Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id569467207
specious claim that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
✏️ You could tell someone, “hey, if someone came and cut your legs off, you could gain the benefit of handicapped parking. (keeping in mind the other person is unpunished).” 🔗 View Highlight
id569472021
While the Florida guidelines emphasize the teaching of “the trades of slaves (e.g., musicians, healers, blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, weavers, tailors, sawyers, hostlers, silversmiths, cobblers, wheelwrights, wigmakers, milliners, painters, coopers),” almost “all of [Florida’s] slaves (98 percent) were involved in agricultural labor,” according to a 2010 article in Florida Humanities magazine, most of which was not skill-building but back-breaking.
id569472495
The guidelines also ignore the fact that many enslaved Africans arrived on these shores with advanced skills of their own. “They already knew how to measure, irrigate, sail, forge, read, write, translate, mine, weave, build, cook, harvest, heal and create
id569473516
The takeaway from the Florida guidelines is that every culture enslaved people at some point, that Africans enslaved other Africans, that whites have at times been enslaved, that Indigenous Americans practiced slavery before Europeans even got here—all the while playing down the peculiarly rigid, race-based, intergenerational, and violence-enforced institution that emerged in the United States.