Florida governor Ron DeSantis is doubling down on a proposal on how educators in his state should represent America’s involvement in slavery.
At the core of the curriculum, the 2024 Republican presidential candidate is advocating a pedagogy that claims African people benefited from being enslaved, despite receiving pushback from major civil rights organizations, politicians, historians and academics.
CNN reporter Kit Maher questioned DeSantis about the curriculum during a July 21 press briefing, highlighting the portion that says, “instruction includes slaves developed skills that in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit.”
The governor quickly retorted that although he wasn’t involved in crafting the bill shaping the state’s curriculum, he supports the scholars chosen by the Board of Education. He believes their historical version is fact-based and aligns with the Stop WOKE Act, a new law his administration is using to counter Black history supposedly being taught in K-12 schools through the lens of Critical Race Theory, which is a university-level discipline.
“I think that they’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later in life. But the reality is, all of that is rooted in whatever is factual,” DeSantis said, calling it “the most robust standards in African American history’ in the country.”
Vice President Kamala Harris was one of many voices that blasted DeSantis’ effort, as Politico reported.
“Come on — adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world. How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
The critique also came from his fellow GOP members, including 2024 hopeful and former Texas Rep. Will Hurd.
“Unfortunately, it has to be said — slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, who is Black, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”
The Florida Board of Education approved the new Black history standards on July 19. One section of the curriculum crafted for middle-school Black history lessons instructs teachers to “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”
The Florida Education Association, the state’s teachers’ union, called the standards a “disservice to Florida students and a big step backward.”
Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, said, “Gov. DeSantis is pursuing a political agenda guaranteed to set good people against one another, and in the process, he’s cheating our kids. They deserve the full truth of American history, the good and the bad.”
Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell chimed in, saying, “Let’s really dissect what he’s saying here. He’s saying that to be ripped away from your homelands and brought to another country against your will, or to be born into the atrocity of the dehumanizing institution that was slavery, that those horrors are some way somehow outweighed by the benefit that you get a trade.”
Part of DeSantis’ platform as a GOP presidential candidate is the claim that under his administration, his state “chose facts over fear, education over indoctrination, law and order over rioting and disorder,” taking a dog-whistling jab at CRT and the Black Lives Matter movement.
His latest statements hearken back to another subversive comment that many believed spoke to bigoted voters, uttered five years ago during his 2018 gubernatorial election campaign against Andrew Gillum, when he said, “The last thing we need to do is monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state.”
Historically, “monkey” was used as a racial slur against Africans. Under the present Stop WOKE policy, instructing students about such offensive terms is prohibited.
