For the first time, 60 schools across the county are piloting an Advanced Placement course in African American studies this fall, with a plan to make the course available to all interested high schools in the 2024-25 school year. "If the pilot program pans out, it will be the first course in African American studies for high school students that is considered rigorous enough to allow students to receive credit and advanced placement at many colleges across the country," New York Times journalist Anemona Hartocollis wrote.
Emphasis on “considered rigorous enough.”
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Henry Louis Gates Jr., an expert on African American history and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, told The New York Times that, in history, "there are always milestones indicating the degree of institutionalization."
“These are milestones which signify the acceptance of a field as being quote-unquote ‘academic’ and quote-unquote ‘legitimate,’” Gates said.
But African American history has long been a legitimate field of study that more students could benefit from learning.
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“A solid understanding of how African Americans have shaped America, its history, laws, institutions, culture and arts, and even the current practice of American democracy, sharpens all knowledge about our nation,” Dr. Nikki Taylor, chair of the Howard University History Department, said in a statement.
Trevor Packer, senior vice president of AP and Instruction at the College Board, said the new course will “introduce a new generation of students to the amazingly rich cultural, artistic, and political contributions of African Americans."
"We hope it will broaden the invitation to Advanced Placement and inspire students with a fuller appreciation of the American story,” Packer added.
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High school teachers that were a part of the African American studies pilot met at Howard University, a historically Black institution, this summer to look into the course framework and prepare for its launch.
The course has the “potential to introduce hundreds of thousands more high school students” to African American studies, “doubling the number of high schools offering an African American studies course and the number of students learning about African American studies,” according to the College Board, the nonprofit that oversees the Advanced Placement (AP) program.
The course plan follows a heap of ill-planned legislation banning “critical race theory” in public schools in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—to name a few.
In fact, Republicans are pushing some form of a critical race theory ban in 42 states, according to Education Week’s count of proposed bills.
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The problem is that some of the legislation doesn’t actually name “critical race theory,” and instead uses Republicans’ overly broad redefinition of the phrase to mean anything that makes white students uncomfortable and reveals the truth of racism or prejudice in America.
Critical race theory is actually a framework for interpreting law, which maintains that racism has an undeniable effect on America’s legal core. It has not been taught in K-12 schools, and was never intended for young children but for law school and graduate-level studies.
Republicans have, however, linked the theory to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ "1619 Project," which maintains that “no aspect of the country” has been “untouched by the years of slavery” that followed the first slave ship’s arrival to the coastal port of the English colony of Virginia in August 1619.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell joined 38 other Republican senators in signing a letter last year protesting a plan from President Joe Biden's administration to encourage schools to discuss how racism is prevalent in American society. “Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” the senators wrote to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
Eric Welch, a Republican member of Tennessee's Williamson County Board of Education, told The New York Times he might have a problem with the content in the new AP course, which hasn't been detailed yet. "It would bother me as a school board member to have any course material that was agenda-driven,” he said. Welch added: “We’re trying to educate, not indoctrinate.”
Gates described the AP African American studies pilot in Time Magazine as a significant achievement “that signifies ultimate acceptance and ultimate academic legitimacy.”
“AP African American Studies is not CRT. It’s not The 1619 Project,” he said. “It is a mainstream, rigorously vetted, academic approach to a vibrant field of study, one half a century old in the American academy, and much older, of course, in historically Black colleges and universities.”
Marlon Williams-Clark, a Florida social studies teacher who helped pilot the new AP course, told NPR the reactions from students, most of whom are Black, have been "very positive."
"They have been ready to indulge in conversations, and they don't shy away from it," the educator said. "You know, when we first began the course—on the first day, I said, ‘I cannot offer you a safe space, because, quite honestly, some things that we will talk about in this course could trigger someone, and I wouldn't know that.’”
“So I can't offer you a safe space, but I can offer you a brave space—brave to indulge, brave to ask questions, brave to be curious. And so they've really taken that mantra, and they've just kind of gone full blast.”
Nelva Williamson, a high school teacher in Texas, told The Hill the new course means a chance to thoroughly evaluate eras of history such as Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance through a different perspective.
“In Texas, the Reconstruction Era is kind of skipped over, and it’s looked at through the lens of being a failure,” Williamson said. “But in my own study of Reconstruction, political strength came out of that era of time for African Americans, taking agency over not only their bodies but what they were going to do, and the development of Black towns here in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.
“I’m really looking forward to teaching that to give it a different spin from what our students have been told about it.”
The educator also talked about the importance of introducing an AP African American studies course now. “This course comes at a time when there’s a lot of pushback against African Americans and, in general, people of color,” she said. “There’s a lot of hate out there against minority groups, and the only way that we could break that cycle of hate is through education.”
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