The connotation of the FL version is that slavery, despite all of the bad things you hear about it, did some good by providing slaves an opportunity to support themselves after emancipation or by renting themselves out while enslaved.
What this sidesteps is that such `benefits' were never the intention of slaveholders, that slaves were fo…
The connotation of the FL version is that slavery, despite all of the bad things you hear about it, did some good by providing slaves an opportunity to support themselves after emancipation or by renting themselves out while enslaved.
What this sidesteps is that such `benefits' were never the intention of slaveholders, that slaves were forced to learn these trades, and they could have learned them in non-slavery settings. It follows the well-worn conservative path of downplaying the harms of slavery and pointing out the `positives': ignore the torture, rape, and separation of family, we taught women how to repair shoes and that allowed them to be good capitalists (even though we really didn't want to allow that to happen)! As they did benefit, maybe they should be a little grateful or this evens stuff out a bit?
The non-FL connotation is: some slaves didn't starve or have to indenture themselves because the skills they were forced to learn were in demand. Obviously this is true because slaves had to learn useful skills to keep plantations/households going, at the expense of artificially depressing the income of non-slaves (hard for a poor white man to compete against a slave), and for a long time black skills were not remunerative because their labor was owned by the slaveholders. The very act of teaching slaves a skill was therefore merely another example of the exploitation that blacks suffered at the hands of whites.
Simply put: one does not get to describe as a `benefit' something that was forced upon an owned person.
This change to the curriculum was done at the behest of two, black Republicans. It's clearly politically motivated as the rest of the committee was not in favor of the language.
It is utterly ridiculous to equate slavery with some form of job training, as these Republicans and DeSantis are trying to do. Ask yourself, do you think any ex-slave ever said: `Well thank god for master! He taught me a trade so that I have some way to support myself now that I'm no longer property! Might even help me earn enough money to track down the wife and children he sold.'
The connotation of the FL version is that slavery, despite all of the bad things you hear about it, did some good by providing slaves an opportunity to support themselves after emancipation or by renting themselves out while enslaved.
What this sidesteps is that such `benefits' were never the intention of slaveholders, that slaves were forced to learn these trades, and they could have learned them in non-slavery settings. It follows the well-worn conservative path of downplaying the harms of slavery and pointing out the `positives': ignore the torture, rape, and separation of family, we taught women how to repair shoes and that allowed them to be good capitalists (even though we really didn't want to allow that to happen)! As they did benefit, maybe they should be a little grateful or this evens stuff out a bit?
The non-FL connotation is: some slaves didn't starve or have to indenture themselves because the skills they were forced to learn were in demand. Obviously this is true because slaves had to learn useful skills to keep plantations/households going, at the expense of artificially depressing the income of non-slaves (hard for a poor white man to compete against a slave), and for a long time black skills were not remunerative because their labor was owned by the slaveholders. The very act of teaching slaves a skill was therefore merely another example of the exploitation that blacks suffered at the hands of whites.
Simply put: one does not get to describe as a `benefit' something that was forced upon an owned person.
This change to the curriculum was done at the behest of two, black Republicans. It's clearly politically motivated as the rest of the committee was not in favor of the language.
It is utterly ridiculous to equate slavery with some form of job training, as these Republicans and DeSantis are trying to do. Ask yourself, do you think any ex-slave ever said: `Well thank god for master! He taught me a trade so that I have some way to support myself now that I'm no longer property! Might even help me earn enough money to track down the wife and children he sold.'