Slave descendant flips the script on Democrats for their false claims about Florida's new curriculum

Dr. William Allen, a descendant of slaves, squashed the narrative that Florida is trying to whitewash the horrors of American chattel slavery.

Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris ignited a firestorm against Florida's new curriculum standards on black history. She accused Florida of trying to "gaslight" students by teaching them "that enslaved people benefited from slavery," characterizing such instruction as "propaganda."

But not so fast, says Allen, a scholar of political science and former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Allen, who helped craft the new standards, said Harris' claims about the curriculum, which have been repeatedly ad nauseam by Democrats and the mainstream media, are "categorically false."

"It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans. 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 served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslavement," Allen told ABC News.

Regarding the standards, Allen said he is "quite confident in their validity, their historical accuracy, and their motivations and intent."

Allen, moreover, rebuked suggestions that the standards should be changed because doing so "would be effectively to erase people's history," using his own family to prove his point.

"My great-grandfather is someone who ... was enslaved here and whose own resourcefulness, resilience, and adaptiveness was certainly instrumental in producing for his family, his descendants, the ability to prosper here in this country. Hence, from his resourcefulness, we derive benefits," Allen explained. "I think anyone who would try to change that language would be denying that [my] great-grandfather ... made any contribution."

ABC News did not air Allen's full remarks. Instead, they were released by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' press secretary.

In another interview on Fox News, Allen condemned the narrative and accused Harris of propagating a "lie," which he says only serves to "erase" the history of enslaved black Americans, citing Frederick Douglass as an example.

"Because what is being done here is the attempt to create stories for our time and impose them on people who told their stories in their own time, thereby erasing their stories," he said.

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