If anyone cares, a couple pieces from one of the few people who've actually seen the curriculum (since it's been kept secret), which explains why conservatives and anti-CRT folks would have a problem with this.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corn...llege-board-with-ap-african-american-studies/
https://www.nationalreview.com/corn...merican-studies-program-violates-florida-law/
Key point is that it's not an African American
history class, it's an African American
studies class. The objection is not about the teaching of the history of African Americans, it's mainly in the fourth quarter of the course where it mainly goes over from teaching of black history to black studies, i.e. exploring theories and readings from the extreme radical marxist position, and not counterbalanced by another position. As the National Review points out, the readings are not just not balanced by conservative readings, they aren't even balanced by traditional liberal readings.
This class is meant to mimic college "____ Studies" curricula, which while frequently involving some history, are primarily political and activist curricula.
I'm not particularly animated by this issue at all, so I don't really care. I agree with the author of those National Review pieces philosophically (if his description is correct - can't know because its being kept secret, which is always a great sign). But if this and future gender studies, transgender studies, etc AP classes come to pass, they will be avoided by most of the smart kids who will continue to take AP classes in science, English, history, etc. The only unfortunate part is that some schools only have a handful of APs, and I regret that some schools will drop AP Biology or Physics for this.
Note: I fully support teaching African American history as part of American history, including all the ugly parts like slavery, violence, segregation, and ongoing inequalities. I'm just not a big "_________ Studies" guy at all.
The College Board hasn’t made it easy to figure out what APAAS teaches. Not only have they kept the pilot-curriculum framework secret, but the framework itself is opaque. There are four topics in the final week of the course, for example, one of which is “Black Study and Black Struggle in the 21st Century.” That topic covers “reflections on the evolution of Black studies and the field’s salience in the present through a text by scholars, such as Robin D. G. Kelley.” Not until you actually read Kelley’s essay, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” do you discover a thoroughly political critique — from the left — of black student activists and their allies.
Kelley warns that simply establishing safe spaces and renaming campus buildings does nothing to overthrow capitalism. Authentic black studies, argues Kelley, can be perfected only through revolutionary study and activism outside of the academy. In Kelley’s view, norms of objectivity that dominate the mainstream academy must be rejected in favor of Marx’s call for “a ruthless criticism of everything existing” — followed by fearless struggle against the powers thus exposed.
This pattern repeats for almost every topic in the final quarter of APAAS, which covers “movements and debates” from about the 1950s up to the present. The topic descriptions sound neutral, but the readings almost uniformly consist of neo-Marxist agitation — pleas for a socialist transformation of America, inspired by African Americans and infused with their cultural style. APAAS’s “debates,” such as they are, explore precisely what sort of leftist radical you should be.
To Kelley, for example, the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates are too preoccupied with the personal trauma of racism to serve as inspirations for revolutionary action. And that tiny distance between Coates’s quietist repudiation of America’s core story and Kelley’s activist Marxism describes the location of APAAS on the political spectrum.
www.rollingstone.com
