Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Vice President Harris is trying to push a “fake narrative” about Florida’s Black history school curriculum — which has sparked criticism across the nation, including from the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus.
“She hopped on that plane quickly on Friday to come to Florida to spew this hoax,” DeSantis said Tuesday in an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters on “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
“She’s here to push a fake narrative about what Florida did,” said DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate who has put stomping out “woke” culture at the center of his campaign. “The interesting thing about this is Florida eliminated critical race theory from our K-12 schools. We’ve got to stop indoctrinating kids in this country, and we can’t be teaching them to hate America.”
Harris traveled last week to Jacksonville, Fla., where she called the state’s new Black history education standards “propaganda.”
The guidelines, which were passed last week, are based on Florida’s controversial law that requires race be taught in an “objective” manner that doesn’t seek to “indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.”
One of the updated requirements that has caused the most fury mandates teachers instruct on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied to their personal benefit.”
Teachers are also required to instruct on “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” such as the 1920 Ocoee massacre and the Tulsa Race Massacre, both incidents where Black people were overwhelmingly killed by white people.
DeSantis and other Republicans have countered that the standards were made with the help of African American scholars.
He accused the Biden-Harris administration of “always attacking” Florida, pushing back on claims that Florida’s state law didn’t want to teach Black history. DeSantis says the bill requires that schools teach Black history, including a discussion of racial discrimination.
“There is no agenda here, it is just the truth and they talk in gory detail a lot of the bad in American history, including, of course, the injustice of slavery,” DeSantis said. “But she is trying to perpetuate a hoax.”