[The discipline emerged from Black struggle. Now the College Board
wants it to be taught with barely any mention of Black Lives Matter.]
[[link removed]]

THE MEANING OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES  
[[link removed]]


 

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
February 3, 2023
The New Yorker
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The discipline emerged from Black struggle. Now the College Board
wants it to be taught with barely any mention of Black Lives Matter. _


Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of history at U.C.L.A., notes that
there is currently “a general assault on knowledge, but specifically
knowledge that interrogates issues of race, sex, gender, and even
class.”, Keith Oshiro

 

On Wednesday, February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, the
College Board released its long-awaited curriculum
[[link removed]] for
a new Advanced Placement class in African American studies. Two weeks
earlier, the Florida Department of Education had rejected the course
[[link removed]],
claiming that it “lacks educational value and is contrary to Florida
law.” Then, nearly a week later, Manny Diaz, Jr., the state’s
commissioner of education, released
[[link removed]] a
flyer listing his complaints, based on a pilot version of the course.
They included the fact that there were units on intersectionality and
activism, Black queer studies, “Black Feminist Literary Thought,”
reparations, and “Black Study and the Black Struggle in the 21st
Century.” The Movement for Black Lives—which brought out the
largest demonstrations in American history, in the summer of 2020,
with more than twenty million people participating—was dismissed as
a topic of study.

When the College Board released the revised curriculum, all of the
sections that Florida complained about had been removed.
Representatives of the nonprofit have insisted that they were already
planning to revise the pilot version, and that the onslaught from
Florida had nothing to do with their changes. It is certainly
believable that the preliminary version of the class would have been
revised, but it is unbelievable that right-wing complaints did not
influence the final outcome. Trevor Packer, the head of the Advanced
Placement Program, told
[[link removed]] _Time_ magazine,
last summer, that the Movement for Black Lives had inspired a renewed
effort to get the class under way. He said, “The events
surrounding George Floyd
[[link removed]] and the increased
awareness and attention paid towards issues of inequity and unfairness
and brutality directed towards African Americans caused me to wonder,
‘Would colleges be more receptive to an AP course in this discipline
than they were 10 years ago?’ ” It is hard to reconcile that
inspiration with the decision to excise almost all mention of Black
Lives Matter
[[link removed]],
intersectionality, police brutality, or any of the litany of issues
that shape the experiences of Black people in the United States.
Indeed, there is barely any mention of the Black rebellions of the
nineteen-sixties
[[link removed]],
which were the backdrop to the demands of Black students that Black
studies be included in college and university curricula. These
omissions undermine the legitimacy of the A.P. course and the College
Board itself. They also diminish the power of Black studies to make
sense of our contemporary world.

On Wednesday evening, I spoke to Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of
history at U.C.L.A. and one of the authors whose work was removed from
the revised course. (My work was listed as secondary reading in the
pilot curriculum; it has also been removed.) In our conversation,
which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the history
of African American studies, its connection to political struggle, and
the consequences of the College Board’s actions.

WHAT IS BLACK STUDIES? WHY IS THIS NOT JUST BLACK HISTORY?

This course is not by any stretch of the imagination a course in
African American studies. The College Board says African American
studies is an interdisciplinary approach, with the rigors of scholarly
inquiry, to analyze the history, culture, and contributions of people
of African descent in the U.S., and throughout the African diaspora.
But this is not the definition of African American studies, Africana
studies, Black studies at the university level.

The way that we teach it, in the way that I came up, is really about
examining Black lives: the structures that produce premature death,
that make us vulnerable; the ideologies that both invent Blackness and
render Black people less than human; and, perhaps most important, the
struggle to secure a different future. And so, therefore, a lot of
it’s about interrogating racial categories, understanding the
persistence of inequality, how this is shaped by the very foundations
of Western thought, which is to say, it’s not about making Black
people feel better. It’s not about your accomplishments. I’m sure
that comes in. But, as a scholarly endeavor, it tries to understand
how Black people came into being in the modern world—how that
process through kidnapping, enslavement, the extraction of labor, the
extraction of ideas, was foundational to the modern world. And,
finally, the way that African people really tried to remake and
re-envision that world, through art, through ideas, through social
movements, through literature, through study in action. That’s what
I understand it to be. And that’s not really in this curriculum.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED WITH THE COLLEGE BOARD AND THIS COURSE?

There’s two levels. One is that it’s about Ron DeSantis
[[link removed]] possibly running for
President. I think that’s the most important thing, because, no
matter what we think about DeSantis and his policies, we know he went
to Yale University, and majored in history and political science with
a 3.7 G.P.A., which means that he was at one of the premier
institutions for history. That’s why I get frustrated when people
say he needs to take a class. He took the class. He knows better. He
knows that the culture wars actually win votes. He’s trying to get
the Trump constituency.

So I think this is about Ron DeSantis wanting to run for President.
But I also think that the focus on Florida occludes a bigger story. As
you know, this goes back to the Trump years—well before Trump, but
let’s just talk about the Trump years—the attack on the 1619
Project
[[link removed]], Chris
Rufo
[[link removed]]’s
strategy of turning critical race theory
[[link removed]] into
an epithet by denying it any meaning whatsoever. And creating a
buzzword. That’s actually a strategy that has nothing to do with the
field of African American studies; it has everything to do with
vilifying a field—attacking the whole concept of racial justice and
equity. So, to me, if DeSantis never banned the class, we would still
be in this situation. And although it is true that a number of states
did accept the pilot program for the A.P. class, some of those same
states have passed, or are about to pass, laws that are banning or
limiting what they’re calling critical race theory. So there is a
general assault on knowledge, but specifically knowledge that
interrogates issues of race, sex, gender, and even class.

It’s an ongoing struggle to roll back anything that’s perceived as
diminishing white power. They want to convince white working
people—the same white working people who have very little access to
good health care and housing, whose lives are actually really
precarious, as they move from union jobs to part-time, concierge labor
to make ends meet—that somehow, if they can get control of the
narrative inside classrooms, their lives would be better. Racism
actually damages all of our prospects and futures.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the people who are targeted
are you, Angela Davis
[[link removed]],
myself, bell hooks
[[link removed]].
To say that we’re not radical would be a lie. What does radical
actually mean? What it means, what Black studies is about, is trying
to understand how the system works and recognizing that the way the
system works now benefits a few at the expense of the many. It’s
easy to allow someone to come in, in the name of Black studies, and
say, “We’re going to talk about ancient Africa, and the great
achievements of the Kush of ancient Egypt.” That’s not a
threat—not as much as the idea of critical race theory saying that,
no matter what policies and procedures and legislation are
implemented, the structure of racism, embedded in a capitalist system,
embedded in a system of patriarchy, continues to create wealth for
some and make the rest of our lives precarious. Precarious in terms of
money, precarious in terms of police violence, precarious in terms of
environmental catastrophe, precarious in many, many ways. And I think
people could agree with me that that’s why we do this scholarship:
because we’re trying to figure out a way to make a better future.
You know, that’s the whole point. And if that’s subversive, then
say it, but it’s definitely not indoctrination, because
indoctrination is a state that bans books.

On Wednesday evening, I spoke to Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of
history at U.C.L.A. and one of the authors whose work was removed from
the revised course. (My work was listed as secondary reading in the
pilot curriculum; it has also been removed.) In our conversation,
which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the history
of African American studies, its connection to political struggle, and
the consequences of the College Board’s actions.

WHAT IS BLACK STUDIES? WHY IS THIS NOT JUST BLACK HISTORY?

This course is not by any stretch of the imagination a course in
African American studies. The College Board says African American
studies is an interdisciplinary approach, with the rigors of scholarly
inquiry, to analyze the history, culture, and contributions of people
of African descent in the U.S., and throughout the African diaspora.
But this is not the definition of African American studies, Africana
studies, Black studies at the university level.

The way that we teach it, in the way that I came up, is really about
examining Black lives: the structures that produce premature death,
that make us vulnerable; the ideologies that both invent Blackness and
render Black people less than human; and, perhaps most important, the
struggle to secure a different future. And so, therefore, a lot of
it’s about interrogating racial categories, understanding the
persistence of inequality, how this is shaped by the very foundations
of Western thought, which is to say, it’s not about making Black
people feel better. It’s not about your accomplishments. I’m sure
that comes in. But, as a scholarly endeavor, it tries to understand
how Black people came into being in the modern world—how that
process through kidnapping, enslavement, the extraction of labor, the
extraction of ideas, was foundational to the modern world. And,
finally, the way that African people really tried to remake and
re-envision that world, through art, through ideas, through social
movements, through literature, through study in action. That’s what
I understand it to be. And that’s not really in this curriculum.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED WITH THE COLLEGE BOARD AND THIS COURSE?

There’s two levels. One is that it’s about Ron DeSantis
[[link removed]] possibly running for
President. I think that’s the most important thing, because, no
matter what we think about DeSantis and his policies, we know he went
to Yale University, and majored in history and political science with
a 3.7 G.P.A., which means that he was at one of the premier
institutions for history. That’s why I get frustrated when people
say he needs to take a class. He took the class. He knows better. He
knows that the culture wars actually win votes. He’s trying to get
the Trump constituency.

So I think this is about Ron DeSantis wanting to run for President.
But I also think that the focus on Florida occludes a bigger story. As
you know, this goes back to the Trump years—well before Trump, but
let’s just talk about the Trump years—the attack on the 1619
Project
[[link removed]], Chris
Rufo
[[link removed]]’s
strategy of turning critical race theory
[[link removed]] into
an epithet by denying it any meaning whatsoever. And creating a
buzzword. That’s actually a strategy that has nothing to do with the
field of African American studies; it has everything to do with
vilifying a field—attacking the whole concept of racial justice and
equity. So, to me, if DeSantis never banned the class, we would still
be in this situation. And although it is true that a number of states
did accept the pilot program for the A.P. class, some of those same
states have passed, or are about to pass, laws that are banning or
limiting what they’re calling critical race theory. So there is a
general assault on knowledge, but specifically knowledge that
interrogates issues of race, sex, gender, and even class.

It’s an ongoing struggle to roll back anything that’s perceived as
diminishing white power. They want to convince white working
people—the same white working people who have very little access to
good health care and housing, whose lives are actually really
precarious, as they move from union jobs to part-time, concierge labor
to make ends meet—that somehow, if they can get control of the
narrative inside classrooms, their lives would be better. Racism
actually damages all of our prospects and futures.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the people who are targeted
are you, Angela Davis
[[link removed]],
myself, bell hooks
[[link removed]].
To say that we’re not radical would be a lie. What does radical
actually mean? What it means, what Black studies is about, is trying
to understand how the system works and recognizing that the way the
system works now benefits a few at the expense of the many. It’s
easy to allow someone to come in, in the name of Black studies, and
say, “We’re going to talk about ancient Africa, and the great
achievements of the Kush of ancient Egypt.” That’s not a
threat—not as much as the idea of critical race theory saying that,
no matter what policies and procedures and legislation are
implemented, the structure of racism, embedded in a capitalist system,
embedded in a system of patriarchy, continues to create wealth for
some and make the rest of our lives precarious. Precarious in terms of
money, precarious in terms of police violence, precarious in terms of
environmental catastrophe, precarious in many, many ways. And I think
people could agree with me that that’s why we do this scholarship:
because we’re trying to figure out a way to make a better future.
You know, that’s the whole point. And if that’s subversive, then
say it, but it’s definitely not indoctrination, because
indoctrination is a state that bans books.

I THINK ONE OF THE WAYS THAT THIS DISCUSSION ABOUT AFRICAN AMERICAN
STUDIES HAS BEEN DISTORTED IS THAT THE RIGHT CLAIMS THAT, IF YOU ARE
RADICAL AND ON THE LEFT, IT IS DISQUALIFYING AS A TEACHER AND AN
AUTHOR. IN AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED BY _NATIONAL REVIEW_ ABOUT THE A.P.
COURSE, THE AUTHOR SAID THAT YOU WERE PRIMA-FACIE DISQUALIFIED,
BECAUSE YOUR FIRST BOOK
[[link removed]] WAS
ABOUT THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN ALABAMA. IF YOU HAVE RADICAL IDEAS, OR
RADICAL POLITICS, THEY CLAIM, YOU’RE MORE INTERESTED IN
INDOCTRINATION THAN YOU ARE IN TEACHING. AND SO I WONDER HOW YOU WOULD
RESPOND TO THAT—IF PARENTS ARE CONCERNED THAT, BECAUSE YOU ARE A
SOCIALIST, OR AN ACTIVIST, OR EMBRACE, YOU KNOW, CAUSES ON BEHALF OF
PEOPLE, YOU CAN’T TEACH OBJECTIVELY.

Right, of course it’s ridiculous. We have outright
conservatives—sometimes just actual confessed white
supremacists—who are teaching at all levels. Stanley Kurtz, who
wrote that article, was a professor, he got a Ph.D. And he’s writing
for a partisan publication. But his credentials are not in question.
In fact, he not only is doing that but he’s doing something neither
one of us is doing: he’s writing legislation—literally writing
legislation
[[link removed]] for
states to ban critical race theory. [In an e-mail, Kurtz acknowledged
that a Texas C.R.T. law was partly based on model legislation he
authored.]

Our job, as educators, is to open up all students to the world—which
is the root of university, _universitas_. We can do that and still
take a political perspective, because we are actual people, right?
What I think would disqualify any teacher is to say, “You know what,
we’re not going to touch that. That’s off limits.” Unless it’s
some made-up, useless piece of information. Generally, we teach in a
way that opens up debate and discussion. We encourage disagreement,
between us and our students or between students. We don’t
necessarily reveal in our classes what our political stakes are. We
choose readings that are across the board. And the evidence of it is
there in the syllabi, it’s there in the actual teaching evaluations,
it’s there in the colleagues who decide that we’re worthy of being
hired.

I ALWAYS TELL MY STUDENTS, “I DON’T NEED YOU TO THINK LIKE ME, I
NEED YOU TO THINK FOR YOURSELF. AND I’M HERE TO HELP YOU THINK
CRITICALLY ABOUT EVERYTHING, AND TO ASK A MILLION QUESTIONS AND TRY TO
FIGURE OUT HOW TO ANSWER THEM.” IT IS THE RIGHT THAT IS ACTUALLY
SAYING, “DON’T READ THIS BOOK, DON’T LISTEN TO THIS PERSON,
DON’T HAVE THIS CONVERSATION.” I DON’T KNOW IF THAT’S
IRONIC—IT’S JUST RANK HYPOCRISY. IN THE SO-CALLED CONCERN ABOUT
THE LEFT RULING THE CAMPUSES, WHAT WE ACTUALLY HAVE IS AN ONSLAUGHT BY
THE RIGHT WING TO CONTROL WHAT WE READ, WHO WE TALK TO, AND WHAT WE
TALK ABOUT.

It’s funny, because they were trying to attack you when you tweeted
that the police are not actually helping us and that we have to think
about abolition—and yet no one is called into account for arguing
that we actually need more police and we need to spend more money.
They’re both actual political positions. They’re positions that
could be argued, rationally, with evidence.

IT’S ALL POLITICS; IT’S JUST WHOSE POLITICS DO YOU AGREE WITH?
THEY WANT TO TEACH THE 1776 COMMISSION
[[link removed]],
AND THINK THAT THAT IS O.K., EVEN THOUGH THAT IS ALSO A POLITICAL
VIEWPOINT OF THE WORLD. IT’S LOOKING AT AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH A
PARTICULAR KIND OF LENS, AND THAT’S O.K. BUT, IF YOU LOOK AT IT
THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS, THROUGH A DIFFERENT SET OF EXPERIENCES, THEN
IT’S SOMEHOW INDOCTRINATION, PROPAGANDA, AND SOMETHING THAT SHOULD
BE DISMISSED.

AND YET, DESPITE ALL OF THESE CONTRADICTIONS, THEY HAVE A TREMENDOUS
AMOUNT OF MOMENTUM. THE 1619 PROJECT HAS BEEN BANNED IN MANY
LOCALITIES. EVERY DAY, THERE’S A NEW STATE THAT IS FINDING SOME WAY
TO BAN THE DISCUSSION OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

I work with a number of organizations, but one in particular, called
Communiversity, is a project of Black workers for justice in North
Carolina. And what we’ve been talking about is what they’re
talking about in Detroit, which is going back to the Freedom Schools
idea. The United States might look like Mississippi
[[link removed]] did
in 1960. So, if we cannot provide a fair and objective and useful
education in public schools, then movements will have to create
alternative institutions and structures.

On the other hand, it’s worth fighting at the legislative level, at
the school-board
[[link removed]] level.
And the thing is, the grounds for this were established a long time
ago. Do you remember, back in the nineteen-nineties, the whole
movement to eliminate school boards and put schools in the hands of
mayors
[[link removed]]?
And I’m not talking about the South. I’m talking about New York,
Chicago, places like that, saying that somehow school boards are
tainted. Why? Because they’re grassroots, or have some kind of
relationship to the community.

So the fact is that we’ve been moving in this direction, where you
have government input into a public education. Florida is a good
example, where the former governor Rick Scott was promoting special
incentives
[[link removed]] for
high schools that develop _stem_ programming and none for those that
invest in the humanities at the public-school level. Now, this may not
sound like an attack on critical race theory, but it’s certainly an
attack on critical thinking. What they want to do is reduce public
schools to vocational schools. Meanwhile, if you’re rich, and you go
to private school, you could do anything you want. You can read the
best of literature, you can read the best of art criticism, you can be
free—and that is your ticket to Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford,
and to do whatever the hell you want to do. So it is reproducing this
kind of class inequality. The architecture for doing so is already
there.

THERE IS ONE LAST THING I WANT TO ASK YOU JUST TO REFLECT ON, ABOUT
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY. BLACK PEOPLE WERE BROUGHT TO THIS COUNTRY TO
BE SLAVES. AND WE WERE ENSLAVED FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS. AND THEN, WHEN
SLAVERY ENDED, WE WERE LEGALLY SUBJUGATED FOR ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS.
AND SO IT STANDS TO REASON THAT THE ENTIRETY OF BLACK LETTERS WOULD BE
COMPLETELY BOUND UP IN QUESTIONS OF STRUGGLE, RESISTANCE, REBELLION.
AND THESE ARE THE VERY ISSUES, TOPICS, AND HISTORIES THAT DESANTIS AND
THE RIGHT ARE TRYING TO EXTRACT FROM THE TEACHING OF BLACK HISTORY. SO
I WAS WONDERING IF YOU COULD TALK SOME ABOUT THE DEVELOPMENT OF BLACK
STUDIES, WHICH IS A DISCIPLINE THAT EMERGES OUT OF THIS LONG STRUGGLE
THAT BLACK PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ENGAGED IN, BECAUSE OF THE CONDITIONS
UNDER WHICH WE WERE BROUGHT TO THIS COUNTRY AND THE CONDITIONS THAT
HAVE BEEN FOISTED UPON US TO TRY TO RESIST.

I would just amplify everything you said: the subject of African
American studies, even before it was called that, has been not just
the condition of Black people but the condition of the country. And
not just narrating that oppression and understanding it, and not just
trying to think about ways to move beyond it—to transcend it, to
come up with strategies to try to live—but also understanding
what’s wrong with this country, with the system.

We’re not just interrogating our lives, we’re interrogating
knowledge production itself. And this is the thing that frustrates me,
and I keep reminding people: when we look at what’s being banned,
it’s anti-racist literature, not racist literature. I’ve never
seen any book ban against Thomas Jefferson
[[link removed]]’s
“Notes on the State of Virginia
[[link removed]],”
or John C. Calhoun
[[link removed]],
or Edmund Ruffin’s “The Political Economy of Slavery
[[link removed]],”
or Samuel Cartwright, George Fitzhugh, Louis Agassiz. They wrote
straight-up scientific racism that has been discredited. And yet those
books are not being banned. What’s banned is Toni Morrison
[[link removed]].
And I’m not saying that those racist books need to be banned. We
need to read that, we need to know it. But that they are not the books
being banned—what does that tell us?

So much of that work, including by W. E. B. Du Bois, what they were
trying to do is write texts that both understand and push back against
a whole edifice of extraction, oppression, dispossession. And you
would think that anyone who really believes in the American creed, who
believes in what the Declaration of Independence
[[link removed]] says,
is going to defend anything that tries to make the nation
better—that tries to recognize that, you know, all people are
created equal.

But it’s always an uphill battle. Because we could talk about the
actual physical brutality that this country is built on. But it’s
also built on the scholarship or the mythologies that are written in
texts and taught in schools at every single level, that keep
reproducing the same structure of knowledge. Black studies is supposed
to be an epistemological break, and that’s why it’s
dangerous—because it actually wants to try to figure out a way to
make this country not racist.

* African American history
[[link removed]]
* AP African American Studies
[[link removed]]
* Education
[[link removed]]
* Florida
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* Struggle
[[link removed]]
* radical thought
[[link removed]]
* class
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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