Rival Republicans blast DeSantis over slavery standards

Black Republicans and fellow GOP presidential hopefuls continue to criticize Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over new standards for how Black history is taught in Florida schools.

The social studies standards, which DeSantis has repeatedly defended, include teaching middle-schoolers that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

On Sunday, Will Hurd, a former Republican congressman from Texas who is also running for the Republican presidential nomination, said that “slavery is not a jobs program.”

“Anybody that is implying that there was an upside to slavery is insane,” Hurd said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

Hurd said he was surprised that DeSantis continues to voice support for the standards, but called his behavior “one more part of a fact pattern of Ron DeSantis being mean and hateful.”

In response to a request for comment, DeSantis’s campaign forwarded a tweet featuring comments the governor made Friday, saying he was “defending my state of Florida against false accusations and against lies.”

Other Republican presidential candidates also criticized DeSantis’s stance Sunday.

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy told CNN’s “State of the Union” that while he hasn’t read the curriculum in detail, “obviously, we should be teaching kids about the awful legacy of slavery.”

And Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the United Nations who is also running for president, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that, in the 21st century, “we can all agree that there . . . were no positives that came out of slavery.”

On Friday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the US Senate, also rebuked DeSantis while speaking to reporters on the campaign trail in Iowa.

“As a country founded upon freedom, the greatest deprivation of freedom was slavery,” Scott said. “There is no silver lining . . . in slavery.”