College Board’s new Black studies curriculum has been 'stripped of subject matter' that offended Ron DeSantis

Far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis set off yet another controversy when he banned, from public high schools, an advanced placement course on African-American studies. That controversy continued to rage on when DeSantis, in late January, visited the Union League of Philadelphia to receive its gold medal award and was greeted by a crowd of angry protesters that included local Democratic officials such as Pennsylvania State Sen. Vincent Hughes and Philadelphia City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson.

The protesters argued that in a city that is about 41 percent African-American, the Union League shouldn’t be giving a prestigious award to someone who had just attacked a perfectly legitimate Black studies course (the first recipient of that award was President Abraham Lincoln back in 1863). Liberal Philadelphia Inquirer opinion columnist Jenice Armstrong, in her January 24 column, angrily declared, “Don’t invite me to anything else at the Union League of Philadelphia ever again. I mean it.”

But despite all the blowback DeSantis has received, the College Board is now offering a different advanced placement curriculum on African-American studies — one that, according to New York Times reporters Anemona Hartocollis and Eliza Fawcett, has been “stripped of much of the subject matter that had angered the governor and other conservatives.”

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In an article published by the NY Times on February 1, Hartocollis and Fawcett explain, “The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum. And it added something new: ‘Black conservatism’ is now offered as an idea for a research project.”

DeSantis’ attack on the AP course, according to the Times reporters, “turned out to be the prelude to a much larger agenda” that also includes “a proposal to overhaul higher education that would eliminate what he called ‘ideological conformity’ by, among other things, mandating courses in western civilization.”

“In another red flag,” Hartocollis and Fawcett report, “the College Board faced the possibility of other opposition: more than two dozen states have adopted some sort of measure against critical race theory, according to a tracking project by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Law School.”

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis claims he banned teaching Black history because it includes 'indoctrination' on 'queer theory'

Read the New York Times’ full report at this link.