By the rules of the school, which they sign an agreement to keep, they have to wait until evening when ALL activities are done. Of course, kids don’t get the nuances of all that and just see two authority figures saying different things. I’m loving the hyper defensive parents responding to this, even the ones being so…

I think “enslaved people” is better than “slaves” because they were people. I get that they were slaves once they reached America, but they were people first.

“Genuinely curious” “Just saying” “Honestly”

I can’t tell if you’re being genuine in your semantics inquiry. If you don’t believe that word choices matter in the framing of stories and history, you can’t be satisfied by our answers. To say that slaves were here to “work” is to deny the reality of slavery, because the connotations for 90% of the population is…

I can also bring some cookies home from my friend’s house, or I can steal some cookies from my friend’s house.

Yeah, I would add, you’d never refer to concentration camp victims as “workers.” Although technically, that would be correct, the fact that you would use the same sentence to describe a completely different phenomenon (“The Great Migration brought x number of workers from the agricultural south to the north”) makes it…

Were *millions* of people enslaved by rival tribes, though? A small percentage, perhaps, but it’s not like we should be excusing the actions of European slavers by saying “What about the rival tribes?”

“The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and 1800s captured and sold millions of people from Africa to perform forced labor on southern agricultural plantations. Those that refused risked brutal punishment or death.” There, and I didn’t even use the word “slave” again.

How is using slave twice more redundant than the word workers followed by work?

Word choice is important in educating people. Workers implies that they are people who work. Slaves are people who are the legal property of another person and forced to obey them. Their personhood is stripped away - making them very different from workers.

Who fucking cares if it’s redundant? Is it really worth whitewashing the history of slavery in America to avoid using “slaves” twice in one paragraph?

That’s the point the fact that it was nuanced leaving kids to fill it in. Only to hope they understand the implication. Just state the facts plainly -they were slaves. No need to sugar coat it. Writing it like this creates doubt about how bad slavery actually was.

The African Slave Trade didn’t bring “workers” here though, it brought slaves. To call them “workers” instead of what they actually were, slaves, is disingenuous at best and a flat out lie at worst.

Another reason is that the writer was consciously trying to soften the language because they thought it would make people feel sad about American history. Which may seem farfetched except that’s what Texas school boards have made clear they want in their text books.

The term workers does imply wages or other compensation when it is done to make other people money. Like cultivating cash crops for land owners. These people were not volunteers or workers. They were slaves or forced labor.

So you think that redundancy in using the word “slave” twice is more offensive than the fact that the word “worker” erases the depravity of the slave trade? You should really reflect on why you even asked this question in the first place.

Always go with the most specific word that conveys your message, to avoid ambiguity. In this case, slaves. Whether “workers” implies wages or not, it’s at least ambiguous, but the history is not. We know slaves didn’t receive wages so why make it vague?

How about People who were taken from Africa, treated and bred like animals, and forced to work under the threat of bodily harm and death.

Lets also mention further dehumanized and experimented on as well.

You know what? I love the balls on Cara Sloane to tell a BCO story about her own fuck-up. Just about every one of these is told from the waiter’s point of view, so I am always curious as to how customers would tell one of these (and what the exact hell was goin on in their cerebellums)...

“So, your table stopped me and asked what kind of fish they had was because they thought you were lying to them; I told them it was cod and they asked why we didn’t have real fish.”