florida school curriculum to teach "slavery was beneficial"

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1) Not being free isn't the same as being another person's property. Fear can't own people and your logic doesn't make any sense. Do you think an apprentice or other indentured servant who tried to run away wouldn't get beaten? That doesn't make them a slave, they're considered separate from slaves because they're not chattel property.

Fear doesn't own anything so your logic makes no sense. Fear of consequences doesn't mean one has been made property.

2) When describing slavery in western cultures, we often reserve the term slavery for chattel slavery. We consider indentured servants and serfs to not be slaves, despite them also not being considered free. When western colonizers examined non-western cultures they didn't bother making that distinction.

If a practice is not considered slavery when Europeans practiced it, why does it get labelled as slavery when other peoples did it?

When prisoners taken in conflicts are distributed as private property, they're unambiguously slaves. When captives are forcibly assimilated with the intention of making them members of society that's not the same even if it's not something we'd condone today.

It's the difference between the Romans (for example) taking everyone in an area captive and selling them vs. those people being told if they pay their taxes for the next decade they'll be granted citizenship. The former is slavery, the latter is not.

For a society that doesn't really amass wealth, there's no taxes to pay, but there's always labour to contribute. Contributing labour and being a productive member of the society is expected of everyone, whether they were born into it or were taken as a captive as a result of conflict.

Accepting a job as an apprentice and being paid a lowly wage until you've learned skills and passed tests in order to be a qualified journeyman/tradesman commanding a higher wage is apples to oranges being captured, relocated, and put to work.

It's not My mostly colonizer caucasian but part Indigenous personal opinion from my own imagination that Indigenous people enslaved other Indigenous people. This history was told to me by a man named Marv, who is from Haida Gwaii, and he proudly conveyed that his people were known as sort of the pirates of the West Coast, paddling up and down, raiding, plundering, taking slaves etc. Since Indigenous history is traditionally orally conveyed vs. written, I took his words to be a true & factual representation of his peoples' history as coastal conquerors/slave takers/possessors ?/owners.

You're describing modern apprenticeships, not how they were practiced several hundred years ago (which is what I was consistently referring to).

You're right, comparing modern apprenticeships to indentured servitude is apples and oranges, but that's never been the comparison I've been making.



Describing that practice as 'taking slaves' doesn't mean they were practising chattel slavery, it just means that's the wording that he believes will be best understood.

If he used a more 'culturally appropriate' term, it wouldn't be less easily understood and he'd end up paraphrasing it as either 'taking slaves' or 'taking captives'.

I've never said that taking captives wasn't common, it was one of the more common goals of the sorts of endemic conflicts that peoples who don't accumulate wealth participate in. It doesn't mean that those captives are made chattel.

If it was the English behaving in that manner, they wouldn't refer to the captives as slaves if they were in fact indentured servants who will eventually be considered full members of society. Being made an indentured servant often is not voluntary.

If we'd make the distinction when it's people who look like you and I engaging in the behaviour, we should be willing to make the distinction no matter who's doing it.

Not sure what your argument is here ??

“A rose is a rose by any other name,” as the saying goes.

Slave = Slave, regardless of culture, language, location, or timeline.

As some other people have mentioned, modern day slavery still exists. The US prison system has black slaves working for less than $1 an hour as of 2016 (source below). The rates might have increased marginally since then, I don't know?

"Slavery persists by another name today. Young men and women of colour toil away in 21st-century fields, sow in hand. And Corporate America is cracking the whip.

Influenced by enormous corporate lobbying, the United States Congress enacted the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program in 1979 which permitted US companies to use prison labour. Coupled with the drastic increase in the prison population during this period, profits for participating companies and revenue for the government and its private contractors soared. The Federal Bureau of Prisons now runs a programme called Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR) that pays inmates under one dollar an hour. The programme generated $500m in sales in 2016 with little of that cash being passed down to prison workers. Stateside, where much of the US addiction to mass incarceration lies, is no different. California’s prison labour programme is expected to produce some $232m in sales in 2017."

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/9/9/slavery-in-the-us-prison-system/

As well as the trans-atlantic slave trade that people like to talk about, the Islamic slave trade, over the course of 1000 years (as opposed to a few hundred in the TA slave trade), actually took more chattel slaves in terms of millions.

Not many people seem to talk about that since it was... Middle Eastern's POC's enslaving Africans for the most part but they pretty much took any kind of slave, including White Europeans.

All except for they arbitrarily lump things that aren't roses in with roses and expect it to not be noticed.

It's a stretch to lump forms of indentured servitude as slavery, unless the goal is to redefine the concept of slavery much more broadly than it is traditionally understood.

Seems to me that you’re trying to carve out an exception to pretend that certain cultures didn’t participate in slavery.

I think getting bogged down in the semantics of a philosophical debate ultimately serves to obscure De Santis's intentions.

I believe he has also said in relation to lynchings and mass killings of black people historically in Florida as incidents or riots where black people are also culpable for triggering the actions of white vigilantes. He has used the deaths of a handful of whites during mob violence as justification. He is pretending to that the education system must be impartial to all sides.

If De Santis was in Germany he would probably argue that German kids should learn that concentration camp guards in Nazi Germany were doing their job and that inmates probably triggered their sensibilities when they spluttered blood all over their nice shiny uniforms.

https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Course ... 3A_Slavery

Different Amerind peoples fall into different parts of the spectrum between hunter-gather and neolithic.

The Pacific Northwest appears to have been an area where slavery of some sort is well-documented. This is different from other parts of the continent. That's not to suggest not engaging in slavery or something resembling it was morally superior, considering the alternative typically was mass slaughter (and often mass torture alongside it) with limited forced assimilation.

Perhaps the Pacific coast provided the surpluses needed, that doesn't mean the entire continent did.

The boundary between slave and prisoner of war is indistinct in many of these cultures. It's not unfair to carve out exceptions for societies that were much closer to the prisoner of war side of things.

As for forced labour, there's a cliche across a lot of First Nations societies about never admitting to an elder that you're bored or have nothing to do, or they'll give you something to do. It seems likely that forced labour of some sort was the norm and expectation for most members for a period in their lives; much like older folks assign chores in many other societies.

Sometimes chores are enforced with threat of violence, but it's a stretch to call that slavery, especially when they amount to contribute to the survival of family you're a part of. In societies with very little surplus wealth/food, it's difficult to really not involve PoWs in the sustenance labour pool.

It's fair to anticipate that structures like that became the basis for social castes that are much more similar to slavery, especially if the status was passed on to descendants. The more war captives can be viewed as either surplus or alien, the more likely it is that their fate won't be good.

Im not from quite THAT far-south fortunately... but I was taught in public school in the 80s that most slaves had good masters and were ultimately appreciative of being raised up into the arms of white, christian american culture and that the most "successful and advanced" blacks on earth are all american and christian.

most every child in class had already been told this by their parents.

the fact that people are appalled over this means that maybe not everyone has been shoveled this horses**t all along,
and i am ,at least, glad that there are presumably other states, likely outside the south, where kids did NOT learn this at school.

Amazing the staying power of a lie people want to believe.

That Americans are free? I concur.

Some of them might be.