DeSantis signs bill limiting tenure at Florida public universities

[jsd]

Any factual history might make people feel bad, and the feelings over facts crowd can't have that. It needs to be literally whitewashed so that no one gets uncomfortable learning that we weren't perfect.

[jsh1138]

The problem doesn't come from teaching students about negative aspects of history, it comes from teaching "their" version of history while conveniently leaving out important parts of history.

America had black slaves, fact. Grind this over and over into students' minds while conveniently leaving out that countries in Africa were the ones selling slaves. There were millions of white slaves too, and oh btw, the United States of America was one of the first countries to abolish slavery.

Original Draft of Declaration of Independence That Criticized Slavery
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

It was already suicide enough for Americans to go against Great Britain, which had the most powerful navy in the world. Keeping slavery kept the union together to fight a war that most likely the United States would have lost if it weren't for France helping us out.

Being proud of American history doesn't mean you have to agree with everything. For example, the 2nd Iraq war was based on lies IMO.

Worth mentioning that there was no such thing as slavery in the US at all until a black man went to court to create it:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180962352/

[Flelm]

Worth mentioning that there was no such thing as slavery in the US at all until a black man went to court to create it:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180962352/

What point do you think you're making here? Just because the word "slave" wasn't used doesn't mean some people didn't live in a de facto state of slavery already.

[ss20ts]

Worth mentioning that there was no such thing as slavery in the US at all until a black man went to court to create it:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180962352/

No matter what label you use, it's the same thing. Indentured servant sounds nicer, but it's pretty much the same thing. Call it planting roses if you want but it means the same. Just because a specific word wasn't used doesn't make it any different or better.

[jsd]

It's whataboutism meant to shift blame to one individual while ignoring any historical context. The point is to prevent any critical analysis of our history.

[Flelm]

It's whataboutism meant to shift blame to one individual while ignoring any historical context. The point is to prevent any critical analysis of our history.

Shhh... I know. I wanted to hear them say it.

[LevelUP]

"Many white people became wealthy at the expense of enslaved people"

88% of all millionaires are self-made
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2871-h...-rich.html

[Alpha]

"Many white people became wealthy at the expense of enslaved people"

88% of all millionaires are self-made
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2871-h...-rich.html

I'm pretty sure that an article about becoming a millionaire in 2021 is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

[freeloader]

The problem doesn't come from teaching students about negative aspects of history, it comes from teaching "their" version of history while conveniently leaving out important parts of history.

America had black slaves, fact. Grind this over and over into students' minds while conveniently leaving out that countries in Africa were the ones selling slaves. There were millions of white slaves too, and oh btw, the United States of America was one of the first countries to abolish slavery.

[....]

Being proud of American history doesn't mean you have to agree with everything. For example, the 2nd Iraq war was based on lies IMO. And putting the legal U.S. Japanese citizens in concentration camps during WW2 were a horrible thing to do and a blatant violation of constitutional rights.

I can only speak from my experience, as someone who has read, been taught, and taught the history of slavery in the United States.  

The mechanism by which slave traders acquired slaves was always a part of the narrative.  This included talking about the mines and mills in Europe where workers (many of whom were paid starvation wages) labored to produce finished goods that were shipped to Africa to purchase slaves.  It also included talking about slave catchers and wars in Africa, the result of which were slaves brought to the coast to be sold to white Europeans.  If included discussion of the very difficult decision that coastal leaders (kings and chieftains) had to make: we know from documentary evidence that leaders in many cases had to decide between capturing people from farther inland (or serving as middle-men for those catching people, particularly as time went on and coastal areas had their populations depleted and as people fled from the coast) or having white Europeans steal people from their own community.  

I was taught and taught in my classroom that there was a fundamental difference between slavery in Europe/European colonies in the New World and in Africa.  In Africa, it was always much easier to move between slave and non-slave status.  Many slaves were "adopted" into their new families and communities.  Their children often were not considered slaves.  Slaves were routinely returned for ritualistic and cultural reasons.  A slave who was captured in a war might also be freed in the next war a few months or years later.  This was not the pattern in the British North American colonies.  There were some places, particularly in Brazil, where the bounds of slavery operated differently than in the United States.  I also taught that the institution of slavery in the New World changed, often for the worse, societies in Africa and that the presence of slave ships on their coast was the necessary precondition for those changes.  

If a person put a gun to your head and said you could send your friends, neighbors, and cousins to live in slavery OR could get some people from the next town/village/kingdom/etc. who would be sent to live in slavery and, in exchange, you would be made wealthy and would never have to worry about your enemies again, which would you chose?  Just because an African leader made a deal with the white men, it doesn't absolve the white man of responsibility.  Victim blaming is really easy, but it doesn't make it right. 

At the end of the day, I was teaching American history to American undergraduates in the United States.  I had to draw a box around my discussions.  I couldn't teach everything. So, I focused on the British North American colonies, the settlers who came here voluntarily, the slaves who were brought here agains their will, and the indentured people who could look more like settlers or slaves depending on their situation and the time.  So, in other words, I couldn't teach everything.  I spent 10 years studying history at the graduate level, reading hundreds of books and thousands of articles.  I couldn't and wouldn't want to teach even a fraction of that. The only version of history that I could possible teach was my version of history; I literally could not have taught anything else.

I do think there is a tendency for many teachers and professors, particularly in history, but in other disciplines as well, to be too critical of the United States.  Part of that is how historians are trained.  For Americanists, in particularly, you learn about the triumphalist narratives of American history that really dominated the discipline until the mid-20th century when new subjects and new methodologies started to become widely taught and valued.  There is some hostility to some of the traditional sub disciplines, such as political, economic, and military history.  I experienced this first-hand, having people make assumptions about me personally and politically because of what I chose to study.  You spend years studying the discipline's literature that is on the cutting edge (things like Subaltern studies, fat history, and so forth) and understand that the handful of jobs that are available are often in these areas as opposed to more traditional areas, so maybe your thinking and focus starts to drift because you want to actually get a job with your PhD.  

On the other hand, I also became MUCH more liberal in grad school in history.  I became more liberal, in part, because I came to understand how groups, including countries, create narratives for themselves.  Those narratives are not reality, even if they are told repeatedly and believed widely.  I studied, for years, how the American government crafted narratives about being a nation of freedom, liberty, and justice, while perpetuating white supremacy at home and abroad.  I read about the corruption of our state by wealthy men and corporations.  I read so many things that made me truly sad to be an American.  But for all of that, I believe that our nation is good or at least has the potential to be good.

[jsh1138]

Worth mentioning that there was no such thing as slavery in the US at all until a black man went to court to create it:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180962352/

What point do you think you're making here? Just because the word "slave" wasn't used doesn't mean some people didn't live in a de facto state of slavery already.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that some people made money off of slavery instead of lumping all white people, including those from states that never allowed slavery, together? Wouldn't it be more honest to say that this is a class issue rather than a race issue? Don't you feel kind of stupid damning the hundreds of thousands of people who died fighting against slavery during the Civil War as racists who got rich off of the practice?

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Worth mentioning that there was no such thing as slavery in the US at all until a black man went to court to create it:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180962352/

No matter what label you use, it's the same thing. Indentured servant sounds nicer, but it's pretty much the same thing. Call it planting roses if you want but it means the same. Just because a specific word wasn't used doesn't make it any different or better.

Not at all, because indentured servitude doesn't include your children and also has an end date. The original colonies as well as the early USA didn't allow non-landed whites to vote and so the surplus population of freed indentured servants who had no say in the functions of government lead to a revolution in North Carolina, which was one of the reasons that indentured servants became less popular and slaves became more popular. There were real differences between the two.

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It's fun how fast "I TEACH FACTS" turns into "well I can only talk about my experiences" when someone is challenged.