Nothing good comes from state education standards. The same holds true for speeches by Vice President Kamala Harris. Together, they make for a terrible combination.
On Sunday, CNN commentator Scott Jennings blasted Harris for her disingenuous criticism of Florida’s new social studies curriculum.
“This is a completely made-up deal,” Jennings said on “State of the Union.”
At issue is a single innocuous sentence in a 216-page document approved Wednesday by the state Board of Education.
“Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” the new standards say.
Based on this one sentence, Harris leaped to an extraordinary conclusion.
During a Friday speech in Jacksonville, Florida, the vice president said “extremists” in the state “want to replace history with lies.”
“Middle school students in Florida to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said.
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Jennings noted the absurdity of Harris’ criticism.
“I looked at the standards. I even looked at an analysis of the standards, in every instance where the word slavery or slave was used. I even read the statement of the African-American scholars that wrote the standards — not Ron DeSantis, but the scholars,” he said. “Everybody involved in this says this is completely a fabricated issue.
“And yet look how quickly Kamala Harris jumped on it.”
.@ScottJenningsKY slams Kamala Harris for buying into the lie that Florida is teaching students that there were good things about slavery: “She can read something on Twitter one day and be on an airplane the next to make something literally out of nothing.” pic.twitter.com/DxmcXjAxif
— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) July 23, 2023
Fellow CNN analyst Ashley Allison took issue with Jennings’ defense of the new standards based on their authorship.
“And just because black people write it don’t mean — that doesn’t mean it’s going to be accurate. Like, we can disagree as black people as well,” she said, according to a CNN transcript.
Nonetheless, Jennings’ criticism of Harris rings true.
By mentioning Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he implied that politics, not history, motivated the vice president to attack the new standards.
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Then again, history might play a role after all. In June, Harris’ net favorability polling numbers hit a historical low for vice presidents.
Perhaps she hopes to resuscitate her poor image by spewing phony outrage over inconsequential passages in state education documents.
On the merits of the issue alone, the vice president cannot be serious.
Harris, of course, is not a serious person, as her word-salad-filled speeches have demonstrated on more than one occasion.
Still, these are frivolous comments even by her standards.
No reasonable person would conclude that the line in question — “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — translates to “enslaved people benefited from slavery.”
As a rule, slaves whose masters forced them to learn trades fared better under brutal conditions than slaves who performed only manual labor.
Likewise, the fortunate few slaves who managed to escape or otherwise secure their freedom certainly benefited from whatever skills they developed in bondage.
Nothing in these general observations could soften slavery’s inhumanity.
Furthermore, no history teacher anywhere in America would make this “skills” and “benefits” analysis the sum of all slavery-related instruction.
Therein lay the real story.
Government officials and especially vice presidents have no business even commenting on history “standards,” let alone creating them.
