Opinion: What’s really behind Florida’s attack on African American Studies

Editor’s Note: Leslie Kay Jones is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers New Brunswick, specializing in social movements. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

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As a student growing up in Florida, I vividly recall my International Baccalaureate English teacher inviting students to read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in their best voice impressions of a formerly enslaved Black woman. She smirked as they giggled out phrases like “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world” and peeked at me, one of the few Black students, for a response. When we read Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” my classmates offered to buy me for cowrie shells.

None of these experiences were considered “teaching kids to hate each other.” Hate, it seems, only arises when all students are exposed to the ideas of Black historians, Black social scientists and Black lawyers.

At least that’s what Florida’s Republican-controlled Department of Education might have you believe. The department has been stoking division among its constituents by singling out African American Studies (AAS) as a site of “indoctrination,” first for employees, and now for students.

Last month, Florida sent a letter to the College Board rejecting its proposed Advanced Placement African American Studies course, citing concerns about six topics of study, including the Movement for Black Lives, Black feminism and reparations. Gov. Ron DeSantis said the course violates the so-called Stop WOKE Act, which he signed last year, and the state criticized the course’s inclusion of work by a number of scholars, including me.

The law DeSantis cited prohibits teaching multiple concepts purportedly related to race and identity — none of which are espoused either by African American Studies or the oft-targeted academic field of critical race theory (CRT). In particular, the idea that “members of one race, color, national origin, or sex are morally superior” is not a claim made by any of the foundational critical race theory texts that the DeSantis administration has targeted for censorship. Nor does critical race theory as a field argue that any individual or group is inherently racist.

The conclusion that CRT argues that a person’s…