After reading parts of The Mis-Education of The Negro by Woodson and the piece from Jarvis Givens, I was left with an overwhelming sense of disillusionment in regards to my own education. Where should the U.S. education system should go from here? How do we make the education system available to black students? These pieces illuminated a lot of ways my own education was tinged with racist undertones.

The exclusion of African Americans and lack of general diversity in general (in textbooks and in children’s books) is a way of demoralizing the black student. Mainstream curricula contain a plethora of white superheroes and protagonists (think Judy Blume, Superman, Charlotte’s Web, which all contain white characters). It is crushing to a child’s psyche to look up to role models and see no one that looks like you. It sends a message that to be a hero or to be successful is to be white- which is a horrible and damaging thing to teach ANY child.

There’s also the ignorance of black Americans on a historical level. By disregarding the contributions of African Americans in U.S. history, students (of all races) are taught to devalue African Americans. If we don’t make space for them in history books, how will we allow space for them in our society as humans?  On top of this, there is also the ignorance of slavery and the heinous historical acts of white people toward African Americans in our country. Woodson notes that many (white) educators are unprepared to speak on this “touchy” issue. To this, I think that educators should push past any comfort issue in terms of speaking about slavery. Black students undoubtedly feel uncomfortable speaking about this- in fact, probably ten times worse than the white educators, and for black students it is not a choice. They are faced with the implications of slavery everyday. It is essential that educators (and other members of society) recognize this.

Woodson asserts “The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race.” By this, he means that to be an educated black American means to have been educated by a white education system, meant to either break or control you. And, since you’ve made it out the other end, it is likely that you’ve become a product, a cog in the wheel – of black oppression. Woodson states that the people who have made it far in education, but have left the system – are in positions of power to enact real change.

In terms of change, I don’t think it’s enough to simply enact “diversity training” for white students . I think there is more to be done, which Woodson alludes to in Chapter 1 of The Mis-Education of The Negro: 

“The children from the homes of white planters and merchants live permanently in the midst of calculations, family budgets, and the like, which enable them sometimes to learn more by contact than the Negro can acquire in school. Instead of teaching such Negro children less arithmetic, they should be taught much more of it than the white children…” .

I know that we are living in a different time – it would be a fallacy to believe all black students come from families of tenants and all white students come from wealthy merchant families – but I think there’s something here that’s worth paying attention to, which is the student-tailored education, particularly for the black student. Woodson goes on to say that an “educated negro” would be against this idea as it can be interpreted as another form of discrimination. I can relate to this conflict because I naturally think that all students should get the same education, regardless of race. But part of myself also believes that something more must be done for black students – especially in a white system which has systematically oppressed young African American minds for centuries.

Jarvis Givens speaks of the term he coins, “fugitive pedagogy.” Givens speaks of an African American slave who kept a book hidden under his hat at all times because it was prohibited at the time for African Americans to read. He had to piece together an education based on what he could acquire – which sometimes involved illicit acts.

Though circumstances are different in our America, this fugitive pedagogy is still present and manifests itself in less conspicuous ways. Students are still “hiding books under their hats.” This could be: a student who vigorously reads and watches additional videos after school to make up for the lack of proper education he/she acquires in a (financially and racially) disfavored school district. Or, stealing library books because he/she cannot afford to buy. A student who stays up late doing homework because of the after school job he/she must work to support the family. A student getting who starts selling drugs to make money to pay for education. A student getting his/her hands on pieces of black literature which were excluded from the syllabus at school. These performances of defiance, though less obvious, represent the ongoing problems in our current education system.