Frankie Franco III 🍉

I am 55 years old. America is the only country I've ever known. And I love my country. When I was in school, I learned about the horrors of slavery. Sure, it was a limited education, but I totally got the gist of it. We learned how people were taken from Africa, and how many DIED during the journey here, forced to labor in hot fields while being whipped, raped, deprived of education, and murdered. In fact, when I was young, there was a mini-series on TV called Roots that depicted the brutality of slavery in horrifyingly explicit detail. And then I did my OWN research, reading more books and watching more documentaries and movies. But somehow, I was able to maintain my love of America. Despite all of the cruelty and brutality I had learned about, I was somehow able to figure out that the people alive in America today had NOTHING TO DO with slavery 200 years ago. Somehow, I can still say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the Star Spangled Banner, no problem. But dishonest fascists like Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ron DeSantis want to deprive American children of the knowledge of slavery, and African American studies because they say it's "propaganda leftist agenda" designed to teach kids to “hate America.” That's a preposterous lie. There are PLENTY of evils and horrors America is responsible for, and if you don't teach kids what happened in the past they may be DOOMED to repeat those horrors in the future. Today's kids are being asked to treat as normal these "shooter drills" where the possibility of being shot with bullets that make them unrecognizable is a very real possibility, but we think they can't handle learning the truth about what happened 200 years ago? If you ask me, those of us who learned the truth about America, and STILL love our country, are even more patriotic than those who are trying to whitewash it and hide the truth from kids. Don't minimize it. Don't rationalize it, with bullshit like "oh, it wasn't all bad because some people learned skills." RESPECT THESE KIDS. TELL THEM THE TRUTH.