As mentioned in the morning thread, VP Harris will be visiting Florida today to call attention to the new standards for teaching black history in the state, which she called “revisionist history” in a speech last night:
“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said at a convention for the traditionally Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta Inc. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”
The DeSantis-appointed African American history task force that created the standards pushed back on criticism by Harris and others. You can read about how DeSantis stacked the task force with right-wing allies here, but to summarize, most are black Repubs, and some are known crackpots.
One task force member who issued a statement pushing back on the criticism is Frances Presley Rice, a right-wing crank who produces helpful (to Repubs) screeds about how Dems are the REAL racists because they did Jim Crow. Here’s an excerpt of the statement the task force released:
Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history… We encourage everyone to view these robust standards for themselves.”
So I took them up on that challenge. Here are a few items I found while skimming through a fraction of the published standards [PDF] yesterday:
Instruction includes writings by Africans living in the United States and their effect on the abolitionist movement (e.g., Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, David Walker, Martin Delaney).
Did y’all know these historical figures were “Africans living in the United States”? I thought they were Americans since each was born in this country. But see, that’s exactly the type of liberal nitpicking that infuriates conservatives. They probably wrote it that way on purpose.
