Members of the workgroup that helped to create Florida's new African-American history standards say there was no intention to suggest that African Americans benefitted from slavery, as Vice President Kamala Harris and several leftwing commentators have claimed.

Instead, they said, they wanted Florida students to understand that people in slavery were "resilient people" who used the skills they developed — through training, through their ingenuity, and from their ancestors — to better their lives, despite slavery.

The African-American history standards — nearly 200 items that take up over 70 pages of a 216-page document laying out broader social-studies standards — were approved last week by the state board of education. Democratic politicians, including Harris, have pointed at a couple of lines in the standards to claim that Florida intends to lie to students about the horrors of slavery.

The standard that has drawn the most attention says that students should examine "the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g. agriculture work, painting, carpentry tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation)." Critics have focused on a follow-up clarification which says that instruction should include "how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."

NBC News reported that the standards "teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills." In a speech on Saturday, Harris claimed that the standards show that Florida intends to "replace history with lies."

"This is unnecessary to debate whether enslaved people benefitted from slavery. Are you kidding me?" she said. "Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world."

National Review spoke with two of the 13 members of the workgroup that developed the standards, and they both said the vice president's interpretation is not correct.

"The intention of it was, African Americans, slaves, my ancestors, they were resilient people," said Valencia Robinson, who teaches African-American history and English in Volusia County on Florida's east coast. People who were enslaved, she said, were forced to work "sun up to sun down" in a variety of jobs, but yet in some cases they were able to use their skills to "gain some extra money" and to purchase goods for themselves and for their families.

William B. Allen, a professor and dean emeritus at Michigan State University and former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said the line in question refers to people such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington who acquired skills "under adverse circumstances, or who came with skills that enabled them to not only survive adverse circumstances, but also to go onto further accomplishments."

Allen said he believes that Harris and others are deliberately misinterpreting the standard.

"Why then are they doing that? Well, it's part of the zeitgeist," he said. "Anything that can be used to prosecute a culture war, and to continue to sew division as a wedge or leverage point to work the transformation of American society will be exploited for that end. So, that's what we see them doing. It's a kind of ideological posturing."

One of the primary purposes of the standards is to allow the people who were enslaved to tell their own stories, he said. "If they say they were able to accomplish things despite slavery, then we need to repeat what they said," Allen said, noting that Frederick Douglass started learning to read from his slave mistress, before her husband put a stop to it.

"He exploited that opportunity to his own advantage," Allen said. "That doesn't mean he benefitted from slavery. But it does mean he acquired a skill from which he benefitted while enslaved."

Allen added that "many skills that slaves had, they had before they became enslaved, they brought with them."

Allen, a Florida native, said that he has never met Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and that DeSantis — who has defended the standards — was not involved in the workgroup's efforts. He wouldn't comment on the group's deliberations or work process, which was open to the public.

"What we have done is to insist throughout the whole process that the comprehensive story be told, the truth be told, nothing else but the truth," Allen said. "It is not our task to pick and choose for the sake of emphasizing pet agendas, but rather to allow the people who lived the history, who lived the experience, to tell their own stories. And that's what these standards are about."

Robinson said that while she recalled the workgroup's conversation about slaves developing skills, she didn't realize that particular line had been included in the approved version until the political firestorm erupted. She said she understands some of the pushback and how some of the language could cause confusion, and she would not be against amending the standard.

"Using the word 'benefit' period, that just implies that they got something," Robinson said. "There was nothing to be gotten from being in bondage, and being raped and tortured."

The state education board approved the African -merican history standards on July 19, during a meeting in Orlando and after more than an hour of public comment. Opponents of the standards, including members of the Florida Education Association, said the standards are not complete, do not focus enough on American leaders who supported slavery, and use outdated terminology. "It's a good start, but the students deserve better," one union leader said.

"I am very concerned about these standards, especially some of the notion that enslaved people benefitted from being enslaved is an inaccurate and scary standard for us to establish in our educational curriculum," said state representative Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat.

Members of the board disagreed. "It's the good, the bad, and the ugly in American history," Florida education commissionerManny Diaz Jr. said at the meeting.

"Everything is there," new board member MaryLynn Magar said, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. "The darkest parts of our history are addressed, and I'm very proud of the task force. I can confidently say that the DOE and the task force believe that African American history is American history, and that's represented in those standards."

Opponents also took issue with a portion of the standards that addresses "acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans" during several prominent race riots and massacres. Opponents of the language said it is akin to "blaming the victim."

"All that's being said there is, tell the whole store comprehensively," Allen said. "Don't tell one side and not the other side. Tell all sides."

He said that "all these terminological disputes" over accusations that the standards use outdated terms such as "slaves" instead of "enslaved people" are "beside the point, and once again an attempt to enforce an agenda."

"If we're going to allow people to tell their own stories, the least we can do is to use the language they used," Allen said.

For nearly 30 years, Florida has required that students learn African-American history, but last year the legislature expanded the requirement. Last August, the Department of Education put out a memo seeking members for the African-American history workgroup. The department received 40 applicants and selected 13 people for the workgroup, Paul Burns, the state's chancellor of public schools, said at last week's meeting.

The workgroup met several times — in person and remotely — from February to May.

The African-American history workgroup is separate from the state's longstanding African-American history task force. Current and former members of that task force told National Review that they had no role in assembling the workforce and a list of its members does not appear on the Department of Education website.

Samuel Wright, a member of the task force for over a decade, resigned recently after a slate of new DeSantis appointees — five Republicans and a conservative Democrat — joined the group in May and voted to postpone a regular summer event.

Wright, a one-time city council member and a former University of South Florida administrator, was on the African-American history task force when the workgroup was assembled, and he said he didn't know who any of the 13 workgroup members were.

He hasn't read all of the standards — "I just read bits and pieces in the media," he said — but he, too, took issue with the idea that there was any benefit to people who were packed onto ships like sardines, enslaved, and subject to hundreds of years of oppression. "How in the hell could we benefit from slavery?" he said.

"We built the pyramids in Africa. People came here with skills," Wright added. "We were brilliant people when we left Africa."

State representative Berny Jacques, a Republican from the Tampa Bay region, is a new member of the African-American history task force. He said the state's African-American history standards are some of the most robust — and possibly the most robust — in the country. He said Harris and others appear to be purposefully distorting them.

"It's not a statement saying that slavery was beneficial. Slavery is bad, and the standards make it pretty clear that slavery was a bad thing," said Jacques, who was born in Haiti. "This simply is a reference to the many well-documented cases of slaves who used trades that they learned while enslaved, and they made the most out of a terrible situation. It actually, if anything, highlights the resiliency of black Americans."

He said there are likely people who are not happy that the approved standards focus on "real history and not an ideological spin you see from things like the 1619 Project."

"I think the critics of this, especially people like the vice president, are not acting in good faith," he added. "To pick one line to try to dismantle what our state is doing is very unfair and it's very inaccurate."