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I still want DeSantis to answer how slaves could use skills they acquired "for personal benefit" if they were owned by someone. Did the slave walk up to the plantation owner and ask to quit being a slave so that they could set up their own blacksmithing business? (Spoiler: No, they didn't. Any slave that tried doing this would have been beaten or worse.)
Maybe some slaves escaped and maybe some of them were able to do certain tasks because they did those chores when they were slaves, but this is a fraction of a fraction of a percent. It definitely shouldn't be used in a classroom as some kind of rationalization for why slavery wasn't that bad. It ignores what happened to 99.99% of slaves because the story of the 0.01% is more politically palatable to Republicans.
(Note: I'll admit that the fractions were made up by me. They're intended to illustrate a point and not to express any actual rate. If anything, 0.01% is probably too high of a percentage.)
You are making the mistake of stepping into the argument. Even if you eventually convince a conservative that this is incorrect, fox news will fix their view back in a couple of weeks, and even add more deplorable viewpoints to boot.
I don't know how to fix the issue. Propaganda is just too effective.
Trying to reason with right-wing extremists is now more impossible than ever. I've seen a dude defend medical bankruptcy as a concept. When trying to explain to them how inhumane that sounded, they called me a commie and starting on a pointless rant about trans people.
As an absolute hater of right-wing propaganda, this is cute af. You're being intellectually honest like it matters to them. But you're really just handing them the rope they'll use to strangle your argument.
Oh, the fractions were made up, then your entire argument is obviously false! You don't know what you're talking about! Maybe you should listen to the real experts like PragerU! (Add a sentence that's an insult that includes the word "groomer" for good measure).
I mean, actual conservative think tanks, ostensibly the conservative intellectual elite, engage in this type of bullshit: Biden’s War on Texas Border Buoys Reveals What He Really Thinks About Immigration Laws
They do not give a fuck about intellectual honesty.
He would point out all of the black folks who drive around in shit cars and pick up scrap all over the state. That shit is so blatant and obvious that that is how the north florida plantation hegemony wants the entire state to be its gross. They keep the black folks down bad there.
You're making the mistake of trying to use logic against batshit insanity instead of simply calling out batshit insanity for what it is. Don't fall into that trap; you're only validating them.
Unless the slaves happened to live at the end of the Civil War or were lucky enough to have an owner that decided to free them (highly unlikely), they weren't freed. They were kept as slaves until they died. It's not like they got to retire from slavery and launch their own business.
And, no, the DeSantis revisionist history doesn't specify "slaves at the end of slavery." It says that slaves in general benefited from "skills they learned that they were able apply for personal benefit." This didn't happen except perhaps in extremely rare circumstances.