The College Board’s pilot Advanced Placement African-American Studies (APAAS) course drew national attention last year when Ron DeSantis barred it from Florida’s high schools for its radicalism and for violating the state’s DeSantis-backed Stop WOKE Act, which blocks public schools’ promotion of concepts derived from critical race theory (CRT).
APAAS, however, is now back and stirring up controversy with a finalized course and a revised curriculum. Florida, South Carolina, and Arkansas had already in various ways withheld full credit from the reworked course. Then, last week, Georgia kicked up a storm by withholding full recognition from APAAS (while still allowing local districts to offer it). Georgia’s refusal to fully approve APAAS has provoked intense blowback from the state’s Democratic leaders. It would be entirely unsurprising were Vice President Kamala Harris to invoke the APAAS controversy during some future visit to Georgia.
Yet no one on either side has offered an analysis of the revised APAAS curriculum. In September 2022, I revealed the contents of the APAAS pilot curriculum, which the College Board had kept secret until then. I showed that the course proselytized for a socialist transformation of the United States, although the socialism in question was heavily inflected by attention to race and ethnicity.
Is the revised and finalized APAAS curriculum still radical and one-sided? Yes. Georgia and the other states are right to withhold full recognition from APAAS, and they would be right to bar it altogether. True, the College Board has removed many of the most controversial readings. They’ve even included an isolated example of political moderation. Yet the APAAS curriculum as a whole remains overwhelmingly radical. This so-called revision is a deception.
Does the APAAS curriculum still violate state CRT laws? I believe it does, although the College Board has tried to disguise the problem to the greatest extent possible. The College Board has employed a series of clever devices to “shrink the target.” Although the curriculum invites and even demands radical readings to flesh out its bare-bones requirements, the College Board has obscured that crucial fact — almost certainly for purposes of political protection.
Let’s expose this radical curriculum, so that states can make informed decisions about whether it’s right for them.
Last year’s dispute over the pilot APAAS curriculum focused on the last of its four units, called “Movements and Debates.” That unit, which spanned the mid 20th century to the present, touched on many current controversies. Again and again, its readings advocated neo-Marxist approaches, with no significant balancing perspectives. It took considerable digging to determine this, since the pilot framework was anything but transparent.
After researching the intellectual affiliations of both the recommended authors and the pilot course’s designers, I argued in late 2022 that the perspective guiding the design of the pilot course was largely that of the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, a student and follower of Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983).
Robinson identified a black radical political tradition generally ignored or downplayed by conventional historians. He found in that tradition a model for the revolutionary transformation of American society, and the world. In particular, he spun out a theory of “racial capitalism,” which brought race into the heart of Marx’s economic theory. Robinson’s contention was that the oppression of non-whites would never be lifted without the destruction of capitalism.
Kelley, especially in his most influential book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002), picked up where Robinson had left off. That book traced the history of black radicals, Marxists, Maoists, and assorted communist splinter groups through much of the 20th century. In particular, Kelley challenged the traditional view that the Black Power movement of the late 1960s emerged out of frustration with the failures and limitations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent civil-rights movement.
Kelley argued instead that a black tradition favoring violent revolution existed before and during the mainstream civil-rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. That radical stream, Kelley argued, could only be fully comprehended if attention was paid not simply to events in America but to the anti-colonial movements and communist revolutions of the Third World. Kelley’s perspective, I argue, continues to govern the revised APAAS curriculum.
Although it’s supposed to be a course in African-American studies, the final unit of the pilot and the revised course begins not with the modern American civil-rights movement but with the international anti-colonial movement in its most radical form. In the pilot program, that meant reading selections from Frantz Fanon, who famously celebrated the healing power of anti-colonial violence and rejected the United States as “a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.”
In the revised course, the key reading for the first APAAS “topic” (the anti-colonial movement known as Négritude, or “blackness”) — is Discourse on Colonialism (1955), by Aimé Césaire, the Martinican intellectual and political leader. Césaire was Fanon’s teacher and was no less radical than his famous pupil. A member of the French Communist Party when he wrote the Discourse, Césaire was trying to reformulate Marxism by suggesting that the anti-colonial movement had superseded the proletariat as the advanced guard of the global Marxist revolution.
In Césaire’s view, Hitler’s fascism was no aberration in the West but rather the logical outcome of Western civilization itself. The West as a whole, including not only capitalism but the West’s great intellectual tradition, must be repudiated and transformed, said Césaire.
As bad as Western Europe has become, Césaire added, its barbarism has been “far surpassed” by the barbarism of the United States. For a new and better society in which the communal fraternity of traditional societies is blended with the productive power of modernity, Césaire suggested that we look to the model of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
By ditching the notorious Fanon for his less known mentor, the College Board has made a change that is no change at all. Note also that the paperback edition of Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism features a lengthy introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley himself. So APAAS teachers are likely to encounter Césaire’s work under the influence of Kelly’s perspective.
The second “topic” of APAAS’s controversial final unit further explores the anti-colonial movement. Here we see the mainstream of the American civil-rights movement, represented by Martin Luther King Jr., juxtaposed with a more radical alternative. On the one hand, this unit assigns an interview with Martin Luther King Jr. on the occasion of his visit to Africa to observe Ghana’s ceremony of independence in 1957. On the other hand we have two photographs, one in which Joe Louis, the famous boxer, sits beside a confident-looking Fidel Castro during Louis’s visit to Cuba in the aftermath of its communist revolution (APAAS p. 233). In the second photograph, the writer Julian Mayfield, the poet Maya Angelou, and several others protest and petition outside the U.S. embassy in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in 1963 (APAAS p. 233).
Heavy use of historical photographs is a peculiarity of the new version of APAAS. Very often we get photographs instead of readings. The pilot course had some photos too, but their number in this new curriculum has very substantially increased. Students are responsible for researching the historical background and context of the photographs, and teachers are charged with filling in that background by providing students with secondary sources. But the curriculum itself often includes only photos with minimal explanation.
This seems to be a way of “shrinking the target.” The photo of Joe Louis and Castro is interesting for obvious reasons, but the photograph of Mayfield and others demonstrating in Ghana is more interesting still. Mayfield, who organized the demonstration, had taken up residence in Ghana after breaking with Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence. As Mayfield grew more radical, he traveled to Cuba and then decamped to Ghana, finding life intolerable in the United States for blacks who rejected King’s nonviolent stance. Other like-minded black American radicals joined Mayfield in Ghana.
Mayfield’s novels and short stories focused less on Southern whites oppressing blacks than on Northern blacks undercutting themselves by succumbing to the supposed delusions of American capitalism. Mayfield, in fact, was one of the first to float the term “racial capitalism,” later elaborated by Robin Kelley’s mentor, Cedric Robinson. Recent scholarship on Mayfield very consciously attempts to elaborate on Kelley’s idea of a black radical tradition that existed in parallel to, and in competition with, King’s nonviolent approach. None of this, however, would likely be evident to state education officials or parents evaluating the APAAS curriculum. There is little more than a picture captioned, “Maya Angelou, Julian Mayfield, and Others Petition Outside the United States Embassy in Accra, Ghana, 1963.”
True, the curriculum adds that the American expatriate activists in Ghana were “presenting a petition of support for (Martin Luther King Junior’s) March on Washington and the end of apartheid in South Africa.” That is true but also incomplete and misleading. The broader context is the radicalism of Mayfield and many of his followers. They supported King’s March on Washington yet considered King’s overall stance far too naïve and moderate.
Mayfield wanted a complete transformation of America’s system, rejecting the idea of integration into the “capitalist American dream.” Recent scholarship has uncovered Mayfield’s radical story and will likely be encountered by teachers and students working to make sense of that photo. For anyone else, including state education officials vetting APAAS, it’s just a nondescript picture.
As APAAS goes on to cover World War II, followed by the heart of the civil-rights movement — Brown v. Board of Education, the major civil-rights organizations, and such — controversy fades. With a topical section on Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and Black Power, followed by a topical section on the Black Panther Party, we return to the radical tradition. Malcolm X, Black Power, and the Black Panthers certainly deserve to be included in a course of African-American studies. In APAAS, however, these sections follow the early radical topics and are followed by still other equally radical topics.
Meanwhile, mainstream black liberalism, as well as any sort of black conservatism, is very poorly represented. Essentially, the final quarter of APAAS consists of the core civil-rights narrative, preceded, paralleled, and followed by the most extreme elements of the black radical tradition, with very little else in the way of political balance. Sadly, that suffices at too many of our colleges and universities. State governments, however, do not need to stand for such bias.
The topic “Black Religious Nationalism and the Black Power Movement” features Malcolm X’s famous 1964 speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” There, Malcolm criticizes the nonviolent tactics of the mainstream civil-rights movement and identifies the struggles of America’s blacks with armed movements of colonial liberation around the world, meshing perfectly with the earlier sections on Césaire, Castro, and Mayfield. The controversial black-nationalist perspective of the Nation of Islam is represented not by any readings but simply by two photographs (APAAS pp. 256-7), leaving it to teachers and students to fill in the context with secondary sources on the Nation of Islam. Leaving readings on Nation of Islam out of the formal curriculum helps deflect public criticism of APAAS.
The topical section of APAAS on the Black Panther Party highlights Malcolm’s inspiration for their stance. Yet the Panthers added a heavy dose of Marxist ideology to Malcolm’s inspiration. Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” served as a kind of bible to the Panthers. “The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program” of 1966, the main reading for this topic, is an evidently socialist program yet one clearly inflected by Malcolm’s black nationalism. The Panther program is notable in particular for making one of the first public demands for reparations.
The next APAAS topic, Afrocentricity, is interesting because in it we find something almost entirely missing from APAAS as a whole — a hint of criticism. According to APAAS, critics of Afrocentricity warn that “it can be a substitute for, rather than a challenge to, Eurocentrism” (APAAS p. 266). It’s striking that APAAS ventures no criticism of, say, the Nation of Islam for calling whites “blue-eyed devils,” or of the Black Panthers for their violence. Yet APAAS does offer criticisms of Afrocentricity. Such criticism makes perfect sense once it’s understood to flow from a leftist perspective, according to which Afrocentricity risks falling into political quietism. From a neo-Marxist prospective, the black radical tradition, not Afrocentricity, provides the real alternative to “Eurocentrism.” APAAS echoes that view.
After Malcolm X and the Panthers, we get two closely related sections, one on “The Black Feminist Movement, Womanism, and Intersectionality” and another on “Interlocking Systems of Oppression” (another name for intersectionality). Here in particular is where the material likely runs afoul of state CRT laws, at least insofar as APAAS can be understood as advocating these ideas rather than merely presenting them for analysis and comparison with competing conceptions.
The only assignment for the intersectionality topic is the famous “Combahee River Collective Statement” of 1977. This is where the term “identity politics” originated along with the idea of multiple, cross-cutting forms of oppression.
The Combahee Statement holds that American political life is “a system of white male rule” best swept aside by a socialist revolution. It treats white women as oppressors and denies that white heterosexual men can bring about positive political change. Yet Georgia law forbids curricula that promote the idea that “the United States of America is fundamentally racist” or advocate “any form of . . . race stereotyping.”
But does APAAS actually “advocate” these ideas, or does it simply present them for analysis and comparison? I would say that APAAS advocates. We can see this in the overwhelming one-sidedness of the curriculum. Also, APAAS formally declares “Intersections of Identity” to be one of the course’s central themes. It offers intersectional analysis as a “skill” to be mastered rather than a controversial concept to be evaluated (APAAS p. 13). While APAAS does float criticisms of Afrocentricity, it provides no such criticism of its readings on intersectionality.
The topic “Interlocking Systems of Oppression” offers yet another way of “shrinking the target.” The only assigned reading is a 1953 short story by Gwendolyn Brooks. In explaining the concept behind the topic, however, APAAS references the work of Patricia Hill Collins (APAAS 270). Although Collins is not formally assigned, teachers and students have to consult her work in order to make sense of the topic. By keeping Collins’s work off the formally required list of readings, the College Board deflects the attention of state curriculum evaluators from her radical writings.
Collins’s 2019 book, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, presents her current take on the issues raised in this section of APAAS. Collins treats intersectionality as a broad topic, difficult to define with precision but best used when harnessed to “resistant knowledge projects” (i.e., politicized knowledge projects) like critical race theory. Collins is at pains to criticize the depoliticization of intersectionality. For her, intersectionality rightly understood must be put to use to dismantle unjust and unequal systems, of which she considers America’s “neoliberal” capitalist system to be one. All of that is entirely consistent with APAAS’s “learning objectives” and “essential knowledge” requirements for this topic. No criticism of Collins is offered.
The next topic, “Economic Growth and Black Political Representation,” is where the sole hint of moderation in the APAAS curriculum occurs. This topic was inserted in response to the controversy in Florida. In particular, this section includes the text of General Colin Powell’s 1994 commencement address at Howard University.
Powell’s speech is powerful and inspiring. In it, he defends the free-speech rights of a controversial speaker from the Nation of Islam who made comments at Howard understood by many to be both anti-white and antisemitic. Yet Powell also condemns such hatred. Powell offers the study of African roots “not as a way of drawing back from American society and its European roots, but as a way of showing that there are other roots as well.” Powell then calls on students to never lose faith in America, “the last, best hope of Earth.” America’s faults are yours to fix, Powell says, not to curse.
Powell’s speech is a gem, yet it’s as a thimble to the ocean of the rest of the APAAS curriculum, much of which is monotonously neo-Marxist, revolutionary, and anti-American. Having inserted it under intense pressure, APAAS makes little effort to compare Powell’s speech with other readings. The “Essential Knowledge” summary of this topic (which identifies the points from the readings that will be on the exam) says nothing about the content of Powell’s speech. This is very unlike APAAS’s treatment of the ideas presented by readings for other topics.
The APAAS curriculum ends with a special week devoted to “Further Explorations in African American Studies.” Teachers and students are given the option to study any one of five topics, three of which are intensely political: “grassroots organizing” (around topics like Black Lives Matter), reparations, and incarceration and abolition (i.e., abolition of prisons and police).
The materials offered for each of these topics make it clear that there is only one right answer. While the reparations issue, for example, is presented as a “debate,” the only debate appears to be over the methods to be used for determining culpability, the financial beneficiaries of reparations, and methods of compensation. In effect, this final unit is a prescription for leftist political activism.
It would not have been difficult for APAAS to present the views of liberal black intellectuals, like Randall Kennedy or John McWhorter. And certainly APAAS could have included writings from black conservatives like Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, or Robert Woodson. APAAS repeatedly ventures into contemporary debates, so why not present the other side of those debates instead of engaging in hairsplitting distinctions between one radical leftist and another? Robin Kelley likes to speak of the “conspiracy of silence” that keeps conventional historians from examining black Marxist radicalism. But APAAS’s conspiracy of silence is directed against contemporary black moderate and conservative thought.
In short, APAAS is still radical, one-sided, political, and propagandistic. CRT laws or not — and most such laws would appear to be violated by this curriculum — no state is obligated to accept such a politicized course. Yes, it’s quite like college-level ethnic-studies courses. But that is the problem. Sadly, these college offerings are politically one-sided. When it comes to K–12 education, however, the people, through their representatives, decide the curriculum. They should reject this course.