A Closer Look at the College Board’s Radicalism

S elf-described “antiracism educator” Tim Wise isn’t happy with the College Board. On a metaphysical level, that’s because being unhappy — and doing one’s darndest to make everyone else unhappy, too — is a core part of the “antiracism educator” job description. But in this specific case, Mr. Wise is upset that the College Board removed the most radical elements from its new AP African-American Studies class plan: “The @CollegeBoard can deny it all day long (and will) but y’all caved to right wing pressure over the AP African American Studies curriculum,” Wise complained on Twitter yesterday. “There is no other logical reason for removing Angela Davis and [Kimberlé Crenshaw] from the material.”

On the first count, Wise may have a point. The head of the College Board insists that “the changes were all made for pedagogical reasons, not to bow to political pressure,” the New York Times reported. But it’s difficult to see how the massive controversy over the original curriculum, led by Ron DeSantis and Florida education officials, didn’t play a role in the College Board’s sudden realization that “Black Queer Studies,” critical race theory, the moral imperative of revolution, and the commendable political thought of card-carrying Communist Party comrades might not be the best lesson plan for America’s high schoolers. One suspects that Davis and Crenshaw may have found their way into the official APAAS plan if it weren’t for the surge of inconvenient public scrutiny. But that’s the trouble with democracy — sometimes the people get their way.

In any event, there are plenty of “logical reasons” for removing Davis and Crenshaw from the class plan, chief among them that their ideas are toxic, and they occupy a central place in the genealogy of some of the worst political and cultural trends in our politics today. “You can’t say they aren’t critical to the Black experience in America and Black political/legal/social thought,” says Wise. Never mind that Wise is white and thus has no business defining what is and isn’t “critical to the Black experience,” according to the standpoint-epistemology rules set by his own cohort. Intellectual consistency isn’t the point. (To invert the famous criticism of conservatism, the anti-racism doctrine operates on a simple heuristic: There are favored groups whom the rules protect but don’t bind, and disfavored groups whom the rules bind but don’t protect.)

The fact is that students will learn black political and social thought just fine without being subjected to Davis and Crenshaw. But the insistence to the contrary — and the commitment to much of the content on the original syllabus — can tell us a lot about what “African-American Studies,” as conceived by Wise and his peers, is really all about.

On the facts of the matter, the suggestion that someone like Davis is “critical to the Black experience” is a serious insult to said experience, given the reality of Davis’s behavior over the course of her 79 years. Davis was a self-described friend of the suicide-cult leader Jim Jones, a one-time member of the FBI’s most-wanted list, and a terrorism apologist, among her many other charming résumé items. She was also a longtime member of the Communist Party USA and a lifelong propagandist for communist regimes, although that’s practically a prerequisite for good standing in academia these days. Here’s David Harsanyi on Davis’s infamous involvement in the deadly Marin County kidnapping:

Davis is an unrepentant champion of domestic terrorists and murderers. In the early 1970s, Davis famously bought two of the guns used in a 1970 Marin County courtroom kidnapping-shootout perpetrated by Black Panthers, in which a superior court judge and three hostages were murdered. After being charged with “aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder,” Davis went into hiding. Even after the FBI caught up to her, and even after evidence showed that she had been in correspondence with the planners and well aware of their violent disposition, she was acquitted in 1972.

Crenshaw’s biographical achievements are more muted than Davis’s, but the Columbia Law School professor is widely credited as being one of the progenitors of critical race theory. (So much for “schools are pushing CRT” being a right-wing conspiracy theory.) She’s also credited with the concept of “intersectionality” — a framework that, at least in its colloquial expression, is more or less a practical application of CRT’s essential premises, expanded beyond race to include a variety of other identitarian categories. Like Davis and so many other figures on the original APAAS plan, Crenshaw defines herself in opposition to notions of “color-blindness” and racial neutrality; she is not interested in a universalistic equality, but a more sharp and militant group consciousness for identities ostensibly victimized by white, cisheteronormative, patriarchal society.

The core demand of Crenshaw’s project is not that black Americans be ensured equal membership within American institutions, but that the coalition of the marginalized lead an insurgency against those institutions, the identities they privilege, and ultimately the civilization they represent. Identity, in Crenshaw’s telling, is not merely a set of immutable characteristics, but an injunction to political action. “The organized identity groups in which we find ourselves,” she argues in a seminal 1991 essay that appears on the original APAAS syllabus, “are in fact coalitions, or at least potential coalitions waiting to be formed.”

What is notable, for our purposes, is that the explicit intent of intersectionality is to define all identities in terms of oppression and privilege. Alongside CRT’s construction of a distinct morality, sociology, epistemology, theory of history, and political philosophy organized around the primacy of the experience of racial marginalization, the net effect is to define all of society in terms of the dialectic between oppressed and privileged identities. In this framework, David Azerrad noted, “only those who understand all that America has done and continues to do to their people and to other marginalized people can claim to be in touch with their authentic identity.”

Here, we can begin to see the true meaning of the hysteria about the de-radicalization of APAAS. Crenshaw, Davis, and the various other radicals littered throughout the original curriculum represent a reading of black — and more fundamentally, American — history that serves specific contemporary ideological ends. Whether they are “critical to the black experience” is not really the central concern of Tim Wise and his comrades. Conceiving of African-American history as one long, protracted (and of course, always unfinished) struggle against the nation’s hegemonic institutions, traditions, and identities, and defining its story through the worldview of its most radical voices, is but one key part of rewriting all of American history in such terms. This time, at least, Ron DeSantis and the Floridians who elected him had the nerve to scramble the plan.

Scramble the plan they did, and we owe them our gratitude. Conservatives should understand the stakes here. Recall that the 1619 Project’s original aim was “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619” — the year that the first African slaves arrived in America — “as our true founding.” (In an ironic historical revision of its own, the New York Times quietly removed that statement after a backlash, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the project, flatly denies that her essay ever said what it plainly and obviously did.) Thus, African-American history becomes defined as a singular story of oppression, and that singular story of oppression becomes the fundamental story of America. Once our history is rewritten, so too is our contemporary understanding of ourselves. A nation that has forgotten where it came from is a nation that has lost its sense of who it is, what it stands for, and where it should go.