The Rejection
In January 2023, Florida’s Department of Education rejected the College Board’s new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies, blocking it from Florida high schools on the grounds that it “lacks educational value” and violates state law.
Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. called the course “woke indoctrination masquerading as education.” At a press conference in Jacksonville, Governor DeSantis explained: “That’s a political agenda. That’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards.”
The specific content objected to included Black queer studies, the Black Lives Matter movement, and slavery reparations.
February 1, 2023
The College Board, which develops AP curricula through committees of credentialed scholars, called Florida’s characterization of the course “slander,” and later stated that it should have denounced more quickly what it described as misinformation spread for political gain.
On February 1, 2023 — the first day of Black History Month — the College Board released the official framework for the course. The topics DeSantis had objected to were gone. Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations, and Black queer studies were no longer in the curriculum.
This is the mechanism operating at national scale from a single state. Florida did not need to persuade the College Board that the scholarship was wrong. It needed only to make the cost of including it high enough — and the curriculum that every AP student in the country would study was revised accordingly.
Why the Sequence Matters
The book is explicit that no single act carries the argument. The pattern becomes visible “not in any single policy but in their accumulation — in the consistency of direction across multiple legislative and administrative actions over multiple years, each individually defensible in the abstract, each part of a coherent and documented effort to remove from Florida’s educational institutions the substantive content of Black history, racial justice, and the ongoing reality of structural racism in American life.”
The instruments changed from the earlier chapters of this history. The pulpit gave way to the statehouse and the curriculum board. The underlying structure did not change: institutional authority used to suppress the full historical and civic identity of Black Americans, defended in the language of the very principles it violates.