Vice President Kamala Harris slammed Florida’s new Black history standards at an event in Jacksonville on Friday, calling them part of “a national agenda … to replace history with lies.”
Harris did not mention Gov. Ron DeSantis by name but blasted “extreme so-called leaders” who she said wanted to push false history and propaganda in schools.
“Middle school students in Florida [may] be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” Harris said. “High schoolers may be taught that victims of violence of massacres were also perpetrators. …They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not happen.”
One expert said Harris’ visit was part of the White House increasingly targeting Gov. Ron DeSantis’ policies, despite the governor’s low poll numbers that suggest he is less likely to be President Joe Biden’s opponent than former President Donald Trump.
“When the Biden campaign started focusing attention on DeSantis, it was because they saw him as a real rival,” said Gregory Koger, a professor of political science at the University of Miami. “As DeSantis’ prospects are fading in the presidential election, I think it’s a way to make a case … against the agenda of the current Republican Party. And Florida is the place to make that case.”
The state Board of Education adopted the new standards at its meeting in Orlando on Wednesday, despite dozens of speakers who urged the board not to do it.
The standards, which for the first time will spell out what students should learn about African American history in each grade from kindergarten through high school, were called by Education Commissioner Manny Diaz a “robust curriculum” which would “set the norm” for other states.
Critics, including civil rights and other community groups, argued they gloss over or rewrite key facts.
Part of the new instructions for students includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Another part states that instruction on the 1920 Ocoee and 1923 Rosewood massacres, in which white mobs destroyed Black communities, must include acts of violence both “against and by African Americans.”
“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. It involves subjecting people to the requirement that they would … 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?” she said.
Florida’s education policies under DeSantis have also included rejecting an AP Black History course and the ban on critical race theory, a college-level course that suggests racism is systemic in society.
A law approved by the Legislature and DeSantis mandates that students should not “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”
“Teachers want to teach the truth,” Harris said. “They should not then be told by politicians that they should be teaching revisionist history in order to keep their jobs. … There are many aspects of our history that some would like to overlook, erase, or at least deny.”
DeSantis defended the standards on Friday, saying in a statement from his campaign that Harris and Democrats were “obsessed with Florida” and were lying about them, though he did not elaborate.
He also repeated his rhetoric that Democrats have an “agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children.”
J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Biden and Harris were going to continue to criticize DeSantis on not only the new history standards but also on books being pulled from school libraries.
“They’re going to roll that into the whole umbrella of, ‘This is what the MAGA Republicans are trying to do,’ Coleman said. “For this subject of African American history and slavery, Harris is a better messenger for it than Biden.”
Coleman also said Harris going to Jacksonville may be an indication the Democrats see an opportunity to improve their prospects in Florida. The city elected a Democrat Donna Deegan mayor in May and the majority of voters chose Biden in 2020 after having voted for Trump in 2016.
“Jacksonville is one of the few good trend lines for Democrats in the state of Florida,” Coleman said. “… Perhaps the Biden campaign is a little more bullish on Florida than maybe some of us analysts are.”