I've been trying to find the right way to articulate this-- but the folks on the right have it backwards about who is driven by "white guilt" --
This impulse to cover up and distort the history of slavery reeks of shame. It's, frankly, weird. Nobody has perfect ancestors, what sort of crisis of identity leads one to lie about the past.
It's just the things that happened. You learn about them you learn from them. You do better. Don't make it so emotional and personal.
I assume you get why it's not a nice thing to say that "slavery helped black people in some ways" but I think some people miss why this particular idea is exceptionally racist.
One of the main arguments to justify slavery was that it "civilized" black people by making us Christian & teaching us obedience to our "betters." Black people were "lucky" or "better off" as slaves.
It assumes that when people were enslaved they had no skills, nothing to offer, that they were basically animals.
@futurebird I recently read that western advances in iron smelting came from Africa, via enslaved people.
:-( So much loss & destruction in such a story.
Saying "Slavery helped black people" sounds like saying "Rapists help women with their self-esteem".... The absurdity of such a statement is beyond me.
@futurebird All Christanism in its current forms was an imposition that a slave empire (the Roman) made us as slaves to all European peoples. Black people from Africa are only the last link in that chain of slavery.Don't forget that currently we are all in fact slaves too.
@futurebird If only every stupid f*ker who is in favor of teaching about the benefit of slavery for the individuals enslaved could have the opportunity to experience this growth themselves. Transport and work them to death in a foreign land, have their children taken and sold so that they never see them again, have their loved ones maimed and raped at the whims of their owners. Force upon them a religion that tells them that this is God’s will b/c they were born in sin. See if they still think it’s a benefit.
@futurebird I sure hope there's some lawsuits that make the obvious argument that if their Florida law says you can't teach things in school that make kids feel bad because of their ethnicity than all this stuff is illegal under Florida law because it makes black kids feel bad by implying slavery improve their lives and also makes white kids disgusted with themselves for being part of the race that's putting this crap out.
@futurebird Well said! I don't think it will change a single mind because there's something literally cognitively socially spiritually sick with those people but it needs to be said, often and loud. Thank you
@KatM@futurebird Um, hate to interrupt your perfectly reasonable line of thought... but they've already said that. "The Jews who survived the camps were the ones who were useful."
Also, "Arbeit Macht Frei"... it's literally the motto that hangs above the gates of Auschwitz. "Work Makes You Free".
So when they say "slavery taught skills" they are LITERALLY QUOTING NAZIS.
@KatM@futurebird I'm really starting to get terrified that the time for ironic disbelief is past. They're literally calling for some of us to be enslaved, and every time they get around to my family, they point directly at the ideas and people who marched us off of cattle cars and into gas chambers. They're not joking, and they're shifting the dialogue of acceptable discourse ever right.
I have heard "Hitler should have finished the job" many times in my life. They're trying to do it for him.
@futurebird it’s so deeply and profoundly racist and disgusting and dehumanizing… and my fear, aside from the disturbing attempt to rewrite the past, is that, along with things like the current racist criminal/prison system (a perpetuation of slavery)… is this is all just a pretext to much much darker things ahead. It’s clear that there is a desire to keep fighting the civil war and there is no lack of desire to return us to the 1850s or earlier.
@futurebird Yep. The whole "Slavery was good for people" seems to ignore those hundreds of thousands who died, and the hundreds of thousands who were definitively worse, for the sake of one or two who might have found some benefit.
But - for me - it is another example of the White Supremacist and Eugenicist mindset. The idea that White People are better than others (we are not). That White culture (incl education and faith) are better than others.
@futurebird
unfortunately, that is exactly how white supremacists view Black people. One extreme faction invented an entire creation myth to support their dehumaizing "others"
@futurebird it's lost on these racists that our ancestors were beaten & killed for learning anything linguistic because the slave owners realized they'd be outnumbered in a uprising due to "importing" us like cattle. But teaching this made up "CRT" would expose the horrors of how inhumane they're ancestors were to foreign society
@futurebird I remember a line that struck me most forcefully when I first started reading about slavery, that they were "saving their bodies from cannibalism and their souls from the devil". Yuck.
@futurebird I feel like the argument that slavery helped black people is in a way like the argument that anti-semitism helped jewish people found Israel. If you ignore a lot of context and focus hard enough on exactly the perspective supporting you, you can make is sound true.
But if you look at even a little bit of context the whole argument falls apart into biased ignorance.
Not that the treatment of jewish and black people is even remotely comparable, just the arguments strike me as similar.
@futurebird
Which is a disgusting suggestion. Those 'savages', as white folk called them, were not less civilized just had a different culture and religion. They were not savages.
I get the feeling the original idea they wanted was "black people benefited from slavery because they became Christian." -- but, this was probably too obviously a violation of separation and racist.
Black people didn't just passively learn Christianity, btw. We re-invented it into a theology of liberation that drove the Civl Rights movement. So much synthesis and invention occurred despite slavery not because of it.
So much of what those people knew has been lost forever, but not all of it.
@futurebird always the assumption that "different" is "less than" and stepping in as saviors to "civilise".
How arrogant. It's embarrassing. A good word: in french "embarras" is "burden". We colonisers have this history; an ugly baggage we need to deal with :-(
@futurebird I don't think Slavery teaching the slaves to become Christian was a "benefit". Maybe, in a patronizing white, Western European way, but I think they would have benefited more from becoming Jewish. And many of their descendants actually gave it a second thought and converted to Islam. Including Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar...
@futurebird It's perhaps worth remembering that the second realm to adopt Christianity as its official religion was the Kingdom of Aksum (modern-day Ethiopia), which was and is predominantly black. The Romans didn't adopt Christianity for another couple of centuries (though the Roman Empire was pretty diverse even before Jesus was born). It didn't start to catch on among most Europeans until the western Roman Empire was in terminal decline.
An issue I see in your posts here is that it comes across as setting up a series of strawmen, your putting words in others’ mouths about what they’re claiming in order to shoot down the things that they’re not necessarily saying.
The arguments that you’re attacking aren’t the ones I’ve been hearing from the other side, so the stance doesn’t come across as actually addressing the issue.
@volkris@futurebird she’s not though. These “arguments” are not new. They’ve been used before, and history shows damn well what they imply. Let’s not make excuses for racists now. Giving them epistemological cover is pretty intellectually dishonest, which is what you’re accusing her of.
Maybe it would be helpful for citation of specific cases where those arguments are made, so they can be addressed directly, instead of vaguely.
Again, the problem is that maybe those arguments are made or were made, but in the present case they’re not the ones I’ve seen, hence it ends up sounding like a strawman attack.
I’d say specific citation would help set the criticism on a firmer foundation.
You just need to plug in the search term "slavery civilized blacks" and you find examples. Here is one: ews/2023/07/28/disgusting-black-republicans-livid-over-desantis-slavery-attack-00108776
And that’s a great example of exactly what I’m saying:
IF this Politico article is accurately capturing the position (and I’m not saying it is) then the arguments being refuted above aren’t part of the position being taken.
Without a specific citation for what’s or who’s being argued against, the critique is open to being waived off as misunderstanding, at best, the idea it’s trying to counter.
If DeSantis said slavery was good because it Christianized those in chains, yeah, that would be a pretty awful stance to take, but that’s not among the arguments that have been hitting the headlines, as the Politico article indicated.
@volkris@InkySchwartz@futurebird no no no!!! You can NOT treat these “ideas” as if they have any sort of legitimacy. That’s exactly what these fuckers want. When you have ANYONE making a suggestion that enslavement or genocide can be good, you dismiss it out of hand because the last thing you want is to give such abhorrent ideas legitimacy. People’s lives and freedom should not EVER be up for debate! When you start debating fascist ideas as if they have any legitimacy, the fascists win.
This conversation isn't about proving a point about DeSantis. It's about larger trends in American culture and the way that older ideas are resurfacing.
You seem to think this is a debate? Or about proving some political point? It's not.
I'm interested in this idea of "guilt" and the notion the a purpose of accurate discussion of slavery is to cause guilt. It seems bonkers to me.
Well I would say that the discussion you are setting off on seems pretty disconnected from the larger trends in American culture since it doesn’t seem to be referencing things that are going on in current events.
And so like I said, pointing to specific examples of the argument that you are criticizing would go a long way to clarify what you are trying to say.
@volkris@futurebird@cadenza Dude, I gave you both a specific example and a way you can find more for yourself. So why do you keep acting like there is no evidence of these ideas out there on the part of what we now call American Conservativeism?
@volkris@futurebird@cadenza Ah, no it did not. The point @futurebird brought up was that the idea that there are conservatives who believe that slavery was good since it gave slaves skills. You objected to that and asked for evidence. I provided that evidence and you then pivoted it to being something about DeSantis in specific.
So you are being a dishonest conversational partner here.
No it did not. A direct quote you can look up yourself:
"At issue are the new education standards for how Black history is taught in Florida schools that DeSantis signed into law last year. The revised guidelines, released this month, require educators to instruct middle schoolers that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”"
You see how there’s a difference between saying slavery was good and saying that slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit?
@futurebird@volkris@InkySchwartz he’s gaslighting. “See, you learned from your abuser so it can’t be all bad!” Africans already had skills. They didn’t need to be beaten, tortured, raped, and had their families taken away to learn new ones.
What do you know about the: 1906 Atlanta Race Riot
1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot
1920 Ocoee Massacre
1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre?
I'm curious if @volkris will reply to my question.
They were the other obviously suspect part of the FL curriculum proposal. (not that they be taught at all but rather the suggestions on how they ought to be taught)
If you’re talking about your question about how I would describe various race riots, well if I had to give a pretty short and simple description, it would be people rising up to try to escape injustices of society.
I wouldn’t generally want to cast various events into one single bucket since each one had their different nuances, different matches to light the fire, but if you want a summary description that might be my quick take.
I could make a bingo board for this kind of generally unproductive conversation.
It's OK to be wrong. It's OK if you assumed that the people you assume are always "unreasonable" about racism were being "unreasonable" again-- but not even black republicans are on board for this. Don't be embarrassing just to win an argument. Take off your debate team badge and try to have a real conversation.
@futurebird@volkris@InkySchwartz@cadenza I'm realizing the intended sarcasm might not have been clear, as I agree with the original post entirely and think the guy arguing with everyone in the replies is doing it in bad faith. Regardless, fair point about it not being a productive comment. Would have been better to just point out that he's sealion-ing the thread and move on.
From what I’ve heard on reporting on this topic, it’s not even that black Republicans ARE on board with the education standards, but that black independants are on board with it, that nonpartisans, academics, promoted the standards that are under scrutiny here.
Not that it should matter at all.
Such matters of fact shouldn’t come down to the identities of the people recognizing them. That just comes down to ad hominem argument that gets us nowhere.
So yeah, it’s okay to be wrong. And if you really want to go that direction, I will be happy to see you admit that you are at any point :-)
Although actually I don’t really care. This is social media and people are welcome to be wrong and to work on their hobby horses as much as they want.
But it absolutely doesn’t get us anywhere for people to attack claims that aren’t being made.
@volkris
Um, they are not the same, obviously, but the one logically entails the other.
If you argue that there was a benefit to enslaved people of being enslaved, then you are also committed to saying that slavery is at least in part, good.
My advice to you is not to try arguing the merits of enslavement, especially to a population that includes the descendants of slaves.
Well no. Just because one receives a benefit doesn’t mean it’s overall for the best. There are examples all throughout life where a person benefits from one thing even though it is on the whole for the worse.
It is entirely reasonable to say that slavery is bad even though there were some minor benefits to individuals in the course of that overall terrible institution.
The two statements are not mutually exclusive, and it’s apparently very worthwhile for our education system to point that out, since so many people on here seem to overlook that.
May I also add - what possible decision would such an argument hope to inform?
Like would this be used to say that we should do slavery again, since there were these supposed benefits?
Because maybe we want students of history to know more about nuances of the world, beyond the simple, often politicized black and white narratives that are as convenient for politicians as they are misleading?
Maybe it’s so important that in the education system we let students know what actually happened?
What’s so important about that? Well, honestly that seems self-evident to me as a proponent of liberal education.
That people were violently abducted from their families and homes, trafficked to foreign lands, sold, and suffered further harms and atrocities including being used as breeding stock, raped, flogged, worked to death, and just killed outright.
Let's specify WHO did this, and to whom
Let's explore the lasting harms to subsequent generations.
Let's explore what current things are also bad
Let's do those
The new curriculum emphasizes that nothing in the teachings may make anyone feel bad about themselves.
I put it to you, Mr. Amateur Sophist, that if education doesn't make a person feel equal measures of wonderment and embarrassment, then it isn't doing its job.
If you aren't a bit embarrassed about your previous state of knowledge after a course, then the course failed to achieve its goals.
Why in the world do you want to make people feel bad about themselves? That’s bizarre, sounds flat out sociopathological, that you have a goal of making children feel bad about themselves, or at least, you are disappointed that the state is not making children feel bad about themselves.
Because that is how personal growth and learning work.
Equal measures of wonderment and embarrassment.
Are you really such a wilting flower that your ego cannot tolerate the embarrassment of finding out you are wrong, that you have been ignorant, or that you were unskilled?
Do you really believe that children are such delicate snowflakes that they must be protected from learning anything that isn't a resounding compliment?
@futurebird a lot of people explicitly took this position about the residential schools, literally clergymen saying that the kids who died in them died baptized so the schools actually saved them
@futurebird pointing at the guy I made deaf by putting him in the Deaf Maker 2000 helmet I built and exploding his eardrums
See, he never would have learned sign language if it weren't for me
@futurebird
A core tenet of christianist mythology is that there's always someone "better' to aspire to and who could do no wrong. This is why you see so many stories about clergy-based abuse (such as those brought to light by the recently deceased Sinead O'Connor).
Christianist mythology is a cancer on humanity that has long since metastasized.
Yes, the idea is slavery 'saved' Africans, there's also a narrative that everyone Africa was a 'primitive' hunter gatherer and slavery 'civilized' them. When in reality there were multiple long standing civilizations with great urban centers full of skilled artisans and complex political traditions - some could be said to be democratic - connected in a network of world trade.
While most of Africa was/is rural, a case can be made that precolonial sub-Saharan Africa had a greater standard of living, individual liberty and social equality than most Europeans and their settlers.
Hunter Gatherers do not make good slaves: they're not easy to catch, they run away or kill their captors at first opportunity and they quickly die in captivity. Most slaves came from more formal/stratified societies, often refugees from countries destroyed by European conquest.
Another thing they bring up is African Slavery, while practiced in many cultures, it's of a fundamentally different character than racial caste slavery - not a defense of old world slavery but there's a difference, Likewise even today 'tribalism' in Africa is seen as something inherently primitive, when Ancient Greece the mythological birthplace of the West was also highly tribal in it's social organization.
@futurebird@SocialJusticeHeals friend of mine wrote their PhD thesis on ACE schooling. There's afb group for survivors too, if anyone wants the link. Sorry you had to deal with that :(
@futurebird There was certainly some "exchange of ideas", but that was almost all in the context of it being forced upon black people or stolen by whites.
@futurebird it's nearly the same as racist colonial statements. Apparently indigenous people were just kinda standing around not knowing what to do and walking into each other before christianity and capitalism made them "upstanding members of society"
@futurebird 100% agreed with you. Only someone like desantis (purposelly not capped) would come up with something like that. he doesn't belong anywhere near politics.
@futurebird It turns out that the idea is pretty old. It probably did not originate in England, but England did rationalize colonizing a large portion of the world by saying that they were bringing civilization to the places the conquered. There were those among them that felt they had a moral responsibility to do so. Human beings, and the strange ideas they convince themselves of, are weird.
@futurebird As a second-generation German-American, my position on Nazi atrocities is, my ancestry doesn't mean that I bear blame, but it does mean I bear responsibility—at a minimum, NOT TO DO THAT KIND OF SHIT, but beyond that, to resist others' efforts to do it.
I think some overly sensitive white folks in this country could take a lesson from this framing.
Nobody's telling them to "feel guilty." We're telling them to see what's right and fucking do it, without trying to make it about THEM.
@futurebird I’m a school teacher from Texas now living in Australia. Every day I see how much my old home is slipping back into a viciously stupid manner; deciding making people dumb on purpose is better than just admitting that they did bad things and never allowing us to get that point of resolution as a country.
My grandma was a literal Nazi from Germany and I take no pleasure in having that connection but I don’t try and run from it. I learn from it and do better for myself.
That's all that we can really do. I don't know why growth and becoming better is so scary for some of these people. Why they cling to the past so desperately.
@futurebird Oddly, this explains Christofascism, one of the leading edges of white nationalism and the anti-awareness backlash against historical truth. Christianity has, at its core, an essential belief in total absolution from sin through professed faith in Jesus "who died for your sins." Believers are wiped clean of all bad acts simply through the acceptance of a figure as God, who prepaid for that forgiveness by a painful tortured death (cue horrible politician crying: "God has forgiven me for my sins...") The fundamentalist view is that white Christians have already "paid" for the guilt or fact of slavery with their own savior's (a savior curiously portrayed as a thin pale Aryan man in pristine white clothing) suffering and death, so it is heresy to force saved Christian children or adults to pay twice with the discomfort of a ("benign" forgiven) sin.
My devoutly Buddhist uncle converted at his deathbed to Christianity to seek absolution from what he did fighting Nazis in WW2. Buddhists don't have a whitewash concept, they only return in the next life to pay/suffer for what they did not learn in this life. He killed other humans, and was tormented by this all of his otherwise good and kind life, he didn't want to return.
@futurebird According to the Republicans, there is nothing in the world more important than protecting the irrational emotions of white conservatives. There is no crime as severe as offending their racial sensitivities.
Many on the Christian Right in the US are practicing a latent form of Ancestor Worship that is enmeshed with a belief that the Bible is the inerrant and comprehensive word of God. They take this to imply that the further civilization gets in time from the period of Jesus, the more errant and less Godly people are.
So the ancestors must be better, purer, and more godly than anyone now, and must be defended at all costs
@futurebird Like my father-in-law used to say, "You really don't want to do too much research into your heredity, sooner or later you turn up a horse thief." 🤣
@futurebird Not so fun fact: Most black people were enslaved by other black people before they were sold to white people.
Not so fun bonus fact: As a Dutch kid/teen, I learned about the Dutch slave trading business… as a neutral fact. Not something to be proud of, but something that our ancestors did. Anyway, I thought we were the most prolific slavers. Turns out the Dutch were not even close to some other nations.
And also make sure not to blame people as if they were the ones who did it.
History is history, but the future is what we make it so don't blame people for what they didn't do and instead let people realize that what happened was bad and should not occur again.
@futurebird There are quite a lot of parallels with this with German fascists, who claim that they want to end the "culture of guilt and shame" regarding the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
It's not about "guilt", it's about doing better than our ancestors!
@futurebird What really puts the lie to that argument is that Africans were already highly civilized and had built ancient empires with all the attributes that US racists ascribe to being civilized. Speaking personally, I don't think forcing christianity on anyone is civilized, but if that's part of their argument, the Kingdom of Aksum adopted that religion in the fourth century (AD) as noted by Infrapink in this thread.
@futurebird I don't think it's just shame -- I think it's actual fear of being financially damaged. I like to think about the excellent episode of Atlanta called "The Big Payback" -- that episode was chilling to light-skinned folks.
@futurebird When you add on removing the ability to talk about anything that makes you uncomfortable about your slave trading murderous past it is clear where this is going.
@futurebird but but... it makes white americans look like the most vile and morally bankrupt humans to have ever humaned. We can't have that. We are beautiful and perfect.
🤦♀️ honestly this attempt by our melanin deprived neighbors to whitewash history shows that FAR too many of them have not actually grown or obtained morals since ... ever and just don't want anyone being able to prove it.
@futurebird
To be honest I don't even think that they are ashamed. I think that they understand that most people see these things as bad and shameful so they lie, project ("it's ok to be white"), etc; but I'm pretty sure that they're doing it consciously. As you get deeper down the rabbit hole the pretence drops and you start celebrating the atrocities
@futurebird agreed. It comes from this bad idea that the morality of our ancestors’ actions is a factor in our own moral worth. It’s not.
You can’t be fairly blamed because one of your ancestors was a slaver, murderer, rapist, or génocidaire. Likewise, you should get no credit for having an ancestor who was a champion for justice or a generous soul who helped others.
Look at RFK Jr. People took him seriously for too long despite having awful ideas just because they admired his dad.
@futurebird@xankarn I mean yes but really they are whipping up agitprop. They lie and distort things about education, immigration, sex orientation etc. they have a super gigantic network of media outlets: websites, radio shows, their own social networks and the ability to juice all social networks, tv etc. they have to constantly feed outrageous bs to those networks.
@futurebird those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, those who are never taught history are given no choice. They will never have a chance to learn about uprisings by enslaved people and be inspired by selfless acts of bravery and defiance.
And that's just the way THEY want it. For them your ignorance is their bliss. Trickle down my ass!
@futurebird I like to call this "turd theory," as in the study of what a person does when encountering a serious mess on their sofa. Do they refuse to move until the responsible party owns up? Insist that they can't clean because that would imply that they don't love their sofa? Refuse to acknowledge or discuss it, down to sitting in it to prove something? Or do they clean their space?
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