AP African American Studies adds new and ugly dimension to leftist indoctrination in high school

Years ago, Richard Rorty, the pragmatist philosopher, defended the leftist slant at American colleges and universities with a kind of thesis-antithesis approach. Focusing on the teaching of U.S. history, he said that in high school students should learn the basic facts with a conventional narrative and in college they should study challenges to that narrative (from the left, of course).

Whatever one thinks of this dialectic, it was never going to satisfy the left. The left wants to inculcate a radical, America-is-evil narrative as early as possible and to both those who attend college and those who don’t. And so it has — starting in elementary school via black history month.

AP History courses are an ideal vehicle for preaching serious anti-Americanism to high school students. As Stanley Kurtz points out, AP courses are controlled by the College Board which uses them to act as an unelected national school board for a wide swath of subjects and students. This effectively nullifies state and local control over course content and imposes what, in part, amounts to a national curriculum.

Moreover, because these courses can provide students with college credit, the College Board has a plausible argument for modeling its AP courses after their college counterparts. When it comes to history, the college counterparts are often radical.

AP U.S. History was the opening salvo in this effort to teach America’s students that their country is evil and that whites are oppressors. I wrote about this development here and here (for example).

Next came AP European History. This was an opportunity to attack Western Civilization as a whole.

Now comes AP African American Studies (APAAS). It provides an opportunity to indoctrinate high students with the teachings of Critical Race Theory and, as we shall see, even more incendiary, more explicitly Marxist theories.

The College Board denies that this is what its course will do. Tellingly, however, it has withheld the course’s curriculum framework from the public.

But Kurtz was able to obtain a copy. He reports that the curriculum is even worse than I imagined.

I imagined that the course would be slanted towards the teachings of black leftists like Ta-Nehisi Coates. I imagined that it would peddle standard identity politics.

But AP African American Studies goes further than that. It promotes a version of black radicalism that considers the teachings of Coates, for example, too tame. According to Kurtz:

There are four topics in the final week of the course, for example, one of which is “Black Study and Black Struggle in the 21st Century.” That topic covers “reflections on the evolution of Black studies and the field’s salience in the present through a text by scholars, such as Robin D. G. Kelley.” Not until you actually read Kelley’s essay, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” do you discover a thoroughly political critique — from the left — of black student activists and their allies.

Kelley warns that simply establishing safe spaces and renaming campus buildings does nothing to overthrow capitalism. Authentic black studies, argues Kelley, can be perfected only through revolutionary study and activism outside of the academy. In Kelley’s view, norms of objectivity that dominate the mainstream academy must be rejected in favor of Marx’s call for “a ruthless criticism of everything existing” — followed by fearless struggle against the powers thus exposed. . . .

This pattern repeats for almost every topic in the final quarter of APAAS, which covers “movements and debates” from about the 1950s up to the present. The topic descriptions sound neutral, but the readings almost uniformly consist of neo-Marxist agitation — pleas for a socialist transformation of America, inspired by African Americans and infused with their cultural style. APAAS’s “debates,” such as they are, explore precisely what sort of leftist radical you should be.

To Kelley, for example, the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates are too preoccupied with the personal trauma of racism to serve as inspirations for revolutionary action. And that tiny distance between Coates’s quietist repudiation of America’s core story and Kelley’s activist Marxism describes the location of APAAS on the political spectrum.

“Revolutionary action”? “Fearless struggle” against “everything existing”? This sounds like a direct threat to “our democracy.” Liberals should be appalled. Instead, they seem to be on board.

How did Kelly, a Marxist revolutionary, become the central figure in section of the course that deals with current African American history? The explanation is straightforward. One of Kelly’s disciples was responsible for formulating this part of the curriculum:

Five individuals sit on APAAS’s curriculum “content writing team,” one of whom is a high-school teacher and four of whom are scholars. Of the four scholars, Joshua M. Myers of Howard University is the one whose expertise matches the subject matter of the last quarter of the course. Myers is an acolyte of Cedric Robinson and a close intellectual ally of Robin D. G. Kelley. Myers’s last book was a 2021 biography of Robinson, for help with which he chiefly thanks Kelley in his acknowledgments. Myers’s writings are filled with laudatory references to both Robinson and Kelley.

In a 2018 article, Myers invokes Kelley to argue that Robinson’s idea of the “Black radical tradition” should be synonymous with black studies itself. (“Black studies,” “African American Studies,” “Africana Studies,” etc. are used synonymously, and with different capitalization strategies.) Myers bemoans the false objectivity of historians whose writings “rarely target capitalism for condemnation and destruction.”

Black studies, says Myers, should properly be thought of as an “antidiscipline,” rather than a conventional academic field, precisely because it resists the classically liberal assumptions of an academy more committed to scholarly detachment than to human liberation. Writers like Robinson and Kelley, says Myers, are rightly less interested in making a “historiographical contribution” than in producing a “political intervention.” In short, Myers, whose course-content writing responsibilities would have focused on the final quarter of APAAS, is deeply committed to a political mission for black studies. In Myers’s eyes, the purpose of black studies is the advancement of human liberation through the dismantling of capitalism and the reconstruction of society along lines suggested by the black radical tradition (as interpreted by Robinson and Kelley). The last of APAAS’s four curriculum sections is certainly consistent with that view.

Consider, too, the course’s unit on anticolonial movements. Kurtz informs us:

The first topic in that unit explores the writings of. . .Frantz Fanon, particularly Fanon’s influence on black political movements in America. Fanon’s paean to the healing power of anticolonial violence was a major influence on the revolutionary plans of the radical groups and Maoist political parties chronicled in Kelley’s book Freedom Dreams. Before Kelley, Cedric Robinson analyzed Fanon by emphasizing his interest in revolutionary violence, and then touting this aspect of Fanon as a model for American blacks. . . .

Fanon was deeply hostile to America, calling the United States “a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.” That tallies well with Robinson’s interpretation, which stresses Fanon’s hostility to Western civilization. Robinson particularly likes the following passage from Fanon: “When the colonized hear a speech on Western culture, they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand.” There might be a case for including material like this if some critic of Fanon was also “close to hand.” Yet like most of the topics in the final quarter of APAAS, high-school students are offered the passionate and powerful writings of an ultraradical figure, with no balancing viewpoints provided.

“The healing power of anticolonial violence”? America as “a monster”? This sounds like a call for domestic terrorism. Liberals should be appalled. Instead, they seem to be on board.

Kurtz maintains, persuasively, that APAAS clearly encompasses CRT — whether defined narrowly as the body of thought descended from legal scholar Derrick Bell and taken up by colleagues like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, or broadly, as almost any theory that looks at classically liberal accounts of race through a skeptical eye, especially as influenced by Marx. Accordingly, the course runs afoul of laws that bar the promotion of CRT-based concepts in K–12.

But, as Kurtz says, no state or school district is obligated to tolerate indoctrination like that inherent in this course, whether a CRT law is on the books or not. It’s bad enough to teach high school students that America is evil and that Western Civilization is rotten to its core. But to preach to high school students the need for revolutionary struggle, or even to entertain it as an option, is beyond the pale.

A society that would allow this is as sick as Frantz Fanon supposed ours to be.

AP African American Studies should not be taught at any school in the land. Governors, legislators, and state and local education officials should do everything they can to make sure it isn’t. If they don’t, voters must hold them accountable.