Florida's new Black history curriculum says "slaves developed skills" that could be used for "personal benefit"
Florida's new Black history curriculum says "slaves developed skills" that could be used for "personal benefit"
The lessons will be taught to sixth through eighth grade students this year.
The damage DeSantis and Florida republicans are doing to the state’s educational curriculum will have catastrophic effects on an entire generation. It’s terrifyingly evil.
It's so weird to me, what do they expect to happen to the economy of their state when their workforce has such a poor education?
It's intentional. "Automation will take our jobs!" Has been used to scare people for centuries, but the reality is physical labour is expensive and tricky in many situations to automate. Which is why Amazon goes through people like they're me with a bag of chips. Power structures rely on large and ever-growing amounts of people with no formal education to do the physical work. This is one reason abortion rights are being rolled back in the US and nobody seems to care about what happens after a baby is born.
People with education are riskier because they might be able to compete with your incompetent nepotism hire. But you need people who are educated to go into professional industries so they can continue to automate existing jobs, which helps keep wages down. So that people can be legitimately scared of a robot or AI taking their job and losing their income.
Which keeps the old-money and their nepotism hire offspring comfortably at the top of the food chain.
The GOP doesn’t care about their constituents beyond the bare minimum required to get votes from them. They’ll do only what is needed to stay in office, even if that’s nothing except blame Democrats for everything possible.
They don't care, they (lawmakers) don't have their fortunes tied to Florida, but they do have their fortunes tied to Florida electorate voting D
They'll find a way to profit from the poorly educated, just like how they're doing it now. They'll find a way to spin this as a positive for the GDP
Tourism economy doesn't needs educated people.
I don't think they care. As long as the top 100 elite ultra rich people in Florida stay rich... They're good with burning down the state.
The folks whose support really matters to DeSantis are invested in other states and countries; they don't depend on the success of the Florida economy for their continued wealth.
They can import skilled immigrants to serve them, including in their hospitals and nursing homes. They can then ensure those workers remain non-citizens — meaning that they can be abused without any political recourse. So they don't need their own city's local children (who are mostly brown anyway, but are citizens — for the moment) to grow up to be doctors.
(Remember: Doctors are mostly working-class these days, in the technical Marxian sense: they work for a salary; heck, they may not even get equity. The elite can buy doctors abroad and keep 'em in their basements.)
Fascist strategy: To the working class, sell hate & cruelty for their entertainment, thus also providing a payoff to hate media outlets. To the rich, sell low taxes & no rights for the poors — but demand absolute political loyalty from business leaders, punishing political dissent even by the rich (see Disney). Get rid of birthright citizenship; establish a permanent racial servant underclass of immigrants without political rights.
2 people downvoted this. I wonder what colour hats they were wearing?
Lol right? I miss the days where if you found yourself in a crowd of red hats it meant you were at a Limp Bizkit concert rather than a Klan rally.
Republicans have been killing the educational system forever now it feels like
Everything wrong with our countru is 6 degrees from Reagan.
That is precisely the point. It is the official position of the GOP to push all children toward private Christian schools. Step 1 of that plan is obviously to make public education so incredibly terrible that people start asking for better access to private schools.
All of the seemingly stupid things this governor does to screw with education are at face abhorrent but also serve only to damage the educational system in Florida.
Honestly I feel like "educations" like these will cause damage for multiple generations, maybe even centuries out.
They've been doing this for decades. This isn't new. They got it so Texas approved the countries textbooks and it all kind of went downhill from there.
I am hoping that Florida's so-called new Black History curriculum gets challenged by organizations such as the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center. In no way, shape, or form was slavery a good or acceptable concept.
DeSantis is already distancing himself so even he knows it's bad.
Fuck DeathSantis hard without any lube. I hate that motherfucker with a passion.
Are they kidding.
This is slavery, not even indentured servitude, let alone a fair exchange of labour for compensation... There is no point at which the slave is released to make use of those skills.
Any and all skills gained are either used as tools by the owner, or as coping/survival mechanisms by the slave.
Slavery is, in all ways, an abhorrent exploitation and degradation of a human being.
That there is even the slightest tolerance for this curriculum change is appalling. Is Florida really so filled with the morally bankrupt and apathetic that this can pass without ending the careers of the contributors?
How can we ever expect greater progress on stamping out the ongoing modern forms of slavery, when things like this can make its way into the classroom.
I really hope this change is crushed before it reaches the ears of impressionable children. But the fact that it got this far means that this is the kind of thinking that too many already get at home.
I agree with you 100%. What they are latching on to is the fact that SOMETIMES, in EXTREMELY LIMITED AND SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES, some enslaved people were able to "hire themselves out" as craftsmen when they had done whatever work the enslaver had required of them. An even more limited number of those enslaved people were paid for their work and got to keep their pay.
But the percentage of people we are talking about here is tiny ... but it is nonzero. The standard therefore isn't completely wrong, but it absolutely gives the impression that these cases were waaaay more common than they actually were.
You reminded me of a legal case I read recently: Guardian of Sally v. Beatty
An unnamed(!) victim of slavery had an agreement with her enslaver to keep excess wage money from her work, which she used to buy the freedom of another person, Sally. Her enslaver figured she didn't have the right to own "property" and it was his lucky day to now own 2 human beings. The courts disagreed and said Sally was a free person. However this was still South Carolina so they made sure to patch up that little "loophole" after the case was over.
The full list is quite interesting. The ~1780 cases in New England outlawing slavery (while the Revolution was ongoing!). Dred Scott and Amistad, of course. Cases mostly from 1780 to 1859. But then heinously, but somehow unsurprisingly, there's a case from 2021: Nestle Inc makes an appearance using child slave labor for cocoa.
The standard therefore isn’t completely wrong, but it absolutely gives the impression that these cases were waaaay more common than they actually were.
It's also dishonest because it leaves out the limitations that slavery put on those same people.
One of them could have been the next Mozart but we will never know because they weren't allowed to do anything more than hire themself out as a piano tuner at wages far below those a white person would get.
You mean like escaping slavery or killing slavers?
It's the dumbest take ever even if you're just trying to play devil's advocate, never mind making it an official state PUBLIC EDUCATION POLICY. It's like saying slaves were fed during slavery that allowed them to live. Technically yes they were fed, technically yes they learned skills, but it's all overridden by the fact that THEY WERE ENSLAVED. There's no room to find any silver lining in this situation that could potentially give any props to slave owners because it's one of the most subhuman behavior imaginable.
Technically correct, the best ki-
Nope, that reference really doesn't work this time.
"Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history. Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants."
Fucking WOW
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priceless cotton picking skills, for all those cotton farms that they owned.
Put your back into it when you throw it onto the pile of Florida's embarassment, it's getting harder to reach the top.
Don't forget that the female slaves developed child-rearing skills after the master raped them. And since importing new slaves was banned by law (but often not policed very well) the master could then turn around and sell off what were likely his own children, and get a higher price for them if they were lighter skinned.
There were slaveholders who focused more on selling children than on picking cotton.
Other examples of the skills developed that still benefit them to this day:
- Running from a rape or a beating. Led to the dominance of black athletes in track and field events.
- Selling out your fellow slaves to become a house slave. Led to Thomas Clarence reaching the highest legal position in the country by selling out his fellow people of color.
- Seducing local white wives and daughters led to the genre of BBC porn which gives many employment opportunities.
If you think about it, the slaves should have been paying their owners for the opportunity to learn these skills and benefits. Reparations to the slave owners should be strongly considered.
(/s for the humor impaired)
Yes Republicans. Keep failing so you can lose 2024.
You say that like the people who keep voting them into office aren't also horrible people.
In the event there are three candidates that got electoral votes, and no one gets a majority; the house votes with one vote per state delegation. A.k.a. they could loose the electoral votes and still get the white house!
Florida is what you get when you don't learn the lessons from 1984 and Fahrenheit 451
Nah, it's what happens when you read them as instruction manuals.
Or get someone to give you the jist of those manuals done you can't read
Blacks nations, like any other, developed much stronger skills when they defeated oppression than when subjected to slavery.
Exactly. Business leaders at the time had cried that their companies and the strength of the US as a whole would fall without the manpower of slavery. Then the exact opposite happened, and industrial creativity and efficiency exploded. Rich men always seem to get it wrong
"really, they were just unpaid interns"
Wow they really are ramping up on all angles how to discredit or silence race injustices (crimes, history, all of it) in American history. Almost like they are scared they will lose republican votes if the new voters are educated enough to realize having white supremacists enthusiastically support the 2016 president who was criticized for how he spoke of other ethnicities was a BAD thing.
Florida politicians need to develop some FUCKING CANCER so they can personally benefit the SANE members of the population.
And the education system was fucked before that.
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Republicans: "Just like people (we put) in prison"
That's great. Time to enlave white folks so they too can develop skills and benefit personally.
Never been a better time to read History as Mystery by Michael Parenti.
Oh my ...
How many times are you up to now? I've counted at 30 times you've posted this so far
Is that half of the point of a social link aggregation and discussion platform?
Original OC ONLY! ONE POST! I SAW THIS A MONTH AGO! REMOVE THIS! (/s)
Yes, and this topic definitely deserves attention, but the sidebar of this community asks for posts not to be on the topic of the US.
For posts related to the United States, please consider !news or !politics
Since the United States is often the most discussed country on internet spaces, we would like to have a space where other countries headlines may be posted.
Should this person just tell their mother over a phone conversation and hope that it spreads via word of mouth instead? What’s the alternative here?