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The long march through the institutions must meet a long march back to sanity. DeSantis’ battle with College Board is just one of many necessary engagements.
For decades, Democrat and Republican politicians have forced Americans to fund schools, nonprofits, and bureaucracies that undermine our personal well-being and country. Breaking this wicked pattern of political sloth, Gov. Ron DeSantis resisted when College Board applied for Florida public schools to teach its anti-American African-American studies class.
Due to DeSantis’ courageous and principled stand, College Board backed down. The massive curriculum and testing organization last week released a revised version of the grievance studies class’s scope and sequence, which it had formerly kept secret from the very taxpayers funding it. College Board removed most of the overtly Marxist and violence-baiting study materials and added a token “black conservatism” option to its long list of voluntary essay topics.
The course still shamefully lacks any note of, for example, Clarence Thomas, one of the best legal thinkers in world history of any ancestry. It is also still clearly tilted politically left, including by omitting serious study of the deep and wide African-American tradition of Christian worship. Scholar Stanley Kurtz summarizes the changes at National Review:
Nearly every now-omitted topic was filled with socialism, CRT, or some other radical perspective. Originally, an entire topic was devoted to Frantz Fanon’s glorification of violence — and its influence on black radicals in America. That topic is now gone. Another topic one-sidedly excoriated American foreign policy in Haiti. Gone. The unit on black queer studies has also been deleted. DeSantis won that showdown with Governor Pritzker. A topic on ‘Afrocentricity,’ the scholarly legitimacy of which is very much in dispute, is gone. Also gone is a CRT-based unit calling colorblindness racist (in direct violation of Florida law). Units plugging reparations, prison abolition, intersectionality, the socialist platform of the Movement for Black Lives, and the revolutionary meditations of Marxist radical Robin D. G. Kelley, are likewise gone.
It’s a clear political win for DeSantis. His choice to fight advanced his voters’ interests. Indeed, he also advanced national interests, as funding its enemies obviously endangers any nation. (That is axiomatic, but connections that basic apparently need to be made nowadays.) As usual, every single Republican needs to learn from DeSantis’ example that going to political war for your voters is a winning strategy.
Still, it is not in Americans’ interest that, even in a more moderated form, this kind of class be taught anywhere — not in high school, not in colleges. Because it’s fashionable to attack what a conservative did not say, let’s be clear: African-American history is American history and should of course be taught richly, fully, and accurately to every American.
But African-American studies classes are not the same as African-American history classes. They’re about identity politics grievance-mongering, which is really about pushing cultural Marxism, the division of Americans into bitterly divided grievance groups that pave the way for undoing...
