Teach that everything was always fine
There are so many gaps in information to this story that it’s hard to form an opinion on it.
Florida Rejects A.P. African American Studies Class
Florida will not allow a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in its high schools, stating that the course is not “historically accurate” and violates state law.
In a letter last week, the Florida Department of Education informed the College Board, which administers A.P. exams, that it would not include the class in the state’s course directory. Rigorous A.P. courses allow high school students to obtain credit and advanced placement in college.
“As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,” the department’s office of articulation, which oversees accelerated programs for high school students, wrote on Jan. 12.
Inexplicably? My guess is that it’s altogether explicable: the AP people designed the course without checking “Florida law” because it’s not all that normal for states to have laws governing AP courses. By “not all that normal” I mean “deeply weird.”
The letter, with no name attached to it, did not cite which law the course violated or what in the curriculum was objectionable. The department did not respond to questions asking for more details. But last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed legislation that restricted how racism and other aspects of history can be taught in schools and workplaces. The law’s sponsors called it the Stop WOKE Act. Among other things, it prohibits instruction that could make students feel responsibility for or guilt about the past actions of other members of their race.
So that will be “teach nothing” then. Anything could make students feel responsibility for or guilt about the past actions of other members of their race. That can’t be helped, because we live in a country that was founded on and grew with and prospered from a system of chattel slavery. There’s always the potential for contemporary people to feel some guilt or responsibility for that fact.
I’m sure they were going for “inextricably”, but hey, close enough. It’s Florida.
This is a very defensive position, but what I’ve been observing is that conservatives tend to talk about personal responsibilty when it comes to finances and, say, abortion. But when it comes to actually understanding how responsibility for racist actions by their government affects the present day, they take it as a personal affront and deny any sort of “responsibilty.” It’s not intended to make anyone feel bad about being white, at all. It’s to gain an understanding of the historical forces behind racism so that we know why things are the way they are, why there is conflict, and why there were riots in 2020. (I’m not defending riots, I feel like I have to say that due to all the people that unfriended me on Facebook for trying to explain the history of race relations in Minnesota.) People need to know why in order to share empathy which other.
I don’t know the content of the course, but I do know that even though my ancestors came here to the States long after slavery, the United States were shaped by it, and still are.
According to the Washington Post, the law states “A person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part.” Which is far different from making students feel responsibility or guilt–you can’t control how people will react to that information. The AP people say that they don’t tell students what to think; instead they “encourage students to examine each theme from a variety of perspectives, without ideology, in line with the field’s tradition of debates.” Which sounds like education to me.
I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 7th grade*, and it knocked me sideways for a long time (in fact I still haven’t fully recovered), but I don’t think that was a bad thing.
*Our assignment was to find and read an autobiography. We had that in one of our bookcases, so I brought it to our teacher, and she asked if I had my parents’ permission to read it. I lied and said yes, though I don’t think my parents would’ve objected. Well, maybe my mother.
I guess we better not teach anything about past actions of other members of our species, then. You can kiss environmental studies goodbye.
What a Maroon describes the inevitable results of good education. We can learn to recognize how we benefit from past and ongoing structural racism. We should learn a more complete history, not the happy happy claptrap the right wants. Is it now illegal to teach the kids of Florida about the Tulsa Riot, the Jim Crow Laws, the use of the rural justice system in the south to effectively enslave MORE people than occurred under chattel slavery-until WWII when Roosevelt recognized the millions of “convicts” sold to plantations were a black eye that could be used as propaganda by the Axis Powers?
What the right wants is propaganda to train kids to being good little citizens, consumers, soldiers. Nationalist claptrap. Funny…this is the same strategy used by the Chinese Communist Party, especially right now as things begin to teeter there.
If said educational programs do indeed teach the kids to feel “responsibility for the actions of other members of their race” I might have a problem with that. And frankly, there probably are “professors” and writers who would try to do this. But I think the right is riling up the troops. I would bet they found one or two paragraphs which, out of context, might be problematical. But when the kids are taught at home and in their churches nonsense like “Slavery was part of God’s plan to bring the benighted Sons of Ham to Jesus” then schools need to teach reality.
No it does not. You cannot trust the NYT to report fairly when it comes to race, just as it won’t report fairly when it comes to gender ideology.
The law actually says: “A person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”
Prohibiting instruction that a student must feel guilt is not the same as prohibiting the teaching of a fair and honest account of history that could cause a student to feel guilt.
Can anyone quote an actual part of the law that is actually objectionable?
No. What the law actually says is:
“Instructional personnel may facilitate discussions and use curricula to address, in an age-appropriate manner, how the freedoms of persons have been infringed by sexism, slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in sexism, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination, including how recognition of these freedoms have overturned these unjust laws.”
Again, what is the actual objection to this?
The NYT summarizes the law, which is what newspapers do. The section of the bill that ends with your quotation says:
It’s a “principle” of “individual freedom” that “no individual is unconsciously racist…solely by virtue of his or her race.”
“Solely by virtue of” is an escape clause, and absurd. The issue isn’t that people are born racist, the issue is that we absorb racism from the world we live in, because we can’t help it. We grow up in cities that were shaped by redlining, so there are neighborhoods that we think of as dangerous or seedy or both. How do you suppose that plays out over time? It’s not difficult to think of other examples of embedded racism that we absorb without being aware that we’re absorbing them.
The point of that clause is to make teachers afraid to talk about how it plays out.
@Ophelia:
The bill only prohibits teaching what you regard as “absurd”. It doesn’t prohibit or discourage the teaching of an honest, evidence-based account of redlining and its history and current consequences or similar topics.
It may be an escape clause, but it’s not absurd. The issue isn’t that people are born racist or that we absorb racism just as we absorb any other attitude. The issue is the idea that if you are white, then you are (at least unconsciously) racist. The escape clause forms the negation of this entailment: for any race R, it is not the case that if you are R, then you are unconsciously racist.
And I know that’s pedantic, but logic is one of those things I get meticulously passionate about.
Ditto with sexism. Racism and sexism; we’re soaking in it. Simply pointing this out can bring accusations of guilt induction, particularly among those who want to pass off the status quo as a pure meritocracy that justly rewards the “industrious.” Those who lag behind or can’t hack it just have to try harder to get that job or make it to the podium. (Does this sound familiar?) We’re not supposed to look too closely at the ways in which the dice are loaded and the game is fixed. And the cheating isn’t necessarily codified in law; it can be ingrained in the beliefs, values and attitudes of any number of gatekeepers who control entrance into whatever system you happen to look at. It doesn’t take laws to keep an “Old Boys Club” going, but it might take laws to dismantle one: the Old Boys aren’t going to go down without a fight.
Which makes it hard to discuss white privilege and male privilege. This isn’t dredging things up from the past, a settling of scores from the Bad Old Days, it’s current reality. You can’t let bygones be bygones if they’re still ongoing and not “gone.” If your first response is anger, guilt, or resentment towards those pointing out structural inequities, then maybe you’ve got something to feel guilty about. But the point isn’t to instill guilt, but to fix (or rather unfix) the system. Removing unfair advantages, dismantling unearned privilege, and tearing down obstacles to full participation in society, and its rewards and benefits, benefits everyone. We’re at a point in history where we can’t afford to waste human potential. We need all hands on deck, and useful ideas about how to get through the multiple crises we are facing could come from anyone or anywhere.
Repair or healing cannot take place without determining what’s wrong in the first place. Pretending things are perfectly fine, and that your position at the top of the heap is quite natural and justified might not be the position of neutrality you’ve been led to believe it is. It looks like you’ve got something to hide when you try to convince the people at the bottom of a hill that a ski slope is a level playing field.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Teach that everything was always […]
Coel @ 8 –
But do you really think that distinction is so very clear and unmistakable that no teacher anywhere will be afraid to teach honestly and with evidence about redlining and its history and similar topics? Because I don’t.
@Ophelia:
Maybe, yes, in some cases teachers will avoid the topic to avoid controversy.
Overall, I would much prefer if K-12 teachers and college-level faculty and admin could be trusted to act as educators rather than as ideological activists. But they can’t (this is amply documented at K-12 level by Christopher Rufo and others).
So it’s understandable if legislators try to clamp down on that. It would be much better if they both didn’t and had no need to. It would be better if everyone would agree that the best approach is honest, evidence-based teaching and enquiry.
So, if you believe that instructors act as ideological activists (some do, some don’t), it’s better to have legislators act as ideological activists? Sure, that’ll work.
Rufo ain’t the fucker to be documenting anything… He’s an evil little natcon shit. That’s what this bill is really about.
I 100% agree that we need to be able to trust educators not to be activist weirdos, but that also describes most of the Florida legislature and Chris Rufo himself. May as well be citing James Lindsay…
I agree with that at least. Progress!
It would be nice if Florida would explain what exactly is in the course that violates their law. Is there a unit entitled “Why all you white folks should feel guilty about your ancestors’ actions and just go kill yourself, ok”? Or is there something in the vapors and penumbra of the curriculum that oh so subtly is guaranteed to make white kids feel guilty.
Yes.
That is quite literally what elected representatives are for.
The underlying assumption here is the belief that people can, through their actions, drive other people to an inevitable choice of emotion. Out of that patent nonsense arises the thought that other people are therefore responsible for your emotional choices and wellbeing.
Further confounding of this narrative is the idea that we are responsible for the actions of our ancestors, duty-bound to atone for their perceived transgressions. Transgressions which revolve around perceived privileges that come with being born into a technological culture, with the underlying assumption that such a society is somehow superior and has the duty to share their wealth and knowledge and perhaps even impose their way of life on other cultures they come up against.
Racism used to mean the belief that people were doomed to inferiority because of their genetic inheritance, which was unfair since that was something they couldn’t change. Nowadays it means any criticism of another’s culture, demanding instead that one should deny the inherent bias that most have that the culture we grew up in is the best.
So, should I feel guilty that my ancestors didn’t behave the way others expected? I don’t think so. Do I need the legislature to protect me from my own choice of emotions? Not that either. Do I need to feel bad about being born into circumstances that others envy and duty-bound to redress that? I don’t feel that compulsion. There is always someone better-off and someone worse-off than you.
It’s not just Americans (of which I am not one); all cultures attempt to present history in such a light as to enable them to claim the most advantage. It was ever so. The world is unequal in all things, power, privilege, poverty, politics. It was ever so.
@Peter:
There’s quite a big difference here between adults and school children, especially as the latter are a captive audience who can’t just walk away.
Then there’s the compelled-speech issue, where teachers demand that children must voice assent to CRT ideologies on pain of failing the course and not graduating. (A real example of this being the Gabrielle Clark law suit, to which the school capitulated.)
Legislatures are acting properly in protecting children from these things.
If you don’t agree, would you be ok with public schools subjecting kids to hard-sell evangelical Christianity on the excuse that kids are still free to have their own internal thoughts and emotions?
Peter:
I’d say that it’s unfair because it’s not true. I am human and can’t change that. My being human isn’t unfair; it simply is the case.
Some follow-up (NB the OP about holes in the story):
Kevin Drum: Ron DeSantis had nothing to do with changes to the AP African American Studies test
Things really don’t turn around that fast. Florida rejection was based on a draft.
KD is also of the opinion that the Florida bill is a lot of bluster that doesn’t amount to anything real, and I think he has a point.