Donalds generally praised the fresh Florida standards, but — like comically raging Vice President Kamala Harris leading the vast leftist education choirs last week — faulted the “benchmark clarification passage” about “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Donalds was confident, he posted, the Florida Department of Education would swiftly correct expunging this objective fact from the record.

The new African-American standards in FL are good, robust, & accurate. That being said, the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong & needs to be adjusted. That obviously wasn't the goal & I have faith that FLDOE will correct this.https://t.co/muq8zi1p85

— Congressman Byron Donalds (@RepDonaldsPress) July 26, 2023

To which Christina Pushaw, the quick response leader of Team DeSantis, replied: 

Did Kamala Harris write this tweet?

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) July 26, 2023

All along, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor and seeker of the GOP nomination for president, has made two things abundantly clear: 1. He wasn’t in the room when the standards were drafted, edited, finalized and approved. 2. He stands by them — all of them — as the verifiable record of the Black American experience.

“These were scholars who put that together, it was not anything that was done politically,” DeSantis said.

In these heated, divisive times, fact-based truth is an elusive concept. As Buffalo Springfield so eloquently phrased it for coming-of-age Boomers:

What a field day for the heat (Ooh ooh ooh)

A thousand people in the street (Ooh ooh ooh)

Singing songs and they carrying signs (Ooh ooh ooh)

Mostly say, “Hooray for our side”

What’s going down? Let’s pick at that a little, shall we?

The Sunshine State standards reflect Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, signed into law by DeSantis in 2022. The statute takes aim at diversity, equity and inclusion indoctrination, with a particular emphasis on doing away with critical race theory instruction.

The legislation dictates that American history “shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” 

Clearly, the offending phrase does not stray from being factual (as we shall verify below), and it benefits from being knowable, teachable, and testable. What’s fascinating, however, is how — are you seated? — this particular Florida standard, a footnote in a 216-page document, comports with the curriculum included in the AP African American Studies Official Course Framework (Page 72):

In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, American Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.

To refresh: This evident abomination comes from the College Board, an organization worshipped by the left and praised to the heights ever since DeSantis’ DOE rejected the AP African American curriculum (for extreme and gratuitous wokeism).

But wait. There’s more. No less than the Library of Congress once hosted (beginning in December 1995) an elaborate “exhibition on slave life curated by [George Washington University] American Studies Professor John Michael Vlach.”

Based on the book Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation and drawing from the testimonies of former slaves recorded during the 1930s, the exhibit, which had toured South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas before arriving in Washington, was shut down almost immediately by offended LOC Black employees. Because of passages such as this:

Slaves had many noteworthy skills and talents which made plantations economically self-sufficient. The services of slave blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, tanners, spinners, weavers and other artisans were all used to keep plantations running smoothly, efficiently, and with little added expense to the owners. These same abilities were also used to improve conditions in the quarters so that slaves developed not only a spirit of self-reliance but experienced a measure of autonomy. These skills, when added to other talents for cooking, quilting, weaving, medicine, music, song, dance, and storytelling, instilled in slaves the sense that, as a group, they were not only competent but gifted. Slaves used their talents to deflect some of the daily assaults of bondage.

Here’s what former Walker County, Texas, slave Corey Davenport had to say about his resourceful father: 

“My father was a carpenter and old massa let him have lumber and he made he own furniture out of dressed lumber and make a box to put clothes in. And he used to make spinning wheels and parts of looms. He was a very valuable man.”

So, some skilled slaves did, indeed, make life better for themselves and their loved ones while still in bondage. Contrary to Veep Harris and company, this is not information to be deplored; it is, rather, a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit. These were people yearning to be free, and they actively prepared themselves for that longed-for day. God bless their memory.

Because, in 1995, we apparently were more reasonable and more interested in reckoning with actual history, the shutdown became enormous news, making the front page of the Washington Post, as well as becoming a widely published AP article. Network news teams interviewed author Vlach. Editorialists remarked with curiosity why the LOC would shut down its own exhibit.

Within a week an invitation to reopen the exhibition came from the DC Public Library. On January 17, 1996 “Back of the Big House” opened with much fanfare at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. Reporters from the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and the Wall Street Journal covered the event. A week later Vlach walked reporter PBS reporter Charlayne Hunter-Gault through the exhibition; this interview was subsequently broadcast as ten minute feature on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. This notoriety not only increased interest in the exhibition but garnered further solictations from exhibit venues. The show ultimately toured to eighteen sites.

To reiterate: Portrayals of slaves as people with human spirits and the capacity to make the most of a terrible arrangement found welcome, once upon a recent time, in the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. Because, maybe, the exhibit spotlighted the content of the character of enslaved Black Americans.

So maybe Rep. Donalds, at least, should sit this one out. As DeSantis press secretary Jeremy Redfern tweeted (or Xed, or something):

Laundering a lie for the White House isn’t a good look. https://t.co/HeesVZ5pwP

— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) July 26, 2023

Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh, too, is unimpressed.

Any Republican who repeats Kamala Harris talking points loses huge amounts of credibility. Very disappointing to see from Byron Donalds. The curriculum briefly mentions that some slaves utilized skills after being freed. This is objectively true and “we shouldn’t teach it because… https://t.co/KrbgtBx9Ja

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 27, 2023

Listen, you absolutely cannot champion facts, accuracy and truth and in the next breath lambaste Florida’s (and the College Board’s, and the Library of Congress’) contextually accurate history. That simply is not prudent.

But while we’re on the subject, in the DeSantis-Donalds skirmish, this much, at least, is worthy of a sidebar: Donalds’ district map matches, almost precisely, a map depicting the worst of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Ian. 

DeSantis moved unprecedented state resources to the region, including — famously — the means necessary to relink Pine Island and Sanibel to the mainland in mere days, rather than the weeks or months typical for such projects.

Since the concept is paramount in certain corners of Maga World, you might imagine such administrative heroics would merit at least a smidgeon of, you know,  loyalty from the congressman representing those islands. Ha. Wrong again. For the Cult of Magadonia, loyalty — unlike DeSantis’ insta-bridges — is a one-way street.

History will not judge them kindly.