Ron DeSantis appears to have succeeded in his attempt to bully the College Board into stripping Black Lives Matter, discussion of gay Black thought leaders (perhaps like James Baldwin, whose mother was born enslaved?), and multiple well-known Black authors from their African American Studies Advance Placement course.
Over at the Popular.info newsletter, Judd Legum et al noted yesterday that the College Board’s revenue is increasingly coming from selling these courses (more and more students aren’t taking the SATs — their other revenue source — as colleges move away from basing admissions on testing), so to maintain their viability and their CEO’s $2.5 million annual salary, they apparently decided they pretty much had to bow to DeSantis’ threats and those from the right wingers who preceded him and he was imitating.
In addition to threatening teachers with prison if they don’t remove books from classrooms, arresting Black men who were told they could vote and did so, and now demanding menstrual histories from high school girls (presumably to look for pregnancies?), DeSantis has laid a reign of terror against minorities of all sort across his state.
Bullying like this is at the core of authoritarian behavior, as I noted in my Daily Take yesterday about DeSantis, and we need to start calling things what they are. And that
— source commondreams.org | Thom Hartmann | Feb 03, 2023
