As if book restrictions from minority authors wasn’t damaging enough, Florida’s Board of Education continue to push agendas that fail to document the true experiences of African Americans as it pertains to living in this country.
On Wednesday, July 19th, the board approved a new social studies curriculum for middle school students that includes controversial language saying “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” as seen on a 216-page document posted on the Florida Department of Education’s website.
Many critics argue that this language undermines the fact that many enslaved African Americans already possessed skills such as blacksmithing, shoemaking, teaching, and farming far before being captured and taken to this country, and instead, America is the one that benefited from the skilled labor of those enslaved.
The new curriculum also includes notations that events such as the 1920 Ocoee Massacre be described to high schoolers as an “act of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” a historic massacre where at least 30 African Americans were killed in Ocoee, Florida for attempting to vote. These standards have been applied to events like the Tulsa Massacre and the Rosewood Race Massacre, as well.
The release of this new curriculum has outraged parents, teachers, students, Floridians, and even the Vice President of the United States, who went to Jacksonville on July 20th to express her disapproval. According to reports made by NPR, Harris called the new standards “misleading, fake and propaganda.”
While the Vice President criticizes that the changes aim to “replace history with lies,” Ron DeSantis argues that what the state approved “makes it very clear about the injustices of slavery in vivid detail … And that particular provision about the skills – that was in spite of slavery, not because of.”
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