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

So don't teach in a manner that does that either. I never felt guilt or anguish about the conditions of slavery during history class. Just teach the material in a factual manner. It's history after all.

 

If the point of this is supposed to be that Blacks are capable of succeeding on their own, even then, if they are simply given the opportunity, that's true and that's a good point.

If it was characterized as something along the lines of "the skills that Blacks developed during slavery helped them assimilate to post-slavery society more quickly," then I don't really take issue with that. It's the whole "trying to credit slavery" for those skills that bothers me.

Not saying they wanted it to read that way, but that's how it reads to me.

 

Amazing statements here all around, I dont really know where to start.

 

So that's the motivation behind these standards! Conservatives are just seeking to empower the ancestors of slaves with an upbeat motivational message. That's so obviously on-brand for them, I wonder that I didn't see it immediately.

 

Fascinating. Exactly what I did. For me a long winded post (or op-ed) that’s starts out with “oh yeah, your feet stink” probably isn’t worth the time.

 

Yes, that's what I read. I did not manufacture spin. That's the motivation as I understand it.

 

It's the truth.

People know what they saw. Contrary to leftist belief, the whole appeal for running on education didn't rise out of thin air. It's not a made-up problem. Parents saw it, they didn't like it at all, DeSantis said he'd strongly address it, and people latched onto him.

 

I suspect that, for the average slave, life was somewhere between LaQuinta Inn and Simon Lagree. If slaves were the means of production, what would it profit slave holders to be mean to them ?

 

So you dont allow the possibility that certain leaders & bad faith opportunists played Republican voters into believing all this? Must be that those Democrats were getting away with something despite not doing anything lol.

 

And that is a controversial, yet factual point that Democrats tend to try and brush off to the side.

I often-times see the slavery issue framed in the US as a "Blacks were enslaved in America when they could've been free in Africa," when the likely alternative is that they would've been enslaved in Africa. Why? I believe there's more people enslaved in Africa today than were seized (EDIT: to the US) under the trans-Atlantic slave trade (EDIT: and more slaves in the world today than were traded through all of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, about 4% of which is attributable to the US).

That's not to dismiss the evil of slavery. It's every bit as evil, but I think the fact that the rest of the world was enslaving people at the time sort of dilutes the burden of that evil for the US.

Now, we can talk about the timeline of who abolished slavery first (and there were a bunch of countries that abolished slavery prior to the US including but not limited to France and the UK), but with respect to the big picture, everybody did it. And the big Western countries of the 1800s tied to modern US land (France, UK, and US), all abolished within about 32 years of each other. So we were about a generation behind the UK in that regard.

I'm going to have to plead ignorance on how unique segregation was in the US relative to the rest of the world. I honestly don't know, and that's a warranted conversation as well.

 

When you own the media…it sure looks a certain way.

 

That seems pretty sketchy. I'm not sure there's a agreed on number of people enslaved over that time, but its estimated at like 12 million with over a million deaths in the process ... are you saying there are that many slaves in Africa right now? Seems like that would be a big deal!

 

Of course this garnered disagrees from folks unwilling to acknowledge what's happening

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehil...their-weakness-among-generation-z-voters/amp/

 

Of course if forced labor is considered slavery, there are roughly a million people enslaved in the united states right now.

 

The main problem with the GOP is that they don’t offer a real alternative to the Democrats. One of myriad examples: go back to April 2020. One man. One man stood against Covid hysteria.

 

So estimates I've seen is that about 388,000 African slaves were shipped to the US during the slave trade. A conservative estimate of how many people are currently enslaved in Africa is about 700,000.

That does not account for the reproduction of Black slaves when they were already on North American soil.

I said "I believe there's more people enslaved in Africa today than were seized for four centuries under the trans-Atlantic slave trade." What I should have said was: "I believe there's more people enslaved in the world today than were seized and traded throughout the world for four centuries under the trans-Atlantic slave trade." That's according to National Geographic and Thomas Sowell.

"There are an estimated 27 million men, women, and children in the world who are enslaved — physically confined or restrained and forced to work, or controlled through violence, or in some way treated as property.

Therefore, there are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade [11 million total, and about 450,000, or about 4% of the total, who were brought to the United States]. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach—and in the destruction of lives."

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/thom...an-were-seized-from-africa-in-four-centuries/

 

Those are interesting figures. We don't often hear about the African slave traders, who of course are of African descent. It seems we ended our blight of slavery in America a long time ago, but it still carried on in nations that are predominantly African descent population. Is it fair to say blacks historically have been more enslaved by blacks than they ever were by whites? I truly don't know the answer to that, but you have seen the numbers.

 

I really don't know either.

We also shouldn't try and keep score too much because I don't like the idea of reducing the slavery discussion to "you had more slaves than us." But when the conversation is so skewed and antagonizing in one direction, the figures are necessary to provide context.

 

In your estimation this is what was being taught?

 

Do I think politicians exploited the situation for personal gain? Sure. You can say that about any political issue.

Do I think Republicans are lying to us about the big picture in pubic schools? No, I don't. I've seen repeated cases of this. People see the incentive structure with the teachers' unions. And whenever a Republican points any of this out, all Democrats do is attack the source... even when all the source is doing is holding up a mirror and putting up admissions from administrators and teachers on a larger platform.