Florida’s state Board of Education approved new African American history standards last week that have been widely criticized for including language on how “slaves developed skills” that could ultimately be used for “personal benefit.” In defending the new state-created standards, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials have argued the College Board used similar language in the framework for its course.
But College Board officials denied that the AP course echoes the new Florida standards, noting that while the course “includes a discussion about the skills enslaved people brought with them that enslavers exploited as well as other skills developed in America that were valuable to their enslavers,” the class does not frame slavery in a positive light.
“We resolutely disagree with the notion that enslavement was in any way a beneficial, productive, or useful experience for African Americans,” the College Board said in a statement to USA TODAY. “Unequivocally, slavery was an atrocity that cannot be justified by examples of African Americans’ agency and resistance during their enslavement.”
Jeremy Redfern, DeSantis’ press secretary, posted Thursday on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, a portion of the College Board’s curriculum that discusses various trades that enslaved people learned. A learning objective for AP course states that “enslaved people learned specialized trades” and “once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”
Remember when Florida wouldn’t allow that AP African American Studies course because it focused too much on CRT and not enough on history, and the @WhiteHouse lost its mind?
— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) July 27, 2023
Well, here is one of the standards considered “essential knowledge.”
See it here https://t.co/MFjfBjEFc9 pic.twitter.com/s8boDdYzks
Alex Lanfranconi, communications director for the Florida Department of Education, made a similar argument on the social media site.
“The AP course supported by the NAACP, teachers’ unions and White House includes nearly IDENTICAL language about the skills learned by slaves,” Lanfranconi wrote Thursday. “Something tells me this conspiracy theory about Florida’s new African American History standards is about to go away.”