Vice President Kamala Harris has channeled millions of Americans’ fury in her denunciation of Florida’s new teaching standards, which will require schools to teach students that enslaved people experienced personal benefits from slavery.
The Florida State Board of Education’s approval of the standards Wednesday has been widely condemned by educators, students, activists, officials and others who are critical of a persistent push, led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, to whitewash school curricula of topics that may offend white people.
At a conference for the historically Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta in Indianapolis on Thursday, Harris said: “Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”
On Friday, Harris made an impromptu visit to Jacksonville to stand on Florida soil as she denounced the state-imposed whitewashing of America’s history with enslavement. In her speech, she criticized “extremist so-called leaders” for “pushing propaganda.”
And she called Florida’s new standards “an abject and purposeful and intentional policy to mislead our children.”
Adults know what slavery really involved. 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. It involved subjecting [people to] the requirement that they would think of themselves and be thought of as less than human. So in the context of that, 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?
As part of the curriculum changes, Florida education officials approved a requirement that schools teach students that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Florida teachers will also be required to teach students that race massacres have involved violence “against and by African Americans” — as if to imply there’s equal blame to be doled out when white mobs attack and Black people defend themselves.
After NBC News reached out to the DeSantis administration for comment, a Department of Education spokesperson replied with a defensive statement from two members of Florida’s African American History Standards Workgroup, who claimed that “some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted,” including enslaved people who became blacksmiths, shoemakers and tailors.
But this framing is dangerous. It invites teachers to portray enslaved people as barbarians or simpletons who had the good fortune of learning “specialized trades” despite their captivity and all of its harms — the rape, the torture, the medical experimentation.
Slavery was about objectification. It wasn’t a summer internship.
In reality, the suggestion that specialized skills were the fruit of the American slave system is undercut by the fact that many Black people already had been practicing such trades, largely outside the context of American chattel slavery. And while Florida teachers will be required to teach that learning these things was for enslaved people’s benefit, the primary benefit was for the white racists who held them in bondage.
Slavery was about objectification. It wasn’t a summer internship.
People and institutions that try to spin technical skills learned under slavery as a positive are very similar to the people overly fascinated with Adolf Hitler’s supposed painting talents.
When they obsess over trivia and details on the periphery, it’s usually a sign they want to ignore horrific details at the heart of the matter.