CNN Is STILL Running With Kamala Harris’s Lie About Florida’s Slavery Curriculum

Long after it was debunked, CNN is still treating Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that Florida’s new African-American history curriculum teaches that “enslaved people benefited from slavery” as the gospel truth.

Harris repeated the incendiary assertion several times last month.

“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” she asked in one instance.

Were one to do such a thing, it would indeed be risible — even deplorable. But the Sunshine State is not guilty of the charge leveled against it.

In fact, the curriculum detailed horrors of American slavery while including one note that described “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

As one of the members of the working groups responsible for the curriculum explained, the note was included not to defend slavery, but to demonstrate resilience in the face of abject atrocity.

“It is the case that Africans proved resourceful, resilient and adaptive, and were able to develop skills and aptitudes which served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslaved,” explained Dr. William B. Allen to ABC. Allen called Harris’s statements “categorically false” and stated unequivocally that “It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans.”

Moreover, an AP African American History course for high schoolers that was vocally supported by the Biden administration included a similar note for instructors to pass on to students.

It read:

In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, American Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.

Despite the truckload of evidence to disprove the claim, the historically unpopular professional sidekick never recanted her weighty accusation — in large part because the bulk of the media chose to parrot, not correct it.

Indeed, even a month later, CNN is still running with the blatant falsehood.

“Florida’s Black history curriculum teaches children slavery was beneficial for Black people. It’s creating outrage” reads the headline of an article by Nicquel Terry Ellis.

Inside, the piece flatly asserts that the new curriculum will “now include a controversial benchmark: students must be taught slaves benefited from bondage.”

The rest of the lengthy piece rests on the testimony of a single middle school teacher, one historian, one parent, and one student, all of whom take Harris’s statements as indisputably accurate.

Consider this passage:

The feud over how Black history is framed in Florida has sparked protests and prompted some historians to begin educating teachers and families outside the classroom.

On August 12, just days before the start of the school year in Miami, a group of teachers clustered around a historic marker in Ocoee, Florida. Despite the sweltering heat, they listened attentively as Miami-based historian Marvin Dunn explained the history of the Ocoee Race Massacre.

In November 1920, a White mob attacked and killed more than a dozen Black Ocoee residents after they attempted to exercise their right to vote. To depart from that history, Dunn told the teachers assembled, is a lie.

“Don’t teach that lie,” he urged them.

In fact, the Florida curriculum singles out the 1920 Ocoee Massacre as an event that students should learn about.

Who’s lying to whom here?
 

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.