Kamala Harris slammed Florida's new history standards. But the truth is more complicated.

It’s tough to be disliked more than Joe Biden these days, but Vice President Kamala Harris has managed to outshine her boss on this metric.

Her negative ratings have hit all-time highs for vice presidents − 49% of registered voters hold an unfavorable opinion of Harris, according to a recent poll.

Since it doesn’t seem that either Harris or Biden is going anywhere, Democrats have opted to get the VP out in public even more. That strategy has had mixed results. For instance, earlier this month, Harris had one of her infamous “word salad” moments when asked to define the meaning of “culture.”

Last week, however, Harris’ comments went viral for a different reason.

She spurred a slew of headlines after attacking Florida’s recently revamped social studies standards, which include the teaching of African American history.

Criticism is fine, but don’t deceive

It’s not a shock for a Democrat to excoriate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, since he’s the only Republican presidential candidate the left loves to berate more than Donald Trump.

Yet, Harris went beyond political chiding into the realm of deceit when she blasted the Florida Board of Education’s new standards as “revisionist history.” Harris took the most umbrage at a part of the standards that calls for instruction on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Biden campaigns on 'decency.' Refusing to acknowledge his granddaughter is anything but.

Placing the word “benefit” anywhere close to slavery was unwise and offensive, and it opened the door to legitimate criticism. The authors of the standards had a reason, though (more on that later).

“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” Harris said at an event Thursday. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”

The next day, the vice president doubled down on her remarks while on a visit to Florida expressly to bash the social studies standards: “They want to replace history with lies.”

“These extremist, so-called leaders should model what we know to be the correct and right approach if we really are invested in the well-being of our children. Instead, they dare to push propaganda to our children,” Harris said.

Some context, please

The way she described the updated standards, you’d think the point was to whitewash history by painting the horrors of slavery in some sort of positive light. If that were true, it would deserve outrage.

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.

Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store.

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.

Feed outrage to motivate voters?

Context is too often missing when politicians seize on something with which to paint the other side as “extremists.” That’s exactly what Harris did.

“When you have government-controlled schools, schools controlled by politics, there will always be people who disagree about what goes into standards, especially history standards,” says Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. “And they will tend to be blown up into bigger political issues that we're told represent extreme sides because the way people are successful in politics is to smear those they are running against as extremists.”

Both liberals and conservatives are guilty of this, and it’s one of the reasons the divisions in our country grow deeper.

What does 'woke' mean? For conservatives, it's so much more than political correctness.

DeSantis has made fighting “woke ideology” central to both his time as governor and to his presidential campaign. And he has overseen legislation and other policies to tackle it in K-12 classrooms and higher education.

DeSantis’ efforts against gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion have made him a prime target of the left. Even some fellow Republican presidential contenders, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, have said it's DeSantis' fault that Florida is being criticized for the social studies standards.

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.

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Don't deceive: Harris Florida slavery 'benefit' attack ignores context