It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (25 page)
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Authors: M.K. Asante Jr
While writing
and producing the film
500 Years Later
, a documentary directed by Owen Alik Shahadah exploring the psychocultural effects of slavery and colonialism on the African Diaspora, I was able to jaunt around the world to Jamaica, London, Paris, Ghana, Senegal, Barbados, and throughout America. At the time, I was a junior in college, struggling for my mind in a predominantly white (socially, culturally, historically, academically) institution. As I filmed Black folks all around the globe, I made it a point to talk to students and teachers alike about their educational experiences and how they kept keepin’ on. I was surprised by how similar our experiences were and how they, too, were searching for ways to fill an educational void. Here’s some of what came back when I asked them about their formal education:
JASON TERRY, STUDENT — KINGSTON, JAMAICA
There’s a lot of Black heroes that I’ve never learned about, but I can tell you a lot about Henry VIII! Or one of the queen Elizabeths! Can’t tell you nothin’ about Marcus Garvey though.
JUNKUNG JOBAREH, STUDENT — BANJUL, GAMBIA
Unfortunately the kind of education that we get here enslaves our minds, makes us believe we are inferior. Education should
liberate, not enslave. And eventually, in the long run, liberate the whole world.
AFRAR AFRIYA, STUDENT — LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Education for me has to be looked upon on two levels. The first one: the so-called training that we receive in school and we understand that it is indeed training because all it’s about is regurgitating a curriculum or regurgitating a set of rules to then pass an exam. But we must also understand that education is also about getting self-confidence, so being proud of who you are. So we must also study the history of our past, meaning African history. However this isn’t taught.
TANYA MORRIS, TEACHER — PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
The mainstream educational system has proven that it’s not able to meet our educational needs. Just look at the youth today and that’s evident.
KHALEEL MUHAMMAD, TEACHER—LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
This is indicative of why we need to be connected to our past, why we need to
know
what happened to us as people because if we can’t tell our students that you actually achieved something why would they feel a sense of achievement? Why would they feel a sense of identity? They have to know what happened before and they have to be able to relate to it and say, “I did that. My people did this. We
are
somebody, we
can
do something!”
DR. SAMUEL HAY, PROFESSOR — EASTON, PENNSYLVANIA
Public education, unfortunately, does not anchor African-Americans in the tradition of Africa. So consequently people float.
KOHAIN HALEVI, TEACHER — ACCRA, GHANA
What institution today teaches the ideology and philosophy of the prophet Nat Turner? What you realize today that with the death of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison; that even with their deaths no matter what charisma they had, the institutionalization of their ideas into the Constitution of America, into the institutions of America, the universities and schools, that today you have to go to school and learn about these individuals and the principles that they believed in… What universities, what elementary schools, what high schools and middle schools do we have that you can come out knowing who Gabriel Prosser was? Who Denmark Vessey was? Who Nat Turner was? Who Booker T. Washington was? Who Malcolm X El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was? Who LeRoi Jones was? Is it mandatory reading, are their ideals and their philosophy mandatory reading?
DONTE HARRIS, STUDENT — COMPTON, CALIFORNIA
I feel that [the school system] is not properly designed to educate us in any way, shape, or form. People can say it’s not working, but it is working, just not for us.
How could it be that Black students and teachers around the world, at nearly every level, were feeling the same sense of despair in regards to the educational system? Dr. Zak Kondo, in his
Black Student’s Guide to Positive Education
, provides a bleak list of what the average Black student will believe upon graduation from high school:
BLACKS ARE INFERIOR, LAZY AND DUMB.
WHITES ARE SUPERIOR, HARDWORKING AND INTELLIGENT.
BLACKS HAVE NO HISTORY AND SHOULD BE THANKFUL WHITES RESCUED THEM FROM SAVAGERY.
EUROPE IS THE MOTHER OF CIVILIZATION, AFRICA IS THE MOTHER OF PRIMITIVISM.
BLACKS CAN DO NOTHING FOR THEMSELVES.
BLACK FEATURES (NOSE, HAIR, SKIN COLOR…) ARE UGLY.
BLACKS SHOULD STRIVE TO BE LIKE WHITES.
EVERY MAN OR WOMAN HAS A PRICE.
SUCCESS IS MEASURED BY HOW THICK YOUR WALLET IS.
BLACK PEOPLE HOLD BLACK PEOPLE DOWN.
BLACKS CAN NEVER UNIFY.
BLACKS IN AMERICA HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON WITH BLACKS IN AFRICA.
BLACKS MUST DEPEND ON WHITES TO HELP THEM.
BLACKS ARE CUT-THROATS, THUGS AND WELFARE CHEATS.
With this picture, it is clear to see why young people, if we look at the numbers of dropouts, have been reluctant to embrace school. This, of course, isn’t the only factor for high dropout rates, but studies have shown, time and time again, that what is being taught is directly connected to focus, enthusiasm, and participation. As Dead Prez remembered:
Get your lessons, that’s why my moms kept stressin’
I
tried to pay attention but they classes wasn’t interestin’
They seemed to only glorify the Europeans
Claimin’ Africans were only three-fifths a human being
.—
DEAD PREZ, “THEY SCHOOLS
,”
LET’S GET FREE
It’s important to understand that challenging the mainstream school system is not antieducational, but actually, the contrary. This challenge reveals our deep concern with the educational process, forcing us to examine the social, political, and cultural role that curricula have on students of color. Additionally, it scrutinizes an educational tradition that is more invested in training a workforce of menials to follow instructions rather than teaching the critical-thinking skills necessary for individuals to empower their lives and communities. The tragic reality is that we have been disconnected from emancipatory education. We have been—in the United States and abroad—trapped in an educational system that has, by estranging us from our own culture and history, prepared us primarily for a subservient role in society. Whether you’re in Baltimore or Compton, Philadelphia or Accra, Ghana, this tragic phenomenon can be observed both in the actual schools and in the menial job markets graduates are forced into. As a result, many young people conclude that mainstream education is, like so many other things in society, designed, maintained, and controlled by another class/racial group to serve that group’s own socioeconomic interests.
I’m not suggesting that we should drop out of school. It’s a difficult and competitive world and it’s common knowledge that the farther one climbs educationally, the farther away one moves from poverty. My concern is psychocultural. How do we keep our minds? Carter G. Woodson, who wrote
The Mis-education of the Negro
, once remarked, “I went to Harvard for four years, and it took forty years to get Harvard out of me.” How do we avoid the Carter G. Woodson fate? This question ran through my mind as—
“It is my pleasure to welcome our guest, M. K. Asante, Jr.,” Eric Sanabria, senior class president and recipient of the Princeton Prize for Race Relations, introduced me to his fidgety classmates. Amid a
light flutter of applause, I approached the microphone, disturbed by what Lisa had told me and unsure of what I would tell them.
I looked out into the audience and a thousand eyes, sunk in the beaming sockets of Black and brown boys and girls, looked back.
“Thanks for that, Eric. It’s an honor to be here,” I said, still searching for substance. In the front row, I saw the hungry blue eyes of Lisa. Then it hit me:
“I want to talk with y’all today about something I call ‘Two Sets of Notes,’” I announced as I pulled my first book out of my back pocket and opened it to the poem by the same name. I lunged my voice and body into the apropos stanzas:
TWO SETS OF NOTES FOR BLACK STUDENTS
I find myself feeling
As if I am ‘pan the ground & ceiling,
In institutions that disengage from healing
Instead, they simply warp open wounds
& Entrap me in rooms
where I am consumed by hypocrisy
& It occurs to me:
Greek philosophers didn’t author their own philosophy
& The statues on campus be watchin’ me,
Washington… Jefferson… Williams,
Clockin’ me—
As if to say ‘time’s up’
But I don’t run laps on tracks
I run laps around the scholars of tomorrow
Because new schools of thought
Are merely our histories borrowed
& They label me militant, and black national radical,
trying to put my learning process on sabbatical.
I don’t apologize,
Instead I spit truth into the whites of eyes infected by
white lies.
They even try to get me to see—
Their point of view from a brother that looks like me,
but that brother don’t—
walk like me
talk like me
or
act like me,
and that brother turned his head
when I asked if he was
black like me.
Mastering their thoughts
and forgetting our own
and we wonder why we always feel alone,
from the media to academia—
hanging brothers like coats
and in their schools….
I always take two sets of notes,
one set to ace the test
and
one set I call the truth,
and when I find historical contradictions
I use the first set as proof—
proof that black youths’
minds are being—
polluted,
convoluted,
diluted,
not culturally rooted.
In anything
except the Western massacre
and most of us are scared of Africa,
we view our mother’s land
Through the eyes of David Hume and Immanuel Kant
well
Immanuel kan’t tell me anything about a land he’s never
seen
a land rich with history
beautiful kings and queens.
They’ll have you believe otherwise
their history is built on high-rise lies
the pyramids were completed
before Greece or Rome were conceptualized,
then they’ll claim the Egyptians’ race was a mystery
you tell them to read Herodotus Book II of the histories
it cannot be any clearer….
Black children
look in the mirror
you are the reflection of divinity
don’t let them fool you with selective memory
walk high,
listen to the elders who spoke
Black Students,
Always take two sets of notes.
“Two Sets of Notes” grew out of my experiences in school systems that neglected to teach me crucial clusters of information connected to my identity. A system that made African-Americans and all non-whites an ethnic footnote in American and world history. This is no light matter as one’s identity is often forged through what we learn in school. This is what Baldwin meant when he said that white American identity “is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.” But we—African-Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, et cetera—don’t learn about our “heroic ancestors” apart from a context of white subjugation. For example, as students we learn that enslaved Africans were acquiescent to slavery. We are not taught, for instance, that in 1526, enslaved Africans and Spaniards founded a town near the Pee Dee River in South Carolina, and that, just months later, the Africans rebelled, killed many of their masters, and escaped to live with the Indians while the rest of the Spaniards fled to Haiti. Omissions such as these not only paint an inaccurate image of history, but adversely affect the way we view our ancestors and, in turn, ourselves. As Gen. Petro G. Grigorenko said in “Letter to a History Journal,” “Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people.”