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New FL standards require giving blame to Black Americans for the violence of their own massacres [1]
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Date: 2023-07-28
By now you’ve heard that the white supremacist trope that slavery had personal benefits for Black Americans is being taught to Florida’s school children. It stems from the lie from the Southern politicians and preachers of the antebellum era who declared that the “white man civilized the Black man and gave him skills." Now it’s curricula. Of course, this is happening in DeSantis’ Florida, the same man who rejected having an AP course on African American studies because it “significantly lacks educational value.”
Yet there is another “benchmark clarification” for teachers that hasn’t gotten as much notice but is just as deplorable. It turns out that Black Americans must share the blame for their own massacres:
“Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C., Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” (emphasis added). And by? In each of those massacres, Blacks were never the perpetrators.
In the early 1920s, the town of Rosewood, Florida was a small but self-sufficient, thriving Black community. As is the case in Tulsa and elsewhere in the US, this led to resentment from white supremacists in the nearby white towns. Just like in Tulsa, there was an accusation that a Black man assaulted a white woman, and a racist mob was formed.
The entire town of Rosewood, Florida burned for days. The buildings and homes were destroyed. Women were gang-raped, and as many as 150 people were killed. The survivors fled and never returned.
To be perfectly clear, some white people in the mob did die, but only because some of Rosewood’s residents took up arms to defend their homes and their families from being murdered and raped. Yet self-defense by Blacks is being called violence now here in Florida.
I have had to make the argument over so many times last week that the institution of slavery in America, and—thanks to Fox News—now the concentration camps of the Holocaust, were NOT trade schools. People didn’t enroll to learn a skill for a business opportunity or personal growth. It was about raw survival in a hellish condition. Period. From 1619 — 1865, anytime someone enslaved learned anything it was for the sole purpose for the labor to be exploited by the one who enslaved him.
In most cases, the enslaved didn’t learn “new skills.” They were already farmers and craftsmen in Africa and the Carribean. In fact, it was often the other way around. In the piece I did last year on Nearest Green, the enslaved man who taught Jack Daniels how to make whiskey, I spoke of enslaved Carribean distillers who were highly sought after for their skills.
Now it appears I will be making arguments that people are allowed to defend their homes from violence without being called the perpetrators of said violence. This holds true even if you happen to have dark skin.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/28/2183775/-New-FL-standards-requires-giving-blame-to-Black-Americans-for-the-violence-of-the-Rosewood-Massacre
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