CNN Newsroom: Interview With State Representative Anna Eskamani (D-FL) About Florida's New Black History Standards
Interview
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Well, Jim, I think Governor Ron DeSantis would really benefit from learning African- American history himself. I mean, he gives off the impression that he thinks people retired from slavery instead of addressing this egregious part of American history, a part of our history that we don't want to repeat.
And it's also really offensive that he acts like he has nothing to do with it. The Board of Education is appointed by the governor. These are his allies. He's appointed Moms for Liberty extremists on our Board of Education so not only is he responsible for this but he clearly does not understand the facts of African-American history.
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So, despite pleas from myself and others including leaders in the African-American community to not approve these standards, to go back and revisit these assumptions and correct them, the Board of Education approved them unanimously. Really with no debate or opposition. So it just speaks to how, in the state of Florida, we are degrading our education institutions, and really the impact will be felt by our students who are going to be misinformed, misguided, and at a severe disadvantage in working at diverse environments and just competing on a global scale.
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Well, in fact, there's been a great deal of analysis of his statement, and some of the attempts to justify the department's position in listing certain members in African-American history that department says benefited and not only have many of their examples been debunked as not actually even being enslaved themselves, but many of these individuals have no roots in Florida either.
So much of the commissioner's attempts to do damage control are failing. And I'm grateful for the national outrage because this isn't just happening in Florida. You know, and unfortunately Florida has been inspiring other extremists, other states to do the same thing. So we have to stop the buck here or it's all going to get worse.
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We have some serious problems here in Florida, Jim, that our governor has been absent on, whether it's the rising cost of property insurance, the skyrocketing rental rates, Floridians cannot afford Florida. And instead of dealing with these issues, our governor continues to flail on the national stage and now is attempting to potentially sue a beer company. It's a sad state of affairs and this other example of why we don't want Governor DeSantis running our state and we definitely don't want him running the country.
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