Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss her criticism of the state’s Black history school curriculum standards after she joined widespread outrage over newly approved guidelines that diminish the impact of slavery and racist violence.
“In Florida we are unafraid to have an open and honest dialogue about the issues. And you clearly have no trouble ducking down to Florida on short notice,” the governor wrote in a letter on 31 July, referencing her recent remarks in the state.
“So given your grave concern (which, I must assume, is sincere) about what you think our standards say, I am officially inviting you back down to Florida to discuss our African American History standards,” he added.
The administration also has invited William B Allen, one of the members of the working group that developed the standards who has a long history of inflammatory remarks and partisan rhetoric.
In remarks from Orlando on 1 August, Ms Harris said “there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: there were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”
The Independent has requested comment from the office of Ms Harris.
The vice president travelled to Orlando on Tuesday to deliver remarks at the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention.
Her visit follows remarks in the state on 21 July to condemn the state’s “propaganda” and the “extremist, so-called leaders” who support it.
Though she did not name him or any other Florida officials, the vice president’s speech was directly aimed at the governor, whose administration has sought to radically overhaul public education and establish a “parents’ rights” agenda that restricts honest lessons of race and racism, threatens discussion of LGBT+ people and events, targets libraries and reshapes local school boards.
A new set of standards for African American history in Florida schools will teach middle schoolers how enslaved people “developed skills” that could be “applied for personal benefit”.
Another guideline instructs high schoolers to be taught that a massacre led by white supremacists against Black residents in Ocoee to stop them from voting in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
Civil rights advocates, educators and lawmakers have warned that the guidelines present a distorted, revisionist picture of American history.
“Adults know what slavery really was. It involved rape, it involved torture, it involved taking a baby from their mother, it involved some of the worst examples of depriving humanity of people in our world,” Ms Harris said in her remarks in Jacksonville.
Members of the working group and the Florida Board of Education have defended the unanimously approved standards, assuring that they include comprehensive lessons on American history, including its darkest chapters.
Mr Allen, a Black professor emeritus at Michigan State University who also sits on the national advisory board of the right-wing think tank Center for Urban Renewal and Education, has repeatedly defended the working group’s guidelines.
A review of his past statements from Popular Information reveals a history of incendiary, contrarian remarks used to bolster and legitimise right-wing ideology.
In 1989, he faced protests while participating in a panel titled “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?” on which he claimed that special classes of protection for LGBT+ people and other minorities are a “fatal” mistake that heighten “tensions and antagonism”.
Creating legal protections for minority groups “is the beginning of the evil of reducing American blacks to an equality with animals and then seducing other groups to seek the same charitable treatment,” according to prepared remarks.
His speech was denounced by the US Civil Rights Commission – on which he was then serving as chair – as “disgusting” and “necessarily inflammatory”.
That same year, he also was charged with kidnapping a 14-year-old girl from a Native American reservation in Arizona while she was the subject of a custody battle between her mother and a white couple who adopted her.
Mr Allen also has opposed race-conscious admissions in higher education, including leading a campaign with a group that included members of the conservative Christian Hillsdale College and right-wing interest group the Heritage Foundation.
He also has criticised The 1619 Project, which is explicitly banned from Florida schools, and has rejected concepts including “systemic racism, institutional racism [and] white privilege.”
Mr DeSantis has routinely accused “the left” and Democratic officials of “indoctrinating” students in the state while he promotes an agenda that bans honest discussions of race and racism, sexuality and gender.
The governor’s administration also recently approved materials from right-wing political advocacy group PragerU to be included in K-12 classrooms. The founder himself has said that those lessons are explicitly designed to indoctrinate.
The campaign for Mr DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2024, has fired back at Black Republicans in Congress who have joined criticism of the African American history standards, including US Reps Byron Donalds and John James, as well as 2024 rival and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott.
Both Mr James and Mr Donalds have endorsed Donald Trump.
