News

NR PLUS Forgotten Fact Checks

Liberal Commentators Go All In on Kamala Harris’s Lie about Florida’s History Curriculum

By
Vice President Kamala Harris looks on as she attends the DNC 2023 Winter Meeting in Philadelphia, Pa., February 3, 2023. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

Harris falsely claimed that Florida’s middle-school students are being given a rosy picture of slavery.

Sign in here to read more.

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the outrageous reaction to Florida’s new slavery curriculum, offer context to an NPR article about “racism,” and cover more media misses.

Florida’s School Curriculum Sparks Yet Another Round of Unwarranted Outrage

Florida’s new standards for teaching African-American studies found a surprising defender on CNN last week amid an onslaught of criticism from pundits and the mainstream media.

CNN political commentator Scott Jennings pushed back against Kamala Harris’s claim that, “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,” Harris added.

“What is amazing to me [is] that how little Kamala Harris apparently has to do that she can read something on Twitter one day and be on the airplane the next to make something literally out of nothing,” Jennings said. “This is a completely made-up deal. I looked at the standards, I even looked at an analysis of the standards, in every instance where the word slavery or slave was used, I even read the statement of the African-American scholars that wrote the standards — not Ron DeSantis, but the scholars.”

“Everybody involved in this says this is completely a fabricated issue and yet look at how quickly Kamala Harris jumped on it. So, the fact that this is her best moment, a fabricated matter, is pretty ridiculous,” he added.

Harris and other critics’ claims center on a new item in the curriculum which states, “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

NR’s Charles C. W. Cooke gathered a list of every single reference to slavery, slaves, abolitionism, civil rights, and African Americans in the curriculum to refute Harris’s “astonishing lie.”

“There is simply no way of perusing this course and concluding that it ‘gaslights’ people or whitewashes slavery,” Cooke writes:

Among many, many other things, it includes sections on “the conditions for Africans during their passage to America”; “the living conditions of slaves in British North American colonies, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, including infant mortality rates”; “the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free)”; “the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease)”; “how the South tried to prevent slaves from escaping and their efforts to end the Underground Railroad”; the “overwhelming death rates” caused by the practice; the many ways in which “Africans resisted slavery”; “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms”; and “the struggles faced by African American women in the 19th century as it relates to issues of suffrage, business and access to education.” Many of these modules apply to Florida specifically.

But not everyone remains as committed to the facts as Cooke.

CNN political commentator Karen Finney instead saw Harris’s comment as a “stellar moment.”

“I think she did something that she has done often in the last couple of years, which is in a moment when something needed to be said, she got out there and said it, and really channeled what people were feeling,” Finney said.

“I mean, the idea that we would literally have a conversation — I have to laugh, it is so disgusting that there were personal benefits of any kind to slaves. It is like saying women, we’re happy when we couldn’t vote and we couldn’t have our own banking accounts. It is just ridiculous,” she said.

CNN commentator Ashley Allison used the curriculum as an opportunity to address the “bigger picture” in Florida.

“This is happening in a Florida where you have a governor who has an anti-woke bill, who has a ‘don’t say gay’ bill, who wants to ban DEI programs, who wants to ban Rosa Parks,” she said.

“I think at this panel we could all agree that slaves did not benefit from slavery. Even if the citation said, ‘Well, they might have gotten . . .’ they didn’t have a choice, so that is not a benefit. Slaves did not have the freedom to choose, like Ron DeSantis said, maybe they could have become a blacksmith. Not when they didn’t have the choice to become a blacksmith,” she said. “And so that was what Kamala Harris was saying.”

The Florida DOE has maintained that the new curriculum will teach students about the “good, the bad and the ugly.”

“The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefited,” the DOE said. “This is factual and well documented. Some examples include: blacksmiths like Ned Cobb, Henry Blair, Lewis Latimer and John Henry; shoemakers like James Forten, Paul Cuffe and Betty Washington Lewis; fishing and shipping industry workers like Jupiter Hammon, John Chavis, William Whipper and Crispus Attucks; tailors like Elizabeth Keckley, James Thomas and Marietta Carter; and teachers like Betsey Stockton and Booker T. Washington.”

“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,” the DOE added. “Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Jeremy Redfern noted that Encylopedia.com has a description of slaves learning skills that created benefit for themselves:

Nonetheless, Vanderbilt professor Michael Eric Dyson suggested the new curriculum may as well teach that there were good things about the Holocaust.

“This would be akin to saying that Native American people when we teach their history, we should not only talk about the smallpox blankets that were distributed by the pilgrims but the attempt of Native Americans to defend themselves — that was equally violent,” Dyson said during an appearance on MSNBC. “This would be like teaching the Holocaust saying that there were some good things that Jewish brothers and sisters picked up in those death camps that should they survive it would be helpful for them to make their way in life.”

“This is ludicrous. This was an institution of enslavement,” he added.

The Washington Post’s editorial board came out against the new standards as well.

“Florida has done it again. The state’s Board of Education has unveiled its newest standards for the instruction of African American history in public schools, and they include some horrendous elements,” the board wrote.

The editorial called attention to the benchmark about slaves developing skills to their potential benefit and also to another portion of the curriculum about how race massacres were “perpetuated by” both black and white Americans.

“So Florida’s children will now learn that slavery was, in part, a beneficial job-training program, and that Black Americans shared the blame for the violence that White mobs inflicted upon their communities,” the editorial says.

“Florida’s plan to teach otherwise should alarm Americans everywhere,” the board warned.

The Florida Education Association (FEA), the state’s largest teachers union, called the new standards “a disservice to Florida’s students and . . . a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.”

The union raised concern over the mention of slaves learning beneficial skills and also that high-school students will be taught that the 1920 Ocoee Massacre will be “conflated” with “acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans.” The FEA also suggested that while elementary-school students will be required to “identify” famous African Americans including Rosa Parks and George Washington Carver, that they will not be taught about the individuals’ “histories and struggles.”

“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 FEA claimed in a press release.

NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson called the new standards “an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected.”

“It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history. We refuse to go back,” Johnson wrote.

MaryLynn Magar, a DeSantis appointee to the Florida Board of Education, told the Tallahassee Democrat that “everything is there.”

“Everything is there,” Magar said. “The darkest parts of our history are addressed, and I’m very proud of the task force. I can confidently say that the DOE and the task force believe that African American history is American history, and that’s represented in those standards.”

Headline Fail of the Week

NPR wants listeners to know that “the right wing conspiracy theory about eating bugs is about as racist as you think.”

“‘I will not eat the bugs’ became a meme on 4chan and emerged in conservative talk shows and political speech. But why has it gained traction? In this week’s Code Switch, Gene Demby and NPR reporter Huo Jingnan dive into the sprawling conspiracy theory behind it,” reads an introduction into the episode. “Proponents of the theory lean on the anti-semitic trope that ‘global elites’ have a plot to control the masses — in this case under the guise of climate change solutions — by forcing them to eat bugs.”

In an effort to create evidence of a racist conspiracy theory, Code Switch seems to ignore the fact that people all over the world do in fact eat bugs and that there has been a push from some environmentalists for more people to eat bugs. This despite NPR having published articles for years now about bug eating:

Media Misses

  • CNN offered paparazzi-like coverage of Special Counsel Jack Smith last week after former president Donald Trump revealed he had received a target letter in Smith’s investigation into January 6. After CNN’s Katelyn Polantz told viewers that Smith was spotted “going to Subway for lunch, picking up a sandwich, leaving and not saying a word,” CNN anchors John King and Dana Bash offered a strange take on the situation:
  • -The New York Times apparently relied on bad CDC data to inaccurately claim that nearly 2,300 American children and adolescents have died from Covid. Writer David Zweig says the data inflates the pediatric mortality count by nearly 40 percent. “The CDC has been providing two sets of Covid mortality data for years. The agency knows one of them is inaccurate. Many journalists apparently do not,” he explains. The misleading set of CDC data include “probable COVID-19 cases and deaths,” and are derived from data “reported by state and territorial jurisdictions to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • Rebekah Jones once again sought to make herself the main character this week by falsely claiming that Ron DeSantis spent his first CNN interview talking about her. DeSantis, however, does not talk about Jones at all in the interview. Fox News mentioned Jones in a write-up about the interview — but only to note that CNN’s Jake Tapper believed Jones’s falsehoods during the pandemic.

You are out of free articles!

Don't miss out! Access premium content, videos, events, the National Review archives and more.

No thanks.
Login
You have 1 article remaining.
You have 2 articles remaining.
You have 3 articles remaining.
You have 4 articles remaining.
You have 5 articles remaining.
Exit mobile version