Because of Florida’s rejection of the new Advanced Placement African American Studies course three weeks ago, Students in Miami in a pilot version of the course were notified that it was no longer being offered in mid-semester! The students in Miami were in one of sixty pilot classes around the country, but after studying and attending classes for half-a-year, they were told abruptly that the class was cancelled. The district will now place them in an alternative Black studies class that is being organized. The district said it was forced to close the class when it was notified by the state education department that offering it was against the law.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, students were shocked at being out of the class. Here are some excerpts from the Times article yesterday:
Last fall, Jaden Walter opted to take a new Advanced Placement African American Studies course during his last year of high school because he wanted to learn more about African American history.
The senior wanted to understand more about “where we came from,” he told the Miami Herald.
In five months of the pilot course, he said he’d learned more about slavery and African American culture than he had in any other history class. He learned about other countries’ perceptions of Black people, particularly those in the Caribbean, and how many things Americans enjoy today, such as music and food, have roots in slavery, he said…
“It sucks,” Chyna Lee Hunter, 17, told the Herald. She and the other students have spoken out about how they feel “robbed” of their education and censored from what they can be learning.
Some students, including Hunter, who is Chinese, Jamaican and Guyanese and took the class to feel more in touch with her Black identity, have written to DeSantis to complain.
“If this is a change they’re going to make (and) take away from me learning simple history, what else can they take away from my education?” she said. If history only focuses on one culture, “we won’t know the full story. Everyone is always going to feel uncomfortable and misplaced.”
Cyara Pestaina, a senior, felt confident in her knowledge of African American history. She’s a member of NAACP youth programs and her father teaches African American history in Miami-Dade County schools.
But like many other students, Pestaina, 18, enrolled in the AP course because she wanted to learn more. And she did, particularly about other regions and South America.
One of the best aspects of the class was that every student had a connection to what was being taught, she said. That’s one reason Pestaina, who is Black, felt so disappointed by the pilot’s cancellation.
…The class wasn’t always about the issues. Instead, it was about art, culture and how different backgrounds created the base of American culture, she said.
“We don’t get a lot of chances to look into how African history plays into this country, (and) we talked about serious topics that are hard to talk about,” she said. “It was shocking to hear we’d stop midway through the year and be degraded to a class we didn’t choose.”
For Walter, though, the disappointment is more about what he believes is a misconception about the course.
Those who’ve rejected the course, he believes, think the class — and some of the topics or authors featured — are meant to tear down American culture. But for Walter, it simply offered more information.
“The class didn’t make me feel a different way or change how I see different cultures or white people,” he said. “It just made me feel that African Americans also had an impact. It doesn’t have to bring their side down. It just brings our side up, too.”
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