The Forum

On January 12, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis garnered national media attention when he rejected a request from the College Board to approve an Advanced Placement (AP) African American studies course for students of Florida’s public high schools, claiming the new course “significantly lacks educational value” and is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law.” Just weeks later, on February 1, the College Board announced a significantly revised curriculum for the course, one that had been refocused on “primary sources” and stripped of “theory.” Despite the College Board’s insistence that these were standard revisions based on the recommendation of scholars and experts, documents seem to reveal months of correspondence with the state’s Department of Education attempting to reconcile the course to Florida statutes. Regardless of the backroom dealings that may have inspired the revisions, the updated curriculum has been purged of key ideas and contemporary issues in the field of African American studies, including institutional racism, intersectionality, Black feminism, and the Black Lives Matter movement, leading a group of “over 1,000 faculty, administrators and supporters in higher education who teach, write, research and lead in the areas of African American and Black Studies” to pen an open letter to the College Board’s CEO calling for a restoration of the integrity of the course. In the ensuing weeks, the College Board has offered apologies for some of its media statements but continued to defend the reduced curriculum.

AP African American Studies is already being taught at a racially diverse high school in Tallahassee, Florida as part of the College Board’s pilot program. FSU doctoral student Marlon Williams-Clark, who is currently teaching AP African American studies, was interviewed by NPR a few weeks into the 2022-2023 school year. He said his AP students are deeply interested in the topics they’re learning about, and he’s had nothing but positive reactions from their parents, who are happy to see their children so excited about their schoolwork. At the same time, he has acknowledged that Florida’s memory law, H.B. 7—better known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act”—is restricting his ability to lead classroom discussions. When Mr. Williams-Clark reaches the final eight weeks of the semester—the portion of the curriculum which the DeSantis administration has cited as illegal under the Stop W.O.K.E. Act—will he be punished for assigning a text by Angela Davis or Kimberlé Crenshaw? We know that arresting a Black man at gunpoint for voting isn’t beyond DeSantis. What about arresting one for teaching high school students about critical race theory?

The comparison is instructive: much like “voter fraud,” the term “critical race theory” can mean whatever DeSantis needs it to mean to justify his anti-democratic agenda. If he is criticized for making it harder to vote in predominantly Black communities, for slashing Black voters’ political power through gerrymandering, or for creating a neofascist election police force that arrested people who had already been told by government officials that they were allowed to vote, DeSantis will insist he’s only standing up for “election integrity.” In the same fashion, the governor defends his restrictions on what teachers and college professors can say about race, gender, and American history, aptly described by a federal judge as “positively dystopian,” by framing these draconian attacks on public education as heroic defensive measures protecting children from woke indoctrination.

Conservative activists from Frank Luntz to Christopher Rufo have mastered the art of framing political issues in terms that benefit Republicans. Luntz’s impact speaks for itself: he’s responsible for Republicans saying “illegal aliens” instead of “undocumented workers,” talking about “border security” rather than “immigration reform,” and referring to the estate tax as “the death tax.” Cognitive scientist George Lakoff gives a persuasive account of the dark arts of linguistic deception on which figures like Luntz and Rufo have built lucrative careers. In a 2005 New York Times Magazine feature, “The Framing Wars,” Matt Bai writes:

According to Lakoff, Republicans are skilled at using loaded language, along with constant repetition, to play into the frames in our unconscious minds. Take one of his favorite examples, the phrase “tax relief.” It presumes, Lakoff points out, that we are being oppressed by taxes and that we need to be liberated from them. It fits into a familiar frame of persecution, and when such a phrase, repeated over time, enters the everyday lexicon, it biases the debate in favor of conservatives. If Democrats start to talk about their own “tax relief” plan, Lakoff says, they have conceded the point that taxes are somehow an unfair burden rather than making the case that they are an investment in the common good. The argument is lost before it begins.

This story is, by now, a familiar one—and it mirrors today’s debates surrounding “critical race theory” and “wokeness.”

First, the “woke” scapegoat fits into a familiar frame of persecution: it presumes that liberal elites have seized control of major American institutions (public schools, elite universities, mainstream media, federal bureaucracies, etc.) and alleges that these outsider elites are now forcefully imposing anti-American values on ordinary people and, worst of all, innocent children. The reactionary right became obsessed with this frame during the Cold War, and it has been recycled to resist new forms of social change ever since. From Brown v. Board to marriage equality and beyond, opposition to entrenched social hierarchies has been vilified as Marxist, or communist, or socialist; arguments for social equality are dismissed as “secular humanism,” “postmodernism,” or “political correctness.” Now, in response to the most massive and diverse wave of protests for racial justice in U.S. history, the political right has seized upon “critical race theory” (CRT) as an all-inclusive punching bag for anti-anti-racist politics.

When liberals and moderates respond to the anti-CRT moral panic by insisting that CRT is not actually taught in public schools, they both concede the conservative premise that the insights of CRT are dangerous and inappropriate for K-12 students and fail to point out that right-wing activists are, in their own words, “intentionally redefining what ‘critical race theory’ means in the public mind, expanding it as a catchall for the new racial orthodoxy.” As Lakoff observes, this kind of approach guarantees disaster for Democrats; the argument is lost before it begins.

Because there is overwhelming support among U.S. adults for teaching Black history in K-12 schools, DeSantis made sure to frame his rejection of AP African American studies in more socially acceptable terms. The governor was reelected by a landslide just months after his Orbán-inspired “Don’t Say Gay” law, described by his press secretary as an “Anti-Grooming Bill” that DeSantis said would protect parents from “schools using classroom instruction to sexualize their kids as young as five years old.” Defending his decision to reject the College Board’s pilot course, DeSantis once again leaned into the rhetoric of the “groomer” moral panic. After noting that the pilot curriculum includes the scholarship of Black queer theorists, DeSantis asked, “Now who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids.”

In “Language as a Mechanism of Control,” the fourth chapter of his book How Propaganda Works, philosopher Jason Stanley describes “linguistic propaganda” as a process in which “certain words are imbued, by a mechanism of repeated association, with problematic images or stereotypes.” Repeated association is a simple strategy that the GOP has used to remarkable success in setting the terms of debate in what commentators on both sides often call “the culture wars.” (Ironically, Democratic strategists who insist on staying away from “culture war issues” are themselves falling into a Republican trap.) In March 2021, conservative activist Christopher Rufo explained his vision for turning CRT “toxic,” writing, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Rufo’s goal has been achieved, thanks in large part to Fox News, where he has become a frequent guest. Masters of repeated association, Fox’s cable TV programs mentioned CRT nearly four thousand times in 2021. As Stanley persuasively argues in his most recent book, How Fascism Works, this kind of linguistic propaganda is especially damaging to democratic politics when it creates an us-versus-them framing vilifying an internal enemy—a group which seeks to poison and corrupt our society from within, to take away our great history, to destroy our way of life, and to eliminate everything that makes us who we are.

In DeSantis’s case, this enemy is “the woke.” In November 2022, the Florida governor likened his efforts to restrict how students are taught about race and gender to the allied powers’ military campaign against Nazi Germany in the second World War: “We fight the woke in the legislature, we fight the woke in the schools, we fight the woke in the corporations,” he said, riffing on Winston Churchill’s famous “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech. “We will never surrender to the woke mob,” DeSantis whined in his second inaugural address. After swearing his oath of office on a Bible borrowed from Glenn Beck, he received a standing ovation for declaring, “Florida is where woke goes to die.” The ever-growing list of things DeSantis has denigrated as “woke” includes all of academia, corporations like Disney and Ben & Jerry’s, President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, and—of course—critical race theory. By the end of his first term in office, Gov. DeSantis envisioned himself as the self-appointed commander in chief of the Republican Party’s war against wokeness.

DeSantis packages his attacks on “CRT” and “wokeness” as an extension of civil rights laws prohibiting “state-sanctioned racism,” but closer scrutiny reveals just how Orwellian Florida’s executive branch of government has become. While the governor’s public statements refer to CRT as “a race-based version of a Marxist-type ideology” that “teach[es] kids to hate our country,” his State Board of Education quietly defines it as “the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems” in ways that perpetuate white supremacy. It is this definition of “CRT” that the Board of Education has decided violates Rule 6A-1.094124 : “Required Instruction Planning and Reporting.” The board expressly prohibits teaching students about how racism has been embedded in American society and its legal systems, an idea which it compares to denial of the Holocaust, listing both CRT and Holocaust denial as “theories that distort historical events and are inconsistent with State Board-approved standards.”

Given that Florida’s “State Board-approved standards” conflict with the simple historical fact that racist policies are embedded in U.S. legal institutions, it is no surprise that the state has rejected AP African American studies on grounds of historical inaccuracy. What does “historical accuracy” mean to the DeSantis administration? The answer can be found in the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which mandates the teaching of a whitewashed, mythologized narrative of our nation’s founding: “American history shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” So it’s not surprising that DeSantis wants to ban African American studies, where students would learn about Black thinkers like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King—all of whom have pointed out the deep hypocrisy of this concept that America was founded on universal principles of liberty and justice for all while systematically denying these to entire populations on account of their race.

In DeSantis’s Florida there is a new blacklist, one composed of Black authors excised from an African American studies curriculum, including all six of the authors whose inclusion was deemed illegal by the DeSantis administration. It’s no mistake that DeSantis repeatedly characterizes CRT as a “Marxist-type ideology”—repeated association is the name of the game. If we do not learn from our history of McCarthyism and blacklisting, we are powerless to prevent it from happening again. Of course, we could compile a truly offensive list of quotes from the founding fathers of the United States talking about the supposed biological inferiority of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. But the DeSantis administration’s hypocrisy is not the point; rather, their efforts to revise the curriculum reveal a coherent mythology of American history that serves their political project. Grounded in a hero-worship of figures like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as enlightened champions of equality under the law, erasing their commitment to white supremacy as a fundamental feature of the United States, this myth also obscures the causes and mechanisms of contemporary white supremacy.

Defending his rejection of AP African American studies, DeSantis said:

We want to do history, and that’s what our standards for Black history are. It’s just cut and dried history… You learn all the basics you learn about the great figures, and you know, I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history. You know, we have history in lots of different shapes and sizes, people that have participated to make the country great, people that have stood up when it wasn’t easy and they all deserve to be taught. But abolishing prisons being taught to high school kids as if that’s somehow a fact? No, no, that’s not appropriate.

What these words reveal is a deep fear. It is the fear that if young Americans are exposed to the sorts of radical ideas that give life to African American studies—ideas like prison abolition and reparations for slavery and Jim Crow apartheid—they might take them seriously. If high school students who came of age in the aftermath of George Floyd are given an environment in which they are encouraged to grapple with these topics, they might agree with critical race theorists’ assessment of racial injustice in America. That is what DeSantis and his fellow Republicans fear more than anything; that is why the CRT moral panic has taken center stage.