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It started as a class project, then turned into a class itself.
Tasked with an assignment to help amplify the voices of people of color during her sophomore year, Marame Diop pitched an African American studies course. It was 2020, and the work felt especially important as Diop saw communities across the nation grapple with protests over systemic racism after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
For the next two years, she worked with her teacher and other students at Manhattan’s Beacon High School to turn that vision into reality.
“This divide and this tension is because we are not taught what racism really is, and how it started,” Diop said. “All these common misconceptions need to be reconstructed, and it all starts with education.”
Today, students at Beacon continue to take an ethnic studies course designed by Diop and others in the school community. Their effort coincided with several larger city initiatives in recent years to increase access to diverse and inclusive curriculums — an expansion under threat from President Donald Trump.
In the latest of a series of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Trump administration on Thursday threatened to withhold federal funding from public schools if state education officials don’t return a memo within 10 days saying they’ll eliminate programs that promote DEI efforts the administration deems unlawful.
New York City schools have made an effort in recent years to expand instruction that celebrates diversity, including this year’s systemwide rollout of a prekindergarten-12th grade Black studies curriculum developed by a group of educators, nonprofits, and government leaders, while a growing number of schools around the city have looked to offer an Advanced Placement African American Studies course.
The Education Department is continuing to add Hidden Voices curriculums, highlighting stories about individuals from diverse backgrounds who often aren’t part of history books and whose stories risk being overlooked. Hidden Voices curriculums have offered students a glimpse into narratives from the Global African Diaspora, Asian American and Pacific Islander history, LGBTQ history, and more.
But some students and educators fear that an escalated push by Trump to restrict how topics of race, gender, and sexuality are discussed in the classroom could make it more difficult for students to access such curriculums in the future. Trump had also issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at schools in recent months, with some explicitly seeking to restrict instruction that addresses issues of race and racism.
Legal experts have questioned whether the orders are lawful, and states, local districts, and teachers retain significant control over how topics are addressed in classrooms.
New York City’s attorney general, Letitia James, led a coalition of attorneys general last month issuing guidance to K-12 schools and higher education institutions countering the Trump administration’s push to eliminate education policies promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Officials from the city’s Education Department recently told parents they were not changing any programs or practices, and Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos this week responded to the Trump administration’s directive, saying, “Diversity is a superpower here in New York City, we are always going to honor that.”
Diop urged local students to keep advocating for courses like ethnic studies.
“It’s a step, and it’s not like it’s all going to change in one day,” Diop said. “But classes like these are what is going to keep the spark alive and not let us lose hope.”
A student-led course 2 years in the making
For two years, Diop, now a sophomore at Yale University, worked with her teacher and other school students to design the course. In some ways, Beacon’s status as a consortium school, where students are exempted from most Regents exams made it easier to create such a class.
“It was really all hands on deck,” she said. “After-school meetings literally almost every single day for hours on end.”
The course’s first unit centers on community-building, with students discussing their own cultural and racial identities, culminating in pairs of students making an hour-long podcast about their identities. The second unit focuses on the history of racial injustice and the movements that led to the creation of ethnic studies, with a particular emphasis on youth activism. For their final project, students write an advocacy letter or op-ed they send to media outlets for possible publication.
Diop said the course resonates with many students, who “appreciate their histories being taught in the class rather than just sitting through a boring, 50-minute lecture on some old, white, dead guy.”
With more severe restrictions in other states about how certain topics are taught, Diop is worried about the national picture.
“It’s looking so bleak,” she said. “To think that what we’re doing in New York is far-fetched and a fantasy to kids in Florida is just really insane.”
Executive orders spark fears over self-censorship in schools
Even before Thursday’s threat from the Trump administration, many worried that educators might “self-censor” out of fear of drawing backlash for embracing diverse and inclusive practices in their classrooms — or that classes like Diop’s might become even more difficult to develop.
Last month, a local affiliate of the Public Broadcasting Service erased a series of videos on LGBTQ history that had been developed in partnership with the city’s Education Department. Though the Education Department quickly reposted the videos to its own site, some concerns lingered over whether the move might diminish the reach of the videos, as well as whether other organizations might opt to take similar action.
Monica Carter, director of the Lambda Literary Writers in Schools, a program that brings LGBTQ authors to classrooms to discuss their work with students, said she’s noticed “an uptick in self-censorship” in schools this year.
“We’ve had to maintain a low profile in order to keep the program going,” she added.
Still, in spite of concerns, Carter said demand for the program had only grown this year — operating in roughly 200 schools across the city. The organization sought to help educators prepare for potential backlash, developing inclusivity guides for teachers with advice for navigating challenges they might face, while seeking new strategies to protect authors and affirm support for LGBTQ students as their rights face attacks from conservatives.
“We want to be part of the resistance, and I think that the educators and librarians and principals that participate understand that,” she said.
“There’s just a general atmosphere of fear, and students are trying to figure out how they can exist in a world where their very lives are threatened,” Carter added. “That’s a difficult thing to deal with and it’s also a difficult thing for them to talk about. We hopefully provide critical safe spaces where they meet an LGBTQ+ author, where they can discuss these things, and see that you can still thrive and survive as an LGBTQ+ person.”
Sonya Douglass, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and director of the Black Education Research Collective who helped develop the city’s pre-K-12 Black studies curriculum, said recent threats from the federal government only heightened the importance of courses like Black studies.
“For those of us who have been working to ensure that we’re teaching the truth about American history, the current moment speaks to why,” she said. “Educating young people about history is really critical to ensuring that our democracy functions properly, and that includes learning about all of the different experiences of individuals and groups that have made the country what it is.”
Douglass noted the city’s Black studies curriculum is a “corrective,” offering students an education that has historically been denied to them. She urged school communities not to “obey in advance” with the executive order and to continue advocating for these curricula and others.
“Yes, there is a chilling effect, which is the intent of these executive orders and policies, but we can’t be dissuaded by that,” she said. “We actually have tremendous power as a community of educators, and so it really is up to us to make those decisions in the classroom.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney contributed.
Bernie Carmona is a high school senior at Beacon High School in Manhattan and an intern at The Bell.
Isabella Mason is a high school senior at Midwood High School in Brooklyn and an intern at The Bell.
Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.