The Aardvark Is Ready wrote:
I was expecting that vague, non responsive, stereotypical answer and you didn't disappoint.
You made a statement so should be able to come up with some current lies, not from 1866. Even if someone is in fear of something, as you say, that is not rewriting something. Rewriting is taking something that's "WRITTEN" and rewriting it. And not teaching something is not rewriting it either. Critical Race Theory is available for anyone that wants to make the effort to read about it.
Whitewashing slavery in US schools will teach students anti-Blackness
Black students who are forced to study a glossed-over version of US history will inevitably internalise anti-Black racism. Donald Earl Collins
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/8/13/whitewashing-slavery-in-us-schools-will-teach-students-anti-blackness#:~:text=It%20means%20a%20paternalistic%20and,worldwide%20once%20emancipation%20finally%20occurred.
At a press event in Utah on July 21, GOP presidential contender and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attempted to find the silver lining of American chattel slavery. “Some of the folks … eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” he said, referring to enslaved people.
DeSantis made these utterings while defending the Florida State Board of Education’s new standards for teaching African American history in public schools, which downplay and whitewash the enslavement of Africans in the Americas.
The racist idea that slavery was a positive experience of self-improvement for enslaved Africans is not new. It is the same racist reasoning the United States’ third president, Thomas Jefferson, used 240 years ago in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, where he wrote that many enslaved Africans “have been brought up to the handicraft arts” under the tutelage of “the whites”. It is the same reasoning American abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglas pushed back on in 1845, when he criticised the myth of the “happy slave”.
The idea that Europeans stole African people from West Africa and then trained them up to be farmhands and blacksmiths is ludicrous beyond measure.
With language like “positive contributions” and “African patriots”, it is trying to veer away from addressing the horrific realities and effects of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and white vigilantism.
Glossing over the brutal history of US slavery will only increase anti-Blackness in the near term by signalling that anything said, written, done, or experienced by Black people in the US matters not and instead deserves erasure and marginalisation.
The racism as exhibited in “anti-woke” curricula and in book bans in Florida and across the US will reinforce anti-Blackness for yet another generation of children.
DeSantis is hardly alone in his attacks, for which there has been much precedent. There was a brief effort in 2022 to get the Texas State Board of Education to call slavery the “involuntary relocation of African people during colonial times” in the state’s social studies curriculum for public schools, an effort the board rejected.
A year earlier, the state passed legislation banning schools from teaching any materials that may cause an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex”. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed it into law, said at that time that more needed to be done to “abolish” CRT.
" ... the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case in which the US Supreme Court ruled that state-sanctioned apartheid in schools was unconstitutional. ..."
They recognised that anti-Blackness in US education was systemic and often excluded Black ideas, Black authors, and Black experiences.
In this context, any curriculum that emphasises that slavery existed elsewhere or that some enslaved Black folk learned a trade is denying their students the opportunity to think critically about their past, present, and future. This kind of education and the racist rhetoric that supports it insinuate that the truth of the Black past does not matter, that their education and full development as human beings in a multiracial society does not matter.
Donald Earl Collins