Joy Reid followed the lead Friday night of Vice President Kamala Harris in slamming Florida for guidelines that will require public middle schools to teach students that there were benefits to being an American slave.
Reid, speaking to MSNBC viewers on “The ReidOut,” called out the requirements of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Department of Education for what they were but went further, explaining the motivations behind them.
“They’re doing it because they want to raise a generation of people who will be conservative enough to give them their damn tax cuts, to give them the money they want and the deregulation they want,” Reid said. “And they’re terrified of young people, because young people already are woke — too late.”
Reid’s show rolled coverage of Harris’ trip to Jacksonville, Florida, and the speech she delivered on Friday. In it, Harris lambasted the notion there were benefits to slavery.
“It involved torture,” an emotional and physically animated Harris said with the expressions and body language of someone who can’t believe she’s having to say and do what she is having to say and do. “It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
Harris went on to excoriate the Florida Department of Education’s new guidelines.
“They dare to push propaganda on our children. This is the United States of America,” Harris said. “We’re not supposed to do that.”
Under the guidelines, middle school students will be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because of job skills they developed during their lives as slaves. High schools, meanwhile will be required to teach students that Black people were also violent during the many race riots and massacres of the 20th century perpetrated by white supremacists.
“You have to wonder why the people who are passing these laws don’t assume their children, if they are white, will not identify with the people who are heroic in history and the abolitionists,” Reid said. “They just assume their children are going to identify with the enslavers, so they’re trying to make the enslavers look good.”
Reid said the guidelines were part of the “war on woke,” which is “really a war against young people.”
“An extreme attack on how they think, exist, speak and especially how they understand the word they live in,” Reid said.
Watch the full segment, which included an interview with Florida State Sen. Shevrin Jones, in the video above.
