Reply to 1619 Project in schools?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "1619 Project in schools?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DD came home yesterday with a reading packet, which included an essay from the 1619 Project.

Are many schools still teaching this stuff?  [/quote]

What did you think of the essay? Who wrote it? What else was in the packet? What is the specific topic being studied?

[/quote]

Typical MAGA reactionary response without bothering to read the assignment.[/quote]

I don't have a disagreement with teaching any history responsibly. The problem that I have is that the teachers always seem to have an "us vs them" approach to teaching it when people such as Hispanics and Asians were not involved. We've had black and white teachers teach pre-colonial history, plantation history, and civil war history and the take was always that kids like mine were somehow made to feel guilty as part of the enslavers by both slightly angry AA or white apologists. Somehow there always seems to be extra room in the guilt trip party for contemporaneously non-existing groups to be implicitly blamed. And this has happened several times in different years.[/quote]

If you are learning about slavery and feeling guilty, you need to unpack that. [/quote]

I’m fine with teaching kids about slavery but would prefer that it is done with the appropriate global and anthropological context.

Slavery has been practiced by the vast majority of cultures that have ever existed.

Today there are more enslaved people around the world than ever before in human history. It is widely practiced in many forms in multiple places around the world, specifically the Middle East but other places as well.

Slavery became prohibited because the white Christian men who were in power banned it.

[/quote]

In some twisted effort to…normalize slavery? WTF?

No, it’s appropriate to discuss slavery as it fits into the context of US history. 
[/quote]

No, this does not normalize slavery.  It shows that the American experience was part of a long history, not some uniquely evil institution.  Most people don't know that only a fraction of slaves from the Middle Passage came to British North America/United States, and that millions died in the much harsher conditions of the Caribbean and Brazil.

That they should appreciate the fact that Enlightenment ideals caused the burgeoning focus on individual rights in the American Revolution and that  ultimately these led to the current day.  It is OK for history classes to focus on the positive aspects as well as the negative aspects.[/quote]
This is patently false.  American slavery has been recognized as "the most awful the world has ever known" by the federal government of the United States of America for damned near sixty years.

[i]The most perplexing question abut American slavery, which has never been altogether explained, and which indeed most Americans hardly know exists, has been stated by Nathan Glazer as follows: "Why was American slavery the most awful the world has ever known?" The only thing that can be said with certainty is that this is true: it was.

American slavery was profoundly different from, and in its lasting effects on individuals and their children, indescribably worse than, any recorded servitude, ancient or modern. The peculiar nature of American slavery was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville and others, but it was not until 1948 that Frank Tannenbaum, a South American specialist, pointed to the striking differences between Brazilian and American slavery. The feudal, Catholic society of Brazil had a legal and religious tradition which accorded the slave a place as a human being in the hierarchy of society — a luckless, miserable place, to be sure, but a place withal. In contrast, there was nothing in the tradition of English law or Protestant theology which could accommodate to the fact of human bondage — the slaves were therefore reduced to the status of chattels — often, no doubt, well cared for, even privileged chattels, but chattels nevertheless.

Glazer, also focusing on the Brazil-United States comparison, continues.

"In Brazil, the slave had many more rights than in the United States: he could legally marry, he could, indeed had to, be baptized and become a member of the Catholic Church, his family could not be broken up for sale, and he had many days on which he could either rest or earn money to buy his freedom. The Government encouraged manumission, and the freedom of infants could often be purchased for a small sum at the baptismal font. In short: the Brazilian slave knew he was a man, and that he differed in degree, not in kind, from his master."

"[In the United States,] the slave was totally removed from the protection of organized society (compare the elaborate provisions for the protection of slaves in the Bible), his existence as a human being was given no recognition by any religious or secular agency, he was totally ignorant of and completely cut off from his past, and he was offered absolutely no hope for the future. His children could be sold, his marriage was not recognized, his wife could be violated or sold (there was something comic about calling the woman with whom the master permitted him to live a 'wife'), and he could also be subject, without redress, to frightful barbarities — there were presumably as many sadists among slaveowners, men and women, as there are in other groups. The slave could not, by law, be taught to read or write; he could not practice any religion without the permission of his master, and could never meet with his fellows, for religious or any other purposes, except in the presence of a white; and finally, if a master wished to free him, every legal obstacle was used to thwart such action. This was not what slavery meant in the ancient world, in medieval and early modern Europe, or in Brazil and the West Indies.

"More important, American slavery was also awful in its effects. If we compared the present situation of the American Negro with that of, let us say, Brazilian Negroes (who were slaves 20 years longer), we begin to suspect that the differences are the result of very different patterns of slavery. Today the Brazilian Negroes are Brazilians; though most are poor and do the hard and dirty work of the country, as Negroes do in the United States, they are not cut off from society. They reach into its highest strata, merging there — in smaller and smaller numbers, it is true, but with complete acceptance — with other Brazilians of all kinds. The relations between Negroes and whites in Brazil show nothing of the mass irrationality that prevails in this country."[/i]

[u]The Negro Family: The Case for National Action[/u], Chapter III, "The Roots of the Problem," Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor (March 1965).

In case you wish to question the legitimacy of the lead author of this report, the next stop you find yourself on an Amtrak train rolling through New York City, stick your head out the window and read the name on the recently-constructed train hall.  Yeah, same guy.[/quote]

Nope - Africans died in far greater numbers in the Caribbean and Brazil.  Here they didn’t.  That’s the definition of harsher.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics