The College Board Regrets Not Calling Out Ron DeSantis’s Racist Bullshit Sooner

Last month, as part of Ron DeSantis’s dystopian crusade to dictate the topics that can and cannot be discussed in schools and businesses in his state, the Florida Department of Education sent a letter to the College Board rejecting a new AP African American studies course, claiming it is “contrary to Florida law” and “significantly lacks educational value.” (The governor followed the letter up with a press conference in which he declared: “We want education, not indoctrination. If you fall on the side of indoctrination, we’re going to decline, if it’s education, then we will do…. We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them.”) Shortly thereafter, the College Board released the official curriculum for the course, and…it sure seemed as though the governor of Florida had successfully railroaded the organization into removing the topics he didn’t like, including Black Lives Matter and works by Black scholars associated with, among other things, critical race theory. Obviously, that turn of events didn’t make the College Board look great, nor did a February 7 letter from the FDOE in which the department attempted to rebut the company’s claims that it hadn’t bowed to political pressure, and effectively took credit for the changes. And over the weekend, the board decided to do something about it.

In a statement posted on the organization’s website over the weekend, in which it wrote “our commitment to AP African American Studies is unwavering,” the College Board accused the DeSantis administration of spreading “misinformation” about how the course was crafted and the impact the FDOE had. Referencing the February 7 letter, the board wrote: “While it has been claimed that the College Board was in frequent dialogue with Florida about the content of AP African American Studies, this is a false and politically motivated charge.” It added: “In Florida’s effort to engineer a political win, they have claimed credit for the specific changes we made to the official framework. In their February 7, 2023, letter to us, which they leaked to the media within hours of sending, Florida expresses gratitude for the removal of 19 topics, none of which they ever asked us to remove, and most of which remain in the official framework.”

The weekend statement also referred to the FDOE’s claim that the College Board removed terms like “systemic marginalization” and “intersectionality” from the curriculum at their behest, and noted: “This is not true. The notion that we needed Florida to enlighten us that these terms are politicized in several states is ridiculous. We took a hard look at these terms because they often are misunderstood, misrepresented, and co-opted as political weapons. Instead we focused throughout the framework on providing concrete examples of these important concepts. Florida is attempting to claim a political victory by taking credit retroactively for changes we ourselves made but that they never suggested to us.”

Elsewhere, the College Board writes that its biggest mistake was not calling out the DeSantis administration on its bullshit sooner. “We deeply regret not immediately denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s slander, magnified by the DeSantis administration’s subsequent comments, that African American Studies ‘lacks educational value’,” it wrote. “Our failure to raise our voice betrayed Black scholars everywhere and those who have long toiled to build this remarkable field.” Neither DeSantis nor the FDOE appear to have commented on the College Board’s latest.

If you’re wondering if DeSantis’s viewpoints about Black history are newly acquired, that does not appear to be the case. In November, in a story about DeSantis’s time teaching high school history at a private boarding school after graduating from Yale and before attending Harvard Law School, a former student told The New York Times that DeSantis seemed to justify slavery while teaching about the Civil War. “Like in history class, he was trying to play devil’s advocate that the South had good reason to fight that war, to kill other people, over owning people—Black people,” Danielle Pompey said. “He was trying to say, ‘It’s not okay to own people, but they had property, businesses.’” And apparently she wasn’t the only one for whom DeSantis’s POV stood out.

Per the Times:

[Gates] Minis, who is white and was in the same history class as Ms. Pompey, also remembers debating issues around the Civil War. Mr. DeSantis wasn’t so much politically opinionated, she said, but, in her view, factually wrong. She remembers him claiming that every city in the South had burned, even though she knew her hometown, Savannah, had not and she called him out on it.

Another student who requested anonymity because he feared repercussions for his job said Mr. DeSantis’s takes on the Civil War were the subject of so much talk that students made a satirical video about him at the time for the video yearbook. The video, which was reviewed by the Times, includes a short snippet in which a voice purporting to be Mr. DeSantis is heard saying: “The Civil War was not about slavery! It was about two competing economic systems. One was in the North…” while a student dozes in class. (A student voiced the role of Mr. DeSantis, because students did not have any actual footage of him, according to a student who helped put it together.)

Last year, DeSantis signed into law the ridiculously named STOP Woke Act, which prohibits schools and businesses from teaching classes or training courses that could result in someone feeling guilty about actions taken by people of the same race. (While the phrase “white people” never appears in the text of the law, it was quite obviously written with their benefit in mind.) In November, a federal judge blocked a central piece of the “Stop Woke” Act, calling it “positively dystopian” and saying violates the First Amendment.

Last month, while decrying the African American studies course, DeSantis announced that his administration plans to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at every public college in the state.