Tag Archives: Black children and white supremacy

Ron DeSantis Battles the African American A.P. Course—and History :: Dr. Jelani Cobb : The New Yorker

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Ron DeSantis Battles the African American A.P. Course—and History

The state’s intent seems to be to provide white Floridians, from a young age, with a version of history that they can be comfortable with, regardless of whether it’s true.

Dr. Jelani Cobb

By Jelani Cobb January 29, 2023

The debacle surrounding the Florida Department of Education’s recent rejection of an Advanced Placement course in African American studies is a reminder that battles over the past are almost always tied to efforts to win some war being waged in the present. The late-nineteenth-century romanticization of the Confederacy was meant to justify the new regime of segregation then being implemented across the South. That campaign was so successful that, in 1935, when W. E. B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction,” his reconsideration of the period following the Civil War, he devoted an entire chapter to the ways in which the South had lost the war but won the historiography.

The road runs in both directions. The social movements of the nineteen-fifties and sixties spawned their own, generally corrective takes on the nation’s past. The discipline of Black studies, which originated in the late sixties and is now more often referred to as Africana or African American studies, is a direct product of that wave of scholarly revisionism. Today, during a period in which states, particularly with Republican-led legislatures, have taken to removing books from libraries, stoking fears about critical race theory, and eviscerating diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs in schools—forty-two have proposed restrictive measures—it’s scarcely surprising that a discipline built on an interest in exploring Black humanity would find itself in the crosshairs. That such a thing would happen in Florida is even less so.

Last year, Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is frequently mentioned as a 2024 Presidential contender, signed into law the Stop woke Act, a piece of Trumpist culture warfare that regulates how subject matter relating to race can be taught in public schools, picking up from where the right-wing crusade against Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project left off. (The State Board of Education had banned the teaching of critical race theory in public schools in 2021.) DeSantis also signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which limits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools and became the centerpiece in a conflict over gay rights with Disney, one of the state’s largest employers. (The Governor voiced concern, too, about the inclusion of “queer theory” in the A.P. course, saying last Monday, “When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”) Both laws have been challenged in court, but together they show the demagogic lengths to which DeSantis is willing to go to burnish his profile among conservatives nationally.

DeSantis shared some of his own ideas about the nation’s past during a gubernatorial-campaign debate last fall, stating that “it’s not true” that “the United States was built on stolen land.” That claim, of course, is starkly at odds not only with the history of westward expansion but with the history of Florida; thousands of Native Americans were forcibly relocated from the region, with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In general, the Governor’s objective is seemingly to provide white Floridians, from a young age, with a version of the past that they can be comfortable with, regardless of whether it’s true.

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The A.P. course is being piloted in sixty high schools across the country, including at least one in Florida, and is scheduled to be available to any schools that offer A.P. courses in the 2024-25 school year. There appear to have been few problems with teaching it, even in Florida, but on January 12th the state’s education department sent a letter to the College Board, which oversees the creation and implementation of A.P. courses, notifying it that the curriculum is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” On January 20th, Manny Diaz, Jr., the commissioner of education, tweeted, “We proudly require the teaching of African American history. We do not accept woke indoctrination masquerading as education.” He cited the course’s references to notable academics, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the late bell hooks, as supposed examples of such indoctrination.

A day earlier, the College Board had released a statement saying that the course was still in draft form, and that “frameworks often change significantly” during the revision process. But the official framework of the course is scheduled to be released to the public on February 1st, the first day of Black History Month. The course guide for instructors, which runs to two hundred and forty-six pages, states in its preface that A.P. “opposes indoctrination” and that courses are built around an “unflinching encounter with evidence” and empirical analysis. It’s an odd note to direct at teachers of high-school students who have displayed the intellectual and emotional maturity to engage with college-level coursework. However, it’s likely intended not for them but for any bureaucrats and politicians who believe that “wokeism”—a threadbare slang term for social awareness—is an actual ideology.

Of all the criticisms aimed at the course, the most questionable is the department’s contention that it “lacks educational value.” The course includes contributions from some of the most highly regarded academics in the field, including the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the historians Nell Irvin Painter and Annette Gordon-Reed. Faculty from Harvard, Emory, Georgetown, the University of California, and the University of Connecticut are on an advisory board. With that contention, the department is, in effect, dismissing the import of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography “My Bondage and My Freedom,” excerpts of which are included in the curriculum; the Dred Scott decision, also excerpted; and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, whose origins are explored in detail. In fact, the idea that the subject matter covered in the course does not warrant a place in the classroom is contradicted by Florida’s own educational standards. Among the topics examined are the transatlantic slave trade, the roots of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the civil-rights movement, some of which students are taught as early as the fourth grade.

Last Wednesday, three Florida high-school students, represented by the civil-rights attorney Benjamin Crump, said that they were prepared to sue the DeSantis administration if the ban on the course is not lifted. But there is little likelihood that the course can be revised in such a way that it is palatable to DeSantis and the state’s education department without losing the essence of what it is attempting to convey about the miasma of race in American history. Their sense appears to be that the evils of the past are not nearly as dangerous now as the willingness to talk about them in the present. ♦Published in the print edition of the February 6, 2023, issue, with the headline “Historic Battles.”

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Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the co-editor of “The Essential Kerner Commission Report.” He is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School. He is an OUR COMMON GROUND Voice.

How Black Mothers Prepare Their Children for School – The Atlantic

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An illustration of a black mother walking her son to school.
MIA COLEMAN
In observing her own family and others, Black has noticed a pattern: Behaviors that many black parents might consider annoying but developmentally appropriate, such as an ill-timed joke or talking back to an adult, are treated by school staff as cause for suspension. From there, students are pushed out of classrooms, lose learning time, and can end up in the school-to-prison pipeline. “It’s a totally different environment, a totally different culture,” Black said when we spoke in July 2018.

Black knows that her kids are not alone in their struggles at school. She works with the Black Organizing Project nearby in Oakland, where she offers peer-to-peer support to other black parents whose children are going through disciplinary proceedings. Black told me that many parents say their children behave as all children do, but wind up targeted by school officials because educators misinterpret these students’ actions, assuming the worst. Glaring, making noise, and violating the school dress code can all lead to suspension. The consequences are significant: When students are excluded from the classroom, they’re more likely to do worse academically, become truant, drop out, and eventually come into contact with the juvenile-justice system.

I heard similar concerns about the gap between home and school cultures when I interviewed dozens of black mothers for my book, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. Many of us know about the disparities: Black students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be expelled or suspended. Less frequently discussed are the strategies black parents use to prepare their children for schools where they might be perceived as threats or expendable misfits who aren’t core members of the community.

The mothers I spoke with were concerned about these disciplinary patterns. They were also worried about subtler ways black students are told they don’t belong in classrooms where the dominant culture, with its emphasis on obedience and hierarchy, is unlike the culture at home. These mothers talked about their efforts to encourage their children to question authority, speak freely, and express opinions—all things they valued—only to then watch as their children were reprimanded or even criminalized for doing so at school. They shared how nonblack peers would unexpectedly touch their children’s hair, making them feel violated and objectified. Some had placed their black children in predominantly white, suburban schools that offered strong academic programs, but that were limited by their own insularity and thus were unable to prepare black kids for the more racially and economically heterogeneous real world. Others felt that teachers had treated their children coldly, and were unable to see them simply as children.

I had many of those conversations around the time that I started taking my toddler—my first child—to a library story circle, a weekly sing-along, and other enrichment programs that were our earliest experiences of school-like environments. We were often the only family of color or one of few, and I began to think about the socialization that comes with schooling for black families of school-age children. The verb socialize means “to make suitable for society.” The word is typically understood as benign, but I wondered: What does it mean to encourage a child to become suitable for a society that isn’t really suitable for her?

Through my research, I learned that helping children survive and have positive experiences at school is another way in which mothering is different in black families. I came across a 1992 book titled Raising Black Children, co-authored by the psychiatrists Alvin Poussaint and James Comer. Poussaint consulted on The Cosby Show and was known as a kind of Dr. Spock within black communities in the 1980s and 1990s. In the book, the authors write, “Many black parents question and have mixed feelings about passing on the values and ways of a society that says in so many ways, ‘We do not value black men and women, boys and girls, as much as we do whites …’ The need to preserve our culture and community springs from a desire to maintain a real and psychological place, where we are accepted, respected and protected. For this reason we are concerned about whether ‘white psychology and child-rearing approaches’ will change us, hurt us, destroy our culture.”

For many white parents, the process of socializing their children is an unalloyed good, an uncomplicated part of child-rearing that poses no real threat. For the mothers I spoke with, immersing their children in a school’s culture meant hoping they’d get what they needed academically without sustaining too much damage to their sense of self.
As both an academic and a mother, Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho knows this balance well. She is a professor of educational leadership at Lewis & Clark College and has written extensively on school discipline; she also has six children, all of them black. Roebuck Sakho told me that she chose to send her children to public schools, even though she knew they would create challenges for her family. Her children are there to learn and participate, but they’re also there to question and transform negative aspects of their schooling. Roebuck Sakho’s children accept this as part of their work as student-activists, she said. When they come home with stories about factually questionable content in a lesson or a teacher’s dismissive behavior, the family has a conversation about how best to respond. Roebuck Sakho said she doesn’t want her children to absorb all the cultural norms introduced by educators. “I’m sending them to school to get a part of education,” she told me.

But conversations like those in Roebuck Sakho’s home aren’t happening everywhere. Parents of color are about three times as likely to discuss race with their children as are white parents, according to a 2007 study of kindergartners and their families in the Journal of Marriage and Family. Three out of four white parents in that study avoided talking about race entirely, according to Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, whose 2009 book, NurtureShock, highlighted the research. White parents often believe that talking about race is itself somehow racist, and so communicate to their children that skin color doesn’t matter and that everyone is equal, Bronson and Merryman found. But even toddlers, with their brief experience of the world, can see that’s not true. When white parents leave kids to make sense of these contradictions on their own, without historical context or guidance on how to think about difference, classrooms are bound to become fraught spaces for black children.

Many parents I spoke with emphasized the role of peers in establishing and maintaining norms at school. When I interviewed Monifa Bandele, a Brooklyn-based community organizer and a senior vice president of the advocacy organization MomsRising.org, in 2018, her daughters were 16 and 19. The girls attended a Quaker school that in many ways aligned with the values the family embraced at home. But her daughters still had to learn to navigate what Bandele described as white-liberal racism, which tends to be practiced by progressives in denial of their own white-supremacist beliefs. Bandele and her husband were raised in families that organized against apartheid and created African-centered schools, so their children’s thinking around issues of race and power is well developed and generations in the making.

Bandele worries that her daughters’ sharp perception has at times left them exhausted from dealing with racism both outright and more subtle, but she’s also seen them take it in stride. “I can check you on this; then we can still work on the science project together,” she told me, giving an example of how one daughter has responded. “You shouldn’t touch her hair, and let’s get these projects done.”
Not all children so gracefully develop survival strategies that allow them to participate in predominantly white schools while also resisting and even transforming the culture. Aya de Leon directs Poetry for the People, an arts and activism program that’s part of UC Berkeley’s African American Studies Department. She said her students carry different types of burdens, depending on the type of high school they attended. “If you’re in a hood school, the harms are clear, and you know when they’re happening that you’re being harmed,” she said, and pointed to physical fights and subpar academic offerings as among the problems. “In these white environments, you’re being harmed, and you don’t even know it because you think there is something wrong with you. [You think] if only you could get these white people to like you,” then everything would be okay.

In her own journey as a parent, de Leon has chosen schools where her daughter can be surrounded by other black and brown children. De Leon was one of several mothers I interviewed who talked about the importance of curating and nurturing friend groups that provide their children with allies and positive reflections of themselves. “Going into the tween years, the beauty stuff is gonna hit hard,” she told me. “And when it does, I just need her to have brown girls around her.” Other families enroll their kids in after-school or community-based youth-development programs that provide lessons on the history of the African diaspora, trips to historically black colleges and universities, and other forms of cultural enrichment that their predominantly white schools do not.

My own daughter has just started preschool. I’m excited and feel I’ve done my due diligence in choosing a place that will value and support her. But I’ve also tucked away tips parents shared with me that may come in handy as she gets older. Maybe one day I, too, will need to tell my child to take pictures of her assignments before she turns them in, a safeguard against some teacher “losing” her work as a provocation or punishment. Maybe I’ll need to remind her that I’m always just a phone call away, and that she should never be the only child in a room of adults asking her questions that make her feel scared, embarrassed, or confused. Like generations of black mothers before me, I’ll think up ways to help my daughter feel safe and confident as she learns about this society and how to survive in it.

You should think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

DANI MCCLAIN is the author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood.

Source: How Black Mothers Prepare Their Children for School – The Atlantic

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A Black Mother’s Love and Fear for Her Children in a White World – The New York Times

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This is a mother who has made it by most standards, yet she cannot guarantee the safety of her offspring because of the color of their skin. She stands guard at a crossroads where past is present, the political is personal and the abstract or purely hypothetical is all too real. Like any parent, she wants her children, two boys, to be able to create a decent and happy life for themselves. Yet the “terrifying specter” of the white imagination means they are often not seen as individuals but instead are judged for being black — “subject to the larger white world’s constant evaluation as to whether or not you are worthy.” (She compiles a running list of criticisms and put-downs to which her kids are subjected: “Too mobile, too slow, too fast, inattentive. Why are you still in the bathroom? It takes you too long to pee. It takes you too long to remember this algorithm, this table. You hold the pencil too tight, you do not hold it tightly enough.”)

We hear echoes of Hansberry’s fictional family in “A Raisin in the Sun” debating the merits of moving to a white community versus allowing those would-be white neighbors to buy them off in exchange for staying put. Perry chose the former for her sons, along with its consequences. “You live in some worlds that are more white than black,” she tells them. “And so, you learn, early on, that the aversion to blackness can turn perfectly lovely people grotesque.”

Source:  BREATHE
A Letter to My Sons  By Imani Perry  NYT Book Review