New Florida curriculum says slavery had “personal benefits” for slaves

Your comment is based on assumptions. Is there any evidence of immigration from Africa in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries? If there is I’ll change my outlook. Keep in mind it’s a whole lot easier to get to America from Europe and from Africa.

Edit: Also keep in mind most of those other nationalities came here because of some kind of hardship in their own country. So there would need to be some kind of hardship in Africa to motivate people to leave for continent so far away.

 

Good post. I think we agree. Was it you or perhaps your child that attended one of these racist lessons? What exactly did the a-hole teachers say (It must be so disgusting and ignorant )? Were there handouts you can share? I’m up for picketing (within 25 miles of my home of course). Enough talk…Let’s do this!!

 

The Florida Department of Education actually managed to step in it even worse in trying to respond to the backlash. These are the people responsible for "educating" Florida's youths:

@EducationFL's "read our standards" statements shows they don't even know the Black history they cherry pick. These are wrong and racist. The one that I initially bumped on was James Forten. Because Forten wasn't a slave. He was born free, served as a sailor in the revolution.

He wasn't a shoemaker, either. He was a sailmaker. But more important, he was an abolitionist, activist, and writer who criticized the state of Pennsylvania's treatment of free Black men. But a bunch of the others on this list are also wrong.

Ned Cobb, who @AlexLanfran cites as a blacksmith, *also* wasn't a slave, born 1885. He wasn't an ordinary sharecropper, but more important, he was a founder of the Alabama Sharecropper Union. He was famous for his profession, which (again) wasn't "blacksmith."

Lewis Latimer, listed in @EducationFL as a "blacksmith" in that list *also* wasn't a slave. (Noticing a theme? I am!) Latimer was born free in MA. He *also* wasn't a blacksmith; he was an inventor with two early patents related to electric light, hired by the Edison Company.

I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of these and I look forward to real historians shredding this stuff (batsignal for @HC_Richardson), but it's worth noting that even in defense of their own racist revisionist history, Florida GOP is detached from basic facts.
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He's responding to this tweet/statement from a FL DOE spokesperson:


BTW, Booker T. Washington was emancipated at nine years old (without having been educated or taught to read at that time). So I'm not sure how slavery benefitted his later career.

 

Pretty much all mass migration to the Americas was premised on filling labor needs. There wasnt enough immigration from Europe to the Americas in the 16th, 17th, 18th century to do large scale agricultural labor to address the needs of the burgeoning capitalist system, slavery addressed a need for a time (as did migrant labor after that), as did mass European migration once industrialization occurred in the 19th century. The Spaniards basically imported serfdom to the Americas too in the form of the latifundia system.

 

I think there’s some truth in what you say here, especially with regards to slavery in the Americas. The question is whether filling labor needs is the cause or the effect of voluntary mass migration. Most people don’t move if they have it good where they live now. People typically don’t leave good jobs just because there’s a labor need somewhere else.

People emigrate because conditions are not good at home, and the target country holds out the prospect of better conditions and a better life.

There’s also the issue of whether there would have been voluntary mass migration from Africa in the absence of any slave system. Did conditions exist in Africa that would drive people to migrate?

 

Well Africa is a pretty diverse continent, but there were a number of kingdoms and empires on par with those in Europe in terms of wealth.

Ashanti Empire - Wikipedia

 

I was curious and tried to learn more about this "African American Workgroup" that the DeSantis DOE created. There is basically nothing out there on the members.

 

It seems like they are putting together a weird coalition to get their votes. Racists, anti women people and religious people who have never read the Bible.

 

The task force preexisted DeSantis, but he just recently packed it with a bunch of folks who are allies of his.

 

Unfortunately, our current body politic enables pendulum swinging rather than a push to an optimal point.

I don’t think this necessarily had bad intentions, I get why Democrats are characterizing it that way, just how politics works.

To me, intent doesn’t matter much. Just get it done and push for an ideal level for the kids, not necessarily as far in the other direction as possible, because that’s wrong as well.

But let’s not pretend like Democrats ran education with any modicum of neutrality. To the parents who supported this in reaction to what you were seeing, your eyes weren’t deceiving you. This is just a case of the reaction going too far.

 

I think the problem with that is that it really fails to contextualize history in such a way that it essentially misrepresents history.

This is a more extreme example, but imagine someone saying that the Holocaust taught Jewish people resilience. Forget sensitivity for a moment, if a class of middle school kids leave with the takeaway that the “Holocaust helped Jewish people in some ways,” they completely missed the forest for the trees. And yes, middle school kids are highly impressionable to authority figures. Getting it right is unbelievably important if you’re a teacher.

 

All I could find was Diaz heads it. it had 40 applicants and chose 13

 

When was the last time Democrats ran anything in this state? School boards are non-partisan elections, and conservatives/Republicans have benefited from that even in bluer areas. The school boards around here have never been particularly liberal. As far as I can tell, a bunch of people assumed "wokeness" was being taught after large scale racial justice protests broke people's brains. The reaction was to a fantasy, which is why this stuff is so whack, because what was being taught previously wasn't particularly controversial, so the changes necessarily have to look like this, because feelings are more important than facts.

 

This is the truth right here. The GOP went off the rails and lost support from the vast majority of people under 40. Rather than try and get back on the rails, they're doubling and tripling down on stuff like this. Which, ironically, is eroding their support even more.

 

When its pointed out the Democrats don't run anything, it shifts to supposedly rogue teachers who must be reigned in by "dont say gay" and other laws about what you can or cant talk about in a classroom.

 

Hit piece...

 

Republicans being asleep at the wheel leaves Democrats running education, even if they're not holding high office.

There's a reason Democrats weren't really complaining about education in Florida before all of this, and it's not because it was a non-issue, or that it was neutral because neither of those are true, it was just working to their benefit.

 

as part of DeSantis “war on woke” teachers must be very careful not to make the students uncomfortable learning aspects of US history. I doubt they can teach that anymore.

“feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress”

New Florida bill would ban feelings of 'discomfort' in teachings about racism in US history



“Florida’s new law restricting “inappropriate” books in schools – removed one-third of the books on his classroom shelves, including a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that was not on her list of approved books.”

‘The point is intimidation’: Florida teachers besieged by draconian laws

 

Seems to me that the gist of what our resident lefties are peeing their pants about, is a thrust to not teach black kids that their ancestors were only victims, and therefore they oughtn't identify as helpless, hapless, victims.

I think that's a good thing.

I told my daughter recently (after she snapped something about rape in some hypothetical situation...) that we are likely the product of rape, several generations up the ladder.

Point being, we don't identify as rape vics--we merely recognize it--and move forward.

I fail to see the benefit of pounding into ppl's skulls that their ancestors were victims, and therefore they are vics by...what... inheritance???--how's that even work?

"...I know, you didn't suffer anything, but your great great grand parents did, and therefore you should feel victimized..."

TBL: I bet our black residents will fare far better under FL's new curriculum, than their black counterparts in California, who are being told as we speak that they are nothing but victims, entitled to *reparations* for shit that they never suffered, and oh btw, drugs are good...go get high, poke yourself with needles (provided by the govmt, so they're kosher....), inject yourself with your choice of hard core inject-able street drug, help yourself to shit off the store shelves--you deserve it--we won't hold you accountable or prosecute you in anyway (unless you steal like $901. of shit, or more in a single stealing--that's just too much--but $900.00 or less, and you're fine (besides, you can always come back later for seconds...)....

 

Should kids be taught that some slaves benefited from being a slave?