Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”

After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

There is a reason slavers are a common villain trope in a lot of fiction. The idea that slavery is in any way good is generally thought to be a universally rejected concept. Way to undoubtedly show your cards leadership slavers of Florida.

  • IntergalacticTowel@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    “developed skills”

    I mean, that’s a weak argument for them to make anyway. The only ones to benefit from this new skill are the owners, not the slaves. Hard to say “I learned how to harvest cotton well” is worth being torn away from your family and brutalized repeatedly because they’ve decided a whole group of people are just property.

    I’m glad the Confederacy lost the war. But I fear that it will, after all these centuries, win the peace.

    • mr47@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Yeah. And you can also develop skills in jail - doesn’t mean we should be throwing people in jail indiscriminately and then argue it’s for their own benefit so they can learn new skills.

    • PostmodernPythia@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      They lost the campaign. (And that’s not nothing, ending chattel slavery in the US was a boon to humanity.) The state of the war is still in question, however.