this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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I think they mean learning about history slaps. History is both interesting and extremely important even when it's depressing.
Encouraging learning about history is something we should continue to do, even if it means using collloquialisms.
I guess it makes slightly more sense if they meant to say learning about history.
But still, I'm not sure making claims like this is going to reverse the eternal reality of young people not giving a shit about history and only starting to recognize its importance after they have made the same mistakes.
It's like "Math is fun kids!", "history slaps!". While young people just roll their eyes. Just because the slang is slightly updated doesn't actually make the message any more compelling.
I'm not sure why I'm being so negative here, I guess I just feel like the tweet is kinda dumb and virtue signalling and that's setting the tone for my interaction with it.
I'm not sure you speak for all young people or why you're bringing up virtue signalling.
I never claimed to speak for all young people? I have loved learning about history since I was a kid. But most people don't know much about history and don't have any interest in learning. They find it boring. That's just what I've noticed from being alive on this planet.
I bring up virtue signaling because it seems like the entire point of the tweet is for the person to signal that they are a moral and good person. I don't even understand the concept of being "offended by black history". Like what does that even mean and who does it apply to?
She's possibly talking about being offended by Black history month, which I guess is a thing? But in that case I would still disagree because you could be offended by it for the exact opposite reason, like how people are talking about Morgan Freeman not being a fan of it.
I disagree with that entirely. It seems more angry to me and has nothing to do with how moral she is IMO.
She's black and probably is angry that people are offended if you mention the Tulsa race massacre because it's uncomfortable.
Or that most of the original men who started the US held slaves.
Thirty-four of the 47 men depicted in the famous "Declaration of Independence" painting were slaveholders.
You probably don't think that way, so you don't see it. I'm not going to pretend I know what her intent is either, I'm just guessing as well.
Not only do I not think that way, but I also can't imagine someone getting offended about people mentioning the Tulsa Race Massacre or the fact that the founding fathers held slaves.
Actual racists aren't going to be offended by those historical facts, they just might argue that they were justifiable in some way. Which is obviously super fucked up, but it's not like racist people are going to deny the fact that slavery happened or that black people got massacred by white people in history. They literally get off on that shit.
Which is why the tweet seems so strange to me. Black people getting enslaved and massacred and persecuted? That slaps? I fucking hope not.
I'm obviously overthinking but it just triggered my nonsense detector.
That has nothing to do with what we're talking about and not what I or you are saying.
I'm assuming you're not black, right? I think we should ask someone who is before we accuse them of virtue signalling.
The OP states
I just don't understand what that statement is supposed to mean, it doesn't make any sense to me.
I do agree that it would be helpful to have additional black perspectives to weigh in on this discussion. Unfortunately Lemmy doesn't seem to have a lot of racial diversity yet. Hopefully we will get there eventually.
A lot of "black history" that is taught is just slavery and some of civil rights, the rest of it (like black wall street, the legislations of early black representatives, the inventions and cultural development from a mixed background to more of a regional blend) isn't commonly taught in school and a lot of it is pretty cool.
We have voip, super soakers, and a ridiculous number or uses for peanuts thanks to black history just to scratch the surface.
That slaps right? Getting to know all the good and the bad instead of just the bad and a smattering of civil rights?
That does slap. But it's also just putting a focus on the feel-good parts instead of the whole reality. And that's not really history imho. It's just isolated stories without the context that real history demands.
You could also say that white history slaps from that perspective, but that'd be quite insensitive and naive. I'm not trying to make a false equivalency, but I'm just pointing out that if you ignore the painful parts of history, you can't really learn from it. And that's the whole point of studying history as an academic pursuit.
Where did I ignore the painful parts?
I just said you instead of using the third person one, because it sounds less pretentious. It was a hypothetical, I wasn't referring to you personally.
You could have also used the non pretentious third person "People"
The problem being that it's not cherry picking. That's what current black history taught in schools is. Cherry picked of slavery and Civil rights without any of the actual improvements made by black people. Not having the other half of context is what makes it easy for a lot of racists to dismiss black people as uneducated or unwilling to work, because even the racist probably doesn't know all the history.
I'm saying non cherry picked history slaps more than biased history. You're saying I'm focusing only on the good stuff but much like the purpose behind black history month it's because we do not get any of that in history class.
Gotta take the good with the bad instead of just the bad. (Which is what I said but you flipped it to cherry picking because.... I'm not sure since I clearly included slavery in that comment as the bit we learned about and then gave context of the cool stuff we didn't learn)
I hear you. But each school and indeed each individual history teacher gives a slightly different rendition of history. I learned about many positive black achievements growing up, because my teachers were consciously trying to provide a well rounded perspective. You realize there are a lot of black history teachers too right? I'm sorry about your experience, but let's not generalize as if it represents every single history class ever taught.
Again, how was I cherry picking? The class taught? We now have offering for african-american studies but that's not incorporated into the main history class which then leaves it to a teacher by teacher basis rather than a standard like European/American history.
I would still argue the majority get the standard based curriculum (which does not include African American history).
I could also argue that you're cherry picking with your personal experience, especially since I have experience teaching in multiple districts in one of the main textbook states.
Okay, fair enough. Ultimately we live in a world that is still dominated by Europe and America. In order for children to have the best chance of succeeding in this world, it's necessary for them to have a basic grasp of how things ended up this way. And most of the main characters in that story were of European extraction. That's the rub of it. It's not pretty, but it is what it is.
Education is not a purely intellectual pursuit, it's actually primarily an economic one, now more than ever. I didn't create this situation, so please don't go after me for explaining it.
While this is true, African American history is American history but has parts that are heavily overlooked or ignored by standard curriculum. So we're not even getting full American history, especially bits that provide valuable context on a demographic that is overlooked and was actively involved in almost all of the mainstream American history. How is it advantageous not to be taught all of your counties history unless it is to allow for overlooking or continuing on prejudiced ideals?
Many racists definitely do get offended by those facts. It's because they're coming at it from an emotional place, and the historical facts make them feel bad. Instead of dealing with that, they lash out. Not all racists are intentional about their racism.
I link this a lot, but it's worth a read https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
That wasn't the intent of the tweet and that is a bizarre misreading of it.
That's a cute comic, thanks for that. I see what you mean, and I could see that happening with the Tulsa Race Massacre because a lot of people actually never learned about it. But not so much with the founding fathers holding slaves, because everyone already knows that.
Unfortunately, I still disagree with your assertions here on a number of levels. It seems to me that you're tilting at windmills in service of a tweet that inherently makes no sense.
I understand that wasn't the intent, which is why it seemed to me that the authors understanding of black history was coming from an extremely shallow perspective. I didn't misread anything, I simply have a more advanced conception of what history is.
If history is defined by excluding all of the bad things that happened, then it's not actually history, it's just fairy tales and bedtime stories to help kids sleep at night.
I'm glad you liked the comic.
I read the tweet as saying "Actually learning about history, the good and the bad, is better than avoiding it to whitewash (pun intended) slavers and spare their feelings"
How did you read it?
This also reminds me of a separate post I saw about how social media, and tweets especially, is a really bad format for communicating. The length constraints and incentivizing being clever don't make for fertile ground for ideas. Most people aren't going to read an essay, sadly.
It just didn't make sense to me. I don't think talking about historical slavery necessarily makes racists feel bad and/or non-racists feel good. It's just a horrible reality all around, it's not really an empowering or liberating discussion on any level.
I totally agree with the difficulty communicating, I have been thinking that a lot of my issue with this is likely due to the limitations of the microblogging format, which I have always found to be very silly. I usually can't express how I really feel with 1000 words, let alone 140 characters. So misinterpretation is inevitable. And honestly that's probably part of the stickiness of the format, because misinterpretations drive engagement on corporate social media.
I honestly didn't like history until my mid or late twenties, except for 9th year. I think it was mainly because every other teacher some about it in monotones, if at all and basically just assigned in-class silent reading and a boatload of homework that didn't even cover important things. 9th year instructor some with inflection, asked questions that prompted deep thought and critical thinking.
That's fair, history teachers can certainly get lazy. If you present the information in an engaging way it's definitely not boring.