The title of this digital came, of course, from the main entrance sign to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which interprets as “Work Sets You Free”. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis is attempting to sugar-coat America’s past history concerning the atrocities perpetrated against black slaves by their white slave owners by maintaining that a goodly number of those slaves were taught skills that later in life were used to their advantage.

There’s an outside possibility that there might be an inkling of truth to that statement, but it is of little or no consequence in comparison to the beatings, rapes, murders, and lynchings, etc., etc., etc., that slaves had to endure. To try to emphasis one minute, questionable, good over all the overwhelming evidence for bad is an absolute oversight. Shame on you, DeSantis. 2024 GOP nominee Will Hurt wonderfully stated that “Slavery wasn’t a jobs program.”

Modern Germany hasn’t bull-dozed over their concentration camps because they’re an embarrassment to them. They obviously feel that whatever embarrassment is incurred is but a small price to pay for not letting history get a chance to repeat itself. Truth will always (eventually) reveal cover-ups. It just takes a little more time to materialize. But it’s always well worth the wait.

So the same reasoning should hold true for America’s black history studies. Just because it’s an embarrassment to we Americans to exhibit our “dirty laundry” of slavery, that’s not a justifiable reason to forgo the necessary, continued acknowledgement that work, in and of itself, played no part in any slave’s freedom nor their future vocation–per se. On the contrary, one might say that the slave’s ability to work, in fact, placed an imaginary barbed-wire gate in front of any anticipated exit of escape.