• be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Yes, I think people don’t like it because they think any time you use a word with a positive connotation (“benefit”), you must be speaking positively.

    Although I agree with your overall point, in this case I think people don’t like it because that’s how it’s most recently been used in this context.

    DeSantis, however, is continuing to defend Florida’s new curriculum, which covers a broad range of topics and includes the assertion for middle school instruction that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

    • Bye@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What the fuck is that, holy hell. Wow I can’t believe that.

      Also no wonder his support for the GOP primary is so low, he forgot to use the n-word.

    • Narrrz@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      their personal benefit… personal?? it’s not like slaves could quit, and find another job. if they developed skills, it helped them perform their forced labour, and so the benefit is all to their owner and master.

      • ripcord@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I assume he meant that benefitted them after emancipation. Or something.

        Go to the Atlanta History Museum sometime, their civil war exhibit has a whole section of “were the slaves really better after being freed” shit that’s pretty disgusting.

        • JFowler369@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          “Yeah we freed them, but we were allowed to restructure our laws to keep them subjugated and continued to treat them as subhuman. So was it really worth it?”.

          Reconstruction should have, at a minimum, barred any supporter of the Confederacy from holding office again, or, even better, had the leaders hanged as traitors. Instead we let them continue just with “banned” slavery (except for as punishment for a crime).

          We then allowed slave owners to write the laws to integrate formerly enslaved people into their society, and, surprise surprise, they structured the laws to benefit themselves and keep the formerly enslaved as second class. So instead of “was ending slavery worth it?”. It should be asking “was keeping slavers alive worth it?” as we are still dealing with the consequences of that today.

        • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I mean, tbf, they have a point.

          During slavery they were fed, protected, and housed by their masters.

          After slavery, they were simply brutalized, raped, murdered, butchered without any protection whatsoever.

          So yes, slavery had benefits, and protected them from the rest of the evil southern monstrous scum.

          • qfjp@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            After slavery, they were simply brutalized, raped, murdered, butchered without any protection whatsoever.

            What exactly do you think masters did to “disobedient” slaves?

            • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I’m saying freeing them didn’t do that much because they were still at the mercy of the monsters.

              We needed to fix the south before we left, instead we left them to suffer among the same evil that literally inspired hitler.

    • pips@lemmy.film
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      1 year ago

      Right, it’s not so much that the words are used incorrectly so much as it is that their use is inappropriate in this context.