Canceling African American Culture

Stories Matter, So It's A Big Racist Deal For Everyone That South Carolina Isn't Recognizing AP African American Studies

In a previous post about the way Ernie Hamilton of Greenville, SC is preserving the history and personal stories of segregated Black high schools through the Piedmont Athletic Association Hall of Fame (“The Importance of Being Ernest”), I offered this thought in detailing the imperative that drives Ernie and all those who sustain the PAA Hall of Fame:

“If you don’t know your formative narrative, you will adopt someone else’s story, where the heroes look like them, and the villains look like you.” - Hak Joon Lee

I can’t help but lament how the S.C. State Board of Education’s decision to not formally recognize AP African American Studies as a course (see Steve Nuzum’s post “South Carolina Effectively Bans AP African American Studies” for a comprehensive explainer of that decision), performs the foul work of denying that formative narrative to the brightest and most enthusiastic students of that narrative.

I don’t assign or ascribe the intellectual sophistication to the Board that’s necessary for them to consciously plot against the state’s Black residents in this specific way, but whether it’s by accident or design, that’s what they’re doing.

Steve Nuzum’s Substack post (see above) outlines how the Board’s decision to not assign a course number to AP African American Studies precludes students from getting the critical boost of a grade multiplier that’s given to Honors and Advanced Placement course offerings. Given how white students have a low interest in African American Studies, the Board’s decision effectively suppresses the GPA’s of the state’s most academically gifted Black students, either by denying them the multiplier where school districts will nevertheless offer the AP curriculum or by discouraging school districts from offering the class to begin with.

As far as origin stories go, The 1619 Project is that for African-Americans. The right-wing objections to the 1619 Project - and their promotion of the alternative 1776 Project - are propelled by an intense white loathing and jealousy toward the indefatigable and inexorable march of Black Americans toward dignity and self-esteem in the face of innumerable slings and arrows and hardships and roadblocks. Here again, I don’t think there’s necessarily a consciously engineered nefarious plot to deny African-Americans their formative narrative - but isn’t that how structural racism operates? By laying on hardships and sleights, large and small, as a matter of custom, without having to specifically endeavor to plot and scheme and even think much about the adverse outcomes produced over there that will flow from trashing folks over here?

In declaring Black history - and LGBTQ+ pride and labor organizers and feminism - off-limits and invalid on account of making majority and dominant white evangelical people feel ashamed and guilty, isn’t the white power structure essentially cribbing Hak Joon Lee’s statement and spitting it back out as a very rough-edged, if not infantilized, rant?

By this I mean that, when white people overhear different ethnic groups and other cohorts voice their formative narratives, they see highly differentiated people self-identifying as heroes of their own counter-narratives and they see those same people noting how the villains in those counter-narratives end up looking white a la Ned Flanders. They see what’s happening just as Hak Joon Lee sees it, but it comes to them viscerally and instinctively because they process it as a dire threat, not as a call to discover and celebrate more formative narratives. They respond, not as scholars but as cornered rodents would.

These counter-narratives are shocking to the white evangelicals and Christian nationalists who eavesdrop and hear whispers of the stories of the out-groups. Oblivious to the ways they consistently self-identify as the hero class and impute all manner of flaws and character defects and “thuggish” behaviors to the out-group people who don’t look, believe, behave or vote like themselves, they are scandalized to discover that the likes of them are cast as the villains in circles they don’t belong to.

As out-group narratives conflict with the narrative they’ve been telling themselves, they process the narratives of “the others” as being false or mere opinions that are objectionable simply for being different. Indeed, the Board of Education has defended this decision by arguing that the African American Studies curriculum is “controversial.”

But who thinks it is controversial? And why does it feel controversial to them?

They invoke their heckler’s veto for the curriculum because the curriculum disrupts their dominant class narrative from becoming deeply entrenched as the authoritative one, to the exclusion of all others.

Without having to bother to think deeply about Hak Joon Lee’s postulate, they intuitively understand the way the gears turn and crystals vibrate inside the hidden watchworks of cultural power clashes. It’s not sufficient for them to claim their own narrative. They insist that other groups honor it as well. And they make room for their narrative by censoring or banning everyone else’s.

Whether it’s Moms For Liberty today or Tipper Gore’s “Parents’ Music Resource Center” (PMRC) of the 1980s and 1990s, or any number of other censorship movements past, present and future, the unstated jackpot is to center the white nationalist or white evangelical narrative in the collective consciousness - which is how a culture defines its heroes and villains.

In this way, the defense of library books for children in marginalized groups is the same battle that’s been fought over punk rock, metal, hip-hop and rap. This applies equally to the fight to ensure AP African American Studies receives a course code from the South Carolina State Board of Education.

In a classic clip from a March 1990 taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Jello Biafra, singer for the Dead Kennedys, famously slammed the music censorship movement with the observation that “the most evil part of the PMRC and people like Tipper Gore and Jesse Helms is that they play on the fears of parents who are too chicken to talk to their own kids.”

The dominant culture doesn’t fear intrusive cultures that challenge their comforting narratives nearly as much as they fear their own children challenging their comforting narratives.

The dominant culture is not as concerned that their children will feel shame or guilt from learning other narratives as much as they feel shame and guilt when their own children discover other narratives.

The censorship movements don’t want challenging conversations. They want doctrine and creed shoved down everyone’s throats. The first step in their age-old recipe begins with a feigned plea to save the children, not so much for the sake of the children as much as they fear that their children will get wise to the lies and fissure lines of the doctrines and creeds that the dominant culture hopes to normalize and center for everyone.

There’s no subtlety or hidden agenda at play when the South Carolina State Board of Education cancels AP African American History. The racism is transparent. They’re dunking on Black residents - young Black residents who may hold some sway with their children.

When we stick the “that’s racist” label on bigoted assaults as though that’s sufficient to invalidate them, we are downplaying the most compelling and disconcerting piece - the battle for control over the narratives of the out-groups. All of the out-groups.

Sure, we can say it’s racist for the Board of Education to “de-certify” AP African American Studies and then claim that racism is wrong as a moral axiom…but there’s more at stake that’s worth naming here. As we describe and dissect this specific action as one that centralizes supremacist culture narratives for everyone, we can paint a clearer picture of how this is an injustice that’s well worth the concern of all people who belong to (or love someone who belongs to) any of the out-groups that don’t track foursquare with the various white supremacist cultures which are force-feeding their narratives on us as universal truths we must accept, with the heroes they insist we admire, and the villains we become acculturated to fear and revile.