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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.
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.
The government may not be able to tell us, for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean the information isn't out there.
This is why the right loses. It finds itself in a hair splitting debate which it eventually loses. Trying to make 'more accurate' African history courses is not answer. The answer is such courses should not exist at all.
Why not? If people are interested, then I think these courses should be offered as electives.
Think you are forgetting the amount of education of a high school grad even one going to an elite school.
Africans just haven’t figured into the big world events that high school kids don’t know. They’ve had zero influence on major ideologies, political systems, communism versus capitalism etc. The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.
The former I think high school kids need training in bigger things or the latter is just woke training.
This is rather silly. History education is not just teaching about the 'objectively' most important things in the world, otherwise British schools wildly under-study Asia and over-study British history, or at any rate certainly pre-Industrial revolution British history. Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.
It's so blindingly obvious you have almost no history education. Yeah, soul food and rap music is the sum total of the impact of race and African-Americans in American history.
This is the correct answer. Of course African American history is important to know, so simply offering the class as an elective is perfectly legitimate. I would prefer a more general ethnicity course, which covers the issues relevant thereto globally, not just in the US, but still.
This whole thread makes me think that we have people who think that it's "woke" to portray African-Americans, or black people in general, doing anything interesting, important or notable, so I'm going to use it as a point to discuss something else I've thought about for the last couple days...
Some days ago I noticed that there is going to be a new movie called "Chevalier" on a black composer/musician in 18th century France. The way I saw this was noting that far-right social media persons like Lana Lokteff were yukking up how ridiculous the mere idea that such a person might have existed is. "We wuz and shieet" and other trite catchphrases in full display, declarations that wokes are now going to claim that Mozart was black (because the post Lokteff is quoting talks about him as "black Mozart"), that the only reason why this movie is made is anti-white hatred (because the composer is portrayed as facing racism) etc.
Of course, even a modest amount of Googling would show that this movie is indeed about a real person, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The trailer does not appear to show anything that would majorly clash with the Wikipedia article - Chevalier de Saint-Georges did indeed enjoy fame in prerevolutionary France, was an accomplished swordsman, at least was rumoured to have an affair with a female aristocrat, experienced racism (because of course he would, this was an era when there was still slavery in the French colonies, and of course a biopic is going to show the subject facing adversity) and was involved in the French Revolution.
He's not supposed to be a literal black version of Mozart, and the trailer does not even refer to Mozart - it obviously happens in France, and if you know literally anything about Mozart, you know he's an Austrian. Based on the Wikipedia article and other stuff I've read about him, he was a fascinating man, and the only weird thing about there being a movie about him is that no-one has made one sooner. The only weird thing about the trailer is that there's no obvious reference to his duel with Chevalier D'Eon, which would of course have the potential to take accusations of preposterous wokery to stratosphere.
Some comments (not necessarily in Lokteff's thread, maybe in one of the quote threads) indicate that it's still odd that someone would make a movie about such an obscure character(???) or that they doubt Chevalier de Saint-Georges even existed, because, well, apparently 18th-19th century Frenchmen would invent a black composer just so that someone could make a woke movie about him in 2023 to foment white genocide.
This seems also remarkable in the way that if there's one thing where even anti-black racists have sometimes acknowledged black talent to exist, it would be music. Apparently the whole narrative about black accomplishments and innovations just plain don't exist as reached the point where a large portion of the "race realist" sphere recoils at portraying black people as anything beyond literal A. Wyatt Mann caricature types.
His oeuvre isn't notable, private life par for the course for someone of his time, place and class.
Given that Galois still lacks a movie, despite his professional accomplishments being notable in their own right while his non-mathematical behaviour is quite cinematic (involved in the French revolution (1830), spent .5 of a year behind bars, once released get into a duel over women, die in said duel aged only 21), means biopics aren't made in descending order of interestingness of the person depicted.
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