Senator and presidential candidate Tim Scott has taken a stand against the new Florida standards for teaching African American history. The standards include sections that emphasize the skills enslaved people supposedly gained for their own benefit, and that claim Black people were responsible for violence in riots perpetrated by whites.
Scott's statement criticizing the standards, as welcome as it was, included a classic sexist assumption. He's quoted as saying:
As a country founded upon freedom, the greatest deprivation of freedom was slavery. There is no silver lining...in slavery... What slavery was really about [was] separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives.
I assume Scott was speaking off the cuff, and things perhaps didn't come out as it would if he had written and thought it through fully. But what that sentence reveals about his assumptions is important, nonetheless.
Humans were mutilated and their wives were raped. The women are not human: The men are the only humans. The women are only wives, essentially property of the men (and girls don't exist at all, I guess).
Irony is probably the word for this.
No comments:
Post a Comment