DeSantis is right about AP African-American Studies.

It's even more radical than I thought.

In this post, I discussed Ron DeSantis’ decision to nix the College Board’s radical AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course in Florida. I noted that Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, called the decision “incomprehensible.”

Jean-Pierre accused DeSantis of trying to “block . . . the study of black Americans.” Like much of what comes out her mouth, this statement is false.

DeSantis barred only a specific APAAS course plan. In fact, as Stanly Kurtz points out, Florida’s Stop WOKE Act actually requires the teaching of a series of topics in the history of black Americans, including slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination.

Thus, Jean-Pierre is lying when she claims that DeSantis is blocking the study of black Americans. And the Washington Post is misleading its readers when it worries that DeSantis’ decision means the end of organized visits by students to sites where blacks once were lynched.

But is the APAAS program really as radical as Stanley Kurtz has said? Discussion of this question has been hampered by the College Board’s refusal to release the APAAS curriculum framework and associated materials. The refusal itself is telling, but it’s not conclusive.

Stanley overcame this problem to some extent by obtaining a copy of the APAAS curriculum, and laying out its socialist agenda and embrace of Critical Race Theory (CRT). However, he confined himself to a “fair use” discussion of the framework, declining to publish the full curriculum out of respect for the College Board’s insistence that it was a “trade secret.” Thus, no one could judge the accuracy of his descriptions.

Now, however, the Florida Standard newspaper has obtained a copy of the pilot APAAS curriculum and made it public. In addition, Kurtz has obtained a copy of a second document, the “APAAS Pilot Course Guide.” This is a manual designed for use by teachers of the course.

Taken together, these documents confirm that DeSantis was right to nix APAAS as constituted. They demonstrate that, in Stanley’s words:

Overwhelmingly, APAAS’s approach is from the socialist Left, with very little in the way of even conventional liberal perspectives represented, not to mention conservative views. Most of the topics in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspectives supplied.

The scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political causes.

More specifically:

The fourth quarter of the course features a topic on “The Movement for Black Lives.” The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. . . .

M4BL is organized around an extensive policy platform, the “Vision for Black Lives.” That platform is radical, to say the least.

As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police. M4BL’s platform goes further, however, by calling for the abolition of all money bail, and even all pretrial detention. To this end, the “Vision for Black Lives” endorses federal legislation by “Squad” member, Representative Ayanna Pressley.

Biden’s press secretary and her boss, the American president, might think it’s incomprehensible to stand in the way of a high school course that advances uncritically a vision that includes defunding the police, abolishing all money bail, and ending pretrial detention. DeSantis is right to disagree.

But the radicalism of the Movement for Black Lives and the Vision for Black Lives, around which the final quarter of APAAS is organized, goes well beyond undermining law enforcement in America:

As explained by Marxist activist Robin D. G. Kelley (whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic), the real purpose of M4BL’s platform is to serve as a “blueprint for social transformation,” radically changing the structure of American society by shifting us away from market principles and toward “’collective ownership’ of certain economic institutions” and a universal basic income.

Kelley also highlights the expansive nature of what he calls M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, the concept of reparations goes far beyond massive monetary awards and includes even “mandated changes in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality.”

According to Kelley, M4BL wants these changes so schools can undermine “the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education.” In other words, M4BL (and Kelley) want schools to inculcate the basic premises of Critical Race Theory.

Will APAAS at least include criticism of these ultra-radical doctrines? No such luck:

The APAAS teacher’s guide presents M4BL’s agenda in a way that is entirely free of criticism or alternative viewpoints. All the recommended topic readings support Black Lives Matter, and the “possible focus areas” provided for teachers uncritically summarize M4BL’s policy platform.

One of two recommended books for this topic is From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a socialist, and in no way shy about it. Her book argues that BLM is a step toward what ought to be a revolutionary socialist transformation of the United States.

While Taylor rejects Stalin’s authoritarianism [I suppose we should be grateful for that], she remains quite fond of Marx and Lenin. Taylor sees capitalism as synonymous with racism, and she argues that any successful struggle against racism must ultimately replace capitalism as well. Taylor also dismisses “colorblindness” as a ploy to disguise the racism inherent in the capitalist system. [This view of colorblindness is excluded from Florida’s curriculum by law.]

Taylor’s radical Marxism carries the day in APAAS. Stanley shows that “virtually all APAAS authors in the final quarter of the course are part of the same tight group of far-left activists.”

Here’s the College Board’s view of what constitutes fair debate about the radical agenda it’s peddling:

The teacher’s guide purports to outline “debates” over reparations, yet the so-called debates don’t actually involve arguments against reparations. By “debates,” the guide simply means practical disagreements about who exactly should pay for reparations, who exactly should benefit, and the precise mixture of monetary compensation and public apology to be demanded.

There is no disagreement about reparations as such. This is political advocacy, pure and simple.

This reminds of what Leninists used to say about dissent: “Within the party, everything; outside the party, nothing.” (Not that they actually believed the first part of this dictum.)

The Marxist ideology of APAAS is clear. What does the course teach about using violence to advance the goals of this ideology? At a minimum, it justifies violence. Stanley says:

In my initial piece on APAAS, I pointed to indications that the course would focus on revolutionary violence as advocated in the work of Franz Fanon, and especially on the reception of Fanon’s writings by American radicals such as Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. The teacher’s guide confirms this.

The guide stresses Fanon’s interest in anti-colonial violence. It then connects Fanon’s work to the belief by black radicals in the 1960s and 1970s that African Americans in the United States live in a kind of “internal colony,” thereby justifying violence here in America. The teacher’s guide also emphasizes the Black Power movement’s critique of nonviolent civil-rights activists.

Here’s a quote from the guide on that issue: “Black Power advocates leveraged Fanon’s notion of the ‘colonized intellectual’ to critique the respectability politics of some middle-class, nonviolent activists as assimilationist.” In contrast, I saw little or no critique of violent radicals by more moderate voices, in either the APAAS curriculum or in the teacher’s guide.

The APAAS teacher’s guide touches again on Fanon’s theory of liberating violence in the topic of “The Black Power Movement” and in the topic of “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense” (another repetitive pairing of topics on overlapping radical themes). If you actually dive into the readings at the end of the course, you see how deeply APAAS brings this theme of violence into the present.

If you’re not already convinced that APAAS justifies insurrectionary violence, you can read Stanley’s dive into those readings.

Now that APAAS has been conclusively exposed for what it is, the ball is in the court of the rest of America’s governors. Will they step up and block this radical Marxist course? Or do they favor the indoctrination of a generation in racialist, hate-America ideology of the kind that leads to police officers being attacked and courthouses being set on fire?

Any governor, Republican or Democrat, who won’t stand with DeSantis needs to be defeated as soon as possible. And needless to say, so does a president whose spokesperson equates the radicalism of APAAS with the study of black Americans.