At this point the Sunshine State is just a sundown town

Gov. Ron DeSantis Rejects College Board's African-American Studies Course on Grounds of State Law Violation

The Sunshine State continues its quest to be a sundown town.

According to a recent report, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has rejected the College Board's request to approve an African-American studies course in his state, citing that the course violates state law. DeSantis' administration reportedly rejected the Advanced Placement (AP) program in a letter to the College Board from the Florida Department of Education.

This decision follows DeSantis' cynical “Stop W.O.K.E Act” signed into law last April, which aimed to eliminate Black scholarship from Florida schools.

The rejection letter stated that "as presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value," according to National Review.

The College Board describes the supposedly lacking course this way: “The interdisciplinary course reaches into a variety of fields—literature, the arts and humanities, political science, geography, and science—to explore the vital contributions and experiences of African Americans.”

Howard University, the famed HBCU that had a hand in piloting summer institutes to test the APAAS, promised it would “deepen and strengthen the AP program’s longstanding commitment to serve diverse communities with culturally relevant and challenging coursework.”

Oddly enough, a Florida high school in Tallahassee was among the 200 nationally to pilot the course. A teacher there, Marlon Williams-Clark, had this to say about his outlook on it when interviewed by NPR:

I'm excited that these students are able to have that exposure that I wasn't able to have until college, and so they'll go into college having a stronger sense of history. For some of them, they have a stronger sense of self. And for other students, it will just have - be a stronger sense of understanding. Unfortunately, when we're not exposed to someone else's experience, it may be hard to walk in those shoes to understand their experience when they may have grievances or, you know, they are expressing an experience that is different than yours. And so I think this class will help bring together an understanding of the African American experience.

Speaking of that godawful rag, the NR says DeSantis - the American governor most loud about ensuring thought diversity on college campuses - is in the right for blocking students from accessing the AP African-American studies course because it “proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States.”

Further, they argue:

Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, bars any K–12 attempt to promote the idea that color blindness is racist. Yet most of the readings in the final quarter of APAAS (Unit 4: Movements and Debates) reject color blindness. One of the topics in that unit is explicitly devoted to “color blindness.” There, APAAS suggests reading CRT advocate Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, best known for his theory of “color-blind racism.” Overall, the readings in the final quarter of APAAS — the quarter chiefly devoted to ideological controversies rather than to history per se — are extraordinarily one-sided. They promote leftist radicalism, with virtually no readings providing even a classically liberal point of view, much less some form of conservatism. If DeSantis were to approve a course pushing the idea of “color-blind racism,” he would effectively be nullifying his own Stop WOKE Act.

So, the APAAS warrants banning because it includes ideas about the concept of “color blindness” that offends the palate of emperor DeSantis and his ideological police.

What about the Black family in Florida who wants their children to learn about uniquely African American perspectives that have contributed to the marketplace of ideas? Should they be prevented from accessing that knowledge because white families and the politicians who serve them exclusively don’t care for it?

Suppose Flordia’s law prevents any school of thought from challenging the Eurocentric views about classical liberalism espoused by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the National Review, and other dogmatists. In that case, those laws are morally corrupt, and they demand disobedience.

Let’s speak plainly about the hypocrisy of the right wing. They use the language of “free speech” and open discourse while actively endeavoring to suppress both. The parallels between days passed when laws were used to control and exclude Blacks match up neatly with today’s efforts by thought-controlling white politicians to limit the studying of those past actions.

Just because you pass laws demanding students be taught the law is colorblind doesn’t make it so.

I’ll keep making the point that nowhere in the United States are there Black governors or elected officials seeking to outlaw white thought, white history, or white scholarship until someone recognizes the one-direction animus of anti-CRT lawmaking.

At the very most, we’re asking for inclusion in the canonical thinking available to all. Our heritage is vibrant and deep, with contributions that have been essential to our nation's story as we know it today – and our experience is worthy of review by fair-minded and curious learners who recognize its uniqueness.

It’s not “woke” that we should stop. It’s cheap suit politicos who gain the world by putting the conscience of good people to sleep.