Mike Luckovich for July 25, 2023

Anybody who swallows that spin on slavery is…

… Going to end up gyroscopic

… Bat-shift CRAZY

If an enslaved African American wanted to demonstrate the “skill set” by which enslavement “benefitted” him, all he or she had to do was lift up the back of his or her shirt and show a deep pattern of layer upon layer of thick scar tissue from the beatings and whippings that covered every inch of his or her back.

Did enslaved African Americans learn skills? Sure. But those skills were not to benefit those who were enslaved, but the cruel torture-masters who dehumanized and tortured them.

Ron DeSatan got his law degree from Yale. Before that, he got his undergraduate degree, also from Yale, with a major in HISTORY. He knows better.

As Kamala Harris so eloquently expressed, THEY ARE GASLIGHTING US and trying to, literally, WHITEwash history.

What’s next? Schools will start teaching how the ash and lava “benefitted” the people of Pompeii in 79 AD?

Republicans are convinced that slavery is good. So good, they want to bring it back.

For the slaves’ benefit, of course. ‘Cause Republicans are NOT racist. In fact, racism doesn’t even exist.

Would you like fries with that?

Job skills they were often denied the ability to monetize once they were free.

Denying anyone a quality education is shortsighted and stupid. Slaves weren’t educated. DeathSatan would restore slavery if he could.

A better title would be “Lies According to Democrats”. This is just a distraction from the upcoming testimony from Archer regarding the Obama bribery scandal involving Biden.

Most republicons think ending slavery was a mistake.

Some slaves were taught specialized skills such as carpentry and brick laying to provide those services to the plantation. Such specialized slaves were also worth much more monetarily. They could be leased out to other plantations, sold for higher amounts, and used as collateral for loans. In no way were they taught these skills to enrich their lives.

This is just a distraction

yes, his every comment is just a distraction from the issue at hand, a monotonous drone of innuendo, falsehoods, and distorted facts…

Do you think this aspect of slavery/skills will be discussed in FL?

https://www.juancole.com/2023/07/desantis-consider-valuable.html

Slavery? What slavery? They all volunteered to come to the New World and be enlightened.

How you say?

“Roots” by Alex Haley should be required reading in FL.

According to the Florida Department of Education, slavery in colonial America was affirmative action!

Dictator Trump would love to teach anyone on the left slavery skills.

History matters. I devoted my life to studying, teaching, and writing about it. Thise who seek to control the narrative seek to control minds. I hope all my working colleagues resist to the best of their ability.

The curriculum was developed by two Black scholars. The bullet point in question was one of over 190 items in the program that decries slavery as evil.

Evil is cherry picking one line out of the summary and claiming that is the premise of the curriculum.

Are there any people in this country who have been slaves? Are there any people in this country who knew slaves? Are there any people in this country who`s grandparents or great-grandparents were slaves? 1865 was 158 years ago.

DeSantis is an exploiter and an inciter .. a demagogue. He’s the worst of us.

One line out of 216 page book. Give us another! Yes a few did acquire useful skills. Any large population would.

Sounds about White.

Desantis is ruining Florida! Worst governor since I got here 40 years ago! Even worse than scott and he was horrible!

I’ve come to wonder who DeSantis paid to take the exams and write the papers to get his degrees from Yale. It’s obvious he’s not smart in any way at all, and quite dishonest.

The rich still benefit from the caste system that keeps college out of the reach of all but those who are already well off. They can pay wages that require two or three jobs per household just to keep food on the table, while they keep the majority of the GNP produced by the people who are living that way. And, they are assured that future generations will remain in that situation, since tuition isn’t an option.

The best investment we could make to keep America strong is to not just forgive all student loans but to make all higher education, including trade schools, etc totally free, as long as the student is making decent grades, and increase the number of schools and teachers to make room for all who can profit from the education. There is no better way to spend money than to invest it in our people, to give them every opportunity to be the best they can be. Yes, It’s good for them individually, but the country is made up of individuals, so what’s good for one is good for the country.. We don’t, even during a time of high unemployment, have so much a lack of jobs as we have a lack of people who have the skills to perform the jobs that are available- in other words, a lack of education.

I suppose Death Sentence would clutch her pearls so she best not read this: If the owner of the plantation didn’t rape his slaves, his overseer probably did. What “benefit” for the slaves could that possibly be? As for the worthless idiotic trolls, let’s just ignore them for the rest of the century.

Well, in white Christian nationalism’s steady march into the past, having already blown off gay rights, the civil-rights movement, and female suffrage, I see they’ve now reached 1850 and are rooting for slavery. I wonder how much longer it’ll take for them to start pining for the Spanish Inquisition.

Ammosexual, your peeps, what about the whole killing slaves, who learned how to read? Was there a limit to the learning? Could you learn too much?

The FLA school board helpfully supplied a dozen or so examples of the sort of thing they had in mind. Not not one of them was valid (one was a sister of George Washington, one was Nεgro who learned whatever it was ten years after slavery ended, one actually had no connection with the trade he supposedly had learned, and so on). Sheesh. Once, there were quite a number of teaching materials that extolled the joys of slavery, the slaves singing and clapping in the fields to make light of their work, that sort of thing.

The statement by DeSantis may seem to beggar belief but is indeed the same argument that Southern plantation owners made about slaves both immediately prior to and after the Civil War (during the failed Reconstruction Era). It was as ahistorical and offensive then as it is now. What exactly did the slaves learn that was of benefit. English? Christianity? White supremacy? It seems to imply that slaves were ignorant animals before being rounded up and sent on a sea journey (during which staggering numbers perished) and made to toil under threat of death for the rest of their brief lives. When in reality Africans had been successfully farming, self-governing, intellectually and physically exploring their environment, worshipping their own gods, creating an oral and written history of their people for thousands of years. Not only does DeSantis want to rewrite or erase the history of African Americans but also wants to ignore the factual history of homo-sapiens in general. White people are indeed the ancestors of those Africans that migrated from Africa and spread to the rest of the world. A feat that required intelligence, grit, courage, and skill that far exceeded the short sighted greed and cruelty that was the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the wasteful, ineffectual and abusive plantation system.

Gov. DeSensitive has still room to fall further in the GOP race……

I’d love to make Donald Trump my slave—-except h e’s so out of shape he couldn’t keep up with me