Florida wants to teach about "skills" slaves obtained in the antebellum south because "beneficent" slaveholders taught their slaves to read, write, blacksmithing, etc. They say this is supported by "scholars." Well, let's see what the scholars really say.../1
...first, let's start with blacksmithing, since this is specifically what DeSantis mentioned yesterday. This, more than anything, underscores the brutal ignorance of the GOP on history, and their apparent belief that Africans arrived here as ignorant, incompetent savages.../2
...reality: People who were already skilled blacksmiths were brought in chains from West Africa. These Africans were among the most skilled blacksmiths the world had ever seen, and *they* taught *white* blacksmiths new skills and techniques. African blacksmith slaves were.../3
....allowed to travel from town to town, both providing services to other plantations and townsfolk, but also teaching the skills (& spreading news) to other slaves and whites. This idea that whites taught slaves to be blacksmiths when it was the other way around underscores.../4
...the ignorance that will vomited up onto Florida students by people who want to mold history into some "whites were so good to slaves" narrative. Now, on to the other one that the Florida GOP always cites to "scholars": Reading and writing. Start off with this: Slaves were.../5
...never taught to write. Ever. It was considered dangerous because plantation owners feared it would allow them to communicate secretly. While *some* slaveholders taught their slaves to read, it was almost exclusively so that they could read the Bible. These excerpts from.../6
...an actual historian writing in 1983 in a peer-reviewed journal on history spells out the reality. It is based on interviews conducted from the post-Civil War until about 1930. As for the religious context of teaching them to read, and the efforts to hold that down:.../7
...and as mentioned there, it goes into more detail about how those slaveholders who taught the slaves to read the Bible because they considered it to be their Christian duty (a self-directed motivation, not just personal beneficence) but would not teach them to write.../8
...however, the idea that all these wonderful white were sitting around dancing and singing about the small number of slaves who were being taught to read the Bible is an obscene falsehood. Do you think Florida will teach this kids THIS reality?..../9
...or will that reality be blocked out because the poor little twinkle snowflake white kids will feel guilty about being white if they learn that slaves seen reading would suffer amputation or decapitation?
History is history. It is not what we choose to make of it.../10
...and there can be no greater anti patriotic act than hiding or manipulating the *actual* history of a country. Stalin did that, as in this example which mirrors precisely what Texas conservatives did with their rules:.../11
...Germany, on the other hand, in an act of deep patriotism, teaches the full, brutal truth about the Nazis. Lying about the true history of the nazis is a crime in Germany. And it does not make German young people feel "guilty" about being German. It makes them angry at.../12
...those in the past who allowed barbarism to spread through the nation, to spread hate of and attempt to wipe out Jews, homosexuals, gypsies etc, to ban and burn books, to manipulate history, to infuse children with false and toxic nationalism, and so on.../13
...America has some terrible, brutal & barbaric parts of our past. Whether slavery, our treatment of native Americans (seriously, if you don't know how bad this was, read up on it), or our treatment of blacks from Reconstruction through Jim Crow through the Civil Rights era.../14
...through today-if you won't teach it, then *you* hate America. You cant change history & claim you love the country. It's only though facing what we were that we can see how we got here & where we still have to go.
And that seems to scare conservatives more than anything.
end
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.