Miseducated Negro Foolishness
Fighting for AP African American Studies while simultaneously abandoning Black History Month
By Dr. Charity Clay
Malcolm taught us that only a fool would let their enemy teach their children.
As I reflect on another Black History Month marked by shameless marketing campaigns from both white corporations and “Black owned Businesses” looking to turn a profit by celebrating Black culture, it is evident that we have become shamefully far removed from Dr. Carter G Woodson’s intentions for Negro History Week. Recently someone sent me a video of Golden State Warriors’ player Draymond Green talking about getting rid of Black History Month, using the common complaint about it “being the shortest month of the year”. Though misplaced, I understand why he is frustrated. As a Black athlete wearing a shirt promoting the NBA’s Black History Month campaign—while schools across the nation are trying to ban Black History from their curriculum, he is pointing out the hypocrisies of this country. But, the reasons that Draymond provides for wanting to eliminate Black History Month, are the exact reasons why we need it. This irony should not be lost on us.
More important than just keeping Black History Month, we need to reclaim it from corporations that only began supporting it after it was declared a national holiday in 1976. This corporate support was driven by the potential profit that white corporations imagined making through sales campaigns around the holiday to attract Black consumers that they were unable to access during segregation a decade earlier. We need to recover it from organizations attempting to absolve themselves from the guilt of longstanding systemic exclusion and discrimination of Black people by bathing in celebrations of Black tokenism. To quote Dr Amos Wilson, “If [our enemies] can celebrate our history and see it as something positive, then it means that we are not using it in a revolutionary sense!” For the last 4 decades, we have been participating in a corporate counterfeit version of Negro History Week rebranded as Black History Month.
Negro History Week was established in 1926 to recap the previous years’ studies of Black History that took place within Black communities. Black educators of Woodson’s generation were adamant about the need for African centered education at all levels. This involved training educators, creating a curriculum, and establishing physical learning centers for Black Children. Dr. Woodson warned us in the 1930s about “the Miseducation of the Negro” that would result from allowing whites to control the way Black children are educated. He indicted the Black community for failing to provide employment opportunities through the development of our own institutions and industries, thus leaving us dependent on our oppressors for our livelihood upon completing our education.
Carter G. Woodson, founder of Negro History Week
Unfortunately, during the school desegregation of the 1950s, many Black parents and communities willingly relinquished the responsibility of educating Black children to the white-run public school system. For the last 7 decades we have remained committed to reforming public education despite the devastating impacts it has had on Black students, educators, and communities. This devastation began when the Brown V. Board Supreme Court decision of 1954 erroneously declared that “separate was inherently unequal.” Today, in classic reactionary fashion, we have become “concerned” with the recent ban on a proposed African American Studies AP class. Perhaps our desire for inclusion and “equality” explains why some of us have rallied to protect a class that few Black children will actually attend.
Across the country, less than 6% of students in AP classes are Black, and this is for two major reasons: The first reason is that Black schools have significantly less AP course offerings than white schools; some Black high schools do not offer any. The second reason is that across the United States, especially in the south, the literacy rate of Black students in public schools is less than 30%. It’s a travesty that many of us have been tricked into giving our attention to a class that will not benefit Black students, when it should be crystal clear that the United States apartheid education system not only fails to educate Black children, but pipelines them into prison, the military, and other for-profit industrial complexes. We need to reassess our priorities, cease all attempts to reform this system, and reinvest in creating an educational system for Black children.
To provide Black children with the education they deserve requires action. It requires dedicated physical spaces for learning. It requires cultural norms to reinforce learning with incentives, rewards and celebrations that encourage our youth to actualize their brilliance. It requires adults role modeling a Blackness that is not based in the anti-intellectual, hyper sexualized and violent, materialistic version of ourselves that we’re fed by our oppressors. Perhaps, next Black History Month we need to revisit the blueprints of educational infrastructures established by Booker T. Washington with the Tuskegee Institute, and W. E. B. Du Bois with Atlanta University, instead of continuing the divisive narrative that they were adversaries. How about, next Black History Month, instead of romanticizing ancient African Royalty we revisit precolonial African models of education and ways of building, sharing, and applying knowledge. Models that enabled civilizations like the Nok, the Baganda, the Kongo and Mutapa to develop mathematical equations and scientific laws that leave modern day scholars stunned. A quick study will show that the strength of these models was that they held up education as a cultural value, and intelligence as a source of cultural pride. We understood that parents were the first educators and homes were the first classrooms.
As previously mentioned, it wasn’t until integration that Black families en masse began relinquishing their children’s educational destinies to white institutions. Since the 1990s, critiques of integration have provided studies that indicate how each generation of Black students in public schools is increasingly less knowledgable about their history, less equipped with the skills necessary to develop infrastructure, and more disconnected from their community. There were some attempts to return to African Centered community schools with the Freedom Schools of the 1960s and 1970s that led the way for independent Afrocentric private and charter schools in the 1990s. But, No Child Left Behind sabotaged that movement by requiring that Charter Schools adopt a standardized curriculum to be eligible for government funds. The privatization of education that intensified in the 2000s has resulted in a systematic removal of Black educators who are replaced with white teachers, siphoning off Black genius from public to private schools through the voucher system, and in many cases complete closures of schools in Black communities. Despite claims that these efforts are to increase the quality of education, the United States continues to rank near the bottom when compared to other industrialized countries in measures of mathematics, science, and reading, causing many parents and educators to question the future of public education in this country.
Many believed that Covid-19 dealt a fatal blow to the already collapsing educational system, but in the chaos of the pandemic, I witnessed a potential renaissance of Black independent education. I saw youth reconnecting with nature, developing the skills to physically build community, engaging their creativity through all different mediums; and I saw adults learning right along with them. Though many of us became exhausted with the task of being engaged with youth 24/7, we did it! Without the tools or knowledge to design a curriculum, or schedule a school day, we mobilized to learn what our children needed. I saw parents become educators and homes become classrooms again. But, I also saw Black parents who were eager to turn their children back over to the public schools, who blamed teachers for their children’s deficiencies, and who fought harder to have schools reopened, than to develop sustainable African Centered alternatives that proved to be more engaging, relevant, and empowering. In just three short years, after a few stimulus checks and some empty promises from politicians, we have been lured back into using our resources to rescue public education. New initiatives to increase Black male educators and to expand curriculum to be more “inclusive” are just examples of the latest symbolic gestures presented to mask the reality that the United States Public Education System is a tool of whiteness. Black children and Black educators deserve better.
Remember… when Black students were bussed into white schools, Black educators were not brought along for the ride. They weren’t given opportunities to teach white children, they lost their careers, and have not been welcomed back into the classroom since. This is why currently, less than 7% of k-12 educators are Black. While integration is responsible for initially removing Black educators from the classrooms, more recently, programs like Teach for America strategically remove many of the remaining loving, caring, brilliant Black teachers out of public schools and replace them with young white uneducated opportunists who recognized that five years teaching in a public school could erase the student loan debt they had amassed while pursuing liberal arts degrees when they couldn’t get jobs in their fields. We have all seen viral videos of our children being abused and disrespected by white teachers lacking classroom management skills to create supportive learning environments for Black students. There are so many studies showing the ways that anti-Black sentiments from teachers result in the over representation of:
Black students being disciplined by law-enforcement
Black families being criminalized and separated by social welfare agencies
Black youth being misdiagnosed and mistreated for learning style differences.
With this being the current state of public education, I do not see how any African American studies class could be taught successfully in the public school system. I don’t want white saviors presenting themselves as the gatekeepers and intellectual experts on Black history. I don’t want teachers projecting their own biases onto Black students; allowing white students to say the N-word while reading and discussing Black authors. Why would we even want to subject Black youth to that type of violence in so-called learning environments? We shouldn’t, especially when we acknowledge that Black students are often an isolated minority in AP classes. This to me, is as irresponsible as the adults who sacrificed the innocence of Black children to integrate white schools instead of fighting for separate AND equal. I don’t think an AP course should be this high on our priority list with respect to improving the quality of education for Black children. In 2023 we do not need, nor should we want the public schools to teach Black Studies to our children. Now, what white people decide to teach their children, is their business.
To be clear, white students don’t need African American Studies either. They need to be taught the truth about white history. If they learn that, they will learn about the contributions of Africans to this country. The reason whites are fighting against these truths being taught to their children is because they understand how detrimental that awakening is to the security of whiteness. If rank-and-file whites ever learn the truth of how they are being exploited by elite whites, and that whiteness is a myth being used to keep them complacent and complicit, they would declare a civil war. If and when this day comes, our place is on the sidelines, too busy implementing our exit plan to take up arms to save imperialism in the hopes of our efforts being rewarded with inclusion. In the mean time, we need to focus on ensuring that Black youth are prepared to navigate through the whiteness that runs the world.
We are too easily distracted and too easily discouraged when it comes to educating our youth. I read complaints about the increasing list of banned books and words, and immediately thought to myself how easy it would be for me to still create an amazing African American studies course within the confines of all these bans. But that’s my task as a Black educator, to overcome obstacles and remove barriers to education for Black students. This is what our ancestors had to do to become educated at a time when learning was illegal and punishable by death. They knew that Black education was a fugitive act, so they got creative, they got intense, they got serious, they got focused, the got committed…and we got educated.
So what do we do?
Understand that, even though we may send our children to public school, we should know that it is still our obligation to ensure that they are educated. Assata Shakur reminded us that “nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.” We cannot simply continue to complain about what the school’s don’t teach, we must continue the Black tradition of education as a fugitive act and detach our learning from the Eurocentric educational system. Shout out to the growing homeschool movement of families and communities taking advantage of tax breaks and reinvesting directly into their children’s education! Shoutout to the online schools bringing Black students and their families across the country and the diaspora together to engage in learning! Shoutout to the educators who exodus from the institutions that exploit their intelligence and passion for students to create platforms to directly engage youth in learning! Shout out to the parents who are realizing that they are the first educators; who may not have had positive schooling experiences but are committed to providing better for their children! Shout out to the practitioners and skilled trades folks who are offering apprenticeships so we can provide the services we need to build, rebuild and maintain our community; physically and digitally! Shout out to those of us developing African-centered curricula built in the spirit of the master teachers we have learned from.
Without the educational foundation of Negro History Week, we are participating in the commodification and exploitation of Black culture. However, with that foundation, we honor Dr. Woodson and other educators by making Black history a daily lesson for our children. Wherever their interests lie, let’s provide African-centered education to equip them with knowledge and creative problem solving skills, and ground them in the legacy of those who paved the way. It is my vision that Black History Month 2024 and beyond be dedicated to sharing and expanding that knowledge across our communities.
Let’s start NOW with a Black History Month Restoration Project!
Dr. Charity Clay is a professor in Critical Race Sociology at Xavier University of Louisiana. She has an upcoming book focused on police terrorism against Black communities, as well as a podcast on how white supremacy benefits from Black protest. She can be found on her website www.urfavcharity.com and on Instagram @urfavcharity