[UPDATE - Put in front, because of the Florida-DeSantis slavery BS situation being really important. Seattle Times carrying a WaPo item:
Note to Florida and DeSantis: Enslaved Africans were already skilled - July 24, 2023
The item is clear and short, so readers are urged to check it. What is clear in the argument: Capitalist slavers like all capitalists wanted to maximize profit attained, each cargo, and skilled captives fetched a better price on the auction block than field workers. As with any sea trader, max cargo value was important to the profit taking flesh traders. Slavery was capitalism at its ugliest, but it was not unregulated capitalism - it had rules and norms. For example, Virginia law stood that had Jefferson freed Sally Hemings she'd have had to leave the Commonwealth, in exile. That legal act seems intended to discourage freeing slaves but then employing them for a wage, or making any other accommodation beyond decent ongoing treatment while still owning title. Plain ugly but carefully thought-out institutionally crafted shit, no matter how DeSantis and crowd would spin it. Capitalism then/now, regulations different now, wage slavery and employment at will being concerns now among those who'd unionize Amazon and Starbucks.] Back to the Georgia Guidestones monument:
As a result the entire thing was removed and scrapped. It's teachings lost, so to speak, except for Internet preservation.
Might we have benefited from knowing if a specific pillar was targeted?
Unlikely, because were that the case MSM would have provided us that detail.
Ignorance over who funded it, who deemed it fit to attack, we know less than we know about the loss of the Trade Center (differing in that something was rebuilt on the Trade Center site, available real estate of the size in NYC being different from rural Georgia open country). One small hint from the image, a language running from right to left was not blown to rubble.
It is as mysterious as the working between the ears of the Florida curriculum setting guru group deciding it proper to teach that slavery benefited slaves (and presumably as a corollary slave descendants wrongly are ungrateful pigs - inexplicably so, and their lack of wisdom and gratitude shows personality deficits education should aim to minimize if not eradicate). What they did, an unintended consequence, was to give Kamala Harris a speech opportunity she could not pass up.
Her words were clear. She sees no basis for gratitude, having been educated elsewhere than in Florida. (Walt Disney, if alive, likely would agree with Harris.)
Others seem to show no gratitude for those job skills, cultivated as they were.
A troubling thought is that Florida might not be unique.
DeSantis is not unique. Florida likely is not either.
UPDATE: As a bet, in this spelled out curriculum - Frederich Douglas is as likely taught as Allen Ginsberg's HOWL. Not wanting consensus challenges, (that being normal as an aim of educating the young), we teach none. We are the educators of the bright, uniform future of Florida. As such, teacher, you are fired from your classroom job if you digress. Any questions?
FURTHER:
Ron DeSantis, Sally Hemings - and Plessy v. Ferguson
Taking things in reverse order. Plessy:
Planitiff Plessy sued Judge Ferguson, well after the Civil War and passage of the 14th Amendment; per Wikipedia:
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal".[4][5] Notably the court ruled the existence of laws based upon race was not inherently racial discrimination. The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South ("Jim Crow laws") after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the south would last into the 1960s.
The underlying case began in 1892 when Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in New Orleans. By boarding the whites-only car, Plessy violated Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890, which required "equal, but separate" railroad accommodations for white and non-white passengers. Plessy was charged under the Act, and at his trial his lawyers argued that judge John Howard Ferguson should dismiss the charges on the grounds that the Act was unconstitutional. Ferguson denied the request, and the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld Ferguson's ruling on appeal. Plessy then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In May 1896, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 decision against Plessy, ruling that the Louisiana law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and stating that although the Fourteenth Amendment established the legal equality of whites and blacks it did not and could not require the elimination of all "distinctions based upon color". The Court rejected Plessy's lawyers' arguments that the Louisiana law inherently implied that black people were inferior, and gave great deference to American state legislatures' inherent power to make laws regulating health, safety, and morals—the "police power" [...]
That was the "separate but equal" decision which awaited Brown v. Board of Education for reversal; 1954, (Thurgood Marshall having argued that case.)
Plessy is online in pdf form, and notes early in recitation of facts:
That petitioner was a citizen of the" United States and a
resident of the State of Louisiana, of mixed descent, in the proportion of seven eighths Caucasian and one eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege and immunity secured to the citizens of the United States of the white race by its Constitution and laws; that on June 7, 1892, he engaged and paid for a first class passage on the East Louisiana Railway from New Orleans to Covington, in the same State, and thereupon entered a passenger train, and took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were accommodated; [...]
Note that Plessy was 7/8 "Caucasian" but "colored" per Louisiana law at the time.
Per Wikipedia: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's spouse, was mixed race; by the Plessy terminology she was 3/4 "Caucasian," but she was Jefferson's slave because her mother was a slave, (Virginia law at the time being status, slave or free, was determined by the mother's status), Sally's mother having been a slave.
Jefferson and Hemings remained unmarried, their offspring being slave. That wiki item notes field and house slaves were unequally treated; the Jefferson offspring being in house, learning trades, as the wiki item notes.
View that in terms of the widely reported new Florida education curriculum, with regard to the teaching of slavery history.
The Jefferson-Hemings situation presumably was the exception not the rule. Yet it fits the contention that some nominal "slaves," such as Jefferson's mixed race offspring, (7/8 "Caucasian" as the 1896 Plaintiff in Plessy), did okay under slavery being the pre-Civil War rule then governing Virginia and a large part of the nation.
So, there is an iota of truth to the Florida business; while at the time slave auction blocks proliferated, Fugitive Slave Act defects existed, and women could be bred much as racehorses today, put to stud, to gain vigorous offspring for the woman's owner. Note that the Florida curriculum has not been reported as emphasizing that part of the story, nor the whipping post. Nor are plantation field management personnel powers to carry pistol and whip to manage field operations. Readers are urged to track down Frederich Douglas writings describing that and other aspects of slavery apart from Florida folk saying "some learned job skills." "Some" meaning some like Thomas Jefferson's offspring, white owners fathering children with slaves, being the Jefferson example.
DO YOU THINK FOR ONE MINUTE ANY FLORIDA TEACHER, UNDER THE NEW TEACHING BURDEN, CHOOSING TO TEACH ACTUAL EXCEPTION/RULE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT SLAVERY WAS, MIGHT NOT BE HARASSED OUT OF A JOB DUE TO UNFAIRNESS OF SUPERVISORY PERSONS USING AN UNFAIR MANDATE TO CULL OUT THOSE NOT "GOOD TEAM PLAYERS"?
Ron does, apparently. Per WaPo content carried by SeattleTimes:
DeSantis doubles down on claim that some Black people benefited from slavery
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday in response to reporters’ questions while standing in front of a nearly all-White crowd of supporters.
DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate who is lagging in polls against the front-runner, former President Donald Trump, and is trying to reset his campaign, quickly drew criticism from educators and even some in his party. He has built his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on attacking what he calls the radical liberal policies of President Biden and the Democratic Party, but the latest remarks could alienate Black voters just as the GOP tries to court them.
Former U.S. representative Will Hurd of Texas, who announced last month that he was joining the race for the GOP nomination, blasted the idea that enslaved people were able to use slavery as some kind of training program.
“Slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”
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.”
Aside from owner-slave mixed offspring Jefferson offspring situations, where the record is unclear as to how frequent such situations were; and considering field worker management as Frederich Douglas graphically exposed; it sure looks as if the Florida intent is to lie - and inexcusably so - about the plain awfulness of some being allowed to hold title to human beings to buy and sell and selectively breed them as if livestock. Florida is out of step, and Ron perishes with his cohorts; where clearly, as Hurd put it, slavery was never a jobs training program. It was cotton fields where hard labor under threat of death or beatings had Blacks laboring long days under a hot son to gain wealth for White owners. It was plain unmitigated sin.
And Ron equivocates over that fact.
Is there any wonder that Vivek Ramaswamy is overtaking Ron in early polling?
Vivek has a brain and is a highly skilled speaker. Ron - he's governor of Florida and will continue to be so after this no-risk try to fly attempt to put his sorry ass into the highest executive office chair the nation offers.
Goodbye, Ron.
FURTHER: Watch a movie. Understand propaganda better. Understand this Florida mischief is legislating misleading propaganda.
We, as an overall nation, are better than that.
FURTHER: Lest it be unclear. The Florida education board members authoring the new curriculum of slavery teaching were each appointed to do so, to set statewide curriculum, by Ron DeSantis. He names his people. Presumably they are grateful and do as expected, by Ron.
There is surely a degree of responsibility attaching to knowing people and choosing from among them for government jobs in Florida.
Ron's appointees. Ron's new rules.
How it is.
FURTHER: If unfamiliar with it, the Quentin Tarrintino film DJANGO UNCHAINED is about a slave learning a skill set, enabling his ability to ultimately locate and rejoin his wife, who had been separately sold. Such a thing, understandably would be complex, plus as a film there must be a story line, a plot from start to finish.