The controversy around the College Board’s AP African-American Studies Course, which was targeted by Republican politicians in Florida seeking to restrict its contents, resulted in a version that made optional several key concepts and areas that were initially part of the core curriculum, including critical race theory, structural racism, intersectionality, Black queer theory and Black feminism, among other issues.

Studying the Black Lives Matter movement, which helped make the course a reality in the first place, was also deemed optional. The most recent version, released in December 2023, reinstated the term “intersectionality” and sections on Black feminism and police violence.

But by relegating large swaths of Black experiences and histories, as explored in areas such as Black feminism and Black queer theory, to optional research topics, argues Black studies scholar Ingrid Banks, the College Board undermined the importance of centering intersectional Blackness in Black studies in general, and Black families in particular.

Her recent article in the Journal of Family Theory & Review examines the controversy’s broad implications for family science and Black studies.

In the following interview, Banks, an associate professor of Black studies at UC Santa Barbara, discusses that article, the use of the term “anti-blackness” in Black studies, perceptions of Black families, and the importance of centering Black people’s experiences in understanding how racism manifests.

The conversation also touches on the erasure of uncomfortable histories and the importance of open access to knowledge.  
 
– Let’s talk about the words you use in your discussion. Why do you use the term “anti-blackness” instead of “racism”?

Banks: There’s a way in which there can be an appropriation of the understanding or definition of racism such that white elite men can be victims of racism.

In this country, in Black studies, we center racism within the context of institutions and structures of power, such as schools, employment, media.

We see images of Black people, for example, that continue to present blackness in negative ways. But when we talk about anti-black racism, that’s a way of centering Black people and really understanding the history of anti-blackness that goes back to slavery because throughout this country’s history, there’s never been any kind of move by this country to deny white people as a group access to social, political and economic rights because they are white. 

For example, it wasn’t just white men who were storming the capitol on January 6. There were also women and folks of color. You don’t have to be white to be committed to or support the system of white supremacy, but there’s this idea of “white grievance” and “white fragility.”

But again, white people have enjoyed access to social and political rights in this country in ways that Black people have not. So that’s why in Black studies we actually talk about anti-black racism.

But as a Black studies scholar, I understand that even when I just speak on institutionalized racism, again, we can look at how Black and brown and Native Americans and Asian folks have to deal with particular things that speak to migration, immigration and so forth. 
 
– In your article you say that “the policing of Black families and Black studies go hand in hand through an explicit attack on intersectional blackness.” Discuss what you mean by that and how it can help us understand the recent controversy about A.P. African-American Studies. 

Banks: In the article, I discuss how anti-blackness is not only central to how the United States views Black families and Black Studies, but how anti-blackness intersects with other key social forces such as gender, sexuality, age, disability, ability, religion and more, to form what I term “intersectional blackness.” I actually use the AP African-American Studies course as a case study, if you will, to show how Black studies as a discipline and the perception of Black families are maligned. 

The Florida Board of Education and Gov. Ron DeSantis stated that the AP African-American Studies course did not meet the standards of something that had academic merit. It was the same old narrative about topics such as intersectionality, critical race theory, Black queer theory and Black feminism.

The College Board made Black feminism, Black queer theory, Black Lives Matter and studies on the carceral state or prison studies optional categories for students taking the AP African-American Studies course 

I thought about this and I was like, ‘Wow.’ Look at the outstanding work that Black queer theorists and Black feminists have done within Black studies to center the family and yet here, families that are seen as non-normative, such as LGBTQ families, they won’t fit into Black studies.

Remember, going back to the enslavement period, Black women have historically been stereotyped as bad mothers. So what I try to do is make new connections by asking what does the AP African-American Studies controversy have to do with Black families?

We can see how it has something to do with Black studies. But I think that I even shed light on the way in which the College Board really didn’t know the history of Black studies.    
The College Board was very intentional in calling it an “African-American Studies” course.

But then it was presented as an African-American history course. African-American history is not a general African-American studies course, though African-American history is an important part of an Introduction to African-American studies course.

– Tell us about how the discipline of Black studies came about and its history.

Banks: There’s a whole history of the institutionalization of Black studies in 1968-69 at San Francisco State College. My argument is that the College Board missed an opportunity to understand the history of how Black studies enters the university, enters the college curriculum, but also enters as a discipline in academia, even though there are scholars from different disciplines that do Black studies.   

We have a discipline. We center social justice. We actually understand the importance of critical thinking. We critique the European-centered model of knowledge and education.

And we’re not saying that we want to get rid of it, but when it is exclusive, then we must say, ‘Hey, there are other histories and experiences that must be centered within a liberal arts education and even within the context of just knowledge and knowledge construction.’ We critique the types of myths about, for example, Black culture as being deficient, inferior, dysfunctional, non-normative, all of that.

When the American Psychological Association responded to their own College Board controversy, they said, ‘Look, in the AP psych course, students have to study about gender and sexual identity, and that makes them better students and better citizens.’

I want that for students who are taking the AP African-American Studies course, too, as well as students taking my Introduction to African American Studies course at UCSB.