Whitewashing slavery in US schools will teach students anti-Blackness

At a press event in Utah on July 21, GOP presidential contender and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attempted to find the silver lining of American chattel slavery. “Some of the folks … eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” he said, referring to enslaved people.

DeSantis made these utterings while defending the Florida State Board of Education’s new standards for teaching African American history in public schools, which downplay and whitewash the enslavement of Africans in the Americas.

As a reminder, slavery in the United States was a 246-year-long apocalypse of kidnapping 300,000 African people, transporting them across the Atlantic, beating, torturing and raping them, and working them to their early deaths.

Load More