![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
14-08-2023, 05:45 PM
Donald Earl Collins
Visiting Professor of African American History with Loyola University Maryland
Published On 13 Aug 2023
13 Aug 2023
......
slavery in the United States was a 246-year-long apocalypse of kidnapping 300,000 African people, transporting them across the Atlantic, beating, torturing and raping them, and working them to their early deaths.
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”.
......
The idea that Europeans stole African people from West Africa and then trained them up to be farmhands and blacksmiths is ludicrous beyond measure. As historian Michael W Twitty has written: “Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no knowledge of how to grow it, enslaved Africans [with experience growing it] were brought to fuel its husbandry, feeding the US’ eastern seaboard, Britain and provisioning many parts of the British Caribbean.”
Elsewhere, it has been documented: “African men with iron making skills were imported to the Chesapeake [in the state of Virginia] to work as blacksmiths … Ironworkers were an elite group in West and West Central Africa.”
There is plenty of historical evidence to disprove the ridiculous claim that the Florida State Board of Education is trying to push about slavery. But this is by far not the only problem with its new curriculum standards.
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. It will also promote internalised racism among African Americans in the long run.
......
The rhetoric and legislation DeSantis, Abbott, and other politicians are pushing aim to appeal to white supporters terrified of living in a majority-of-colour nation that could threaten their economic and political power. They serve to whitewash the truth of the Black experience in the US and the endemic nature of American racism. They are deliberately anti-Black.
......
I remember one summer day in 1976 when my mother and I walked into a Black-owned mom-and-pop store in Mount Vernon, New York, near the border with the Eastchester section of the Bronx.
My mom complained bitterly about the higher prices the store had for the same stuff she usually bought at a Met supermarket or at Waldbaum’s. “If it’s Black, it’s no good,” she said as we walked out of the store that day, and not for the last time.
What my mother said, articulating a common stereotype about Black businesses, and what I experienced while shopping at Black-owned stores while growing up never really matched up, so I never internalised this anti-Blackness the way my mother had. In college, I learned about the unfair lending practices that made Black-owned stores more expensive to run, which was when I finally jettisoned this kind of anti-Black perception.
......
What is clear is that as attacks from DeSantis, Abbott, and so many others continue, state education departments across the country will continue to revise curricula and ban books they deem anti-racist. It means a lack of representation of Black authors, Black intellectuals, Black ideas and Black experiences for millions of African American kids.
It means a paternalistic and racist misrepresentation of the horrors of slavery and of the resilience it took for enslaved Black folk to build a culture of resistance that would foster social justice movements and cultural creation worldwide once emancipation finally occurred. It means that even the knowledge of such resistance and innovation, including the path to the Brown v Board of Education ruling, could be marginalised or erased at the whim of an “anti-woke” politician or state school board.
......
Disillusioning white kids by teaching them the ugly history of American racism is not teaching hate, but not teaching the truth of the Black experience is certainly teaching anti-Blackness to Black students.
Much better to read full article at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/...-blackness
Visiting Professor of African American History with Loyola University Maryland
Published On 13 Aug 2023
13 Aug 2023
......
slavery in the United States was a 246-year-long apocalypse of kidnapping 300,000 African people, transporting them across the Atlantic, beating, torturing and raping them, and working them to their early deaths.
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”.
......
The idea that Europeans stole African people from West Africa and then trained them up to be farmhands and blacksmiths is ludicrous beyond measure. As historian Michael W Twitty has written: “Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no knowledge of how to grow it, enslaved Africans [with experience growing it] were brought to fuel its husbandry, feeding the US’ eastern seaboard, Britain and provisioning many parts of the British Caribbean.”
Elsewhere, it has been documented: “African men with iron making skills were imported to the Chesapeake [in the state of Virginia] to work as blacksmiths … Ironworkers were an elite group in West and West Central Africa.”
There is plenty of historical evidence to disprove the ridiculous claim that the Florida State Board of Education is trying to push about slavery. But this is by far not the only problem with its new curriculum standards.
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. It will also promote internalised racism among African Americans in the long run.
......
The rhetoric and legislation DeSantis, Abbott, and other politicians are pushing aim to appeal to white supporters terrified of living in a majority-of-colour nation that could threaten their economic and political power. They serve to whitewash the truth of the Black experience in the US and the endemic nature of American racism. They are deliberately anti-Black.
......
I remember one summer day in 1976 when my mother and I walked into a Black-owned mom-and-pop store in Mount Vernon, New York, near the border with the Eastchester section of the Bronx.
My mom complained bitterly about the higher prices the store had for the same stuff she usually bought at a Met supermarket or at Waldbaum’s. “If it’s Black, it’s no good,” she said as we walked out of the store that day, and not for the last time.
What my mother said, articulating a common stereotype about Black businesses, and what I experienced while shopping at Black-owned stores while growing up never really matched up, so I never internalised this anti-Blackness the way my mother had. In college, I learned about the unfair lending practices that made Black-owned stores more expensive to run, which was when I finally jettisoned this kind of anti-Black perception.
......
What is clear is that as attacks from DeSantis, Abbott, and so many others continue, state education departments across the country will continue to revise curricula and ban books they deem anti-racist. It means a lack of representation of Black authors, Black intellectuals, Black ideas and Black experiences for millions of African American kids.
It means a paternalistic and racist misrepresentation of the horrors of slavery and of the resilience it took for enslaved Black folk to build a culture of resistance that would foster social justice movements and cultural creation worldwide once emancipation finally occurred. It means that even the knowledge of such resistance and innovation, including the path to the Brown v Board of Education ruling, could be marginalised or erased at the whim of an “anti-woke” politician or state school board.
......
Disillusioning white kids by teaching them the ugly history of American racism is not teaching hate, but not teaching the truth of the Black experience is certainly teaching anti-Blackness to Black students.
Much better to read full article at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/...-blackness
