[We are deeply concerned about disinformation campaigns that seek
to discredit intersectionality, Black feminism and antiracism ]
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US EDUCATIONAL AUTHORITIES MUST RESIST ‘ANTI-WOKE’ CENSORSHIP  
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, Angela Davis, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X Kendi,
Gloria Steinem, Cornel West and others
March 8, 2023
The Guardian
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_ We are deeply concerned about disinformation campaigns that seek to
discredit intersectionality, Black feminism and antiracism _

A woman holds a sign outside a bookstore where Florida governor Ron
DeSantis was signing copies of his book on 28 February 2023. ,
Photograph: Marco Bello/Reuters

 

As academics, artists, advocates, policy-makers and concerned persons
from different parts of the world, we emphatically oppose the attacks
being waged on educational curricula in the United States and
elsewhere against intersectionality, critical race theory, Black
feminism, queer theory and other frameworks that address structural
inequality. We join the thousands of signatories
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have opposed censoring critical content in public and higher
education. We also agree with the 30 Black LGBTQ organizations
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have denounced the “relentless attacks that have led to book
banning, curriculum censorship, politically motivated purges of
educators, and an exodus of skilled teachers”.

Here we write as concerned individuals in professions ranging from
education and research to policymaking, clinical care, and advocacy
who have benefited from and continue to use intersectionality and a
family of related concepts in our work. In this letter, we express our
concerns about the coordinated and dangerous disinformation campaigns
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seek to discredit and censor vital tools such as intersectionality and
Black feminism. This strategy has surfaced in conjunction with the
recent debacle concerning college-level curriculum for high school
students in the United States, but has appeared elsewhere
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well.

Since the summer of 2020, an emboldened and well-resourced
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in the United States, and increasingly around the globe, has declared
war on hard-fought advances in civil and human rights, social justice
and democratic participation. This faction, which includes multiple
state legislators and governors, has attacked the democratization of
the teaching of US history, attempting to censor concepts that sprang
to life out of decades of struggle against racism, sexism, ableism,
colonialism and related forms of domination.

Promoters of this racially extremist agenda have banded together with
others across the political spectrum to wage a war against their own
invented grievance that they have labeled as “woke-ism”. They have
attacked librarians, surveilled and harassed teachers, canceled
classes, banned books and weaponized the law
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forbid ideas, frameworks and viewpoints in the nation’s schools,
colleges and workplaces. Their campaign has not only targeted
and demonized antiracist work
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but they broadened their attacks to discredit frameworks that Black
women and queer people have produced in order to explain, describe and
transform the conditions of their lives.

The consequences of the assault on these ideas are painfully evident
in the rollout of the College Board’s Advanced Placement African
American Studies (“AP AAS”) curriculum, a college-level course
available for high school students in all 50 states. The College
Board’s interest in launching the AP AAS curriculum – a proposal
that had languished for over a decade – was “reinvigorated” by
the multi-generational, multi-racial, and transnational movement
sparked by the killing of George Floyd. This “racial reckoning” in
the summer of 2020 increased the demand for ways of understanding and
defeating systemic racism. It also ignited a powerful backlash against
the very idea that racial injustice and its intersections with other
forms of inequality delimit the opportunities of African descendants
and other racially marginalized people. Yet the College Board,
a billion-dollar American non-profit
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serves a gatekeeping role in higher education
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remained silent when this conservative backlash collided with their
stated objectives in launching the course. This silence continued even
after the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, denounced an early draft of
the course as having “no educational value” because it included
material pertaining to structural racism, intersectionality and Black
queer studies.

When the College Board finally made public its long-awaited African
American Studies course on 1 February, students were left with a
watered-down curriculum that expunged key lessons, scholarship
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goals
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drafts
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the course
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Contemporary issues such as structural racism, Black Lives Matter,
reparations and prison abolition – issues that resurfaced during
2020’s reckoning with anti-Black racism and increased student demand
for African American studies – were reduced or eliminated. Lessons
and course goals pertaining to intersectionality
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queer studies
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feminism
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been removed entirely or downgraded to untested optional material,
subject to state and local censors. Contrary to the College Board’s
denial that politics played any role in the course revisions, Dr Jason
Manoharan from the College Board disclosed that he deleted
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– identified as one of four core concepts in the AP AAS curriculum
by Black studies scholars – because the term had
been “compromised by disingenuous voices
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and was thus no longer “effective” having been “drained of its
meaning and filled up with political rhetoric”.

In response we ask: drained of meaning for whom? And by what authority
does a single individual or institution decide that a term used by
people all over the world in their work and day-to-day lives was so
valueless as to be legitimately excluded from any classroom, much less
one on African American studies? If all terms can be censored from a
college-level curriculum simply because they have been politically
contested, then the College Board ought not include “liberalism”,
“populism”, “freedom”, “culture” or even “democracy”
in their curricula. When we acquiesce to eliminating words because
opponents have tried to redefine or misconstrue their meaning, we
allow power politics – rather than the pursuit of knowledge – to
dictate the content of our courses.

Contrary to “anti-woke” propaganda and the College Board’s
conclusion, intersectionality is a vibrant and organic
conceptualization of historical and social dynamics. In its most basic
form, intersectionality is a prism that uncovers how structures of
subordination often interact, exacerbating the problem-solving
challenges faced by those who are multiply marginalized. It has been
used and adapted by countless people across the planet to analyze and
address many facets of human experience.

Far from being “drained of value”, intersectional frames have been
indispensable in the work many of us have done to uncover unwritten
histories, to analyze overlooked social problems and to address
current human rights failures. We are just a fraction of the artists,
advocates, academics, leaders and lay people who have incorporated and
adapted intersectional ways of seeing social dynamics in our work and
in our lives. Among us are Black women fighting against state violence
and horrifying rates of maternal and infant mortality in the United
States; Indigenous communities and peace activists from around the
world fighting to end environmental destruction; Dalit women fighting
caste violence in India; laborers resisting the gendered dimensions of
globalization in South Africa; people of color with disabilities
fighting against ableism and racism; migrants, refugees and displaced
peoples around the world resisting sexual assaults and harassment at
borders and refugee camps; and queer youth of color protesting the
censorship of LGBTQ+ and antiracist books.

Today’s students use intersectionality quite broadly but often draw
their references from limited online sources. This should not be their
only resource. Their demands to better understand its contours are all
the more reason to include a guided study of it in the AP African
American studies curriculum.

In light of the multiple ways that intersectionality continues to
matter across multiple boundaries, its foundations in Black women’s
experiences, and the demands of today’s students to understand its
contours, we find the College Board’s “politicized”
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to remove it from the African American studies curriculum to be
disgraceful and dangerous.

Students of Black history know all too well that the suppression of
knowledge and the delegitimizing of Black intellectuals are
tried-and-true tools of racial retrenchment and oppression. Punishing
literacy, criminalizing “divisive concepts”, and discrediting
those who are regarded as dangerous have all been tools of racial
domination in the United States and elsewhere. Compliance with
today’s “anti-woke” imperatives is likewise grounded in
retrenchment – in recovering a mythic past in which the subservient
role of women and the rigidity of race, gender and sexuality is
established and secured. Intersectionality, Black feminism and Black
queer studies have been indispensable in resisting the marginalization
of women, the reimposition of heteronormative ideals and the
rigidifying of gender roles. While it is thus not surprising that they
have been marked for distortion by anti-equity factions,
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is disappointing that any educational institution would acquiesce to
that distortion.

Unless we fight back and hold accountable those who capitulate to
these extremist wars on anti-racist and democratic education, our
capacity to sustain and nurture critical knowledge will be diminished.
While today, the site of censorship is Black studies, tomorrow it
will be another
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another, and another. It will continue to expand until public
education is so compromised that it becomes all but impossible to
teach critical thinking.

There is too much at stake for us to fail.

The arc of history bends backwards if we allow our conceptual assets
to be stripped away. Every time we relinquish valuable insights from
those who have come before, we pass on to future generations the
burden of reimagining and rebuilding livable futures without the tools
that have been fashioned to do that work.

We cannot expect anyone – students or ourselves – to understand
problems we are no longer permitted to name or to prepare for a future
we cannot imagine. The fight for our ideas, our language and our
history is critical to the fight for our lives. Thus, we demand that
the College Board restore critical concepts, scholarship and
frameworks to the African American studies course, and to resist
pending demands
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other states to bend to their “anti-woke” orthodoxy.

More broadly, we call on responsible leaders at the College Board, in
public education, and beyond to lend their considerable resources to
support educators and students whose freedom to teach and to learn is
compromised by state-sponsored repression and threats to their very
wellbeing. In this pivotal moment in which illiberal censorship is
cresting around the world, where the freedoms to think, to create, to
teach and to learn are at stake, it is a betrayal of democratic values
for any responsible leaders to actively participate, to stand by
or to capitulate
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such destruction. Because we know that attacks on knowledge
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fueling threats to freedom, and that repression in one place fuels its
spread elsewhere, we call for global resistance to all efforts to
destroy the vital tools that help us to imagine and create more
equitable and inclusive futures for us all.

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A growing number of activists, intellectuals, academics, and others
have signed this open letter
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by the Action Network

* anti-wokeness
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* Academic Freedom
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* anti-racism
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* Intersectionality
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* Black feminism
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