Why there’s a fight over AP African American studies

We sometimes treat the Black experience as though it is peripheral to the American experience, when in fact it is central. I wrote a newspaper article long ago now, the headline of which was “Black History is American History.” And the point of it was that while Black History Month, (which started as Black History Week), is a good thing, the ultimate endpoint should be that we have issues of Black history fully integrated into American history. That should be the endpoint, to understand the extent to which the central issues involving the nature of our democracy have played out in a racial context, because the struggle with racism has defined our nation. We’ve been struggling with racism since the very beginning. African American Studies is a step in the direction of the full integration of the Black experience into the American experience.

There has been some controversy about Florida Governor DeSantis and his railing against this new AP course. The College Board released an official curriculum that, by news accounts, has been revised, stripped of much of the subject matter that angered DeSantis and conservatives, including critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

What people seem to be doing is taking positions based on their identity, rather than their knowledge of the facts, whether they’re DeSantis or one of his supporters or one of his critics. That said, the appearance here is that the College Board made a decision for political reasons, rather than substantive, pedagogical, or curriculum-oriented reasons. And that’s a bad thing.

But I should also say that the fact that the outcome here, if it’s politically motivated, may be a bad outcome, doesn’t mean that the concerns that prompted the criticism by DeSantis are wholly illegitimate. And this is what I think people miss. There may still be some legitimate reasons that are giving rise to proposed amendments, some legitimate things that people are reacting to. This is not a debate about what’s true versus what’s false. It’s a debate about the ways in which teachings of history can create narratives about society. Evidently the narrative of the nation embedded in the prior version is something that DeSantis and others were opposed to because it created a sort of orthodoxy about the nation that they could not support.