Sharpton: “He’s hitting at the core of liberating people because you can’t hold people down if they’re enlightened.
And if you can censor what they know, then you can in many ways inhibit their behavior.
And it strikes a cord with us when we — those of us that are descendants of those that were enslaved know that our great grandparents — my great grandfather was a slave in Florida and he — it was against the law for him to read or write, and whites would be prosecuted and endangered if they taught a slave how to read and write.
So here we are, three or four generations past, and you’re now going to tell us that, ‘We will decide what part of black history is acceptable and comfortable to us?’ Well, we need to talk about what was uncomfortable for blacks and others, for Latinos, for poor whites, for LGBTQ, and how we dealt with that discomfort.
The history of America is trying to deal with everybody’s plight and this experiment for democracy, not trying to eliminate the parts you want.
And he’s doing it for political reasons, joy.
He feels, ‘If I can do what Donald Trump did,’ Donald Trump launched his political career off of birtherism, saying that Barack Obama was other, and then he went on from there with other racial kind of tomes, so now we have Ron DeSantis, who I call baby Trump, who is now trying to do the baby Trump thing and come with a new racial divide, like he is in some way going to liberate America from its past, rather than to say, ‘Let’s glorify that these people were enslaved and fought their way all the way to where we put a black man in the White House, re-elected him, and have a black woman as vice president today.’ Tell the whole story, baby Trump.”