"In fifth grade, my classmates and I were taught that slavery was not that bad. Why? Because our enslaved ancestors were provided with free food, water, and shelter, my teacher said. That was Georgia in the mid-2000s, but fast forward to 2023, and middle school students in Florida will now be taught that free skill development was another upside of slavery.
To make sure we are all on the same page here, let us recall that slavery involved over 12 million Africans being dragged from their homes and thrown onto ships headed to the Americas. The bodies of the nearly 2 million of those men, women, and children who died during the treacherous Middle Passage journey were thrown overboard to feed hungry sharks. Those who reached American shores were rewarded with a lifetime of hard labor, abuse, degradation, and violation."
In her Nobel Prize-winning novel, Beloved—which is now banned in libraries and schools across Florida—Toni Morrison describes slavery as a jungle that spread so horribly that even white folks were “so scared…of the jungle they had made.” This jungle has since evolved into a system of oppression so pervasive that years later, we can spot signs of it in every corner of society: mass incarceration, economic inequality, racial disparities in education, and more.
