Forcing them to argue that washington had slaves is a step in the right direction. It is a crack in their jingoistic myth of the founding fathers. Theyre being forced to learn a bit of history thats been intentionally hidden. Next question; If most the founding fathers owned slaves, whats that mean? Whats that say about america? So slavery was an institution and treated as the norm?

Its messy but this is progress

One helped found this country.

Canadians don't have a cult of personality around our first Prime Minister the way Americans do around George Washington.

Canada was apparently founded on uniting white Europeans to eradicate the "savage" indigenous populations here.

So... founding the country can be overlooked to an extent if the person was otherwise an asshole.

I remember spending almost an hour reading some of the declarations of the states, and I remember Texas writing that they were given the right to own slaves by God, and that they will fight to defend that that right against anything 🙄. They couldn't have been more clear.

We really need to teach better in history class. THAT is where we need to stop removing things, not statues and dedications to traitors of the country

Did you miss the insane freakouts by conservatives related to critical race theory?? They refuse to allow history to be taught, it's not that we need to "do better" like we've made some mistakes, these are malicious purposeful actions.

They prefer to teach this kind of history:

The Florida Board of Education approved new social studies standards July 19 following a law passed by the legislature in 2022, known as "Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act" or the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act."

The law bans workplaces and schools from teaching that anyone must feel guilt based on their race as a result of actions by others in the past. Earlier this year, Florida rejected a new high school Advanced Placement course on Black studies.

The 216-page standards document covers a broad sweep of Black history, along with topics such as the Holocaust, world history and geography. It includes different standards for elementary, middle and high school students.

The part of Florida’s new standards that Harris was citing is for grades six through eight. It says:

"Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation)."

The controversial part is in this "benchmark clarification" about slave labor: "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jul/24/kamala-harris/do-Florida-school-standards-say-enslaved-people/

THAT is where we need to stop removing things, not statues and dedications to traitors of the country

I wholeheartedly DISAGREE. We do NOT NEED monuments to literal fucking traitors. Should we put up a goddamn statue of Benedict Arnold too?? Jesus Christ. Do black people really need to see the face of the oppressors of their ancestors every day?

Not the same.

More so than we like to admit. Washington was a loyalist until the Dunmore Proclamation threatened his human chattel.

Lee broke for the Confederacy with the election of Lincoln.

Both these men were fundamentally driven by their economic conditions. The difference between Washington and Lee is that Washington won.

He doesn’t understand WHY the Confederacy started the war, does he?

The regional industrial power threatened the South's economic position as a confederacy of slave holders. That's what got Washington, Jefferson, and a host of other Southern planters on board, too.

Pretty fucking short lived culture if slap bracelets were around longer than it

feel unwelcome.

This is the basis of systematic oppression in US.

• Freedom of speech to treat minority like shit who will likely be lynched if they speak up in the past. Now when minorities do speak up, and can't be silenced with "traditional means", it's woke.
• Guns to deter minorities who can't afford to. Now minorities can own guns, use police as cartels to kill them with impunity and be promoted.
• Taxes for poor people, and cuts for the rich.
• Two justice systems based on class
• Separation of religion and government, but only for non-christian beliefs
• Portrays itself as science leader, does not really give a fuck about climate change.
• Portrays itself as defenders of democracy, has a well documented history of destroying democracies around the world.
• Supports genocide when it's favorable to them.

They know how to oppress by seeming altruistic with false sense of progress, that only benefit itself, the racists and the rich.

If your excuse for keeping this shit and the statues and everything around is “culture”, then your fucking “culture” is nothing more than just being an asshole. That’s it.

As evidence: Their current Messiah. Their humor (always at someone else's expense). Their obsession with "liberal tears" and doing anything that makes "the left" upset. Their conquest against "woke" (as in: giving a shit about other peoples experience.) etc...

Absolutely

Long storied tradition of profiting off the labor of others. It's the American way.

No. We most certainly are not. Some of us are trying to be better, though.

Nope.

Yep, they are just trying to keep child marriage legal and remove restrictions for child labor. Totally fine.

I thought they were going to take us to the '50s but it looks like we're going back to the 1910's

Wonder which side he cosplays for

I will say that's actually probably a fair point.

Maybe the only fair point in the entire argument. Most of the people who fought for the South were ignorant uneducated redneck hicks who were being told that the gub'ment was going to seize their means of production and leave them to suffer in poverty.

That vastly oversteps the fact that the means of production and question were other living human beings with fundamental value equal to theirs, but when you have the power of media and a society built on closed-mindedness, I can almost understand why they would choose to fight to protect their ignorance and their way of life rather than to adapt to a new world.

Doesn't make it right, and it does not validate anything else about their movement. The Confederacy failed. Slavery is bad. Memorializing Confederate slavers is bad. No city has a statue of Pol Pot hanging out in its Town center.

Maybe we should have the same amount of self-respect that the survivors of the Khmer rouge do.