(Jan. 23) After two new reports about the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American Studies Course, reasonable people should have two major objections to the APAAS — one objection to its specific content and one on grounds of broader principle.
This AP course is in the news because appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) rejected it, calling it contrary to a new state law, and then White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre mendaciously said DeSantis “wants to block” the “study of black Americans.” Now, reports in the past four days in the Florida Standard and in the National Review demonstrate just how radical, indeed toxic, the APAAS is in its current form.
Rather than being a neutral, apolitical survey of the subject matter, the APAAS pushes astonishingly one-sided Marxist content that by ordinary definitions is flat-out racist. It also effectively endorses books pushing “the hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it” and justifying “passions of violence” among black people while actually criticizing “nonviolent civil rights activists.” The curriculum and teachers’ guide lack anything that remotely balances those views with more moderate ideas. Moreover, the entire APAAS agenda clearly is designed not just for learning but for promoting left-wing political activism.
One section of the course syllabus, according to the Florida Standard, “includes ‘Black Queer Studies.’ A description states: ‘This topic explores the concept of queer color critique, grounded in Black feminism and intersectionality, as a Black studies lens that shifts sexuality studies towards racial analysis.’”
Huh? This is tendentious stuff even for college graduate students. And the same tommyrot apparently suffuses the entire APAAS enterprise.
Remember, this is for a course in which high school students, minors, can earn college credit. Nobody in good conscience should be using school systems to foist any content- or viewpoint-specific political activism on minor children, much less nostrums so radical, so antithetical to most American parents’ outlooks, and without even the slightest attempt to provide opposing viewpoints or context…. [The full column is at this link.]
