Florida Man Attacks ‘Woke’ Curriculum

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis succeeded in stripping important ideas and essential people out of the new curriculum for the national Advanced Placement African American Studies course. Khalil and Ben discuss why people like DeSantis are working so hard to obscure parts of our history. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Push it. I'm ready. I'm gonna start us off. Okay, okay,
do it. Smiling, keep smiling, keep shining, you shine, knowing
you can always count on me for sure. That's what

(00:36):
some of my best friends are for. Man, you got it.
I'm Khalil Jibrad Muhammad, I'm Ben Austin. And even after
that song, we're still best friends. One black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And in this show,

(00:57):
we wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a
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.

(01:18):
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

(01:50):
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

(02:14):
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,

(02:38):
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

(02:59):
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

(03:22):
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,

(03:43):
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,

(04:10):
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,

(04:33):
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

(04:54):
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

(05:15):
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

(05:39):
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.

(06:00):
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

(06:21):
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

(06:43):
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

(07:03):
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

(07:25):
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

(07:45):
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

(08:06):
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

(08:28):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:12):
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,

(09:32):
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

(09:53):
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

(10:14):
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

(10:36):
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

(10:59):
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

(11:20):
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,

(11:42):
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

(12:03):
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

(12:24):
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

(12:46):
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

(13:07):
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

(13:30):
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

(13:53):
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

(14:16):
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

(14:39):
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

(15:00):
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

(15:23):
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,

(15:46):
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,

(16:09):
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

(16:32):
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,

(16:52):
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.

(17:28):
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,

(17:51):
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

(18:17):
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

(18:38):
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,

(19:00):
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

(19:21):
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

(19:43):
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

(20:06):
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

(20:28):
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?

(20:51):
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

(21:12):
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

(21:33):
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

(21:54):
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

(22:17):
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

(22:37):
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

(22:59):
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

(23:23):
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,

(23:44):
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

(24:06):
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

(24:28):
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

(24:52):
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.

(25:12):
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

(25:32):
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

(25:55):
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

(26:17):
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

(26:38):
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

(27:01):
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

(27:23):
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

(27:44):
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

(28:06):
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

(28:26):
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.

(28:48):
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

(29:08):
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

(29:31):
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

(29:53):
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

(30:14):
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

(30:34):
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.

(30:56):
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

(31:17):
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

(31:37):
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

(31:59):
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

(32:22):
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

(32:45):
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.

(33:09):
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,

(33:33):
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

(33:54):
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,

(34:17):
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

(34:39):
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,

(35:02):
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

(35:25):
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

(35:46):
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,

(36:08):
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

(36:30):
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

(36:51):
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

(37:12):
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

(37:33):
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,

(37:55):
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

(38:18):
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

(38:40):
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.

(39:03):
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

(39:26):
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,

(39:51):
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

(40:12):
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

(40:36):
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

(41:01):
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

(41:25):
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

(41:48):
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.

(42:11):
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

(42:32):
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,

(42:54):
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

(43:16):
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

(43:36):
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

(43:57):
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.

(44:18):
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

(44:39):
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,

(44:59):
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.
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(45:22):
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(45:59):
is it indoctrination in doctrine, woke indoctrination