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A couple of weeks ago, in the week of Jan 16 thread, there was a discussion of the kerfuffle re Florida refusing to offer the pilot of AP African American Studies. There were a couple of minor developments last week. First, the course description is available here
Second, Florida specified its objections here
Now, I am not a fan of most "studies" courses, because, in my limited experience, they tend to lack rigor and often push a political viewpoint, which is both a disservice to students and, to the extent that students are required to parrot that viewpoint, a First Amendment violation when the course is taught in public schools (and in private schools as well, in California). I have not looked closely at the course description for the AP class, so I don't know if it has those flaws. That being said, this decision by Florida seems to be more a part of the DeSantis for President campaign than a principled objection. That is because the course description is not a curriculum, and the course description, like all AP course descriptions, says:
I have attended several AP trainings in my day, and can attest that they make a big deal about individual teachers being given autonomy, as long as their syllabus addresses the content and skills set forth in the course description. So, none of the readings complained about are required, and teachers are free, as required by Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" to assign readings on all sides of the issues in question.
And, btw, the claims on the other side that Florida does not want to teach African American history is also nonsense, because teaching of African American history is mandated in FL schools
Edit: PS: There is a very odd complaint in the Florida DOE's list: It objects to a reading by one author in part because, "Kelley's first book was a study of Black communists in Alabama." Not, 'an adulatory study," but merely a "study." It is like objecting to a reading by Donald Horowitz because he wrote a study of ethnic riots.
It's not hard to look up.
It's not terrible as a book, as much as I'd take a lot of its summaries with mountain-sized pieces of salt (in particular, I remember being impressed by how poorly the book glosses around Soviet funding of the organizations while describing Soviet influence or organization as propaganda). But for however the reviewers call it a 'descriptive' study, it's very much a descriptive study from the perspective of someone that really fucking likes communists and communism. There's occasional recognition of faults and failures, but they're things like :
or
or
That is, Hammer and Hoe details a lot of ways communist groups were sometimes incompetent, occasionally became unintentional strawmen, and were often insufficiently communist; it has few places where it considers or even describes potential solutions to a given economic or social problem other than more
Stalinscommunism except to consider these things conservative interlopers. The 25th Anniversary edition opens with a preface explicitly spelling out that "I'd be lying if I said Hammer and Hoe was conceived as a purely academic contribution, unburdened by presentist concerns", before highlighting perceived overlap with the 1990s South African revolution.There's a fair criticism that the Stop WOKE Act doesn't actually have any rules about communism, and in that sense, yes: I don't think you could honestly say Kelley blamed people for the racism of their ancestors at any point, both because it's not the focus and also because he was too busy blaming them for the insufficient communism. In that sense, the inclusion on the list is pretty obviously and overtly a political moment (ed: and not even an especially competent one: the recommended authors for 4.1 and 4.2 are far more controversial in Stop WOKE-specific ways).
But even if I hadn't previously read the book, I don't think I'd have had to make really difficult calculations on its political position, or the political position of its inclusion on the Florida DOE's list.
Yes, I am sure the book is terrible, and horribly biased, etc. But the point is that the document doesn't claim that. It complains merely that he wrote a book on the topic.
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