Last week, Florida changed its school curriculum to require students be taught lies about Black history, including that enslaved people benefited from slavery. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis and Fox News hosts have defended this move, trying to argue that enslaved people learned useful skills.

To be clear: Black people did not benefit from being owned, dehumanized, raped, beaten, terrorized, and killed for generations. The United States government benefited, however -- profiting off the enslavement of Black people for centuries.

The U.S. economy was built on the backs of enslaved Africans who were forced to produce tobacco, sugar, rice, and cotton. But our government refuses to acknowledge the lasting harms of slavery and the unjust world it created for Black people. Instead, public schools push propaganda.

We need to tell the truth, that slavery and discrimination have been integral to our country’s development. And we’re still living with the vestiges of slavery -- with a $14 trillion Black-white wealth gap, ongoing housing discrimination, outrageous healthcare disparities, and a so-called justice system that criminalizes and brutalizes Black people.

Cori Bush’s visionary Reparations Now Resolution argues why the federal government must provide reparations to descendants of enslaved Black people and people of African descent, and outlines the various forms those reparations should take.

We can’t let right-wing extremists whitewash slavery. Please sign now to support Cori Bush’s Reparations Now Resolution, which recognizes the federal government’s responsibility to fix the harms from centuries of enslaving stolen Africans who built this country’s wealth.