'There's nothing worse': Black GOP strategist whacks DeSantis slavery claims
July 24, 2023
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign has been disrupted again by outrage over his state's adoption of new education standards teaching children that Black people learned valuable skills from their bondage in slavery — a claim the governor swiftly doubled down on, despite some commentators pointing out that many of the examples the Florida Department of Education provided were historically inaccurate.
Speaking to CNN on Monday, Joe Pinion, a Black GOP strategist and former candidate for Senate in New York, tore into DeSantis' bad judgment and bad read of history.
"I was struck really by Ron DeSantis doubling down on this," said anchor Erica Hill. "You know, these are the standards, this is the history, hey, you could be a blacksmith and you could go use that somewhere. It is remarkable, and I think [former Congressman] Will Hurd, perhaps, put it really well when he said in a tweet ... basically saying, I can't believe I have to say this, but slavery wasn't a jobs program that taught beneficial skills. It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property, because they lacked any rights or freedoms. When you look at this, Joe — especially as a Republican strategist — when you look at this, how is it that this is where Ron DeSantis is going? He is doubling down on this, and there is this push that somehow this is a more accurate view, accurate telling of U.S. history."
"Well, look, the only thing slavery taught anyone is that there are no limits to the brutality that lurks in the hearts of man," said Pinion. "And the only thing that those comments teach us is that in many ways, the vestiges of that brutality still exists. There's nothing worse than trying to tell the people that are descendants of such brutal subjugation that somehow, there were some lessons learned along the way. It's a sad day."
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A bigger problem, Pinion continued, is that all of this drama distracts from one of the biggest issues facing Black Americans, which is that they are being shut out of the educational system, from majority-Black schools struggling, to a high profile incident at Texas A&M University where the president was forced to resign after interfering in the hiring of a Black journalist to a professorship.
"It's a broader issue that Black professors have struggled to get tenureship at many institutions," said Pinion. "Issue by issue, I think the actual issues confronting Black people in many ways on a day-to-database get lost because of the insanity on the far fringes, when in reality, you're looking at California, where we have over 70 percent of juniors who are not reading at proficient levels, in Florida, you see those numbers much the same way for Black students. So those are the real issues, those are the real stakes. The civil rights issue of our time. And we have people trying to relitigate the values of the civil rights movement in the first place."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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