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Dear College Board: [1]

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Date: 2023-02-01  

Well, this one has clearly pissed me off. As it should. I know there are so many things to be angry about, and honestly, I try to limit my participation in these struggles to what my emotional health can handle.

In this case, the thought of high school students being institutionally subjected to white supremacist hatred, compounded by the blatant ass-kissing of the ostensibly pro-education College Board, has brought me to the place where letting it go is just not an option.

Feel free to write to them on their internet form as well. Hopefully, they are getting inundated with such messages. The URL is form.collegeboard.org/… Feel free to take from mine if that helps you take action on this.

Note: Like with your members of Congress, your message is more likely to be taken seriously if you avoid swearing and name-calling. Even though I have not shied away from terms like white supremacy, I’ve tried to keep my focus on the kids. They are our future, and they need us now.

I have put myself as a High School teacher on their form, even though I’ve now retired from that work. You do have the option of “other”.

To the College Board:

It is my understanding that you have amended the proposed curriculum of your African American Studies AP course, after attacks on the course by Florida Governor DeSantis. The new version of your curriculum is said to eliminate important Black scholars and writers, such as the widely respected writer bell hooks, and political commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates. Further, it appears that you have removed mention of the Black Lives Matter movement, and references to Critical Race Theory and the issue of reparations. BLM is the modern incarnation of the Civil Rights movement; no serious discussion of Black Civil Rights can take place without including them. Critical writers and thinkers like hooks and Coates, and thought-provoking positions on race and reparations are essential to encouraging critical thinking among our high-achieving students, of any ethnicity.

Your job in creating the course was never to make it somehow acceptable to bigots and white supremacists, hateful cynics who would like nothing better than to the relegate essential struggles for Black humanity to a historical status irrelevant to contemporary context. Our promising young learners deserve the chance to weigh such issues thoughtfully, and to make up their own minds free from the tyrannical impulses of demagogues.

In the interest of authentic learning, please reconsider your African American AP course content.

Just for the record, I’m including a one-option “poll”: Have you written to the College Board? If you have taken another action in addition or instead, please let us know via the comments, as others might take inspiration from that. They do have a twitter account, @CollegeBoard, in case you are still on Twitter.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/1/2150614/-Dear-College-Board

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