Here I’m imagining that Facebook took all the abolitionist statements as hate speech, whereas Wish.com placed a bunch of ads for Xinjiang goods on the slaver ones? It would still burn, but the code switching could take up nicely. Not sure where I am on having the kid come home ready to beat anything involving sugar with a baseball bat, and complementary sofa lighting v. silhouettes for the bay window livingroom, but it was nice once.
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Yes, no, wait… Writing from the perspective of people from very different backgrounds is indeed a good way to teach some aspects of history. It essential to teach that people in history did some extremely weird and offensive things but had totally consistent reasons to do so.
I think the main problem here is that the perspective of racists and slavery-apologists is not not different enough.
I also thing the tweets shown are actually not that good, an indication the topic was though well. There were biblical, historical, biological, and economicals arguments made in favour of slavery. Bad arguments I know, but those were the “reasons” why people defended slavery. Writing from the perspective from these people should use those reasons because that is what slavers would argue. A good writer could totally create a slaveholding character who would be good and ethical in their own eyes, that is what such an exercise should aim for.
I see nothing of that.
THIS. I don’t see why there’s always such an effort to leap up to excuse racist actions as innocent and unintentional. Does it matter? If I run someone over with my car because I wasn’t paying attention I still ran someone over with my car. As a white person, TRUST ME, we’ll survive if we do something monumentally stupid and someone does us the favor of pointing out that it’s actually harmful-- even if it means having some feelings hurt in the process. And if everyone pretends that shit like this is just a wacky misfire on behalf of a well meaning teacher we end up with schools that reinforce racism at every level. Like the schools we already have now.
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I think about it this way: What would happen if a school here in Austria, or in Germany, were to do a similar project with part of the students representing the Nazis and constructing fake tweets by Josef Goebbels? Yeah, that would be fucking insane, not to mention illegal.
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The Confederates were many things, but among those was very literate and unashamed to express in writing their rationale for secession. The Cornerstone Speech, the SC and TX declarations of independence, among many many others, put the lie to the whole “War of Northern Aggression” and “State’s Rights” arguments. They said flat out that it was about defending their right to own other human beings as livestock. Any argument otherwise is just flat out wrong.
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All societies and all peoples are, to some degree, accepting of violence — violence being the unilateral exercise of force (physical, financial, or legal) over others, though the american south was uniquely evil in how much violence it applied to Black people at that point in time by 1860.
Like, what, just 20 years earlier the slaver States threatened secession and worse because other States used their States rights to cancel ownership of people as property. A slave-owning senator nearly beat an abolititionist senator to death on the Senate floor over what later dipshits would pretend was merely an economical issue: the ownership of human beings as property.
There was, at the time, only one justification for slavery, and that was violence. An unspeakably evil system upheld by institutional and personal violence, one smashed at the cost of much blood.
It was not uncommon for slave owners in america to turn enslaved people into leather, or in a particularly insulting fashion, use human hair forcibly extracted from enslaved peoples as a substitute for wool in chair padding.
While the institution of personal ownership of enslaved peoples and the institution of chattel slavery is illegal in the US today, it still continues in the form of coerced prisoner labor. Didn’t take former slavers long to realize they could make up specific laws targetted against Black folk in order to extract coerced labor.
Britain can also shut its trap; Britain only got around to abolishing slavery in the colonies about 30 years before America did, and to add further insult to injury, the British crown compensated slavers for each formerly enslaved person set free.
To erase the atrocities from the historical record and conciousness would be a grave sin. But to “teach” this by writing slaver propaganda, and slaver propaganda alone, is a graver sin yet.
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Slavery was mentioned in passing in history classes at the schools in the rich white suburb (we could barely afford to live in, but was) where I grew up. It was hard finding non-racists there.
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