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You know who also learned valuable skills? Free people. And unlike the enslaved, those free people could keep the $ from those skills, they could buy property with those skills instead of be property, they could support their families instead of have their children sold from them
They could pass along the financial benefit of those skills to their children in their wills instead of have their children bequeathed as gifts in other people's wills. We mustn't let ourselves be gaslit. We mustn'tlet them disrespect our ancestors by diminishing their suffering.
Chattel slavery was not a jobs or apprenticeship program. It was a system of violently enforced stolen labor and a crime against humanity and the fact that enslaved people resisted, used their minds, had skills, lived and survived does not in one bit diminish the crime.
Chattel slavery was heritable and permanent, meaning the vast majority of enslaved people had no chance of ever benefiting personally from their skills as they'd never know freedom, and neither would their children, or their children's children, or any of their progeny. Ever.
They hate the 1619 Project because most of us have received some glossed-over, damn-near Gone With the Wind fantasy of slavery that in know way portrays the extent, brutality and depravity of this system.
As I say to my students all of the time: Ask who does the narrative benefit and then you'll know why it exists.
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