The College Board announced this Thursday that they will be changing and releasing a revised version of the AP African American History course. The course is said to be released on February 1, 2023. There is no insight on what the new revised version entails, but many people have their suspicions.
This comes after the governor of Florida, Ron Desantis, rejected and threatened to ban the course in schools. Desantis claimed that the state requires that Black History be taught in schools as part of the core curriculum.
“We want education, not indoctrination,” the governor said. He mentioned that the course does not meet the Floridian educational standards because one of the lessons taught is “Queer Theory.”
“That [course] is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids,” Desantis went on. “So when you look and see that they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that's a political agenda.” He claims that they believe in teaching children facts while blocking teachings from students. “When you try to use black history shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”
Queer theory has been a part of African history since the very beginning and is being shown more and more in education. Queer theory tackles the hetero normalities throughout history. The term “Queer theory” comes from Teresa de Lauretis who wrote about it in “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities.”
She expresses three ways queer theory is involved within history, “refusing heterosexuality as the benchmark for sexual formations, a challenge to the belief that lesbian and gay studies are one single entity, and a strong focus on the multiple ways that race shapes sexual bias.” Intersectionality pulls this into play, which Desantis claims to be a political agenda, by describing “how systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects.” To erase this from history would be incorrect and would take away a part of history that is still relevant today.
Race plays an important role in queer history and vice versa. To eliminate one or the other from history would be inaccurate. Ron Desantis believes that the two have nothing to do with each other and that the College Board is trying to impose a queer agenda on the children. But without queer theory, you're only getting a portion of African American history.
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