WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris says she won’t be debating slavery with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Speaking at a African Methodist Episcopal convention in Orlando, Harris rejected DeSantis’ invitation to participate in a conversation about the state’s Black history guidelines.
“I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no redeeming qualities of slavery,” Harris said Tuesday afternoon.
DeSantis challenged Harris on Monday to come to Florida and have a discussion with him about the curriculum, which she had derided as “propaganda” and “lies” over an assertion that slaves benefitted from skills they developed in captivity.
He invited her to meet him in Tallahassee, the state’s capital, as early as Wednesday of this week, in a letter that blasted the Biden administration and accused the vice president of attempting to “score cheap political points.”
The Florida governor, who is also seeking the GOP nomination for the presidency, said in the Monday letter that his office posted on social media that Biden officials had “repeatedly disparaged our state and misinformed Americans” about the state’s Black history standards.
“One would think the White House would applaud such boldness in teaching the unique and important story of African American History,” he said. “But you have instead attempted to score cheap political points and label Florida parents ‘extremists.’ It’s past time to set the record straight.”
DeSantis’ letter also took jab at her over the situation at the southern border and taunted her over a last-minute trip she made to Jacksonville last month to speak out against the new standards.
Harris was already scheduled to be in Orlando on Tuesday to deliver remarks at an AME convention.
“Right here in Florida, they plan to teach students that enslaved people benefited from slavery. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us in an attempt to divide and distract our nation with unnecessary debates,” she said in her remarks. “And now they attempt to legitimize these unnecessary debates, with a proposal that most recently came in, of a politically motivated roundtable.”
After the state released new curriculum that advised instruction on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” Harris went to Florida and decried “extremist so-called leaders” who “dare to push propaganda to our children.”
“Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother,” she said.
To suggest that “there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization” is false and misleading,” the vice president said. “And it is pushing propaganda.”
DeSantis defended the standards at a news conference, where he said he wasn’t involved in their creation directed questions to the state’s education department.
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” he said.
Black Republicans including South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who is competing against DeSantis in the GOP presidential contest, have criticized the Florida governor for his comments and called on him to clarify his position.
“Nothing about that 400 years of evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors,” GOP Rep. John James of Michigan told DeSantis is a social media post.
In the Monday letter daring Harris to meet him in Florida, DeSantis said he would bring William Allen, an academic who helped write the curriculum, with him to the meeting and told Harris she could invite American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, or someone else who shares her views, to present the other side.
In a statement to USA TODAY on Tuesday morning, Weingarten hit back at DeSantis, invoking his campaign struggles.
“Is this debate schtick a new tactic for flailing presidential campaigns? I didn’t debate Mike Pompeo and I certainly won’t debate Ron DeSantis over whether slavery had ‘benefits,’ the labor leader said. “That debate was settled by Lincoln—and DeSantis’s side lost.”
