Nothing Proves It More Than the Backlash
Feb. 1 — the first day of Black History Month — should have been a day of triumph, as the College Board released the curriculum for its new AP course in African American Studies. Instead, it was mixed with anger and confusion, due to the striking absence of crucial subject matter that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had attacked just a few weeks earlier, but which had appeared in an earlier document from February 2022. Attention focused on missing prominent figures, such as Alice Walker and Angela Davis and the exclusion or marginalization of topics, such as Black Lives Matter, reparations, and prison abolition. These were consigned to a list of “Sample Project Topics: Illustrative Only,” which any state was free to edit as it pleased.
There was no connection between the two, the College Board claimed — and they could be right. Dr. Kerry Haynie, who helped develop the course, called it “a DeSantis sharpie moment,” a ludicrous attempt to retroactively create an alternative reality. “There is nothing real about it,” Haynie told Random Lengths News. “What he has said about the course has been misleading and deceitful. It is unfortunate that DeSantis succeeded in getting the New York Times (and other media outlets) and numerous academics to accept his sharpie lines hook, line, and sinker. He succeeded in getting them to engage in a debate of a figment he created, and not the course framework I played a role in developing.”
But DeSantis was just a distraction, according to Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading figure in the field whose work is central to the controversy. Rather, she said, the issue is that of responding to a much broader backlash that’s been underway at least since the 2020 BLM protests. “When you look at the learning outcomes, you see them taking a scalpel to precisely the ideas that the anti-woke faction has demonized,” Crenshaw told Random Lengths. In fact, “In some ways I think that the best thing that might have happened to them was DeSantis making a big display, when they may have already decided to minimize the ideas that they knew the neo-Confederate faction was going to scream about,” Crenshaw said
Similar backlashes have occurred repeatedly in response to Black freedom advances, and much of what’s being objected to now under the misleading rubric of “CRT” (critical race theory) is concerned with making sense of this pattern, particularly the backlash against the civil rights movement. Much like the “Lost Cause” ideology sought to downplay and disavow slavery while laying the foundation for nearly a century of segregation, colorblind racism plays a similar role today, reinterpreting the civil rights movement as a struggle against individual racist attitudes, rather than against systemic oppression. Today’s backlash seeks to bury both the fact that colorblind racism persists — explaining away dramatic group differences in terms of “personal responsibility” — and that scholars have extensively documented it, so it can be coherently studied, critiqued and countered. The College Board is caught between that backlash and its targets, Crenshaw explained.
“They are obviously a billion-dollar company that has a business model that looks to the 50-state adoption of new product that is suddenly marketable because of 2020,” she said. However, “That same product is not marketable to all the states, particularly the neo-Confederate states, because they’ve said there are features in this product that violate their anti-woke, anti-CRT sensibilities. It strains credulity that it just so happens that the things that could interrupt the 50-state marketing strategy were taken out for pedagogical reasons, after a year and a half of these states, basically one after another, denouncing precisely these aspects of the course.”
Intersectionality Is a Core Concept
Crenshaw is best known for coining the term “intersectionality,” which she described in 2017 as “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects,” adding: “It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.” Not coincidentally, recent Florida laws and regulations have attacked people on all these fronts.
Last February, an internal framework document for the AP course repeatedly identified intersectionality as one of the core concepts in the field of African American studies. Differences between that document and the final framework lie at the center of the controversy, while DeSantis distracts attention with his credit-claiming. “The smoking gun, I think, is in the weeds,” Crenshaw said, referring to all the changes that had been made. But intersectionality is the prime example.
The February document had a section titled “Learning Outcomes” (absent from the final framework) in which the second entry was:
- Identify the intersections of race, gender, and class, as well as the connection between Black communities, in the United States and the broader African diaspora in the past and present.
There was also a 16-page “Research Summary” that described the course development process. Under the heading of “Course Content” (derived from experts) there were two “Research Takeaways” the first of which was:
- Students should understand core concepts, including diaspora, Black feminism and intersectionality, the language of race and racism (e.g. structural racism, racial formation, racial capitalism) and be introduced to important approaches (e.g. Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism).
And in the section “Students’ Expectations for the Course” (derived from student focus groups) intersectionality appeared again in one of four expectations that were cited:
- Students should have an opportunity to learn about lesser-known figures, culture, intersectionality, and connections across time and topics.
In short, the College Board itself made clear that intersectionality is and should be central to African American studies. Yet, the word “intersectionality” appears just once in AP framework, in the list of “Sample Project Topics” that “can be refined by states and districts,” meaning it can simply be removed: “Intersectionality and the dimensions of Black experiences.”
“They just scratched out the intersection of race, gender and class. Just scratched it out. Now what is the pedagogical reason for that?” Crenshaw asked.
When the Florida Department of Education claimed credit for the removal of “19 topics, many of which FDOE cited as conflicting with Florida law, including discriminatory and historically fictional topics,” intersectionality was one of them. Haynie pushed back in a document he shared with Random Lengths, in which he cited four specific examples, which simply reflected the fact that Black women exist, and have done things (though he did not cite the one mention of Black lesbians). By Haynie’s standard, it would have been impossible to erase intersectionality.
Other topics FDOE cited seem innocuous, such as “Population Growth and Ethnolinguistic Diversity,” which in fact wasn’t removed. But three hot-button issues — “Incarceration, Abolition, and the New Jim Crow,” “Reparations,” and “The Movement for Black Lives,” — Haynie noted were “ Included as possible project topic,” which both pushes back against and confirms Florida’s claim that they were removed. That ambiguity, in turn, could still lead Florida to ban the course, while leaving it gutted of crucial compelling content, depriving students nationwide.
A Coherent Defense
While the College Board’s accounts of its dealings with Florida have appeared contradictory, Haynie has presented a consistent, coherent narrative: “From our vantage point as members of the official AP African American Studies Development Committee, we’ve been concerned to see the work of more than 300 college professors caricatured and misrepresented as a political pawn,” Haynie wrote in a co-authored Feb. 1 open letter.
But Crenshaw was dubious. “They keep saying we had 300 scholars. Did those 300 scholars all agree that it was better to add more about Kush and take out Movement For Black Lives entirely? Really?” she asked. “That would be pretty surprising if that could possibly be proved.” In fact, it wasn’t so.
The letter describes “two big choices” that produced the final result. First a decision to prioritize “giving students a historical foundation” over “a thorough exposure to the complexities of the contemporary moment” and second an adjustment to pilot project teachers reporting in inability to “teach all of the historical foundations we were requiring, and still make it to the contemporary topics before the school year ended.”
The first choice was reflected in the Feb. 2022 document, with four thematic units following a chronological structure, which was subsequently presented to a large audience. This macrostructure has not been changed. But the second choice came exclusively from the development committee a comparatively insular group of nine university faculty and four high school AP teachers, according to Haynie. That choice was to prioritize depth over breadth so that “rather than a sprint through all contemporary movements and debates, a brief discussion of reparations one day, then a shift to healthcare the next, then a nod to the carceral state, the AP course requires each student to devote three weeks to an in-depth study of secondary sources related to one such topic in our field,” Haynie wrote.
Questioning The Defense
But the Feb. 2022 document already devoted two weeks to an in-depth essay, so this wasn’t entirely a new development, nor does it engage with the potential to elucidate common themes and contrasting dynamics (including historical roots) shared by the three movements cut from the required curriculum.
Suneal Kolluri, who specializes in the study of AP courses at UC Riverside. File photo
Suneal Kolluri, who specializes in the study of AP courses at UC Riverside, was more broadly skeptical. “Professors in college cover these topics in a few hours per week over a semester. The AP Course has over one hundred days. I’m not sure why there would be no space at all to cover the present-day Black experience, and anti-Black racism specifically,” he told Random Lengths. “Also, I think this latter content is particularly important in our present context.”
In fact, removing that content has a sinister impact, as he noted in an LA Times op-ed titled “Watering down AP African American studies preserves the myth that racism exists solely in the past.” In it, he noted, “This pernicious framing is used by conservative ideologies that cast present-day Black inequality as the fault of Black inadequacy, and to buttress theories of white supremacy.” This is colorblind racism in a nutshell.
The changes are not as simple or clear-cut as Haynie’s description might suggest. The course’s four units are all thematically unified and chronologically structured — so even the “contemporary” topics that were removed were historically situated. After all, reparations are as old as the post-Civil War promise of “forty acres and a mule,” prison abolition is a response to abusive practices rooted in the 13th Amendment, and Black Lives Matter seeks to end practices rooted in pre-revolutionary slave patrols. Similar connections can be made with virtually every topic that’s been marginalized — or, in the case of colorblind racism, entirely removed.
Originally, the third unit, “The Practice of Freedom” from Reconstruction through the Harlem Renaissance, was the second-shortest with 20 topics, compared to 32 topics (the most) in the fourth unit, “Movements and Debates” from early 20th Century anti-colonial movements through the present. Now both are the same size — 19 topics covered in 26 class periods. The third unit is 30% longer, the fourth is almost 20% shorter.
A Closer Look
Getting more in the weeds, the troubling changes come into focus. We can see this by comparing three weekly themes from February 2022 with the analogous themes in the final framework.
The weekly theme, “The Black Feminist Movement, Womanism, and Intersectionality,” with four fully-articulated topics has become “Black Women’s Voices in Society and Leadership” with just two topics in three classes. “Intersectionality and Activism” is gone of course, but the entire subject is substantially reduced.
The weekly focus “Black Power, Black Arts, Black Pride, and the Birth of Black Studies” is pared down to “Black Power and Black Pride,” with Black Arts and Black Pride combined into one class, while “the birth of the field of Black studies from student-led protest and the political and cultural movements of the late 1960s and 1970s” completely disappears — a truly bizarre omission. The deep connection between Black activism and Black studies is foundational to any honest understanding of the field.
A more complex, but instructive example is found in the theme “Diversity Within Black Communities,” where the new content is strikingly more upscale and less critical. Completely gone is the topic of ‘Postracial’ Racism and Colorblindness (which flies in the face of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act”), while two classes on “The Growth of the Black Middle Class” are added. Also gone is “ Politics and Class in African American Communities” focused on “the diversity of political and economic affiliations among African Americans,” replaced with “Black Political Gains” exemplified by three figures: Barack Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Two other topics — “demographic diversity” and “ religion and faith” — are combined into one — demographic and religious diversity — which is then given two classes. The cumulative effect is far more Florida-GOP friendly, whether consciously intended or not.
While Haynie presented a coherent, if debatable account, the same can’t be said for the College Board. In a webinar, Trevor Backer, who leads the AP program, claimed, against all evidence, that “the course framework as published enables contemporary topics to be a more important focus than in the pilot, not a less important focus as has been reported.”
“So much of this suggests political motivation,” Kolluri said. “Maybe these political components were done separately from the conversations had by these professors, but they seem political nonetheless.”
The College Board’s attempt to placate Florida can’t be seen in a vacuum. It took place in the context of that lack of response. Now, unsurprisingly, DeSantis has threatened to kick the College Board out of Florida entirely — to get rid of all its AP courses as well reliance on the College Board’s SAT tests. This is precisely what’s to be expected in light of our history, as African American studies would warn us all. The fight to preserve it is inextricable from the fight to preserve our democracy.