BLACK HISTORY

the global history of slavery and the false equivalence of anti-Black violence with acts of Black resistance.

Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, who attended the Wednesday meeting, pointed to part of the middle-school standards that would require instruction to include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

“I am very concerned by these standards, especially … the notion that enslaved people benefited from being enslaved. It’s inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish in our educational curriculum,” Eskamani said.

Etienne, the West Homestead K-8 Center teacher, was equally disturbed.

“It’s disgusting to use children as pawns in their adult scheme,” she said, calling the changes an “indoctrination” into “white, Christian nationalism.” “They feel like if you’re teaching the bad, it somehow takes away from the good and it doesn’t. If I’m not allowed to teach the evolution of the country and the changes that have been made, what am I doing?”

“This is fascism at its best,” added Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of the United Teachers of Dade, which represents teachers in Miami-Dade public schools. “This is exactly what fascist governments do when they censor teachers, when they go after education, when they try and suppress content from being taught.”

Since the Florida Legislature passed a slew of education laws over the past two years — from giving parents power to challenge books to restricting how gender identity and sexual orientation is taught from Pre-K to eighth grade — teachers have been worried, Hernandez-Mats said.

But these changes related to Black history are “not a way that students should be educated,” she said.

“This is narrowing minds,” Hernandez-Mats said. “

The controversy over how Black history will be