Vice President Kamala Harris stands against the Florida Board of Education’s new academic guidelines on the teaching of slavery that requires middle schools in the state to teach students that enslaved people benefited from slavery.
Under the new guideline, Florida students will be taught that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and middle school teachers are required to teach students about “the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”
Harris, the First Black Female Vice President, called the move an insult.
“Speaking of our children, extremists pass book bans to prevent them from learning our true history – book bans in this year of our Lord 2023,” Harris, 58, said during the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc.’s 56th national convention in Indianapolis Thursday. “And while they do this, check it out, they push forward revisionist history.”
“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” Harris continued. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”
The board’s new standards were approved on Wednesday, PEOPLE reported. The state pushed its 2022 “Stop WOKE Act,” which included new academic guidelines that requires race to be taught in “an objective manner” that does not”indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.”
High schoolers will also be affected under the new guidelines, which direct educators to teach them about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” when discussing Reconstruction after the Civil War.
The board’s new standards met opposition from the Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers’ union, who called the changes a “big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.”
“How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from? Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them,” FEA president Andrew Spar responded in a press release to the news.
Elementary school students will also be asked to “identify” Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, and other famous African Americans without being taught their “histories and struggles,” the union wrote.
“Evidently in an attempt to protect students from wokeness, these new standards will make sure that, through the fourth grade, elementary school students’ knowledge of African American history doesn’t extend beyond being able to know who a famous African American is when they see them,” the release continues.
