U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina has criticized fellow Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for supporting new standards that require teachers to instruct middle school students that slaves developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“What slavery was really about was separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was just devastating,” Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate, told reporters on Thursday after a town hall in Ankeny. “So I would hope that every person in our country — and certainly running for president — would appreciate that.”
“People have bad days,” Scott added. “Sometimes they regret what they say. And we should ask them again to clarify their positions.”
DeSantis has been facing criticism from Florida teachers, civil rights leaders and President Joe Biden’s White House on the school standards. Vice President Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, traveled to Florida last week to condemn the curriculum.
Scott’s comments came as he and DeSantis stumped in Iowa ahead of the state Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner, a gathering at which 13 candidates in the GOP presidential primary field, including front-runner Donald Trump, will be addressing an expected 1,200 activists on Friday. Scott, part of the GOP’s most diverse presidential field ever, was asked for his take on the standards hours after DeSantis defended them during a gaggle with reporters as he campaigned.
“At the end of the day, you got to choose: Are you going to side with Kamala Harris and liberal media outlets or are you going to side with the state of Florida?” DeSantis told reporters, citing Democrats’ criticism of the language. “I think it’s very clear that these guys did a good job on those standards. It wasn’t anything that was politically motivated.”
Responding on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to reporters’ posts of Scott’s video, a super PAC supporting DeSantis on Thursday night called the posts “incredibly sloppy or intentionally disingenuous,” reposting video of DeSantis’ defense of the curriculum earlier in the day.
(AP)
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DeSantis may have a made a fatal mistake. While it isn’t part of his family history (he appears to be an “Ellis Island” alumni), he really should have known better. American slavery was probably the most outrageous form of slavery in human history, compatible to the Holocaust and the Communist Gulag systems.
If wants to say something “conciliatory” about slavery, he can mention that through the 1700s most of the world still had slavery, and the major impact of slavery on the southern states was to leave them hopelessly backwards, much poorer than the northern states (in terms of GDP and both industrial and agricultural production), and so they ended up fighting the Civil War with obsolete gear and inadequate food and a population much of whom were supporting the Union. He could say that had the South abolished slavery in 1861, they probably would have won the Civil War. But instead, DeSantis, who is well educated, puts his foot in his mouth.