Reviewers of Florida's AP African American Studies sought ‘opposing viewpoints’ on slavery

29 August 2023

MAGA Republicans in Florida drew widespread criticism from historians when they blocked an Advance Placement course on Black studies. The subjects in the course that Republicans, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, objected to included the Black Lives Matter movement and "queer theory."

But according to Miami Herald reporters Ana Ceballos and Alyssa Johnson, Florida Republicans "did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state's attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African-Americans throughout history."

"For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced," Ceballos and Johnson explain in a report published on August 29. "The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach 'may lead to a viewpoint of an oppressor vs. oppressed' based solely on race or ethnicity. In another lesson about the beginnings of slavery, the course delved into how tens of thousands of enslaved Africans had been 'removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe' and how those 'plantations became a model for slave-based economy in the Americas.'"

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Alexander Weheliye, a Black studies professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, believes that the reviewers offered a "complete distortion" of the history of slavery.

Weheliye told the Miami Herald, "It's really trying to go back to an earlier historical moment, where slavery was mainly depicted by white historians through a white perspective. So to say that the enslaved and the sister African nations and kingdoms and white colonizers and enslavers were the same really misrecognizes the fundamentals of the situation."

The Miami Herald's full report is available at this link.

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