r/politics • u/MothersMiIk Washington • 17h ago
OK Rep. defends history cartoon claiming slavery was ‘better than being killed’
https://kfor.com/news/ok-rep-defends-history-cartoon-claiming-slavery-was-better-than-being-killed/amp/495
17h ago
[deleted]
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u/ShearGenius89 14h ago
I mean the choices are being collectively tortured, in a lot of cases raped and being worked to death in some of the cruelest labor conditions possible…
Or die?
…So die, or die horrifically??
Choose wisely
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u/Ok_Passion_6771 13h ago
Or like, maybe, successfully make a case on why those are both horrible options for one human being to give to another
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u/ShearGenius89 12h ago
These people you're trying to plead a case of humanity to would need a toddlers level understanding of empathy for that to work.
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u/jdtrouble 11h ago
If you're not a cis white male, pretty much yes. After all that's the endgame for conservatives, no?
Where does this half-brained idea come from? My FIL parroted this shit a couple of years ago. Is it Russian? "Better slave than dead." Sounds Soviet to me."
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u/FrostyDucks879 17h ago
Slaves would kill themselves to avoid being held without their will. Many hundreds of thousands to millions died by slavers’ hands.
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u/Critical-Path-5959 17h ago
Not to mention the enslaved women being kept alive just to be raped and breed so their children could be born into servitude. I'm sure they're incredibly grateful to have stayed alive just so that their children could be brought into such a wonderful life.
White slavers sold their own children that they had with enslaved women, too. And they performed barbaric cesareans without any anesthetic and left them to bleed to death. I'm sure that's preferable to a quick death in their homeland, too!
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u/Erikblod Europe 17h ago
So the "give me liberty or give me death" is just something that they said for fun?
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u/algorithmic_fetters 14h ago
Live free or die is on NH’s plates iirc. .
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u/DaoFerret 14h ago
“Live Free or Die” is on the NH license plate because it is the official state motto.
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u/NoMoreProphets 15h ago
Thomas Jefferson enters the chat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Hemings
Pretty well proved that Sally was impregnated by Jefferson when she was 16 and he was mid 40s after his wife died. He only freed 2 of his 6 children.
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u/hoggie_and_doonuts 13h ago edited 13h ago
A crazy and horrifying part of the story was that Sally Hemings was the half sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha.
Ultimately, Jefferson raped the enslaved daughter of his FIL, who was also the product of rape. Think about this … John Wayles raped a slave who bore a daughter. That daughter, Sally Hemmings, came to Monticello as a slave years after her free half sister, Martha. TJ began raping Sally, just as Sally’s father John W had raped his slave, Betty Hemmings, who herself was the product of rape by a white man (who was not the owner of Betty’s mom).
Two generations of wealthy landowners raping their own slaves in addition to having wives, and their keeping own progeny enslaved.
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u/alwaysbeblepping 5h ago
Pretty well proved that Sally was impregnated by Jefferson when she was 16 and he was mid 40s after his wife died. He only freed 2 of his 6 children.
Obviously it's still bad, but it seems somewhat more complicated than just having a slave and then raping her. The Wikipedia article says they started "having intimate relations" when she was in Paris and not a slave. It says she was in Paris for 26 months and that range would have started when she was ~14. It also says she agreed to come back to Virginia and resume being a slave as long as her children would be freed when they came of age. Apparently he kept that deal and also allowed some of them to just leave and go to the north.
So it seems like Sally Hemings and her children has a special relationship with Thomas Jefferson. He owned a lot of other slaves, however, that didn't get treated specially or even freed in his will when he died.
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u/Hesitation-Marx 15h ago
Not to mention that slavers stole skilled craftspeople.
It wasn’t just cotton picking and farming. They stole metalworkers, weavers, and engineers. They would sell someone with skills for a premium.
They literally robbed Africa of its wealth and its talent. And then they get shitty about African nations still having issues.
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u/MoonChainer California 15h ago
Our "now great' nations gathered together and, one-by-one, ripped open the African continent like a pack of feasting vultures. The sole reason any of us enjoys the pleasures of modernity is through the gorging of resources we stole.
And then we say "primitive" in response to the groans of the disemboweled.
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u/monsantobreath 13h ago
Original prose?
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u/MoonChainer California 13h ago
Yup, thought as I typed. It's certainly no Frost, but I try.
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u/monsantobreath 11h ago
I got most of the way through it waiting to see the credit line at the bottom before I realized it was probably yours. So there's that.
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u/oliversurpless Massachusetts 12h ago
Or more recently via the Congo and South Africa, falsely attributing those “pull yourself up by your bootstraps!” banalities they apply to labor difficulties in our own history…
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u/Greedy-Affect-561 16h ago
“Just bury me in the ocean... with my ancestors that jumped from ships... because they knew that death was better than bondage.”
Wild that this is a quote from a marvel movie.
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u/Aegon20VIIIth 15h ago
And from the villain of the film, too! I feel like that was my biggest issue with Black Panther: Killmonger wasn’t wrong. And so long as PragerU exists, the message of the film is in that quote. Fuck bondage, better to die than to lose your humanity.
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u/SnooOwls9584 15h ago
Was he the villain though? I feel like they did a good job on the complexity there.
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u/devlin_dragonus 15h ago
He was the antagonist m, whether he was a villain or not is a matter of perspective.
Which imo, makes the best antagonists
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u/Ok_Value5495 15h ago
I mean, I'd be super pissed too if the most advanced society on the planet—that just happens to be Black— did jackshit to aid the plight of others like them, including literal kin, going through horrendous racism for CENTURIES.
Wakanda is both a paragon of Black (and humanity's in general) excellence AND the epitome of 'you may be skinfolk, but not kinfolk.'
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u/AugmentedDragon 3h ago
not to mention, when you look at the scenes showing wakandan society in general, you see a lot of aspects, including fabrics and fashions, borrowed from their african neighbours—a very one-sided relationship, what with them being a hyper-isolationist state.
imagine being one of those other neighbouring countries, suffering from the lasting effects of colonialism, but still being open to trade with your neighbours at a "we're all in this together" discount rate, only to find out that the tiny country you thought was also dirt poor? nah, they're rich af but they're keeping everything for themselves, despite taking full advantage of those discount rates. for those other african countries, wakanda would probably be as untrustworthy on the world stage as the US
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u/kung-fu_hippy 11h ago
He was, because he was a hypocrite. He criticized wakanda for not sharing their resources for the good of all black people. But then the second he became king and got that power, his first act was to burn the plant that gave the black panther his power and ensure he’d be the strongest.
Not to mention that starting a race based war of terror wasn’t likely to do much good for the world as a whole.
There is a difference between being a villain who is concerned about a real problem (Magneto, Killmonger, some versions of Lex Luthor, etc.) and not being a villain at all. If you’ll take evil actions to fix that problem, you’re still going to be a villain.
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u/billtopia 9h ago
Having somewhat noble end goals being achieved through less than honorable means combined with the black and white thinking that allows for an extreme ends justify the means attitude is an incredibly common villain trope in fiction.
It’s incredibly well done in Black Panther. But it does not in any way mean that Killmonger isn’t a villain.
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u/ThirteenthPyramid 12h ago edited 12h ago
The problem with Killmonger is that they took reasonable responses to the history of how the world has treated black people, and then packaged it in an exaggerated and unsympathetic character who goes too far, while everyone else hasn’t even begun to try(that part is thankfully addressed), meanwhile it makes the white American CIA guy the wholesome good guy.
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u/kung-fu_hippy 11h ago
Ehh. I’ll agree with you on Killmonger being problematic, but he is a villain. It’s like how Magneto has some solid points about the treatment of mutants being analogous to the holocaust he’s already lived through, but there is a reason he formed a group called The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to deal with it.
The CIA as a whole isn’t shown as good guys, just that one individual. Throughout the Black Panther and the marvel movies, it’s pretty clear that the US/world governments want the power various supers have and will take it by force if they can’t get it willingly.
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u/ThirteenthPyramid 10h ago
He still becomes the personification of “America” in the movie, like the actor, don’t love the warped perspective.
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u/Jafooki 15h ago
A quote that hard has no place in a movie set in the same universe as a talking CGI raccoon
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u/redhatfilm 14h ago
Bro have you seen gotg 3? The fucking racoon has more depth and pathos than most of the humans in the universe.
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u/HumongousBelly Europe 14h ago
What better way to reach the mindless masses and enlighten them with food for thought?
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u/JessieJ577 17h ago
Slaves would jump off the ships because dying was better than making it to America.
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u/ModernTenshi04 Ohio 16h ago
Right?
"Hey, we could have killed them outright, but we realized it was more advantageous for us to subjugate them and treat them as property under the threat of death if they didn't do what we told them."
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u/Luck1492 15h ago
Give me liberty or give me death.” - Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775.
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u/kiwigate 10h ago
The founders were, unironically, woke. We built a world on reason and enlightenment, and the majority wish to drag us back to the cave, back to a demon haunted world.
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u/edwardturnerlives 17h ago
Remember the right think they are the good guys.
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u/ShamelessCatDude 17h ago
They think they’re genetically superior. They think that anyone who disagrees with them is a sub-human savage that needs “taming”. You can’t argue with someone who views you as a barking dog
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u/Bell3atrix Minnesota 17h ago
I don't think this is necessarily true at this point in history. A lot of people view Trumpism as like a necessary evil or have the "I voted for him because he's the world's greatest mob boss" mentality.
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u/Angstrom_Wither 17h ago
What happens in the video?
Leo and Layla wonder why their teachers don’t want them to celebrate Columbus Day anymore and only want to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day/Native American Day. They say they’ve heard mixed things about Columbus’s character.
The kids “travel back in time” using a cell phone to speak to Columbus. Leo and Layla meet Columbus on his ship as he is sailing back to Spain, and he explains his backstory.
Leo says he’s heard at school that Columbus spoiled paradise and brought slavery and murder to peaceful people.
Columbus says he met tribes that were highly intelligent and others that were “vicious, warring cannibals.”
Leo and Layla ask Columbus about slavery.
Columbus says that slavery is “as old as time.” Columbus also adds that “being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.”
Leo and Layla push back about slavery no longer being allowed in the 21st century.
Columbus tells the kids it’s not fair to judge him by the same standards as the future. He makes comparisons to Ancient Greeks and says that while he doesn’t agree with everything in their society, their achievements are not ignored.
Columbus says that no one is perfect, except for his lord and savior, Jesus Christ.
Leo and Layla travel back home and recap what they learned.
😐
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u/liebkartoffel 17h ago
Columbus tells the kids it’s not fair to judge him by the same standards as the future. He makes comparisons to Ancient Greeks and says that while he doesn’t agree with everything in their society, their achievements are not ignored.
Ah, shall we judge him by the standards of his contemporaries, then, and point out that he was deposed as a colonial governor and sent back to Spain in chains for being a rapacious, bloodthirsty, tyrannical dickbag?
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u/Angstrom_Wither 17h ago
The "Man of His Time" fallacy falls apart instantly because it's predicated on the idea that no one at the time felt differently. The existence of abolitionists throughout all of history means that, at no point, was slavery a universally accepted and appreciated component of any society.
He can't be a "product of his time" if his time also created people who weren't tyrannical dickbags.
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u/liebkartoffel 15h ago
It's also interesting how the same people who decry cultural relativism in the here and now suddenly get all "hey, the past is a foreign country, man!" when it comes to the actions of white people 20+ years ago.
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u/Angstrom_Wither 15h ago
Relativism became the distinctly American curse after we vaporized tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and ushered in a new and terrifying epoch where human beings possessed the capacity to eradicate themselves.
For a country to get up in the morning, the next day, and go on about its business? That's why we can't figure anything else out. American history is rife with atrocities, but reckoning with our own auto-extermination caused the relativism spiral to atomize us all into warring clans of one.
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u/Funny-Mission-2937 16h ago
like thomas jefferson played in a string quartet with robert carter iii. he knew what was possible
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u/monsantobreath 13h ago
It's actually a very chauvinistic power based mentality. That might makes right.
It only considers the moral calculus of the ones with power. It doesn't care that if a Belgian citizen were to be given a tour of his kings Congo holdings they'd probably demand it end on the spot. But they have no power so the standards of the time don't care.
And it's an inherently anti democratic mentality too. It says the morals of an undemocratic society should be based on the values of those with power. So how do we not then say we have no right to judge North Korea? It's normal for their system.
What exactly does time have to do with it? Is north Korea a less evil regime of we go back to the 19th Century? What about mid 20th century? When did morality suddenly care about the dignity and freedom of others? Before or after WW2?
Were we meant to grandfather in immoral people at these transition times?
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u/jeo123 14h ago
Nazis were also men of their time....
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u/Angstrom_Wither 14h ago
No one is a "man of their time." Everyone, every day, makes moral decisions and have every possible resource necessary to make the right ones. People sucked then. People suck now. When they suck has little bearing on how or why they suck.
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u/turquoise_amethyst 17h ago
“being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.”
Is this to condition the kids for the Project 2025 “work farms”?
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u/Jimorstan-Genn420han 15h ago
Yes. Yes it is. Lawrence Co. Tennessee schools director created a "no doctor's notes for excused absences" policy for kids to condition children for the expectations of the work force, explaining “if you’ve got the sniffles, that’s fine. You’re going to have them when you go to work one day. We’ve all gone to work sick and hurt and beat up. I think as a group and society we’re losing that reliability and that opportunity begins in the school house.”
Lawrence County school district will no longer excuse students with a doctor’s note • Tennessee Lookout https://share.google/scq20VypabxfoxCYt
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u/Angstrom_Wither 17h ago
Or for when they start forcing the detainees to work for free as an alternative to gas chambers.
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u/Critical-Path-5959 17h ago
The thing is there were plenty of abolitionists back then and loads of detractors. They were ignored because of the financial benefits of slavery, not the "we don't know it's really wrong" false narrative these ghouls push.
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u/Angstrom_Wither 16h ago
Absolutely. Moses was an abolitionist. It isn't new. People don't like to be enslaved. It's one of the handful of basic truths about the human condition that are pretty much indisputable.
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u/AbueloOdin 15h ago
I think Moses was an abolitionist for his specific ethnic group. I'm not sure you can say he did or didn't support slavery in general.
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u/Angstrom_Wither 15h ago
I was just using him because I like to throw religious figures back in the face of people who supposedly believe in them. I don't put a ton of stock in myth and legend of any kind. The odds of the historical figure we know as Moses being anything in particular is anybody's guess, because he's an amalgam of verbal religious traditions manipulated by historical bullshit.
But: point taken.
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u/zubuneri 17h ago
This seems so Mormon-coded
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u/ShamelessCatDude 17h ago
Surprisingly, Dennis Prager is an Orthodox Jew. He just aligns with the Christian far-right socially and economically.
Don’t know where the weird comment about Jesus being perfect came from considering that, but still
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u/zubuneri 17h ago
I don’t think Candace Owens believes racism doesn’t exist since she sued her college for racism.
Case in point, grifters gonna grift. Prager is no different.
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u/Jafooki 14h ago
It's a very easy way to make money if you have no scruples. Republicans will always need a black "friend" to point to when accused of racism. Anyone black could easily become a conservative influencer so long as they're willing to publicly push white nationalist talking points. The fact that Candice Owens started as a liberal influencer who sued of racial discrimination doesn't even matter to them. Just go out and repeat the talking points and you're good
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u/Angstrom_Wither 17h ago
The other half of PragerU is a fundie who used to write for "Touched by an Angel." He also, crazily enough, co-wrote the sequel to Pocahontas where they go back to England and teach her how to be "civilized." Go figure.
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u/zubuneri 17h ago
“Touched By An Angel” sounds so on-brand for MAGA pedophiles
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u/Angstrom_Wither 17h ago
It ran for 211 episodes across 9 seasons. The premise is essentially "What if Quantum Leap but Jesus?"
I promise, it's worse than you imagine.
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u/TheVintageJane 17h ago
Because that’s his target market and hypothetically Columbus was a devout Catholic.
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u/sadataybeokay 17h ago
It's prager u propaganda. Definitely pushes theocratic view of US history despite the enlightenment being a backlash against the intolerance exhibited during the European reformation where millions slaughtered each other over their interpretations of the Bible that was widely circulated with the invention of the printing press.
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u/ResurgentClusterfuck Texas 16h ago
Fuck PragerU, fuck Christopher Columbus, and especially fuck Oklahoma schools that want to teach this racist shit to children
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u/TheWeirdTalesPodcast 17h ago
Forrest Valkai, who you should all be following and watching if you aren’t, has a series on his YouTube channel called Reacteria.
He did a whole episode about Prager U, and these videos played a fairly significant role in them.
https://youtu.be/DlDAUsO6AVk?si=2XI6y_Nz0Fir4AWt
They’re horrific, and racist as hell, and it’s terrifying that some parents feed this to their kids unquestioningly.
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u/Weekly_Rock_5440 17h ago
There is TONs of actual slavery going on today, all around the world. There are a billion people this very second, who work as hard or harder than slaves at that time, while living in the same or worse conditions. Grinding, endless toil for 8-20 square feet of unsecured personal space.
The only thing that’s changed is the efficiency of overseas shipping. Capitalists no longer have to buy and transport people to produce and sell good locally . . . they can just outsource labor and transport goods globally.
It’s still fucked. Fuck this video.
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u/GargamelTakesAll 15h ago
Not even the only time PragerU has made videos defending slavery
Animated Frederick Douglass calls slavery a ‘compromise’ in PragerU video
"Slavery was a compromise. The Black Lives Matter movement led to more crime. Masculinity helped win World War II.
Those are some of the lessons included in PragerU Kids videos..."
Same show, actually, this Leo and Layla:
"...one called “Leo & Layla Meet Frederick Douglass,” in which a pair of children go back in time and meet an animated depiction of Frederick Douglass. In the video, Douglass, an abolitionist who devoted his life to anti-slavery efforts, describes slavery as a compromise between the Founding Fathers and the Southern colonies for the benefit of the U.S."
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u/Angstrom_Wither 15h ago
I actually watched this one, and I know this is not the biggest issue here, but I'm 99% sure it's a white guy doing a bad impression of a black guy that's voicing him. Voicing Frederick Douglass.
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u/Forcistus 16h ago
I actually thought that video was fake when I saw it
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u/Angstrom_Wither 16h ago
Since I stumbled across this article, I've been scanning and skimming some of their other stuff. They all feel like they should be satirical, but they aren't. A sizeable chunk of this country is just actually this stupid.
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u/Forcistus 16h ago
They have a very strange chip on their shoulder. Obviously, I have not been in school for a long time, but even when we learned about things like Columbus or slavery, they were not literally saying how evil they were. They were simply explaining what happened. There wasn't a moral judgment, it was just history.
The holiday or observance should not be named after him, though. That makes it a celebration of the man, who was morally reprehensible. If we want to observe the colonization of the Americas, which is inextricably connected to the USA, it seems fair to discuss the impact and the negative actions of the people we consider to have been the pioneers.
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u/Last-Internal-8196 15h ago
The video is wild. Like, they take such a deliberately obtuse stance on the "progressive" view of history that it comes across like a comedy sketch. One of the things they keep harping on in the segment is that the kids were taught that Columbus "spoiled paradise" and that the native tribes were all just one big peaceful and happy society before Europeans showed up.
But...like... where the fuck is that taught? It's like he's describing the plot of the movie Avatar. Only he's not, because I think the cat people in Avatar also had various factions who disagreed with each other? Maybe they are describing Disney's Pocahontas? But the Indians in that movie also had disagreements. I think Pocahontas herself disliked her living situation. I don't know, man, I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt by thinking surely there must be some kind of pop culture boogeyman that they're mistaking for public school curriculum, but I'm starting to think they might just be disingenuous and cartoonishly evil assholes.
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u/Educational_Impact93 17h ago
Even some of Columbus's contemporaries were appalled by his cruelty. This isn't just a "things were different back then" sort of deal.
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u/Funny-Mission-2937 17h ago
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?psid=3040&smtID=2
Slaves suffered extremely high mortality. Half of all slave infants died during their first year of life, twice the rate of white babies. And while the death rate declined for those who survived their first year, it remained twice the white rate through age 14. As a result of this high infant and childhood death rate, the average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for antebellum whites. Compared to whites, relatively few slaves lived into old age.
A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment. Slaveowners showed surprisingly little concern for slave mothers' health or diet during pregnancy, providing pregnant women with no extra rations and employing them in intensive field work even in the last week before they gave birth. Not surprisingly, slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth, or what we would today consider to be severely underweight.
Infants and children were badly malnourished. Most infants were weaned early, within three or four months of birth, and then fed gruel or porridge made of cornmeal. Around the age of three, they began to eat vegetables, soups, potatoes, molasses, grits, hominy, and cornbread. This diet lacked protein, thiamine, niacin, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D, and as a result, slave children often suffered from night blindness, abdominal swellings, swollen muscles, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions.
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u/Jimorstan-Genn420han 14h ago
Exactly. It was not so much an either/or situation as much as it was a matter of getting both enslavement and a gruesome death. This generosity needs to be recounted in a future chapter of white-comforting history. Also, PragerU is exactly why we're not allowed to have white history month. 😭
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u/lancea_longini 17h ago
The girls that were raped by you know who were better off because they werent killed? I see.....
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u/kiwigate 10h ago
"It could have been worse" is a thought terminating cliche. It expresses nothing, changes the topic; cope is ersatz justice.
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u/i_code_for_boobs 17h ago
“I think what they’re alluding to is, if you’re still alive, you have the opportunity for change and for freedom and for reformation to come.”
That is his defense? The only alternative to slavery was... death? Those people got kidnapped and sold, bought and abused... but no one is thinking that maybe not kidnapping them to start with was also an alternative?
Republicans are not serious people.
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u/OkSecretary1231 Illinois 17h ago
Right, like...there was always the option of leaving them alone and going home?
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u/Ohnoherewego13 North Carolina 16h ago
Yeah, but who else would we use to build our roads, maintain our farms and raise our children!? - Slaveowners.
That's their logic and it's so extremely flawed that I don't even know where to start.
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u/SayVandalay 17h ago
Something about “give me liberty or give me death”
I’m guessing like Trump this rep also has a low IQ and doesn’t know how to read.
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u/BigDaddyBain 17h ago edited 14h ago
The video is called Christopher Columbus: Explorer of the New World. The description says it’s meant to explain why we honor Columbus and says it’s meant to teach elementary students not to judge events of the past by the standards of today.
Well if we’re going by that standard, Columbus was still seen as a massive POS in his day.
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u/Savage_Amusement 17h ago
He also said he believed the remarks about slavery in the video were being misconstrued. “I think what they’re alluding to is, if you’re still alive, you have the opportunity for change and for freedom and for reformation to come.”
Amazing stuff. “Well yeah, being enslaved is bad, but hey, wait it out, maybe someday you won’t be?”
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u/OkSecretary1231 Illinois 17h ago
I've been formulating this theory over the last year or so that the way schools often teach about slavery - i.e. not even addressing it until it's time to talk about the Civil War - has made a lot of people subconsciously believe that everyone who was ever enslaved got freed. Oh, maybe a handful of unfortunates died first. But for the most part, everyone saw the promised land.
They seem to seriously have no idea that generations and generations lived and died in slavery.
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u/Ohnoherewego13 North Carolina 16h ago
I'm from the south. Not even the deep south really and we glossed over the Civil War when I was a kid. Spent plenty of time talking about the build up to the war, but the reasoning was basically "because the North invaded!" Not too much mention of slavery to be honest. It's no wonder that younger generations around my area still don't understand that we were enslaving people and working them to death. Not everyone was freed or even lived long enough to get to that point in time.
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u/OkSecretary1231 Illinois 16h ago
This exactly. I'm from the North, and even though the bent of the curriculum was anti-slavery, IMO it still elided the worst bits of it until and unless you took an upper level high school or college class. At the elementary level it was very much in the "constant march toward progress" mold where bad stuff wasn't really brought up until there was a triumphant story to tell about fixing it.
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u/Ohnoherewego13 North Carolina 16h ago
I don't even know if we had the option of higher level classes on slavery in my area. Hell, my college was still sporting the name of a known racist on several buildings (Charles Aycock) until about 2016 or so. The irony to all of this? The Woolsworth Sit-ins were held right down the road from my college. I hope that things have changed in terms of teaching slavery correctly, but I'm guessing the Orange Idiot will do anything to turn the clock backwards.
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u/HobnoblinGoblin 16h ago
They 👏🏼 want 👏🏼 to 👏🏼 bring 👏🏼 it 👏🏼 back
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u/ShamelessCatDude 15h ago
I’m honestly surprised that video was so heavy on the idea that “you can’t use modern morality to judge the actions of the past” because that involves believing that “modern morality” says that slavery is wrong and that we know better now. So they can acknowledge that we all know it’s wrong and yet they still are trying to justify it.
That’s not very “moral relativist” of them, that’s just believing it was never wrong to begin with and trying to convince people that
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u/evasive_dendrite 16h ago
Columbus was a tyrant. Spain had him arrested and deposed him after a pathetic confession filled with crocodile tears. He was inhumane even for a slaver in his time. Choosing him as the target of the video is extremely out of touch with reality.
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u/VegetableYesterday63 17h ago
Wow! Oklahoma is giving Florida and Texas some competition for having the most racist and backwards governments
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u/whichwitch9 16h ago
If your defense is "we enslaved them so we wouldn't murder them" you are not good people
In fact, the majority of people don't feel personal guilt over slavery because they do not identify with or agree with enslavers, as a reminder. We can acknowledge we benefited from a system while not agreeing with it and understanding that it was such an awful system, chunks of the population are still suffering ramifications from it. But a sane person also knows they are not their ancestors and can make different choices.
Acknowledging it doesn't mean feeling personal guilt, for all the racist fucks out there who can't get the difference. It means we should make choices that allow everyone to stand on even ground and be aware of where inequities exist and how to minimize them. That certainly doesn't involve minimizing owning people like livestock and tge literal horrors that came with that system
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u/Goatesq 15h ago
Ironically their resistance to a radical acceptance of historic reality and the shadow it casts upon today, is exactly how republicans have continually gotten elected even though all they do is further immiserate the entire working class, loot the coffers, shutter institutions, pare back individual and labor rights, and sell out their constituencies for pennies on the dollar. With little if any exaggeration, white fragility and aggrieved entitlement have been responsible for basically every loss in status we've actually suffered over the past century. It's so infuriating it actually makes me ill if I think about it too long.
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u/hairymoot 17h ago
Slaves are beaten, raped, worked for free, forced to have their rapist's baby, abused, and wasn't free to live their own life, or have their own goals...
Or death?
Republicans are just wrong about everything and are wicked hateful.
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u/gunmaster102 16h ago
I just can't get over Christopher Columbus, the Italian, saying "ay caramba."
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u/Brief-Whole692 15h ago
We literally had a war about this, wtf is wrong with these guys
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u/aBrickNotInTheWall 16h ago
If only Americans had a famous historical figure who had the perfect quote for a situation like this. Someone who in the past said something about death being preferable to enslavement. But in a catchy way, maybe something like "Give me liberty or give me death"
Too bad nothing like that exists. It'd be the perfect way to counter this talking point from Republicans, who idolize America's past...
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u/RamonaQ-JunieB 16h ago
They are idiots. All of them.
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u/Mighty_Poonan 16h ago
worse. just stupid i can forgive but stupid and malicious is a recipe for atrocity.
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u/Eusocial_sloth3 16h ago
If they’re normalizing that slavery was ok, they want to bring back slavery.
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u/Look_Im_Not_Sure North Carolina 15h ago
The written word of the accounting of slavery couldn't possibly fully explain the horrors that people of color withstood on a daily basis. Any person - apparently of any color or heritage - that says otherwise should immediately be discounted and ignored. To say that white people havent dominated other races to the point that those people would rather pray for and successfully accomplish a simple death over endless torture, is a continuance of that torture. Rape, murder, dismemberment, psychological and emotional abuse, theft of identity and family doesnt even cover it. Including money feels almost insulting to mention, but obviously nothing could be held dearly, ever.
We can see the effects of racism and slavery on the faces of people today. The ability to criticize and minimize the cruelty of slavery and racism, freely and without any real repercussion should be an overt realization that you're in a position of power.
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u/chargernj 14h ago
So Columbus was going to murder or enslave and they want to pretend that there were no other alternatives.
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u/needlestack 16h ago
Even if it was better than being killed -- something slaves who risked or took their own lives clearly did not agree with -- but even if it was better, what does that even mean? Why should those people have been forced to choose between slavery and death? This does nothing to absolve slaveholders. Based on this I can enslave these slavery apologists at the end of a gun and they should shrug and say "better than death!"
What the ever-loving stupid has taken over our country?
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u/telephile 16h ago
“No, I said “give me liberty or give me death.” Obviously you should be happy with slavery.”
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u/LordTuranian 15h ago edited 15h ago
I'm sure Republicans don't want people to know that slaves throughout history thought slavery was worse than death and therefore has no desire to have children. And so as a response, slave masters just had their female slaves raped on a regular basis to get future slaves. And a lot of them committed suicide too.
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u/joefred111 Pennsylvania 15h ago
Columbus would definitely know all about that, because his version of slavery made Taino women drown their babies so they wouldn't have to live in the hell he created.
Whitewashing slavery and defending Columbus, PragerU is really stretching with this one.
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u/heartwarriordad 15h ago
"If slavery wasn't that bad, it didn't have any impact on Black and Native inequality and therefore that inequality is really their own fault; therefore, we as a country don't have to fix it."
That's the conservative gambit when they do this kind of thing.
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u/PhysicalGraffiti75 14h ago
Ahh yes the classic phrase that kicked off the revolution “Give me liberty or give me slavery!” - Patrick Henry. Wait that doesn’t sound right…
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u/Arch-Fey66 12h ago
You know what's better than both? Not getting kidnapped and taken an ocean away from your family.
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u/dasreboot 10h ago
Wasn't he removed as governor by Isabella because of his treatment of the natives?
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u/lacronicus I voted 16h ago
strictly speaking, yes, you could argue that slavery is a moral advancement over outright genocide.
But this is america. We are children of the enlightenment. Human rights, rule of law, all that good stuff.
Our basic guiding principle is to be disgusted by what came before, and to try to be better.
Columbus was not an american, not in that sense of the word. We don't owe him reverence, we owe him contempt, or, at best, pity, that he was born too early to know anything better.
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u/Taako_Cross 16h ago
Doesn’t that conflict with Joni Ernsts “well we’re all going to die eventually” logic?
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u/MaraScout 16h ago
Wish I was at all surprised. After all, Exodus 21 is the part where God is chill with slavery, and this kind of politician doesn't have a single opinion that can't be found in his favorite bedtime story
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u/nodogma2112 16h ago
But not quite as good as being left the hell alone to live their lives in peace.
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u/LuvKrahft America 15h ago
Yup, like PRE-WOKE American history class used to teach “Give me liberty enslavement, dont give me death!”
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u/nattakunt 15h ago
What would happen if these legislators were put into slavery? Would they still prefer slavery over death even if they saw their loved ones being sold off or killed by strangers because they were considered property? Would they still want to live even if their lives would be filled with trauma and forced labor at the behest of someone else? It's crazy to see how far we have regressed as a society.
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u/theroguesstash 14h ago
The J6 traitors should've kept that in mind about their "persecution" in prison. They could have been sentenced to death.
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u/anonskeptic5 13h ago
Even if. Would you also say being raped is better than being killed? As if you could defend rapists.
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u/FredFredrickson 13h ago
If Dennis Prager believes that slavery is better than death, he's welcome to become a slave for a year and see how that goes.
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u/Sir_Earl_Jeffries 12h ago
What the US won’t do is tell you of the generations of ethnic cleansing, the human experiments to breed “super slaves”, or equate the journey to freedom with choosing death.
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u/RIPCurrants 12h ago
State Superintendent Ryan Walters says PragerU helped…
Oh that guy, the guy who was looking at porn during a school board meeting as the superintendent
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u/6Arrows7416 9h ago
One of the founding war cries of this country is “Give me liberty or give me death.” Death is always preferable to slavery.
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u/EM05L1C3 America 8h ago
“Better than being killed”
Let’s just totally gloss over lynching and mandengo fighting and sadistic slave owners.
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u/ProperBlue 6h ago
Oh the rep from the state ranked 50th out of 50 in education has an opinion on history? Ya dont say
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u/SKDI_0224 Oklahoma 15h ago
Please read the 1619 project. Please look at how slaves were brought across the Atlantic. Chained together lying in a space smaller than a coffin, the living chained to the dead. The screams. The smell of sweat, vomit, waste and death. Those who survived had their minds broken. Forever.
Women kept their entire lives as breeding stock. Kept to be bred, to black bulls or white masters. Forced to carry and birth only to have it done again. Their whole lives spent that way. Birth to death. Never knowing even the concept of freedom or safety.
Fuck PragerU.
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u/Cael26 16h ago
If the shoe was on the other foot then it would be a completely different answer.
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u/phosdick 16h ago
So this guy's defective brain has told him that he'd be OK with being sold into forced labor, handing over his kids to his masters for the same forced labor, being forced at will to submit to rape and child bearing, whipping and flogging for fun, and all those other benefits that human trafficking and slavery bring to the lucky victim.
I hope he reaps all those benefits when he's condemned to the fires of hell.
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u/withanamelikejesk 15h ago
Meanwhile white people at the time were talking about give me liberty or give me death.
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u/nwmisseb 15h ago
People jumped off of ships to drown instead of being chattel slaves.
Just say y’all lazy and want someone to wipe your behind for you.
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u/LordTuranian 15h ago edited 15h ago
Being tortured every day by cruel masters is better than death? That's like saying suffering in hell is better than death. Sure, some slaves were lucky enough to get a master who was not that cruel but nobody wants to play that fucked up lottery game of there being only a 85% of you going to hell on Earth.
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u/Bishopjones2112 15h ago
Right so this whole article basically says that the republican government of Oklahoma is completely racist and wants to ignore reality. Perhaps we should make the republicans there into slaves and see how nice it is. I’m kidding I know the rest of humanity that understands how crazy the idea of owning another human being is. Someone needs to get them out of office before another generation of children is turned into racist homophobic pawns of billionaires.
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u/JyuVioleGrace95 15h ago
Remember as the revolutionaries once said, “Give me Liberty or give me Death.”
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u/eightdx Massachusetts 15h ago
"There was an important lesson in the conduct of that noble Krooman in New York, the other day, who, supposing that the American Christians were about to enslave him, betook himself to the mast head, and with knife in hand, said he would cut his throat before he would be made a slave. Joseph Cinque on the the deck of the Amistad, did that which should make his name dear to us. He bore nature's burning protest against slavery. Madison Washington who struck down his oppressor on the deck of the Creole, is more worthy to be remembered than the colored man who shot Pitcaren at Bunker Hill."
--Frederick Douglass
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u/mustard_train 15h ago
I wonder why so many slaves knowingly risked their lives—and died—trying to escape it then?
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u/Beevershot 15h ago
"I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees." Every person fighting for their freedom. Enslavement isn't freedom of choice, it's the illusion of hope that one day, you might obtain freedom.
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u/Sunnyjim333 15h ago
From 1936 -1938 the WPA (Works Project Administration) collected first person recollections from former Slaves.
https://archive.org/stream/slavenarrativesa13847gut/13847.txt
These stories should be read by every American.
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