Translator: C E Blanco Santini Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx
with a D average,
but I earned a PhD from Princeton University.
(Applause)
This is a story about once being afraid to learn
to now having an ongoing love affair with reading and learning
that has not stopped.
This is a story about Dr. Keith Mayes,
but this is also a story about the power of black studies,
the importance of the black intellectual tradition,
and the relevance of the black experience.
I want to demonstrate
why we need to bring the black experience into the K-12 classroom,
where every black student sits.
Many struggles surfaced during my high school career,
but I'd like to underscore one that involved my dad
when I was in the 9th grade.
He made me read Muhammad Ali's autobiography,
entitled "The Greatest."
The first problem with the book was it was rendered as a form of punishment.
(Laughter)
The second problem was
it was just too big.
And, mind you now, this was over the summer.
(Laughter)
But the real issue was I was afraid to read it.
I was afraid to read it
because I had not developed the wherewithal to learn.
The book had no immediate import for me
because in my formative years of education,
no one had bothered to connect the larger black world I had come from
to the possibilities of learning.
Too often, for young black students, reading feels like a reprimand,
a form of punishment.
How can you extract all of the personal joy
and all of the liberatory possibilities
from one of the simplest activities that is reading?
No one had explained
the relationship between reading and my black identity development.
It wasn't until I read the autobiography of Malcolm X many years later
that my desire to understand my surroundings triggered.
I was fascinated by Harlem and all of its decay.
I wanted to understand
why so many young black men sold drugs on the streets,
why were there so many liquor stores in the neighborhood,
and why were there burnt-out tenements on every block.
When traversing the streets back and forth from my apartment
to the campus of the City College of the City University of New York,
I became enthralled over the pre-gentrification aesthetics
of this urban black community -
my community.
I found the answers
as to why my neighborhood looked this way in black books.
I found the answers to the state of black America in black books.
I found the answers to the predicament of Africa in black books.
But it wasn't only Malcolm X's autobiography.
Also Chancellor William's "The Destruction of Black Civilization,"
Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man,"
Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,"
James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time,"
Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land,"
Nell Painter's "The Exodusters,"
Toni Morrison's "Beloved," and Cornell West's "Race Matters."
"The Destruction of Black Civilization"
demonstrated that the continent of Africa had a rich history and culture
that stood on its own before repeated European and Arab invasions.
"Manchild in the Promised Land" depicted a Harlem of the 1940s and 1950s
that was very reminiscent of the Harlem I grew up in
in the 1970s and 1980s.
Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"
explained the life struggles of my own black teenage mother,
who birthed me at 16 -
the same age Maya gave birth to her daughter.
And "Race Matters" contextualized my anger and rage as a young black man
by talking about how nihilism permeated black America.
Before black books helped me earn a PhD from Princeton University,
reading black books saved my life.
They kept me off the streets,
they kept me academically focused,
they provided a sense of direction,
they made me believe one day I could be a university professor.
More importantly,
black books gave me the desire to finally want to learn.
I learned how to learn through the discovery of reading,
but I discovered reading because of my own black experience.
I believe we can use the black experience as a vehicle to transform urban education
and black student performance in the classrooms.
Many of us know the number of problems black students face,
which have life-and-death implications
and now represents a major public health issue.
In school districts across the country,
the graduation rates of black students hovers between 40 and 65%.
In some individual schools,
the completion rate for black students is below 50%.
Reading and math proficiency is in the 50th percentile
and in some schools, even much less than that.
All of this contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline,
pushing frustrated black students into the streets.
After languishing in these educational graveyards,
too many now languish in prisons across the United States.
Why do we fail to see the life-and-death implications
of not educating every black and brown student?
We do not have a problem understanding the relationship
between a doctor and his or her patient.
The doctor knows what's at stake.
The cut and laceration has to be disinfected and bandaged.
The bone has to be reset.
The artery has to be bypassed.
The tumor has to be removed.
The doctor doesn't judge the incoming condition;
he or she just administers the care.
If it's the doctor's responsibility to reset the body,
then it's the educator's responsibility to reset the mind
by reestablishing the desire to learn.
In the medical context, we get it.
But we've failed to translate that same sense of urgency and importance
to the classroom, from teacher to student,
especially from white teacher to black and brown student.
This is not an indictment on white teachers,
because there are many good white teachers and bad black and brown ones,
but our classroom caretakers must pay attention to those scars,
those lacerations, those wounds, those broken minds and spirits
that are trapped inside of failing schools.
It is not the student's fault. It's the system's.
An educational system that likes to focus on numerical gaps,
like graduation rates and test scores,
but fails to see the more important gaps
that black students and students of color bring:
the inspiration gap,
the motivation gap,
the engagement gap,
the belief gap,
and the relationship gap.
Notwithstanding the deficits that black students bring to the school,
it is still the job of those who work inside the system
to inspire and motivate,
to understand their racial reality,
to engage black students
with the intellectual content and instructional styles
that will foster stronger and trusting relationships
between student and teacher,
and to forever close the belief gap that says with so much ferocity
that the American Dream is not for young people of color.
As a young black student in New York City,
these gaps were more circumscriptive and definitive in my everyday life
than the numerical ones.
So, why would we as a society eschew the very things
that can inspire, motivate and engage black students in the classroom?
Why would we want to preclude
the possibilities of creating better relationships with black students
and inculcating within them
the belief that they too can achieve anything in this world?
Currently, our classrooms are not built to bring in the black experience -
not at the level of the curriculum,
not at the level of pedagogical practice,
and not at the level of administrative will.
The reason that's the case is because there is nothing in the toolbox.
What's in the toolbox of classroom teachers and administrators
that could be transformative in the lives of young boys and girls?
Some good things currently exist,
but if we were to open up the toolbox, too often we would find
the saw of indifference,
the wrench of low expectation,
the clamp of mediocrity,
the nail of white racism,
the hammer of oppression,
and the tape measure of failure.
What we would not find
is the creative use of the black experience
that not only teaches
but is also transforming the lives of young black people.
So let me take you back to my early days in New York City
and explain the major ingredients that went into transforming my life.
I call it "the early days of being an autodidact."
It's when the different worlds of arts and letters,
social justice, and the City University surrounded and collapsed around me.
It's when a very public grassroots struggle
educated me about the excessive use of police force.
The victims of excessive force weren't Philando Castile or Alton Sterling
but rather Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo.
The leaders of these organizations, of the grassroots' movements,
were not Black Lives Matter, Neighborhood Organizers for Change,
Nekima Levy-Pounds or Wintana Melekin,
but rather Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason, and Alton Maddox.
We must never castigate black's black movements for change
but recognize how they are part of the rich tapestry
of intergenerational protests
and that they, too, have the power to educate.
Street corner black book vendors, whose tables line 125th Street in Harlem,
continued to feed the black experience to me,
helping provide the historical context
to the modern-day black struggle occurring in the streets.
I took courses with black professors at City College
such as Leonard Jeffries, James Small and Venus Green,
as well as white professors who also had a great impact on me
like Louis Masur, Darren Staloff and David Jaffrey.
Then came the undergraduate research programs
designed specifically to encourage and nurture a pathway into the academy
for undergraduate students of color.
Not only did I spend my entire $5000 summer stipend buying black books,
it was here where the groundwork was laid
to apply to majoring programs, graduate programs in history.
What I am describing to you is a 7-year process that it took for me
just to put myself in the position to apply to doctoral programs -
much less earn a PhD.
Academically disengaged black students don't have seven years after they turn 18
to recover a lost sense of self.
It's usually too late.
Intellectual and personal transformation
is not on the mind of people who have long decided
that education is not for them.
They have succumbed and now exist at the margins of our society.
So what does the power of the black experience mean
to a five-year-old black girl?
Or a 10-year-old black boy? Or a 15-year-old black student?
What does the black experience mean
to a white teacher who lives in the suburbs
but teaches at a predominantly -
teaches a large number of students of color?
Is there anything in the lives of the students
that could be a source of knowledge for you as a teacher?
What about the background of the students that could be a source of knowledge
for them in their edification and their personal transformation?
It's not a given that I know much about the black experience
just because I am black.
Chances are I know very little, but what I do know
is that the key to my liberation exists in the very fibers of my being,
within the innermost corners of my soul.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a book called "The Souls of Black Folk,"
but he also followed that up
with the book called "The Gift of Black Folk,"
explaining how black people's greatest gift to American society
were the black experiences
that contributed to the economic, social and cultural development
of the United States.
As a young black student, this is what I need to know.
And I need to hear it from you as the teacher
as well as to read it for myself.
But how is the teacher to teach something that he does not know?
How is the teacher going to teach something that she does not care about?
How does the teacher going to teach something
that his or her principal does not support?
How does the principal give support
to teachers who want to teach about the black experience
when white parents are hostile to it?
I've just underscored much of the problem today:
lack of knowledge about the black experience,
lack of will to teach the black experience,
lack of administrative support and vision by the district and/or site leader,
and white parent backlash and overall fear
of the black experience inside school buildings and classrooms.
The longer we wait to transform our curriculum -
especially social studies in English -
the stronger the message is sent.
The message being sent is
"We may not mind having black bodies in the classroom,
we just don't want your experience being taught inside the classroom."
But resisters must understand that this train has long left the station.
You cannot separate the experiences of people of color
from the intellectual movements that represent them.
The ethnic studies movement is here to stay.
It is not going anywhere.
It's a movement that has multiple points of entry,
dating back to the 19th century,
but its later embodiments have been at Howard University in 1967,
San Francisco State in 1968,
and the explosion of black and ethnic studies, programs and departments
across the country in 1969 and beyond.
We see today, in places like Tucson, Arizona,
that there are people trying to put the ethnic studies genie
back in the bottle.
The resisters are realizing
that those courageous Latino brothers and sisters
are part of a larger movement that exists beyond one city like Tucson.
The resisters may not fully be aware
of how broad, long, and deep this intellectual insurgency is,
but it only feels like an intellectual insurgency
because of your intent to resist it.
The people who opposed black studies or ethnic studies yesterday and today
were in all on the wrong side of history.
Just like the people opposing queer and trans movements today
will see that they were on the wrong side of history tomorrow.
I always tell my students,
"Don't find yourselves on the wrong side of history."
So I want to say to state education commissioners,
district leaders, principals and classroom teachers:
Don't find yourselves on the wrong side of history.
Don't allow the good work that you're already doing,
like in Minneapolis Public Schools
with the creation of Ethnic studies courses
and the Office of Black Male Student Achievement,
under the leadership of Michael Walker,
to wither away
from a lack of administrative support and teacher resistance.
The most important barometer in education
is what students say about their learning experience.
Listen to any student of color
that has sat inside a class related to his or her experience
or has read a book about their experience,
and, typically, they will say
that it was the most exhilarating and transformative experience
in their college or in their high school career.
I hear this from students all the time
in the Department of African-American and African Studies
here at the University of Minnesota,
where I teach.
I also hear this from students in Minneapolis Public Schools,
in Miss Courtney Bell's high school African-American History class
and from students in the "Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge" class
taught by Jamil Jackson and Corey Yeager.
Think about the academically marginal student
looking for inspiration, hope, and personal validation.
There isn't any other place a student can go
to begin resetting the mind.
But that student cannot do it alone.
Once the student is on his or her way,
yes, there is some level of autodidacticism.
But the marginal black student
needs a curriculum that speaks to his or her experience,
black books that speak to his or her history and culture,
and an instructional style from the teacher
that can inspire intellectual curiosity and transform behavior.
Education is a service mission,
which means the student is on the receiving end
of your ability to help him/her discover.
So, once and for all,
let's discover the power of the black experience
and its ability to rehabilitate us all and to bring us together
rather than the fear of the black experience,
that many assume will keep us divided and apart.
Thank you.
(Applause)