- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion
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“When I look at Robert E Lee, the comparisons to him and George Washington are immense,” he said, noting Washington also owned slaves.
Not the same.
“I wonder when George Washington’s name and things like that will then have to come off of things.”
One helped found this country. Another fought this country.
“But to be taught that everyone who fought for the Confederacy, or did this, or did that, is a racist slave holder, that’s all or nothing, and that really isn’t doing history justice,” he added.
We really need to teach better in history class. THAT is where we need to stop removing things, not statues and dedications to traitors of the country. He doesn’t understand WHY the Confederacy started the war, does he? Maybe he should dive into the declarations from the various states on why they seceded. It’s plainly mentioned in almost all of them.
Forcing them to argue that washington had slaves is a step in the right direction. It is a crack in their jingoistic myth of the founding fathers. Theyre being forced to learn a bit of history thats been intentionally hidden. Next question; If most the founding fathers owned slaves, whats that mean? Whats that say about america? So slavery was an institution and treated as the norm?
Its messy but this is progress
And then you find out that not only was Saint George a slaver, but he did things like having teeth yanked out of his slaves’ mouths to construct false teeth for his own.
He was genuinely not a good dude.
Hmm, it sounds like he actually bought them.
This somehow makes it weirder.
Washington was the wealthiest man in the colonies by 1776. Sort of the Jeff Bezos of tobacco.
Would you let Jeff Bezos pull out nine of your teeth if he offered to paid you $1200?
Next question; If most the founding fathers owned slaves, whats that mean? Whats that say about america? So slavery was an institution and treated as the norm?
It also means we can, as a country, chose to be better. These asshats are not choosing to be better. There is a moral and ethical onus to improve ourselves as a nation and as individuals. They’re failing that.
One helped found this country.
Canadians don’t have a cult of personality around our first Prime Minister the way Americans do around George Washington.
Canada was apparently founded on uniting white Europeans to eradicate the “savage” indigenous populations here.
So… founding the country can be overlooked to an extent if the person was otherwise an asshole.
There’s a difference between founding a country by winning a war against a monarchy and founding a country when a CEO sucks a monarch off.
And Canada still continues that tradition today, don’t worry. Y’all might acknowledge your First Nations people better, but that doesn’t mean Canadian police and the RCMP especially hesitate when they see a chance to shoot some indigenous people.
No doubt. Our police aren’t quite as gun happy as the US cops, but they still find their own ways to murder people they consider to be lesser than them if a gun might be too egregious for a given situation.
I mean sometimes they would just arrest a native American on a freezing cold night, drive them miles out into the middle of nowhere and then kick them out.
They gave it a beautiful name. They called it a “starlight tour”. And we have no official records of how many native Americans were murdered by Canadian police officers using this process.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/starlight-tours
This is one of the first things that comes to my mind, as a native american, every time somebody mentions that Canada is so great and wonderful and how much they wish we could move there.
That’s interesting. I don’t think I have ever seen someone refer to an Aboriginal Canadian as a Native American. Native Canadian yes, but native Americans were always south of the border in my mind.
A native American in the general is somebody that’s native to the Americas.
There are native Americans in Mexico and in all South American countries as well.
I understand the concept, but I have never heard the term Native American used for anyone except the indigenous people within the United States of america.
We really need to teach better in history class. THAT is where we need to stop removing things, not statues and dedications to traitors of the country
Did you miss the insane freakouts by conservatives related to critical race theory?? They refuse to allow history to be taught, it’s not that we need to “do better” like we’ve made some mistakes, these are malicious purposeful actions.
They prefer to teach this kind of history:
The Florida Board of Education approved new social studies standards July 19 following a law passed by the legislature in 2022, known as “Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act” or the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.”
The law bans workplaces and schools from teaching that anyone must feel guilt based on their race as a result of actions by others in the past. Earlier this year, Florida rejected a new high school Advanced Placement course on Black studies.
The 216-page standards document covers a broad sweep of Black history, along with topics such as the Holocaust, world history and geography. It includes different standards for elementary, middle and high school students.
The part of Florida’s new standards that Harris was citing is for grades six through eight. It says:
“Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”
The controversial part is in this “benchmark clarification” about slave labor: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
THAT is where we need to stop removing things, not statues and dedications to traitors of the country
I wholeheartedly DISAGREE. We do NOT NEED monuments to literal fucking traitors. Should we put up a goddamn statue of Benedict Arnold too?? Jesus Christ. Do black people really need to see the face of the oppressors of their ancestors every day?
My statement agreed with you, saying we should stop removing (or start including) uncomfortable lessons of history in schools, and remove the objects that as you say were put there long after the war not as a memorial but as a reminder (and a promise to go back if they can) of the oppression. I’m not sure how you read it as the opposite, I called them traitors.
I remember spending almost an hour reading some of the declarations of the states, and I remember Texas writing that they were given the right to own slaves by God, and that they will fight to defend that that right against anything 🙄. They couldn’t have been more clear.
Not the same.
More so than we like to admit. Washington was a loyalist until the Dunmore Proclamation threatened his human chattel.
Lee broke for the Confederacy with the election of Lincoln.
Both these men were fundamentally driven by their economic conditions. The difference between Washington and Lee is that Washington won.
He doesn’t understand WHY the Confederacy started the war, does he?
The regional industrial power threatened the South’s economic position as a confederacy of slave holders. That’s what got Washington, Jefferson, and a host of other Southern planters on board, too.
Chandra Manning, a professor of history at Georgetown University, said the naming of schools after Confederate soldiers really took off in the 1950s after the government mandated that whites-only segregated schools accept black pupils, as a way to make black students feel unwelcome.
“It wasn’t a widespread trend until the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954, which mandated the desegregation of public schools,” she told the BBC. "And it was after that decision that the number and the frequency of schools named for Confederate generals quite dramatically and suddenly accelerated.
If your excuse for keeping this shit and the statues and everything around is “culture”, then your fucking “culture” is nothing more than just being an asshole. That’s it.
Pretty fucking short lived culture if slap bracelets were around longer than it
feel unwelcome.
This is the basis of systematic oppression in US.
- Freedom of speech to treat minority like shit who will likely be lynched if they speak up in the past. Now when minorities do speak up, and can’t be silenced with “traditional means”, it’s woke.
- Guns to deter minorities who can’t afford to. Now minorities can own guns, use police as cartels to kill them with impunity and be promoted.
- Taxes for poor people, and cuts for the rich.
- Two justice systems based on class
- Separation of religion and government, but only for non-christian beliefs
- Portrays itself as science leader, does not really give a fuck about climate change.
- Portrays itself as defenders of democracy, has a well documented history of destroying democracies around the world.
- Supports genocide when it’s favorable to them.
They know how to oppress by seeming altruistic with false sense of progress, that only benefit itself, the racists and the rich.
If your excuse for keeping this shit and the statues and everything around is “culture”, then your fucking “culture” is nothing more than just being an asshole. That’s it.
As evidence: Their current Messiah. Their humor (always at someone else’s expense). Their obsession with “liberal tears” and doing anything that makes “the left” upset. Their conquest against “woke” (as in: giving a shit about other peoples experience.) etc…
Absolutely
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A reminder of the history of changing school names in the 1960s to make black students feel unwelcome? Is that the history they’re trying to make endure? Because that’s the history of the naming of that school.
At least it didn’t bother RILEY.
For people who love history so much they seem awfully timid about tagging Lee for what he was: a traitor and a loser.
why would you want to name a school after a bunch of losers?
oh thats right; racism. got keep it racist.
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“Muh heritage” (of racism)
Long storied tradition of profiting off the labor of others. It’s the American way.
Traitor Jackson High School.
Is America okay
No. We most certainly are not. Some of us are trying to be better, though.
Nope.
Yep, they are just trying to keep child marriage legal and remove restrictions for child labor. Totally fine.
I thought they were going to take us to the '50s but it looks like we’re going back to the 1910’s
That’s not very Jesus like
“Let the little children come unto me, that they may work 40 hours a week in an Amazon warehouse”
One of the people leading the charge to restore the schools’ names is Mike Scheibe, a father of two students at Ashby Lee and Civil War re-enactor, who is also the spokesperson for the Coalition for Better Schools, a local organisation that campaigned for the school board to change the names back.
. . . “But to be taught that everyone who fought for the Confederacy, or did this, or did that, is a racist slave holder, that’s all or nothing, and that really isn’t doing history justice,” he added.
Well, I’ll give him the point that he didn’t use the word “heritage”, so. Good job with that. However he did mention something about justice.
Wonder which side he cosplays for
I will say that’s actually probably a fair point.
Maybe the only fair point in the entire argument. Most of the people who fought for the South were ignorant uneducated redneck hicks who were being told that the gub’ment was going to seize their means of production and leave them to suffer in poverty.
That vastly oversteps the fact that the means of production and question were other living human beings with fundamental value equal to theirs, but when you have the power of media and a society built on closed-mindedness, I can almost understand why they would choose to fight to protect their ignorance and their way of life rather than to adapt to a new world.
Doesn’t make it right, and it does not validate anything else about their movement. The Confederacy failed. Slavery is bad. Memorializing Confederate slavers is bad. No city has a statue of Pol Pot hanging out in its Town center.
Maybe we should have the same amount of self-respect that the survivors of the Khmer rouge do.
It’s a fair point in a good faith argument.
I highly doubt the good faith of a school board restoring Confederate names though.
You are correct.
Everything about their argument is stupid and regressive and part of a shoddly orchestrated attempt to restore slavery to America and to take away the rights of anybody other than wealthy white men to vote or own property.
But if it were argued in good faith, this one point is a point that makes sense to me, that likely not every person who fought for the Confederacy was a racist, there were likely a few of them who fought to “protect their way of life” not knowing that they were fighting to keep slaves enslaved.
Even with saying that, the grand majority of them, I’m willing to wager 97% or more of them, were by all accounts racist and were fighting to maintain their claim to white superiority.
Agreed. It gets really complicated at a certain point, and - again, arguing in good faith - it’s interesting to consider how people who don’t agree with slavery get caught up in the fight for it (and, likely, vice versa).
But, that’s for some other discussion.
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At first I was like “is this oniony?” Then it clicked and I was all, “oof this isn’t pulling any punches”
If it weren’t for the Virginia Senate, it would be just as bad as Texas and Alabama.
