The College Board’s announcement Wednesday of a revised curriculum for its new AP African American Studies course, after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected the initial curriculum, has partisans aflutter. Conservatives celebrated the changes — including the removal of topics like Movement for Black Lives, scholars associated with critical race theory and the Black queer experience — as a victory for DeSantis in the culture wars. Liberals denounced the curriculum, the first of its kind, as a “watering down” of necessary truths and an erasure of the Black experience.
If the changes were made for political reasons, then that’s cause for concern.
If the College Board chose to eliminate Black Lives Matter and articles on critical race theory from the official curriculum because, as its President Dean Coleman told The New York Times, those materials were “quite dense” and what works for “most people is looking directly at people’s experience,” fine.
If the changes were made for political reasons, then that’s cause for concern. But given the state of American education today and the way millennials like myself were taught history, this course’s existence represents progress and a truer sense of American identity. The way we are taught American history and identity is so bad that this national, structured education on the Black experience and African American contributions to our history is welcome.
In the late 1990s, I attended an elite public high school, one that is often criticized for using racist systems to admit students but was once labeled “the best high school in America.” My graduating class of nearly 1,000 high achievers had fewer than 15 students who were Black or biracial. (I’m of the Asian persuasion, but not the type that was the majority ethnicity in the school.)
The course offerings reflected this reality: Of the dozens of Advanced Placement classes available, none was taught by Black teachers and certainly none was…
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