Bridging the Racial Gap in Education
The American educational system in general and the California educational system in particular must be totally and utterly dismantled and destroyed simply because it is the main instrument of the perpetuation of domestic colonialism otherwise known as white supremacy. This past week’s Achievement Gap Summit to bridge the racial divide called together by Jack O’Connell, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, offered false hope that the educational system can be saved despite the cultural lag between the old Eurocentric paradigm and the new racial reality of majority African, Latin and Asian population.
The Eurocentric system has been unable to inculcate its values successfully into the so-called minority populations that are rapidly becoming the majority. In short, the system is a failure because it was created by Frankenstein so that Afro-Latin peoples could assimilate into the monsters needed by a white supremacy capitalist regime. What are needed are wage slaves, up from chattel slavery, but the system has been hard pressed to create the dutiful slaves needed by a society whose purpose is the domination and exploitation of the world.
The 1960s revolution threw a monkey wrench in Frankenstein’s plan and even though the revolution was aborted, enough information made it through the Cointelpro operation to alter the consciousness of a generation of students whose children and grandchildren are now of age and even in their unconsciousness are in rebellion against the Eurocentric domestic colonial regime. The children know something is very very wrong here and hence over fifty per cent drop out of the school system before graduation.
The irony is that the students are not given credit for having the natural intelligence to know that something is very very wrong, that something stinks, but rather they are blamed for being the problem, or their families, mothers, fathers, or the lack thereof, their economic situation but never is the system that is contrary to their cultural identity blamed, never is the racist nature of the content and presentation labeled the cause, for after all, white supremacy is perfect and holy. And so when the system looks at the monkey in the zoo, it never occurs to it that the monkey is looking at them. And this tragic blindness can never be healed by reform but only by revolution, the decolonialism of the society in general and education in particular.
Thus, we must now ask the question: is the society prepared to go beyond nick picking and cherry picking reformism into the reality and necessity of revolution, concluding the revolution that was begun forty years ago when black students went to war to establish black studies, soon followed by other ethnic groups calling for Latin, Asian and Native American studies, even gender studies. It most cases, these programs were tolerated, but in the main they were diluted, polluted and absorbed into the general curriculum until they were meaningless, harmless and totally reactionary, thus returning to the Eurocentric status quo and the system smiled and was happy and content once again, for its life was extended and the rebellion of the natives was squelched.
After all, during the 60s, the system had seen the danger of Johnny reading books and thinking independent thoughts, learning the craft of writing, even publishing books on consciousness, and so he was made dumb again, told he was incapable of mastering the King’s English, even though the king had been dethroned long ago but somehow his language remained as an instrument of terror and trauma, thus even today when the natives try to reconstruct viable communication in the language of their oppressor, they are condemned as being illiterate and uncivilized, even by their own culture police, such as Cosby and others. So again, Johnny says to hell with the English language and the colonial administrators and instructors say to hell with Johnny. Get out of here, you do not fit, nothing about you is acceptable, your speech, your poetry, your dress, your music, nothing, and by the way, we have a cell ready for you, a condo with a life estate.
And rather than pay you a minimum salary of fifty thousand dollars per year to stop your mayhem in the hood—as we are now paying the insurgents not to kill us in Iraq, we will hold you in your cell or condo and make fifty thousand dollars per inmate per year off you while you sit like a monkey in a cage. And even while imprisoned when you request conscious literature, we allow you, if at all possible, to read only material of the urban or gansta genre so you may continue in your wretchedness and iniquity, and upon release spread more psychopathology into the hood, along with HIV/AIDS and other diseases from homosexuality, although you claim to be a straight American Gansta.
Of course we shall continue to meet periodically to assess the racial divide, the gap between the practice and the promise, the reality and the dream. But the reality speaks volumes about our real intentions which is that nothing shall change fundamentally because it is about domination and exploitation, it is about holding onto our sense of reality until the end, and if necessary we shall call out the troops, order them to use their guns to prevent any radical change of the social order, in particular the educational system which perpetuates the values of the white supremacy culture. We are both privileged and blessed to have this Eurocentric white supremacy culture so why should we, and for that matter how can we, change?
This would involve a radical recovery from our racist heritage, a deconstruction of our world view. We would need to detox from the magic spell we have allowed to consume us for generations, centuries; in short, our world would come to an end. But perhaps we would discover who we really are as we discovered ourselves as members rather than masters in the global village. We would then accept Johnny, his language, his dress, his hair, his culture as equal to ours. We would even accept his thinking outside our box and he would not be penalized for such since we now see him as our equal, as a man among men, as a woman among women.
When world events happened, we would consult him for his views on the matter. We would not ignore his opinion or refuse to implement his ideas that may just happen to be sound and solid, based on a sense of history and reality, contrary to our which is based on illusionary hubris. As a matter of fact, I left the Achievement Gap Summit early to attend an Afro-Asian sponsored fund raiser for Merve Dymally who is running for State Senator, even though he is eighty years old. At the event I met and talked with Asians who assured me they could get my books printed in China, even translated into Chinese for the people of China.
And so it is, we must prepare for the world beyond the white box of Americana that has been nothing but a shallow grave for our people. But in the shallow grave there is hope of resurrection, only if we are willing to jump out in a hurry, yes, seize the time, for time can be reversed. Before leaving Sacramento I watched a television program about a family in Turkey who walked on all fours, a reversal of evolution. And it was said at the conference on education that this present black generation is the worse ever, and thus we are perhaps witnessing a reversal of evolution unless we make a great leap forward.
And indeed, this will involve revolutionary changes in education, including the establishment of independent institutions financed by ourselves so they can remain independent, staffed by persons who teach with love and a sense of service, as Mr. Tavis Smiley said in his keynote address at the conference. Tavis may not be prepared for the revolution I speak about, but he is correct about love and service. He also spoke about fulfilling the promise, and we know the founding fathers called upon the people to again make revolution if the promise is not kept.
--Dr. M/marvin x
11/15/07
Moratorium on Theory
A Response to Wilson J. Moses by Rudolph Lewis
Most formulae that are currently presented by well-meaning contemporary Brothers and Sisters are flawed by impatience, and haste, leading to a "magpies nest" of schemes informed by incomplete knowledge of our past, and a failure to engage in the painful and pessimist appraisal of black traditions, that Harold Cruse advised in his flawed, but brilliant masterpiece The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. His central advisory was overlooked. What he said was: Declare a moratorium on theory until you have studied our own past.—Wilson
I just read a piece by Marvin X, titled "Bridging the Racial Gap in Education." Specifically, it is a complaint about schools in California and their seeming educational failure with regard to black as well as Hispanic students. One marker of this failure is the black dropout rate of 50%, which is similar to other black urban educational systems across the country; in some systems like Detroit and Baltimore they are even higher. Seemingly, these students, however, at some point get a GED, for over 75% of blacks above 25 have at least a high school equivalency. Marvin's indictment against the public school system as presently organized is that they are "Eurocentric" and ooze with Eurocentric values in the classroom, that is, "white supremacy" or colonial-like "domination" values. And thus he recommends independent black schools supported by blacks with curriculums influenced primarily by Afrocentrists like Dr.Wade Nobles.
These kinds of criticisms and recommendations made me take your advice to heart: "Most formulae that are currently presented by well-meaning contemporary Brothers and Sisters are flawed by impatience, and haste, leading to a "magpies nest" of schemes informed by incomplete knowledge of our past." Further, it makes me think of your book Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (1992). Crummell was a priest and an above-average preacher. Of his writings we are mostly left with his sermons. But Crummell wanted to be a teacher. He wanted to transmit the principles of civilization into the minds of young black scholars. You point out his catalogue by which he would "introduce among our youthful citizens a sound and elevating English literature" (150). Among these one cannot find one black writer, not even Frederick Douglass' Narrative nor The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa.
Before he reached Cambridge, most of Crummell's learning took place in independent schools for blacks, beginning with the African Free School in New York. His schoolmates included Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet, and James McCune Smith. Crummell’s education was thoroughly Eurocentric, yet he was by turns a black nationalist, a Pan Africanist, a colonizationist, an abolitionist, a Liberian and African nationalist, a Civilizationist, an Ethiopianist, an Anglophile, and sometimes all at once. These ideological perspectives were more a commitment to black uplift rather than a pedagogical commitment to what we consider today cultural “blackness,” which Marvin (or Dr. M) thinks will make a difference in the scholarly commitment of black children. He proffers no evidence such a catalog or curriculum guarantees a different scholarly production.
For much of his life Crummell wanted to head a black college, to found black schools. Of course, he would not have wanted to start black schools to teach Afrocentric texts or black folklore, or the current black mythologies or any of the recommended texts for today's black independent schools. He would want his black students to master the European classics, be able to read Greek and Latin and know other European languages. One wonders indeed whether teaching Afrocentrist texts primarily would decrease black dropout rates. Crummell had no love for black popular education as we now formulate it. Popular culture did not then have the critical influence as it has now.
Wilson J. Moses' Alexander Crummell book can teach us much about the problems of founding independent black schools and other black "independent" institutions and their dependency on white benefactors. The problem is always money and usually the money among us do not go heavily into black educational commitments or experimental institutions and when they do they are geared toward getting one's students ready to pass entrance exams for the best Ivy League schools.
In his racial career, Crummell was concerned with "the spreading of a cosmopolitan civilization, rather than the nurturing of a cultural nationalism or separatism" (Alexander Crummell, 130). Middle-class African American parents (on the whole) are more in line, it seems, with Crummell’s idea of education as a means of mastering the principles of Western civilization to assimilate and to become successful, goals which have very little to do with political rebellion or decolonization or creating cultural warriors as an advance guard against cultural oppression or establishing a separate distinct racial nationalism.
I am afraid that the curriculums imagined by some Pan Africanist, black nationalists, and Afrocentists won’t do that, in any event. American realities have their demands that must be satisfied. Marvin suggests that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) threw a “monkey wrench” into the assimilationist plans of American public education. He says “even though the [black] revolution was aborted, enough information made it through the Cointelpro operation to alter the consciousness of a generation of students whose children and grandchildren are now of age and even in their unconsciousness are in rebellion against the Eurocentric domestic colonial regime. The children know something is very very wrong here and hence over fifty per cent drop out of the school system before graduation.” Such transmission is speculative at best. But if mindless rebellion was indeed transmitted, all the worst for us. From this perspective we are as blameworthy as "Cointelpro."
So, according to Marvin (Dr. M), the 60s literary revolution is a cause, then, of the present scholarly revolt of public school students, as manifested in the 50% drop-out rates. It is not the lack of such BAM texts, even if the more important ones were available in print, existing in today's public school education. The problem is how we regard and approach such texts, or any black texts. I wonder indeed in such Afrocentric schools would there be a study of an Alexander Crummell or even a Martin Delany. Both Crummell and Delany would have serious criticisms of contemporary "blackism" or the "bitterness" found in Black Arts texts. These 60s' texts of rebellion, I doubt, would provide the skeptical scholarly approach to a well-rounded education that black students require to operate truly as liberated beings in our contemporary world.
In a recent black Canadian commentary, “Debunking myths about African centred schools” (The Star), the authors George J. Sefa Dei and Arlo Kempf believe “Often integration means giving up one's identity in a so-called "multicultural mosaic." What “identity” these authors reference is unstated and unclear to me or any reader. If one seeks a Canadian identity, integration seems the path to take. Their characterization of the desired black independent school is similarly obscure: “They will be open to all who share Afrocentric ideals, who have high expectations of the learner and who are willing to go the extra mile to ensure success for all. The African-centred school is defined more by a set of principles and philosophies governing the conduct of school than the race of its students and teachers.” Most parents of black public school children would be similarly puzzled by the concept of “Afrocentric ideals.” I know that I am.
In such schools I wonder what use would be made of say the life of Martin R. Delany or his The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) and its criticism of black life in America. Or whether such schools would be willing to deal thoroughly with 19th century African American intellectual life at all, which has a Victorian cast to it, and their emphasis on the "civilization and Christianization of Africa." Of course, it could not be done adequately without a knowledge of white American, English, and European intellectual history and life.
The dualistic arguments about a white vs. a black education are indeed rationally problematic. Neither can fit neatly into a vacuum. It is to escape one evil and to enter another. A truly scholarly education, I doubt, can fit well into either one of these paradigms. What we should argue is that the present public school systems are not truly scholarly and that they tend more toward propaganda and programming. That is indeed to be avoided. But we do not want a black version of the same problem.
I haven't read Delany fully since the early 80s when I was writing my master's thesis. I need to read him again. His The Condition and other black texts of the 19th century should indeed have their readings in public schools. But we do not have the teachers prepared to teach such texts in white or black systems and if they were prepared I do not think that they would be allowed to teach them. And if they were allowed to teach them I am uncertain that black students would respond any better to them than the ones they now seemingly reject.
I came across an interesting passage from The Condition, which maybe relevant to our present economic concerns:
White men are producers—we are consumers. They build houses, and we rent them. They raise produce, and we consume it. They manufacture clothes and wares, and we garnish ourselves with them. They build coaches, vessels, cars, hotels, saloons, and other vehicles and places of accommodations, and we deliberately wait until they have got them in readiness, then walk in, and contend with as much assurance for 'right,' as though the whole thing was bought, paid for, and belonged to us (The Condition 45).
With all our supposed wealth (buying power) and education and cosmopolitan sophistication, how many black spokesmen would make such a candid statement to our contemporary black middleclass consumers. And if they did, what indeed would be their recommendations in how to respond to it? It seems indeed that they should have enough study and scholarly background to be critical of the one that Delany offered over a century ago. So indeed Moses' advisory (cross) should be taken up by us all: "Declare a moratorium on theory until you have studied our own past."
Even those of us with advanced degrees have holes in our knowledge of the past whether it is black or white or Hispanic or other literatures. The search for knowledge indeed cannot cease at graduate ceremonies.
