Vice President Kamala Harris jetted into Florida Friday to denounce Gov. Ron DeSantis over the state’s rewrite of its history curriculum to claim that slaves benefited by gaining valuable life skills from being enslaved.
The first Black vice president in American history lambasted the conservative Republican — who is running against former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — for whitewashing the horrors of slavery as part of his effort to push back against so-called “woke” influence in public education.
“They decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” Harris said Thursday in an impassioned speech to a Black sorority group. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”
She said Black Americans should fight back against efforts to rewrite their own ancestors’ history.
“There is so much at stake in this moment: our most basic rights and freedoms, fact versus fiction, foundational principles about what it means to be a democracy,” she said.
Harris planned to deliver a similar message in Jacksonville Friday afternoon on DeSantis’ home turf.
The DeSantis-appointed Florida Board of Education voted Wednesday to approve a revised Black history curriculum that the governor said is necessary to prevent liberal indoctrination.
The new curriculum includes instruction on how slaves supposedly benefited from skills that they gained during centuries of brutal oppression. It also focuses more on achievements of Black Americans rather than the injustices they faced through slavery and segregation.
Florida Education Department spokesman Alex Lanfranconi said slaves should be considered more than “just victims of oppression” and called slavery “a difficult time in American history.”
The pushback on Black history is one facet of a conservative push to impose new rules on schools like Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law that restricts classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation and banning of drag performances in school.
Earlier this year, the DeSantis administration rejected a College Board Advanced Placement course on African American history, which DeSantis asserted amounted to woke “indoctrination.”
Critics are challenging the new Black history curriculum in court.
“African American history (includes) the lessons of cruelty and inhumanity interwoven in the determination of a people to live and breathe free,” said Democratic Florida state Sen. Bobby Powell, who is Black. “It is as much Florida’s story as the nation’s story and it needs to be fully told.
