I want to endorse the Sun-Times’ editorial board’s position on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ludicrous ban on an Advanced Placement course on African American Studies. I also wanted to share a “friendly factual amendment:” This is not just a course on history. There is an assumption that anytime anyone says anything about African American Studies or Black Studies, that it is and must be an academic discussion about history.
I am a professor of Black Studies and have practiced in the field for the better part of three decades. As much as I respect history and consider history an important part of the discipline, I am not a historian, but a sociologist and political scientist. In our discipline, there are specialists in every field of the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. African American Studies has a similar wide swath of people from many disciplines. This kind of course is important for helping people understand that reducing entire fields of the study of matters related to those of African descent to just history is errant and part of the problem.
