The Meaning of African American Studies

[Nevilledog]

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/q-and-a/the-meaning-of-african-american-studies

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https://archive.is/XetgV

On Wednesday, February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, the College Board released its long-awaited curriculum for a new Advanced Placement class in African American studies. Two weeks earlier, the Florida Department of Education had rejected the course, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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.

*snip*

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1. K and R