Kamala Harris went to Florida on Friday to address the state board of education’s controversial new standards for Black history, which include the contention that some Black people benefited from being enslaved.
In an impassioned afternoon speech, the vice-president predicted the standards would rob children of knowing true US history that the rest of the world has been taught.
“All the folks that we would go out and send our children to go and meet around the world are clear about our history, and we … send our children now to not know what it is,” said Harris, who is the first woman and first Black person to hold the office of vice-president.
“Building in a handicap for our children that they are going to be the ones in the room who don’t know their own history – when the rest of the world does?”
Harris was in Jacksonville to discuss ways to “protect fundamental freedoms, specifically, the freedom to learn and teach America’s full and true history”, NBC reported, citing a White House official.
She was to meet civil rights leaders, educators, elected officials and other community members, NBC said.
On Wednesday, the Florida board of education approved new standards for how public schools should teach Black history.
According to a 216-page document, public school students will now be taught that some Black people received “personal benefit” from slavery – because it taught them useful skills.
“Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” one curriculum benchmark said.
The new curriculum also says Black people perpetrated violence during some race massacres, including the 1906 Atlanta race riot and the 1921 Tulsa massacre.
On Thursday, at a conference for the Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, Harris condemned the updated education standards as “revisionist history”.
“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” the vice-president said. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us and we will not stand for it.”
Advocacy groups have denounced the Florida curriculum changes for providing a sanitized version of history.
In a statement, Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said: “Today’s actions by the Florida state government are an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th-century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected.
“Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat and tears for.”
The Florida Education Association, a union representing more than 150,000 educators, called the new curriculum a “disservice to Florida students” and a “big step backwards”.
“Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them,” said Andrew Spar, the FEA president.
The changes to the state curriculum came a year after the Republican Florida governor, the presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, enacted the Stop Woke Act, Time reported.
The law prohibits teaching students or employees about anything that could cause them to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” because of their race, color, national origin or sex.
LaGarrett J King, director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo, said the updates to the Florida curriculum were “anti-Black”.
Students of Florida, King said, will be “extremely ignorant about the history of this country.
“For those who are going to college, there’s going to be a lot of correction. Especially if they go outside of the state. For those who don’t go to college, they’re going to hold these inaccurate perceptions about Black people throughout their years, if they don’t get any correction.”
King added: “I’m fearful because history is about identity and history helps us understand other folk. If we do not understand the complexities of those histories, that can have some damaging consequences to how we treat people in the present.”
Harris warned on Friday that damaging curriculum updates like the one in Florida to which she was referring in her speech will not go away on their own if no one takes a stand against them.
“There is a national agenda,” Harris said. “Extremist so-called leaders … want to replace history with lies.
“They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not have it. We will not let it happen.”