After months of keeping a relatively low profile, Vice President Kamala Harris has once again drawn attention to herself with a series of very public attacks on Florida Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis.
Despite the fact that Harris is apparently unwilling to debate DeSantis publicly over the new Florida education standards – as he has challenged her to do – The Associated Press lauded the vice president’s “aggressive posture” in the face of things she believed to be wrong.
“Her newfound aggressive posture is a natural one, Harris allies say, considering her background as a prosecutor who thrives on zeroing in on an opponent and hammering their faults,” AP White House Reporter Seung Min Kim wrote with Will Weissert and Steve Peoples.
“Her newfound aggressive posture is a natural one, Harris allies say, considering her background as a prosecutor who thrives on zeroing in on an opponent and hammering their faults.” w/ @apwillweissert + @sppeoples re the latest in Harris vs DeSantis https://t.co/kwzBpp6OgI
— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) August 2, 2023
While they expounded on Harris’ ability to “hammer” the faults of her opponents, they neglected to report the fact that her attacks on DeSantis and the Florida education standards were predicated on a fundamental misreading of the curriculum in question — and her refusal to debate on the subject belied more of a passive-aggressive posture than the “aggressive” one for which they were praising her.
The one line in question in the Florida standards, cherry-picked and presented without context, stated that slaves had “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Dr. William Allen, Florida’s African American History Standards Workgroup member, explained that Harris was actively promoting a fundamental misunderstanding of the statement.
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“As I stated in my response to the Vice President, it was categorically false. It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans,” he said. “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 serve to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslavement.”
But Harris went to Florida — her second trip in the space of a week – and continued to promote that misreading of the curriculum.
“I’m here in Florida,” Harris said Tuesday at a convention of black women missionaries. “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.”
She even responded directly to Allen, using the same cherry-picked statement to suggest that he was lying about the content of the curriculum he helped to write.