The Florida Legislative Black Caucus today sent a letter to Governor Ron DeSantis and Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz, urging them to revise the new African American History Education Standards, to either clarify this vague, insulting, and destructive language.
Per the letter, Chair of the Florida Legislative Black Caucus, Rep. Dianne Hart (D-Tampa) offered the following, “Our request is simple; stop playing partisan politics with the futures of Florida’s children. To say that the enslaved Americans of our past somehow benefited from their violent exploiters without acknowledging the millions that never knew the freedom of autonomy over their own bodies, lives, and futures is shameful and disgusting. Florida’s educational standards should ensure that all children, regardless of the color of their skin, can learn from the past, make sense of the present, and robustly prepare for the future. In fact, the future of this great nation relies on protecting its very history, so we learn from it– let’s not run from it.”
The letter reads as followed that was sent to Governor Ron DeSantis:
Governor Ron DeSantis,
Earlier this week/Recently, the State Board of Education revealed their appalling new standards for African American history education. The members of the Florida Legislative Black Caucus stand to condemn these standards and the Florida Department of Education’s false and inappropriate rewriting of history.
Though we shared these concerns when HB 7- Individual Freedom moved through the legislature and subsequently passed during the 2022 legislative session, to see this policy in action is despicable and does a disservice to our students. The Black Caucus believes that schools are a place where children from different places and races learn from the past, make sense of the present, and prepare for the future. While teachers in Florida work hard to deliver an accurate and honest education to our children, these policies to write people who look like them out of our history books are harmful.
The language in the standards is intentionally both insulting and vague. To say that enslaved Americans benefited by learning skills from their violent exploiters to use later in their lives, without acknowledging the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, who would never live to see freedom, is disgusting. To leave an unclear rule about violence “perpetrated against and by African Americans” dishonors the memories of the Ocoee, Tulsa, and Rosewood Massacres, which took decades to be recognized as history, much less rectified and made just to the victims and their families.
The statements in these standards discredit the lives of those abolitionists and civil rights leaders that your curriculum requires teaching. Slavery was not a kindness to the enslaved, but a time when Black families were held hostage in death camps by their human traffickers who stole their labor for profit and employed torturers to subjugate, torture, and kill them. It was a time when enslaved women were raped, children were stolen from their families, and unimaginable suffering was inflicted on captive people without an end in sight. This history shows us that governments can legislate shameful atrocities that permit people to be terrible. To avoid that historical fact is to place us all in a state of delusion that may make the descendants of these oppressors comfortable but will doom descendants of the oppressed to worse as we shirk the responsibility of learning about the sins of our forefathers, so they can never happen again.
For these reasons, the Florida Legislative Black Caucus is calling for the Florida State Board of Educationto revise the current vague and harmful language with correct and factual history. We are demanding transparency regarding these standards. The appointed members of the African American History Task Force should have vast knowledge of African American history, not just connections with your administration.
History has always been written by those in power, and it is disgraceful that this administration is trying to unilaterally command these revisions of the truth before our very eyes. Florida’s students deserve better than a whitewashed, edited story-they deserve history.
