Opinion | In Lessons on Slavery, Context Matters – By Jamelle Bouie (The New York Times) / July 29, 2023
One of the points I tried to make in my Friday column about the new Florida curriculum on the history of slavery is that the context of a statement can have a radical effect on its meaning.
To be clear, there are legitimate objections to make to the particular phrasing. As I noted in my piece, to say that “Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” is to make several untenable assumptions about the experiences of most enslaved Africans as well as to occlude the essential quality of life under slavery, which is that neither your person nor your labor were your own.
But the basic idea that “slaves developed skills” isn’t an illegitimate one. And although it has been deployed in efforts to minimize the fundamental injustice of American slavery, it has also been used in defense of the essential humanity of the enslaved. For example, at the same time that white supremacist authors were writing slavery apologia for student instruction, scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois were taking note of the skills and agency of enslaved Africans for a very different purpose.
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