“Any kind of standards that indicate that slavery benefited Black people is such an insult,” State Rep. Rita Harris said.
-WFLA:
“The notion that enslaved people benefitted from being enslaved is inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish in our education system.” State Rep. Anna Eskamani said.
Beginning this school year, Florida’s Social Studies curriculum will teach students in sixth through eighth grade how “slaves developed skills” that could be used for “personal benefit.”
The line about “personal benefit” is included as a “benchmark clarification” to a lesson that asks students to “examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves,” such as agricultural work, domestic service, blacksmithing and household tasks like tailoring and painting.
VP Harris says Florida’s new Black history curriculum replaces ‘history with lies’
“It is not only misleading, it is false and pushing propaganda,” she said Friday in Jacksonville, Fla. “Pushing propaganda on our children.”
Harris also criticized Florida’s new standards for requiring high schools to teach that African Americans were perpetrators in some racially motivated massacres. She described these lessons as efforts by “extremists” to replace “history with lies.”
