Heather Cox Richardson, a historian, analyzed the controversial Florida social studies curriculum and explains how they attempt to minimize racism and slavery. Their fault lies not in one or two sentences but in their central ideas. The influence of Hillsdale College is blatant in the document’s apologetics. Richardson posted this keen analysis on July 22, but I missed it. I’m pleased to share it now.
She wrote:
The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.
But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.
Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).
The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.
In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.
This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.
Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.
Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.
Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).
It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).
That’s quite a tall order.
But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).
Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).
All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”
The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.
And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.
—
Notes:
“…how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
This curriculum may deserve criticism for other reasons, but this sentence reflects basic reality in labor markets then and now. People with marketable skills will have more opportunities to support themselves at higher wages compared to lower-skilled people. This is true no matter how they learned those higher-level skills. Slaves who were educated to a high degree of literacy had major advantages post-slavery over those who did not have that education. A highly skilled carpenter had opportunities that a mere field hand did not. These economic realities in no way justify or lessen the moral evil of slavery, but they are realities nonetheless. Saying otherwise is mindless partisanship.
So free white people never got those “marketable” skills? What is your point? That white people should have sold their children into slavery in the hopes that their white children could achieve some marketable skills?
Mindless partisanship – mindless white supremacy – is trying to justify some evil thing white people did to non-white people by finding some irrelevant, fake silver lining that they would NEVER say if it was white people being subjected to those horrors. Hey, you were sold into prostitution, but you learned how to cook in that brothel where you were kept, so isn’t that dandy and something that MUST be taught to students when they learn about the pros and cons of forced prostitution? The right wing promises to teach your students about the good points of forced prostitution in the name of being “truthful”.
This is why I rarely post anymore. These kind of hate-filled, demeaning replies by people who have been empowered by this blog to hurl insults at people they don’t like instead of engage in the topic they raised.
The only acceptable response here is for me to agree that Heather Cox Richardson is just a “mindless partisan” for not seeing the value and “truth” that teaching students about how slaves got marketable skills in slavery.
But I won’t do that. What a sad statement that people who call themselves teachers are like this.
As other people on this blog have noted, you have a habit of putting words into the mouths of other commenters, attributing beliefs to them that they didn’t express and that you have no basis for accusing them of having. My second to last sentence is the following: “These economic realities in no way justify or lessen the moral evil of slavery, but they are realities nonetheless.” Repeat: “…in no way justify or lessen the moral evil of slavery…”.
You read that – did you, actually? – but then you wrote “What is your point? That white people should have sold their children into slavery…?” No rational person would conclude that that was my point. You spend so much of your time trying to be holier-than-thou, morally superior to everyone else. Take a few deep breaths, take a walk outside, pet your cats if they don’t avoid you. Life is too short to be in a rage 24/7.
These realities – that there are students in charter schools or who get vouchers who thrive — in no way justify or lessen the problems of charters and vouchers, but they are realities nonetheless. Saying otherwise is mindless partisanship. And I will hurl personal insults at anyone who challenges me about how it is “mindless partisanship” if we don’t all acknowledge all the students who thrive in charters whenever we discuss ed reform.
Mark, you couldn’t take any criticism so you changed the subject to my “tone” instead of looking at how insulting you were to Heather Cox Richardson in your “mindless partisanship” criticism of her daring to challenge the idea that looking for positives of slavery is valid instead of problematic since no white person would ever sell their child into slavery in the hopes they would get a marketable skill that people who are not slaves can get.
I have no idea why you are so nasty, but since Diane Ravitch apparently condones this, I will take the hint and leave. Talk amongst your kindred spirits like dienne77, I don’t enjoy hate fests directed at me.
Excellent .
How about: A survivor of a holocaust / genocide (any ), may have had genes that allowed them to survive while other perished in forced labor and starvation. The children of those who survived genocides should thank the oppressors for improving the gene pool.
Thanks, Joel. I was trying to think of anything good that might have been an unintended consequence of the Holocaust, but I couldn’t.
I have no doubt that some Nazi apologist could “truthfully” point out that being one of the Sonderkommandos (the Jews who were kept alive to help the killing machine) learned “marketable” skills like shaving people’s heads and how to dispose of the bodies of the dead (useful for pandemics). But who the heck besides a Nazi apologist would mention a “marketable skill” that could be acquired outside of being in a concentration and think it is worthwhile (instead of wildly inappropriate) to mention that some concentration camp inmates got a “marketable skill” during their time in the camps?
Very few slaves were allowed to learn literacy because, in the words of Frederick Douglass, it “unfitted them to be slaves”. As for other skills they learned, they were never taught those skills; they learned those skills because their lives depended on doing so. So it seems that they could just as easily have learned those skills outside of slavery, no?
Mark Jackson
I suspect you need to have those skills developed in you in the same manner. Then see how marketable you feel those skills were . Spare the whip and spoil the bigot.
“Slaves who were educated to a high degree of literacy had major advantages post-slavery over those who did not have that education”
Now seriously by 1847 only three slave states did not have Anti Literacy Laws.
Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Laws that not only punished the slave but the White man who taught them. Roughly 5% of former slaves were literate to any degree. And that number would be even lower if many of those taught to read were not done so clandestinely.
80 % of slaves worked in the fields. Well into 1840s there were still slaves in some Northern States. Some were yes used as tradesman. If a Southern Slave had some trade skills ,he almost never benefited from the the proceeds of his labor. Black Codes some enacted during and especially after reconstruction in the Jim Crow South severely limited the occupations of any who had obtained any skills.
Legitimizing right wing framing is a specialty of some folks on this blog. When called out on it, they hurl insults.
Some of the folks here are teachers, and I suspect they would not condone the legitimizing of the anti-union, anti-public school rhetoric by agreeing with the education reformers that some kids benefit from going to a charter school or getting a voucher or by having a young teacher fresh out of college with no teacher training.
These realities – that there are students in charter schools or who get vouchers who thrive — in no way justify or lessen the problems of charters and vouchers, but they are realities nonetheless. Saying otherwise is mindless partisanship. And I will hurl personal insults at anyone who challenges me about how it is “mindless partisanship” if we don’t all acknowledge all the students who thrive in charters whenever we discuss ed reform.
Another mindless comment. I don’t justify slavery, as my first comment clearly states: “These economic realities in no way justify or lessen the moral evil of slavery, but they are realities nonetheless.” Repeat: “…in no way justify or lessen the moral evil of slavery…”
I just point out that having a marketable skill after slavery ended was better than not having such a skill. American society was still terribly unfair to the freed slaves, but some newly freed people had better opportunities than others did. That is an indisputable fact.
Mark,
I don’t know why you felt compelled to defend the Florida-DeSantis-Hillsdale claim that some slaves learned skills that were of personal benefit to them. It does sound like you are justifying slavery, even though you say you didn’t mean to.
Mark,
You put words in my mouth again. I did not say that the benefits that some students get from going to charters “justified” them – I said that it no way lessened the problems with charters. Why are you so touchy? Go out and take a walk and calm down so you aren’t so angry.
Only mindless partisans would not acknowledge that students who attended charters came out with a marketable skill — a good education. Neither of us said that that positive outcome JUSTIFIES slavery or education privatization, so I don’t know why you put words in my mouth.
Putting words in my mouth. I never said charters and vouchers were justified and I never said that YOU believed slavery was justified.
You criticized as “mindless partisans” those (Heather Cox Richardson?) who objected to teaching students about this positive outcome because they were not acknowledging the truth of this positive outcome that some slaves got a marketable skill.
That speaks for itself.
Ms. Ravitch,
You say that it sounds like I am justifying slavery. My first comment has this sentence: “These economic realities in no way justify or lessen the moral evil of slavery…” IN NO WAY JUSTIFY.
Mark Jackson,
I said exactly that: you contradicted yourself. First you said that you did not mean “ to justify or lessen the moral evil of slavery…” but then parroted the economic benefits to slaves who learned a skill. That’s exactly what the Florida standards did. They said that bad as slavery was, some slaves derived an economic benefit. That’s justification: the good side of losing your freedom and being owned by someone else. The fact that you claimed not to be justifying slavery does. Or change the perception that you were doing just that.
What “economic realities”? You really haven’t said except to imply that some slaves got a “marketable skill” because of being slaves that they would not have received if they were not slaves.
They got that marketable skill DESPITE being slaves. Not as some benefit.
There is a big difference between those two things. (And I am prepared for the nasty personal insults you will no doubt respond with in lieu of actually defending what you wrote.)
Mark,
I do not believe there is any redeeming value in Florida’s Black history curriculum.
Slavery was not a job training program. No one sought to become a slave so they could learn marketable slaves.
Very few slaves had “a high degree of literacy.” In most slave states, it was illegal to teach slaves to read. Slave owners were afraid that slaves might be able to read abolitionist literature.
Slavery is a crime against humanity. There is no reasonable justification for one human beings to own another human being, as if he were a cow or a pig.
Did ex-slaves have higher wages than workers who had never been enslaved? I’ve never heard of that.
I truly don’t understand why you chose to defend the most loathsome aspect of a document intended to whitewash the shameful practice of human slavery.
Mark: Coming a bit late to this discussion, I would point out that slaves from 1619 to 1867 may have learned skills, but their status as slaves kept them from benefitting very much from their skill. Indeed, masons and carpenters who were slaves were routinely used to make the owner money during slavery. Moreover, since a majority of people were farmers, the most often used skills were related to agriculture, and most often slaves (and poor whites as well) were participating in a subsistence economy designed to cut down the owner’s overhead relating to keeping slaves.
Let me put it another way: Stephen of Caswell County developed the system of drying tobacco called “light fired” tobacco that became the essential ingredient for cigarettes. He was a slave. It was Reynolds and Duke, who were not slaves, who profited from it handsomely.
Not only are the new Florida education standards an affront to civil rights activists who contributed to the changes in equality under law, they also wreak of colonialism as if enslaved Africans had no skills to begin with.
How dare they frame the worth of individuals this way? The cruelty is the point.
Hillsdale College is a toxic word-weapon in the Fascist, Federalist, Libertarian war (let’s call them the AXIS – a brick in the foundation of a Fourth Reich) to destroy the United States as a Democracy and Constitutional Republic.
Since moving to Florida, I have become a student of propaganda which has been snowballing at an alarming pace. Whether it is “alternative facts,” embellishment, hyperbole, over generalization or downright lies, the objective is to mislead and misrepresent the truth. Right wing extremists will churn reality and bake it in their own fascist leaning ideological oven that results in a paternalistic, white, interpretation of reality that is anti-immigrant, female and people of color and very much pro-Christian, straight, white male and capitalism.
Add- Pro-right wing Catholic- DeSantis is Republican Catholic.
https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm
Has some statistics taken from the 1860 census. I think slavery as an institution was far different from what most of us perceive. In so many ways it was more pernicious, in others, perhaps not so.
Curious as it’s not immediately apparent to me from the table of stats — in what ways was it “perhaps not so”?
Roy,
Tolerating human slavery in a new nation whose ideals were freedom, liberty, justice, and a belief that all people are created equal was America’s original sin.
We paid for it with a bloody Civil War that took more American lives than any other conflict.
We continue to pay for it by the persistence of racism, segregation, vastly inferior living conditions for people of color, violence, and other horrible consequences.
Slavery had no redeeming features.
No, America’s original sin was the genocide of the native peoples already here and the theft of their land. Slavery is just one of many (albeit among the worst of many) additions to that sin.
It’s astonishing that you actually had to put “From my view” before saying “Slavery had no redeeming features” as if whether or not slavery had redeeming features is debatable. Only in the abnormal right wing framing that seems to have been normalized.
It’s absurd, because a redeeming feature implies that slavery was NECESSARY for that advantage, when the obvious truth is that any so-called “redeeming feature” of slavery had nothing to do with slavery at all. A small number of white people who owned other human beings found it helpful to teach those human being the skills that their own non-enslaved children and free children in the country could learn without being slaves.
Slaves didn’t get those skills because of slavery, they got them despite being slaves.
NYCPSP,
You are right. It was far, far better to learn skills as a free person than as a slave. There was nothing good about slavery.
I deleted “From my view…”
Dienne
Can we agree, one of Putin’s many sins is killing his political enemies (poisonings, falls out of windows, plane explosions, etc.) which makes Russia look really bad?
Dienne never finds fault with Putin. Her shtick is pointing out the many sins of the US and NATO. She is not even-handed.
Sorry for the brevity of this statement. I was at work. Taking a lunch break. The stats show that slavery was seldom practiced like the sugar plantation model of the Caribbean. The majority of slaves in the southeastern US were in a community relationship that meant that they were owned one or two at a time. This is still slavery, and still unjustifiable, but remarkably different from the big plantation image. This could be more pernicious than the image many people have of slavery as a long line of Africans going to the cotton field. Because they were owned, and because they were at the whim of their owners, this could be more pernicious if the owner wanted to take advantage of his position. His violence was personally directed toward a slave who was basically part of the family. If the owner wanted to commit rape (many did, antebellum journals discussed the problem of miscegenation), he was committing this crime at a person who was familiar to him in a close relationship, generally with one or two slaves. His wife would have known. His children.
On the other hand, slave owners could treat the people they owned with some degree of respect, if they believed they should do that. I suspect some relationships were better than others, but that just speaks to the remarkable ability of human beings to get along despite the fractured social institutions they inherit.
My friend Joe Lee had a grandfather who had a remarkable relationship with his owner. When the Civil war came, he left the farm and went off to fight in the Union Army. His owner fought in the Confederate Army. During the war, the owner was injured and Joe Lee’s grandfather was given leave to go home and nurse the guy back to health. After freedom, they farmed together.
This remarkable story, and others like it, have led white supremacists to argue that slavery was not so bad. I would argue that it shows how remarkable human kindness is in the face of dysfunction in society. The same argument could be made against the Hillsdale suggestion that the slaves learned skills. It is remarkable that anyone in the condition of slavery could excel. That speaks to the good of the slaves themselves, not the good of slavery.
Well said, Roy.
“That speaks to the good of the slaves themselves, not the good of slavery.”
I don’t know what it means to “excel” as a slave, however. I think you used the wrong word. Maybe it was remarkable that freed slaves were not vengeful, some anyway.
I think Frederick Douglass excelled as a human being despite slavery. Maybe my choice of words needs attention. Since I have been doing carpentry, my powers have been more inclined toward learning Spanish, or at least the vagrant words therein.
On another matter, check out Thom Hartman on the destroy the school movement. Do you write for him?
I believe that varied by State and the type of farming that was dominant. The deeper South the more likely was a slave to be on a large cotton Plantation. Tenn. with 6k more slave holders than MS. MS. with 7 xs the number of large plantations.
So I guess we can add it depends to that analysis.
Joel: you notice that the Deep South has more large plantations. This was, of course, due to cotton and sugar cane culture. Even in Alabama and Mississippi, however, there were more slaveholders who had just one slave. There is a lot written about this. Frank Owlsley points out in Plain Folk of the Old South that a majority of people in Alabama, about 2/3, did not own slaves at all. What this means has filled volumes.
Roy Turrentine
It would not be hard to imagine that majority not holding slaves could even be larger than 2/3s .
Which would point to a concentration of land ownership. Of course a substantial portion of the 2/3s benefited from an economy that was thoroughly dependent on slave labor. An economy that replaced slavery with share cropping after the war. And economies that to this day have some of the highest poverty rates and lowest wages in the Nation. Much of that along Racial lines. The number of poor Whites in Alabama is slightly larger than the number of poor Blacks. But the conditions of poor whites are accepted because the percentage of Blacks in poverty is far higher. Alabama for instance has no minimum wage law. Would Tommy Tuberville ever vote to raise the Federal Minimum wage.
Gee whiz, Joel, wouldn’t you think that the economically advantaged ex-slaves who had learned skills would have lifted the southern economy after 1865?
Fascinating comment, Roy.
Stockholm Syndrome
Roy, Thom’s piece about the destruction of public schools is a long time coming. It might that he has been checking out all of Diane’s work. He is a champion of the common good, but there was a time many years ago when he was touting charter schools. I was avid listener up until then. However, I have slowly come back to his program and emails since he is one of the smartest analysts out there with a very high social intelligence IQ. He’s also a scholar and his knowledge of our country’s civics throughout history is sterling. I’m glad he came around.
What is troubling about requiring that students learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” — beyond the fact that the authors of the Florida social studies curriculum do not actually name the principles — is that the language of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution stating or implying them isn’t self-executing. It took a Civil War to end slavery and to provide for the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Progress isn’t inevitable. It requires struggle and sacrifice. Heather Cox Richardson makes this point in her penultimate paragraph: “In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear.”
About how students must be taught to “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States”: Apart from the dubious implication that freedom is a means to an end (enrichment), while it’s fine to believe in laissez-faire economics, it isn’t okay to teach that the Constitution requires it. The infamous decision in Lochner v. New York (1905), in which the Supreme Court declared invalid a New York law restricting the number of hours a baker could work each day and week, on the ground that the “general right to make a contract in relation to his business is part of the liberty of the individual protected by the 14th Amendment,” was repudiated by the Court long ago. (Lochner was effectively overruled in 1955 in Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma.) Rather than analyzing “how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States,” students should read Justice Holmes’s brilliant, spot-on dissent in Lochner, which includes this:
“. . . This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain. If it were a question whether I agreed with that theory, I should desire to study it further and long before making up my mind. But I do not conceive that to be my duty, because I strongly believe that my agreement or disagreement has nothing to do with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law. It is settled by various decisions of this court that state constitutions and state laws may regulate life in many ways which we, as legislators, might think as injudicious, or, if you like, as tyrannical, as this, and which, equally with this, interfere with the liberty to contract. Sunday laws and usury laws are ancient examples. A more modern one is the prohibition of lotteries. The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well-known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not. The 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics. . . .
[A] Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States. . . .”
Wonderfully said, Mr. Kulick!
I stopped reading this blog six months ago because of its extreme partisanship and even more so because of its demonizing of anyone who dissents in the slightest from the party line. I’m off work this week because of a medical procedure, so I have free time to peruse the Internet. I see this blog is the same as always. Mark Jackson says that slavery is in no way justified; he also notes that former slaves who had learned marketable skills were likely to be better off than former slaves with low skills – Economics 101. For citing that obvious fact the blog host and other commenters twist his words and accuse him of supporting slavery – when he explicitly and repeatedly said otherwise.
In the book “White Fragility” the author used a term to describe white people who try to outdo everyone else in their allegiance to the far Left view on racial issues. She said they try to “outwoke” each other. That’s a perfect description of what occurs on this blog all the time. I leave you forever.
Emily,
When someone writes that he is in no way justifying slavery but it did have its benefits…that’s justifying slavery because it had benefits. Slavery was not a job training program: it was a system of brutal exploitation in which one person, the owner, had total dominion over others: to beat them, to rape their daughters, to sell them to others. “But there were personal benefits” because you learned valuable skills. Most slaves worked in the fields and learned nothing of value.
I’m glad to see you go.
Heather Waters,
Those former slaves were “better off” than who? Better off than slaves who became strong working in the fields because you don’t consider that a “marketable skill”? Better off than white people who could learn that marketable without being a slave?
I deleted that comment. People who insult me are not welcome in my living room.
I repeat: There were no benefits to slavery. Human beings because of their color were enslaved for life to labor for their master at no pay. They were whipped, their families were sold off, they were property. They were not allowed to learn to read. “But they had a marketable skill.”
So, Emily, you endorse what Mark Jackson is saying do you?
Why?
White fragility describes Emily King. She feels very attacked just for saying that slavery provided a very nice benefit for some slaves by teaching them “marketable skills” and ignoring the fact that white people who were NOT slaves could learn the very same “marketable skills” without suffering by being owned by a master.
The implicit racism here is that the people who are slaves are too inferior to have gained those “marketable skills” the way white people did – without being slaves owned by their master.
Emily and Mark,
Is it possible for you to compare the economic benefits of acquired skills of a pre-emancipated slave vs. one post Civil War?
Do those economic benefits diminish the further back you go before emancipation?
Should slaves have been more proactive regarding their economic futures during the war, learning skills while simultaneously being owned?
Also, if these acquired skills were, in fact, so very economically valuable, why didn’t slave owners continue with their in-house training opportunities for the plethora of freed slaves?
Addressing these questions without reverting back to your “outwoke” dumbassery is most appreciated.
“Is it possible for you to compare the economic benefits of acquired skills of a pre-emancipated slave vs. one post Civil War?”
See Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. After that book there have been reams of paper catching buckets of ink on account of that question, largely due to contemporary apologists for slavery claiming that it was not really profitable.
“I stopped reading this blog six months ago because of its extreme partisanship”
HAAAAAAA! That’s so funny.
Most of the folks who post here are educated people, teachers, many of them retired teachers, and they come from all around the country.
Here’s the thing: The entire country, especially the younger people in the country, has left the troglodyte Repugnicans WAY BEHIND on a long, long, long list of issues, including Medicare for All, abortion, immigration, LGBTQ marriage, religion, and so on. To the Reichwing, informed, contemporary views sound extreme. That’s because they live in backward bubbles in places like Tennessee and Florida (aka Ivankalandia) and Texas and West Virginia.
And Missouri and Kansas and Arizona and Arkansas and Eastern Washington And Indiana, and etc. . . .
Woke-Light Airlines Flight 1776 would like to announce: Now departing from Gate 5, Emily King. Emily King, please proceed to Gate 5.
Anyone considering voting for the 3rd party candidacy of Cornel West or the person that the No Labels party selects, is no friend of democracy.
The No Labels Party is fueled by oligarchy money. Republicans will likely fund West as a spoiler for the Democrats.
On Fox, there was a segment in March of this year-“How do Cornel West and Robert P George maintain a close friendship?” In summary, their point, “Losing friendship due to political polarization is a ‘failure of trust.’ ”
We can assume that George doesn’t express racism or else, it should be very hard for West to “trust” him. On the other hand, we know George’s attitude about LGBTQ (Manhattan Declaration) and women. Either of those two groups would be fools to trust a GOP political activist like George.
Has Cornel West been married 5 times and divorced 4?
The topic of “trust” is an interesting choice for him.
Maybe it makes him less likely to get involved in multi-decade foreign military conflicts. Someone who knows when it’s time to call it quits.
call it quits from a political career
We need to broadcast emphatically what you wrote re 3rd party candidates. In the 2000 presidential election, FL had six 3rd party candidates who each won >100,000 votes—more than the margin between Bush and Gore. The election might not have gone to the Supreme Court if it weren’t for those candidates.
With each day’s passing, IMO, it becomes clearer that the Green Party fronts for Russia.
“Cornel West Blames NATO” for Russia war against Ukraine.
The teacher who spends time explaining that slaves “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” is distracting his students’ attention away from the unmitigated horrors of slavery as well as confusing them, by suggesting that slavery was not entirely bad. The teacher might just as well tell his students that slaves received free meals and housing.
The entire Southern economy was fueled by the labor of enslaved Blacks, who were the property of their enslavers. To tell students that some slaves learned about blacksmithing or shoemaking uses a meaningless detail to invent a “benefit” purportedly important enough to teach when in fact slavery was brutal and barbaric to its core.
Well said, Neil.
The teacher might just as well tell his students that slaves received free meals and housing.
This was precisely what I was taught in elementary school in Southern Kentucky.
Bob and Neil,
Not only did slaves receive free meals and housing, they didn’t pay taxes. They never lost their job in an economic downturn. They got free clothing, as well as medical care. Add to that the skills training, and you have to wonder why non/slaves didn’t ask to be enslaved to get all those benefits.
lol
Brilliant observation, Bob and Diane!
Thank you Diane– this post gave me a real chuckle!
“The entire Southern economy…”
Not to mention the textile mfg. in England and the US, and the money left over from slave trade that made families wealthy for generations, regardless of geography.
This is the time when teachers MUST STAND UP and teach the truth, whatever the consequences might be. This is their duty. To teach the truth and be fired for it is an honorable thing indeed.
I have a few words for DeSantis and his miseducation commissioner and for the ugly, lying, supposedly Christian troglodytes of Hillsdale College, but Diane does not allow such language on her blog. These are all little, little people, twisted and creepy and breathtakingly backward, and their modi operandi are equivocation, lying by omission, and jingoism.
They have no idea, these people, how behind the rest of the culture they are.
Suppose that you are an enslaved person in 1840 and you develop a particular skill–say expertise in the grading of tobacco. Do you benefit from this? No. What might happen is that your so-called “master” will hire you out to others to do this task in order to make a little additional money. The enslaved person would not see it, typically. The so-called “master” would.
Precisely. At large plantations there were often shops to repair farm implements, mostly blacksmiths, mostly slaves. I imagine the owner took any profits from work done for surrounding communities. Or maybe he let the slaves profit from it. You think?
I have read a few accounts of a few enslaved people making a tiny bit of money on the side, but yes, of course, anything they earned was the property of the person who “owned them,” so this was a rare phenomenon. Typically, all or almost all of the fruits of their labor, skilled or unskilled, were stolen from them.
TRUMP: They want to put your president—the most popular and loved president in history—more popular than Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglas or any of those presidents—in prison. But they do that—they even try that—people will not be happy, believe you me. Not happy. You know those animals? Big, big animals they can fly and breathe fire and come from Chynuh? These people, these prosecutors, and they are not good people, I can tell you that—well, it won’t be pretty when real Americans, patriots, rise up, and they all get burned. Dragons are real, by the way. A lot of people don’t know that.
MODERATOR: In comments at a rally this last Wednesday, Donald Trump seemed to suggest that he believes in dragons. So, this raises a question. Do you believe in dragons, and should someone who thinks that dragons are real or that we should inject disinfectant or who has been determined by a judge and jury to have committed rape or who tried in several ways to overthrow the elected government of the United States be allowed to run for president? Let’s take the dragons question, first, quickly. Governor Christie?
CHRIS CHRISTIE: It’s time we faced facts. Donald Trump doesn’t know dragons. I do. As Governor, I took on the teachers’ unions. So dragons are nothing. I’ll take on dragons too.
VIVEK RAMASWAMY: You say “dragons” like they’re a bad thing, Brett, but people want a new generation of leadership that knows as Trump does how dragons can be useful, how they can burn up whole cities of Democrats and women who wouldn’t date me when I was a teenager.
RHONDA SANTIS: Let me be clear about this. Day 1, we slit everybody’s throats and feed them to the dragons.
NIKKI HALEY: Look, I served with Donald Trump, and I’m proud of it. So, don’t expect me to join the dragon-bashing train, OK? But I can tell you, as a woman, that there’s nothing wrong with dragons except maybe that we have to accept that dragon breath in the morning, well, maybe we can do without that. Maybe we can all agree about that. But that’s just one little part of the whole. Got it? I know this may be over some people’s heads.
Brilliant! Bob
Slave trading has been around for thousands of years. jews have been slaves and kicked out of countries for thousands of years too.
Blacks sold blacks, Portuguese sold blacks, was not just all white people. If it weren’t for the majority of white people fighting the revolutionary war and defeating England we would have all been enslaved under a king.
It is 2023 not even close to slavery besides us being stuck in this bullshit matrix where we pay taxes and go through the motions of this life.
“Bullshit matrix”?? Not sure what that is. Please elaborate. Thanks!
India,
Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society and a first world nation. Btw- by definition, slaves don’t pay taxes.
Throughout history, people have died from dysentery, cancer, plague, etc. that doesn’t mean that our taxes shouldn’t fund attempts to mitigate.
If you are one of the end-of-times nutcases, never mind.
Psst, India. Learn some history, and get some help.
India, ignorance has also been around for thousands of years, and it’s still with us. There are those who would post a comment such as yours to prove it. Thanks for contributing to the research.
Gov. DeSantis attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic school. Today, the school has a student body with only 15% kids of color in contrast to the state’s student body-47%.
Seton Hall University posts dissertations/ theses on-line. One posted Spring 2-22-2021, is, “Exploring the Experience of Black Students in a Predominantly White, All-Male, Suburban Catholic H.S.”
From the research, the following conclusion- “political and racial divisions were exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump furthering a chasm.”
Preceding that statement, “…barriers that exist that prevent membership…marginalizes (Black students)…seen as others…normalizing of anti-Blackness and the N-word…micro-aggressions.”
My taxes should not go to private schools.
I’ve never seen a precise or even rough figure reported, but the amount of tax revenues that go to private corporations (i.e. contractors and non-profits) must be absolutely stunning.
Your point?
two, among many, differences- employers who have to follow civil rights employment law and who are prohibited from discrimination against customers (protected classes).
My point is that probably a quarter or more of all tax dollars go to private corporations (both “nonprofit” and for-profit) that have little to no transparency or accountability.
Charter schools are legally permitted to discriminate against students and employees on the basis of race, religion, and sex? I don’t think that’s true where I live.
(1) The green light for religious charter schools
(2) Religionist lawyers got rulings from courts including SCOTUS that allow religious organizations to discriminate against protected classes e.g. Biel v. St. James Catholic school.
What policies/laws are in effect that would prevent a Catholic charter school from being similar to a Catholic suburban school that receives voucher money?
Thirty percent of Catholic schools are single sex. Check the number of male teachers at Covington Catholic H.S. in Ky,… does that ratio suggest an anomaly as compared to the male to female teacher national average for high schools?
I worked for an aircraft engine manufacturer- a major government contractor. The firm’s practices reflected the federal government’s stringent guidelines for equal opportunity. Yes, contractors can find surreptitious ways to discriminate against protected classes but, it’s not legitimized.
On occasion, an institution has done something for so long that people forget to question its ethical/moral practices.