Florida Reps Slavery Remark Sparks Criticism: A 15-year-old video of Florida state representative Kimberly Daniels saying to a church, “I thank God for slavery,” has surfaced. This has led to growing criticism about her role in developing new black history standards in that state. Daniels is known in Christian circles around the world as “the Demon Buster.”
“The ‘Thank God for Slavery’ political ploy was taken out of context from a message I preached 15 years ago. The message was not about slavery but about overcoming obstacles in life as a believer of Jesus Christ,” Daniels said in a statement to The Christian Post Tuesday. “Taking it out of that setting and putting it in any other context is simply slanderous.”
In the 18-second clip from her 15-year-old message, Daniels appears to be crediting historic slavery for her Christian faith.
“I thank God for slavery. I thank God for the crack house. If it wasn’t for the crack house, God would have never been able to use me how he used me now,” said Daniels, a former at-large city councilwoman from Jacksonville, who also leads the nondenominational Spoken Word Ministries. “If it wasn’t for slavery, I might be somewhere in Africa worshiping a tree.”
But as recorded in history, Christianity existed in Africa much before it did in the West.
In the first or first half of the second century AD, Christianity first reached North Africa. The BBC highlighted that North African Christian communities were among the world’s first. According to legend, Mark, one of the four evangelists, carried Christianity from Jerusalem to Alexandria on the Egyptian coast in the year 60 AD.
Daniels currently sits on the board of the African American History Task Force, which helped to develop the black history standards that were approved last week for public school students in the state. The standards include a line about teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
In her statement to CP, Daniels acknowledged that even though she was appointed to the task force by Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz, “I never participated in any conversation about the state’s Black History standards.”
“I was never consulted about these standards. I disagree with and would have immediately challenged and resisted any notion that slavery was a benefit to African Americans,” the Florida Democrat said. “I am a Black woman who was born in the early 1960s. I understand the atrocities of racial oppression and Jim Crow. I lived it.”
On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris criticized the state’s new black history curriculum as “propaganda.”
She allegedly stated, “They dare push propaganda to our children,” according to the Associated Press, in Jacksonville. “How is it possible that anyone could suggest that there was a benefit to being subjected to this degree of dehumanization in the midst of these atrocities?”
The new black history requirements were supported by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, as a deterrent to left-wing indoctrination.
The standards, he claimed, “are probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later, later in life,” despite the fact that he was not involved in their development. However, the truth is that everything there is based on fact.