Byron Donalds and Kamala Harris Finally Agree On Something
The media have baited everyone over a sentence in Florida's new academic standards.
Two birds one stone: The media is salivating over pitting Byron Donalds against Ron DeSantis as a proxy for Trump — while also leveraging the racial connotations of the disagreement over the new Florida academic standards.
First, a quick recap of recent events to better understand the current situation.
In 2022 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the Stop WOKE Act which mandates instruction on black history while prohibiting the inclusion of illiberal, anti-academic propaganda to substitute for academic study. Not long after, the Florida Department of Education rejected the College Board’s pilot AP course on African American studies after it was discovered that the course included less about African American history and more on studies of queer theory and the promotion of communism. Vice-President Kamala Harris at the time assailed the rejection as “extremist.”
Last week Harris flew herself to Jacksonville for political performance theater where she blasted the new standards for African American history passed last week by FLDOE — except the text she’s objecting to in the new standards is the same as the text in the pilot AP course she previously praised.
Here is the sentence from Florida’s 200+ page curriculum Harris objected to in the just-passed standards, on the bottom of page six:
This is from the aforementioned AP pilot course, pg. 72, which she recently praised:
So the new standards say the same thing as the old standards but it only became “racist” when African American scholars worked with Florida for its inclusion in new standards and the left could tie it to DeSantis. To date, Harris hasn’t condemned the College Board, which has been oddly silent as she rages over their framework.
Civil rights activist Dr. William B. Allen co-authored the new academic standards as a member of the Florida African American History Standards Workgroup and excoriated Harris over her claim in an ABC interview:
"The only criticism I’ve encountered so far is a single one that was articulated by the vice president and which was an error," Allen told ABC News according to the audio Redfern released. "As I stated in my response to the vice president, it was categorically false."
He then went on to claim the course is not portraying slavery as beneficial in itself, but rather how African Americans managed to prove themselves adaptable and resilient in a time of crisis.
"It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans," he noted. "What was said, and anyone who reads this will see this with clarity, 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 enslavement."
He added:
"My great-grandfather is someone who came from the islands and who was enslaved here and whose own resourcefulness, resilience, and adaptiveness was certainly instrumental in producing for his family, his descendants, the ability to prosper here in this country."
He then emphasized his point by calling back the wording of the curriculum, "Hence, from his resourcefulness, we derive benefits. I think anyone who would try to change that language would be denying that great-grandfather Cidipus made any contribution. I certainly could not endorse doing that."
From Allen’s with Jesse Watters :
WATTERS: Tell her right now what specifically this component of the slavery course teaches.
ALLEN: Well, permit me to have Frederick Douglass tell her. He wrote an autobiography in which he described how the mistress of his slave owner began to teach him to read. She pulled back the curtain through which a glimmer of light showed before the master made her close it. But that glimmer of light was enough for Frederick Douglass to illuminate a bright flame that he exploited to his benefit and his country’s benefit thereafter. Such examples are numerous, and they are detailing the stories of those who suffered the indignity of slavery time and again.
And quickly permit me to say, what this curriculum is about is having people who lived the experience, who lived the history, tell their stories. And nothing is more important than that we never, ever erase the stories that people who lived the stories tell. No one has a right to interpret before first understanding the stories as the people who lived them understand them themselves.
And this is how we get the Rep. Byron Donalds point of the story. Donalds tweeted:
Donalds told WINK News that he himself will have a conversation with people at the State Board of Education in hopes of getting them to fix the section that says “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Did he do that before tweeting out his press piece on it? Did he ask why the College Board was silent? I’d ask him these questions myself, but he’s not available to talk and his comms team hasn’t responded further to our inquiries.*
DeSantis called Harris’s situational hysteria a “hoax,” battled reporters, and urged people to not “side with Kamala Harris and liberal media outlets” while his press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, quoted a statement from Florida’s Education Commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr. in response to Donalds:
The VP comparison angered Donalds who reminded people that he backed Trump:
What’s crazy to me is that he also reiterated Kamala Harris’s sentiment on the interpretation of said sentence. I get that he’s hesitant to say that he agrees with her on this, but, uh, how else do you define two people thinking the same thing about the same thing?
It feels like he and others thought they could take the media’s red herring and use it as primary cudgel — but it’s backfired:
The Congressional Black Caucus is pushing the White House, Justice Department and the Department of Education to adopt an “aggressive legal strategy” to scrutinize recent changes to Florida’s Black history curriculum.
The same DOJ that worked with the FBI to classify school board parents as domestic terrorists is sure to be completely non-partisan when investigating this issue. And now the national press is now gleefully running once again with the race card. What a brilliant move orchestrated by the party that fought to maintain discrimination all the way up to their record-setting boycott of the Civil Rights Act
Donalds’s mention of Trump in his previous tweet was followed by the spox response below:
Will they all defend FLDOE and scholars like Dr. Allen from the “smear” of violating federal laws on discrimination as suggested by the Congressional Black Caucus?
The left is still stinging from losing Florida. The best offense they can run is to resurrect accusations of racism while whitewashing the contributions of Florida’s minority voters. Why would anyone with an R after their name help such efforts?
This is a media-baited rhetorical misdirection and enough recognized names went for it. No one, literally no one, said, wrote, or argued that the sin of slavery was of personal benefit to those enslaved. Rather, as Allen illustrated earlier with the example of Frederick Douglass: “But that glimmer of light was enough for Frederick Douglass to illuminate a bright flame that he exploited to his benefit and his country’s benefit thereafter. Such examples are numerous, and they are detailing the stories of those who suffered the indignity of slavery time and again.” Meaning even the oppressive indignity of slavery couldn’t put out the flame of resilience.
What a wasted opportunity to focus the nation’s attention on such strength at the expense of a primary dig.
*RELATED: While drafting this piece the CBC’s involvement broke and I posted this to Twitter (or X?):
I like Donalds but I don’t like the fact that he apparently recruited his comms guy, Harrison Fields, out of the squeakers in a COD lobby. Field called Kane tonight after my tweet and screamed at him, yelling that I was “cheap” and “classless.” We continued the dust-up on Twitter. I’ll discuss it more on air tomorrow.
The strength of conservatives is the "e pluribus unum" quote our fearless liege, Dana, noted earlier this week. However, it can also be our "chink in the armor", by having a diverse individual thought process and an openness to new ideas from learned experiences, WE can at times test each other's mettle/nerve on how to interpret or forge new ways to improve our shared Constitutional beliefs and the continuance of the Freedoms and Liberty handed down to us by our betters. WE need to be reminded of the fact that our goals should not be to destroy each other over these differences, but to hone our skills by sharpening our "swords of salvation" through these tumultuous times for the true enemy, the "Legion Left", for they plan dominion over us daily without pause and without mercy. WE must "stay the course". Just an honest opinionated observation. Stay Frothy