It’s bad enough that NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell tossed Vice President Kamala Harris such easy softballs in her latest interview — “Are you that new generation, for the Democrats, if the president decides not to run?” (Kamala whiffed on that one, failing to answer Mitchell's question.)
But the worst part of the interview was when Mitchell volunteered a completely false attack on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while tossing another softball Harris’s way.
THE LEFT'S NEW CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM SCARE
"Let me ask you, what does Gov. Ron DeSantis not know about black history and the black experience when he says that slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren?" Mitchell asked.
Her claim, that DeSantis has said that “slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren,” is completely false, without any basis whatsoever.
Here is what DeSantis's Florida Department of Education lists as the official state standards for teaching African American history in Florida Public Schools:
The history of African Americans, including:
the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery;
the passage to America;
the enslavement experience;
abolition; and
the history and contributions of Americans of the African diaspora to society.
The Florida Department of Education's African American history standards go on to note:
There it is, in black and white. The state guidelines approved by DeSantis explicitly require the teaching of both slavery and the aftermath of slavery.
But then it also does add, “However, classroom instruction and curriculum may not be used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view inconsistent with the principles of this subsection or state academic standards.”
Crucially, Florida law also requires that all materials prepared for the teaching of history are consistent with the principle that “No person is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex,” and that “a person, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”
There is a divide in this country between Democrats like Mitchell, who want public schools to teach that all white people are personally to blame for every injustice in the world, and Republicans like DeSantis, who want the facts about slavery and the Civil War and its aftermath taught in a factual manner that does not blame students today for injustices committed long before they were born.
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There is a reason why a record low 25% of young Americans are extremely proud to be an American. It is because Republicans have let Democrats teach a hateful version of America’s past for far too long.
The reality is that, despite the depredations of slavery and the evils inflicted by people in the past, today's black Americans are among the richest, healthiest, and best-educated black people on the planet. We should all be proud of that, even as we seek to do better.