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The DeSantis gambit

Are there any beneficial skills a slave could have developed that they could not have developed as a free person?
 
Ziggurat said:
Never trust the press,
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Some media are more reliable than others. Kneejerk blanket rejection of all press would be quite silly, possibly on par with trusting some pseudonymous person who insists the Florida curriculum's "for their personal benefit" was not intended to suggest some kind of personal benefit.

Ziggurat said:
Who said that? Seriously, do you not know how to parse English?
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He knew how to spell the name of Frederick Douglass.
 
Ziggurat said:
It really depends on how its being framed:

A) Slavery was really awful, but some slaves were able to learn to read while working at a printing press and were able to better themselves after being freed or even used it to pass messages along the underground railroad.

or

B) You see slavery wasn't THAT bad. They could learn skills which their masters would reward them for by giving them better conditions since their labor was more valuable. Heck, it was if anything a better system than the hardships of sharecropping where poor black workers were at the mercy of market conditions and crop failures.

That Tim Scott is criticizing it leads me to believe its more along the lines of option "B".
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Never trust the press
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Couldn't you just use the phrase "fake news"?
they want it to be B because that's a better story. So that's how they're reporting it, and for some reason Tim Scott believed the press when he should know better. But a better story doesn't make it true. It's option A.
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You see, here's the problem I see with your argument...

If the ONLY change ever made was that one little section of the history outline, it might have been more... acceptable. You might be able to chalk up the controversy to a misunderstanding, etc.

But this one change did not happen in a vacuum. The governor of Florida has made pronouncements about opposing "wokeism". He has attacked critical race theory. Teachers have found it necessary to self-censor various lessons because they are worried about violating new educational laws regarding race.

When you try to limit teachers talking about just how bad slavery was (as well as the long-term after effects), and add a little bit about "how a few people got SOME benefit", its going to be seen as whitewashing the issue of slavery.
 
Ziggurat said:
Not that I know of. But nobody claimed there were. So what's your point?
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I can't speak to others' points here, but mine is that, if you say, certain skills were advantageous despite slavery and not because of it, the phrasing cited is at the very least deficient, and smacks of racist apology. I think anyone who believes it is not the latter, given the context and source of the curriculum, is at best deluded, and at worst cannot be described accurately in this forum.

Yes, the victims of evil can sometimes rise above it. Good for them. The history of that evil should never imply or claim credit for that. An evil is not in any way characterized by the resiliency of those who overcome it. There is no ambiguity here and there should be no room for it in our policy, our curriculum, or our lives.

The attempt to soften a crime by pointing out that you could have done worse may be relevant to sentencing, but not to the verdict.
 
bruto said:
I can't speak to others' points here, but mine is that, if you say, certain skills were advantageous despite slavery and not because of it, the phrasing cited is at the very least deficient, and smacks of racist apology. I think anyone who believes it is not the latter, given the context and source of the curriculum, is at best deluded, and at worst cannot be described accurately in this forum.
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Have you read the curriculum? You speak of context, but I don't think you actually know the context.
 
Ziggurat said:
Have you read the curriculum? You speak of context, but I don't think you actually know the context.
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It seems to me that someone who had read the curriculum would have known how to spell Frederick Douglass's name.

That name is spelled correctly, twice, on page 7 of the curriculum, in the "Benchmark Clarifications" for SS.68.AA.2.4 and SS.68.AA.2.6. That page 7 is the very next page following SS.68.AA.2.3, which appears at the very bottom of page 6 and says this:

SS.68.AA.2.3
Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).

Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
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Ziggurat said:
Seriously, that's what you're going with? A misspelling? You should at least have used the [nitpick] tag.
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I find it amusing when someone who appears not to have read a document repeatedly suggests, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that others haven't read it either.
 
jrhowell said:
Excerpt from a related story in today's Tampa Bay Times
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Hey, do you all remember when we were told we were lying about the 'Don't Say Gay' bill? That it would only apply to really wrong things and to 3rd grade and below (despite the literal bill saying only one provision applied to that)? And then the bill was implemented to do exactly what we said it would followed by it also being expanded in legislation to cover more things? The libraries that couldn't loan books, the teachers leaving, the take over of colleges by lying reactionaries who drove professors out of the state?

There is no reason to listen to those who insist we take the words and goals of the GOP, specifically the Florida GOP, in good faith. We know who is doing what, so it's reality denying anti-skepticism to claim it's not used to do just what we see it is doing.

The PrageurU stuff are indoctrinating lies. They are indoctrinating lies made to advance the 'conservative' agenda, as people like Zigg are well aware. That this stuff is what they are going to use is absolute proof of that. When you're arguing that Columbus didn't do anything wrong by the standards of the time when he was condemned and arrested for those things (although released by the King and Queen) then you're just lying. It isn't even a useful simplification for kids. What he did wasn't seen as just acceptable at the time.

The 'defense' of this is the 'if I don't confess to it in a court of law in your jurisdiction it doesn't count' defense.
 
W.D.Clinger said:
I find it amusing when someone who appears not to have read a document repeatedly suggests, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that others haven't read it either.
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And you think I didn't read the document because I misspelled a name. Damn, that's weak sauce.

I suck at spelling. I always have, this isn't news, and it's not even relevant. In another thread I keep trying to spell vacuum as "vaccum" despite multiple autocorrects. And "Fredrick" vs. "Frederick" is a spelling mistake that the browser autocorrect doesn't catch.
 
tyr_13 said:
There is no reason to listen to those who insist we take the words and goals of the GOP, specifically the Florida GOP, in good faith.
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Except that's not my argument. I don't care what the GOP says. This sub-discussion isn't about the GOP. It's about what the curriculum says. And it doesn't say what you seem to think it says. Go read it yourself. This one sentence is the only thing anyone is objecting to, and they're doing so on the basis of an assumed meaning that the sentence itself doesn't even contain.
 
Ziggurat said:
And you think I didn't read the document because I misspelled a name. Damn, that's weak sauce.

I suck at spelling. I always have, this isn't news, and it's not even relevant. In another thread I keep trying to spell vacuum as "vaccum" despite multiple autocorrects. And "Fredrick" vs. "Frederick" is a spelling mistake that the browser autocorrect doesn't catch.
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I notice, however, that you are being careful not to say you have actually read that 216-page document.

Why do you suppose pages 8-21 are identical to pages 124-137?

Or did you not even notice that duplication before I pointed it out?

ETA: This being a thread about DeSantis, I wonder whether DeSantis has read the document. He certainly wants us to know he didn't write it:
DeSantis said:
"I didn't do it. And I wasn't involved in it," he said last Friday, adding, "I think that they're probably going to show — some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life."

The latest controversy comes after DeSantis rejected a pilot program for an Advanced Placement class in African American studies earlier this year, calling it "indoctrination."
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Ziggurat said:
Have you read the curriculum? You speak of context, but I don't think you actually know the context.
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Think what you will. It is true I have not read the whole document, though I will try at some point later if I can. But you have chosen to repeat a specific part of it, presumably on the assumption that it contains the core of the meaning of the curriculum. I believe that one statement, by itself, to be seriously flawed, and to imply a serious flaw in the attitude of its promoters. If there is a political context involving the stated policies and attitudes of De Santis and his cohorts on this matter which reflects well on him then perhaps you should explain it.

In the mean time, if the statement you cite is not an attempt to provide an "up side" to slavery, then whoever made it is very stupid. If there is a context that justifies a statement so blatantly off base, then perhaps you, who purport to have read the whole thing, can point the rest of us in the right direction.
 
W.D.Clinger said:
I notice, however, that you are being careful not to say you have actually read that 216-page document.
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Because I didn't, because only part of it has to do with African American history, and that's the controversial part. I read the African American section, I did not read the financial literacy section, or the geography section, or the psychology section, or any of the other non-African American sections. Do you think the other parts are relevant to this discussion? If so, why? If not, does it matter that I didn't read them?

Why do you suppose pages 8-21 are identical to pages 124-137?
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It's a bit of a puzzle. The first part of the document contains the African American strand for all grades. Then the rest of the document contains all strands for each grade level arranged by grade level and then strand. I have no idea why this document is arranged that way. So there are multiple duplications of the African American strand, one for each grade level (or group, for middle and high school), not just the one you pointed out.

Or did you not even notice that duplication before I pointed it out?
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I didn't. I got to the end of the African American section and the start, and concluded I had covered all the African American content. And despite the duplication, that conclusion was correct.

Did you notice that wasn't the only duplication?

And what's your point anyways?
 
bruto said:
If there is a context that justifies a statement so blatantly off base, then perhaps you, who purport to have read the whole thing, can point the rest of us in the right direction.
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What do you mean by "off base"? What exactly is off base about it?

People keep claiming that this implies that slaves somehow benefited from slavery, but the statement itself contains no such meaning. On its own merit, it's just factually true. Sometimes slaves learned skills which they used to benefit themselves. That actually happened, and nobody here has even attempted an argument otherwise. The fear seems to be entirely that the statement will be used as a springboard for something that isn't in the statement itself. The statement does not contain the idea that slavery itself was beneficial.

But I see no evidence that this is actually what's going to happen. I think there are very few teachers in Florida who think that slavery had an upside, or who will teach that it did. And the few who might think that and might try to teach that would likely have done so regardless, because the official curriculum has limited control over what teachers actually teach. The official curriculum is much more relevant to textbook writers, and I don't think any of them are going to interpret those standards as requiring them to write that slavery was somehow good.

There's also a lot of appeals to assumed motives, but I don't buy those arguments. Assuming the worst of your opponent's motives and then interpreting everything in the light of those assumed motives isn't persuasive, it's not intellectually justifiable, and it's a good way to fool yourself. And it's a flaw that conservatives engage in just as much as liberals. You could even argue that DeSantis is engaging in it and encouraging it. But that isn't an excuse to engage in it yourself.
 
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