Blacks Should Be Grateful for the Skills They Learned as Slaves
The new message from Florida educators is all about making white folks feel better — who cares if they have to rewrite history to do it?
A recent update to Florida’s school curricula for middle school children aims to focus on the skills slaves were taught as a way of showing how helpful slavery was to the Black people taken by force from their homelands, chained and beaten into submission and then sold to white people as free labor.
You see, slaves had mad skills. Didn’t you know? They include cotton picking — such a valuable skill for people who didn’t own cotton fields. Of course, that may be an unfair point given that slaves didn’t own anything — they didn’t even own themselves, so why would they own cotton fields?
But they also learned other things. They learned to suffer in silence when their children were taken from them and sold to people they would never meet and who would prevent them from ever seeing their children again. They learned the skills necessary to properly care for the white people who could beat them to death on a whim.
But the biggest lesson they learned is that nothing they learned would help them. Nothing they learned would give them the right to name their children after themselves and pass down their legacy. Nothing they learned gave them the right to choose their vocation. Nothing they learned allowed them to flourish. Everything they learned benefited the white people who owned them.
I wonder how white students would feel if we told them they could go to an Ivy League school, but the price of their education would be a life of servitude without pay. Perhaps next time we send a legacy applicant to Harvard or Yale, we can offer free tuition if they agree to serve a master they don’t choose and can never escape from — not until they die. Would it matter if we told them their offspring — who might well be the result of rape by their Black masters — would be sent to an unknown place, and they would never see or hear from them again?
I don’t know the specific skills the educators in Florida think Black people benefited from. Maybe blacksmithing? (No pun intended). But since slaves didn’t own horses, I’m struggling to see how that worked out in their favor.
Maybe these Floridians are focusing on Black women. Perhaps they think Black women benefited from learning to make clothes they were uncomfortable wearing or grow flowers to decorate the rooms they were not allowed to live in or the dining room tables they were not allowed to sit at.
Of course, Black women were not only enslaved, as were their men. They had the added benefit of being nonconsensual sexual partners of the white men who owned them. Perhaps they were okay with that since some of them learned to cook.
There is only one way to make sense of this. It is to hold a deep-seated belief that Black people are not fully human. That being the case, they wouldn’t need to be free, allowed to raise their children, or have satisfying work.
A person of color who is nothing more than an animal can’t possibly be interested in esoteric concepts like freedom and choice — so what’s the problem here?
Go get ‘em, Laurie! Well done