But they developed skillz
Speaking of monuments to the Confederacy and Just Asking Questions about why we should remove them and who is going around defending slavery anyway, let’s take a quick look at Florida and its education standards.
Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills, part of new African American history standards approved Wednesday that were blasted by a state teachers’ union as a “step backward.”
The Florida State Board of Education’s new standards includes controversial language about how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to a 216-page document about the state’s 2023 standards in social studies, posted by the Florida Department of Education.
Yes of course they did; how could it have been otherwise? The whole point of them was to do work for the slaveowners such that the slaveowners would make big profits. Of course that meant developing skills. That doesn’t count against the fact that they had no choice in the matter, they couldn’t leave, they weren’t paid, they were property from birth to death, they had no rights, any children they had were also property from birth to death, they could be whipped, tortured, locked up, killed at their owners’ discretion.
H/t Seanna Watson
This is a good example of how activists, aided by the media, try to make an issue out of a non-issue. Those Florida standards do not say that “some Black people benefited from slavery”, nor is that concept there.
Now, yes, it does say that: “… slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”.
That’s not the same thing as saying they “benefited from slavery” [if that’s not clear, suppose that, under slavery, they had a 10% chance of developing a skill such as blacksmithing; but had they not been slaves they would have had a 40% chance of the same].
But note that that is only one sentence out of a 216-page document that people are objecting to, and damning Florida/SeSantis with. (Really, if there’s only one objectionable sentence in 216 pages, then that’s not bad.)
And why is that sentence there?
Well, let’s recall. There had been a previous “AP African American Studies” curriculum that DeSantis had rejected as being too woke. This has been developed by “prominent African American studies scholars”, and the Democrats and the media were saying that DeSantis was wicked for not adopting this curriculum.
So what does that curriculum say? Well, at one point (in 103 pages) it says:
“In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, American Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”
The Florida curriculum, which in places is based on the prior AP curriculum, is a re-working of that. Since no-one has complained about the AP curriculum that DeSantis rejected, the complaint can only be about the difference between the above two quotes, and the difference there is actually minor.
Now, why might one include a mention of slaves developing skills? Well, partly, because one does not want to strip them of absolutely all agency. Despite the direness of their predicament, some (a small fraction of) slaves did manage to improve their lot marginally by becoming useful for their skills. Some (a few) bought their freedom by that route. Is it really better to give the impression that none of them could do anything other than pick cotton?
Anyhow, the NBC News piece is a good example of how the US debate on such topics is so polarised. The accusation “Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery …” is just not true. And the one sentence under question (among 200-odd pages) is similar to wording that no-one has objected to.
And, honestly, no-one is suggesting that we re-institute slavery. The renewed emphasis on the topic today it bizarre. It’s as though people wanted to make a big issue of and re-litigate the Divine Right of Kings.
Sure, teach it as history, and while I much prefer universal-franchise democracy to feudalism and absolute monarchs, nor am I wanting to tear down all the statues from times when people thought differently.
And yeah, nobody is suggesting that we re-institute slavery. Why you think that you need to deny it is sort of bizarre, Coel.
That seems like about as big a twisting of words as TRAs’ saying that Helen Joyce called for the genocide of trans-identifying people.
Coel is a very sensitive person, James, particularly where white people are concerned. Were he on the left, people would call him a snowflake, which is rather suitable, considering the colour of snowflakes. But I’m glad that he has come round to agreeing that history exists and that the study of it might have a value in coming to terms with the past, though not, clearly, with the present. Perhaps some kind people will erect a statue to him in the future. Come, kindly pigeons, let fall on…!
No, it isn’t. It really really isn’t. Maybe for you the subject is that remote and irrelevant, but for many people who aren’t you and don’t have your history and don’t live thousands of miles from the Mississippi Delta it isn’t. This smug callous shruggy dismissal of the brutal history of other people is nauseating.
Slight correction, Tim. White men. He’s on record as thinking women are underrepresented because reasons, but not sexism.
And regarding those ‘skills’, many of the slaves who were brought over were skilled workers. One might think of the kingdom of Benin, its architecture & bronzes, for example. The great trouble is that very few people in the West are aware that there is such a thing as African history, and still dismiss the idea in the manner of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History in Oxford, in 1963:
‘Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach…at present there is none: only the history of the Europeans in Africa…. The rest is darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history… History, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement, too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests… the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the world.’
That is an attitude that persists all too commonly among the ignorant, as well as those who choose to be wilfully ignorant.
Thank you, iknklast, for the reminder!
As for the ‘agency’ of the slaves, about which Coel seems to be worried, the great fear of slave-owning white people in the Americas was that of rebellion by the slaves. And there were, of course, a number of rebellions: in, famously, Haiti, and in Jamaica (‘Tacky’s rebellion’ and others), Barbados, Demerara, Suriname, and the 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana. But this is news (not old news) to most people whose ancestors were not involved in such rebellions.
Coel, face it–your mask slipped, finally, and you’ve exposed yourself as the racist that I’ve long suspected you of being.
Consider the line you quoted again:
“… slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”.
Note that it fails to note which ‘instances’ that would be true in–namely, freedom. The AP course line you quote later makes explicit that the only ‘benefit’ that could be drawn from those skills pertained to their lives after freedom, not before. And the reason for that is that they were never taught skills to benefit themselves, only to benefit their owners. That a small proportion of them somehow managed to parlay that into a benefit for themselves is a mark of triumph for them, but by no means mitigates by one iota the utter depravity and evil of those who instituted and exploited the ‘unique institution’ of American chattel slavery.
And the only folks who deny or diminish that evil are utter racists.
I’d say that passage is in there specifically as bait for a trap so the Floridians can pull some motte and bailey shit while sane-washing the rest of the curriculum.
@Freemage:
That’s not fully true, but even so, your complaint amounts to one somewhat clumsy rewording of the AP wording. One sentence in 216 pages. They reworded it clumsily. That’s the complaint?
And even then the accusers have to misrepresent what it says. It doesn’t say: “some Black people benefited from slavery”.
@Tim:
All along I’ve considered that history is interesting and important in understanding both the past and the present. You routinely misrepresent me.
@Ophelia:
And yet, when I’ve tried to discuss how this history affects the present, people don’t seem to want to discuss that on the evidence.
@iknklast:
There are lots of areas today where women are over-represented. For example (UK today): “75% of veterinary surgeons qualifying between 2010 and 2019 were female”, similarly for doctors: “Women account for almost two thirds (64%) of the 2021/2022 medical student intake”.
And yes, that is “reasons”, not “sexism”. If you personally are not interested in the “reasons” then ok, but other people are and they are important for understanding society. An unthinking slapping of the label “sexism” on any and every disparity, regardless of evidence, is how ideologues operate.
You have not ‘routinely considered that history is interesting and important in understanding both the past and the present.’ Certainly not here.
And I would add that for all your talk about your ‘evidence’, you routinely ignore evidence when it doesn’t suit your not very interesting prejudices.
@Tim:
You do realise that you misquoted me in what you put in quotes?
Anyhow, you’re wrong, I’ve always taken proper account of the role of history. And what evidence am I ignoring?
I should simply look back, Coel, at your record here. Look back on the many occasions on which evidence has been presented to you, evidence that you routinely dismiss for no good reason or, more often, do not address. I do not intend to rehearse it. And you have not ‘always taken proper account of the role of history’, as you assert. You are a very slippery customer. That is all i shall say.
Tim, your posts are akin to “the evidence for God is all around you if you would only look”. I’m well used to that tactic.
Very well. A list of some matters that I have brought up regarding ‘race’ (in the social construction meaning) in response to your special pleading, and to which you have made no serious response or no response at all:
The Windrush scandal & the terrible injustice visited by the UK Post Office on postmasters from minorities; Sir William Macpherson’s use of the phrase ‘institutional racism’ and his careful definition of it in the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, after which the Metropolitan police had sought to smear Stephen L’s parents; Baroness O’Casey’s report on institutional and systemic racism within the Met; in the US, the increasing attempts by Republican state governments in the US to gerrymander districts in order to decrease the importance of the Black American vote (which goes against the ‘universal franchise’ that you claim to support above); the lasting effects on Black American communities of redlining, and the building of highways whereby areas where Black Americans lived were either deliberately destroyed, so that the people living there had to move out, or deliberately cut off from places where white people lived, which resulted in greater poverty and inconvenience for black communities – and still does (for there is no firm dividing line between present and past, as in your naive understanding of what history is – you have made it clear on a number of occasions that you think history is all about something safely in the past: very little is ‘safely in the past’) ; the appalling response of powerful people in government and law-enforcement to the situation of black people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
This is to go on to another matter: your insinuating & Tucker Carlsonesque set of questions as to what was ‘wrong’ with black society, as though their communities lived in a wholly separate world, uninfluenced by the wider society of which they are part. Alcoholism, drug-taking, violence, etc. You may find the same pattern throughout, in particular, the Anglosphere: among the indigenous people of Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the USA. It is due to the way they have been treated over a great many years, to poverty, and to powerlessness.
@Tim:
First, well done on providing some substance. Let me explain that my primary interest here is the marked racial gaps in educational achievement and crime rate among today’s youth, and the explanations for that. That’s because that is what is driving the DEI ideology that is subverting universities and wider society and making conversations impossible. That came out of CRT and that was driven primarily by the circumstances of black Americans. Everything else (including the DEI turning on Jews post Oct 7) is underpinned by that.
So I tend to ignore stuff that isn’t relevant to that. There’s also the factor that you often accompany your points with deliberate snide distortion of what I’ve said, which suggests that you’re not actually interested in a discussion. And then there’s the Gish Gallop aspect, in that you can throw out a claim, not backed up by evidence or argument, which then would take a lengthy rebuttal. Hence why there’s lots of what you’ve said that I’ve never replied to (do you really want me to?).
Take, for example:
The original complaint was the gerrymandering spread black voters too thinly in districts, reducing their influence; nowadays the complaint is that gerrymandering concentrates black vioters too much in some districts (reducing their influence in others). While I think it would be better to have a politically neutral commission doing the districting (and noting that both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander) the overall effect is marginal. And it likely does very little to explain the racial gaps in educational achievement and crime rates. You haven’t made an argument that it does.
Again, you’re not actually making a case for why this affects educational achievement and crime rates nearly 60 years later. Again, the reality is more complex (whites were redlined also, indeed more whites than blacks were redlined, though a smaller fraction; many of those redlined would not have been lent to whatever). I can point you at analyses by Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury saying that this is not a clear-cut issue.
Again, you’re pointing to stuff from 60 years ago, 1960s-era freeways, and asserting that it has major effects today. Again, I don’t see the actual argument. You say that “resulted in greater poverty”. Why?
And anyhow, as I’ve said multiple times, the above racial gaps are not simple consequences of poverty. We know that since we can control for family SES.
@Tim:
Of course I’ve never said or thought that.
There you make a contentious claim about the explanations as though it were obvious and straightforward.
As regards today’s youth (again, the primary issue; if the kids were alright most other things would be less of an issue), I don’t agree that they are “powerless”. They have the same power as anyone else their age. If you want to say they have less power owing to lower SES then, again, SES does not explain the racial gaps in educational levels, violence, drug-taking etc! It is easy enough to make comparisons that control for SES.
So poverty doesn’t explain it either. The standard left-wing claim is that poverty causes crime, but the facts don’t really support it; a better claim is that crime causes poverty. [It’s very hard for neighbourhoods to develop in a high-crime area, because that requires small businesses to thrive, and that requires stability and dependability.]
As for “have been treated over a great many years”, again, today’s 20-yr-olds have not been mistreated. If you’re, instead, going to claim that “alcoholism, drug-taking, violence, etc” are due to how people like them were treated before they were born, then what is the mechanism for that? The answer could be “culture”. That is, they have absorbed a culture damaged by past mistreatment. Do you want to give that answer?
For example: “past mistreatment of blacks by whites has led to a culture today of black youth rejecting school and academic success as being “white” and not for them, and that leads to poor educational outcomes”. I think you could find a lot of support for that claim. (And if you want to say that that would ultimately be white people’s fault then yes, it would.) But then the fix has to be repairing black culture. This is the the exact opposite of today’s “anti-racism” which refuses to find any fault with black culture, and insists that it is only white people who need to change, even when that is against the long-term interests of black youths.
Yet another thread becomes all about Coel. Basta.