What you don’t know
“One of the great challenges in the world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong”—Neil deGrasse Tyson
Education is the United States is filled with half-truths, omissions, lies, distortions and erasures. People have been taught to look for quick answers to complicated questions, and this is where trouble begins. All complicated questions must be looked at from different disciplines in order to arrive at the best answer. It is no different when talking about how education is controlled by white supremacist thought (a superstructure of ideological control) and how that control has robbed generations of the truth. White supremacy has controlled the content in books used from elementary school to the university level. Our educational system has been whitewashed and filled with outright denial of the contributions that blacks and people of color have made. Women have been left out of the history books as well. However, white supremacy and gender denial is crumbling.
TV stations have blacks, browns, or Asians in the commercials and on the shows themselves. Even though we have a long way to go blacks are on shows from comedy to news, to soaps, game shows, talk shows, TV series, sports of all kinds, documentaries, history, etc. This must feel to a person without enough knowledge that their world is falling completely apart. Blacks are in shows and movies like Star Trek Discovery, the Good Doctor, General Hospital, Scandals, and cartoons. What a difference from the past, where seeing a person of color on any show was a shock, and where almost every cartoon was as racist as could be. Blacks are taking a knee at sporting events and Black Lives Matter commercials are all over the place.
Education comes in many forms. Racism was synchronized with the education system to control the presence of blacks. Racist education was used to strip away the dignity of generations. Education must be associated with actions, not just in books but in our daily lives and public spaces, which can take the form of naming streets or places after individuals like Katherine Johnson, the great Apollo spacecraft mathematician, Harriet Tubman, Robert Williams, Henrietta Lacks, David Walker, Nat Turner, the Black Canary Islanders, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Fred Hampton, Oscar Micheaux, John Robinson (founder of Tuskegee Airman), John Brown, Langston Hughes, Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin, the black soldiers that fought for Santa Anna, and many hundreds of others.
Education comes in academic settings and well as in life. We learn from what we see on TV and read in the newspapers. White supremacists taught us about European heroes and never heroes of color. We were never taught about presidents that owned slaves, and the truth about famous intellectuals whose brains were masticated with racism. A new generation of educators is being trained to tell the truth.
Educators have a responsibility to uncover the lies that are touted as facts. This is why African American Studies, Mexican American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women’s Studies are super important. A new generation of learners and teachers question why black lives never mattered in this country. They bring to light the millions of black refugees that had to leave the South to keep from being murdered and worked to death by racialized business and plantation owners after the Civil War. We are learning about mass incarceration, and educators committed to tell the entire story of the blacks who fought for the British against George Washington. We live in a changing era that seeks to reeducate the population about the importance of the history of women, blacks, Hispanics, and people of color in general. The old white supremacist version of history is being dismantled everywhere and it is up to us to speed that process up.
