Florida Man Attacks ‘Woke’ Curriculum

deeply divided and unequal country. And in this episode, we're exploring the story of the Florida man who calls the teaching of the History of Race and Racism or ap African American Studies propaganda and indoctrination. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Florida man. Here is Ronda Santis, and he and his conservative cronies, they are sabotaging this advanced placement African American Studies course. And we're gonna look at the national implications of this move. Let's get to the show. Let's do

it now, Khalil. In January, ron De Santis, the governor of Florida Republican, announced that he was going to ban this AP African American Studies curriculum in his state. I mean, I've heard, I've heard all about it. He is he is about to ban our show too. I mean that's that. I have a friend inside of the of the governor's mansion who sent me a leaked memo that said, some of my best friends are is way too woke. It will potentially infect the minds of our students in the

state of Florida. It lacks any educational value, and we need to go after it. So those are the things that his education department or people in his administration said about this AP curriculum, where you just said about our podcast, and both are probably not true. He called it woke indoctrination, that it lacks educational value, and actually, let's hear around a Santa's basically trash this AP curriculum, this course on black history, what are one of what's one of the

lessons about queer theory? 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 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's standards. We believe

in teaching kids fact. I love it teaching kids facts like I love that you responded to this, because since this story broke in January and then in February, the college board who creates the APE curriculum, actually came out with a curriculum with a bunch of revisions. You've been in the news. You've been all over the place talking about this, and in the way that our you know, sound bite social media news cycle works, even things you've

said became part of the news. Right. Actually, I'm just trying to drum up, you know, even more downloads for our podcast. Fox News had a headline of a story and said Ivy League professor meaning Khalil Jibrawn Mohammed on MSNBC trash's critical race theory critic as fake journalist. Well, I mean I was really just giving the facts of the guys actual credentials. That's what I didn't trash him that. I know you didn't, man, I know you did. But this is this is why it's so great because now

you and I get to talk about this subject. We get to talk about this AP curriculum and all that it means. So let's jump into this important story. Yeah, all jokes aside. This really is fundamental to who we are as a country. It's fundamental to our capacity to make the changes that you and I think are so important and so many of our guests have been talking about all season. All right, my man, here's how I feel like we can talk about this to actually sort

of explain what has happened throughout this process. So the College Board, which which writes the AP curriculum for states and then for the entire country, they created an African American Studies curriculum and they said that they were piloting this in I think about sixty different in schools across the country. Yeah, something like that. That's right. They had like a draft of this going out, and that draft

is leaked and conservative news media and then ROUNDA. Santis, the Florida Governor sort of jump on this and criticize it. When they start seeing what's inside the curriculum. The Governor of Florida, Rhunda Santis, and the Department of Florida Education

got hold of what was in the framework. They called it a framework and it listed a number of topics that would be explored in this future curriculum, and some of it was about black lives matter, some of it was about reparation, some of it was about people who are black and queer, and more particularly, it was about a number of topics that you and I are constantly historicizing because they overlap with the story of our lives.

In other words, things have been going on since the civil rights movement, you know, like since the nineteen seventies. And we heard the Santis in the opening, and we heard sort of him talking about what he felt was

the problems of this curriculum. And one of the other things that he's able to say is that it's actually against the law in the state of Florida to teach these things, which is crazy because the laws have changed in the last two years there, so there's a stop there's a stop Woke Act that that bans the teaching of critical race theory. There some aspects of the courts have sort of challenged some aspects to it, and not just critical race theory but also the sixteen nineteen project.

But yeah, I mean, I'm glad that you're you're emphasize this point because here he basically set the conditions in place to render anything like what we're talking about with this African American studies and things to come as illegal. I mean, talk about a rig system. You have a situation where you've defined an entire category acknowledge as potentially divisive and not just about race and racism, also about

sex and sexism. This is as much about gender issues in the broadest sense as it is about about race. And so here you pass a law a year ago they say, hey, we're not going to allow these things, and we're gonna call out the sixteen nineteen project and other things. And of course this curriculum comes along independent of the State of Florida's own retrograde backwards agenda, and he's like, OOPSI it breaks our law. Can't use it here, but yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. No, So I

just want to talk about what happens next. So there is this sort of conservative attack on this curriculum, and then the college board comes out on February first, the first day of Black History months, they released the final version of this class and it suddenly has emitted, it's excluded all these things that conservatives like the Santiss has said are problematic. That's right, and very conveniently. So, I

mean you took a look at it. What did you think when you saw some of the things between the before and the after. Well, you know, here's one of the things I thought about. Like, you and I are both teachers. We both teach college courses, and I've taught high school as well in the past. And when you make a curriculum, you do have to make all sorts of choices, right, you have to. You can't teach everything

in the world, and so you have to. You might teach you know, my new book Correction and your book The Condemnation of Black Condemnation of Blackness. Oh man, see you don't even you're stumbling on the title of my book to all these years, and that's all you need. And then and then you throw in some other like

you know, here and there things. But but but this is more than just that kind of uh, you know, natural pruning that you have to make to fit things into a class, right, this is something different is going on here. Well. The thing is, I mean, when you look at them before and after, it is obvious that they've turned something that was defined as African American studies which is inclusive of history but also includes concerns about

the present. If you take a sociology class right now on any college campus, you're going to talk about the prison industrial complex, you're going to talk about policing, you're going to talk about the current education system. So the thing about African American studies that is different than African American history is it is a conversation between the past and the present. That's what it was built to do. And so they took out basically most of the present.

So you were among eight hundred scholars who criticized this and wrote a public letter. What did the letter say, Well, just to be clear, the letter basically said because it came out before the revised curriculum, but it was intended to come out right before because we were concerned, as the drafters of the letter, that there would be political influenced by Florida and that we would see the kind

of changes that we saw. So we didn't want this celebratory news story on February one, on the first day of Black History Month, to be like, oh my god, look at this amazing thing that the college board has done, without paying close attention to the implications that Florida governor

had in fact influenced it. So what we said is that the college Board has an obligation to uphold the standards of academic freedom and to protect the broad range of academic interest expressed in the original curriculum, and that Rhonda Santis ultimately was trampling upon their autonomy as an organization, as well as implications for all people doing this kind of work in the field. So that a politician censoring academia is problematic in itself. Yeah, but like you know

this as well as anybody. You're a journalist, right, I mean, this is this is the equivalent of some politicians somewhere saying that you, I mean, let's not even make it hypothetical, your book could be banned in the state of Florida, Like, yeah, precisely because of the content of it. So the implications are massive and different from all the states that have passed these anti CRT laws and book banning laws. The difference is that what happened here has national educational implications.

Did you you took an AP class, right, and how did it work? Remind me how your AP class work and why you took it in high school? Yeah? Yeah, I mean we're going into AP. I probably only took AP European History. This is going back to the late nineteen eighties, and you probably took like three or four APS when we were in high school together. Ye. But but but it's a way to get college credit. So it says that you know, if you if you get I think if it's the top scores of five, the

next scores of four, you get college credit. If you get a high score, and it shows that you're college ready, just shows that you're taking you're you're taking the highest level classes in your school in a way. That's right. So your AP European History, like my AP American History course, we both did well enough to get credit going to into college. But guess what you get? I got I gotta I gotta five, I gotta four. Yeah, well my four was just as good in terms of one, you know,

the four hours of credit. Yeah, you became historian. Look at me? So no, man. Look, So here's the thing. What people have to appreciate why this has national implications is because this AP class will define every AP offering in this course across the entire United States, not just in Florida, not just in Tennessee, not just in Illinois

where we went to school. And guess what all the colleges that then will be asked and universities to accept this curriculum in terms of giving credit to those students. So everybody's invested in this. So that's why this is such a big deal. I'd like us to talk about maybe a few specific writers and techs that were taken out of this AP African American Studies curriculum and use that to think about the bigger issues what happened there in Florida and now the country and how we're supposed

to think about this. Okay, all right, And maybe a good place to start is one of the authors who was omitted from the APE curriculum is James Baldwin. I know, man, it's unbelievable. Let's talk about what it means that he's

actually removed from this curriculum, right. And so you know, when you when you look at the curriculum, the final version that came out, it has Martin Luther King, it has Malcolm X, and it sort of jumps over James Baldwin and and a lot of stuff of sort of the black power movement, and you know, maybe it even kind it kind of stops there. It not only stops there. The original full curriculum had a whole unit on the

Black Panther Party. It even dealt with the Nation of Islam, which, frankly, you know, aside from my own family history, you can't actually understand Malcolm X without putting the Nation of Islam in its own historical context. The original unit they had was from The Fire Next Time, Baldwin's nineteen sixty three essay that is an interrogation of the Nation of Islam, because Baldwin was trying to make sense of this alternative

path to self determination and independence for black people. In other words, one of the most dominant strains of black thought was black nationalism, and at the time when Baldwin was writing The Fire Next Time, he was trying to make sense of these different paths. All of that's gone. Yeah, And one of the ironies of this curriculum is that the whole idea or the idea of black studies sort of emerges from this moment, from this protest moment. Correct,

this is when the field is invented. That sort that to remove sort of the genesis of it feels ahistorical and the last question on Baldwin before we move on. Why do you think he was the target of removal. Why would he sort of spur this kind of backlash against him. Well, I think Baldwin is controversial today because Baldwin's critique of white liberals has been a very prescient

voice in this moment. Is his attempt to try to give voice to the contradictions of a country that claimed this, you know, this American exceptionalism, this city on the hill, this American democracy like the world had never known. And when you listen to Baldwin, you hear him really fundamentally articulating that the damage of racism was really the moral perversion of white people. They've been raised to believe, and

by now they helplessly believe. Then, no matter how terrible their lives may be, and their lives have been quite terrible, and no matter how far they fall, no matter what disaster to overtake, some they have one enormous knowledge and consolation which is like a heavenly revelation. At least they are not black. Yeah, it's like a it's such a powerful rendering of white privilege. Exactly, And in his amazing locution, I just want to repeat this notional white privilege, as

you put it, at least they are not black. And see that's that is Baldwin putting his finger on the deepest wound in the American psychology, which is to say, a long time ago this country decided they would define blackness as those who would whose lives would subsidize the

freedoms of others. And that is the third rail of American politics right now that people like de Santists and red state leaders around the country have been working double time against in the wake of all those white people who are like you know what, I don't want to be part of this anymore. After seeing George Floyd be killed, I don't want to have anything to do with this,

and I want to learn more. Khalil, you and I are here talking about this ap African American studies curriculum, and we are going to take a short break and when we come back, we're going to continue that conversation. But we're going to see how it's also about gender studies and queer studies. Let's do it, Khalil, we are back. Some of my best friends are and man, this ap African American Studies curriculum all right, So we talked about

Baldwin being cut out of it. Another huge sort of whole after the final version comes out, is that there was all this stuff on queer studies and gender studies, and as we heard de Santis in the opening, you know, he was objecting to that and he says that is

not history, and that's all removed. That's right. Yeah. So he when he says something like queer theory, and I love his like very like fourth grade enunciation, intersectionality, He's like, he's essentially creating these categories that are dog whistles to his supporters to say that must be bad. And of course, in a time when we are seeing legislative action to ban transpeople from having access to healthcare or access to publicly funded sports, something like queer studies has a direct

relationship to the actual political fights that are happening. But that's what education has always been about. Let me give you a really good example of this from my standpoint. You could tell me if you disagree in the sciences, nobody pretends in the sciences that they aren't solving problems based on hypotheses that will cure cancer, solve global warming, increase safe and clean water fixed irrigation systems in the

drying deserts of California. Everyone has a normative goal. Why shouldn't we have a normative goal to solve our understanding of the ways that people's lives are affected by forms of discrimination, bigotry, and systemic inequalities. Now, historians don't necessarily do that, but a lot of other social scientists do that work. And that's the work of people who have

been doing queer studies. They've been trying to do something that is really simple, like, if we can't solve for the fact that trans people are the most likely to experience violence in any other identity based population, then we're probably not going to fix this problem until we fix it for them. That's simple, right, That is simple. Yeah, And you know this is this is sort of low hanging fruit for someone like the scientists to attack, you know.

He his state, Florida had also passed this don't Say Gay legislation, which bans the teaching of I think kindergarten through third grade where you can't talk about gender identification or sexuality sexual orientation, right because the idea essentially at you know, as the news has reported that one this is inappropriate for kids. And two that you know this

curriculum might convince some kid that they aren't sis gender. Look, I got to tell you this story because this isn't just about you know, two smart guys and two smart alecky guys like you and me having this conversation and on our moral high horse, you know, just like all these dumb people. Right, this is also said you said, I love that he said smart Alec. The other day we were talking and I said, I said the word joshing, and I was like, man, I hated just that. I remember,

I was like, what am I doing? What have I become? Sometimes as we age, you know, we revert back to the mean. You know, that whiteness just just just just bubbling up inside of you. So so one of my really close friends sends me a text and he's following the news and he literally writes this. He says, he's following, he's following the news. He's seeing you talk about this ap Carre's on the news, that's right. So he's following this particular controversy and he says from the text, he says,

keep fighting the good fight. Brother. I washed a discussion on MSNBC this morning regarding the issue and the discussion meldedt LGBTQ plus civil rights with the current APFAM studies. That doesn't sit well with me. But I admit I'm ignorant on many of the LGBTQ concerns, like the lgbt kicks concerns. It reminded me of like I'm ignorant on the blacks and their situation. But so But but he's also being really honest, and he's looking to you for he's trying to understand. But he for him, these are

totally separate things, and he feels like it's mudding. This is a black guy. I'm assuming that's right. Yeah, and and and he is saying that, you know, I'm feeling like these two things shouldn't be conflated in a way, they shouldn't be connected. That's right. But but he's open, he's oh, he's asking you to like correct him in

a way that's correct. Yeah, He's like, I'm prepared to admit I'm not sure I understand why these things are being put together, because for him, it's like, I am a fierce warrior for our black history being taught truthfully, but why do we have to link this to queer theory. So in other words, you can rally behind the black history stuff to some degree, even that's controversial in many ways, but this other stuff is like, it doesn't seem like

it's appropriate. No, But even even when you're talking about somebody who is an ally and who's experiencing this is

also confused about these connections. So it is like I was saying, it's much easier to exploit that as a reason to sort of throw it all out, and you were talking about intersectionality, and so intersectionality is this idea that our different identities and the different ways that people experience oppression that they can be they can be interconnected, they can reinforce one another, they're they're not wholly separate, and we can think about them in those terms. That's right.

So the one way to think about this is both historical and in terms of thinking about how people need certain tools to make sense of their lived experiences today. So historically, intersectionally, we can understand that someone like James Baldwin was a fierce critic of American racism, and he was gay, and he experienced being gay in ways that made him not as much a celebrated writer in some

pockets of Black America at that time than he is today. Similarly, one of the leading towering figures in the civil rights movement, a person who was in many ways responsible for helping to guide Martin Luther King Jr. Was a man named Bayard Rustin who was also gay, and in fact his homosexuality, his gayness was a source of tension, so much so that he was essentially pushed to the back of the movement at key moments because people tried to embarrass him

by it and said, you know, we're going to expose you, so you can't fully participate. So that's yeah. I also think about I think about Bell Hooks, who's also you know, deeply involved in the study of intersectionality and who identified as queer, of also being removed from from this curriculum as well well, not just that she's been banned like Tony Morrison and some of the others even before the ap African American Studies curriculum. She passed recently too, which

makes it even more sad. But you asked this question about intersectionality in terms of the specific way in which it is such a charged issue, and one way that is is because a person who's who is credited for

coining the term. Her name is Kimberly Crenshaw. She's a law professor, and she essentially coined this term in nineteen eighty nine because she was trying to make sense in legal studies in cases the differences between white women's experiences with employment discrimination and black women's experiences with employment discrimination.

They weren't the same. All women were suffering from a lack of promotion, they were subjected to serial sexual harassment, and they were paid much less than their male counterparts. But black women experienced all those things plus the additional anti black racism, which meant that what they were experiencing

was even worse. Not to say that these things always have to be compared on a hierarchical scale, but if you were only solving for gender issues for women in the workplace, you were not solving for race issues amongst women of color too. That's it. That kind of the original contemporary version of intersectionality. So a curriculum that doesn't think about all the ways that these are interconnected, you're missing out on an understanding of the world. This is

how the world was. Yeah, so what did you tell your friend, Well, I told him, I said, you can't actually understand the fullness of the civil rights movement without understanding the people who actually made it happen. We just it's just another form of mythology. It's you know, it's

like one that we feel good about. I mean, I didn't tell him this, but I, you know, would also say, like a lot of black churches that supported the civil rights movement were also simultaneously discriminating against black people who were gay, either closeted or outwardly from fully participating in the life of the church. So this is something that today contemporary social justice movements have been very active to

correct for. And the reason why they've been active in correcting forward is because it was an issue, and it did hurt the movement, and it created divisions, and it also created unfinished business literally like things that never got sold for. And so Black Studies was totally built to look at that dance between what happened in the past, what have we learned from the past, and how does

that help us make sense of our current condition. Man, man, I got so much going on in my head right now, I actually need to take a short break and let's pause for a minute. Let's come back and let's talk more about how all these contemporary issues are removed from the curriculum. Okay, so we're back from the break, and I just want to go back to Kimberly Crenshaw for a minute. Like, she is a critical race theorist. That's who she is. She's been that for her entire career.

That's what you get from that body of work to help make sense of the world as it actually operates. And that's a powerful thing. It's kind of like, for me, anti scientism at its best. It's like the scholarship has moved on from where Desantist thinks it was when he was a student to a better place, just as science does. And he's like, Nah, I don't like these I don't like these updates. Let's stick with the old ones. Let's stick with what we used to know, because that makes

us all feel better. Yeah, what he talked about is truth. To him, that truth is a sort of very narrow and very palatable one that's right and does it isn't challenging in ways that are uncomfortable. So, yeah, you're talking about truth. Well, one of those truths is that the United States has the largest prison system the world has ever known. That's not news right to us. You've written about it. I've written about it. You know many people who we are engaged with. This is a well known thing.

But guess what. In the early version of the African American Studies curriculum, there was a whole unit to address this issue and they were featuring the author and scholar activist Michelle Alexander. Yes, I said scholar activism, because in Black studies a lot of people are scholar activists. That's just the way it is. So people read excerpts from the New Gym Crow that was in the curriculum, and now it's been cut out, it has been removed altogether.

The AP is moving to this space where some material may not actually be used on the test, but you can opt into studying more deeply a topic. And for this particular topic, it couldn't be more pressing as a societal issue, covering everything from the war on crime and the war on drugs to systemic policing and of course,

as I've already said, this massive punishment system. Okay, so we're talking about Michelle Alexander and the New Gym Crow, and you told me that you were going to have dinner with her last Saturday, and that you were going to try to record her to just hear a response to how she felt about being cut out of this curriculum. Yeah, the timing couldn't have been better. We were planning to have this conversation and I was going to have a chance to talk to her about it. So we're at

a dinner party, folks are doing the dishes. We've just finished up, and it was a little awkward, I'll admit, because you know, Michelle Alexander's like super famous and she's my friend. But it felt like I was crossing line between like, Okay, by the way, I want to hear your thoughts on this issue, which has everything to do with That's what it means, That's what it means to be a professional podcast. You got you gotta do the work, all right. You know she understands. So so here's what

she said. I guess I would say that I'm sorry to see it being part of the fascist backlash in Florida to the teaching of truth about our past and our present. I'm not surprised, but I also hope that the teaching of this history isn't limited ever to people who have good GPAs and have access to AP courses.

I'm dreaming of freedom schools that make this kind of education available to all students of all colors, no matter what their background or their GPA, or whether it's a college board course or something that's being taught in someone's kitchen or backyard. I think this is history. Well, y'all need to know. Good job Khalil getting that tape. That's that's the work that's in fascist backlash, the truth and

her talking about AP as. You know, there is something I guess elitist about it, but that the education that we're talking about, it needs to happen all over the place, and it's great that she's focusing on ways to get this information elsewhere besides from an AP curriculum. Well, I just saw just to echo your point in what she said. I was actually surprised by her response in that way, because what she said is, yeah, this is this is fascism binding its way out of Florida and impacting the

rest of the nation. And of course this is not the first or only example we could point to, but she's like, this material is so important that it needs to be taught, whether it's in classes, classrooms or not. And that's the bigger issue because, you know, to use a very academic way of putting it, Black studies has always been about fugitive knowledge, meaning knowledge that was being policed,

knowledge that was criminalized. Because knowledge, as we say, as you know, the Old Schoolhouse rocks, you know, little animations would say, knowledge is power, and so the power to diagnose one's condition matters. And I just want to go back to the College Board because so Michelle's book is omitted, and really everything contemporary is emitted, and you know, sort of history kind of stops in the nineteen sixties. The College Board says that it cut out most of these

books because they're not primary sources. They're secondary sources, that's right. You know, like a primary source would be like an Audrey Lord poem or or Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail. But that a work of history, or a work of journalism or a work of criticism that's secondary. That's right, And that's kind of bogus. It's a very blurred line between what is primary and secondary, in part

because as history evolves, those things change. What is secondary in one moment later becomes primary I mean diary entries, letters between people, even news reporting in the moment, say news reporting about the Civil War or the Civil rights movement, all primary documents today and generally when historians write from the position of the present looking back on that stuff, we call that secondary sources. And the thing about Michelle's work just to focus on that, in particular, the New

Gem Crow. It was a cultural touchstone for a massive re education or not even re education, new learning about the scale of the system at this punishment system and where it came from, meaning what its origins were. So it changed not only hearts and minds. I saw people as in diverse as settings as reading on the New York City sub way when it first came out, to

folks on the beach in Martha's Vineyard reading it. I mean, everybody was reading the New Gym Crow at some point, and of course people organized around it and used it to make policy claims. So it's hard to say ten years later whether or not the New Gym Crow is a quote unquote primary or secondary source. What is clear is that it's essential. Listen. I just had I made a timeline for the beginning of my book called Corrections

about the prison system. And I put the publication of our book in the timeline because it's a historically important moment. It is this reevaluation marking toward this movement that in the last I don't know, ten years or so towards decarceration. You know, President Obama is the first president to enter a federal prison after this book is published ever. And

I'd say because of this book. Because of this book, it is it marks a moment in time when thinking about prisons and our system of incarcerating a quarter of the world's prison population changes, and what an important thing to study just as a historical document. That's an historical moment. That's right, yea. But listen, as you said, it's bogus that the College Board is saying this issue about secondary and primary because that's not really the issue here. I mean,

we're we've sort of been talking about this throughout. The real issue is that these current events, that contemporary issues are in some ways the most threatening, and they're also and they're also the easiest to turn into round Santis or Trump or whoever propaganda. They're the easiest sort of to fire people up about. That's right. Yeah, And it's not just Michelle Alexander. Just to mention a couple of

other things, the whole issue of healthcare discrimination. I mean, so many people now have a better sense of how racism in our healthcare system because of COVID nineteen is a life or death matter. And people like Dorothy Roberts, who we've had on show recently talking about the family policing system, has been a major contributor to understanding this broad history of medical racism and healthcare discrimination and the

tackle on black women's reproductive rights. And it's not just Dorothy Roberts, it's the entire Black Lives Matter movement that was in the first version of this thing is now completely gone, which is astounding, And it just goes on and on at the end of the day. Yeah, And I mean it's it's really important to reiterate again that this is not a history curriculum. This is not African American history curriculum. It's not an ap history class. It's

it's African American studies. So I guess you can make the argument that history is sort of said in a moment, but sort of studying, say, the Black experience in America to remove sort of anything from the present sort of even how that path reverberates up to. Now, that's not you're not looking at the field. That's you're cutting yourself off.

You're not only not looking at the field. But here we are having a national conversation yet again about systemic police violence in the case of the murder of Tyree Nichols and Memphis that happened just a few weeks ago, and this is something that Congress is currently debating. I mean, you remember those scholastic newspapers that were current events like this is this is current events, and it's depressing current events, but it's most certainly current events. It's part of the

world we live in. And guess what if you happen to be a black child and you're living in a household, either in Memphis or where your parents are concerned about this, and they're watching the news, You're being exposed to this information.

You can't escape it. So at the end of the day, if we are actually to truly understand what black studies had always been about, it is the basic building block for connecting the dots from the past of slave patrols to racist sheriff's in the gem Crow South, to the kind of policing that's been going on all over America over the last fifty years. That's what Black studies empower students to understand and gives them the choice at the

end to do something about it or not. Yeah, you know, it makes me think about a lot of the the energy that has fueled this political censorship, you know, from from critical race theory and the and the sixteen nineteen project to this ap curriculum and this idea of a kind of patriotic education. You know, of of of something about America that you can only think of it in terms of all its ideals. And you know, you, if you're white, you shouldn't be made to feel uncomfortable about

all of it. It's problematic aspects. Um maybe you should celebrate other you know, other races, but maybe even not um. And and that's sort of been behind a lot of this. It's such a it's such a like almost it's a childish view of history that things are that are uncomfortable, if you just sort of close your eyes to them,

then they don't exist. African American history and studies has always been, in some ironic way, a way of just saying, be true to what you put on paper, as doctor King wants it, like just live up to your own fucking principles, and and like like what are we supposed to do with that. We can't even do that without laws being passed to say that is propaganda. So that's where we are right now, and that's why this is

such a massive issue that isn't going to stop. Yeah, yeah, you're making me think about Michelle Alexander and what she said to you that the ap curriculum is really important in all the ways that we've been talking about, and it's also symbolic. So it's it's actual students and a curriculum, and it's also symbolic of all of the censorship and

the exclusion that's going on right now. And it's scary both for what it is and and for what it augurs, what it pretends, what it makes us think is possible in excluding more and more and more. And I've been thinking in our conversation about Baldwin and then also about the new Jim Crow, about a moment last year when I was actually teaching Baldwin inside a maximum security prison here in Illinois. It was late Baldwin. I mean, it was sort of Baldwin in the nineteen eighties during the

Reagan era before his death. I think he dies in nineteen eighty seven, right, he does, and Baldwin depressed. Baldwin, Baldwin feeling defeated by history. Baldwin, who his friends from the civil rights and Black power movement are mostly gone, had been killed, feeling like everything from them home and

had failed. And the students, most of them who had who were roughly our age and had been in prison since they were young men or teenagers, and most of them had no outdate, and they had such long sentences that they were likely to die in prison or to

be elderly by the time they get out. They do have those sentences, and how much Baldwin meant to them in understanding the Reagan era and the Trump era and the excitement that was happening, like crackling, you mean, being able to understand how Baldwin the same things happening thirty years ago. Yeah, And just like when you're in a classroom and and you know, sparks are flying and it's

crackling with energy because people are making these connections. It was I could see it better because I was sort of experiencing it, you know, inside this crepid maximum security prison. What a what a curriculum can actually do to sort of bring these things together? You know, it's it's it's it's liberating. I mean, quick quick addendum to what you described. I mean, one of the most affecting things I've experienced is talking to a formally incarcerated person and them say

to me, man, brothers, nice to meet you. You're one of the most well read people in prison. And by that they mean people are reading the Condemnation of Blackness and it's helping them make sense of their reality. That's, you know, I mean, very personally gratifying. But I know that that this is exactly what your teaching experience has

been like for you. Yeah, and this is it's you know, a moment like that in that classroom of sort of having to look at Baldwin again much more closely, having to think about the past, which isn't that far away. You know that this is nineteen eights, which is excluded from this APE curriculum, and thinking about our last five ten years. Um, it made sense to me. It made sense to me more. And you know that's what you want out of this. We don't want to ignore it.

We want to try to sort of get inside of these this these stories of our of our country. Yeah. So, I mean in so many ways. You know, what this moment tells us is that knowledge is the building block for changing our society. And Rod de Santist knows that as well as anybody. And he's cutting off that. Yeah, you're not saying listen in a positive way, like you're saying that the opposition knows that there's there's there's power and danger and people knowing too much absolutely that's right,

and seeing things for what they are. And therefore we if those of us committed to truth, those of us committed to justice, this is all of our fight. And you know he's coming for ap African American studies today. It'll be women in gender studies tomorrow. So folks, folks, folks better get get ready, get your armor on. Yeah. Man, well I'm glad. I'm glad I have this fight with you, or at least that we are in this fight. That's right. I'm not fighting with you right now. We're in this together,

all right, man, Love you, Love you too. Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil, Gibron Mohammed and my best friend Ben Austin. This show is produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Sarah Knicks, our engineer is Amanda Kawan, and our managing producer is Constanza Gallardo. At Pushkin, Thanks Selita Mulad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Niggliori,

John Schnars, Gretta Khne, and Jacob Weissberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the Brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his music at his website Avery R Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

And if you like our show, please give us a five star rating and a review and listen even if you don't like it, give it a five star rating and a review, and please tell all of your best friends about it. Thank you. Woke, Woke, indoctrinization, indoctrination indoctrinization is it indoctrination in doctrine, woke indoctrination