By Stanley
Kurtz
Monday, January
23, 2023
Last
week’s rejection by Florida governor Ron DeSantis of the College
Board’s pilot AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course has kicked up a
controversy. Last Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre falsely
accused DeSantis of trying to “block . . . the study of black Americans.”
In reality, DeSantis barred only this specific and very biased APAAS course
plan — while inviting the College Board to revise it. Florida’s Stop WOKE Act actually mandates the teaching
of a series of topics in the history of black Americans, from slavery, racial oppression,
racial segregation, and racial discrimination, to the overcoming of these
injustices, and more. So there is no question here of “blocking the study of
black Americans.” The issue is what specific sort of curriculum a given state
should favor.
The
debate over APAAS has been complicated by the College Board’s secrecy. The
College Board has steadfastly refused to release the APAAS curriculum framework
or associated materials. Nonetheless, I obtained a copy of the APAAS curriculum
and wrote about it in September, laying out its
socialist agenda and
its promotion of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Unfortunately, no one could judge
the accuracy of my characterization because the curriculum remained secret. I
confined myself at the time to a “fair use” discussion of the framework,
declining to publish the full curriculum out of respect for the College Board’s
insistence that it was a “trade secret.” In the wake of the controversy,
however, the Florida Standard newspaper has obtained a copy of
the pilot APAAS
curriculum and
made it public.
In
another new development, I have now obtained a copy of a second document, the
“APAAS Pilot Course Guide,” a manual designed for use by teachers. Taken
together, the curriculum framework and the teacher’s guide expand our
understanding of the course in a way that confirms the wisdom of DeSantis’s
decision.
The most
serious problems in APAAS are in the final quarter of the class (“Unit 4:
Movements and Debates”). This is where the course grapples with contemporary
political and cultural controversies. Overwhelmingly, APAAS’s approach is from
the socialist Left, with very little in the way of even conventional liberal
perspectives represented, not to mention conservative views. Most of the topics
in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views
were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspectives supplied. The
scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political
causes. Now let’s get down to cases.
The
fourth quarter of the course features a topic on “The Movement for Black Lives.” The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was
started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. Yet M4BL
extends far beyond BLM, encompassing “over 170 Black-led organizations.” M4BL
is organized around an extensive policy platform, the “Vision for Black Lives.” That platform is radical, to say
the least. As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police. M4BL’s platform goes further,
however, by calling for the abolition of
all money bail, and
even all pretrial detention. To this end, the “Vision for Black Lives” endorses
federal legislation by “Squad” member,
Representative Ayanna Pressley.
It would
be a mistake, however, to think of M4BL’s extensive policy menu as a mere
attempt to influence the platform of the Democratic Party. As explained by Marxist activist Robin D.
G. Kelley (whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic), the real
purpose of M4BL’s platform is to serve as a “blueprint for social
transformation,” radically changing the structure of American society by
shifting us away from market principles and toward “’collective ownership’ of
certain economic institutions” and a universal basic income.
Kelley
also highlights the expansive nature of what he calls M4BL’s most controversial
demand: reparations. For M4BL, the concept of reparations goes far beyond
massive monetary awards and includes even “mandated changes in the school
curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in
producing wealth and racial inequality.” According to Kelley, M4BL wants these
changes so schools can undermine “the common narrative that American wealth is
the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from
misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education.” In other words,
M4BL (and Kelley) want schools to inculcate the basic premises of Critical Race
Theory.
The
APAAS teacher’s guide presents M4BL’s agenda in a way that is entirely free of
criticism or alternative viewpoints. All the recommended topic readings support
Black Lives Matter, and the “possible focus areas” provided for teachers
uncritically summarize M4BL’s policy platform.
One of
two recommended books for this topic is From #BlackLivesMatter to
Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a socialist, and in no way shy about it. Her
book argues that BLM is a step toward what ought to be a revolutionary
socialist transformation of the United States. While Taylor rejects Stalin’s
authoritarianism, she remains quite fond of Marx and Lenin. Taylor sees
capitalism as synonymous with racism, and she argues that any successful
struggle against racism must ultimately replace capitalism as well. Taylor also
dismisses “colorblindness” as a ploy to disguise the racism inherent in the
capitalist system. (This view of colorblindness is excluded from Florida’s
curriculum by law.)
Far from
BLM fulfilling American ideals, as Taylor sees it, “when the Black movement
goes into motion, it destabilizes all political life in the United States,”
exposing “the foundational lie of the United States as a free and democratic
society.” Taylor ends her book with a quote from the Marxist intellectual and
“revolutionary,” C. L. R. James: “The hatred of bourgeois society and the
readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among
[Blacks] to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the
United States.”
Virtually
all APAAS authors in the final quarter of the course are part of the same tight
group of far-left activists. Taylor’s book carries an enthusiastic blurb from
Barbara Ransby, the author of the other book assigned for this topic; another
blurb from Robin D. G. Kelley, the Marxist radical whose work is the subject of
the very next APAAS topic; and a blurb from Michelle Alexander, whose work is
the subject of a previous APAAS topic. In general, readings by authors assigned
in the final quarter of APAAS endorse, are endorsed by, and overlap with, other
APAAS readings. When it comes to APAAS’s treatment of contemporary policy
debates, conventional American liberals and conservatives need not apply.
The
APAAS topic immediately prior to the topic on “The Movement for Black Lives”
covers “The Reparations Movement.” We’ve just seen that the most controversial
demand of M4BL is reparations, expansively defined to include even mandated
school curricula. So why does APAAS include yet another topic on reparations?
It may not add up as an educational strategy, but it is an effective political
recruiting tool.
The
three suggested items for study in the reparations topic are Ta-Nehisi Coates’s
article “The Case for Reparations,” a button that the teacher’s guide says
serves to “promote” reparations for the Tulsa race massacre, and the copy
of H.R. 40, a federal bill that sets up a
commission to develop proposals for reparations. It’s clear from these
assignments that APAAS itself is promoting reparations. No article criticizing
this highly controversial policy is assigned. In effect, APAAS is pushing students
to lobby for legislation. And by the way, M4BL also endorses H.R. 40, so
students will find the same de facto call to legislative lobbying waiting for
them in two successive topics.
The
teacher’s guide purports to outline “debates” over reparations, yet the
so-called debates don’t actually involve arguments against reparations. By
“debates,” the guide simply means practical disagreements about who exactly
should pay for reparations, who exactly should benefit, and the precise mixture
of monetary compensation and public apology to be demanded. There is no
disagreement about reparations as such. This is political advocacy, pure and
simple.
The
topics on reparations and M4BL are part of a special section of the course.
That section presents four different topics touching on “Contemporary Issues
and Debates.” This special set of four optional topics allows teachers to
instruct students to focus in-depth on only one of the topics in question. The
selection of a single topic out of the four options can be done by a whole
class, by small groups of students, or by each individual student. In addition
to reparations and M4BL, students can focus either on “Incarceration,
Abolition, and the New Jim Crow,” or on injustices and activism regarding
“Medicine, Technology, and the Environment.” Because students choose only one
of the four topics to explore in-depth, all four topics are omitted from the
final AP Exam. Students, the guide says, cannot be held responsible on the test
for the topics they didn’t choose to focus on.
So far
as I know, this omission of four topics from the exam is an unusual
arrangement. By omitting a great deal of material from exam coverage, the
College Board appears to be making the APAAS exam significantly easier than it
might have been. (Some teachers will be able to fit the non-tested topic in
after the test, but others will teach it earlier in the year, prior to the
test.) That’s important, because AP exams are supposed to reveal a student’s
capacity to handle college-level demands. The omission of content from the exam
also allows APAAS to include much more material on contemporary activism,
precisely because students will not have to be tested on that material.
Finally, the omission of course material from the exam allows students to focus
in-depth on a single chosen political cause in a way that makes a great deal of
sense if your real goal is to recruit students into leftist activism.
It would
be a mistake, however, to conclude that the topics most obviously oriented to
contemporary political activism are somehow separated from the rest of the
course. On the contrary, consistent political themes run through the entire
final quarter of APAAS.
In my
initial piece on APAAS, I pointed to
indications that the course would focus on revolutionary violence as advocated
in the work of Franz Fanon, and especially on the reception of Fanon’s writings
by American radicals such as Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. The
teacher’s guide confirms this. The guide stresses Fanon’s interest in
anti-colonial violence. It then connects Fanon’s work to the belief by black
radicals in the 1960s and 1970s that African Americans in the United States
live in a kind of “internal colony,” thereby justifying violence here in
America. The teacher’s guide also emphasizes the Black Power movement’s
critique of nonviolent civil-rights activists. Here’s a quote from the guide on
that issue: “Black Power advocates leveraged Fanon’s notion of the ‘colonized
intellectual’ to critique the respectability politics of some middle-class,
nonviolent activists as assimilationist.” In contrast, I saw little or no
critique of violent radicals by more moderate voices, in either the APAAS
curriculum or in the teacher’s guide.
The
APAAS teacher’s guide touches again on Fanon’s theory of liberating violence in
the topic of “The Black Power Movement” and in the topic of “The Black Panther
Party for Self-Defense” (another repetitive pairing of topics on overlapping
radical themes). If you actually dive into the readings at the end of the
course, you see how deeply APAAS brings this theme of violence into the
present.
Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor’s assigned book on BLM, for example, invokes the ’60s Black Power
Movement’s understanding of American blacks as “colonial subjects in relation
to white society” (heavily based on a reading of Fanon). In effect, Taylor uses
this analogy to justify her contemporary revolutionary message. That
exhortatory passage on blacks’ “readiness to destroy bourgeois society” by C.
L. R. James, with which Taylor concludes her book, for example, also includes
this: “Let us not forget that in the Negro people, there sleep and are now
awakening passions of a violence exceeding, perhaps, as far as these things can
be compared, anything among the tremendous forces that capitalism has created.”
The
teacher’s guide also confirms what I claimed in my initial piece: that the
course will assign Robin D. G. Kelley’s essay “Black Study,
Black Struggle,” a
Marx-inspired argument on the revolutionary purposes to which black-studies
courses ought to be put. Kelley maintains that the real goals of black studies
can be fulfilled only by radical study and activism outside the academy. Kelly
wants students to return to the days of the ’60s radicals who demanded the
creation of black-studies courses while also carrying their commitment to the
“overthrow of capitalism” far beyond mere coursework. The teacher’s guide not
only identifies these themes in the topic on Kelley’s work; it also ties
Kelley’s work to the demands of “The Movement for Black Lives,” the immediately
preceding topic within APAAS. And as we’ve seen, Kelley is a prominent advocate
for M4BL.
In
short, as I argued last September, the final quarter of APAAS conveys and
promotes a story of leftist political radicalism as a model for student
activism. That radicalism is grounded in Marxist socialism, is far from averse
to violence, and is consistent with the core assumptions of CRT. Virtually no
conventional liberal or conservative voices emerge in the final quarter of the
course to contradict this narrative. So the additional information provided by
the still-secret APAAS teacher’s guide, a copy of which I have now obtained,
confirms what we already knew. DeSantis was right to block this course.
Indoctrination in socialism and CRT have no place in Florida schools. Both are
rightly prohibited by law and policy.
And now,
with new evidence confirming the radicalism of APAAS, what will other governors
say and do?
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