Rashida Tlaib: “I thank my good colleague from Vermont for her incredible courage. I know I come from and grew up in the most beautiful…”

“I thank my good colleague from Vermont for her incredible courage. I know I come from and grew up in the most beautiful, Blackest city in the country, the city of Detroit, where every corner is a reminder of the civil rights movement, a reminder of different movements that ensured that our Black neighbors had human dignity. Across the country, far-right extremists, elected officials like the Governor of Florida, are attempting to whitewash Black history and ban books in our children's classrooms. Florida's own Board of Education just approved new Black history standards, and public school students will be now taught that enslaved Black folks benefited from slavery. The audacity. There are no two sides, Mr. Speaker, to slavery. Slavery was cruel, was inhumane. It was a violent practice that denied our Black neighbors and communities their basic human dignity. It had no redeeming qualities. Many of the Founding Fathers in this Chamber even owned human beings themselves. These are just facts. This is our history. You cannot teach the truth about American history without teaching African-American history. We must teach our children, Mr. Speaker, the truth about our Nation's history. That means reckoning with racism, oppression, lynching, dehumanization, and white supremacist violence. We cannot learn from our past if our past is no longer being taught. We will not allow anyone to rewrite our history.…”