“In the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” Kamala Harris
falsely asserted during a speech last week in Jacksonville, Florida. She then added, “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”
Harris’s characterization of the Florida Department of Education’s newly announced standards for the teaching of African-American history was at best disingenuous. To put it more accurately, it was a flat-out lie.
The
new curriculum standards require a comprehensive teaching of slavery in the nation and in Florida, and in no way do the standards teach that slavery was anything but evil and reprehensible. Indeed, of the history curriculum’s 191 references to slavery, there is no positive reference to the practice of slavery, but there is a positive reference to slaves seeking to better themselves. That teaching guide notes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Nowhere in that statement referencing a historical fact is slavery being condoned. Indeed, the curriculum is rightly concerned with noting that, despite slaves’ plight, they in many ways sought to make the best of their circumstances. To suggest otherwise is to not only give an inaccurate view of history but to cast the slaves as entirely devoid of any self-agency or even action toward independence. In other words, Harris’s simplistic view of history is insulting in its depiction of African-American slaves.
In any case, who’s going to tell Kamala about the
AP curriculum that tells about slaves who learned to become “painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers” and subsequently “used these skills to provide for themselves and others”?
Well, there’s the firsthand account of former slave Booker T. Washington, who observed after slavery ended: “The slave owner and his sons had mastered no special industry. They unconsciously had imbibed the feeling that manual labor was not the proper thing for them. On the other hand, the slaves, in many cases, had mastered some handicraft, and none were ashamed, and few unwilling, to labor.”
The irony is that it is not Florida’s Education Board, almost half of whom are black academics, who are doing the gaslighting — rather, it is Harris herself. And she is gaslighting in order to peddle a simplistic oppressor/oppressed narrative that supports a political agenda motivating voters by appealing to identity rather than policy.
Dr. William B. Allen, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University, was one of the authors of the new Florida curriculum. Allen, who happens to be black, blasted Harris’s claim as “categorically false.” He
observed: “Grammar, for people of basic literacy, sufficiently refutes the charge. … But I came to understand this had nothing to do with the standards; it had everything to do with a larger agenda, starting with the teachers union and its allies and, of course, carrying it to the level of the vice presidency in order to give it heft … and to account for slavery as the soul of America and discount the accomplishments of America.”
Florida is the target of Harris and the Democrat Party due in part to its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. He is, of course, running for president based in large part on his stance against the injection of leftist political ideology (CRT and DEI) into the state’s public educational curriculum. That’s why Harris is smearing him as a racist slavery apologist.
Preventing the promulgation of leftist ideology among a generation of Florida’s students represents a future threat to the Democrats’ political power.
Furthermore, Harris is literally engaged in the dissemination of misinformation, and yet there are no calls from Big Tech and social media to censor her damaging lies. In fact, the “fact-checking” site
PolitiFact has once again beclowned itself by defending Harris’s lie as “Mostly True.” Gotta protect that narrative irregardless of the truth.
This episode with Harris also serves to validate why parents have become increasingly involved in their children’s schools. Their eyes have been opened to the reality that in far too many schools, what passes as education is in reality leftist indoctrination. Students are presented with dubious opinions as if they are facts. Just like those media “fact-checking” sites.
Harris might believe she is engaged in a
fight against her political opponents, but in truth she’s engaged in a fight against the historical record.
