Nah let’s not do that
One terrible idea got shot down:
A group of educators in Texas proposed referring to slavery as “involuntary relocation” in second-grade classes — before being rebuffed by the State Board of Education.
The nine educators made up one of many groups tasked with advising the Texas board on changes to the social studies curriculum, which would affect the state’s almost 9,000 public schools.
…
Aicha Davis, a Democrat representing Dallas and Fort Worth, said during the meeting that the wording was not a “fair representation” of the slave trade, according to the Texas Tribune, which first reported the story.
Part of the proposed draft standards for the curriculum, the Tribune reported, directed students to “compare journeys to America, including voluntary Irish immigration and involuntary relocation of African people during colonial times.”
Yeeeeah that’s a very euphemistic way to name it, no matter what the surrounding subject matter is. Violent abduction into enslavement would be more realistic.
In a statement posted on Twitter on Thursday, the Texas Education Agency responded to the backlash the proposal had created.
“As documented in the meeting minutes, the SBOE provided feedback in the meeting indicating that the working group needed to change the language related to ‘involuntary relocation,’ ” it said.“Any assertion that the SBOE is considering downplaying the role of slavery in American history is completely inaccurate.”
Good. Now about systemic racism…
Last year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill prohibiting K-12 public schools from teaching critical race theory — an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not limited to individual prejudices, that conservatives have used as a label for any discussion of race in schools.
If schools can’t teach about systemic racism…that’s a problem. Of course racism is systemic. One word: redlining. That’s just a starting point but it’s a useful one, because its effects are in everything.
Whenever anyone claims “Black people are more violent”, a good response is: “How did Black people get to the US in the first place? Surely because white people were more violent, and violently brought them here, no?”
I think that we need to acknowledge that it was a full employment program with free transportation, food, and lodging included.
And in perpetuity.
Why are these neo-Confederates so squeamish? You want to call it Southern Heritage? — then use the language of your ancestors, the Original Patriots you claim as your “heritage.” If they called them “slaves,” and the institution “slavery,” why isn’t that good enough for you?
Why are they so damn interested in this? They can have an authoritarian theocracy without it and with considerable buy-in from minorities. Just seems utterly unnecessary.
It’s not slavery, it’s alternatively compensated labor. Some workers are compensated by money and some are compensated by getting to keep their lives (for now…). It’s only a minor detail really.
But that Texas law does not prevent schools teaching about systemic racism, nor about redlining, nor an honest account of race over the history of the US. The WaPo is (surprise!) misrepresenting what the law says.
[By the way, more whites were redlined than blacks, though this was indeed a smaller fraction of whites than of blacks.]
GW: don’t forget, though, that the slave trade requires active participation by African kingdoms. Not that traditional war captive slavery was anywhere as bad as the transatlantic trade but…. It is ironic that European prohibition of the trade weakened these kingdoms economically so they were more easily conquered as colonies.