Thanks for the thoughtful response, John!

I do agree with you that it is an improvement. My point is that a text-dependent, objective technique of reading is itself not ideologically neutral.

Louise Rosenblatt, tracking the development of this trend through the 19th and the 20th century, observed how the reader was relegated the role of an “invisible eavesdropper.” Since the dominant white culture is the only one for whom this kind of cultural “invisibility” is possible, I say AP English Literature privileges white readers. For similar reasons, the approach also favors white writers and characters. I’m glad people are fighting back against that basic whitist orientation, but I’m not convinced disrupting the canon is enough.

By requiring critical and personal “silence,” this approach constitutes a form of what Paolo Freire called “antidialogical action,” which is always meant to keep the oppressed in a subjugated state and further consolidate power. This may seem extreme, but consider again Kendi’s statement: “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies.”

Here’s Freire:

Within an objective situation of oppression, antidialogue is necessary to the oppressor as a means of further oppression — not only economic, but cultural: the vanquished are dispossessed of their word, their expressiveness, their culture. Further, once a situation of oppression has been initiated, antidialogue becomes indispensable to its preservation.

…the oppressors attempt to destroy in the oppressed their quality as “considerers” of the world…the oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given — something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt.