American Studies

plays a similar role today, reinterpreting the civil rights movement as a struggle against individual racist attitudes, rather than against systemic oppression. Today’s backlash seeks to bury both the fact that colorblind racism persists — explaining away dramatic group differences in terms of “personal responsibility” — and that scholars have extensively documented it, so it can be coherently studied, critiqued and countered. The College Board is caught between that backlash and its targets, Crenshaw explained.

“They are obviously a billion-dollar company that has a business model that looks to the 50-state adoption of new product that is suddenly marketable because of 2020,” she said. However, “That same product is not marketable to all the states, particularly the neo-Confederate states, because they’ve said there are features in this product that violate their anti-woke, anti-CRT sensibilities. It strains credulity that it just so happens that the things that could interrupt the 50-state marketing strategy were taken out for pedagogical reasons, after a year and a half of these states, basically one after another, denouncing precisely these aspects of the course.”

Intersectionality Is a Core Concept

Crenshaw is best known for coining the term “intersectionality,” which she described in 2017 as “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and inter sects,” adding: “It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that frame work erases what happens to people who are sub ject to all of these things.” Not coincidentally, re cent Florida laws and regulations have attacked people on all these fronts.

Last February, an internal framework document for the AP course repeatedly identified intersectionality as one of the core concepts in the field of African American studies. Differences between that document and the final framework lie at the center of the controversy, while DeSantis distracts attention with his credit-claiming. “The smoking gun, I think, is in the weeds,” Crenshaw said, referring to all the changes that had been made. But intersectionality is the prime example.

The February document had a section titled “Learning Outcomes” (absent from the final framework) in which the second entry was:

• Identify the intersections of race, gender, and class, as well as the connection between Black communities, in the United States and the broader African diaspora in the past and present.

There was also a 16-page “Research Summary” that described the course development process. Under the heading of “Course Content” (derived from experts) there were two “Research Takeaways” the first of which was:

• Students should understand core concepts, including diaspora, Black feminism and intersectionality, the language of race and racism (e.g. structural racism, racial formation, racial capitalism) and be introduced to important approaches (e.g. Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism).

And in the section “Students’ Expectations for the Course” (derived from student focus groups) intersectionality appeared again in one of four expectations that were cited:

• Students should have an opportunity to learn about lesser-known figures, culture, intersectionality, and connections across time and topics.

In short, the College Board itself made clear that intersectionality is and should be central to African American studies. Yet, the word “intersectionality” appears just once in AP framework, in the list of “Sample Project Topics” that “can be refined by states and districts,” meaning it can simply be removed: “Intersectionality and the dimensions of Black experiences.”

“They just scratched out the intersection of race, gender and class. Just scratched it out. Now what is the pedagogical reason for that?” Crenshaw asked.

When the Florida Department of Education claimed credit for the removal of “19 topics, many of which FDOE cited as conflicting with Florida law, including discriminatory and historically fictional topics,” intersectionality was one of them. Haynie pushed back in a document he shared with Random Lengths, in which he cited four specific examples, which simply reflected the fact that Black women exist, and have done things (though he did not cite the one mention of Black lesbians). By Haynie’s standard, it would have been impossible to erase intersectionality.

Other topics FDOE cited seem innocuous, such as “Population Growth and Ethnolinguistic Diversity,” which in fact wasn’t removed. But three hotbutton issues — “Incarceration, Abolition, and the New Jim Crow,” “Reparations,” and “The Movement for Black Lives,” — Haynie noted were “ Included as possible project topic,” which both pushes back against and confirms Florida’s claim that they were removed. That ambiguity, in turn, could still lead Florida to ban the course, while leaving it gutted of crucial compelling content, depriving students nationwide.

A Coherent Defense

While the College Board’s accounts of its dealings with Florida have appeared contradic- tory, Haynie has presented a consistent, coherent narrative: “From our vantage point as members of the official AP African American Studies Development Committee, we’ve been concerned to see the work of more than 300 college professors caricatured and misrepresented as a political pawn,” Haynie wrote in a co-authored Feb. 1 open letter.

But Crenshaw was dubious. “They keep saying we had 300 scholars. Did those 300 scholars all agree that it was better to add more about Kush and take out Movement For Black Lives entirely? Really?” she asked. “That would be pretty surprising if that could possibly be proved.” In fact, it wasn’t so.

The letter describes “two big choices” that produced the final result. First a decision to prioritize “giving students a historical foundation” over “a thorough exposure to the complexities of the contemporary moment” and second an adjustment to pilot project teachers reporting in inability to “teach all of the historical foundations we were requiring, and still make it to the contemporary topics before the school year ended.”

The first choice was reflected in the Feb. 2022 document, with four thematic units following a chronological structure, which was subsequently presented to a large audience. This macrostructure has not been changed. But the second choice came exclusively from the development committee a comparatively insular group of nine university faculty and four high school AP teachers, according to Haynie. That choice was to prioritize depth over breadth so that “rather than a sprint through all contemporary movements and debates, a brief discussion of reparations one day, then a shift to healthcare the next, then a nod to the carceral state, the AP course requires each student to devote three weeks to an in-depth study of secondary sources related to one such topic in our field,” Haynie wrote.

Questioning The Defense

But the Feb. 2022 document already devoted two weeks to an in-depth essay, so this wasn’t entirely a new development, nor does it engage with the potential to elucidate common themes and contrasting dynamics (including historical roots) shared by the three movements cut from the required curriculum.

Suneal Kolluri, who specializes in the study of AP courses at UC Riverside, was more broadly skeptical. “Professors in college cover these topics in a few hours per week over a semester. The AP Course has over one hundred days. I’m not sure why there would be no space at all to cover the present-day