Harris hits back at DeSantis invitation: Will not ‘debate an undeniable fact’
Haisten Willis
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Vice President Kamala Harris publicly refused an offer to debate Ron DeSantis on Tuesday.
Speaking at a church convention in Florida, Harris mentioned DeSantis’s offer to discuss the state’s black history standards with one of the educators who helped create them.
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They will not be meeting.
“I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact,” Harris said to cheers. “There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”
Harris made waves last week by calling out a portion of Florida’s black history standards that state that slaves learned skilled trades that, in some cases, they could use for their own benefit.
“They want to replace history with lies,” she said during a speech in Jacksonville. “Middle school students in Florida [are] to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”
While detractors have pointed out that Harris’s comments stem from a single bullet point in a semester-long course and that she had even praised courses making a similar point in the past, her speech made major headlines. Even some prominent Republicans, including Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), echoed her concerns.
DeSantis hit back by calling the attacks misinformed and inviting Harris to Florida to discuss the state’s black history standards with one of the educators who helped create them. She visited the state, but not for a discussion.
Defenders of Florida’s curriculum argue the line in question is about how slaves persevered through the despicable conditions of slavery and learned skills in spite of their treatment, not because of it.
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“Over the past several weeks, the Biden administration has repeatedly disparaged our state and misinformed Americans about our education system,” DeSantis wrote in a letter. “Our state pushed forward nation-leading stand-alone African American history standards — one of the only states in the nation to require this level of learning about such an important subject.”
The Florida governor also nudged Harris as the Biden administration’s “border czar,” adding, “I am prepared to meet as early as Wednesday of this week, but of course want to be deferential to your busy schedule should you already have a trip to the southern border planned for that day. Please let me know as soon as possible.”
Harris is making a series of speeches with Biden on vacation this week.
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Speaking in Orlando, she also made the case for abortion access, gun control laws, more drop boxes for voters, and an end to “book bans” that remove controversial material from public school libraries.
“As I said last week when I was again here in Florida, we will not stop calling out and fighting back against extremist so-called leaders who try to prevent our children from learning our true and full history,” Harris said. “In this moment, let us remember it is in the darkness that the candle shines most brightly.”