CNN analyst Ashley Allison pushed back when fellow analyst Scott Jennings attacked Vice President Kamala Harris and claimed the controversy over Florida’s new Black history curriculum teaching the “benefits” of slavery to enslaved people is a “made-up deal.”

The Florida Board of Education voted Wednesday to approve a curriculum on Black history that includes teaching that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and requires teaching “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Vice President Kamala Harris torched the new curriculum in two speeches on consecutive days, and The Tampa Bay Times published numerous examples debunking the claims of the board’s working group, which is headed by the chair of the  National Black Republican Association.

On Sunday morning’s edition of CNN’s State of the Union, anchor Dana Bash played some video of the speech VP Harris gave, and analyst Karen Finney called it a “stellar moment.”

But when Jennings attacked VP Harris for speaking out against a “made-up deal” and cited the Black scholars who developed the curriculum, Allison pushed back:

SCOTT JENNINGS: Well, it’s amazing to me that how little Kamala Harris apparently has to do, that she can read something on Twitter one day and be on an airplane the next to make something literally out of nothing.

This is a completely made-up deal. I looked at the standards. I even looked at an analysis of the standards in every instance where the word slavery or slave was used.

I even read the statement of the African-American scholars that wrote the standards, not Ron DeSantis, but the scholars. Everybody involved in this says this is completely a fabricated issue. And yet look how quickly Kamala Harris jumped on it.

So, the fact that this is her best moment, a fabricated matter, is pretty ridiculous, in my opinion.

BASH: Let’s get Ashley in.

ASHLEY ALLISON: Well, I’m glad she said — went down, and I’m glad she spoke on the issue.

And just because Black people write it don’t mean — that doesn’t mean it’s going to be accurate. Like, we can disagree as Black people as well. I think what the bigger picture is, is that this is happening in Florida. This is happening in a Florida where you have a governor who has an anti-woke bill, who has a don’t say gay bill, who wants to ban DEI problems, who wants to do — wants to ban Rosa Parks. And now you have — children reading Rosa Parks or other academic books that talk about a diversity of issues. I think, at this panel, we can all agree that slaves did not benefit from slavery, even if the citation says, well, they might have gotten something — but they didn’t have a choice, so that’s not a benefit.

Slaves did not have the freedom to choose if — Ron DeSantis said maybe they could have become a blacksmith, not when they didn’t have the choice to become a blacksmith. And so that was what Kamala Harris is saying.

And I hope, in this moment, when we have such a contentious political environment, that we can all agree that slavery was not a good thing and slaves did not benefit, and then we could move on. But the problem is, the governor, who is the second in the polls for the Republican nomination, won’t do that.

Watch above via CNN’s State of the Union.

The post CNN Analyst Hits Back When Scott Jennings Calls Slavery Controversy ‘Made-Up Deal’: ‘Just Because Black People Write It…’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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