Senator Tim Scott urged Florida governor Ron DeSantis to remove a line pertaining to slavery from his state’s history curriculum during the second Republican primary debate Wednesday night, echoing a line of attack that’s been widely embraced by progressives.
The specific section in question directs students to examine “the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g. agriculture work, painting, carpentry tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” Critics have focused on a follow-up clarification which says that instruction should include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Asked by Univision anchor Ilia Calderón what he had to say to African Americans who are still “hurting” over the line’s alleged insinuation, DeSantis rejected the premise as an out-of-context attack on an unobjectionable and factual reading of history.
“First of all, that’s a hoax that was perpetrated by Kamala Harris,” he said. “Second of all, that was written by descendants of slaves, these are great black history scholars, so we need to stop playing these games. Here’s the deal: our country’s education system is in decline because it’s focused on indoctrination, denying parents’ rights. Florida represents the revival of American education.”
Given that Scott had previously criticized DeSantis for refusing to eliminate the offending line, which was written by a panel of scholars tasked with devising the state’s history curriculum, the moderators asked the South Carolina senator to weigh in.
“There is not a redeeming quality in slavery,” Scott began.
“He and Kamala should have just taken the one sentence out,” Scott added. “America has suffered because of slavery, but we have overcome that. We are the greatest nation on earth because we faced our demons in the mirror and made a decision. So often we think that all the issues, talk about crime, education, and healthcare, we always think that those issues go back to slavery.”
Approved in July by the state board of education, the standards drew the criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris, who said they were the creation of “extremists in Florida want to erase our full history and censor our truthers.” DeSantis then invited Harris to Florida to debate her claims.
Other progressive organizations — namely the Florida Education Association and the NAACP — cast the standards as “an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected.”
Over the summer, it was uncovered that the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) syllabus for African-American studies included a similar section on slavery. In Unit 2 of the AP’s new syllabus on “Slavery, Labor, and American Law,” a chapter on the slave economy suggests that slaves learned to become “painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers” and subsequently “used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”