Seems like the outrage over "slavery was beneficial" was manufactured:
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Kamala Harris slammed Florida's new history standards. But the truth is more complicated. (msn.com)
If you read the standards, however, that’s far from the truth.
Shortly before the Civil War began, slaves made up more than 40% of Florida's population. The state's disturbing history includes horrific violence against Black people after the Civil War. Florida also had some of the worst Jim Crow laws in the country. Those laws, which denied Black Americans basic rights, were enforced into the 1960s, meaning in the lifetime of many people alive today.
It's essential that students learn about their state’s ugly history. But the new social studies standards don’t gloss over the damning facts.
The standards are comprehensive, and include instruction on the following topics: “the conditions for Africans during their passage to America”; “the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free)”; “how the South tried to prevent slaves from escaping and their efforts to end the Underground Railroad”; and “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms (e.g., the Civil Rights Cases, Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, lynchings, Columbian Exposition of 1893).”
In addition, the standards call for Florida-specific instruction about violence against Africans Americans, including the 1920 Ocoee massacre and the 1923 Rosewood massacre. They also mandate that students learn about historic Black settlements in Florida, such as Lincolnville and Eatonville.
William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, two Black members of the Florida work group that wrote the new standards, issued a statement in light of the criticism. They said the group included the benchmark on skills because “any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history.”
“It is disappointing, but nevertheless unsurprising, that critics would reduce months of work to create Florida’s first ever stand-alone strand of African American History Standards to a few isolated expressions without context,” they wrote.
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Harris has a right to criticize conservatives like DeSantis, but as the saying goes, she doesn’t have a right to her own facts.
Feeding the outrage machine with misleading comments on how Florida plans to teach about the history of slavery is a cynical and dangerous way for the vice president to score political points.
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