College Board AP Course Tests Our Racial Politics, Too
Sometimes people who want to show you how clever they are only end up exposing their own ignorance.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stumbled into that hole in a news conference just before Black History Month, as he tried to explain why he supported his education department’s rejection of an Advanced Placement African American Studies course created by the nonprofit College Board.
State officials announced in January that they had rejected the course because of six areas of concern — “Black Queer Studies,” “Intersectionality,” “Movement for Black Lives,” “Black Feminist Literary Thought,” “The Reparations Movement” and “Black Struggle in the 21st Century.”
Also blocked were works by Angela Davis; Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneer of critical race theory; and Gloria Jean Watkins, more widely known as bell hooks, among other Black authors.
DeSantis’ objection: The board’s newly created Advanced Placement curriculum on African American history offers a lesson on “queer theory” that may run afoul of the state’s new Parental Rights in Education law, mocked by its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Actually, that law applies mainly to third graders and below, not so much to college-bound high schoolers.
But, asked for examples of what troubled him about the AP test, which is administered to high schoolers nationwide, the governor quickly came up with “queer theory.”
“This course on Black history,” he told reporters, “what (is) one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now, who would say that’s an important part of Black history, queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids.”
Actually, I know more than a few scholars and others who would say James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes and Chicago’s very own Lorraine Hansberry, just to name a few iconic Black gay and lesbian figures of the recent past who would argue that “queer theory” covers an “important part of Black history” — and American history, too.
But the DeSantis administration decided earlier this month to bar high school students from taking the new course, claiming its lessons run “contrary” to the “Don’t Say Gay” law and that it “significantly lacks educational value.”
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