Half As Black: The College Board Cowardly Caves to the Right

[Nevilledog]

https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/half-as-black-the-college-board-cowardly

When news broke on Wednesday that the College Board had watered down its high school Advanced Placement curriculum for its African American Studies course, I was reminded of the words of one of the important voices it had removed, Ta-Nehisi Coates. In a seminal piece in The Atlantic published during the Obama era entitled “Fear of a Black President,” Coates wrote, “Acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black.” President Obama, contended Coates, could forge and maintain his coalition by being Black enough for African American voters while not alienating white voters by being another Angry Black Man.

The part of Blackness that apparently most frightens conservative critics—the half they would see removed from the AP course itself—includes two notable facets: Black identity and Black rage. By no small coincidence, and of great concern to any who believe in academic freedom, these are the parts that the College Board stripped out of the course. As The New York Times reported,

The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum.

Among the authors removed are bell hooks (intentionally no capitals), a path breaking author who insisted upon including Black and working-class women in the otherwise white and middle-class world of modern feminism. “A devaluation of Black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years,” hooks wrote, her identity and her long rage clear to any reader. It seems viewing racialized, sexual exploitation not as just a part of our past slave history but as an ongoing act of violence and oppression has proven too much for the censors.

Gone too is Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia who more than 30 years ago coined the term “intersectionality”—a way of describing how race, class, gender and sexual identity overlap. Conservative critics of “intersectionality” agree in theory that the life experiences of a queer Black woman will be different than those of a cis white man. But fundamentally, they intuitively fear enshrining and empowering any identity that upends the established social hierarchy, where they historically have enjoyed a superior position. Unsurprisingly, then, the term “intersectionality” was specifically stricken from the draft AP AAS curriculum where it had earlier appeared eight times, leaving only one mention now in the “optional topics” for a research project.

*snip*