politics

Yeah it is. I've actually heard people make this argument too. How stupid do you have to be to believe that?

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.

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.

hopefully, we can wall Florida off before that happens. you know. and make them pay for it.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puJ-arJgkZU

Homeless people should clearly all be given cocaine so that they are less hungry. I mean c'mon!

"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.

We have Trump on record admitting that he committed tons of crimes.

He’s still allowed to lead this country.

Didn't you hear? Racism officially ended when Obama got elected! We did it everyone!

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?

Hopefully more on this Tuesday November 5th 2024

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.