A 30-year educator in the Compton Unified School District, Inge is a and . 

He also taught Lamar’s 7th-grade English class at Vanguard Learning Center, where he shape Lamar’s academic foundation, introducing him to poetry, nurturing his ability to think critically and developing his passion for language. Now, Lamar’s an award-winning, internationally renowned hip hop artist.

Back in the classroom, Inge used to talk to Lamar about the importance of using his platform to drive change – an idea that would resonate throughout the rapper’s career. Lamar’s journey from Compton to earning and a reflects values that deeply resonate with Inge’s classroom philosophy: hard work, creativity and ability to balance education and talent. 

Now, joining the list of achievements is Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, which Inge says is “a salute to Black history and an opportunity for millions of people to witness Lamar’s dynamic artistry.” It a bigger audience than the game itself, is officially the most-watched halftime show performance of all time and the first show with a solo rapper to , according to the Apple Music.

Inge spoke with ����Ӱ��’s Trinity Alicia about how Lamar’s academic foundation laid the groundwork for his storytelling success and how it continues to inspire his students in Compton.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When it was announced that Kendrick Lamar would perform at the Super Bowl, what was your first emotion?   

I had a great feeling of joy to know someone who has honestly put in the work gets to be at the level he’s at and the stage he was going to be on. The city felt good. My students felt good. It was a circle of joy.   

Everyone was so happy for him because it was a chance for millions of people to see just how dynamic this person really is. It was a perfect example of how putting in hard work gets you great outcomes. It gave me a sense of pride to know he worked hard to be rewarded with this opportunity. He deserved to be there.  

How did you feel when you saw the halftime show?

My initial feeling was that it was a message he was trying to send to both America and to the hip hop culture in itself. There was a lot of thought put into each aspect of the show, and I’m proud of how it all came together because he did exactly what I know he’s supposed to be doing — teaching and sending messages to others. It was an awesome feeling for me as his former English teacher.   

What do you see as the major themes in his performance? Do you think there’s particular significance that those themes were performed at that particular Super Bowl in our current political climate?  

The major theme I saw in the Super Bowl performance was to wake up and understand what’s going on from an African-American perspective and a people of color perspective. The different stages, different colors, different movements, each song and each skit he did — even down to Samuel L. Jackson’s performance — it was so clear that everything was intentional.  

It was a teachable moment for those who wanted to look more deeply at what exactly Lamar was saying. And to me, it all made sense because I know he loves to debate — not so much a matter of right and wrong — but the meaning behind things and why it impacts people. So I feel he went into this wanting people to analyze and discuss the performance.  

Do you see parallels between your role as a Black male educator and what Lamar does with his art?   

Yes! I see one great parallel between what Lamar does and what I do — and it’s something I used to talk to him about — which is using your platform. I have a platform in the classroom and he has a platform on the stage. My platform is to give students wisdom, encouragement and understanding of what the future could look like for them. On stage, Lamar’s platform is to express what it feels like to live in an inner city, for those who have never been to an inner city, and to give people hope. A lot of his music deals with hope. It may not come in the way people expect, the music may have some colorful words every now and then, but at the end of the day, it’s about expression. I’m very happy he’s using his platform to share hope and not expressing negative aspects of hip hop that can sometimes come from the big stage.  

This Black History Month, are there any teachable moments that can be extracted from the halftime performance?  

The art of creativity. African-Americans were historically stripped of their creativity when brought over to this country, and here we are in the present where I feel the renaissance is coming back out and through hip hop — which is a creative outlet on its own — in music.  

When I saw all of the intentional choreography, I felt Lamar used the halftime show performance as a whole to salute Black history and I believe it was presented from the standpoint of how, from the beginning of our existence in this country, our poise and livelihood as Black-Americans flourishes when we are being creative.

Tell us about Lamar as a student. What unique qualities did he exhibit as a student, if any? Was there any indication early on that he had exceptional potential? 

One of the things I remember about him is that he was very quiet, which may be a little strange for others to hear considering this megastar can get on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people to perform song after song. But when I taught him in the seventh grade, I felt he was academically sound for his age and just needed someone to push him in the right direction. 

I spent a lot of time instilling in Lamar that vocabulary is super important. When my students go out and speak in public, I want them to be prepared to use language comparable to their age group. So for his assignments, I would circle words on his paper he could improve on and give him a thesaurus to identify synonyms for those words to deepen his vocabulary. I told him I wanted him to have a little shock level because there is an understanding that people from Compton are not going to have the best profile. But I remember telling him I wanted him to be able to show people through his speech that he is sharp, strong, an academic … and not someone who is only successful on YouTube and on social media. 

How do you help students connect to their creativity and writing with activism and social justice? How do you think this shaped Lamar as the artist we know today?   

Connection with students is extremely important to me as an educator. I believe in this connection because it helps me understand how my students operate and I’m able to have a plan on how to individually impact each one of their lives both in and out of the classroom.  

It’s also very important for me to understand culture. I need to know what’s going on at home and their environments because I am aware I can’t teach everyone the same. When students believe in you just like you believe in them, you create a family dynamic in the classroom. I have always been a family-oriented teacher and once I have a student in my class, they are family forever. 

In that same dynamic with Lamar, he understands that people are going through things and wants to create music that makes people dance, but also invites listeners to think about their surroundings and to remind them there is a light out of the struggle if they work hard.

In your classroom, how do you encourage students to imagine, create and push boundaries in their own work? How do you believe Lamar’s schooling and upbringing in Compton translate into his character and art in the current political climate?  

One thing I do in my class when we are doing any type of creative writing, I tell students I will take the boundaries off of their assignments. That means if an essay or poem they’re writing causes them to say a word that isn’t deemed appropriate for school — as long as they don’t say it too many times — then it’s okay because I want them to say what they truly feel. Poetry is all about the five senses, and that in particular is not something I need to teach, but I just like to remind them of this so that when they are writing, they can reflect on their experiences and emotions. What I don’t want them to do is mute themselves so that what they’re writing isn’t what they feel.

I encouraged Lamar in the same way. At that time, many of my students were coming to school very angry and if something causes trauma, frustration or an inertia of energy building up, students have to be able to get it out. Expanding the boundaries in class was the thing that helped. 

Lamar’s music, especially in his later albums, has been known to be deeply shaped by themes of social change, inequality, activism and criticism of politicians. Do you think you saw the beginnings of this in his early writings in classroom assignments or discussions? 

I didn’t really see writings of social consciousness from Lamar. When you’re in the seventh grade, you’re typically going off of what the teacher is assigning. But I remember his passion for writing was unique and different from his classmates. Some of his writings were a little more thought-provoking. What happens is when you’re focused on writing and passionate about your writing, as you get older and start to see more outside of your city, surroundings and community, you will start to see gaps. When you start to see gaps, when you start to feel frustration. When you start to feel frustration, you start to express it. 

With Lamar, he expressed his feelings in class through his writing and does the same thing as an artist. Now, we are here today with someone who is expressing a full emotional closet, from his joy to his insecurities to his trauma throughout his music.

Compton Unified has recently been ranked first in reading performance, surpassing pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading, according to the Ed Recovery Scorecard. Given Lamar’s rise from Compton to global recognition, how do you think his journey can inspire students in fostering the art of storytelling? 

One thing I feel that our students of today can be inspired by Lamar’s journey is to understand the art of working hard and being passionate. Even though students are doing well, they need to continue to work hard.

Sometimes social media waters down the art of working hard to achieve goals. Since I know Lamar personally, I have the ability to give students a bird’s eye view of what it takes on a day-to-day basis to earn Grammys and to be the first hip hop artist to be given a Pulitzer Prize winner, which is no small feat. 

I give my students an understanding of how many hours it could take for Lamar and his team to make one song or the amount of songs he writes that fans will never get to hear on the radio. This is about a lifelong journey of trying to do your best in every aspect of your life. 

I use Lamar as a [symbol] of hope because he came from Compton. And while my students may not become a Kendrick Lamar, perform on stage or emerge into a world-renowned artist, I want them to understand what it takes to get to a level of success to be world-renowned in other industries and professions. 

What’s something that most of the world probably doesn’t know about Lamar?  

I’m most proud of the person Lamar is off stage. I love the man he’s become and the person he is striving to be.

When I taught him, he enjoyed being around his friends and sat next to his cousin in my class. Now, I can see the same regard for relationships in his life. He likes to be present with family. He doesn’t mind being vulnerable with himself and others he trusts in order to share about the insecurities he’s working on. It’s why I feel his music is very genuine … it’s debatable, you can talk about it and you can teach it. There are so many emotions that can be translated from his music. 

I don’t know how I would feel if I taught an artist and the nature of music was very negative and went against everything I believed as a person. But I thank God I get the privilege of being associated with someone who is out here, making an impact, making music that gives people hope and encourages them.  

Confining Black history lessons and leadership discussions to a designated month risks perpetuating a narrative of tokenism and underrepresentation. It suggests that Black stories and achievements deserve attention only within a limited timeframe, reinforcing historical stereotypes and erasing the daily realities of Black heroism. Imagine the transformative impact of integrating the stories and contributions of Black mathematicians into the math curriculum seamlessly, not just during Black History Month. Similarly, amplifying the voices of Black leaders in ongoing educational discussions, not just during diversity panels, .

Breaking free from historical stereotypes requires shifting focus beyond iconic figures of the past. Everyday heroism exists within each community, often unseen and undercelebrated. From the dedicated teacher nurturing young minds to the entrepreneur creating opportunities, a more comprehensive and relatable narrative is created that inspires students to envision themselves as agents of change and leaders in their own right.

Make no mistake: Black History Month should continue and serve as a launchpad for year-round celebration. Education plays a profound role in shaping young minds and influencing future leaders. It opens doors to possibilities, expands perspectives and fosters the critical thinking and empathy needed to navigate an increasingly diverse and interconnected world. Imagine a school where Black students see themselves reflected in their teachers, their curriculum and the heroes celebrated on the walls. This isn’t a dream, it’s our reality at . Rather than limit our showcasing of Black excellence to February alone, we weave it into the fabric of our school year. Here’s how your school can, too:

Integrate diverse local narratives into your curriculum and conversations. Don’t wait for February to highlight Black voices. At Brooklyn Lab’s Parent Leadership Council, Black parents become active partners, shaping the school experience for their children and all students. Seek out books, films and resources that offer a multifaceted perspective on history and contemporary life. Celebrate a tapestry of cultural traditions by acknowledging and embracing the diverse heritages that make your community vibrant.

Expose students to everyday local heroes and Black role models, including teachers and school leaders. Consistent exposure to positive Black role models and educational aspirations of Black students. Who inspires you in your community? Share their stories with students, colleagues and friends. Let their journeys illuminate the diverse paths to success. At Brooklyn Lab, 93% of our team identify as people of color, and our Teacher Coaching Residency program develops teachers and leaders who reflect our students’ reality. Our annual Success Looks Like Me career day and showcasing Historically Black Colleges and Universities open doors and expand possibilities. Encourage networking events and job shadowing programs, or simply spark conversations that broaden horizons.

This continuous approach fosters belonging and self-worth that transcends the calendar. Students see themselves reflected not just in February, but every day, propelling them to dream bigger and reach their full potential. Each action, big or small, contributes to a richer, more inclusive reality for all, powered by your own school community.

Each city is shaped by the vibrant people of its community. While the specific heroes and initiatives may differ, the call to action is universal:  to move beyond the limitations of seasonal recognition and embrace a genuine commitment to celebrating Black excellence year-round. Harness the unique local environment of your school and community, fostering a space where Black students feel acknowledged, empowered and equipped to build their own bright futures, brick by brick, not just during “history” month.  Living role models of Black success can .

Together, educators can break the cycle of seasonal Blackness and illuminate the brilliance of each community every single day. Reflect on your role in building a more inclusive and supportive environment where Black excellence is not just celebrated, but nurtured and empowered. The future is brimming with possibilities. The influence of educators can ensure that all children see themselves as authors of their own story, not just during a “history” month but throughout the entire year.

Will a new generation of Black teachers step in to replace them? What must it feel like for would-be teachers to see the classroom become a culture war battleground, with educators facing public attacks and scrutiny? Will they still want to take up that mantle?

I know firsthand that the impact of Black educators reverberates far beyond the classroom. Like many Black folks from the South, I’m the child of two Black teachers who brought the Black teaching tradition into our home and immersed us in spaces that reinforced those principles, from church to and beyond. At Spelman College, I was honored to learn from professors who were committed to fostering the next generation of Black, college-educated women. Today, I work with DonorsChoose, helping teachers ensure their students have access to resources to help them fulfill their potential.

Black educators don’t just communicate history, they shape it. There is a deep legacy of teaching in the Black community. At a time when Black people had limited employment options, teaching was an important way into the workforce, and education was in and of itself an act of resistance. It’s no coincidence that so many civil rights leaders began as educators. , the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, whose literacy and citizenship workshops helped tens of thousands of Black people register to vote, taught in public schools for 30 years. As Clark famously said, “Literacy means liberation.”

Black educators like Clark played , telling the stories of Black history and showing students not just how to navigate a system in which they were seen as second-class citizens, but how to question and change it. Black teachers today carry on that proud legacy. For many, teaching is an .

Their impact is just as powerful: Black students who have at least one Black teacher between grades 3 and 5 are than those who don’t. Black teachers are less likely than their white colleagues to and more likely to refer them to . The benefits go to all students: Black male teachers spend more than double the amount of time outside of class than their white counterparts.

Yet burnout among Black teachers has reached critical levels, pushing many to move to careers outside of education. Black teachers experience significantly more burnout than their white counterparts, and in a , more than 1 in 3 said they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the year. They also face greater financial obstacles. Black college graduates average that white graduates, and they face the highest monthly student loan payment of any ethnic group

Any effort  to ensure that future generations of students benefit from Black teachers must begin with investment in the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. While HBCUs make up just 3% of the nation’s colleges and universities, they produce half of all Black educators nationwide. A from the United Negro College Fund cited HBCU programs as a model to follow in recruiting and training prospective Black teachers and offered recommendations on how to support them. DonorsChoose’s own indicated that educators who are graduates of HBCUs showed the highest student engagement of any group surveyed.

To address these issues and strengthen the pipeline of Black teachers, there are steps that can be taken at every level. Government and private education funders can increase their support of , so they have the resources to implement these types of innovative and effective efforts. They can also invest in financial aid for prospective teachers — fixing loan forgiveness programs and supporting comprehensive programs covering tuition, certification preparation and testing fees, field placement expenses, and other costs. States can also support training for paraprofessionals and other school staff who are already working with students to help them achieve certification as educators.

Districts can get Black students into the educator pipeline while they’re still in high school by exposing them to the value of teaching careers. By cultivating relationships with the education programs and alumni networks of HBCUs and other higher education institutions, they can help students connect with mentors and build relationships that can support them along the path, from choosing a college to completing their degree, attaining certifications and finding work in the field. They can even begin their hiring processes early, to attract a larger and more diverse pool of candidates.

This Black History Month, let’s remember Black history and those who teach it. Let’s invest in the future by investing in those who shape it and whose passion and care will inspire the next generation of Black students and all students.

After his administration prohibited the adoption of a newly developed AP course on African American studies, the Republican governor last week, openly musing about dropping all AP classes throughout the state. Even with many Florida students and families protesting the decision, governors in four other states that they would also review the content of the new course, warning that it could introduce political content into classrooms. 

Daryl Scott, a professor at Baltimore’s Morgan State University and self-described “anti-public intellectual,” sees enough blame to go around. While lacerating the College Board for acquiescing to DeSantis’s criticism and revising its product, he sees the rising GOP star as an opportunist exploiting white anxieties to build his political brand. 

Scott spent much of his career at Howard University before departing to chair Morgan State’s history department last year. He previously served as the president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which was founded in 1915 by the pioneering Black thinker and academic Carter G. Woodson. Along the way, he has become a kind of historian of Black studies, acquiring an insider’s view of the field’s leading figures and intellectual tendencies: multiculturalists and Afrocentrics, social scientists and humanists.

His commentary on national affairs and Black historiography bleeds over from to a lively social media presence. In neither venue is Scott known for pulling punches, sometimes excoriating writers and educators for yoking their scholarship to political causes. Over the last few years, one of his most frequent targets has been the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which as “an exercise in African American exceptionalism that elides the question of class.” 

In a conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Scott turned his focus to the political clash in Florida, where he said conservative backlash is endangering the study of Black history. But he added that historians and teachers alike should be leery of wading into cultural wars that they aren’t equipped to win — and potentially alienating families in the bargain.

“We need to take seriously that white mothers do not want their kids to have their psyches toyed with in K–12, and we can’t tell those mothers to just have their kids toughen up,” he said. “If we’re going to counter this onslaught, we need to take that opposition seriously and find ways to take away their criticisms.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Let’s talk about the content of this AP course. The is that the curriculum, and particularly the sections that focus on more recent history, privileges radical voices and leftist critiques of American society. Do you think there’s substance to that complaint?

Daryl Scott: I’m pretty much a gadfly when it comes to that final curriculum. It’s not so much that I take issue with it. I just want to point out to the people who participated in it that it could have been a much different curriculum.

First and foremost, it’s a college course that’s taught in high schools. This is where some folks on the Right get lost, but again: This is a college course, taught in high schools, potentially for college credit. And it becomes the basis for admission into the better colleges in this country. 

I happen to have been part of the redesign of AP U.S. History, which recognized a whole lot of things that the Right now calls problematic. So maybe we should just stop for a second to see what they’re calling problematic. Half of critical race theory has to do with optimism versus pessimism about the present and future of race in America. The pessimism started in the 1950s, with saying that things weren’t going fast enough: “These obstacles are here! We thought we were going to dismantle the structure of white supremacy and usher in equality, and it didn’t happen. Will it ever happen? Maybe not.”

When did pessimism become something you can legislate against? We’re legislating against pessimism now, and legislating for American exceptionalism? And as I’ve said elsewhere about the 1619 Project, when did racial progress become a pet idea of conservatives? I’m old enough to remember — and we should still have to teach — that it was conservatives who believed Black people couldn’t assimilate; now they’re saying they’re optimistic that Black people should assimilate, and you can’t teach otherwise.

The big point is that academic freedom in a college-level course dictates that we can debate all these things. This is why they’re fundamentally wrong, no matter what’s in the College Board’s curriculum. And this is why the College Board itself was fundamentally wrong when it allowed itself, whether through external pressure or otherwise, to be put in what I used to call “self-check.” If they weren’t being expressly censored by the state of Florida, they self-censored. And they did this for the same reason textbook publishers do it all the time: so they could get their products through state departments of education. That has a negative impact on what is being taught. 

We’re saying that we’re going to create a college course for high school students, and we’re going to limit inquiry? Can we get more backwards and un-American than that? My belief system has always been one of racial pessimism, and here’s what I mean: I’ve been of the belief that the best we could do as a society was to hold racism in check. And we could reach a set of fairly equal opportunities, and likely equal outcomes, if we could hold racism in abeyance. That marks me as a pessimist; in Black studies, there are lots of people who call themselves , and there are critics of Afropessimism, like Cornel West, who now has to defend pessimism [against censorship]. I don’t want to speak for him, but West that the problem with racial pessimism was that it didn’t believe in the Christian notion of human progress and redemption. 

Some people say, “Well, you can’t teach about Black Lives Matter,” but at this point, something that happened between 2013 and 2020 is pretty much a historical topic. If you can’t even teach about the facts of that movement, you’re doing something that used to be done in the Soviet Union — erasing history, saying, “That is not a valid topic of inquiry.” Black studies includes debates around reparations, and anyone who knows I don’t think reparations are going anywhere. But in a democracy, reparations can be debated.

One of the problems with the whole course is that it attempts to be a history course. But Black studies, and many studies, tend to be fairly contemporary. The content of most of these courses, if you were to ask me, should be 21st-century topics. We should be trying to figure out the consequences of assault weapons through these courses, the consequences of a society in which quality healthcare is not widespread. In other words, the need for a studies program at the college level is to be robust in debating the issues before society. What we’re being told in Black studies now is that we can’t debate things because it’s indoctrination, and yet, the people claiming this say that we should be teaching American exceptionalism. That’s an indoctrination program.

The concern of everyone in a democracy should be how we debate matters, not what we debate. Some people on the Right have reached the foregone conclusion that we’re not going to have a debate and that teachers will, of necessity, indoctrinate. They’re pretending that we’ve got madrassas out here. But nobody’s sending their kids to madrassas, and anybody who understands the teaching profession knows that they try their best not to indoctrinate. So no matter what critique I have of the content of the College Board course — and I do have a critique — the bigger issue in a democracy is academic freedom and holding teachers responsible for teaching responsibly. If they’re indoctrinating, it should be dealt with in schools, not at the state level.

You mention a few times that the AP African American Studies course is effectively a college seminar. But it’s still being taught to high schoolers, and academic freedom is strictly limited, if not nonexistent, in K–12 settings. If 16- and 17-year-olds are being taught a curriculum that Florida voters don’t agree with, doesn’t the governor have the authority to intervene?

I hear what you’re saying. But let’s put brackets around the College Board, because we know that the origins of Florida’s law [the Stop WOKE Act, passed in 2022] don’t lie with the College Board. The origins lie in the broader assault that comes in the wake of, and as a consequence of, the New York Times’s 1619 Project. 

Some genius of political persuasion put three words together that are very volatile: critical race theory. It never gets taught like that in K–12 settings, but I’m a good enough intellectual historian to know that nothing stays within its box. So elements of it have been taught in K–12, and the power of this critique is right in the name. By labeling everything “critical race theory,” it brings out three things conservatives don’t like to hear: They don’t like “critical,” they don’t like “race,” and they don’t like “theory.” Critical race theory has become the perfect foil to go after everything you don’t like in a history culture war. So it’s brilliant on their part.

The problem is that they’re effectively telling parents — Black parents, white parents, any parents — that their children cannot be taught Black history if it’s not a good-time story. To survive under this repressive regime, Black history has to shoot for [a tone] somewhere between the old-school, “We all happy negroes here,” and this other idea, “Ain’t we done great lately?” That’s the content they’re allowing to be taught, and anything else is said to be something that makes whites feel guilty. 

Now, I do hear what you’re saying, and I keep telling people to stop acting like we’re talking exclusively about college courses. We should pause and ask the question, “Are white kids being made to feel bad about America? Are white kids being made to feel bad about being white? Are they being made to feel individually guilty for slavery or any other form of racial oppression?” To the extent that is the case, white parents have a point, and they have cause for concern — in the same way that Black parents, historically, had cause for concern that their children were being taught that slaves were happy and didn’t really want their civil rights, or were being told that they were racially inferior. 

Everybody in a multicultural, multiracial democracy has a vested interest in their kids not being taught to have negative feelings about themselves. That should never be the goal of K–12 education. I’m not going to be flippant, like some of my colleagues can be, and say that white kids should just toughen up. No, we’re talking about kids! Everybody’s got ’em, and I don’t want to accept that an eight-year-old boy, or even a 15-year-old girl, should have to “toughen up.” The teacher is supposed to take care that generalizations are not visited upon individuals in a way that makes them responsible for what someone else has done. Children cannot bear the weight of all of society’s ills. We believe that self-image should not be damaged through the educational process. So to the extent that white parents have this concern, we all need to address it.

But that does not make it legitimate to go wholesale into violating what should be free inquiry. You should not reduce the curriculum to something resembling a right-wing madrassa. That is the problem with DeSantis: Rather than just saying that educators have the burden of delivering curriculum that leaves intact the self-image of all students — and most teachers do this — he is creating a fairytale effect for white folks at the expense of all students learning. And race is only one side of the [Stop WOKE] law. The real focus of that law is LGBTQ rights, because there’s a live debate about when these discussions enter education. We need to have that debate in a sane and civil way as well, but not by outlawing things at the state level and exploiting the politics to get elected.

It’s notable that this clash between Florida and the College Board just seems to keep growing. Gov. DeSantis that he’s open to the state just dropping the whole range of AP courses. 

It’s been suggested that the College Board should have told Florida, “Take ’em all or take none!” I’m not a political prognosticator, but it’s also been said that DeSantis stakes out hard positions that he later reverses when no one is looking. For example, he went after Disney, but then later of all the measures he was supporting. So this seems like a feint of some sort, because there would be hell to pay in Florida [if AP courses weren’t offered]. There are so many kids in Florida who need the AP courses to get to the best schools in the country. 

You don’t just get college credit from the AP exams. Some schools use AP scores as a proxy to determine who’s qualified to attend. And politically, it’s not like Florida is Mississippi. People would be up in arms, whether it’s the well-heeled people or the striving people, about the prospect of their kids not having access to AP classes. 

So the College Board might get the better of DeSantis on this, but to me, the College Board should have stood on principle rather than self-censoring. Or they should have had the guts to take a look at this stuff earlier on. In other words, they brought people together, and they were trying to legitimize a class that was going in a direction they were willing to go. If they felt it was going too far, they should have had the guts to stop it before that point. Sometimes, you can feel the College Board giving you the sense of how far they’re willing to go. Having sat on a board, I know that the board is sometimes going to protect the institution. If they were disposed to doing that, the College Board should have been protecting the institution before they ultimately did. 

But once they went down this road, I really believe their decision to cave in to censorship was wrong, because it was a massive cave-in. I’ve kept telling people, “Don’t believe any of the spin they’re putting out.” You could see their spin about this, and the next thing you know, Florida between them and the College Board. There was no smoking gun, but they had a clear sense all along. When the law passed, they didn’t need anybody to tell them. Between the first version of the curriculum and the second, there was that Stop WOKE law, and they must have known which way the wind was blowing.

Is it necessary that there be a widely available course for high schoolers on African American studies? And, if so, should the College Board be the ones to develop it?

Everybody is free to do what they want. I believe in an open market of education.

By the same token, another track for all of this could have been pursued by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. It could have been pursued as well by the National Council of Black Studies. But especially when we’re talking about red states and the CRT debate, one of the issues has been finding consensus about the content for any of these courses. Whoever first took the initiative would have to fight for some kind of market share; schools would probably only adopt your particular version if, and only if, they felt it would be widely adopted. So it was likely that the College Board would be the most successful at this.

But if you know how the College Board functions, you’d know that their process was going to preserve the hierarchy of the academy. They were going to the most elite echelons of the academy and select participants from a cross-section of the discipline. It’s a multicultural strain of African American studies that I tie to the rise of [Harvard professor] Henry Louis Gates; , as a department, as opposed to various programs that had a menagerie of people from different disciplines. 

Something else has happened since then, which I call “Black Studies 4.0,” and which goes beyond what Gates and his generation of scholars signed onto. It’s a development out of the same camp, but it’s a more forthrightly race-conscious group. So it’s not surprising to me that elements of the AP course are different from what most of Gates’s generation would have created. Even though the College Board selected people like [Harvard historian] and Gates himself to be figureheads of sorts, the content looks more like that of a younger generation. They’re in the same multicultural tradition, but this new generation is more race-conscious, more committed to tangible goals like reparations and LGBTQ rights and things like that. 

This was always going to be an issue. For instance, in the College Board’s original curriculum guide, which was leaked, Afrocentric thinkers were just a marginal part of that. You’re not old enough to remember the ’90s, right?

Not really.

Well, this is where it gets interesting. People say that there’s been one continuous war against Black studies. But they’re kind of glossing over the 1990s and pretending that the political configuration is the same as it was then. 

Here was the situation in the ’90s: Afrocentric scholars were placing an emphasis on changing the K–12 curriculum in many places across the country. They had great influence in the Black community and had some success in changing the curriculum to fit their goals. They got close to having great success in New York in changing the statewide curriculum and, in doing so, between political liberals about and about Afrocentrism. It was a fight about education, but it didn’t involve true conservatives; we’re talking about a fight between Afrocentrics — who often said that only Black people could study Black people — and mainstream academics, most often education policy people like Diane Ravitch. The way it played out, on the academic level, was as a debate over the claims of progressive and Afrocentric scholars that the Western tradition came “out of Africa.” I’m probably misrepresenting that clash somewhat because it was never my central concern in life. [Laughs.]

Can you provide a little flavor of how this debate came to be?

When Black studies came to higher education in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was led by Black Power-ites, who tended to be social scientists and very political. They wanted policy changes, but they never succeeded in winning the mainstream of the academy. In fact, their affiliation with Black Power turned out to mean that Black studies only functioned well at the second and third tiers of the academy. In the elite schools, Black studies was pretty much a set of programs where people really stayed in their original disciplines. No one even conceptualized any notion of Black studies as having any kind of uniform mission. The Black Power-ites at the second- and third-tier institutions did. 

They got slaughtered at the elite colleges, and most of the leading Black scholars wanted nothing to do with a departmental status for Black studies. The big-time Black scholars at elite schools were big-time within their own disciplines, not Black studies. I say all of this because Skip Gates finally moved from that programmatic style of Black studies at Yale to the creation of a proper Black studies department at Harvard, and how he got there was important: He got there by critiquing Afrocentrics. And he made the mainstream academy safe for a new brand of Black studies.

The point I’m making is that this fight in Florida isn’t just a new front in the same war. If you want to say this is the same war, you’re fooling yourself about who was fighting it all this time. 

The conservatives weren’t in that fight! You can point to people like Allan Bloom and , or to [Arthur] Schlesinger’s book, . But remember that Schlesinger was an old-line liberal. Where we are now is a completely different place. Nobody back then was passing laws to invalidate the teaching of certain kinds of Black history. It’s a full-on assault on academic freedom, and it’s quite a different thing from last time.

It sounds as though you’re saying that the debate over how to teach African American history essentially has essentially broken through, from the academy to society at large, with predictable political effects. On the one hand, that’s potentially destructive, but on the other, it’s a marker of the success of the discipline, right?

It’s the success of a certain strand of Black studies, exactly. But there’s a related point: Before anybody ever talks about Black studies, and before it pops up as a field in the 1960s, there had been a Black history movement . Over the years between 1915 and the 1970s and ’80s, what had effectively happened is that the study of Black history made it into the school systems. People like me never felt that it was enough, and I know the criticisms that said, “We only talk about the same five people every February,” but that was an exaggeration. It wasn’t a true assessment of the progress that was made in bringing the study of Black history into the curriculum.

started during the 1960s. They included Black history. You saw textbooks changing to include Black subject matter and Black imagery. Hell, I’ve even seen books out of Bob Jones University Press that had multicultural images in them. In the ’60s, we were fighting a war for rights; but with that war came a notion that, now that Black people were in schools, they were going to be taught something about themselves. That’s how the rights war led to the culture war.

In the United States Army, I had officers who could stand up during Black History Month and lead pretty good Black history conversations. They knew the cast of characters. There was some kind of presence of it anywhere you went in society, even if you were talking about fairly conservative schools. In fact, I could take you to former segregation academies where they’re teaching Black history. The ones that survived did so because they were pretty upscale, and they ended up being integrated and hiring Black folks who would teach Black topics in courses. So let’s not pretend there was no progress being made, and let’s not pretend that conservatives were trying to purge it. Because they weren’t.

Given the existence of these laws about instruction on race and sexuality, what is the responsibility of organizations like the College Board when it comes to creating these curricula? I realize that they disappointed a lot of people by revising this course, but the legal reality in a large number of states meant that they were always likely to cave, right?

The College Board was always going to cave here, because they cannot afford to lose states like Florida and Texas. Even if they wanted to give up the “heartland,” they can’t lose those states. 

Gates was attempting to create a multicultural democracy, and so he was more attuned to people’s feelings. This younger generation of scholars believe that you’ve got to power your way through. There is this sense that the ultimate victory is theirs, and sometimes, they don’t deal with the political realities of what won’t fly in the heartland, or off of college campuses generally. Quietly, there are people in the Black community who don’t want to hear that, and they’re not too interested in that kind of compromise. 

I would have been much more open to debate within the confines of the College Board. But I become a hardcore advocate of academic freedom, particularly with a college course, once it’s been developed. And particularly when it’s supposed to represent the best knowledge we have, however we got to this position.  

But I take the meaning of your question to be: If the College Board was going to cave, should they have been the vehicle for this project in the first place? I would flip it and ask, would anyone have adopted a Black history course from the Association of African American Life and History? Would it have been the gold standard at elite institutions?.

It’s like I said: Everybody is free to do what they want. Me trying to say what the College Board should or shouldn’t do would be akin to saying that McGraw-Hill shouldn’t have a Black history textbook. That violates the liberal principle, which I share with someone like Henry Louis Gates, that inquiry and the presentation of knowledge should be universal. In a democracy, you don’t have a monopoly on studying yourself and your own group; everybody gets a chance to put forward their version. So I support the College Board and its right to create this course. But as big a giant as it is, the fact that it caved is a bad thing for all of us. 

Even with the disappointment you feel over the College Board’s reversal, I’m wondering how you feel about the development of a widely available course on African American studies. You may have designed it differently, but how do you feel about the end result?

Well, that is the shame of it all. There is no legitimacy to any course in African American studies that cannot grapple with the historic reality of the Black Lives Matter movement. Think about what it would be like if you said, “9/11 didn’t happen! Don’t talk about 9/11!” We can feel however we want about Black Lives Matter, but we can’t pretend that that movement — which has lasted for almost a decade — didn’t happen. Would you like for someone to say, “The ’60s didn’t happen”? 

It’s beyond ahistorical. It’s erasing history and saying it didn’t happen. DeSantis wants us to say, so to speak, that Black Lives Matter did not happen. But Black Lives Matter has shaped much of the second and third decades of the 21st century. How do you pretend it didn’t happen, for good, bad, or ugly? Is the next thing to say that the LGBTQ rights movement didn’t happen? You can’t talk about it, so we can’t even study the historical phenomenon now? 

The College Board will tell you, “You can do it, it’s an optional module.” But we know that optional modules aren’t tested and are rarely taught. Could you imagine a course on Western civilization where you can’t teach the French Revolution? [Laughs.]

What do you think of complaints that DeSantis’s win here was only partial — that the course still contains elements of left-wing orthodoxy that need to be expunged?

Here’s what I keep telling my friends when it comes to any of these related issues: We cannot write off the carnage that is already taking place, among both teachers and students, in places that aren’t just red states. There are where teachers are being told they can’t teach Black history in predominantly Black schools, because they’re supposedly teaching it wrong. There was where CRT was used as a pretext to get rid of a principal.

So there is real carnage out here. The big losers are teachers and students. Now, the Left likes to say — and this is a lot of my colleagues — “Hey, we’re selling more books than ever!” Yeah, and that represents a fraction of the children who aren’t learning anything about topics that they were learning the day before yesterday. The impact of the anti-CRT, anti-critical analysis movement is profound. The National Review can pretend that every school district in any liberal state is teaching critical race theory, but you can get fired anywhere in Oklahoma because someone spies on your classes. So it becomes a way of going after people and purging Black history from schools in ways we’ve never really seen before. 

This hearkens back, as some have said, to the Jim Crow era, when Woodson’s disciples used to teach with his book under their desk at the risk of being fired. We won that war. It was a rights war that had cultural consequences. We win rights wars, conservatives win culture wars. But we’ve been fighting this thing as a culture war, and we’ve been so dumb and blind to not care about white kids as students. That’s the biggest mistake we’ve made.

When [Gov. Glenn] Youngkin won in Virginia, this issue of what kids were being taught was a big part of it. The notion that white kids were being made to feel bad was what flipped some people from Democrat to Republican. We need to take seriously that white mothers do not want their kids to have their psyches toyed with in K–12, and we can’t tell those mothers to just have their kids toughen up. If we’re going to counter this onslaught, we need to take that opposition seriously and find ways to take away their criticisms. It’s unethical for teachers to go after kids, and teachers typically don’t do it.

I saw a documentary last fall about how the Civil War is taught around the country. A teacher in a Boston school had a conservative kid in class. Even though he’s a conservative, I can identify a little with him: They went after him, and he held his ground. But the job of the teacher was to make sure that he had a chance to express his decidedly conservative point of view. The job of the teacher is to prevent the conversation from devolving into ad hominem attacks. 

And when we go to even younger levels, teachers have an even greater burden. You don’t let kids gang up on anybody in those settings. That’s teaching, and that’s how we should discuss it — but to outlaw things is political demagoguery. And that’s where we find ourselves now, because we served up this culture war.

If you had a high school-aged child, would you let him or her take this AP class?

I would talk to my kid and let them make the decision. 

My whole idea of parenting is to empower my kid to know how to make decisions, and then live with the consequences of what they decided. My kids are both grown now, but I don’t walk into a room and say, “Intellectually, you can’t do this for such-and-such a reason.” People have to be free, and this is part of it when we’re talking about high school-aged kids.

On the other hand, if I really thought my kids were being taught to hate themselves, or that they were guilty of something — oh hell, I’m getting into the school. Like I’ve said, we need to pay more attention to these parents. I think they’re being sold a bill of goods, but we shouldn’t just dismiss this with a sweep of the hand. “Toughen up?” You’re talking about kids who might be six or eight or 12 years old.

In the face of centuries of anti-Black violence in America, it has become easy to dismiss the Holocaust as Europeans killing other Europeans, as “white-on-white” violence. This notion completely misses the Black history of the Holocaust, the details of which are lost because educators rarely teach it. 

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews, and the centrality of Jewish identity to the perpetration of the Holocaust must not be forgotten. But from a diverse array of communities — including persons with disabilities, LGBTQ people and members of other religious minorities — were also targeted by Nazi ideology. This included Black Germans.

While anti-semitic remarks from celebrities draw headlines and outrage, they are ultimately a symptom of a deeper problem: the failure of educators to teach about the Holocaust in ways that relate it to other marginalized communities’ experiences.

I teach courses on political violence at Virginia Commonwealth University, a minority-serving institution in Richmond — the former capital of the Confederacy. The students in my classroom have the same blind spot about Holocaust history as those celebrities. Yet, I’ve connected with my students in profound ways by studying the Holocaust and allowing them to forge their own personal connections to the victims and survivors of Hitler’s attempt to wipe out Jews and other minorities.

Sadly, the anti-semitism that motivated Nazi ideology has been in American culture and political discourse. Still, when tasked with rooting it out, students are readily able to identify anti-semitism. One student highlighted an circulated by a politician running for county office. One drew a connection between South Park’s and . Another supplied far too many quotes from . Young people from diverse backgrounds are able to recognize anti-semitism when they see it, but they struggle to understand where it comes from and why it affects them. 

That’s why I teach the Holocaust through an intersectional lens that reveals the relevance of religious, racial, gender and sexual identities. While the deep roots of Nazi ideology are found in , the forerunners of Nazi policy can be found in the colonization of Africa. Germany’s colonial genocides that began in 1904 in contemporary Namibia were only in 2021. The annihilation of the Herero and Nama peoples by German forces, through tactics such as forced starvation, deportation to concentration camps and medical experimentation, provided a blueprint for the Holocaust. But that isn’t the only connection. 

Nazi racial policy was built around the concept of eugenics, which held that mental illness, poverty and criminality were biological traits passed down from one generation to another. Popular in the United States as well as Western Europe, eugenicists sought to control who could have children as a way of addressing social problems. Virginia enacted eugenic laws in 1924, the same year it banned interracial marriage, and allowed state institutions to sterilize individuals to prevent the conception of so-called genetically inferior children. Virginia’s law became a model for the country after it was upheld by the in in 1927. Twenty-two percent of the sterilized in Virginia alone were African Americans, and two-thirds were women. 

Similarly, Nazi eugenics focused on the elimination of Afro-Germans — Germans of African descent. Hitler wrote about Afro-Germans in Mein Kampf, arguing that they defiled Aryans’ racial purity. Black and mixed-race people in Nazi Germany were subject to similar to that inflicted on Jews. Ye may like Hitler, but if he and his family had lived in Nazi Germany, they would have been socially and economically marginalized and potentially . The history of Nazi-era discrimination against Afro-Germans continues to affect Black people living in Germany today, with many reporting that .

Teaching Black history alongside Jewish and other histories of the Holocaust helps connect it with students’ own experiences with discrimination, violence and hate. It can also help educators better understand their students. As one of my students wrote while reflecting on an image of Germans mocking their Jewish neighbors as they were to a Nazi concentration camp, “I know the fear of deportation, of being taken away from your home and all you know, and just imagining people I’ve known all my life enjoying me losing everything, I can’t even explain how horrible that feels.” The experiences of the Holocaust still have meaning for marginalized students today.  

By forging connections between Black history and Jewish history, between the exploitation and murder of colonized peoples and the Holocaust, between marginalized communities, educators can help students of all backgrounds make important emotional and intellectual connections between the Holocaust and the bigotry and discrimination experienced by marginalized communities. Teaching the Black history of the Holocaust demonstrates to students how events that seemingly affect only one community ultimately affect us all.