I have a new essay @HammerandHope on the shenanigans in Florida over the state’s African American History curriculum. Yes, I read the entire 200+ page document and it’s not just one bad sentence. Thread follows.hammerandhope.org/article/florid… The whole lot reflects the DeSantis extreme right “anti-woke” education agenda, by design as mandated by law. The efforts to “both sides” American slavery reflect the conservative political agenda’s minimization of the role of racism in our history and today’s society.

I wrote about how I experienced indoctrination as a high school student in Florida. Remember this when you hear DeSantis & gang decry a “woke” agenda as an excuse for banning courses, books, and ideas they dislike. thenation.com/article/politi… I was required to take a course, “Americanism v. Communism.” It was as bad as it sounds, dictated by conservatives, the “anti-wokes” of the Cold War era. Americanism was considered all good and communism all evil.

Let's discuss the significance of #Juneteenth, which was amplified during last summer's protests and the escalating take-downs of Confederate monuments. Juneteenth served as a counter-narrative, especially starting in the late 19th century when the the Lost Cause ideology was fabricated. The erection of Confederate monuments was part of a deliberate and successful effort by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to bolster white supremacy; to rewrite history to deny the significance of slavery in the Civil War and its violent role in American

Lawrence Mead is exhibit “A “to dispute David Brooks & others who claim there are no conservatives in academia. Not true. They are often the most influential scholars. Mead has played a key role in national welfare reform. His latest polemic “Poverty and Culture” in Society” /1 is a summary of a book he published a year ago and a rehashing of arguments he has been making for decades. It is listed as “commentary” that appears online, but not in the print journal. Thus, it was not peer reviewed, I’m assuming. /2

I want to talk about emancipation, for anyone who is interested. As Juneteenth is being discussed there is a lot of misunderstandings about the Emancipation Proclamation, how slavery came to an end, and what made Texas different. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free most enslaved people. The short version is that it applied mainly to the Confederate states. They obviously were not going to obey a dictum from a government whose authority they had rejected.

Thread. This is a response to a conversation on @nhannahjone ‘s timeline a couple of days ago about slavery. She argued that for most of U.S. history, “black people were set completely *outside* of the class structure.”
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1102545… … That slaves, “As non-people, as property, as a tradable commodity, they were classless. Their race meant they had NO class.” Most people on her TL agreed with her. A few were puzzled and skeptical. In another tweet in response to a critic she said:

These were “work or fight” laws originally issued during World War I to require able bodied men to either serve in the military or find civilian jobs. In the South, there was already a long tradition of coercing black labor through vagrancy laws. Black men were disproportionately

https://twitter.com/johnedwinmason/status/1077031611185676288

arrested under “work or fight”. But the white South originated something wholly unintended in the law by targeting black WOMEN. A military conscription was used as a pretext to force them to work as domestics in white homes, at precisely the time other jobs were opening up