DeSantis signs bill limiting tenure at Florida public universities

[wow]

Slavery was/is a horrible thing, and all races, whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos, were/are involved in it.

There were a few freed blacks that owned slaves in America. The Great Wall of China didn't get built by not using slaves.

"Only about 6 percent of all Africans shipped across the Atlantic were taken to North America. The largest numbers went to Brazil and to the Caribbean."
http://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0011

Unfortunately, this doesn't fit the narrative of whites being the only bad people involved in slavery in the Americas. 

Currently, 30 million slaves exist today
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worl...n-the-u-s/

It's horrible we haven't learned from history, but that is the world's reality today.

It's really weird that so many people think that whenever a discussion of slavery in the United States comes up, it is somehow an attack on all white people. I never heard any of the people in this thread who were talking about the problems associated with U.S. slavery attacking all white people, and I never heard a teacher or professor in my many years of education attack all white people while discussing U.S. slavery. If someone says that "many white people in the United States benefited from chattel slavery," I don't assume that means that literally no one else could have benefited from it, and I don't assume it means that every single white person benefited from it--because that's literally not what the sentence said.

Chattel slavery is a major part of the history of the United States. The fact that slavery has existed in other parts of the world and continues to exist does not change that fact.

I'm sorry that some white people feel attacked by the fact that historians teach about history in their classes, but maybe they should just learn not to take it so personally. I'm white and it doesn't make me feel attacked to learn that many white people in the United States benefited from the fact that, for many years, the legal system treated enslaved Africans and their descendants very similarly to livestock. It's sad and it's horrible, but it's also a fact, and it had huge economic and social impacts that helped shape our history. A white person who takes that as a personal attack is a literal poster child for the phrase "victim mentality."

[sacredrain]

I have seen similar arguments in North Carolina, recently over history. In fact there are people who are upset that slavery is not being taught enough and there are people who do not even want it taught at all. History should be taught exactly as it happened--even if it upsets people. I can remember being in middle school and my 8th grade history teacher was teaching the Holocaust. She had all of the Caucasian non Jewish students go one side of the room and all of the students who were Jewish and non Caucasian go to the other side. She then pointed out that us non Caucasian students (I am biracial African American/Caucasian) would have been sent to the gas chambers. This really made me feel deeply about the Holocaust. Of course in today's time, that particular teacher would be vilified or called racist for doing what she did.

[ss20ts]

I have seen similar arguments in North Carolina, recently over history. In fact there are people who are upset that slavery is not being taught enough and there are people who do not even want it taught at all. History should be taught exactly as it happened--even if it upsets people. I can remember being in middle school and my 8th grade history teacher was teaching the Holocaust. She had all of the Caucasian non Jewish students go one side of the room and all of the students who were Jewish and non Caucasian go to the other side. She then pointed out that us non Caucasian students (I am biracial African American/Caucasian) would have been sent to the gas chambers. This really made me feel deeply about the Holocaust. Of course in today's time, that particular teacher would be vilified or called racist for doing what she did.

The really sad thing is that she was right! It still blows my mind that there are people out there that don't believe the Holocaust ever happened. I wonder if these same people are the ones pushing to remove education on slavery and other parts of our history that aren't pretty.

[Old Guy]

It's really weird that so many people think that whenever a discussion of slavery in the United States comes up, it is somehow an attack on all white people. I never heard any of the people in this thread who were talking about the problems associated with U.S. slavery attacking all white people, and I never heard a teacher or professor in my many years of education attack all white people while discussing U.S. slavery. If someone says that "many white people in the United States benefited from chattel slavery," I don't assume that means that literally no one else could have benefited from it, and I don't assume it means that every single white person benefited from it--because that's literally not what the sentence said.

Chattel slavery is a major part of the history of the United States. The fact that slavery has existed in other parts of the world and continues to exist does not change that fact.

I'm sorry that some white people feel attacked by the fact that historians teach about history in their classes, but maybe they should just learn not to take it so personally. I'm white and it doesn't make me feel attacked to learn that many white people in the United States benefited from the fact that, for many years, the legal system treated enslaved Africans and their descendants very similarly to livestock. It's sad and it's horrible, but it's also a fact, and it had huge economic and social impacts that helped shape our history. A white person who takes that as a personal attack is a literal poster child for the phrase "victim mentality."

In 1860 1.7% of Americans owned slaves.  Slavery did not build the United States.  It was pretty much irrelevant in the northern states and much of the south.  It had economic relevance in large agricultural works growing cotton.  The downside of slavery was delayed industrialization in the South.  Cheap labor forestalled the need for labor saving technology.  Even in the South 2/3 of the families never owned slaves.

Slavery was the norm until about 200 years ago.  Turks and Berbers captured and sold millions of Southern Europeans over 1,000 years.  The US went to war with North Africa to free American sailors taken as slaves.  Even in the late 1700s Central Asian Turkish tribes were still capturing European slaves in Russia.  There was nothing particularly unique about slavery in America.  Europe had an almost universal form of slavery called feudalism where the serfs were bound to the land.  In the early days of industrialization in Russia, large estates were selling serfs to factory owners.

[indigoshuffle]

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. 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.

What about basic human decency? That should be enough to not violate the HUMAN rights of so called U.S. Japanese citizens.