That'd be because he's a racist.

I still want DeSantis to answer how slaves could use skills they acquired "for personal benefit" if they were owned by someone. Did the slave walk up to the plantation owner and ask to quit being a slave so that they could set up their own blacksmithing business? (Spoiler: No, they didn't. Any slave that tried doing this would have been beaten or worse.)

Maybe some slaves escaped and maybe some of them were able to do certain tasks because they did those chores when they were slaves, but this is a fraction of a fraction of a percent. It definitely shouldn't be used in a classroom as some kind of rationalization for why slavery wasn't that bad. It ignores what happened to 99.99% of slaves because the story of the 0.01% is more politically palatable to Republicans.

(Note: I'll admit that the fractions were made up by me. They're intended to illustrate a point and not to express any actual rate. If anything, 0.01% is probably too high of a percentage.)

Ugh. What a fucking piece of shit. Good thing he is getting TROUNCED in the primary race so far.

Racism could be why.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Ron DeSantis is tripling down on his state’s newly approved social studies curriculum guidelines that erroneously teach students that enslaved people “developed skills” that they could use for “personal benefit.”

The controversy also highlights the Republican Party’s sluggish gains among Black voters, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic, as it makes a rightward shift on race.

The kindergarten through fourth grade standards require students to identify Black people who have had a “positive impact” in politics, art, invention, and other areas.

In these sections, teachers are guided to create lessons about the jobs enslaved people performed, including tailoring, blacksmithing, and agricultural tasks, and how the skills they learned could be used for “personal benefit.”

Nothing about that 400 years of evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors,” tweeted Rep. John James, a Michigan Republican, referring to the acronym for career and technical education.

But in the party overall, Republican leaders have moved right on race, aligning with far-right figures who reject the idea that minority groups face structural bias.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Full speed ahead, icebergs don't exist if you ignore them. If he admits that he's wrong, he's not going to gain votes from people who criticize that position but will lose votes from the ones who interpret that as weakness.

I can't begin to imagine how people like this draw pleasure from life. This sort of evil is so extremely shallow. Have they ever even considered what they will think in their death bed? Or do they also just wanna kill themselves before it gets too bad, a la Hitler?

Looking forward to the day this meatball becomes irrelevant.

“developed skills in spite of slavery, not because of slavery,” adding that “it was them showing resourcefulness and then using those skills once slavery ended.”