Tangle - Florida's African American Studies debate.

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

On Friday, the Florida Department of Education said it will not allow an Advanced Placement (AP) class on African American Studies to be taught in the state's public schools. The class was developed by the College Board as one of its many classes high school students could take to gain college credits. The Department of Education says the class violates a Florida law which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) introduced to fight what he describes as "woke indoctrination" in schools. Plus, a follow-up story on Rep. George Santos (R-NY) and some good news for veterans' health.You can read today's podcast here and today’s “Under the Radar” story here.Today’s clickables: Quick Hits (0:58 ), Today’s Story (2:58), Left’s Take (7:06), Right’s Take (12:00), Isaac’s Take (17:08), Under the Radar (23:52), Numbers (24:51), Have A Nice Day (25:35)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Zosha Warpeha. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about the ban or prohibition, I guess you could say, of Florida's African American Studies course, an advanced placement AP class that the Florida Department of Education has rejected. Before we jump into that story, though, as always, we'll start off with some quick hits. First up, a small number of documents with classified markings were found in former

Vice President Mike Pence's Indiana home last week, his lawyer said. The documents were turned over to the FBI. Number two, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky fired at least a dozen senior officials, citing the need to clean up corruption among the country's top brass. Number three, after weeks of negotiation, Germany announced it would agree to send 14 German-made tanks to Ukraine and authorize other countries to do the same. Number four, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing with Live Nation, the company that owns Ticketmaster, questioning its potentially monopolistic behavior. Separately, the Justice Department and eight states have sued Google for monopolistic behavior in advertising. Number five, new Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican

from California, blocked Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee, citing Schiff's work on former President Donald Trump's impeachment and Swalwell's alleged ties to a Chinese intelligence operative. controversy today over the state rejecting a proposal to add a new AP course on African American studies. While civil rights leaders say that it is a move to erase black history, Governor Ron DeSantis is firing back saying it violates Florida law. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis defending his decision to block a new advanced placement course on African-American studies from being taught in Florida schools. He says Florida's current standards for teaching black history are, quote, cut and dried history and that multiple lessons in that particular course go too far. When you try to use black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.

Now at six, Governor Ron DeSantis is holding firm. It's on his position to block an advanced placement course on African-American studies. On Friday, the Florida Department of Education said it will not allow an AP class on African-American studies to be taught in the state's public schools. The class was developed over 10 years by the nonprofit College Board as one of its many classes for high school students to gain college credits. The Department of Education said the class violates a Florida law which Governor Ron DeSantis introduced to fight what he describes as woke indoctrination in schools. Last year, DeSantis signed the Stop Woke Act into law, which, among other things,

barred schools and employers from mandating certain racial sensitivity training, although the law is being challenged in court. He also passed legislation restricting how and at what age group sexual orientation can be discussed in schools. The African American Studies course, whose curriculum can be found with a link in today's episode description, will be taught in 60 schools across the U.S. on a trial basis. Florida is the only state rejecting the course, according to the Wall Street Journal. Florida education officials said the course violated state law, though they haven't specified how. The Stop Woke Act actually mandates teaching African American history, but it limits the way ideas like capitalism, critical race theory, and meritocracy can be discussed. In a one-page document,

the Florida Department of Education objected to the inclusion of teachings about the Black Lives Matter movement, reparations, Black feminism, and Black authors and historians whose work addresses critical race theory and Black communism. In the document, the state said it objects specifically to the inclusion of Robin D.G. Kelly, a professor of American history at UCLA, who warned that simply establishing safe spaces and renaming campus buildings does nothing to overthrow capitalism, according to the document. The state also said that arguments in the curriculum on compensation for black Americans for slavery and other historical atrocities through reparations does not contain any balancing opinions or critical perspectives. All points and resources in this study advocate for reparations, the document said.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis defended the decision. What's one of the lessons about queer theory, DeSantis said. Now, who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids. And so when you look to see if they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that's a political agenda. And so we're on, that's the wrong side of the line for Florida Standards. We believe in teaching kids facts about how to think, but we don't believe they should have an agenda imposed on them. When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes. Democrats both in Florida and across the country have criticized DeSantis for the decision. White House Press Secretary Korean John Pierre called it

incomprehensible. If you think about the study of Black Americans, that is what he wants to block, John Pierre said. These types of actions aren't new. They are not about the study of Black Americans, that is what he wants to block, Jean-Pierre said. These types of actions aren't new. They are not new from what we're seeing, especially from Florida. Sadly, Florida currently bans teachers from talking about who they are and who they love. Today, we're going to explore some arguments from the left and the right about this decision, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the left is saying. Many on the left criticize DeSantis, arguing that he is a hypocrite for limiting free thought and free speech. Some contend the ideas in the course are legitimate areas of study for a high school AP class. Others say the ban is authoritarian overreach. In MSNBC, Zeesheen Aleem called it an assault on free thought. It's shocking to see the state dismiss the work of widely esteemed

scholars who are staples of college curricula across America, which is precisely what AP courses are meant to introduce high school students to, Aleem wrote. But even more shocking is the way Florida is policing ideology. The statement does not explain why these writings, which are uncontroversially part of the Black intellectual tradition, lack educational value. It is instead just a list of ideas that Florida's right-wing government officials think should be forbidden for discussion. Anything that registers as too vociferously anti-racist, too openly left-wing, or too friendly to progressive activism is out. DeSantis seems to think that students' mere exposure to these ideas represents an effort at proselytization. Never mind that one of the key goals of liberal arts education is to expose

students to an abundance of different histories, ideas, and traditions, and teach them to engage them critically. I'm sure none of Florida's educational officials believe that studying the Confederacy is the same thing as an endorsement of slavery, Aleem said. Nor is it likely they think that reading about formation of racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, as I did in school, ensures that a student will simply become a supporter of lynchings. This is to say nothing of the substance of the coursework, which is defensible on its merits. Left-wing black intellectual critiques of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy have long been vital currents of American intellectual life.

In Newsweek, Jason Nichols said DeSantis banning Black studies in schools is disgraceful. DeSantis has bragged that Florida is where woke goes to die, a slogan that has catapulted him ahead of former President Donald Trump in polling about 2024 matchups. Using the word woke, a term created by Black people to refer to systemic injustice, and disregarding what Black people mean by it in order to ridicule it is anti-Black. What is DeSantis afraid of, Nichols said. Why would he not want students to explore inconvenient academic concepts like institutional and systemic racism and the ineffectiveness of a colorblind approach? Perhaps students will begin to question Governor DeSantis on why Florida still

celebrates three Confederate holidays. They may also wonder why the state has 75 Confederate monuments, the result of a miseducation campaign by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Students at Robert E. Lee High School in Duval County may already be wondering why their school venerates the name of a man who fought for the pro-slavery Confederacy, Nichols said. Students in Miami-Dade may learn that Overtown, an impoverished section of the city, was once a relatively prosperous Black community dubbed the Harlem of the South before city and state officials built highways right through Overtown, displacing thousands of Black residents and upending its business district. Residents were unable to live and set up their businesses in white communities,

leaving Black Miamians in overcrowded communities that have been economically decimated for generations. In the Daily Beast, Jeremy Young argued that the ban is going to hurt students intellectually and financially. When politicians go to war with teachers, students will always lose, he said. Nearly 1.2 million high school students took an AP test in 2021, with over 750,000 receiving a score of at least three out of five on at least one test, the minimum score some colleges will accept for college credit. Other colleges award credit for only scores of four or five. Those students earned a transferable college-level credit at a fraction of the cost of college tuition, just $97 for a successful test worth three or four college credits, which allows

them to amass college credits early, thereby cutting the tuition and time it takes to graduate from college. Further, the ban on the AP African American Studies makes plain the openly censorious intent of educational gag order laws. This law bans course content that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels a student to believe in specific concepts about race, color, sex, or national origin. Yet the course does none of those things and merely presents essays from historical thinkers that help students understand the history of African-American thought, Young wrote. But we now know that Florida's gag order law bans that too, because the law requires courses

to be consistent with a set of principles that include support for colorblindness and meritocracy and rejection of the concept of unconscious bias, social stereotypes about groups that individuals form unconsciously, merely including essays in the course that present or debate these ideas would arguably be illegal if the law stands. All right, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right supports the ban, arguing that the class is designed to indoctrinate students. Some say the course is explicitly teaching far-left ideas without any dissenting opinions. Others argue that Black history is still being taught, just not in a way that would push students into being left-wing political activists. In the New York Post, Rich Lowry said DeSantis is right for rejecting the curriculum. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stands accused of a long parade of horribles, to which has now been

added a new count, allegedly opposing the teaching of African American history, Lowry wrote. Never mind that there's obviously a difference between objecting to the ideological content of a pilot course that hasn't yet been adopted and erasing the history of African Americans as such. This is the typical game of pretending that the only way to teach history of African Americans is through the tendentious political lens favored by the left. When red states push back against critical race theory, its proponents make it sound as if students will, as a consequence, never learn about the transatlantic slave trade, the 13th amendment, or Frederick Douglass. This is preposterous. No reasonable person opposes teaching American history fully and truthfully.

In Florida, the controversial Stop Woke Act itself stipulates that instructors should teach the history of African peoples, the Middle Passage, the experience of slavery, abolition, and the effects of segregation and other forms of discrimination. The problem is when the curriculum is used as an ideological weapon to inculcate a distorted, one-sided worldview, and here, Florida has the College Board dead to rights. The College Board hasn't released the pilot curriculum publicly, but as conservative writer Stanley Kurtz and a publication called Florida Standard have documented, it really goes off the rails when it addresses contemporary issues. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows

the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases.

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In National Review, Stanley Kurtz laid out those details. Most of the topics in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspective supplied. The scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political causes, Kurtz said. The fourth quarter of the course features a topic on the Movement for Black Lives. The Movement for Black Lives, or M4BL, was started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. Yet M4BL extends far beyond BLM, encompassing over 170 Black-led organizations. M4BL is organized around an extensive policy platform, the Vision for Black Lives. That platform is radical, to say the least. As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police.

M4BL's platform goes further, however, by calling for the abolition of all money bail and even all pretrial detention. To this end, the Vision for Black Lives endorses federal legislation by squad member Representative Ayanna Pressley. Kelly also highlights the expansive nature of what he calls M4BL's most controversial demand, reparations. For M4BL, the concept of reparations goes far beyond massive monetary rewards and includes even mandated changes in the school curriculum

that acknowledges the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality. According to Kelly, M4BL wants these changes so schools can undermine the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education. In other words, M4BL and Kelly want schools to inculcate the basic premises of critical race theory. In Newsweek, Jeff Charles said DeSantis is not trying to block black history. The curriculum features writings by Kimberly Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, noted proponents of critical race theory, which would not be a problem if the course also provided viewpoints from a classical liberal perspective. But it does not, Charles said. The one-sided approach makes it clear that this is more about

political indoctrination than teaching factual history. Critics are not wrong about DeSantis focusing on the culture war to push his agenda, but the notion that he is attacking black history and trying to push far right education in Florida through the Stop Woke Act is absurd on its face. Most of the people lambasting the governor and Florida Republicans over the Stop Woke Act fall into two categories, those who haven't read the law and those who have read it but are lying about it. The text of the legislation actually mandates the teaching of the history of African Americans, which includes the development of slavery, the passage to America, the enslavement experience,

abolition, and the history and contributions of African Americans to the African diaspora. Indeed, this is only a sliver of the teachings on Black history required under the Stop Woke Act. This is not to say that the legislation does not have any issues. The law also applies to private businesses and universities, meaning that DeSantis is essentially using this state to dictate what private institutions are discussing with employees and college students. While the application of the Stop Woke Act has its problems, the notion that it is intended to somehow erase Black history is easily disprovable. Alright, that is it for the left and the right is saying, which brings us to my take.

When Florida first started rolling out laws to limit how critical race theory and gender were taught in its public schools, I objected, loudly. I responded to reader criticism and addressed my own bad arguments, and then I also followed up about a year later, last January, to write that Republican responses to critical race theory had been even worse than I thought. That response has continued to get uglier and more frightening since then. That response has continued to get uglier and more frightening since then. There is a new breed of conservative, independent, right-leaning pundits and politicians whose rhetoric on paper is very appealing to me. They are people in the mold of everyone from Ron DeSantis to Elon Musk, who pay a great deal of lip service to free speech, free thought, and the open debate of controversial ideas. These same folks often criticize language policing and the overly sensitive left while insisting that uncomfortable, offensive ideas, and sometimes

even misinformation should all be discussed out in the ocean in the name of free expression and free thought. And I agree with what they are saying wholeheartedly. I'm the guy who wanted the Hunter Biden laptop story to run freely on Twitter, disagreed with the deplatforming of Donald Trump, called for the allowance of misinformation and conspiracy theories in the public discourse so they might be debated, and I've repeatedly expressed my disdain for our culture of constant victimization. Which is why the actions of people like DeSantis and Musk, which are so contrary to their rhetoric, are so unbelievably infuriating. When I wrote about Florida's parental rights, or don't say gay bill depending on who was talking about it, one common refrain from the bill's supporters was that its main goal was to protect

the innocence of children. Won't there be third graders who might get confused? What about five year olds who didn't need exposure to ideas about adult sexuality? Little girls who could be confused about their own gender by learning of trans adults. These questions are all worth considering, even if different states and people come up with different answers. Ultimately, at what age a kid should be taught about gender and sex is not simple. But how do you justify this? These are juniors and seniors in high school who are applying and voluntarily electing to study advanced college-level classes. Most are surely old enough to drive. Many in Florida could enroll in the military or legally consent to sex with an adult. In some states, a lot of these students

could buy a gun, but they can't handle reading Angela Davis. They can't read arguments for reparations or communism. Is this really what we are doing in education in the United States of America? And it's worth emphasizing that these students would be selecting these classes. They are not obligated to enroll. If they knew they wanted to major in Black Studies, they could knock off college credits to save money and time at college. Rich Lowry, whose writing I respect a great deal and who gets cited in this newsletter a lot, wrote that when red states push back against critical race theory, its proponents make it sound as if students will, as a consequence, never learn about the transatlantic

slave trade, the 13th amendment, or Frederick Douglass. No, what's actually happening is that people like Lowry are pretending that this black studies class is going to replace literally everything else students learn about American history. Lowry and others make it sound as if learning about black communism, black queer theory, and black activist movements in a single class means students will never encounter capitalism, Columbus, Christianity, Martin Luther King Jr., and heterosexual marriage. It's akin to arguing that teaching the South's perspective about the Confederacy will indoctrinate kids, even if they're taught the Union's perspective too. The reality Lowry is constructing is completely backwards. In fact, the argument he is using is precisely the argument that should compel him to change his stance. Florida students obviously

learn about the transatlantic slave trade, the 13th amendment, and Frederick Douglass. I'm sure they also learn about the confederacy and the KKK, Nazi Germany, the pilgrims, European colonizers, and wars with Native Americans. Many of the texts they read, indeed most of them, will be written by the victors, as is true with nearly all of history. Having an AP Black Studies course that dives deep into the thoughts of Black scholars, including fringe and extreme views, is a completely inbounds way to expand a student's thoughts about American history. Shoot, teachers in Germany are rightly arguing that they should be teaching kids about Mein Kampf, while here in America we're boxing out Eduardo Bonilla-Solva? If you're worried about exposure to these ideas or that they will compel students to believe the writers, that is an indictment of the counter-arguments, not an indictment of the

writers and scholars themselves. This is the problem with this entire game DeSantis has started. What happens when a liberal governor takes over a state like Texas and decides that curriculum teaching the Confederate side of the war is an indoctrination for gun violence or insurrection or white supremacy? Will we sweep that entire part of our history under the rug and tell kids that maybe they'll learn about that if they go to college? Of course, even sillier is the same impact this kind of censorship always has, the well-known Streisand effect. Do you think that 17-year-olds hearing about a book they are not supposed to read, indeed not allowed to read, won't have their curiosity ignited? Do you suppose that they will decide these forbidden texts are uninteresting

and unworthy of their time? Of course not. DeSantis has now heaped more fame and interest onto the Black scholars he loathes, and many high schoolers in Florida are certain to seek them out with even more reverence and energy than they did before, which is true of almost all kinds of censorship in all contexts. Yesterday, when I wrote about the ridiculous reparations proposal in San Francisco, I said that a better form of reparations included, among other things, a reckoning and acknowledgement of the sordid parts of our racial history. Part of that reckoning includes accepting a wider diversity of narratives about our history and engaging narratives outside the

same ones being retold by the same people over and over. That exercise does and should include giving a slice, however small, to controversial and biting Black scholars, many of whom hold views I find unconvincing, thought-provoking, sometimes offensive, and regularly fascinating. Ignoring, censoring, or rejecting those voices because they include fringe political positions is antithetical to everything our country and people like Ron DeSantis claim that they stand for. It's embarrassing and dispiriting. Anyone who truly cares about free thought, free speech, and a genuine exchange of free ideas should roundly reject it. should roundly reject it. All right, that is it for my take. We are skipping today's reader question because I know my take was kind of long and impassioned. If you are interested

in asking a question, you can email me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C at readtangle.com, and we'll try to answer the question in the newsletter and the podcast. Next up is our under the radar section. The mystery over Representative George Santos' $700,000 in loans to his own campaign is only deepening. In previous filings with the Federal Election Commission, Santos included paperwork stating that he had lent his own campaign $700,000 of his personal money. That filing sparked questions about how exactly Santos had made enough money to loan himself $700,000. But now, in amended filings, Santos' unmarked box that indicated $500,000 of those loans came from his own personal money. Santos' lawyer, Joe Murray, said it would be inappropriate to comment on the change due to pending investigations.

Campaign finance experts said they are befuddled by the change and unsure how to interpret it. The Daily Beast broke the story and the New York Times has some more context. There are links to this in today's episode description. All right, that is it for our Under the Radar story. Next up is our numbers section. The number of parents who ranked that making sure that schools do not teach critical race theory as one of their top three priorities for their kids' education was 1 in 10, according to a national survey by Hart Research Associates. The percentage of parents surveyed by Hart who say that teachers generally stick to

teaching appropriate academic content was 74%. The percentage of parents who believe teachers often go too far in promoting a woke political agenda in classrooms was 21%. The percentage of Republican Florida voters who have a favorable view of Ron DeSantis is 86%, according to a Ragnar poll. The last time the college board introduced a new class before unveiling the Advanced Placement African American Studies course was 2014. All right, that is it for our numbers section, which brings us last but not least to our Have a Nice Day story. Starting on Tuesday, all U.S. military veterans who are in suicidal crisis will be eligible for free care at any Veterans Affairs location or private facility. Unlike other medical benefits, veterans do not have to be enrolled in the VA system to be eligible for the free emergency mental health care. The new policy will include up to 30 days of inpatient care and 90 days of

follow-up outpatient care and is being introduced to help address the mental health crisis among U.S. veterans. 6,146 veterans died by suicide in 2020, or an average of 16.8 per day, and roughly 5,000 veterans are hospitalized in acute psychiatric units every month. If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs immediate help, call or text 988 to connect with the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, if you want to support our work, please go to retangle.com and become a member. You can also donate to the podcast or Tangle. You can simply spread the word or give us a five-star rating. Anything you can do to help us get the word out is greatly appreciated. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow.

Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited by Zosia Warpea. Our script is edited by Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Matt Gwendoly-Volkova, who created our podcast logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, check out our website at www.tangle.com. We'll be right back. Don't want to holla do the most? Holla don't. More festive, less frantic. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web,

his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.