given cocaine so that they are less hungry. I mean c’mon!
And more productive!
There’s a clip where white supremacist Richard B. Spencer (who has family ties to plantation history) argues the point against UK Guardian writer Gary Younge.
They benefited from being in a nation different from their own
…said the guy who wants to form an ethnostate
I swear man people just don’t have functioning brains
A ‘pure’ ethnostate wouldn’t have people to do the actual work. A lot of the right wing wants a caste-style system in reality, and for women and ‘those people’ to stay in ‘their place’ within it.
The actual curriculum was good. Ignorant people easily manipulated by lies about made up bigotry were just tricked to sic their bigotry on Florida
Good. Put out a plain bill that bans something they claim won’t happen, and get them on record.
DeSantis is going to invariably weigh in on this and make things even worse for himself
“get them on record” nobody cares about that shit anymore when they have an ‘R’ next to their name. Pointing out the hypocrisy has been a waste of time for a long time. They don’t care.
correct. getting them on record doesn’t do shit – but making sure they are legally liable if they do try that bullshit might help.
Even so, there’s a line of racism that is still too far. Musk shows that well. It’s still worth getting them on record for appalling things in case that’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
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Luckily Desantis is no Trump. I will die before I’m able to wrap my head around what his followers see in him, but for whatever reason he pretty much really can do whatever he wants with zero repercussions. Desantis just doesn’t have that.
Again, I will never understand it.
The great thing about this is that any argument against this which isn’t explicitly focused on confronting the racial aspect, is an argument against the Don’t Say Gay law.
If racism doesn’t exist anymore why do we need this?
Didn’t you hear? Racism officially ended when Obama got elected! We did it everyone!
I love that the same people who say that will turn around and say Obama wasn’t born in America.
We need to know Obama’s last name
Baraka. Like that dude from Mortal Kombat.
(Hussein intensifies)
Good. Black people did not.
And while we’re at it, neither did Native Americans. And we enslaved them far longer than we enslaved black people:
This practice continued throughout the colonial era aided and encouraged by Native American tribes themselves up through 1750 and, after the American War of Independence (1775-1783), natives were pushed into the interior as African slavery became more lucrative. Even so, the enslavement of Native Americans continued even after slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. Americans got around illegal enslavement of natives by calling it by other names and justified it in the interests of “civilizing the savages”. The practice continued up through 1900, dramatically impacting Native American cultures, languages, and development.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1742/native-american-enslavement-in-colonial-america/
Guess how much of that they teach in U.S. schools?
Judge: "Mr. Jones, you can’t own slaves. It’s literally in the Constitution.
Jones: Your Honor, I’m just civilizing the savages. They need our guidance as they make their way into modernity."
Judge: “Oh, that’s permissible. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about the benevolent guidance of savages for our benefit. Carry on.”
Saying that black people benefited from slavery is like saying a kidnapping is beneficial when people are rescued from it.
This is cognitive dissonance if I’ve ever seen it.
Better analogy is that carpet baggers benefitted the south.
Breaking news: Teaching children blatantly, shamelessly false information is bad. More on this unexpected development at 11!
Hopefully more on this Tuesday November 5th 2024
Everyone is talking past each other on this issue.
Some people who don’t know anything are arguing that enslaved people literally benefited from slavery, but that’s not what started this discussion.
Mm, yes, and what would happen if they tried to take these “transferable” skills and make money elsewhere?
Fucken rubes, how did we end up here?
This was exactly my view when this whole “black people learned valuable skills from slavery” thing came up.
Let’s say it was true. Jim is a slave and he’s learned a few valuable skills due to being a slave. How can Jim use those skills? It’s not like he can just tell his master “I’ve decided to quit and open my own business.” He’s literally a slave. His entire being is owned by his master.
The only way he might be able to put those skills to good use would be to flee slavery. Even then, though, he’d first need to avoid capture or being killed. He’d have needed to make his way north to Canada. Former slaves couldn’t just stop in a Northern “free” state because the South got a law passed to allow them to go into Northern states and drag escaped slaves (and sometimes free black people) back to the South.
The best case scenario for this “slave that learned valuable skills” is that they might be able to use those skills only after a perilous escape and journey during which they risked dying in a multitude of ways. There is no way that “but they learned useful skills” makes slavery any less horrific.
because the South got a law passed to allow them to go into Northern states and drag escaped slaves (and sometimes free black people) back to the South.
remember this when they try to cast the civil war as being about “states’ rights”. They wanted the federal government to stomp on the rights of free states. They put in their constitution that no confederate state had the right to be a free state. They tried to use force and violence to annex free states. They didn’t give a fuck about states’ rights. Anytime a conservative is talking about freedom he’s talking about two freedoms in particular:
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his freedom to do what he wants
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his freedom to use violence to force you to do what he wants
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No no no. They simply had to wait fifteen generations until the rules of slavery changed in 1865, at which point Black people were suddenly treated perfectly well and had access to all the opportunities of other Americans.
Forget where I heard this but “slavery didn’t just end like a no-wipe shit.”
I definitely remember Trevor Noah saying that.
Might have been Louis cause I’ve never watched Noah
I refuse to have this argument in real life. This is the kind of shit politicians should be threatening fights over.
