Jesse Watters Says Florida's Slavery Lessons 'Historical Fact' on Fox News

Fox News' Jesse Watters has been criticized after saying it is "historical fact" that slaves benefited from skills they learned while in bondage.

His comments come after Vice President Kamala Harris and others slammed Republican efforts to overhaul educational standards, referring to changes in Florida's curriculum as "propaganda."

The Florida Board of Education has approved a revised Black history curriculum to satisfy legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has decried "woke" education.

The new standards include instruction to middle school students about how slaves "developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit," according to a document on the Florida Department of Education's website.

DeSantis has made combatting what he calls the "woke ideology" of liberals a priority in Florida as well as a focus of his campaign as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Defending the curriculum changes on Fox News, Watters said that "this is well documented among historians."

He said: "This is historical fact that slaves did develop skills while they were enslaved and then use those skills as blacksmiths, as in agriculture, tailoring, in the shipping business, to then use to benefit themselves and their families once they were freed."

Watters, who hosts a prime-time show in the time slot vacated by Tucker Carlson's departure, added that it is "not controversial."

"And it actually speaks to the resilience and the aptitude of the enslaved African Americans who were at the time, able to better themselves and able to improve their situation despite brutal, brutal conditions," he said.

Newsweek has contacted Fox News for comment via email.

Watters' comments appear to be an attempt to push back at criticism about Florida's new curriculum. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, is among the critics and accused DeSantis of being "pro-slavery" over the changes.

Harris, the first Black person to serve as vice president, has said extremists in Florida "want to replace history with lies" and "gaslight us."

"They dare to push propaganda to our children," she said in Jacksonville on Friday. "This is the United States of America. We're not supposed to do that."

Adults "know what slavery really involved," Harris said. "It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother... how is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?"

Some excoriated Watters on social media for his recent comments.

Sherrilyn Ifill, a prominent civil rights attorney and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the comments "a disgrace."

"What really galls is behaving as though slavery existed from 1860-1865," Ifill tweeted. "As opposed to a system well over a hundred years in which you, your children, their children, & their children labored every day from 'can't see to can't see' subject to rape & abuse. Skills. Ugh."

Bakari Sellers, an attorney and political commentator, tweeted: "If slavery was so good, why didn't white folk volunteer. This is asinine."

The MeidasTouch account wrote: "The GOP and Fox are now overtly pushing a pro-slavery platform. That'll surely help with independent voters, who already find the Republican Party to be extremist and repulsive."

Qasim Rashid, an author who is running for Congress in Illinois, tweeted: "White supremacy is ignoring the thriving nations, languages, skills, & cultures Africans already had, ignoring that white supremacist enslavers denied enslaved people the right to read, write, or speak in their native tongues—& lie that white supremacists 'taught them skills.'"

DeSantis said on Friday that he was not involved in devising the Board of Education's standards, but defended the parts concerning how enslaved people benefited.

"I think that they're probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith, into doing things later in life," DeSantis said. "But the reality is all of that is rooted in whatever is factual."