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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31035 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Just saw the headlines about DeSantis banning an AP African-American Studies course. According to AP news, "Florida education officials did not specify exactly what content the state found objectionable."

I have two questions about this.

  1. What reason would there be to not say what about the content was objectionable? Would it violate copyright, or some kind of NDA?

If the DeSantis administration's objections to the content are reasonable, then sharing the content would make it impossible for intellectually honest people to say that DeSantis doesn't want the history of American slavery to be taught. Because the objections are left ambiguous, a person can fill in the blanks with whatever best fits their priors, and if someone who doesn't have exposure to current year progressive narratives on race, then their priors probably are "those backwards hicks just don't want their kids to learn things that challenge them." If I hadn't updated my priors since the debates on evolution and intelligent design, that's what I'd assume is happening. But because I've been paying some attention to cultural changes this past decade, my prior is now that some version of disparate impact/critical race theory/systemic racism/Ibram X Kendi's personal philosophy is in the course. But like my hypothetical leftist, I'm using my priors to fill in blanks that ideally the government would be filling in for me.

  1. Is there any information anywhere online about what material was in this course?

The government may not be able to tell us, for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean the information isn't out there.

There's a wikipedia article about the course that talks a little about its development. The College Board also has their own page about it that link to articles from last August by outlets like Time and the New York Times that describe some of the curricula at a high level. From an interview with a teacher involved in a pilot program for the course:

Mr. Williams-Clark, who teaches at Florida State University Schools, a laboratory charter, said he sticks to state standards for history and literature and was not worried about falling afoul of laws that aim to restrict education about race.

“I think people need to understand that critical race theory is not an element of this course,” Mr. Williams-Clark said. “As far as the 1619 Project, this course is not that either. There might be elements that cross over. But this course is a comprehensive, mainstream course about the African American experience.”

From CBS (quoting Henry Louis Gates Jr.):

Henry-Louis Gates, Jr., one of the country's foremost experts on African American history, helped develop the AP African American Studies program. He told TIME that the class "is not CRT. It's not the [New York Times'] 1619 Project. It is a mainstream, rigorously vetted, academic approach to a vibrant field of study, one half a century old in the American academy, and much older, of course, in historically Black colleges and universities."

In a statement to CBS News, the College Board said it has been working on this course for nearly a decade, and that it is "designed to offer high school students an inspiring, evidence-based introduction to African American Studies."

...

In a statement, Trevor Packer, the senior vice president of AP and Instruction at the College Board, said the class "will introduce a new generation of students to the amazingly rich cultural, artistic, and political contributions of African Americans."

"We hope it will broaden the invitation to Advanced Placement and inspire students with a fuller appreciation of the American story," he added.

This is the bit from Wikipedia that raises questions for me:

Advocates of the launch of AP African American Studies argue the course will help attract more African American students to AP programs and will bolster minority scores. According to 2019 data, 32% of black students passed their AP exams compared to 44% of white and Asian students respectively. Some information regarding the course's structure and exam have not been released; College Board will reveal more about the course as the pilot program progresses. Additionally, College Board described that AP African American Students would further "[attract] Black and Latinx high school teachers"

If it's in line with other, established AP courses then good. But if it's being set up as an easy course to give black students a sure and soft pass, so that it will "bolster minority scores", then that's not good.

Imagine a hypothetical Irish-American Studies course. It could either be rigorous about the interconnections between Ireland and the USA, or it could be an easy course that relies heavily on stereotypes about Paddy's Day celebrations, Irish cops, the Kennedys, and the presentation of shamrock at the White House every year for Paddy's Day green beer corned beef and cabbage leprechauns gimme my A now thanks.

I don't know if Gates is telling the truth, but if he is, then DeSantis is in the wrong here.

I went through a link chain to figure out who/what Crenshaw was, and I ended up at the Time Magazine article, which does provide some useful context.

"While the Reconstruction era after the Civil War is often skimmed over in high school U.S. history classes, AP African American Studies delves into progress made at that time, as well as how the roots of today’s mass incarceration system can be traced back to that era."

That's where my alarm bells went off. Mass incarceration is critical race theory. It's a conspiracy theory which, depending on which version you hear, states that the reason 13% of the population makes up 52% of the arrests is that either A. they're not actually committing more crime, the police just have it out for them because they're black or B. they are committing more crime, but there's deliberate social conditioning to make them do it (because they're black).

I mean, I'm totally sympathetic to the claim that the existence of prison labor provides incentive to arrest more people and hold them for longer. I'm also sympathetic to the claim that people whose jobs depend on the existence of prison will try to arrest more people and hold them for longer to protect their job security. The part of mass incarceration that always loses me is when people make race a part of it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the reason that America bought slaves from Africa wasn't because they had a pre-existing, innate antipathy towards Africans; it's because Africa was doing the selling. There is no similar reason I can think that would motivate the prison-industrial complex to go after black people, specifically. And every time I've asked a leftist to provide me with a reason, they just say "racism," and I've never found that satisfactory, because the vast majority of racists don't take pleasure in inflicting pain on a particular race for the sake of it, they're just indifferent to it and/or care about it less than they do pain inflicted upon members of their own race. I could argue that white people in power feel less guilty arresting black people than arresting white people, so they target black people to lesson their guilt over the horrors of the prison-industrial complex, but without any supporting evidence, I'm inclined to assume the other explanations for 1350 are more accurate. And even if the hypothesis I just created has truth to it, it doesn't connect to Reconstruction, like the paragraph says.

Sorry if I come across as dismissive in the above paragraph. I want to be more open-minded. f anyone reading this wants to make a case for racial mass incarceration as the result of systemic racism, I'd appreciate it and I promise not to belittle you.

states that the reason 13% of the population makes up 52% of the arrests

27% of all arrests. It's only in the 50% neighborhood for homicide, robbery, and gambling.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-43

Henry Louis Gates is the guy best known for attempting to break into his own house, then throwing a fit when a police officer stopped him, and then hung around for an hour until his identity could be confirmed.

That is what Henry Louis Gates is most famous for among poorly read people. And if you think he is some sort of wokester, you are sadly mistaken.

He has had a tv show for ~ 10 years, which he's surely more famous for than being arrested when his front door jammed.

Also many reasonable positions which support trusting him:

The enemy of individuality is groupthink, Gates says, and here he holds everyone accountable. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies field—especially those campaigning for government reparations for slavery—by insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. "Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that."

(critical theory) that in fact is rarely taught below the graduate level...

To succeed on the pilot AP African American Studies test, students will have to understand the concept of intersectionality, a way of looking at discrimination through overlapping racial and gender identities, and know that while it was written about by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw—a leading thinker on critical race theory

Those absolute scumfuck liars. What else can you possibly say about the CRT gaslighting campaign at this point?

the history of the reparations movement and Black Lives Matter activism

Oh boy, I wonder what the "research" on those will be about.

in-depth lessons on the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast and medical programs, often seen as taboo topics to cover in class because critics historically smeared the group as violent and communist.

Of fucking course.

And just quoting them is banworthy, apparently. Looks like I was on the list.

Your comment is almost all heat.

I even happen to be in complete agreement with you that critical theorists, with the assistance of corporate media, are 100% gaslighting the American public on these matters. I share your anger about that. But the point of this space is not to vent our anger at one another or at our outgroups. There are times and places for that sort of thing, but this is the space where we try to have difficult discussions with people who disagree with us.

And you were just warned about this, not long after a ban of a day, and a ban of a week. You've got to cool down. This time you get two weeks to do it.

the history of the reparations movement

Gates, the guy speaking:

The enemy of individuality is groupthink, Gates says, and here he holds everyone accountable. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies field—especially those campaigning for government reparations for slavery—by insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. "Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that."

It's rather even handed. He doesn't support the reparation movement!

I wonder when AP History classes on Nazism start covering Winterhilfswerk.

in-depth lessons on the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast and medical programs, often seen as taboo topics to cover in class because critics historically smeared the group as violent and communist.

Plenty of violent groups do good things for people in the 'hood. It gets them good publicity and a small core of supporters. Saddam Hussein created public welfare programs.

And Al Capone set up a soup kitchen precisely to repair his public image. That the Black Panthers were "smeared" as being violent and Communist is nonsense, they were Marxist-Leninist in ideology. As to violence, well - that's one of those 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' questions, but certainly they didn't think the struggle would be won by handing out flowers.

To add on to this, my understanding is that these supporters, esp. if geographically clustered well, enables the coverup of activities and other forms of support that allow the organisation to exist stably.

Some of it does make sense when one considers that many such societies started as kinship or mutual-aid organisations. It does seem like a pretty central modus operandi for underworld groups.

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