Gov. DeSantis is wrong. Slavery did not benefit Black people.

Last month, I drove to Buffalo, N.Y., for a family reunion of relatives on my mother’s side. She’s long gone but five of her siblings were there, along with what had to be more than 75 cousins.

Relatives traveled from as far away as Australia to attend our three-day lovefest. We had a great time reconnecting and taking photos. At one point, I took a break from playing kickball and catching up with my kinsmen to consider how far my family — and so many others — have come. And how people like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis want to erase so much of that journey.

My mother was born in 1934 in a small town in North Carolina. I grew up hearing her talk about having to use a separate entrance at the movie theater, attending racially segregated schools, and other day-to-day indignities of living in the Jim Crow South. She got away from all of that by attending a historically Black college, North Carolina Central University in Durham, where she met my dad during her senior year. They eventually relocated to Washington, D.C., in 1967, where she worked as a school librarian.

Her parents followed a different escape path. As Uncle Ronald Corpening reminded us while praying over our food at the reunion, in 1959, our grandparents Paul and Helen loaded up a station wagon with their youngest children and everything they owned and moved from Morganton, N.C., to Buffalo in search of a better life.

Up north, life continued to be hard. My grandfather struggled to find work. But we’re a loving family that leans on prayer and each other to get through. And we got through.

Now, all these years later, the descendants of Paul and Helen Corpening had gathered together to celebrate being a family.

There was my cousin Lisa and her husband, both retired Buffalo police officers who relaxed outside the Johnnie B. Wiley Amateur Athletic Sports Pavilion, named in honor of her late father-in-law. Another cousin, Debra Collins, who retired as a deputy city manager of Alexandria, Va., was flanked by her two beautiful daughters.

Then there was Tami McGee, chief of human resources for the Buffalo school district, who had just made an impressive run to first base in kickball. Cousin Doretta Corpening works as a medical assistant. Four of my mother’s surviving siblings — Mary Jo, Wanda, Vanda, and Ronald — presided over the festivities in their navy blue family reunion T-shirts as the youngest among us jumped in an inflatable bounce house.

As we gathered to take a group photo, I marveled at how each of us is living out our version of the American dream. Despite all the odds that were stacked against us from the beginning, we are living our ancestors’ wildest dreams.

But here’s the thing: My family’s story isn’t unique. It’s one shared by many Black families, and it’s one that’s every bit as American as apple pie and baseball. Our journey from Africa in the bowels of slave ships, through enslavement and the degradation of the Jim Crow South, was one of struggle but also one of triumph.

When I learned Gov. DeSantis and some others in Florida are backing new standards that will have middle school teachers tell students that Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them “skills,” I was furious.

My ancestors didn’t benefit from slavery.

Slavery was an especially ugly chapter in American history and is still a painful era to revisit. It’s a difficult subject — I understand, believe me. But it should not be whitewashed or downplayed by teaching students that some of the enslaved “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” as the new Florida standards specify.

The vast majority of enslaved Africans never reaped the benefits of anything they may have learned toiling in cotton and tobacco fields under a blazing sun. Most died in bondage, never owning anything, much less themselves.

The so-called “peculiar institution” destroyed countless generations of Black people, as did state-sanctioned racial discrimination that, until not all that long ago, denied Black people the right to vote, among other things. This nation will never be able to chest thump about American exceptionalism until it makes amends for the generations of enslavement and discrimination against Black people that helped create the vast disparities that are so evident, even to this day.

It will take much more than creating a national holiday in honor of Juneteenth, the day that enslaved Africans working in Galveston, Texas, finally learned that they had been freed.

It will take more than the creation of a national monument honoring Emmett Till, a Black teenager whose horrific death in 1955 helped galvanize the civil rights movement, which President Joe Biden authorized last week.

It will even take more than reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans and those who lived through the Jim Crow era.

America will never be able to move on from its history if we are still fighting about what that entails and how it gets taught.

That weekend in Buffalo, I didn’t think about all of that. I just looked out at that sea of smiling, loving faces that I’m proud to call family and thought: We did it.

Despite the odds, we are still here. We not only survived as a family but thrived. That happened in spite of everything our ancestors faced during slavery — not because of it.