myrmepropagandist
I've been trying to find the right way to articulate this-- but the folks on the right have it backwards about who is driven by "white guilt" --
This impulse to cover up and distort the history of slavery reeks of shame. It's, frankly, weird. Nobody has perfect ancestors, what sort of crisis of identity leads one to lie about the past.
It's just the things that happened. You learn about them you learn from them. You do better. Don't make it so emotional and personal.
Bø!rge
@futurebird Or they want to bring back legal domestic slavery, and needs people to not be aware how terrible it is.
Paul Cantrell
@futurebird Love the meme.
myrmepropagandist
I assume you get why it's not a nice thing to say that "slavery helped black people in some ways" but I think some people miss why this particular idea is *exceptionally* racist.
One of the main arguments to justify slavery was that it "civilized" black people by making us Christian & teaching us obedience to our "betters." Black people were "lucky" or "better off" as slaves.
It assumes that when people were enslaved they had no skills, nothing to offer, that they were basically animals.
feld
myrmepropagandist
What do you know about the: 1906 Atlanta Race Riot
1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot
1920 Ocoee Massacre
1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre?
How would you describe these events?
volkris
Can you quote a mainstream conservative saying otherwise?
Again, it seems like you’re arguing against a stance that isn’t being taken, arguing against a strawman.
Pamela Ehn
@futurebird @volkris @InkySchwartz he’s gaslighting. “See, you learned from your abuser so it can’t be all bad!” Africans already had skills. They didn’t need to be beaten, tortured, raped, and had their families taken away to learn new ones.
myrmepropagandist
@volkris @InkySchwartz @cadenza
No.
Every person who has been forced to do something learns something from it. What is the point of pointing that out?
InkySchwartz
No it did not. A direct quote you can look up yourself:
"At issue are the new education standards for how Black history is taught in Florida schools that DeSantis signed into law last year. The revised guidelines, released this month, require educators to instruct middle schoolers that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”"
volkris
You see how there’s a difference between saying slavery was good and saying that slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit?
Those are absolutely not the same positions.
volkris
The article said otherwise, but okay let’s go with you, what conservatives said slavery is good?
InkySchwartz
@volkris @futurebird @cadenza Ah, no it did not. The point @futurebird brought up was that the idea that there are conservatives who believe that slavery was good since it gave slaves skills. You objected to that and asked for evidence. I provided that evidence and you then pivoted it to being something about DeSantis in specific.
So you are being a dishonest conversational partner here.
volkris
Dude, your specific example refuted the discussion, showing that it was off base!
InkySchwartz
@volkris @futurebird @cadenza Dude, I gave you both a specific example and a way you can find more for yourself. So why do you keep acting like there is no evidence of these ideas out there on the part of what we now call American Conservativeism?
volkris
Well I would say that the discussion you are setting off on seems pretty disconnected from the larger trends in American culture since it doesn’t seem to be referencing things that are going on in current events.
And so like I said, pointing to specific examples of the argument that you are criticizing would go a long way to clarify what you are trying to say.
myrmepropagandist
@volkris @InkySchwartz @cadenza
This conversation isn't about proving a point about DeSantis. It's about larger trends in American culture and the way that older ideas are resurfacing.
You seem to think this is a debate? Or about proving some political point? It's not.
I'm interested in this idea of "guilt" and the notion the a purpose of accurate discussion of slavery is to cause guilt. It seems bonkers to me.
volkris
And that’s a great example of exactly what I’m saying:
IF this Politico article is accurately capturing the position (and I’m not saying it is) then the arguments being refuted above aren’t part of the position being taken.
Without a specific citation for what’s or who’s being argued against, the critique is open to being waived off as misunderstanding, at best, the idea it’s trying to counter.
If DeSantis said slavery was good because it Christianized those in chains, yeah, that would be a pretty awful stance to take, but that’s not among the arguments that have been hitting the headlines, as the Politico article indicated.
InkySchwartz
You just need to plug in the search term "slavery civilized blacks" and you find examples. Here is one: ews/2023/07/28/disgusting-black-republicans-livid-over-desantis-slavery-attack-00108776
volkris
Maybe it would be helpful for citation of specific cases where those arguments are made, so they can be addressed directly, instead of vaguely.
Again, the problem is that maybe those arguments are made or were made, but in the present case they’re not the ones I’ve seen, hence it ends up sounding like a strawman attack.
I’d say specific citation would help set the criticism on a firmer foundation.
Pamela Ehn
@volkris @futurebird she’s not though. These “arguments” are not new. They’ve been used before, and history shows damn well what they imply. Let’s not make excuses for racists now. Giving them epistemological cover is pretty intellectually dishonest, which is what you’re accusing her of.
volkris
An issue I see in your posts here is that it comes across as setting up a series of strawmen, your putting words in others’ mouths about what they’re claiming in order to shoot down the things that they’re not necessarily saying.
The arguments that you’re attacking aren’t the ones I’ve been hearing from the other side, so the stance doesn’t come across as actually addressing the issue.
myrmepropagandist
I get the feeling the original idea they wanted was "black people benefited from slavery because they became Christian." -- but, this was probably too obviously a violation of separation and racist.
Black people didn't just passively learn Christianity, btw. We re-invented it into a theology of liberation that drove the Civl Rights movement. So much synthesis and invention occurred *despite* slavery not because of it.
So much of what those people knew has been lost forever, but not all of it.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.