Dems, GOP push to remove language about slaves’ skills and ‘personal benefit’ in FL state standards

Florida Phoenix | By Mitch Perry | January 11, 2024

There was national outrage last summer when the Florida Board of Education issued a new set of standards for African American history. It included a section on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Criticism rained down on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration the day the standards were released at a meeting of the DOE meeting last July in Orlando.

Six months later, two state House members — a Democrat and a conservative Republican — introduced legislation (HB 1521) in the Florida House this week that would prohibit specified instruction and state academic standards from indicating or implying that enslaved persons benefited from slavery or enslavement experience in any way. A Democratic senator introduced the same legislation, (SB 344).

“Someone must have picked up some useful skills at some point but of all the things that we could be instructing on, I don’t think that needs to be in the [academic standards of Florida],” says House Republican Mike Beltran, who represents portions of Hillsborough and Manatee counties.

“I’m not someone who plays identity politics or likes to be preoccupied by something that happened over 200 years ago, but still I think that’s offensive,” Beltran adds. “I can see how it would be even more offensive to other folks.”

Beltran is co-sponsoring the measure with Miami-Dade Democrat Christopher Benjamin in the House of Representatives.

The curriculum for African American history standards for middle school students include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to the document posted by the Florida Department of Education (DOE) last summer. The DOE did not return a request for comment.

The bill provides specific information about what instructions should be provided to students in Florida’s public schools when it comes to the history of African Americans:

“Instructional personnel may facilitate discussions and use curricula to address, in an age-appropriate manner, how the individual freedoms of persons have been infringed by slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation and racial discrimination, as well as to topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination and how recognition of these freedoms has overturned these unjust laws.”

The Senate measure was filed by South Florida Democrat Shevrin Jones.

He says the inclusion of the controversial language in the state’s African American history standards was damaging because “it puts us in a very unfortunate position to where we’re making it seem as if slavery was a good thing during that time in American history when it wasn’t.”

“Slavery was demeaning,” he says. “It was a stain on American history. It was a rough time in Black history where individuals were hung. Families were separated. Women were raped. Men were castrated during slavery. That’s not a time to where anyone believes it was a benefit. It was torture.  Young people need to know that was not true.”

Two days after the standards were published last summer, Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd in Jacksonville that the revisions were part of a national right-wing agenda.

“Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape; it involved torture; it involved taking a baby from their mother; it involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world; it involved subjecting people to think of themselves and be thought of as less than humans,” Harris said. “So, in the context of that, how is it that anyone could suggest that, in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”

DeSantis, a presidential candidate, has relished telling campaign audiences in Iowa and New Hampshire that Florida has become the place where “woke” policies go to die. The governor has also championed eliminating Critical Race Theory from public schools as well as removing any references to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in higher education.

Jones calls Beltran a friend and says he is happy that he is co-sponsoring the measure in the House. He hopes it’s a harbinger of more Republicans pushing back on some of the DeSantis’ administration’s policies in the 2024 session.

“There comes a time where I hope that they [Republicans] understand that the laws that we are passing have long lasting effects and we can become an independent body to reject these hurtful policies that the governor has continued to push over the last 3-4 years, considering that he’s about to come back home after Iowa,” Jones says.