As a chronic Black woman and terminal intersectional feminist, my Library of Alexandria is burning. Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and more incinerated at the hands of the College Board. This — just weeks after Governor Ron DeSantis ’01 banned the AP African American Studies curriculum in Florida — only highlights the juncture between education and politics.
After racial classifications designated who was Black and who was not, capitalism decided who was property and who was not, and disenfranchisement determined who could vote and who could not, conservatism now declares what is history and what is not. This resembles the beginnings of an institutional overhaul of accountability with civil rights-level ramifications. For a community whose dehumanization stems, in part, from the redaction of their intellectual contributions, Black history is rarely acknowledged as a civil right despite the capacity to be known, seen, and remembered being so thoroughly out of reach for African-Americans. It is not just legislation that dictates the societal progression that separates us from the past, but how we teach people to remember Black people.
To cut down AP African-American Studies in the way the College Board has is to cut down a Black history that breathes. Some would relish in the fact that the guillotine came down on the latter end of the course. However, threatening Black epistemologies that unpack the contemporary forms of injustice described earlier in the course aims to historicize racism. To educate on Black history without including how that community reflects on it in recent times is to not educate at all. It defines African-Americans as active but not intellectual, as individuals who can protest and “make a fuss” but not think critically about their oppression and be rendered complacent by receiving legislation instead of intention. Modern Black social and political theory, the spinal cord running between the past and the present, so expertly synthesizes the conduct of oppression that injustice would become unavoidably actionable. The College Board and white conservative politicians cannot contend with such a reality. Instead, they must decapitate Black history and take the contemplation out of it, take the modern criticisms out of it, giving students only the historical building blocks to a Black Tower of Babel that seemingly goes … nowhere?
A quote from Gwyneth Paltrow’s character Georgina Hobart in the show “The Politician” has always struck me: “We can’t agree on policies because we can’t agree on the facts.” What we require children to know or not know will always be political by virtue of the fact that they must primarily use the information that is available to them. DeSantis and the like, fearful of critical race theory but certainly not creative writing, have penned their own narratives and inserted themselves into public education as the architects of true history. Endangering courses that educate on Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, intersectional feminism, etc. paves the way to turning conservative feelings into fact.
The irritation of protest will become the irrationality of protest. “Why do Black people complain so much? What bad thing has ever happened to Black people?” When asking oneself this question in the future, we may reach a point where people won’t have answers not because they ignore presented evidence, but because that evidence won’t exist. When you get to change what the facts are and how they are shared to the learning public, you modify the entire political landscape that we operate on. Paralleling Orwell’s Newspeak in its goal of ultimately effacing every word of protest or rebellion, the public won’t even have the history to conjure ungovernable thoughts that question the Black American condition.
It pains me deeply for modern Black history to not be codified within educational systems, especially by an institution as academically significant as the College Board. Academics and educators in ivory towers making optional Black political theory abuses the very resilience that these ideas were forged as a result of. No, intersectionality does not get to be optional when it could never be for the vast majority of the community you wish to educate others on. No, contemporary sources of Black sociological and political intellect will not fight their way out of the crevices of curriculums. No, Black history will not be forced to earn a seat at the table in a course of its own dissemination.
By removing Black realities from Black history, white conservative politicians hope to be released from the shackles of culpability. Hand constantly cocked back in wait for a retaliation they have anticipated for centuries, they work to extract from curriculums across the nation any evidence that would validate the racial tensions society is yet to surmount. Lawmakers hope to create a future without racial rebuttals.
Black presents will not wait to become Black pasts that cannot be amended. Herein lies the fate of Black history within the American education system. You won’t sympathize with Black suffering because you won’t even be able to fathom how or why it both exists and persists. The tools will simply not be there. If we let such politically-motivated evaluations of what is relevant history go unchecked, it will snowball and overtake more aspects of education until the historical and contemporary basis for protest goes untaught, until activism looks unreasonable.
YVONNE AGYAPONG is a first year in Benjamin Franklin College. Contact her at yvonne.agyapong@yale.edu.