Surely a course that teaches students to advocate for radical political causes was always going to elicit public backlash. Surely creating an entire lesson that offers a favorable perspective on voodoo — a religion that engages in spirit-possession, divination, causing harm to enemies, and ritualistic cannibalism — would spark national controversy. “It made me think that not everything has to be bad… There could be alternate ways of looking at things,” a student told the Washington Post after the course’s voodoo lesson. How…nice?

The entirely predictable liberal reaction elides one particularly important point: the curriculum of other AP courses is already awash with narratives related to racial minorities and racial grievance. AP US History, for example, devotes extensive effort to cataloging the slave trade, chattel slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. Reading lists for AP English include books on colonialism (e.g. Josef Conrad and China Achebe) and race in America (e.g. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Harper Lee, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor). AP Art History devotes almost half of its curriculum to non-Western topics.

I could go on, but does anyone really doubt that the current list of available AP courses in Florida is not already tailored to racial, sexual, or gender narratives?

[I don’t mind the topics covered in the other AP courses, as long as they are in reasonable balance and perspective. In middle school, I picked up The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison thinking it was the H.G. Wells book and got my perspective broadened considerably for the better, for instance. But this AP African-American Studies sounds more suited to college than high school, and far more biased and tendentious. — Ed]