College Board's revised Advanced Placement African-American Studies (APAAS) course tries to hide its radical, one-sided approach, writes Stanley Kurtz in National Review. But the revised curriculum is "monotonously neo-Marxist, revolutionary, and anti-American."
Florida, South Carolina, and Arkansas have withheld full credit from the reworked course, he writes. "Last week, Georgia kicked up a storm by withholding full recognition from APAAS (while still allowing local districts to offer it)."
Georgia law forbids curricula that advocate “race stereotyping," Kurtz notes.
The sole "intersectionality" assignment is the “Combahee River Collective Statement” of 1977, which holds that "American political life is 'a system of white male rule' best swept aside by a socialist revolution," he writes. "It treats white women as oppressors and denies that white heterosexual men can bring about positive political change."
APAAS doesn't present these ideas for analysis and comparison, he writes. "I would say that APAAS advocates," and therefore violates Georgia's law.
General Colin Powell’s 1994 commencement address at Howard University provides the only moderation, writes Kurtz.
Powell’s speech is powerful and inspiring. In it, he defends the free-speech rights of a controversial speaker from the Nation of Islam who made comments at Howard understood by many to be both anti-white and antisemitic. Yet Powell also condemns such hatred. Powell offers the study of African roots “not as a way of drawing back from American society and its European roots, but as a way of showing that there are other roots as well.” Powell then calls on students to never lose faith in America, “the last, best hope of Earth.” America’s faults are yours to fix, Powell says, not to curse.
But the curriculum doesn't compare Powell's ideas to other readings, writes Kurtz. Students don't encounter "the views of liberal black intellectuals, like Randall Kennedy or John McWhorter," much less "writings from black conservatives like Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, or Robert Woodson."
"APAAS repeatedly ventures into contemporary debates, so why not present the other side of those debates instead of engaging in hairsplitting distinctions between one radical leftist and another?"
Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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