DeSantis responded to reporters’ inquiries on Friday while addressing a largely White crowd of supporters by saying, “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
DeSantis, a GOP presidential contender who is trailing former president Donald Trump in the polls and is attempting to refocus his campaign, drew immediate ire from educators and even some within his own party. His attack on President Biden and the Democratic Party’s allegedly radical liberal policies has been the cornerstone of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, but his most recent statements risk alienating Black voters at a time when the GOP is actively courting them.
Will Hurd, a former congressman from Texas who announced last month that he would run for the GOP nomination, scoffed at the notion that slaves could use slavery as a form of education.
Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted that slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught useful skills. Because they had no rights or freedoms, it was literally dehumanizing and treating people like property.
DeSantis, however, continues to support Florida’s new curriculum, which includes the statement for middle school instruction that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and covers a wide range of subjects.
DeSantis claimed he “wasn’t involved” in the creation of the brand-new curriculum that went into effect this week. The “most robust standards in African American history probably anywhere in the country” were, however, the work of “a lot of scholars,” he claimed.
Many people, including educators, civil rights activists, and others, have expressed disgust at the notion that being an enslaved person had advantages.
Vice President Harris has intensified her attack-dog role as Biden’s running mate and went to Jacksonville on Friday to criticize DeSantis’s policies in his home state. She emphasized that rape, torture, and “some of the worst examples of robbing people of humanity in our world” were all part of slavery.
DeSantis’s most recent comments, according to Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat who last year became the first Black woman to hold the position of House Democratic Leader, were a “assault on Black history.”
Let’s examine what he is saying in detail, she said. “He’s saying that the advantages of a trade somehow outweigh the horrors of being taken from your native land and forcibly transported to another nation, or of being born into the dehumanizing institution that was slavery. Are you serious?
DeSantis said in a statement on Friday that Democrats like Kamala Harris “have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children.” A Saturday email seeking comment from his campaign received no response.
Fox News host Jesse Watters defended DeSantis. “No one disputes that slaves benefited from slavery, Watters said on his Friday night program. Nobody is making that claim. It is untrue. In some cases, during slavery, they are teaching how Black people can develop skills that they can use for their own personal gain.”
The co-chairman of the Biden campaign, Cedric L. Richmond, called DeSantis’ defense of the new Florida curriculum “disgusting.” In a statement on Saturday, he added that it was “a symptom of the extremism that has infected the Republican candidates running for president. Slavery is not up for debate. It was completely evil and had nothing good about it.
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Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University and author of “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes,” said DeSantis would gain no political advantage from his argument because “it is so outrageous that people are going to reject it.”
“These children know in their hearts and in their minds that slavery was evil,” he said.
Beyond the physical harm it caused to so many generations of people, he said, “one of the main things about slavery was that it prevented people from becoming what they could have become.”
“So what if you became a carpenter or a blacksmith or a good maid? Your chances of that were not determined by you, it was determined by somebody else. That’s not a rationalization for enslavement.”