I'm not sure if this says more about the minimisation of the immorality of slavery or more about how standard modern employment practices are degrading to the point they fit the definition of slavery.
Either way, it's not saying good things. Florida needs help badly.
While the isolated statement itself is technically not incorrect - think of freed slaves who survive by growing cotton on their own after the end of slavery for example - it is obviously used with the evil intention of implying that slavery was in a way beneficial to the slaves, which is a particularly sickening form of historical revisionism, especially when considering that the people who made the statement are probably descendants of slave owners who still financially benefit from slavery because of their family assets.
This is exactly their process, if their constituents swallow this as acceptable then feed them the next, slightly worse thing. Slavery was horrible and we haven’t recovered from it as a nation.
For what? Their next slavery gig??? "Now folks, there here slave can not only work the fields but they can cook and see and as such we will start the bidding higher because they're more valuable."
literally this. slaves with hard-to-replace skills were treated better, both individually and systemically. please don't get me wrong, slavery was a horrid institution that represents the absolute worst humanity is capable of and there's nothing that can happen to a person that is so awful that slave-owners don't deserve it, but much like everything else in the western capitalist world slaves existed in a hierarchy. On an individual basis, house slaves were treated to "luxuries" that field slaves weren't privy to, like being able to sleep indoors and even sometimes in individual chambers rather than communal housing, and greater access to the amenities of the house when they weren't being used. On a more zoomed out level, slaves that came from areas with unique skills in their culture were granted much more leeway in preserving that culture than slaves that were used for so-called "unskilled" labor. One well-known example is that of the Gullah-Geechee people. Because they came from a people in Africa who knew how to grow rice, a process that is idiosyncratic compared to other crops and involves a lot of domain knowledge, they were mostly forced to work in rice paddies in the coastal lowlands of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. This let the Gullah-Geechee people preserve their heritage and language better than other slaves because their community wasn't broken up at the whims of the masters. Only Gullah could work the rice paddies so the rice paddies were full of Gullah teaching other Gullah their language and culture. After slavery was reduced in America, those same rice paddies became the livelihood of those same Gullah people, who tended to form insular, rural communities that are still alive to this day.
So yeah, they're arguing that slavery taught black people skills they could use to make slavery a bit more bearable. That's the freedom that markets offer: slavery with amenities.
I don't think he's doing anything but concern trolling to benefit the right and to disinform the next generation of people. We have to reach out to the young ones they're lying to and make sure they have access to the truth, and that they know their schools are being forced to lie to them.
That argument is as old as the transatlantic slave trade, possibly older. Slaves were forced into Christianity, supposedly saving them from Hell. In return, they were forced to work as slaves for their mortal lives. What skill could be more valuable than loving Jesus? The slave owners got to feel good about themselves, the slaves got Jesus and beatings and forced labor and worse, and the same twisted reasoning continues in slightly altered form here.
No slave ever learned anything beneficial by being a slave. Those skills became non beneficial simply by virtue of how they were forced on them. Even shit like farming cotton now leaves a bad taste in people's mouths because it is tainted by that trauma. And the machinery required to render hand labor for it redundant was invented around the Civil War anyway, rendering any such skills anachronistic and obsolete.
And even if we granted that they learned some skills, exactly how were they going to apply it for their personal benefit? Does DeSantis think that slaves could just walk up to their masters and say "Hey Guy Who Owns Me Like Property, I've been doing this farming thing for a while and have gotten good at it. Would you mind if I left and started my own farm?"
Seriously, does DeSantis really think that slaves were set free so they could do things for themselves? Nope. They were kept at property until the day they died. This "they learned skills that they could use" is wrong on every level.
While I don't like it when people do this at least be accurate if you're going to call them out, or is it your Florida education showing and you can't count to 6?
Why are you constantly defending these tactics? You're a mod here.
You want your politics community to be a shit hole? Then you allow this stuff.
Brand new user spams 6 threads at once to mainstream communities, clearly race baiting by posting in !politics, !conservative, !Florida, !news, ! worldnews.
So, as you and I have discussed before, if you want to have a legitimate community to aggregate and discuss politics, you must eliminate bad actors. No matter what type of content they post.
Depending on the wording, maybe teachers can just add some things like sleeves develop skills that can be used for the personal benefit of their owners.