I'm In Florida,So Here's Story About Ponce de Leon And Other American Myths

Painting of Agueybana greeting Juan Ponce de León from U.S. Military. Painting by Puerto Rican artist Agustin Anavitate. (Source: Wikipedia)From the New York Times:

Florida probably was first sighted by Portuguese navigators, or perhaps by the Cabots sailing from England. Either way, it started appearing on maps as early as 1500. By 1510, its distinctive peninsular shape had emerged clearly on maps in Europe. By 1513, when Ponce de Léon first arrived, so many Europeans had visited Florida that some Indians greeted him in Spanish.

Sounds about right.

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Slavery? Not That Bad, Sez CPAC Attendee

Stay in school, kids. Or ... um, don't stay in school. They're probably teaching that unit on slavery wrong if you live in certain parts of the American South and Texas. (Source: Clutch)

theGrio: Why Revenge Flicks Almost Never Go Black (Featuring "Django, Unchained")

This weekend for theGrio, The Snob tackles the cautious excitement (and pre-emptive annoyance) over Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and that most rare of revenge flicks -- the slave revenge film. Why is it so rare? I'm sure it has to do with the difference of the fantasy violence of revenge films like "Taken" versus the reality of slave revolts, like the one in Haiti that liberated the colony in a round of vicious bloodshed. Revenge is fun if you don't think it's going to be directed at you. And by "you," I mean your average white American movie-lover. Maybe Tarantino will pull it off by virtue of being Tarantino, but I doubt Spike Lee could have got this film greenlit.

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Fashion Is A "Slave" For Your Hoop Earrings and Other Race Maladies

Fashion decided to make your human chattel an accidental fashion icon.No one ever takes sensitivity training seriously. It's always a joke to people. I have a friend who works in human resources who occasionally conducts racial sensitivity training sessions in various workplaces. It's a mess. No one, I mean no one, ever truly "thinks" they have a race problem. But then they say troubling things like, "Shelly only got this job because he was an Affirmative Action hire and a woman. She's a two-fer!" Ignoring the fact that Shelly put herself through four years of law school, had three letters of recommendation and is the first black and woman they've hired since never. Preston Winthrop the third who was a legacy hire from Yale because his father is a big cheese down at the cracker factory "worked hard for everything he got in life" and whatnot and so forth, so it was OK for him to say that shit about Shelly.

A nightmare it is. After all, Winthrop is NOT racist. He totally has black friends and maybe even dated a kind of blackish lady once. Does anyone ever think of HIS feelings? And conversations like this exist whether you're working on an assembly line in the South or in a posh office in lower Manhattan. 

Sensitivity training. It's important.

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Conservative Group Walks Back From That Whole "Black Marriage Better During Slavery" Comment

Presidential wannabe Michele Bachmann performed a reading comprehension fail last week when it was reported she signed a conservative "defense of marriage" pledge that included some wonky language about slavery. The pledge argued that more black children were raised by mothers and fathers during slavery than during the Obama Administration. Now the group that created the pledge are trying to walk back these more problematic, revisionist history-style statements.

More after the jump.

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The Southern Experience: I Didn't Know Slave Reinactors Did Political Hodowns? (WTF)

Um ... is this Colonial Williamsburg or something? No? It's a party thrown by the National Federation of Republican Women in South Carolina, you say? It featured people dressed up like both Confederates AND slaves? Well, spank me on the ass and call me Scarlett O'Hara, what in the great land o' cotton is this!

More after the jump.

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Should France Payback Haiti's "Independence Debt?"

Battle scene of the Haitian RevolutionWhen Haiti was a French colony it was France's most wealthy and productive colony. So wealthy that when the former slaves staged a successful revolt and defeated Napoleon's army in 1804, the former French landowners demanded that the government of France "compensate" them for their losses. In other words, they wanted the slaves who'd self-emancipated to pay for their own freedom. A tax on their own right of self-determination. This, despite the fact when the debt was demanded in 1825 slavery was already illegal in France.

More after the jump.

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Discuss: Skip Gates on Slavery Blame Games

My Twitter timeline went up in flames this morning over a recently column by Henry Louis Gates published in The New York Times. While he deals with the familiar (that African leaders sold other Africans into slavery), he takes it to an unfamiliar place -- the very American reparations debate. Gates seems to think various Gold coast African nations are getting off easy in the debate over who should pay retribution to African Americans.

More after the jump.

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Confederate History Month: Um, OK

Last week I got a long crazy letter from a reader reacting to a post I wrote a year ago telling me that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Oh, OK. That whole slave state/free state thing was just an accident? A misunderstanding? The fact that pro-slavery factions and abolitionists flocked to territories that could potentially become states to tilt them in one favor or the other causing terror and bloodshed was just incidental. The Missouri Compromise had nothing to do with all those people KILLING EACH OTHER over whether or not former territories would be "slave" or "free" states. Politicians didn't beat each other up on the floor of Congress over slave or free states. It was "state's rights!" And it just HAPPENED that the right the government was threatening to infringe upon in the South was the ownership and sale of black people. OK. Sure. Great. You want to take history and put it in rewrites, let's rewrite it. Still doesn't explain all those slaves and all those people who were "afraid" of what would happen if they were freed. But yeah. STATE'S RIGHTS! (To own slaves)

More after the jump.

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