DeSantis is wrong about Black studies

In the latest salvo in his war on “wokeness,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced support for a statewide ban on a new Advanced Placement class on African American studies that will be officially unveiled this week at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. In defending the ban, DeSantis (R) and his allies at Florida’s Department of Education relied on a draft framework for the curriculum, and cherry-picked from roughly a hundred proposed topics to object to a handful of buzzwords, including “reparations” and “intersectionality,” as well as Black feminism and Black queer activism. “We want education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis declared.

DeSantis’s attack on this new high school curriculum is an extension of a bill he signed into state law last year called the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act. This provocatively entitled “Stop WOKE” Act prohibits Florida schools from teaching history in any way that generalizes about what members of one racial group have done to members of another racial group in the past. “No one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race,” DeSantis said at that signing, turning language that once might have applied to minorities on its head to signal to today’s White students and their parents that they shouldn’t be made to feel bad about anything their ancestors did to Black people.