Nayyera Haq: The 'watered-down' AP African American History course still has a lot to offer students.
“the best high school in America.” My graduating class of nearly 1,000 high achievers had fewer than 15 students who were Black or biracial. The course offerings reflected this reality: Of the dozens of Advanced Placement classes available, none was taught by Black teachers and certainly none was on African American studies. Our closest approximation was AP American History, so lessons on Harriet Tubman would have to suffice.
We did not delve into ideas of power and how human beings experienced the cold calculus of being counted as only part-human. When we arrived at the Civil War, those of us who noted the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free all enslaved people won kudos for reading critically, before the teacher moved swiftly on to military battles. We did not watch “Roots,” but we did watch “Birth of a Nation.”
Two weeks before we were meant to take the national exam, we barrelled through everything from 1950-1999. The events that most directly impacted our young lives — the post World War II baby boom that shaped our neighborhoods; the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War and Cold War that molded our parents; the modern immigration rules that allowed our families to have access to this public school; the U.S.
Around the time someone enters high school, somewhere in the range of 14-16, their sense of personal identity in relation to society gets set. I was given very little about the Black experience in America, other than images of violence on television. I was 20 when I first learned that Hitler used the framework of the Jim Crow South for his Holocaust strategy. I was 25 when I learned that, leading to the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 and allowing my parents to arrive from Pakistan.
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