You don’t say? What a surprise? People who say slavery was not all bad are on the far right? Just what we already knew. Hugs
Mother Jones reports:
Florida education officials William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, members of the group that crafted the standards, released a statement in response to the backlash. “The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted. This is factual and well documented,” the pair wrote. “Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history.”
The statement includes several examples of such historic figures, including blacksmiths, shoemakers, fishing and shipping industry workers, tailors, and ironically enough, teachers. But, it appears these Florida educators didn’t do their homework.
As critics were quick to note, many of the “examples” listed in the statement were never slaves, or they launched their respective professions only after gaining their freedom. The Tampa Bay Times pointed out several examples, including Booker T. Washington, listed in the statement as a teacher. “Washington was enslaved but did not gain his skills until after being freed at age 9,” the paper notes.
Kyle Mantyla reports at Right Wing Watch:
Right Wing Watch had written about Rice years ago when she was chairman of the National Black Republican Association, an organization that once ran radio ads and erected billboards falsely claiming that civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. “was a Republican.”
In 2008, the NBRA produced a series of radio ads declaring that “the Democratic Party is a racist party” and attacking then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for being “an arrogant elitist who turned his back on poor blacks and his own country.”
In the wake of Obama’s election, the NBRA took it upon itself to issue a “White Guilt Emancipation Declaration” in which the organization unilaterally declared that all “white American citizens are now, henceforth and forever more free of White Guilt” because the nation had elected “a socialist who does not share the values of average Americans and will use the office of the presidency to turn America into a failed socialist nation.”
Scottie's Playtime 
Can someone help this slightly confused ‘Brit’ here.
These folk who say ‘slavery was not so bad’ ie the removal of a persons liberties, for profit- right?
Are these the same ones who are making a big fuss about the ‘socialism’ in Central / Federal Government which is taking away their liberties?
Now to my mind that seems to suggest that ‘white folks’ liberties are very important to some white folk, but as for black folks……not so much?
Seems to be either a disconnect in the thinking…or some kinda prejudice thing…Gosh! Surely not the latter?
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Hello Roger. Yes very true. It is a case of what happens to affect me is important, but what affects you is not. Those that claim slavery is not that bad are like the people that don’t understand what it really was. They really can not seem to imagine a situation where people were owned by another, where every action, every morsel of food, every aspect of a person’s life, where the very body of a person is owned like a piece of furniture by someone else to do with what they wanted.
I think they see it like a parent / adult’s control over a child. Yes the child has to obey and do things like chores they don’t want to and yes the child may be punished even spanked if they are bad … but really they grow up and become adults. They become free.
They can not seem to comprehend the real horror of it, where there was no growing up or out of the control, but all your life your very body and existence was under the control / whims of another, where your own needs and wants did not exist, and you were to please them all the time. That is the point behind the idea that “slaves gained skills they could use to benefit them” crap. But there was no later for slaves that they could use those skills for. They were owned for life, forever.
I look back at my childhood and how horrible it was. I still have nightmares, in fact night before last I again woke Ron with me trying to scream out “do not touch me, please do not hurt me”. But my physical torment ended. The physical part of it stopped at 17 when I left home. A slave doesn’t have that choice, that opportunity. They never got to leave the home, to leave being a slave, to stop being something someone else had complete control over. To stop being something used by others for what ever pleased them, to stop having to please someone against their will, to stop being hurt.
That is what pisses me off the most about these people downplaying and ignoring the horror of having someone else control your body, not having the freedom of your own choices. They seem to think it is like raising your hand to go to the bathroom in grade school. They lack understanding and empathy for what it really was, and they want to make sure that no future generation of kids understand / know what it was either. All to pretend it did not really happen or was not that bad? Why? So they don’t feel bad about being sort of racist or not wanting those people around them? To be able to claim black people being less affluent and in a worse neighborhood is their own fault? To feel superior to darker skin people? I don’t get it. I do not understand this.
Shit sorry Roger. I did not mean to go off on a rant but the sheer assholery of the racists pisses me off to the highest levels. Hugs
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You rant on Scottie. You have every right and entitlement to do so.
These folk who try and re-write history and complain about how hard-done by their heritage has been annoy me too. Well boo-hoo!
How do they answer such observations that African American folk who were born free and lived free were, during the Civil War and particularly during the Gettysburg campaign were considered mere booty and shipped south?
Gimme a break!!
They know- jack!!
Slavery, is slavery in all its forms.
You suffered terribly. You know. Rant on.
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