Teaching race. When Aetna sold insurance policies to slave owners on those who were enslaved.

We’re in Florida until the end of this month.

We are in the land of beautiful Gulf beaches, great seafood, key lime pie and a racist Governor.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been on a campaign against what he calls “wokeness”.

It’s not even a dog whistle. It’s just blatant racism.

Florida legislators passed and the Governor signed The Stop Woke Act, which requires lessons on race to be taught in “an objective manner,” and not “used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.”

What? Like enslaving people was abhorrent.

That’s a particular point of view shared by millions.

The law also says white students should not be made to “feel guilt” because of actions committed by others in the past.

Some folks should feel guilt.

This morning I want to talk about some racist U.S. history that somebody should feel guilty about.

In Florida it may be against the law to teach it, but I can still be in the state and write about it.

As of January 1st my Illinois retired teacher insurance plan was switched from United Healthcare to Aetna’s Medicare Advantage.

I was interested in learning about Aetna so I Googled it and discovered that Aetna company history can be traced back to slavery.

In fact, Aetna sold insurance policies to slave owners on the lives of the human beings they enslaved.

In 2000, the issue of Aetna paying reparations was raised by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who, through her research, discovered that Aetna used to issue insurance policies for the lives of slaves, which would reimburse slave owners when their property died.

Farmer-Paellmann contacted Aetna requesting more information on the subject from their archives.

Aetna sent her copies of two policies, which confirmed that the company was selling the insurance deals for at least four years from 1854 to 1858. Maybe longer.

Aetna assured Farmer-Paellmann that they would make a formal apology and pay reparations.

Gwen Houston, the head of diversity at Aetna at the time and later Global Diversity and Inclusion Manager at Microsoft, said to her that “they would make an acknowledgement apology, not an apology per se. And they would enhance scholarships to university and college students, and that would be the form of restitution that they were going to pay.”

Two days after that, Aetna apparently changed their mind again, saying they would publicly apologize, but that there would be no restitution.

None was ever paid.

It turns out that Aetna was not the only one in the slave insurance business.

Aetna, NY Life, AIG, Penn Mutual and other northern insurance companies all made money by selling similar slave insurance policies.

Some quit the business because so many enslaved people died that they were paying out more than they were collecting.

Because of the switch in my Medicare Advantage plan by the state of Illinois I investigated and learned a little more about the sordid connections between Southern slavery and Northern capital.

I learned it while in Florida.

It would piss DeSantis off if he knew I learned it and wrote about it in his state.