Mark Whitaker is a journalist and the author of “Saying It Loud: 1966 — The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement,” which will be published on Feb. 7.
In the latest salvo in his war on “wokeness,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced support for a statewide ban on a new Advanced Placement class on African American studies that will be officially unveiled this week at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. In defending the ban, DeSantis (R) and his allies at Florida’s Department of Education relied on a draft framework for the curriculum, and cherry-picked from roughly a hundred proposed topics to object to a handful of buzzwords, including “reparations” and “intersectionality,” as well as Black feminism and Black queer activism. “We want education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis declared.
