This is the College Board‘s first new AP course offering since 2014, according to TIME, and it joins the various other classes that are offered through the AP program — including European History, English Literature and Composition, Psychology and United States History.

This allows high school students to potentially earn college credits in order to both get ahead and bump-up their GPA.

The College Board notably says that this new course is “designed to offer high school students an inspiring, evidence-based introduction to African American Studies,” according to CBS News.

“You can tell there is a thirst [students] have to obtain this knowledge,” Marlon Williams-Clark, a social studies instructor at Florida State University, said, CBS News reports. “I think that this course will be the forerunner for other histories on…marginalized people.”

Williams-Clark also added that “we have to understand is that history is told from the perspective of the winner” when he was asked about why courses like European History were offered with no Afrocentric counterpart.

“I’m very proud of the College Board for taking this step and the work that they have put in to create this course. It is really historic, but it is also something that is very much needed,” he noted.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., who directs the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, noted that the curriculum’s coursework is “rigorously vetted;” he also pointed out that this AP African American Studies course is not the same as the controversial critical race theory (CRT) framework.

“Nothing is more dramatic than having the College Board launch an AP course in a field — that signifies ultimate acceptance and ultimate academic legitimacy,” Gates said, according to TIME. “AP African American Studies is not CRT. It’s not the 1619 Project. It is a mainstream, rigorously vetted, academic approach to a vibrant field of study.”

While the program is currently only available at 60 high schools, the plan is to have AP African American Studies offered at 200 schools by next year, according to CBS News.

By the 2024-2025 school year, any high school that’s interested in offering the course should be able to do so, the outlet reports.

What do you think about the course, and would you have been interested in taking AP African American Studies back when you were in high school?