College Board AP Course Tests Our Racial Politics, Too

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Feb 6, 2023

That’s when two prominent Democratic governors who, like DeSantis, are often mentioned as hopefuls for the 2024 presidential race, stepped in and suggested DeSantis should butt out.

Don’t bow to the “political grandstanding” of DeSantis or Florida’s racist and homophobic laws, wrote Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker in a strongly worded letter reported by the Chicago Sun-Times and NBC News, and “refuse to bow to political pressure that would ask you to rewrite our nation’s true, if sometimes unpleasant, history.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom took to Twitter: “DeSantis has decided black history is irrelevant and ‘lacks educational value,’” he tweeted. “‘Don’t Say Gay’ —> ‘Don’t Say Black.’”

Gentlemen, gentlemen!

Fortunately, the College Board released a decision that sounded downright Solomonic in balancing the concerns voiced by both sides.

Some of the most controversial names or concepts have been moved from the main curriculum to a section of optional choices, reducing the sense that certain people or ideas are being rammed down the students’ throats.

Neither version of the AP African American Studies curriculum mentioned critical race theory, which has become a trigger word for the political right, mostly for reasons as detached from reality as a QAnon theory. Professor Crenshaw is not mentioned, although some of her theories are.

While CRT is seldom explicitly taught outside of universities, the term itself has become an object of fixation for many conservatives, who object to K-12 schools emphasizing racism and other forms of discrimination.

In other words, like any great compromise, plenty remains to displease both sides but also enough for both sides to declare victory and go home — until the next historic argument.

There’s another old saying that in academic arguments, the fighting is furious because the stakes are so small. Such is not the case here, where the stakes involve the schooling of the next generations.

And, who knows? They could help decide the next president, too.

“It is astonishing,” James Baldwin once said, “that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.”

Surprisingly, that’s still true. In today’s political culture, people talk a lot about being afraid to speak. But a bigger problem, I find nowadays, is that too many people are afraid to think.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)