AP African-American Studies

With the culture wars sweeping the nation and especially public schools, it wasn't going to be long before actual academics became the issue. 

Many parents know that AP courses tend to be "a mile wide and an inch deep." They also know that not all college and universities give AP credits. They also are aware that many colleges and universities are starting to back away from the SAT. So change is happening and more to come. 

One thing to consider (which is, sadly, true for all of life) - it's about the money. The College Board is a business and makes huge sums of money.

However, one thing you could say for AP courses is that there is a strong curriculum and a standard for teachers. (This is even more true of the International Baccalaureate program.) Colleges and universities know that "honors" is a term that varies from state to state, district to district and even school to school. Those institutions are looking for students who pushed themselves the hardest and that's why the AP or IB moniker carries such weight.

But as the College Board tries to be current and more comprehensive, they wade into the fight over what students should know and how it is presented. And so it has been for the AP African-American Studies course. Naturally, it's probably easier to update an AP Spanish or AP Calculus course than any of the ones around history and social studies.

Vox has a very good overview article about this issue which has now played into the venal hands of one governor, Ron DeSantis of Florida.  Here's how they sum it up (all bold mine):

The College Board is facing backlash from conservatives who want it to do less — and from left-leaning critics who say it isn’t doing enough.

 How it started:

When the College Board began developing its AP African American studies class amid the social justice uprisings of 2020, it set out to create a pathbreaking high school class that would demand that students deeply engage with African American history, culture, movements, and debates.

The AP African American studies class is being taught in about 60 schools this year, the first of a two-year pilot process. Beginning in spring 2025, students will be able to take the AP exam and be eligible for college credit if they pass. When the College Board released the official framework for the course last week, it was the first time that the course content became publicly available. 

But six months into a pilot program at a few dozen schools, the course is at the center of controversy. An official framework the College Board released last week omits concepts and scholars that experts, including many consulted by the College Board while developing the class, say are core to modern Black studies and essential to include in any college-level survey class. The omissions include some of the most frequently read authors on introductory African American studies syllabuses — syllabuses that the College Board studied while developing the class. 

Naturally, many said that the College Board bowed to Florida but the Board put out a strongly worded but apparently somewhat false statement.  They did however say:

We have made the mistake of treating FDOE with the courtesy we always accord to an education agency, but they have instead exploited this courtesy for their political agenda. After each written or verbal exchange with them, as a matter of professional protocol, we politely thanked them for their feedback and contributions, although they had given none.

What did Florida not like?

Black queer studies, intersectionality, and Black Lives Matter, and the scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robin D.G. Kelley, bell hooks, and Angela Davis, among others. Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz announced that the state would not allow schools to adopt the course until the College Board removed the “problematic” topics it identified. When the College Board released the new framework, those topics were gone.

The College Board has denied these accusations and said the revisions are routine changes that have nothing to do with DeSantis or the current political climate, but correspondence between the College Board and the Florida Department of Education, publicly released Thursday, revealed that Florida has been in contact with the College Board about the course since January 2022.

So what changed?

Topics and sources are reordered, renamed, or removed altogether. For example, a topic on “enslavement in Africa,” covering enslavement in West Africa before the Atlantic slave trade, was removed; a topic titled “African Americans and the US occupation of Haiti” was nixed, though the framework still calls for two days on the impact of the Haitian Revolution earlier in the course.

New topics and texts were also added: “the concept of race and the reproduction of status,” and “the Black Panther Party” in unit four. Others were merged: The final framework combines “the Black Is Beautiful movement” and “the Black arts movement” into one instructional day.

A topic titled “The Black feminist movement and womanism” was removed, along with text suggestions including excerpts from writer and African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, and renowned Black feminist writer Audre Lorde. So was “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” a text from Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a leading scholar of African American women’s history (who endorsed the new framework). The Combahee River Collective, a landmark Black feminist organization, still appears in the framework as essential knowledge, but the group’s statement is no longer required reading.  

Other topics that could help students understand contemporary Black culture, resistance, and protest did not make the cut. “Black vernacular, pop culture, and cultural appropriation” and “movements for Black lives,” along with texts from African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and sociologist Leslie Kay Jones, were not included in the final framework.

What did college faculty who were consulted say?

In its conversations with college faculty, the organization found that “intersectionality” was the second most frequently mentioned topic; “diaspora” was the first.

One participant told them: “Please think about Black women and LGBTQ people as central to the history and future of the African diaspora.” Another added, “Scope is key; [this is] not just Black male studies.”

When the board asked college faculty to rank content topics and themes, “intersectionality, cultural production and appropriation, and structural racism” were selected as the most essential ones, according to data included in the draft framework. Yet none of these topics made it to the official framework. 

Some of the removed texts are widely read in college classes. The College Board’s syllabus analysis found that scholar Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness was the second most common text on the college syllabuses, after W.E.B. Du Bois’s essay “The Souls of Black Folk.”

Why it matters:

After the omissions, the course that remains is mostly African American history up until 1965, with elements of culture. But an introductory-level college class in African American studies, scholars in the field told Vox, should help students connect the past with the present through theory. African American studies is the study of Black resistance to structural racism — and, as such, it was likely always going to be on a collision course with conservative states that would prefer schools not discuss the concept in the first place.  

“You cannot have a non-political African American studies course because its whole invention, its raison d’être came out of political struggle,” said Kelley, a professor of history at UCLA and one of the authors omitted from the new version of the framework. “You can’t professionalize something that was actually created in the midst of protests.”

I don't know that "professionalize" is the word I'd use. I would say "sanitize."

The board’s ultimate goal is to get as many institutions as possible to commit to the course. So far, more than 200 institutions have committed to accepting the course for college credit. But multiple states have banned the teaching of “divisive content” or critical race theory, which could limit the new course’s reach or even lead to broader backlash against the College Board.

And the controversy has broader implications for the future of public schools, too. “Whatever the content of this particular course is, it has become a lightning rod for a much bigger problem,” said Blight. “And that is, how do we support, buttress, and save public school, and who gets to control knowledge and education?”  

Amen to that last sentence because every day on my Twitter feed, there are more and more people who want public education to be some kind of free for all on the idea that "parents know best." 

I want to repeat one sentence from the Vox article because I think it is key:

African American studies is the study of Black resistance to structural racism — and, as such, it was likely always going to be on a collision course with conservative states that would prefer schools not discuss the concept in the first place.  

I'll be blunt. There are white people in this country on the Right who do not believe that you can teach a class about the history of the treatment of Black people and their lives in a way that won't make white kids feel bad. 

I am always amused when those from the Left are called "snowflakes" when that's the term I would assign white parents and their children. Give the kids some credit! 

I recall learning about the Holocaust (which I first did not want to believe because of the scope of what it meant).  But I have German ancestors and my brother lives there. I don't feel guilty but I'm glad to know that history because it cannot ever be repeated (or sanitized). 

Black history IS American history. If this country had never used enslaved people, it's not hard to imagine how different it would look and feel. But it did happen and the Civil War did not change nearly enough.

 I also think there are those white people on the Right who think everything is peachy keen and equal and fair and everything. That's just bullshit. There is a lot to ponder on both sides but everything is not equal for Black people. 

We just learned this today:

Virginia state Sen. Jennifer McClellan overwhelmingly won a Tuesday special election for a vacant Richmond-based congressional district, making her the state’s first Black woman elected to Congress.

In 2023 Virginia is JUST electing a Black woman to Congress? 

But public education is ground zero now in this fight. There should be no bullying on EITHER side and the goal should be to help our children realize that we must unite as a country. Or it's gonna be fighting forever.