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DYSCONSCIOUS RACISM, AFROCENTRIC PRAXIS, AND EDUCATION FOR HUMAN FREEDOM In the World Library of Educationalists, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces—extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/or practical contributions— so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field. A dynamic leader and visionary teacher/scholar, Joyce E. King has made important contributions to the knowledge base on preparing teachers for diversity, culturally connected teaching and learning, and inclusive transformative leadership for change, often in creative partnership with communities. Dr. King is internationally recognized for her innovative interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching practice, and leadership. Her concept of “dysconscious racism” continues to influence research and practice in education and sociology in the U.S. and in other countries. This volume weaves together ten of her most influential writings and four invited reflections from prominent scholars on the major themes the work addresses. Joyce E. King is the Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair of Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership at Georgia State University, USA. Dr. King served as the 2014–2015 President of AERA, chaired the AERA Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE), and served as editor of the resulting volume, Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century. Her publications include “Remembering” History in Student and Teacher Learning: An Afrocentric Culturally Informed Praxis (with E. E. Swartz), Preparing Teachers for Cultural Diversity and Teaching Diverse Populations: Formulating a Knowledge Base (both co-edited with E. R. Hollins and W. C. Hayman), Mothers to Sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with Social Practice (with C. A. Mitchell), and numerous book chapters and journal articles. In recognition of her professional service, Dr. King was presented the Distinguished Career Contribution Award from the AERA Committee on Scholars of Color in Education. She has received fellowship awards from the American Council on Education, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and the National Institutes of Mental Health. She received the Distinguished Fellowship Award for Research and Leadership in Critical Studies in Education from the University of Auckland and “The Living Treasure of Africans in the Diaspora in Education and Social Sciences Award” for 20 Years of Participation in the Black Studies Research Center at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil.

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World Library of Educationalists Series

Lessons from History of Education The selected works of Richard Aldrich Richard Aldrich

In Search of Pedagogy Volume II The selected works of Jerome Bruner, 1979–2006 Jerome S. Bruner

Knowledge, Power, and Education The selected works of Michael W. Apple Michael W. Apple

Reimagining Schools The selected works of Elliot W. Eisner Elliot W. Eisner

Education Policy and Social Class The selected works of Stephen J. Ball Stephen J. Ball

Reflecting Where the Action Is The selected works of John Elliot John Elliot

Race, Culture, and Education The selected works of James A. Banks James A. Banks

The Development and Education of the Mind The selected works of Howard Gardner Howard Gardner

In Search of Pedagogy Volume I The selected works of Jerome Bruner, 1957–1978 Jerome S. Bruner

Constructing Worlds through Science Education The selected works of John K. Gilbert John K. Gilbert

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Making Sense of Learners Making Sense of Written Language The selected words of Kenneth S. Goodman and Yetta M. Goodman Kenneth S. Goodman and Yetta M. Goodman

A Life in Education The selected works of John Macbeath John Macbeath

Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics The selected works of Ivor F. Goodson Ivor F. Goodson

Learner-Centered English Language Education The selected works of David Nunan David Nunan

Education and the Nation State The selected works of S. Gopinathan S. Gopinathan Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Research The selected works of Mary E. James Mary E. James Teaching, Learning and Education in Late Modernity The selected works of Peter Jarvis Peter Jarvis

Overcoming Exclusion Social Justice through education Peter Mittler

Educational Philosophy and Politics The selected works of Michael A. Peters Michael A. Peters Encountering Education in the Global The selected works of Fazal Rizvi Fazal Rizvi The Politics of Race, Class and Special Education The selected works of Sally Tomlinson Sally Tomlinson

Education, Markets, and the Public Good The selected works of David F. Labaree David F. Labaree

Corporatism, Social Control, and Cultural Domination in Education: From the Radical Right to Globalization The selected works of Joel Spring Joel Spring

Politics, Policies and Pedagogies in Education The selected works of Bob Lingard Bob Lingard

The Curriculum and the Child The selected works of John White John White

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The Art and Science of Teaching and Learning The selected works of Ted Wragg E.C. Wragg Landmarks in Literacy The selected works of Frank Smith Frank Smith Multiculturalism in Education and Teaching The selected works of Carl A. Grant Carl A. Grant Thinking and Rethinking the University The selected works of Ronald Barnett Ronald Barnett China through the Lens of Comparative Education The selected works of Ruth Hayhoe Ruth Hayhoe

Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity The selected works of William F. Pinar William F. Pinar Faith, Mission and Challenge in Catholic Education The selected works of Gerald Grace Gerald Grace Dysconscious Racism, Afrocentric Praxis, and Education for Human Freedom: Through the Years I Keep on Toiling The selected works of Joyce E. King Joyce E. King

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DYSCONSCIOUS RACISM, AFROCENTRIC PRAXIS, AND EDUCATION FOR HUMAN FREEDOM: THROUGH THE YEARS I KEEP ON TOILING The selected works of Joyce E. King

Joyce E. King

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of Joyce E. King to be identified as author of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-85932-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-71735-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

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For our Foremothers Whose names we no longer know Who traversed the Waters of the Sahara In ancient times, then continued the journey from Songhay to the Diaspora. To all of our Grandmothers whose names we know— Lena, Mary, Indiana, Elrena and my mother, Mable And all the family’s menfolk we have Loved and leaned on. May your memories live on through us, Our Children and Grandchildren. For Jordan Maya, Makena Jae, and Kellan Lewis. Let the circle be unbroken.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Credits Introduction: My Grandmother Made Quilts—Forms of Knowledge, Ways of Knowing and Being, Teachings for Human Freedom

xii xiii

1

PART I

Groundings: Answering an Ancestral Call, Deciphering Dysconscious Racism Reflection: Groundings—A Framework for Educational Inquiry Annette Henry

13

19

1 A Black Woman Speaks on Leadership

22

2 In Search of a Method for Liberating Education and Research: The Half (That) Has Not Been Told

30

3 Critical and Qualitative Research in Teacher Education: A Blues Epistemology for Cultural Well-Being and a Reason for Knowing

54

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Contents

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Reflection: Dysconscious Racism, Land of Immigrants, and Culturally-based Pedagogy—The Legacy of Joyce E. King Joel Spring

105

4 Dysconscious Racism: Ideology, Identity, and the Miseducation of Teachers

111

5 “[Art Thou] Come to the Kingdom for Such a Time as This?”: Transformative Public Scholarship for Social Change

126

PART II

Afrocentric Praxis: Liberating Knowledge for Human Freedom Reflection: Forbidden Knowledge Ibrahima Seck

139

147

6 Diaspora Literacy and Consciousness in the Struggle Against Miseducation in the Black Community

153

7 “If Justice is Our Objective”: Diaspora Literacy, Heritage Knowledge, and the Praxis of Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom

178

8 Who Dat Say (We) “Too Depraved to Be Saved”? Re-membering Katrina/Haiti (and Beyond): Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom

200

Reflection: Teaching and Learning Informed by a Culturally Grounded Practice Susan Goodwin 9 Transformative Curriculum Praxis for the Public Good

229 235

10 Cultural Knowledge

248

11 “Thank You for Opening Our Minds”: On Praxis, Transmutation, and Black Studies in Teacher Development

255

Contents

Epilogue: Black Education Post-Katrina—And All Us We Are Not Saved

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Notes on contributors Index

xi

270 288 290

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My work has been and continues to be a reflection of what I learn from and with my colleagues, students, and my community-family about the culture and our human possibilities—especially Scholar-warriors Sylvia Wynter and “TLW” Thomasyne Lightfoot Wilson. My circle of sister-friends (and some brothers, too) has nourished me spiritually and intellectually, especially: Aisha Kareem, Evelyn Crawford, Mary Macauley, Janice Fournillier, Melanie Schmidt, DrRashon, Iva Elaine Carruthers, Sharon Parker, and Carolyn Mitchell—when she and I got through our “drylongso” days at Santa Clara University listening to the Blues. Were it not for the support, guidance, and encouragement of Jean and Fred Leornard, two young Black teachers who knew me first at Fair Oaks Elementary School in Stockton, California, and who were a steady presence throughout my junior high and high school experience, it’s not likely that I would ever have enrolled at Stanford University. Also, I thank Annette Henry, Joel Spring, Ibrahima Seck, and Susan Goodwin for writing Reflections so graciously and generously for this book. I am honored and humbled by their words. I also want to acknowledge Kristen Buras and Carmen Kynard, who read portions of this volume at various points in the process, and my editor, Naomi Silverman at Taylor & Francis, has believed in the project from the beginning. Her team made it possible to have a book in-hand during my term as President of the American Educational Research Association. My partner and best friend, Hassimi Oumarou Maiga, Pan-African Scholar par Excellence and Paramount Chief of Songhay, has helped in ways too numerous to name: Albarka. While this book pays homage to my grandmother, Elrena Ellis Harrell (1898–1997), my mother, Mable Harrell King (1917–2009), remains my touchstone and the symbol of the Goddess Maat in my life, a true Jemima/Yemaya Woman of Ifa whom I seek to emulate to “Be Found Worthy,” because “99½ just won’t do . . .”

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CREDITS

Chapter 1, Joyce E. King, “A Black Woman Speaks on Leadership,” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, 2(1), 49–52. Copyright © 1998 by Sage. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. Chapter 2, Joyce E. King, “In Search of a Method for Liberating Education and Research: The Half (That) Has Not Been Told,” From Cart Grant (Ed.), Multicultural Research: A Reflective Engagement with Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation (pp. 101–119). Copyright © 1999 by Falmer Press. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. Chapter 3, Joyce E. King, “Critical and Qualitative Research in Teacher Education: A Blues Epistemology for Cultural Well-Being and a Reason for Knowing.” From Marilyn Cochran-Smith et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts (3rd ed., pp. 1094–1136). Copyright © 2008 by Routledge. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. Chapter 4, Joyce E. King, “Dysconscious Racism: Ideology, Identity, and the Mis-education of Teachers,” Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146. Copyright © 1991. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. Chapter 5, Joyce E. King, “ ‘Art Thou Come to the Kingdom for Such a Time as This?’ Transformative Public Scholarship for Social Change,” Womanist Theory and Research, 3.2/4.1, 15–21. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. Chapter 6, Joyce E. King, “Diaspora Literacy and Consciousness in the Struggle against Mis-education in the Black Community,” Journal of Negro Education, 61(3), 317–340. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. Chapter 7, Joyce E. King, “ ‘If Justice Is Our Objective’: Diaspora Literacy, Heritage Knowledge, and the Praxis of Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom.”

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xiv

Credits

From Arnetha Ball (Ed.), With More Deliberate Speed: Achieving Equity and Excellence in Education—Realizing the Full Potential of Brown v. Board of Education (pp. 337–360). National Society for the Study of Education, 105th Yearbook, Part 2. Copyright © 2006 by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. Chapter 8, Joyce E. King, “Who Dat Say (We) ‘Too Depraved to Be Saved’?: Re-membering Katrina/Haiti (and Beyond): Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom,” Harvard Educational Review, 81(2), 343–370. Copyright © 2011. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. Chapter 9, Joyce E. King, “Transformative Curriculum Praxis for the Public Good,” is an adapted and longer version of an invited essay written for the American Educational Research Association, 2011. Chapter 10, Joyce E. King, “Cultural Knowledge.” From Susan Goodwin and Ellen E. Swartz (Eds.), Teaching Children of Color: Seven Constructs for Effective Teaching in Urban Schools (pp. 52–61). Rochester, NY: RTA Press. Copyright © 2004 by Susan Goodwin and Ellen E. Swartz. Reprinted by Permission of the Editors. Chapter 11, Joyce E. King, “Thank You for Opening Our Minds”: On Praxis, Transmutation, and Black Studies in Teacher Development.” From Joyce E. King, Etta R. Hollins, and Warren C. Hayman (Eds.), Preparing Teachers for Diversity (pp. 156–169). New York: Teachers College Press. Copyright © 1997 by Teachers College Press, Columbia University. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher. All rights reserved. Epilogue, Joyce E. King, “Epilogue: Black Education Post-Katrina. And ‘All Us We’ Are Not Saved.” From Linda C. Tillman (Ed.), The Sage Handbook of African American Education (pp. 499–510). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Copyright © 2009 by Sage. Reprinted by Permission of the Publisher.

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INTRODUCTION My Grandmother Made Quilts—Forms of Knowledge, Ways of Knowing and Being, Teachings for Human Freedom

I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of Developing confidence in one another. I leave you a thirst for education. I leave you respect For the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity. (Mary McLeod Bethune, 1875–1955)1 More important than the memory of slavery . . . was the memory of freedom. (Robin D. G. Kelly, Thelonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original [2009, p. 2]) We think of inheriting as land or something, not the things people teach you. . . . We came from the cotton fields, we came through hard times, and we look back and see what all these people before us have done. They brought us here and to say thank you is not enough. (Louisiana Pettaway Randolph, Gee’s Bend, Alabama Quilter, [Wallach, 2006])

Introduction My grandmother made quilts—bold, colorful, decorative works of “folk art” in the African American textile tradition—that kept us warm, quilts in which she also infused her indomitable freedom-loving spirit and soaring survival arts and in which her personal creative genius and collective labor merged. Making quilts was actually a labor of love that she often did evenings, by the light of a

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Kerosene lamp, as she bent over a disciplined patchwork creation stretched between rollers resting on the two quilting “horses” that one of my uncles had built for her. Whether in Africa or the Diaspora, quilting has been womancreated space for expressing individual genius, ingenuity, and competence as well as their care for family and community well-being (Arnett, Wardlaw, Livingston, & Beardsley, 2002; Mazloomi, 1998). For my grandmother, Mrs.

Figure I.1

“My Grandmother’s Quilt—The Fan.”

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Elrena Ellis Harrell, making quilts was both a practical necessity and one of the ways that she expressed the dignity of her personhood in spite of raced and gendered economic exploitation: back-breaking low-paid work in the fields and soul-crushing impoverishment. Nevertheless, with great personal integrity my grandmother’s way of being in the world was not defined, confined, or diminished by these material constraints. When I had the opportunity to organize this volume of my selected work, my grandmother’s quilts and her life example inspired me to “piece together” and re-purpose selections of my scholarship in order to share my determination to keep the spirit of human freedom in the forefront of my work as an academic. My inheritance from my grandmother includes forms of knowledge, ways of knowing and being, and her teachings for human freedom. The same way that she pieced quilts, sometimes defining borders with brightly colored strips of cloth or squares, that both held a design together and connected one section to another, I invited four colleagues whose work I admire to write a “connecting” Reflection. These essays are placed among previously published and new chapters in this volume. Their Reflections help to illuminate the multiplicity, diversity, and complexity of my collegial relationships and our teaching, research, and community interests focused on the PanAfrican Diaspora (Annette Henry), the relevance of my work to the critical education tradition (Joel Spring), the African and African American linkages illuminated in my work (Ibrahima Seck), and my working partnerships with practitioners (Susan Goodwin). Thus, like my grandmother’s quilts often were, I wanted this volume to be a product of collective work. In addition, I chose to use language that my grandmother might have spoken in the African American sacred song tradition in the title of this volume: Through the Years I Keep on Toiling.2 The word “toiling” suggests more than merely “working.” I use it consciously to connote the “hard and continuous labor” involved in staying the course, remaining engaged as an activist scholar morally committed to the arduous tasks involved—often in the face of resistance, rejection, and eventual recognition some of the time—in theorizing and deciphering the forms of knowledge and ways of being (mis)educated that define our predicament. If quilts in the African American tradition, in contrast to those European American women produce, are often an emotional expression of “home,” my intellectual labors are grounded and rooted in both my grandmother’s teachings and the Black intellectual tradition. Thus, my intellectual home, the discipline of Black Studies, is represented in the historical renderings of Carter G. Woodson and Vincent Harding, for example, the activist leadership of Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker, and the engaged scholarship of my teachers, St. Clair Drake, Sylvia Wynter, Asa G. Hilliard, III, and Molefi Kete Asante. While my grandmother pieced her quilts, recycling before the practice was named as such, my place—always—was right by her side, threading her needles,

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tying knots at the end of the thread between my fingers, as she taught me to do, and absorbing her teachings about human freedom. I also accompanied her visiting menfolk in the family who were incarcerated in various California prisons—Atascadero, San Quentin, Folsom, etc.—before I was even 12 years old—and before there was any academic language for, or analysis of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and Black “mass incarceration.” By dint of her work ethic and her lived example of generosity and care for others, she taught me to feel proud of doing good work and to be a person others could count on. My grandmother taught me how to “make a way out of no way” without bitterness, rancor, or envy, while being giving (and forgiving), hopeful, and respectful of all people.

My Grandmother Was Fearless My grandmother’s always said: “Stand up for your rights,” which was all the more remarkable given her diminutive stature. Everyone but me called her “Miss Chicken,” I think because of her fighting spirit. I heard that my grandfather, Andrew Harrell, gave her that name. But she was “Chick-a-dee” to me, growing up in Stockton, California in the central valley where my parents, uncles, and aunts regrouped, settling among other Black workers who had also migrated to California from the same towns “back home” in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. Many had been recruited from the South to work in the San Francisco Bay Area shipyards and factories during World War II. At the end of the war they were expelled from those “good jobs” and like most of my family, they went back to toil in the fields. The people in our community in Stockton came from places like Ashdown, Arkansas, where my grandmother was born, and Idabel, Oklahoma, my mother’s birthplace. Before that they had followed the Red River and “came from down in the swamps of Louisiana”—as recounted by one of my uncles. He said we were all related to “those Choctaw Indians.” I know that my grandfather had special trading privileges on the Native American reservations in Oklahoma and could speak the language. But like so many African Americans our knowledge of our heritage and family history is fragmented. Born in 1898, my grandmother was the oldest in a family of 13 and the only girl. Her mother, Indiana Cook, married Nathan Ellis in Arkansas in 1895. Chick-a-dee had known her grandparents on both sides of the family and she knew that her father had a “White brother” on the other side of town, another Ellis, who brought them mules and other assistance when the going got too tough. Her family sent her to school—not for long but long enough to become literate and to be able to pass that mark of distinction on to her five children and many grandchildren, including me. My grandmother’s courage—she was absolutely fearless—has given me a fuller sense of the responsibility of my generation and the confidence to live and to do work that honors the struggles and sacrifices of our ancestors—that is to say, my sense of an ancestral calling. From

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their example, I have inherited the “racial dignity” to define my work as an academic in the terms of what Vincent Harding described as the “vocation of the Black scholar” (Harding, 1974). Thus, family heritage is important both to re-member and as a focus of study. In his groundbreaking biography of Thelonius Monk, African American jazzman extraordinaire, historian Robin D. G. Kelly (2009) makes this observation about the legacy and memories of freedom that Monk’s family passed along to him after the Civil War during the first post-emancipation period of Reconstruction that was soon violently overturned: “The disenfranchisement of black folk and the restoration of power to the old planter class (after ‘emancipation’) was rapid and violent” (p. 2). Yet, for the “Emancipation generation,” which included Monk’s parents and grandparents, and my grandmother, like “any Southern black person(s) living between 1865 and 1900 . . .” Kelly notes, “freedom wasn’t a word taken for granted or used abstractly.” That is to say, they never “lost their memory of post-Civil War freedom, or their determination to possess it once again” (p. 2). My grandmother enacted such memories of freedom in her daily life and ways of being and these memories have informed my identity and my work.

Re-membering/Identifying With the Black Struggle for Human Freedom The Black revolutionary response to white supremacy racism—whether in the form of “slavery by another name” (Blackmon, 2008) that was imposed after the Civil War or the White Citizens Councils that emerged to oppose the Civil Rights Movement, or the white flight to private academies established throughout the South, a hallmark of what C. Vann Woodward (1955/2002) described as the Second Reconstruction—included armed self-defense (Umoja, 2013) in Black communities, on the one hand, and the Black Studies (i.e., African American Studies) programs my generation established in higher education, on the other. However, this knowledge revolution has failed to transform the K-12 sector (Traoré, 2008). Multicultural education has become in too many instances a “gate-keeper” staving off more radical and transformative curriculum interventions grounded in community ideals and the values of freedom and selfdetermination (Swartz, 2009). A primary mechanism through which African Americans and other culturally dispossessed people are currently being disempowered and dis-enfranchised in this Third Reconstruction—in spite of the election of a Black president— includes the disestablishment of public education and the specific un-doing of the epistemological revolution the modern Black Studies movement (and other Ethnic Studies initiatives) launched in the 1960s. High stakes testing—and high stakes cheating (Merrow, 2013)—actually obscure the epistemological challenge of liberating education that Black Studies represents. And while several states

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have established policies that require teaching African American history, Traoré (2008) observed that Black Studies “intervention” is required in Philadelphia, where, for example, a mandate for teaching African American Studies is a high school graduation requirement but remains largely unfulfilled: “Many students of African descent still struggle to be reconnected to the rich African traditions from which they originated” (p. 663). The students I teach in the Education Policy Studies Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta are usually professional educators—teachers, counselors, and school administrators. They come to our program from many areas of the country and foreign countries as well. My courses in Educational Policy Studies offer a critical sociological lens on urban education issues within a Black Studies theoretical/knowledge paradigm. What my students know and why they know what they do—not just what they don’t know—is an important point of departure in my courses. In my study of dysconscious racism in the late 1980s (Chapter 4), I documented teachers’ “uncritical habit of mind” that takes societal injustice for granted—and this challenge persists. Typically, the doctoral and master’s degree students I teach have had no academic exposure to strengths-based Black Studies (or Ethnic Studies) analyses in their educational careers. So, these education professionals pursuing advanced degrees are vulnerable to and often have internalized conservative cultural deficit ideologies masquerading as educational theory. In contrast, I share my own educational and intellectual journey toward a critical and ethical Afrocentric praxis in my teaching, research, and service that was nurtured by my search for liberating knowledge and methods of inquiry within the Black Studies Movement. For example, I share how appalled and angry I felt in an undergraduate sociological theory course at Stanford University, when a professor proclaimed that Native American poverty was the result of their “lack of achievement motivation,” the theoretical focus of the course. The professor’s claim that Native American Coyote folk tales provided empirical evidence to support this theoretical explanation was typical of how deficit ideology was presented as empirically supported theory. When we were assigned to use this theoretical explanation and its quantitative measurement in a course assignment, I devised an alternative statistical formula from within a Black Studies theoretical perspective. The data that I collected and analyzed using African American folktales and Euro-American nursery rhymes and Grimm’s folk tales demonstrated that, when compared to “Humpty Dumpty” and “Jack and Jill,” African American trickster figures like Brer Rabbit demonstrate much higher levels of “achievement motivation.” When I tell my students about this experience with racism as a form of ideological knowledge, I also tell them that I “got an A” on this assignment. However, when the TA in that class and I were both on the faculty at Santa Clara University, she asked me one day if the paper that I wrote for that assignment was my “own work.” She said: “We always wondered.” There is always an audible gasp whenever I share that story.

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Their suspicions actually mirror Andrew Hacker’s (1994) telling observation concerning the “ultimate expression of racism”: the “ascription of inbred incapacity” (p. 459). Educators at every level are not immune to but are actually victims themselves of this aspect of our national history and contemporary socio-cultural reality—our “cultural model” (Wynter, 1992/2012). As a result, they, too, are miseducated and incapacitated, often without being consciously aware of it (King, 2005, 2010). I use this experience of surviving academic racism at Stanford University in the 1960s to illustrate how, even as students, we were involved in liberating our own education from hegemonic, oppressive forms of knowledge and research. What we knew then about the miseducation we were being subjected to prompted students at San Francisco State to organize a strike that eventually led to the establishment of Black Studies and then Ethnic Studies departments. At Stanford we compelled the university to organize the program in African and African American Studies that brought St. Clair Drake as the first director, followed by Sylvia Wynter. My point also is to underscore that what students need to know now is that deficit assumptions about poverty and the presumed intellectual inferiority of African Americans are still prevalent and have been internalized by both scholars in the academy and K-12 teachers as well as the students we teach at every level. I also use the memories of the miseducation that I experienced to make historian Vincent Harding’s point: “Black Studies ‘sees’ with Indian eyes.” For example, I was among the student activists whose “Ten Demands” that we presented to the President at Stanford days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. included a call for the admission not only of more Black students but also Native American and Latino/a students, as well. The Black Studies Movement was our praxis of freedom—translating thought into action—within the university, and I was inspired to know more about my own heritage as an epistemological arsenal in the freedom struggle—freedom from both material and ideological oppression, particularly in our education. Now decades since students at San Francisco State University initiated the first Black Studies Department at a four-year college (Rogers, 2009), I am compelled to tackle enormous gaps in my students’ knowledge. In my courses I include a role for indigenous community knowledge and thought by requiring my students to engage a community member in their research projects. In addition to presenting my pedagogical and research praxis and theorizing in this volume, my aim is to introduce this generation of scholars and practitioners to the intellectual tradition and the scholarly resources that have helped to shape my consciousness and to sustain my commitment. In my courses we examine what racism does vis-à-vis African Americans and other marginalized groups and White people, as well, in order to contextualize current educational conditions and opportunities for solidarity. Whether education in public schools should actually enable Black students to develop not only academically but also

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to be conscious of and committed to the well-being of our community, that is, to develop a sense of peoplehood and pride in our ethnic-racial group identity continues to be contested. Consider a 1963 essay in Commentary magazine, written by the ultraconservative former Editor of the magazine, Norman Podhoretz (1963), when he was a self-described liberal. In the “Negro Question” Podhoretz wonders whether Africans in America should (want to) survive as a people.3 In this same vein, the “language of oppression” (Morrison, 1993) ensconced within assimilationist scholarship continues to suggest that education should prepare African Americans to reject any such “ethnic loyalties” (Ravitch, 1990). The danger is that not knowing this history also prevents students’ recognition of these ideological barriers as such. A good example is the widespread acclaim for Diane Ravitch’s (2010) change of heart regarding educational reform—acclaim that totally ignores her continuing rejection of the liberating educational premise of Black Studies. Although Black Studies departments have become a familiar feature of higher education institutions, there is no normative connection between the knowledge base of the discipline of Black Studies, its liberating intellectual tradition, and professional studies in education for teachers and school administrators (see Chapter 3). A Google search produces one undergraduate degree program in Black Studies and Childhood Education at York College in Queens, New York. Moreover, parents today, who may be involved with “education reform,” unlike those we collaborated with as student activists in our community work, and those parents who were involved in the movement for community control of their schools, have little opportunity to connect with or support education for liberation (Oakes, Rogers, & Lipton, 2006).

Education for Liberation Dismantled In a 1992 essay/letter addressed to the California State Board of Education challenging the state-wide adoption of controversial history/social studies textbooks, Sylvia Wynter (1992/2012) raised the fundamental question concerning the connection between what Black students are learning and their engagement with school. More recently, in a letter to the Schomburg Research Center’s supporters, Howard Dodson, then Director, also observed the importance of what I have called “Heritage Knowledge” for African American students (see Chapter 7). Like Wynter’s earlier critique of school knowledge, Dodson’s observations draw direct implications between the knowledge and the pedagogy of teachers and how Black students experience schooling in terms of their academic engagement and achievement motivation: Imagine . . . if our children understood the monumental sacrifices made by generation upon generation of their ancestors just so they could have the opportunity to learn—that most slaves were prohibited by law from

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learning how to read and that those who chose to do so, or who taught fellow slaves, faced severe punishment, even death. Getting up and going to school to learn might not seem so unreasonable. Imagine for a moment if they knew about the courageous boys and girls, their age, who walked through cordons of bricks, bullets, and hateful diatribes just to walk into the school building, much less sit down and learn to read or write. Then perhaps behaving in the classroom or doing homework might be cool. But because our children don’t know these fundamental facts about our heritage, it is easier to understand why so many accept the lure of the streets. It is easier to understand why so many accept the destructive notion that they can’t learn. . . . Why don’t they know the truth . . . and understand the greatness that lies within themselves? Because the history being taught in most of our schools some 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education still does not begin to reflect the base of knowledge in the field of African-Diasporan and African-American Studies. (cited in Kirkland, Robinson, Jackson, & Smitherman, 2004) The rationale for liberating education that Dodson presents is precisely the rationale Arizona’s political leaders have rejected in justifying the banning and dismantling of education for liberation, in the case of Mexican American (and any other Ethnic) Studies in Tucson (see Chapter 9).

Conclusion Excellent teaching requires educators who have critical, deciphering knowledge of the curriculum, society, and the communities and heritages of students we serve in order to connect with indigenous community knowledge and family partners and to correct curriculum bias and omissions and so that students see themselves in the curriculum (King, Akua, & Russell, 2014). The purpose of education, Asa G. Hilliard argued, is to “prepare youth for incorporation into a community, to be interconnected with family and community, as opposed to strictly individual development” (Lee, 2008, p. 801). I have embraced this understanding of education and my experiences as a parent have also informed my scholarship, activism, and leadership (see Chapter 1). In these contexts academic and cultural excellence—a conceptualization of educational excellence Asa G. Hilliard and Barbara Sizemore (National Alliance of Black School Educators, 1984) advanced—are prominent and vitally important in my teaching, research, theorizing, and policy concerns. The selected works presented in this volume demonstrate my commitment to this standard of excellence in education and the moral choices all educators need to be able to recognize in their work, whatever their identity and background, in order to meet this expectation.

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Organization of This Book This volume is organized into two sections—not chronologically but thematically, and several themes appear in both sections (e.g., dysconscious racism, curriculum transformation) given their continuing relevance as my work has evolved over time, from the late 1980s when the first essay in Part I was published to a recent publication in 2011 that is included in Part II. Each section begins with a brief introduction followed by a “Reflection”; a second reflective essay is also embedded among the chapters. The book ends with a previously published Epilogue.

Notes 1 See: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/bethune/a/Mary-McLeod-Bethune-Quotes. htm. Retrieved September 5, 2014. 2 This is the first line from the Black gospel hymn composed by Thomas Dorsey, “When the Gates Swing Open”: Through the years I keep on toiling; Toiling through the storms and the rain; Patiently waiting and watching; For the Savior to come again . . . I’m coming home, Lord . . . Keep me every day of my life . . . Hide me in your love; Write my name above. When the gates swing open, I may be burdened down, but I’ll walk in . . . Lord, teach me how to treat my neighbors; every day, teach me how to love my friends . . . See the hymn performed by the inimitable Otis Clay: www.youtube.com/watch?v= X8Rx0Z9W2pY&list=RDX8Rx0Z9W2pY. Retrieved September 5, 2014. 3 After confessing his childhood “envy” and even “hatred” of “Negroes,” Podhoretz (1963, n.p.) wondered openly if Negroes shouldn’t marry Whites, assimilate totally, and just disappear. He mused: I envied Negroes for what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for what seems to me their superior physical grace and beauty . . . I am now capable of aching with all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the dance floor, or a Negro playing baseball or basketball . . . [but] I wonder why they should want to survive as a distinct group at all.

References Arnett, W., Wardlaw, A., Livingston, J., & Beardsley, J. (2002). The quilts of Gee’s Bend. Atlanta, GA: Tinwood Books. Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books. Hacker, A. (1994, April 4). The delusion of equality. The Nation, 258(13), 457–459. Harding, V. (1974). The vocation of the Black scholar and the struggles of the Black community. In Institute of the Black World (Ed.), Education and Black struggle: Notes from the colonized world. Harvard Educational Review, Monograph 2 (pp. 3–31). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Kelly, R. D. G. (2009). Thelonius Monk: The life and times of an American original. New York: The Free Press.

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King, J. E. (2005). Rethinking the Black/White duality of our times. In A. Bogues (Ed.), Caribbean reasonings: After Man, toward the human—Critical essays on Sylvia Wynter (pp. 25–56). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers. King, J. E. (2010). Mis-education or the development of critical race consciousness? Curriculum as Heritage Knowledge. In K. Buras, J. Randels, & K. Salaam (Eds.), Pedagogy, policy and the privatized city: Stories of dispossession and defiance from New Orleans (pp. 126–130). New York: Teachers College Press. King, J. E., Akua, C., & Russell, L. (2014). Liberating urban education for human freedom. In H. R. Milner & K. Lomotey (Eds.), Handbook for research on urban education (pp. 52–107). New York: Routledge. Kirkland, D., Robinson, J., Jackson, A., & Smitherman, G. (2004). From “The Lower Economic”: Three young brothas and an Old School Womanist respond to Dr. Bill Cosby. Black Scholar, 34(4), 10–15. Lee, C. D. (2008). Synthesis of research on the role of culture in learning among African American youth: The contributions of Asa G. Hilliard, III. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 797–827. Mazloomi, C. (1998). Spirits of the cloth: Contemporary African American quilts. New York: Clarkson Potter. Merrow, John (2013, April 15). Michelle Rhee’s reign of terror, Beyond Chron. Retrieved April 4, 2014, from www.beyondchron.org/articles/Michelle_Rhee_s_ Reign_of_Error_11214.html. Morrison, T. (1993). The Nobel Lecture in Literature. New York: Knopf. National Alliance of Black School Educators. (1984). Saving the African American child. Washington, D.C.: Author. Oakes, J., Rogers, J., & Lipton, M. (2006). Learning power: Organizing for education and justice. New York: Teachers College Press. Podhoretz, N. (1963, February). My Negro problem—and ours. Commentary, 35. Retrieved October 1, 2012, from http://commentarymagazine.com/article/my-negroproblem-and-ours/. Rogers, I. (2009). Remember the Black campus movement: An oral history interview with James P. Garrett. The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2(10). Retrieved April 4, 2013, from www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol. 2no10/2.10_Remembering_the_Black_ Campus_Movement.pdf. Ravitch, D. (1990). Diversity and democracy. American Educator, 14(1), 16-20 ff. Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books. Swartz, E. E. (2009). Diversity: Gatekeeping knowledge and maintaining inequalities. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 1044–1083. Traoré, R. (2008). More than 30 years later: Intervention for African American Studies required. Journal of Black Studies, 38(4), 663–678. Umoja, A. (2013). We will shoot back: Armed resistance in the Mississippi freedom movement. New York: NYU Press. Wallach, A. (2006, October). The fabric of their lives. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved September 15, 2014, from www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fabric-of-theirlives-132757004/?page=3. Woodward, C. V. (1955/2002). The strange career of Jim Crow. Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Wynter, S. (1992/2012). “Do not call us negroes.” How multicultural textbooks perpetuate racism (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Aspire.

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PART I

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Groundings Answering an Ancestral Call, Deciphering Dysconscious Racism

We are encouraged to feel empathy and concern for the Southeast Asian people, who have fled oppression, or the Central American people, who are suffering from the ravages of war. Yet, when the subject of the psychological moral, emotional, spiritual, and physical effects of slavery upon AfricanAmerican men, women, and children comes up, the responses are often very different, even hostile. (McElroy-Johnson, 1993, p. 88) “We shall have trouble with the negroes here just as long as they can’t behave” . . . [said] a leading citizen of Statesborough [GA]. . . . A large supply of buggy whips has been received here in the past two days. These whips are being left at the cabin doors of certain negroes as a suggestive hint for them to leave. (New York Times, August 24, 1904)1 What is missing today in Black Studies is the sense of inner confidence and respect that the collective struggle of the sit-in movement gave us. (Cecil Brown, 2013, n.p.)

Introduction One morning several years after my good friend and teacher Asa G. Hilliard, III, Nana Baffour Amankwatia died, an email from him appeared in my In-box. The message contained an illustration depicting a scene in the Hall of Maat in ancient Kemet (Egypt): the heart being weighed on the scales of judgment as the scribe Jehewty (Thoth) recorded the event. Our ancient Egyptian family believed the “heart was the center of all consciousness.”2 The hope, then, was that one’s good deeds and good character would make one’s heart as light as the feather of Maat (Truth and Justice).3 In the sacred text, the Book of the Dead

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(Karenga, 1990), after death, the heart was weighed against the feather of Maat (which represents Truth, Justice, and Balance) to see if the individual was worthy of joining Osiris (God) in the afterlife. Since the day that I “received” that “ancestral” message from Baba Asa, I have incorporated the image and the lessons of this ancient African cultural ideal in my teaching and workshops using the caption: “We want to be found worthy.” This ideal encapsulates my understanding of what “answering an ancestral call” means. Another aspect of the spiritual dynamics that inform my work—drawing inspiration from the African American “spirituals to the blues”—is that I want to be worthy of the sacrifices my ancestors, represented most immediately by my grandmother, have made on our behalf. A South African traditional healer’s explanation of what “answering the ancestral call” means provides yet another vantage point. This Sangoma came to know her path was to be a healer, as a calling from her grandmother: “People are called to heal through other healers in the family” (Cox, 2008). In my case, my healing path is through teaching, research, and engaged public scholarship in service to my community and the greater public good. My grandmother always said, “Stand up for your rights.” I have attempted to heed my grandmother’s call—that is, to understand what standing up for our rights means under conditions of white supremacy racism in our generation—by deciphering dysconciousness and other ways that our human right to cultural well-being has been obstructed as a result of our miseducation. Like the Jemima Women that I describe in Chapter 5, my ancestral calling is a spiritual lineage passed on to me through my grandmother and Ifa priestesses who came to care for our ancestors who had been kidnapped and enslaved. My grandmother made quilts; I decipher dysconscious racism to nurture consciousness and emancipatory education for human freedom. As the chapters in Part I indicate—this is not a “color coded” calling. Rather, we are all implicated and “all necks are on the line.” Brief summaries for each chapter in Part I follow.

The Chapters In Chapter 1, “A Black Woman Speaks on Leadership,” published in 1988, I chronicle my early attempts as an untenured Assistant Professor to resolve personal and professional contradictions—dilemmas that arose from my commitment to Black liberation and radical social change more generally. I describe the power of Black women’s overcoming spirit and the visionary practice of servant leadership, which has included my activism as a parent, a consistent dimension of my research and writing in which the personal is cultural and political. I discuss the social justice leadership challenge for such scholarship that engages urgent community needs in ways that do not reinforce the elitist isolation and separation from our communities that Black intellectuals too often experience.

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Chapter 2, “In Search of a Method for Liberating Education and Research: The Half (That) Has Not Been Told,” also uses narrative biographical accounts to illustrate the inherent cultural divide and racism I experienced as alienation in the education system. In this chapter I argue that a truly liberating education must be grounded in collective cultural-memory work. That is, developing culture-centered pedagogy and research methods grounded in Black people’s collective cultural-memory, given the nature of racism, is a way to combat dysconsciousness among teachers, teacher educators, researchers. Chapter 3, “Critical and Qualitative Research in Teacher Education: A Blues Epistemology for Cultural Well-Being and a Reason for Knowing,” interrogates how situating teacher education research within a Black Studies theoretical paradigm can contribute to racial-social justice. The chapter discusses four inter-related critical and qualitative justice-oriented teacher education research genres, arguing for attention to the omission of culturally informed, strengths-based perspectives as a crisis of knowledge in the field. A Blues Epistemology theoretical framework within the discipline of Black Studies (Woods, 1998) highlights research for cultural well-being “as a reason for knowing,” not just for the pursuit of educational equity outcomes for individuals. The assertion is that racial-social inequities persist partly because the epistemologies of the oppressed do not inform teacher education and teaching. Examples of extant research and practice show how knowledge and values of diverse communities can be integrated into teacher education practice and research. Chapter 4, “Dysconscious Racism: Ideology, Identity, and the Mis-education of Teachers,” introduces the concept and defines and presents a qualitative analysis of the effects of dysconscious racism on teacher education students’ selfidentities, socio-political consciousness, and their likely teaching practice. A content analysis of several cohorts of my students’ written explanations of how current racial disparities have come about reveals an “uncritical habit of mind” that takes the existing social order as given: the majority of my teacher education students believed that debilitating impacts of African American enslavement or prejudice rather than systemic, institutionalized white supremacy racism account for ongoing racialized inequities. I describe the pedagogy I developed to provide these future teachers with an opportunity to experience the ways that dysconscious racism and miseducation also victimize them. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the liberatory pedagogy I implemented in my teacher education course to advance students’ critical thinking and their freedom to choose emancipatory education. Chapter 5, “ ‘[Art Thou] Come to the Kingdom for Such a Time as This?’: Transformative Public Scholarship for Social Change,” uses the metaphor of the Biblical narrative of Queen Esther confronting the king in order to save her people to examine my “call to serve” in the academic context. Personal experiences illuminate critical choices we face in the academic “kingdom.” While Esther risked her life to save her people, in the academy we face the prospect of

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“publish or perish.” Examples of transformative public scholarship illustrate some of the ways I answer my ancestral call to serve and resolved dilemmas discussed in Chapter 1. This chapter describes my intellectual and ethical journey toward a praxis of public scholarship that blends a commitment to service and knowledge production on behalf of the community for social change.

Conclusion My intellectual journey answering an ancestral call has produced original conceptualizations like dysconscious racism and Heritage Knowledge as well as research on the emancipatory pedagogy I employ in various settings: with Black teachers (King, 1991; King & Swartz, 2014), the social practice of Black mothers (King & Mitchell, 1990/1995), and analyses of alienating curriculum and racism in textbooks (King, 1995). My journey has involved searching for ways to do sociology better using an Afrocentric ethical praxis within a Black Studies paradigm—in ways that do not serve oppression. My research and teaching can be seen as an ongoing intellectual tradition and systematic ethical praxis to restore and mobilize historical consciousness in order to address problems of injustice in education and society. My work continues to be influenced in major ways by the African-centered scholarship of Asa G. Hilliard (2000) and Molefi K. Asante (1988), the Pan-African Diaspora perspective of St. Clair Drake (1987), and the deciphering Black Studies practice of Sylvia Wynter (2003), in particular. One premise of my research and teaching is that liberating methods of inquiry that use our culture and heritage as a foundation for scholarship, that is to say, the lore of the Black Experience (Drake, 1993), can support social action, including transformative culture-centered curriculum and pedagogy, that serve human freedom (King, 1995).

A Coda Given the contemporary global crises, which confront the human species as a whole, the question that we pose is, “What is the connection between these crises and our system of education?” For, unlike present-day discourse on education which focuses on the type of education that our present world-system needs—i.e., a “multicultural” education for a “multicultural” world, or the “back-to-basics” approach to prepare a work force to compete in the technological age—the question that we pose is not “what type of education our world needs,” but more profoundly, “what type of world does our education (including the “multicultural” and “back-to-basics” approach) create?”4

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Notes 1 “Negroes shot and flogged in Georgia: Statesborough’s double lynching has violent aftermath—Four more Blacks killed.” New York Times, August 24, 1904. Retrieved April 4, 2014 from http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archivefree/pdf?res=F50817FB3A 5913738DDDAD0A94D0405B848CF1D3. 2 African American Nile Valley scholars like Asa G. Hilliard, III and (his cousin) Jacob Carruthers (1995, 1999), following the groundbreaking research tradition of Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop (1978, 1991), established historical linkages among Africans in the Diaspora and ancient Kemet (Egypt). West African scholars, Hassimi Maiga—from Mali (2010) and Farmo Moumouni—from Niger (2008), document cultural and linguistic connections tracing the East to West peopling of Africa—using evidence in the language and cultural traditions of the Songhay people of Mali and Niger. Edward Robinson (Robinson, Battle, & Robinson, 1992) argues that Africans in the Diaspora continued The Journey of the Songhai People (Songhai, Songhoy, Songhay, Sonrai, Soŋay [Maiga, 2010] are various spellings of the same classical West African civilization). 3 See: “The Judgment of the Dead in the Hall of Maat, c.1370 b.c.” Retrieved on September 10, 2014, from www.egyptartsite.com/judgement.html. 4 Institute N.H.I. (1990), Stanford University (personal communication). The acronym N.H.I. (“No Humans Involved”) is the name of the student collective working with Sylvia Wynter at Stanford University in the mid 1990s. N.H.I. is the code reportedly used by the police in Los Angeles when there was a call to a Black or Latino neighborhood. See Wynter (1990).

References Asante, M. K. (1988). Afrocentricity. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Brown, C. (2013). “Good-bye Black Studies,” Black Agenda Report.com. Retrieved April 4, 2013 from http://blackagendareport.com/content/goodbye-black-studies. Carruthers, J. (1995). Mdw Dtr: Divine speech: A historiographical reflection of African deep thought from the time of the Pharaohs to the present (2nd ed.). London: Karnak House Publishers. Carruthers, J. (1999). Intellectual warfare. Chicago: Third World Press. Cox, A. (2008, April 25). Answering call from ancestors. South Africa: IOL News. Retrieved September 10, 2014 from www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/answeringcall-from-ancestors-1.397927#.VB89m0vF9g0. Diop, C. A. (1978). The cultural unity of Black Africa: The domains of patriarchy & of matriarchy in classical antiquity. London: Karnak House Publishers. Diop, C. A. (1991). Civilization or barbarism: An authentic anthropology. Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill. Drake, S. C. (1987). Black folk here and there: An essay in history and anthropology (Vol. I). Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Center for African American Studies. Drake, S. C. (1993). Diaspora studies and Pan-Africanism. In J. Harris (Ed.), Global dimensions of the African Diaspora (pp. 451–514). Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. Hilliard, A. G. (2000). “Race,” identity, hegemony and education: What do we need to know now? In W. H. Watkins, J. H. Lewis, & V. Chou (Eds.), Race and education: The roles of history and society in educating African American students (pp. 7–33). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Karenga, M. (1990). The Book of Coming Forth by Day: The ethics of the Declarations of Innocence. Los Angeles: Kawaida.

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King, J. E. (1991). Unfinished business: Black student alienation and Black teachers’ emancipatory pedagogy. In M. Foster (Ed.), Readings on equal education. Volume II: Qualitative investigations into schools and schooling (pp. 245–271). New York: AMS Press. King, J. E. (1995). Culture-centered knowledge: Black Studies, curriculum transformation, and social action. In J. A. Banks & C. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research in multicultural education (pp. 265–290). New York: Macmillan. King, J. E., & Mitchell, C. A. (1990/1995). Black mothers to sons: Juxtaposing African American literature with social practice. New York: Peter Lang. King, J. E., & Swartz, E. (2014). “Re-membering” history in student and teacher learning: An Afrocentric culturally informed praxis. New York: Routledge. Maiga, H. O. (2010). Balancing written history with oral tradition: The legacy of the Songhay people. New York: Taylor & Francis. McElroy-Johnson, B. (1993). Giving voice to the voiceless. Harvard Educational Review, 63(1), 85–104. Moumouni, F. (2008). Aux sources de la connaissance directe: La parenté entre l’Egyptien ancien et le Songhay [Sources of direct knowledge: The relationship between ancient Egyptian and Songhay]. Paris: Editions Menaibuc. Robinson, C., Battle, R., & Robinson, E. W. (1992). The journey of the Songhai people (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: PanAfrican Federation Organization. Woods, C. (1998). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso. Wynter, S. (1990). Breaking the epistemological contract on Black America. Forum N.H.I., 2(1), 41–57. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom. Towards the Human, after Man, its overrepresentation—an argument. The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–357.

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REFLECTION Groundings—A Framework for Educational Inquiry Annette Henry

I first met Dr. King in 1990 as a graduate student. We were on an American Educational Research Association (AERA) panel together. All the panelists decided to dine together the night before presentation. At dinner, I was struck by her brilliant mind, her wisdom, her commitment to the Black community, as well as her passion to rewrite the historical record in education concerning African Americans through her teaching and research. The chapters presented in Part I: “Groundings: Answering an Ancestral Call, Deciphering Dysconscious Racism,” attest to Dr. King’s praxis—exemplified by the following quote from the opening essay, “A Black Woman Speaks on Leadership”: What I am trying to do is redefine the role of a Black academic and the nature of Black scholarship so that scholarship, community/public service, and parenting, another aspect of the Black liberation struggle are compatible and interdependent. (1988, p. 50) I come from a Jamaican background. For me, “groundings” evokes the Rastafarian use of the term. “Groundings” or “reasonings” refer to regular group inquiry or meetings in which Rastas come together and reason about events that affect their lives or communities. The term also evokes Guyanese historian, activist, and politician Walter Rodney, a brilliant thinker and an important figure in the 20th century Black radical tradition (Bogues, 2009). In his early years, Rodney was very much influenced by dialogues with Rastafarians while teaching at the University of West Indies in Jamaica, hence his book Groundings with My Brothers. Rodney came of age during the Caribbean struggles for independence in the 1960s, and represented a Pan Africanism that disregarded

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Europe as center, and put Africa and the Caribbean, and African liberation struggles at the center of his politics. In his activism and academic life, he stayed close to the poor and working class. As David Austin (2001) writes about his years in Jamaica: “He earned the reputation of being a professor of the people, participating in grounding or reasoning sessions with Rastafarians and others living in economically depressed areas of Kingston on history and politics” (p. 62). The first three chapters in this volume can be viewed as “groundings” with her brothers and sisters—people who know, first hand, the realities in Black communities. In the case of Dr. King’s White teacher education students whom she wrote about in her study of “Dysconscious Racism” (Chapter 4) as well as Chapter 11 in this volume (“Thank You for Opening Our Minds . . .”), she describes how she provides her students with opportunities for regular inquiry into their understandings of race, racism, class poverty, and ideology more generally. In Chapter 2, “In Search of a Method . . .” King gives an account of some of the ways in which her worldview and creative imaginings in adult life were formed by her autobiography. Indeed, Black auto/biographical accounts reveal the existence of other ways of knowing, being, feeling, and doing (Henry, 2006). Thus, King’s activism and life experience grew out of her autobiography and were quilted into her intellectual activism. She reveals some of the influences in her life history that have formed her life-long search for justice and equity, and desire to remain connected to the Black community through her praxis. “In Search of a Method” also reveals the scope of teaching and learning in non-traditional educational sites within Black families and other Black institutions. As a young child, her grandmother’s example and life lessons helped her understand how to live in the world as a Black woman. When one comes from a productive community, one knows the white supremacist ideology to be untrue. The institutions of the family, the Black church and Black community as well as other communities of color, formed her consciousness of alternative ways of knowing and being. As well as experiencing the struggles for racial justice in the 1960s, Dr. King was blessed with encountering some of the greatest Black radical scholars in the 20th century. These events informed her own work. Her research studies couched in a Black Studies paradigm have helped create new ways of researching in the field of education both in the United States and internationally. Advocating for emancipatory frames, she contended that the system was “atrisk” rather than Black children; she re-read the educational archive through her analyses as sociologist, educator, and mother. In another of her publications (not in this volume), “Unfinished Business: Black Student Alienation and Black Teachers’ Emancipatory Pedagogy,” King (1991b) highlights the beauty and intelligence of Black children and African American culture, providing systemic explanations for Black student underachievement, namely racism and classism and the lack of culturally appropriate educational strategies especially for poor

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Black children. In various publications she provides exemplars of excellent pedagogy of Black teachers who have taken up the charge of providing the kinds of education that Black students need (King & Swartz, 2014). In “Dysconscious Racism,” King’s sharp sociological analysis of white supremacy and the ways that it affected her all-White, teacher education students at an elite institution provided a framework for working in the nation’s predominantly White pre-service settings (King, 1991a). Her focus on liberatory praxis informed her curriculum and pedagogy as she challenged students intellectually, broadened their understandings of ideology, and worked to help them critically examine their own consciousness and belief-systems. King continues to challenge us to think about the spiritual, cultural, sociohistorical, and political lives of Black children and Black families. Her contributions have greatly challenged contemporary educational research and practice with her emphasis on equity, justice, and transformative ways of approaching Black education and teacher education.

References Austin, D. (2001). Introduction to Walter Rodney. Small Axe, 5(2), 60–65. Bogues, A. (2009). Black power, decolonization, and Caribbean politics: Walter Rodney and the politics of The Groundings with My Brothers. Boundary 2, 36(1), 127–147. Henry, A. (2006). Historical studies: Groups/institutions. In G. Camilli, P. Elmore, & J. Green (Eds.), Complementary methods for research in education (pp. 271–293). Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association. King, J. E. (1988). A Black woman speaks on leadership. Sage, 5(2), 49–52. King, J. E. (1991a). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the mis-education of teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146. King, J. E. (1991b). Unfinished business: Black student alienation and Black teachers’ emancipatory pedagogy. In M. Foster (Ed.), Readings on equal education. Volume II: Qualitative investigations into schools and schooling (pp. 245–271). New York: AMS Press. King, J. E., & Swartz, E. (2014). “Re-membering” history in student and teacher learning: An Afrocentric culturally informed praxis. New York: Routledge.

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1 A BLACK WOMAN SPEAKS ON LEADERSHIP

This essay describes my growing awareness of the responsibilities of leadership and chronicles my attempts to resolve certain contradictions or dilemmas I experience in my personal life and work, which arise out of a commitment to social justice and Black liberation. Power is the word that captures the essence of African and African American women’s leadership. Faith, in seemingly hopeless situations, is the source of the power of our overcoming spirit, which characterizes the heritage women of African ancestry have in common. The power of African women’s spirit to transcend objective conditions of oppression is demonstrated in the remarkable accomplishments and otherwise inexplicable courage of our foremothers and living Black women leaders, among them Nzinga (Angola), Sarraounia (Niger),1 Nanny (Jamaica), Winnie Mandela (South Africa), and Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, Angela Davis, Byllye Avery, Clementine Barfield, and Gwen Patton Woods (U.S.). This overcoming spirit transcends the opposition between African women’s spiritual power and the powerlessness imposed by racism, sexism, and other forces of domination and exploitation. In a recent Afrocentric2 analysis of African American leadership, Willie L. Baber suggests that Black leadership combines the elements of “choice and action,” regardless of situational constraints (Baber, 1987, p. 269). One lesson Black women with leadership responsibilities can learn from other Black women is how we can effect change by overcoming particular constraints or contradictions we confront. Helping each other overcome contradictions we face is an essential task of Black women leaders. This chapter describes some of the persistent contradictions I experience in my personal life and work and how I resolve them through leadership, which

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serves the community. I offer these personal reflections in a spirit of sisterhood with the recognition that the personal is also cultural and political. Through scholarship, community action, and teaching, I strive to make my intellectual, social, and personal activities, including parenting, a catalyst for social change. One dilemma I confront is the reality of “publish or perish.” This requirement of academic life is in direct opposition to the responsibility I feel to respond to the urgent problems facing our communities. For Black academics like myself, the leadership challenge is how to transcend this contradiction by doing research and writing, which does not reinforce the elitist isolation and separation of Black intellectuals from our communities. While the norms and structure of the academic profession make it appear that the nature of one’s intellectual work is an individual decision, Black people who consciously identify with the struggle to end oppression do not separate from the struggle or the personal from the political. This schism is especially painful for those of us who live in a Black community ravaged by drugs, violence, and educational failure, to name a few of the current manifestations of our oppression. Even decisions about where to live—in a Black community or the suburbs—or where to send our children to school—private or public—are seemingly personal dilemmas, which are shaped by the politics of domination and have implications for our leadership responsibilities. The systematic destruction of our families and communities reinforces my conviction that activist leadership for radical social change, combined with research and writing is urgently needed. In recent weeks my neighbors and I have watched in dismay as one young family after another on our street folds under the weight of drugs and violence. The women lament the fact that the men don’t “come out to take a stand” and help clean up the neighborhood. But as shots ring out at night, who can blame them? In Detroit, however, Clementine and other mothers of slain youth have organized to “save our sons and daughters” (S.O.S.A.D.) (Hollyday, 1988). Black scholars can make a contribution to their efforts. We need this kind of organized resistance in every besieged Black community. In addition, from my vantage point at the predominantly White, elite university where I teach, I also see a need for radical change in White communities. As the “minority” becomes the “majority” in our public schools, and the number of Black teachers declines, one of the most challenging aspects of my work is helping economically privileged and monocultural White students/ teachers overcome their ethnocentrism and develop the understanding and commitment necessary to teach successfully in culturally diverse communities. To act on my commitment to improve the conditions of Black life and to make this society more just, I combine activist leadership in education with research related to educational issues in the Black community and teacher education. My research is both a form of leadership and praxis—action and reflection—for social change.

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What I am trying to do is to redefine the role of a Black academic and the nature of Black scholarship so that scholarship, community/public service, and parenting (another aspect of the Black liberation struggle) are compatible and interdependent. For example, with several other mothers, I organized a citywide parent advocacy group. Several of my ongoing research projects involve women in discussion and analysis of the challenges we face in our communities as teachers and parents. An African proverb says, “The future is not running toward you. You have to go fetch it.” It is in this spirit that I describe here my approach to leadership for social justice. Prior to my involvement in a national leadership development program, I had not developed a conscious social change strategy or thought about the implications and contradictions of leadership. I did not aspire to a conventional leadership role, in electoral politics or in a professional organization, because I did not see room for my concerns and commitments in the “mainstream” leadership roles. Nor did I realize when I applied for the Kellogg National Fellowship that I would feel profoundly ambivalent about being designated as a “leader,” to be groomed for a more prominent and influential leadership role. My resolve neither to “sell out” nor be “bought off ” with prestige, status, or “recognition” was strengthened by studying women’s involvement in social change and meeting women in Africa, China, and South America who are confidently assuming the responsibility of changing their societies. My notions of leadership, though not fully clarified, did not seem to fit the kind of managerial, corporate, and public service leadership roles the program emphasized as models for us. It became clear to me that notions of leadership cannot be separated from one’s larger social vision, political commitments, values, and beliefs. When other women and I expressed our reservations about the managerial and corporate models of leadership, Robert Greenleaf ’s concept of “servant leadership” was suggested as an alternative (Greenleaf, 1977). He urges those who really care about building a “good society” to be “servants first” and leaders second. This kind of leadership, he argues, begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve first . . . then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. . . . The ‘servant as leader’ differs from a person who is a leader first because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions . . . Servant leadership “manifests itself in the care taken by the servant—first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.” We will know if their needs are being served, Greenleaf suggests, if “while being served . . . [they] become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants.” In consideration of the “effect” of servant leadership “on the least privileged in society,” Greenleaf asks: “Will they benefit, or at least, not be further deprived?” (pp. 13–14).

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Now this is the most important issue. But answering the question requires a clear notion that Greenleaf offers to make people “freer.”3 His use of terms like “underprivileged and deprived” suggests that his social analysis doesn’t adequately challenge the existence of privilege itself. While Greenleaf hopes that more of the so-called underprivileged will themselves become servant leaders, authentic Black (and feminist) leadership challenges the social bases of privilege. Several other contradictions related to Black leadership are not addressed in his discussion. These are related to credibility, consciousness, and social change. I became acutely aware of credibility as an issue in Black leadership when I helped organize and mobilize parents in my community. As a teacher/educator and researcher, I often visited schools in wealthier communities, and I was aware of specific inequities in the curriculum, policies, and the overall quality of education available to our children (the high school dropout rate remains high, around 50–60%). A group of mothers decided to get together to “do something about the schools.” Initially, some of the mothers thought teacher morale was the main problem to address and that decorating the teachers’ lunch room would be a good place to start. Several of us in the group were educators with a different level of knowledge about the ways our children were being miseducated. Other mothers who had lived in the community longer had more experience with the schools, but our experiences were similar—we encountered low standards, low teacher expectations and morale, and poor relations among teachers, parents, and administrators. What differed were our interpretations of these problems. After several meetings, we decided to hold a citywide forum to find out what others in the community thought the problems were, then we identified the priorities which needed to be addressed. During five years of active organizing (1982–1987), this group of mothers became an effective democratic organization for change. Our activities resulted in district-wide changes in the curriculum, policies, parent advocacy, and involvement, and provided continuity through four changes of superintendents. More importantly, the core group of mothers who founded the Parents for Positive Action shared the responsibility for leadership. This experience of helping others in my community develop as leaders taught me how important it is to maintain my credibility in the community. Credibility is reflected in serious and consistent commitment. There is a history of people who use the community as a “stepping stone” or who only “come around when they are running for office.” (Some of these folks “joined” the parent group from time to time.) Ironically, the success of the parent group was probably a factor in my selection for the national leadership development program, which turned out to be a “fast track” to a more visible, high profile leadership role. Recognition and reward for service can enhance one’s status and influence, but being “tapped” for leadership can also widen the gap between Black intellectuals who want to be “servants first” in the communities

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we serve. I was skeptical about suggestions that I should “think about moving on” to more “influential” leadership roles. Black social scientists have studied the historical and psycho-cultural origins of this problem of Black leadership credibility. Na’im Akbar has analyzed leadership in the Black community since slavery (1984). He observes that whenever and wherever authentic Black leaders who are revered and respected emerge, they have been “decimated.” Thus, “designated leaders” have been mistrusted, and with good reason. Black sociologist, Robert Staples, criticizes the current generation of Black mayors and politicians whose leadership is based on a “pragmatic adaptation to white institutions and values” (1982, p. 78). Staples argues that these “designated” Black leaders serve the interests of the larger society. My goal is not to help more individuals become “leaders,” albeit servants first, but to help people get organized and sufficiently informed to participate in bringing a radically different society into being. This kind of leadership involves developing people’s ability to recognize their own needs, not just developing their capacity to “serve” within the existing social order. It is no accident that the American version of democracy conditions “leaders” to fear the prospect that the masses will have the knowledge and power to lead themselves and by implication to bring about fundamental change. But history, particularly the history of the oppressed, tells us that “ordinary” people do have the capacity for leadership. I take seriously visions like the one Mary Cappe offered in 1645. She envisioned the future as a time when all people would “prophesy,” that is, when people would know and understand the social realty and by implication would become their own leaders without “superiors” or “inferiors” (Rowbotham, 1972, p. 13). Moving the country toward this prophetic and utopian vision of a liberated future is a task of leaders, which transforms power relations between “inferiors and superiors.” Helping people discover their own interests, their implicit theories of mutual, respectful learning and action with people, which prepares them for leadership. This kind of collaborative, reciprocal learning is the kind of educating community organizers do that Boyte suggests is a requirement “for the emergence of democratic social movements” (Boyte, 1981, p. 176). For Boyte, organizing that is also educational is how “ordinary people, steeped in lifelong experiences of humiliation and self-doubt” get the knowledge, skills, mutual trust, hope, and self-confidence to “take action in their own behalf ” (p. 205). Black leadership aimed at change confronts both personal and collective contradictions. For example, the struggle for personal and social change inevitably confronts the myth of Black “progress” and its corollary, that only the Black “underclass,” misfits left behind by the Black middle class in its flight to mobility, is not “making it.” For many of us who have attained some measure of individual “success,” maintaining the kind of (collective) community relationships I have described involves some personal sacrifice. However, the influence and prestige we may attain as successful individuals will probably help us to

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effect change in society if in the process we do not lose our personal involvement with the realities of Black life. I gained a new appreciation of the implications of personal prestige for social change when I interviewed the Brazilian professor who founded one of the first women’s studies research centers in Brazil during the military regime. At a time when others with radical intentions were being forced into exile, this professor (she would be regarded as a Black woman here) succeeded in creating a center for university women and “faveladas” (women from the favelas) to work together for democratic social change. When I asked her how she did it, she was unequivocal: “In addition to being dedicated, thorough, and doing good work,” she said, “you need some prestige, of course.” Her response reveals the harmonious integration of the personal and the political in her personality. She is not ambivalent about either prestige or the responsibility for initiating change, which challenges the status quo, and she is confident she can make change happen. The experience of getting to know women abroad and here in the U.S. who are taking on such challenges inspired me to work for better education through a state education commission assignment. To avoid the problem of overextending myself, I chose my “battles” carefully and worked with a network of other Black women educators who are involved on a daily basis with education issues in the community. In this way, I am carrying the struggle into more “prestigious” contexts without ambivalent feelings of abandoning the community. The Brazilian educator also demonstrates that rebellion within the academy is possible through deliberate leadership and scholarship that serves the people. This is another strategy for overcoming forces opposed to social change. If we are not going to be “domesticated by the world,” we have to maintain a critical perspective about society. I am often told that I’m “too negative.” But being critical is not being negative necessarily. It means keeping our hope for a radically different future in view always. But it is hard to do this alone. We need to be renewed by a spirit of community and a shared “commitment to a common future” (Alves, 1972, p. 131). Leadership that helps to clarify the vision of the world we hope for is essential to our liberation from America’s various forms of oppression. What Angela Davis (1988) refers to as the “continuum of women’s work” involves many modes of leadership in different contexts—the church, sororities, the arts, public service, health, politics, law, education, and parenting to ensure Black children’s survival.4 As we exercise leadership in these diverse contexts, we may or may not become famous, have a large following, or gain public recognition for our efforts. But whether we manifest our leadership in the sphere of daily existence or in the public spotlight, each of us has a vision of society that is an implicit theory of how the world works and what we think is needed to bring about change. We need a common vision and the fellowship of which Alves speaks so eloquently (p. 172). Through our own leadership efforts Black

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women are creating this fellowship.5 In doing so, we will also be creating the conditions people need to participate in changing this society. In conclusion, I want to emphasize that leadership which merely aims to meet needs that society defines, within its limited vision, risks being irrelevant at best and reactionary at worst. Black women’s leadership that merely aims to “improve” Black life in the U.S. within the present social order will fall short of our heritage and the power of our overcoming spirit.

Notes 1 Sarraounia is described as a woman of great spiritual power and military genius in Robinson, Battle, and Robinson (1987, pp. 174–177). Drewal and Drewal (1983) discuss African women’s power and spirituality. 2 For several approaches to the idea of Afrocentricity, see Asante (1998); Baber (1987); and King and Mitchell (1990). 3 For several cogent analyses of the kind of social change needed to make people “freer” and society more just, see Albert, Sargeant, and Sklar (1986); Bell (1987); Davis (1981); hooks (1984). 4 This publication is the official newsletter of the National Black Women’s Health Project, headquartered in Atlanta, GA. 5 bell hooks observes, however, that we will still have a long way to go to build solidarity among Black women. See hooks (1988).

References Akbar, N. (1984). Chains and images of psychological slavery. Jersey City, NJ: New Mind Productions. Albert, M., Sargeant, L., & Sklar, H. (1986). Liberating theory. Boston: South End Press. Alves, R. (1972). Tomorrow’s child: Imagination and the rebirth of culture. New York: Harper & Row. Asante, M. K. (1998). The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Baber, W. L. (1987). Psychocultural perspectives on Afro-American leadership style. In G. Gay & W. L. Baber (Eds.), Expressively Black: The cultural basis of ethnic identity. New York: Praeger. Bell, D. (1987). And we are not saved. New York: Basic Books. Boyte, H. (1981). The backyard revolution: Understanding the new citizen movement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race & class. New York: Random House. Davis, A. Y. (1988). The politics of Black women’s health. Vital Signs,5(1), 53–65. Drewal, H. J., & Drewal, M. T. (1983). Gelede: Art and female power among the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Greenleaf, R. (1977). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. New York: Paulist Press. Hollyday, J. (1988). Mothers of sorrow and hope. Sojourners, 17, 14–20. hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. Boston: South End Press. hooks, b. (1988). Black women and feminism. Zeta Magazine, 1, 39–42. King, J. E., & Mitchell, C. A. (1990). Black mothers to sons: Juxtaposing African American literature with social practice. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

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Robinson, C., Battle, R., & Robinson, E. W. (1987). The journey of the Songhai people. Philadelphia, PA: Farmer Press. Rowbotham, S. (1972). Hidden from history. London: Pluto Press. Staples, R. (1982). Black masculinity: The Black male’s role in American society. San Francisco: The Black Scholar Press.

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2 IN SEARCH OF A METHOD FOR LIBERATING EDUCATION AND RESEARCH The Half (That) Has Not Been Told

It was through their unrequited toil that I was educated, while they were compelled to live in ignorance. I am indebted to them for the power I have to serve them . . . (Harper, 1892, p. 176)

Groundings As my grandmother and I approached the corner store just before daybreak, a fire flickered in a battered, old steel drum. The people huddled around the fire, their heads wrapped or hooded against the damp morning chill, were our neighbors. Nodding in unspoken, respectful greeting; they stepped aside and opened the circle so that we could take our places beside them. I was about 9 or 10 years old, and my head and shoulders barely reached my grandmother’s elbow as I stood next to her. We were in Stockton, California, in the rich agricultural heartland of the San Joaquin Valley. These people and their families, like mine, had come from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana where they had known my grandmother long before I was born. We were there early that morning in the semi-darkness to wait for the rickety bus that would take us to the fields outside of town. Some days we went to “cut” onions (which meant pulling them up out of the ground, cutting off the top, stuffing them into burlap sacks, and dragging the sacks over to the weighing stand to be paid a few cents for each sack). This was hot, back-breaking, dirty work that people with no other options were paid very little to do. That day we were going to pick strawberries, and we were in the field working by sunrise. It was a wonderful day for me because I was going to work with my grandmother and share the special status that she enjoyed. I recall how the people stepped aside when we

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passed because my grandmother, whom everyone called, “Miss Chicken,” was someone special in our community. Later, I understood some of the reasons why my diminutive grandmother commanded such respect and power in our community. She could read and write but my grandmother did not complete elementary school. Yet, she owned not just her own home—which she had helped to build—but several other houses where our relatives lived as well. Still, we were not prosperous but working people like our neighbors. My grandmother was also one of the best workers around: No matter what crop was being cut, picked, or chopped, she always kept ahead of everyone else in the field. When I was older, my grandmother explained to me how she became such a fast worker. In Oklahoma, when my grandfather was in prison, she was working in the cotton field alone to feed their five young children. Two ex-convicts made up their minds to help her. They used to put her in the row between them and chop alternately in her row and theirs, so she could make more money. Working in coordination with them, she swung her hoe in tune with their rhythm and, matching their cadence, she kept up with them. Despite her small stature, she developed the speed, stamina, and accuracy to set the same pace for other workers. Ironically, in the California strawberry field that day, a group of Filipino men had great fun helping me keep up with her. They put me in the row between them and they kept my baskets filled with berries. All morning we stayed close behind her as she worked her way up and down the long rows of luscious strawberries. (I couldn’t resist popping one in my mouth from time to time.) Not only was I proud of how much money I made that day, I didn’t know that we were “poor,” or that the work we were doing was looked down upon. Such memories play an important role now in my work as a sociologist of education. They remind me of ways the actual Black Experience often contradicts representations of Black life and culture in school texts, research literature, and images of Black people in mainstream American popular culture. The neighborhood where I grew up was very much like an African village: the people who lived there were related by family ties, social bonds, and survival struggles over several generations. The elders had known my mother when she was a girl. These families had migrated more or less together from the same towns in the south before coming to California during the Depression. Mostly they were field hands, share croppers, laborers, and domestic workers. For generations they had followed the harvests doing the work that made it possible for them to survive and for me to be educated and to become a sociologist, teacher educator, and researcher. Like my mother’s side of our family, they had come to California’s central valley to pick cotton and harvest other crops. Yet they were also skilled in carpentry, plumbing, cooking, sewing, house building, bricklaying, and other forms of knowledge and expertise that ensured our survival. Whenever the older people talked about their lives and their struggles, which was not very often, they would tell us—in that parsimonious and poetic

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way that they used Bible verses, proverbs, and metaphors to make a particular point without saying it directly—“The half has not been told.” More often they would tell us to “Get an education because nobody can take that away from you.” I never knew for sure, and they never told us, just what they thought might be “taken away” from us. Our dignity and self-respect perhaps? Or perhaps they feared for our very sanity, considering how often I heard someone begin a prayer in church by intoning, “Thank you, Lord, for waking me up clothed in my right mind.” Growing up in Stockton, I remember being surrounded by people in my family and in our neighborhood who knew how to do any number of things well. Doing things well was especially important in my family. My mother has often told me stories about Grandma Lena, who, although she was born into the presumed slothfulness of plantation slavery, impressed her high standards upon my mother. Under Grandma Lena’s watchful eye, my mother’s job as a young girl was to iron the long, starched white aprons the women wore. My mother vividly remembers her grandmother’s warning: “Don’t leave no cat faces in them aprons!” That’s what Grandma Lena called the almost unavoidable wrinkles and smudges that resulted from using the old-fashioned iron they heated in a fire outdoors. If Grandma Lena spotted any “cat faces,” my mother said she would have to start over, boil the water to wash the apron, then starch and iron it again. In other words, not only was the ethic of doing good work highly valued, but the expectation was excellence. My mother has passed this expectation on to me and I have done the same with my children. What’s more, in my research and writing I am contributing to the growing body of scholarship that documents these kinds of strengths and the Cultural Knowledge that has been useful for Black people’s survival (King, 1994, 1995a, 1995b; King & Mitchell, 1995). In addition to values like these that have grounded me, I, too, observed and participated in processes of economic and cultural production that demonstrated the knowledge, skill, ingenuity, and creativity in our community. When I was a girl, I helped my grandmother make quilts. I watched her recycle old garments and create intricately beautiful and useful quilts that we very much prize today. I marveled at the evenness and uniformity of her tiny stitches and the strength in her steady hand. She taught me how to make a knot at the end of the thread with one hand. What a great sense of accomplishment I felt when I could finally lick the thread, twist it just right around my fingers, and produce a neat knot, effortlessly, like she did. My job was to thread her needles and, of course, to keep her company. I also helped my mother make jams and jellies, “can” (preserve) peaches, pickle cucumbers, and I watched her make the lye soap that she cooked in a tin tub over a fire outside in the back yard. My mother also tended the roses and lilies that spruced up our yard. She even removed a wall in our small house one day to enlarge a room. My father, who worked as a laborer building roads and

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bridges, wore khaki pants and shirts that I ironed. He hunted rabbits and pheasants and often he brought home freshly caught catfish or red snapper. During the hunting season, he took the whole family with him to hunt deer in the mountains each year, so we missed school but experienced another kind of education. Just about everyone in our community was engaged in some kind of productive work: the Mexican couple whom we called “Moms” and “Pops” lived and owned the store next to my grandmother’s house. I spent many hours there watching the women grind chillies and corn and make tortillas and enchiladas. A Black family owned the corner store where we waited for the bus to go to the fields; a blind, itinerant preacher earned money by piercing ears when he passed through the neighborhood. He pierced my ears when I was about six years old. Then there was “Miss Laurine,” the lady who took care of me while my mother did “day’s work” (domestic work) on the white side of town. Although Miss Laurine was different from the other adults around—she had some rather peculiar ways—her presence in the community was not marked by her differentness but by inclusion. Miss Laurine lived alone in a trailer by herself; she smoked a pipe, and she talked with a “funny,” unfamiliar accent. For example, she called me “Jice.” I didn’t know why until Bobby Hill, a young Jamaican scholar whom I met years later at Stanford University, said my name the same way. “Back home in Jamaica,” he said, “we would call you Jice.” For the first time I realized that Miss Laurine must have come from Jamaica, too. But why? And how did she get to a town in California’s central valley? This is a story I will never know. I remember asking my mother why everybody called Miss Laurine “Miss”—including my mother, who was not so much younger than Miss Laurine. My mother explained that Miss Laurine’s white hair—a sign of eldership—required showing her that kind of respect. Miss Laurine was another of those powerful Black women who commanded immeasurable respect through her life example, her care for the people, her competence, and her courageous spirit in overcoming life’s difficulties; I wrote about these qualities of Black women in an article on Black women’s leadership (King, 1988). It is unfortunate that the know-how, striving, and struggles of the people in my community-family were never reflected back to me in school in any way that enhanced my understanding of either my own life or theirs. Our stories were untold and, therefore, invisible or distorted. The only textbook narrative about us that I remember at all declared triumphantly that “The slaves were happy on the plantation.” On the other hand, the questions I have pursued and the interpretations that I offer in my research, writing, and teaching are grounded in this community-family reality that is often and necessarily in opposition to the official curriculum of the school and the social curriculum of U.S. culture (King, 1992, 1994, 1995b) which too often depict Black people as defective or deficient. The National Alliance of Black School Educators has

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observed this and notes the consequences such distortions have for the education of African American students. NABSE reported that: African American culture is often relegated to an inferior symbolic universe by schools, thus hiding our group’s true historic struggle for survival, liberation, and enhancement. The African American student, then, may view herself or himself and her/his group as inferior and behave accordingly. Ignorance of and disrespect for African American history and culture also breeds low expectations and unhealthy educator assessments of African American students, families, personalities, and potentials. (NABSE, 1984, p. 12) While we didn’t learn about the significance of the African presence in U.S. society or much about the histories and cultures of the diverse people around us, our families expected us to respect the human dignity of each person. This included our Mexican neighbors, the Filipino men, as well as different individuals among us, like Miss Laurine or the man who had his hair done every Saturday at the beauty shop and who “shouted” in church on Sunday morning just like the women when someone sang “his song.” In other words, we were raised to recognize and respect the worth of people and to value honesty, helping others, generosity, and justice.

From Collective Cultural Memory to Historical Consciousness and Liberating Modes of Inquiry It is worth noting that I do not have many childhood memories of White people, with the possible exception of teachers who stand out for the special ways in which they encouraged me but not others. I realize that both White and Black teachers, in fact, chose to sponsor, promote, and support me but not my cousins or my older brother. In the second grade, for instance, the same Black teacher, who didn’t form any overt bond with me but who I think sent me a summer subscription for the Weekly Reader, dragged my cousin out of our classroom kicking and screaming. I can’t remember what he did but he was expelled from school. He has become a casualty of the war against black males.1 When I was in sixth grade on the first day of school, my former kindergarten teacher, who was White, called me back to her classroom to calm my younger cousin whom the teachers had locked in the bathroom for punishment. When I got there, he was crouching in the toilet, crying and yelling hysterically that he did not want to be locked up like his father, my favorite uncle, who had been sent to prison for possession of marijuana. Nevertheless, he became a professional football player and is now a successful businessman. In effect, White people were not really part of our community. At school we discovered that we were different from them: we didn’t talk like them and they were unpredictable

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and even dangerous. This was especially so for those who came into contact with the police or strayed too far from home into “Okie Town” across Highway 99, which divided us from them. My cousins and I trespassed on a White man’s property there once, and he shot at us to chase us out of his cherry orchard. Another White man followed us home from high school for several days. He exposed himself as he drove along slowly beside us with the car door and his pants open. No one thought about calling the police to report this. Instead, my best friend’s mother kept a vigil by the window each day, watching for our return from school until this danger had passed. We had White friends at school but this depended on their behavior and their attitude towards us. For example, one of my White classmates, who lived near our school, Fair Oaks elementary, invited me home with her one day. I discovered that they had Kool-Aid with dinner just like we did. In the second grade, another White friend said she wished I could come home with her and go to her church, but she couldn’t invite me because I was Black. Our teachers were oblivious to, or unconcerned about, these kinds of incidents. They concentrated on teaching us “American” culture: We sang European American folk songs (“Oh, my darling, Clementine . . .” and “She’ll be coming around the mountain, when she comes . . . she’ll be driving six white horses, when she comes . . .”); we learned to square dance; and our teachers corrected our speech. Very patriotically we celebrated Hawaii’s statehood by dancing the hula in grass skirts. This hegemony, now called white supremacy/racism, persisted at all levels of our formal and non-formal educational experiences. By the time I went to junior high school, another one of my cousins, who is a year younger than I, still could not read. When we were bussed to the white side of town for summer school in the eleventh grade, the school we attended, Lincoln High, was much better equipped than ours. The wealthy White students could actually speak the language and perform plays in French, while we couldn’t say a word in French after three years of study. The pernicious cultural system that values whiteness and devalues Blackness was also evident in the community. Whenever Black people expressed admiration for the beautiful cultural center the Filipinos built, they would also say, “It’s a shame that Black people can’t work together to build anything like this.” Is it any wonder that, like many other Black and White children who were bombarded with images of whiteness in school books, White angels and disciples on our Sunday School cards, and a blond, blue-eyed Jesus behind the pulpit at church, I grew up with that nagging suspicion, wondering: “Is there something wrong with us?” The professional vocabulary that I learned in graduate school, terms like “tracking,” “sponsored vs. contest mobility,” and “cultural deprivation” did not adequately explain and only partially addressed such alienating educational experiences. Paradoxically, my search for methods of liberating education and

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research is rooted in the collective cultural memory of the Black Experience that Black church and community-family life also produce. Despite the predominate cultural system, affirmations of our humanity were always erupting within various forms of Black cultural expression: in the beauty and harmony of the gospel songs we sang when our youth choirs traveled from church to church; or in the “Sha-na-nah . . . Get a job” doo-wop harmonies we crooned as teenagers; in how “sharp” we could look on the first or the last day of school or Easter Sundays; in a powerfully moving sermon that made people jump up and shout, “Preach!” or in a rhythm and blues artist’s mesmerizing performance that made us shout, “Get down!”; in the eloquent prayers of the deacons and deaconesses; in our Easter speeches that we learned “by heart”; in the precision routines and intricate hand signals the ushers used to direct the congregation at church; in the abundant and delicious “soul” food served at church and family gatherings; in the talent shows and after school dances where we did the “Texas Hop,” the “Chicken,” and the “Mashed Potatoes” to James Brown’s latest hit song. In other words, Black cultural expression, which is most often collective, participatory, and life-affirming, validated our being within an existential social reality where everyone could be and do something excellent and worthwhile. This is the power of Blackness that could not easily be contained, repressed, or simply erased from our collective cultural memory. As C. L. R. James (1970) noted, “the capacities of men [and women] were always leaping out of the confinements of the system” (p. 136).2 Reading this kind of critical interpretation of our survival and struggles by Black Studies scholars, especially after meeting someone like C. L. R. James at Stanford University, made a tremendous impact on my thinking. Eventually, I gained the confidence and the historical consciousness to pose new questions about the Black Experience from a “Black Perspective” and to think in new ways about racial justice, liberating education, and liberating inquiry by, with, and for the people (Dubell, Erasmie, & De Vries, 1980).3 This achievement was a victory of collective cultural memory and historical consciousness over alienating education and abductive school knowledge (King & Wilson, 1990) that misrepresents reality, as Carter G. Woodson (1933) showed so clearly in his classic study, The Mis-education of the Negro.

The Deciphering Praxis of Black Studies The critical power of African American Cultural Knowledge and thought (King, 1995a) are significant dimensions of the Black Experience that are reflected in my research and the “practical-critical activity” (Kilminster, 1979, p. 17) that characterizes my teaching methods. Grounded theoretically in the Black Studies intellectual perspective and practically in the participatory, communal, and expressive quality of Black life and culture (Gay & Baber, 1987), my theoretical and methodological approach to research and teaching represents a praxis of transmutation that seeks to change both cognitive and affective

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schema.4 My focus is on thought and feeling. I use the term praxis to denote more self-consciously reflexive teaching, learning, and inquiry processes than the term “practice” suggests. Thus, as the knowledge, thought, and abilities of students or research participants change (Carr & Kemmis, 1986, p. 42), a reflexive process of teaching or research also changes, and as I have discovered in my own work, this kind of praxis can enable new forms of competence, collective cultural memory, and consciousness. According to Karenga, one of the founders of the modem Black Studies discipline, “Black Studies is critical and corrective of the inadequacies, omissions and distortions of traditional white studies” (Karenga, 1993, p. 18). The theoretical perspective of the discipline of Black Studies consists of an epistemological critique of the social order and its hidden costs and a critique of school knowledge and practices that sustain it. In this regard, Black Studies represents a critical perspective that transcends ameliorative multicultural educational approaches (King, 1995a). Wynter (1992a, 1992c, 1995) uses the term “deciphering practice” to describe how the Black Studies intellectual perspective can reveal the cultural rules of the “symbolic representational systems” and the “conceptual-cognitive categories” (Wynter, 1995, p. 13) of the social order that govern (and limit) our behavior, perceptions, and affective responses. Her culture-systemic analysis also reveals how conceptual Blackness and whiteness function in our society (Morrison, 1992), that is, how Black people’s socially constructed “otherness” plays the role of alter-ego in relation to the society’s normative conception of whiteness (Wynter, 1992a). Consequently, this alterego role actually gives Black people—or any group put in this position—a perspective advantage of alterity that is not the result of our ethnicity but of our “liminal” social position. Alterity not ethnicity, therefore, permits critically aware Black people to understand and to challenge white supremacy/racism for the benefit of humanity.5 That is why, as Karenga has observed, it is possible for Black Studies to be “critical” and “corrective.” Wynter’s culture-systemic analysis enables us to understand and to transcend the societal discourse that regards Black identity, intelligence, and ingenuity with suspicion—with the “taint” of inferiority that results from our supposed “genetic defectivity.” Hacker (1994) describes the persistence of this founding belief structure of race in American society thusly: “at the heart of the matter is a belief once freely voiced, but no longer openly aired, that African genes do not provide a capacity for complicated tasks” (p. 459). In sum, Wynter’s “deciphering practice” of Black Studies (Wynter, 1992c) aims to advance human freedom from the “specific perceptual-cognitive processes by which we know our reality” (Wynter, 1995, p. 13). Her analysis builds on the work of Carter G. Woodson, Frantz Fanon, Ralph Ellison, and others who laid the groundwork for the new studies that emerged in the 1960s, as well as scholars like Elsa Goveia and Asmarom Legesse, whose work contributes a Caribbean and African perspective on these matters.

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Building a more just society and world is a task that involves rewriting the knowledge in school curricula and the academic disciplines, as Wynter’s (1992b) work suggests, and rethinking the narratives that are embedded in our minds and bodies (that limit our cognitive and affective capacities). Thanks to the Black Studies Movement I developed greater understanding of, and I remain dedicated to, helping others understand the significance of the African presence in the history and development of this society—and indeed of all humanity (King & Wilson, 1990). Therefore, I have devised research methods that function pedagogically in culturally relevant ways to recuperate the truth of Black life and Cultural Knowledge from America’s myths, including the narrative of “race.” Hopefully, my work is contributing to the kind of education in which people need to know their own special cultural truths, that is, as Karenga suggests, to know themselves in order to live better and to make a better world. Thus, the research contexts and methods I have constructed for recovering the collective cultural memories of African American women, in particular, are designed to use our memories, knowledge, perceptions, and feelings to analyze and change our social and cultural condition. My research has examined the educational and social practice of Black women as mothers and as teachers, racism in the curriculum, and Black student alienation. In the early 1980s I began a series of group conversations with Black and White mothers about their social practice or pedagogy (Reeves [King], 1983). This experience led me to investigate the specific “emancipatory pedagogy” of Black teachers who were known to be particularly effective and dedicated to liberating education. I undertook these inquiries in response to the puzzlement that Black women—both mothers and teachers—expressed to me about the education and survival of Black children. The research that is reported in Black Mothers to Sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with Social Practice, and in several other publications analyzing Black student alienation and Black teachers’ emancipatory pedagogy (King, 1991b, 1992; King & Mitchell, 1995; King & Wilson, 1990; Reeves [King], 1983), illustrates the way in which I have involved the participants in my research in reciprocal and reflective dialogue with me and with each other. This line of inquiry began with listening to women who were trying to understand their own practice in relation to the predicament of Black students and families. My research documents the social practice/pedagogy of Black mothers and contradicts the (mis)representation of their work in the education and social science literature and popular culture as well. Vivid memories of the remarkable women in my community-family have inspired me to search for and to construct liberating research methods and contexts to challenge the images of Black women as inadequate mothers or emasculating matriarchs that I read about in graduate school, the popular stereotype in fiction, print, television, and film of Black women as maids, mammies, and Jezebels, and the invisibility of Black teachers in the research literature. That Black women have been more honestly

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and accurately portrayed in Black fiction and poetry is indicative of the “communicentric bias” in the conceptual paradigms and research methodologies that Gordon and his colleagues identified and critiqued (1990). About the same time that Carolyn Mitchell and I were working on our study of Black mothers and sons using African American literature, these researchers suggested that a marriage between the “arts, humanities and social sciences” is needed “in order to understand the lived experiences of Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans” (p. 18). In fact, we used African American literature in Black Mothers to Sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with Social Practice (King & Mitchell, 1995), in the way Gordon and his colleagues suggested. Also, in part as a result of methodological and ideological bias, my research and writing challenges positivist claims of a special, detached status of researcher “neutrality” and “objectivity” (King, 1995a, 1996a). I have advocated and modeled a more publicly partisan role for the researcher (and teacher) as a participant in the cooperative generation of “critical consciousness and forms of knowledge that serve social action” (King, 1991b, p. 265). Further, I argue that this is a “legitimate task of social research” (King & Mitchell, 1995) and education, a position that is perhaps more acceptable now that qualitative research and critical pedagogy have found a stronger foothold in the academy. The inquiry processes I have developed conclude by focusing participants’ attention on thought and action for changing the predicament of Black people. This pedagogical role for research that has evolved includes reciprocal group conversation (among participants and with the researcher/s) followed by the “practical-critical activity” of reflecting back on and co-analyzing our experience. This mode of inquiry helps participants recover and value their collective cultural memories and to develop historical consciousness. Critical, collective awareness of our history, centered in one’s cultural reality, as well as knowledge and awareness of systemic factors, our own complicity in our predicament, and of our potential as change agents is what I am referring to as historical consciousness. One of my studies, which was undertaken in 1986, is a participatory investigation of Black teachers’ emancipatory pedagogy (King, 1991b). The study concludes with the following observation regarding the pedagogical nature of this kind of participatory and liberating mode of inquiry: The discussion [with the Black teachers] that took place at the end of the research seminar suggests that this experience of reflecting on and sharing their thinking and practice holds some promise for supporting teachers in their professional development . . . [and] suggest[s] that the opportunities for reflective analysis and the supportive group experience that the study provided contributed to the teachers’ conscious awareness of system factors that affect their teaching. (King, 1991b, p. 264)

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The participating teachers found support in this research experience for their emancipatory pedagogy in opposition to alienating education. This study, which illustrates the research-as-pedagogy approach that I have been developing over a number of years, demonstrates the process of constructing a specific site of memory, which Clark refers to as lieux de mémoire (Clark, 1991; King, 1992).6 I concluded that this kind of research that involves [teachers] in learning with other teachers in this way can also help them gain the confidence and insight to work together to invent educational solutions for the problems of student alienation, professional disempowerment, and societal oppression (King, 1991b, p. 265). The search that led me to develop this kind of liberating research (and education) began when I was an undergraduate at Stanford University in the 1960s and we were awakened by reading Fanon’s (1963) Wretched of the Earth, Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and other writers who privileged the collective cultural memory and historical consciousness of those for whom education (or research) has been a deadly weapon (King & Wilson, 1990). This contradictory dialectic of alienating schooling and resistance, which has influenced my research, is discussed below.

Education and Research: Deadly Weapons or Tools for Liberation? Some of our citizens will have large amounts of money spent on their education, while others have none. Those who receive this privilege, therefore, have a duty to repay the sacrifice which others have made. They are like the man who has been given all the food available in a starving village in order that he may have the strength to bring supplies back from a distant place. . . . If he takes his food and does not bring help to his brothers he is a traitor. Similarly, if any of the young men and women who are given education by the people of this Republic adopt attitudes of superiority, or fail to use their knowledge to help the development of this country, then they are betraying our Union. (Nyerere, 1964) Alienating schooling annihilates or co-opts those who are unable to resist. Although I was not aware of it when I entered Stanford University in 1965, the Cultural Knowledge and the values that grounded me in my community-family also prepared me to resist schooling for alienation and annihilation (see Chapter 7 for my explanation of “Heritage Knowledge”). This was not necessarily a conscious and deliberate process of resistance but a journey of discovery and recovery of cultural memory that was aided by the Black Studies Movement, the “new scholarship” of the 1960s, and mentoring by older scholars who showed us the way. The social movements and the climate of the 1960s as well as my family’s socio-economic circumstances launched me on an inexorable

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search for the intellectual autonomy that is necessary to understand our special cultural truths and our social reality “in order to change it.” I was the first and “only one” to go to college but I had also been selected for this privilege, that is, for “sponsored mobility” by the first grade when, for example, I was chosen to play the lead role of Jane in the school play. My mother has helped me remember that I learned the lines for all the characters not just my own. Certainly, the teachers appreciated my abilities. As the years passed, however, I watched as my family members and peers were utterly destroyed by the same alienating schooling that promoted and enabled my “success.” Without consciously rejecting this unsettling reality, I nevertheless began searching for something better than education for assimilation, alienation, or annihilation. When I entered Stanford University during the height of the Black liberation movements and the Black Arts Movement in the Diaspora and in Africa, Black students had the opportunity to be inspired and challenged by Black scholars, artists, and activists throughout the Black World. Amiri Baraka brought his revolutionary vision to the campus. In a riveting recital of his revolutionary poetry Baraka’s challenge was: “Who will survive America? Black people of course, very few Negroes and no colored people at all!” Karenga chided us to remember that the names of the workers who had built the buildings where we were studying would never be memorialized in placards on the walls. Reading James Boggs’s (1963) book, Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook was also inspiring. Angela Davis, Gwen Patton Woods, and Sonja Sanchez were some of the women who moved us to more critical thought and action by their heroic example. We read Fanon in a community study group that St. Clair Drake invited us to attend. “Drake,” as he was fondly known, introduced us to the Black intellectual heritage in the larger Black World, as we struggled to overcome our miseducation in our courses. The dialectic of alienation and resistance that propelled me toward forms of consciousness and self-possession as an African-descent person also included particular community-family-church experiences that helped shape my identity, education, and my idea of work. I distinctly remember, for instance, a thunderous sermon a visiting minister delivered at our church one night. “You are Black, people. You are a Black people!” he roared, putting extra stress on the word “Black” each time and pounding the pulpit with his huge hands to punctuate this heretical message. We knew this minister; he was from a church in Oakland and he was a laborer like my father. His rugged hands, like my father’s, were chapped, swollen, and calloused from digging ditches and shoveling wet cement. The church sat in stunned silence. At home later that evening, as my mother and I exchanged furtive glances, we laughed nervously and we whispered these heretofore unspoken words again: “You are Black people!” It felt good. Never had we heard such a fearless declaration of racial pride. A study of Black history, of course, shows the powerful role of Black ministers and the church in the Black liberation struggle.

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Just as the Black Panthers were organizing in the community, we Black students were struggling for change on our campuses. By the time Black students at San Francisco State launched the Black Studies Movement, I was ready to reject the idea that education should help us escape our community, family, identity, and the role and responsibilities of being Black. I was one of the student leaders at Stanford who demanded changes in university admissions and the curriculum and the university’s relationship to the community as well. An indication of the miseducation against which we were struggling is that, before I began to study with St. Clair Drake, I discovered the Harlem Renaissance and the writing of W. E. B. DuBois in Europe, when I was studying at Stanford’s campus in Florence, Italy. No teacher in high school or at the university had ever mentioned this watershed of Black intellectual history and culture. A poem by the Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuny (1923) titled “No Images,” that I read for the first time in 1968 in an Italian library, spoke directly to my predicament. When I visited the Louvre in Paris, I was amazed to learn that the Egyptians were actually Black like me. What I saw was the unmistakable Black color the Egyptians used to depict themselves. I stood there dazed, motionless, and speechless in front of the wall sections taken from the Egyptian tombs. Other memories of my awakening historical consciousness are more painful. While I was in Florence enjoying the privilege of studying the Italian language, absorbing European art and architecture and the glory of the European Renaissance (and recovering my African roots), Black communities back in the United States were under siege. I felt helpless and betrayed. Black people were dying in the streets as cities burned and tanks rolled through our communities. I could barely express my anguish and distress to my fellow students. When I returned home, my older brother described how he sat up throughout the night with a loaded rifle across his lap trying to decide if he should go out in the streets and use it. As far as I am concerned, my consciousness, my educational privilege, and my opportunity to make a contribution to the “race” have been bought at a terrible price. Although I excelled in school with the sponsorship of teachers at every grade level, many of my relatives and classmates, who were alienated from school were expelled, failed, jailed, and some were killed. I have never ceased to be in awe at the totality and brutality of their destruction. The disproportionate number of Black men, women, and youth in prison today, the so-called “war on drugs,” and the criminalization of Black men in particular are manifestations of alienating schooling for annihilation. Therefore, alienation, a central focus of sociological analysis, is not an abstract concept for me. I understand very well the distinction that Wynter makes between the supposed nihilism of Black existence today and our nihilated (néantiseé) identities (Wynter, 1989). My freshman class at Stanford in 1965 included the largest group of Black students that had ever entered the university at one lime. There were 25 of us and fewer than a dozen black students were already enrolled. Earl, a brother from Watts in

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inner-city Los Angeles, used to wear his “stingy brim” hat and brightly colored “Bossa Nova” shirts that stood out against the stark whiteness of White Plaza in the center of the campus. Before the end of our second year, Earl was dead. I believe that I became a sociology major to seek answers to save our lives. It wasn’t sociology but the 1960s that saved my life by making it possible for me to question the predominate research paradigm and the prevailing body of knowledge about Black folks in this society that I was introduced to in my study of sociology and other courses. The process of becoming educated not merely schooled (Shujaa, 1994) included participating in the student-led, communityinspired movement to transform the university and use our knowledge in service to the community. We were deeply involved in the Black community of East Palo Alto located at the opposite end of sedate, palm tree-lined University Avenue, the main thoroughfare in the city of Palo Alto that leads to Stanford. Real community problems and the reality of oppression sharpened my understanding of the need for, and the possibility of, liberating education and research. For example, in my junior year I asked my sociological theory professor how this course could help me address the life and death issues I was confronting in East Palo Alto, where I lived at that time. He asked me if I ever worked crossword puzzles, which he described as an intellectually challenging pastime. Somewhat taken aback by this, I explained that I was too busy tutoring high school students who couldn’t read and who were dropping out of school. So, I said, “No,” I had not spent any time working puzzles. Quite matter-offactly he said. “Perhaps you are not intellectually capable of succeeding here at Stanford. Maybe you should go down the road to San Jose State and study Social Work.” I excused myself and that was the last time I sought his assistance. Fortunately, I was developing other standards by which to measure my intellectual abilities and my potential for success at Stanford. My response to his assessment of me was to do good work on my own culture-centered terms. When I was a senior in the Sociology Honors program the next year, I began to critique the theoretical assumptions and the research methodology taught in my sociology courses as objective, neutral, and universal knowledge.7 I was both disturbed and challenged in another sociology course that used Native American Indian Coyote tales to illustrate achievement motivation theory and to demonstrate a statistical procedure for quantitative content analysis. The professor presented research that purported to show that Native American people have a low level of motivation to achieve, as demonstrated by an analysis of their folktales. I found the analysis to be culturally biased and offensive, so I devised a different statistical procedure. Mine showed that Coyote, the protagonist in the Native American tales, as well as “High John the Conqueror” and “Stack-o-lee,” folk heroes in African American tales (Lester, 1969), demonstrated more motivation to achieve than characters like “Humpty Dumpty,” “Little Miss Muffet,” and “Jack and Jill” in European Mother Goose nursery

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rhymes. Although the TA asked me if I had done this work myself, 1 received an “A” on the assignment. My collective cultural memory and my engagement with the Black intellectual tradition enabled me to think such autonomous, oppositional thoughts.

Research With/For the Community: From Cultural Knowledge to Social Action No one ever thinks that Duke Ellington might well have been a classical composer, but [that] he was looking for something better. (Ellison, 1972, p. 408) The Black Studies Movement also called for both research and service in the community. As a result of my experience tutoring barely literate Black high school students, I developed an honors thesis research project that focused on generating new knowledge related to the problem of student alienation. This project, which I completed at Ravenswood High School in East Palo Alto, focused on how Black students understood and interpreted their own alienation and school failure. Working with a sympathetic school counselor, I developed an innovative qualitative research design that permitted me to talk with Black students about these problems using examples that reflected their own lived experience of schooling. The counselor and I invented a group of fictitious “cases,” including photographs, school records, and family backgrounds for students who were failing, doing poorly academically, or were not achieving their full potential in school. I presented these cases in interviews with a group of Black high school students whose records were similar to those of the ones we had invented. My purpose was to invite these students to help me understand their own behavior (e.g., cutting class) and “lack of motivation” as well as how they perceived the fictitious cases. One student in this study offered a perceptive observation that I will never forget. This young Black woman said, “If he [the student in the case] knew why his parents are the way they are and why he is the way he is, maybe he could do better.” Her observation has been a guiding focus of my work since then. My doctoral research a few years later involved a behavior change/decisionmaking curriculum intervention for Black high school students that extended and built upon this honors thesis project. Since then, the research that I have conducted on the emancipatory pedagogy of Black teachers, the social practice of Black mothers, as well as analyses of alienating curriculum and racism in textbooks (King, 1992), reflect the importance of “knowing why” in order to enable students, teachers, and parents to “do better.” My research and writing focuses on alienation and consciousness, culture-centered knowledge, ideology, and hegemony, and bias in research, curriculum, and school knowledge. In short, I have been searching for ways of doing sociology better—in a way that

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does not serve oppression. My research and teaching can be seen as an ongoing, systematic study of how collective cultural memory, which is a form of folk knowledge, and historical consciousness can be mobilized to address problems in education and society. One premise of my research and teaching is that liberating methods of inquiry that use the Cultural Knowledge or lore of Black people can support social action that serves human freedom and emanicipatory education, including transformative, culture-centered pedagogy and curriculum. According to Robinson (1990), the word “folklore” is a composite of “folk” . . . meaning “people” . . . and “lore,” meaning “knowledge” (p. 212). Robinson continues: Thus, it is the knowledge of the people, not just any knowledge but a particular knowledge that has proved to be valuable within a community because it has passed the test of time, a lore that people have found to contain important representations of themselves as a group. (p. 212) My work is grounded in Black lore or Cultural Knowledge, the Black Studies epistemology, and dialectical social theory (Fay, 1975; Giddens, 1979). This theory holds that people develop particular forms of knowledge (e.g., Black Cultural Knowledge) which, like class consciousness, reflect “a political and social awareness that grows out of a common experience; perceived common interests and shared self-knowledge and self-definition” (Eyerman, 1981, p. 283). I referred to such Cultural Knowledge as “the survival structure of Black life” in my doctoral dissertation (Reeves [King], 1974) and as “Diaspora Literacy” (Clark, 1991) in a more recent publication (King, 1992). In Black Mothers to Sons I describe the need for a “dialectical research strategy” to recover these forms of knowledge, that is, a research strategy “which aims to help people discover more about their own lives in a culturally relevant way” (King & Mitchell, 1995, p. 67). Here is the description of my approach to this kind of liberating social science: This methodology recognizes that particular knowledge of the world contained in people’s daily cultural practice and social experience is not merely distorted by the dominant ideology. Rather, knowledge generated from and grounded in people’s culture and experience can be liberating as well. Illuminating the conditions which produce this kind of liberating, culturally relevant knowledge is the long-term theoretical and practical goal of the Afrocentric method. This methodology is the outgrowth of a conviction (and theoretical perspective) that social science inquiry can be a liberating process, which simultaneously fulfills certain conditions of science. From this perspective what differentiates this partisan (non-neutral) mode of inquiry from a mere ideological exercise in

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self-deception is that it generates knowledge using procedures that are systematic and public, that is, knowledge that is subject to verification or refutation. (p. 67) Although I had long since graduated, I sought Drake’s reaction to this chapter because these were issues we had discussed many times over the years. It was very gratifying when he read it and told me that my position was “well argued.” In fact, since this book was first published in 1990, other liberatory and critical approaches have evolved among Afrocentric and feminist scholars and researchers in the decolonized world (Ballenger, 1992; Collins, 1991; Dubell et al., 1980). In a chapter in the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, I discuss several exemplary educational models, which I refer to as “culture-centered,” that value community knowledge and “redirect learning [and research] toward community needs” (King, 1995a, p. 281). These models include Maiga’s (1995) Gao School Museum, a pedagogical innovation that was developed in Mali, West Africa; Fasheh’s (1990) critical community-based approach to mathematics that is responsive to the Palestinian revolt: and the critical, culturally grounded teaching interventions MacLeod (1991) developed working with Black students in rural Mississippi. Both Maiga’s Gao School Museum and MacLeod’s culturecentered critical pedagogy, which builds on the freedom schools of the Civil Rights movement, “get students directly involved in studying their culture and emphasize the need for social action through collaborative research that enhances their academic learning” (King, 1995a, p. 281). As my research evolved, I also resolved certain contradictions and criticisms of critical pedagogy and research grounded in critical theory. For example, opponents of these approaches argue that there is an inevitable element of coercion or indoctrination involved in critical theory/pedagogy, whether used in the classroom or the research process. In addition to concerns about ideological imposition, however, Black researchers have experienced the countervailing positivist admonition that researchers should be objective and, therefore, detached from the “object” of study as a particularly burdensome dilemma. I experienced this dilemma in graduate school and addressed it in my doctoral dissertation in the following way: Social science research as a vehicle of the oppressor’s ideology and consciousness, which the black [graduate] student must internalize to be accepted as a full-fledged member of the profession, conflicts with the values, goals, and experiences all oppressed people necessarily share. (Reeves [King], 1974, p. 87) The Dean of the School of Education at Stanford at the time, Arthur Coladarci, suggested that I address such concerns by including an additional chapter in my

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doctoral dissertation called “The Black Sociology of Knowledge.” At first, I believed I was given this assignment as a sanction for having taken a public (and political) position that was critical of the cultural deficit paradigm that was prevalent in the School of Education at that time. Actually, the assignment helped me tremendously: It challenged me to review the literature systematically and to critique the prevailing paradigm in writing. Consequently, in this chapter I expressed my understanding of the partisan role of the researcher and the sociocultural foundations of research (and teaching) by, for, and with the people (King, 1988, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1997). Affirming my cultural groundings in this way was an invaluable lesson, for as C. L. R. James understood so well, culture is also a form of political expression (Hamilton, 1992). With the assistance of professors like St. Clair Drake and Elizabeth G. Cohen, who listened to me, challenged me, and encouraged me to express and develop my views, eventually I was able to articulate an alternative to the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological orthodoxy of the time in sociology and education. In the process, I also discovered the scholarship of other Black and Third World scholars who were raising these issues in other fields, including the humanities. For instance, the Black essayist Mel Watkins emphasized the importance of using our own lens to view and interpret Black life and culture. I cited his critical essay on James Brown’s lyrics in my doctoral dissertation to make the point that the Black alternative to the “meaningless and fragmented existence of mainstream American culture [and education] has been an intense concentration on the personal in social relationships” (Watkins, 1971, p. 30).8 Scholar-activists like Grace and James Boggs provided incisive readings of reality. In fact, an essay by Grace Boggs analyzing the educational crisis facing Black youth that I cited in my doctoral thesis, is still urgently relevant today. In this essay Grace Boggs noted that: “The overwhelming majority of black youth see no relationship between this type of education and their daily lives in the community or the problems of today’s world which affect them so intimately” (Boggs, 1974, p. 69). My point is that in graduate school I experienced a similar kind of alienation. However, our predecessors in the Black intellectual tradition had demonstrated ways to “many their thought” in Wynter’s words (1995) to the plight of the oppressed (Childs, 1989; Fasheh, 1990; King & Mitchell, 1995; MacLeod, 1991), and sometimes asking my mother or grandmother their views on a particular subject also kept me grounded. That is to say, the collective cultural memory of the lived realities of the Black Experience aided my search for ways to recover and to use the knowledge and cultural practices that have been of value to Black people’s survival. Thus, both critical scholarly analyses and the folk or traditional wisdom of our “living thinkers” (J. James, 1993) have been central to my development as an activist scholar and educator. Though challenging, graduate school was part and parcel of my continuing journey of discovering a larger and ongoing Black intellectual tradition of

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struggle. In the process I questioned the concepts, methods, and worldview that research terms such as “informant,” “collaborator,” “control group,” “target population” as well as labels like “dropout” and “culturally deprived” connote. I rejected methods and concepts that disempower people by making them “objects” rather than “subjects.” Eventually, I resolved the contradiction between the conflicting interests and the culture of the social science profession and the needs and culture(s) of oppressed people by creating opportunities to include those whom I am studying with as full-fledged partners in the research process (and in my pedagogy). Although I use methods like participant observation in my research, I accept without ambivalence the responsibility and leadership involved in modifying this methodology in order to do research in partnership with people in ways that serve the community’s interests (King, 1988). Despite the psychic holocaust of racism (King & Mitchell, 1995), in my community-village we lived and worked in respectful solidarity; upheld the ethic and dignity of good work; and demonstrated racial solidarity while valuing cultural democracy. As a result of a deepening understanding of this cultural legacy, my commitment to a liberating mode of culture-centered research and education for all people also deepened. My recent research and pedagogy in teacher education opposes society’s obsessive valorization of whiteness and challenges ideological distortions in the curriculum and the culture. The experiences described in this chapter have helped me to build a pedagogy for (mostly White) credential candidates that responds to a form of racism that I have identified and defined as dysconsciousness (King, 1991a, 1995c, 1997).9

Conclusion Malcolm: The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals.You have to wake people up first; then you’ll get action. Miss Nadle: Wake them up to their exploitation? Malcolm: No, to their humanity, to their own worth, and to their heritage. The biggest difference between the parallel oppression of the Jew and the Negro is that the Jew never lost his pride in being a Jew. He never ceased to be a man. He knew he had made a significant contribution to the world, and his sense of his own value gave him the courage to fight back. It enabled him to act and think independently, unlike our people and our leaders. (Breitman 1965, p. 198) My work as a sociologist of education and teacher educator in both university and community contexts relies on reflective, experiential, community-based inquiry methods that evoke and use Black people’s collective cultural memory in order to awaken people’s historical consciousness of oppression and agency

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(King, 1997). During a recent group interview that I organized with several Black women who wanted to start a community women’s group, for example, we shared memories of women who had exerted a strong, positive influence on our lives. This group conversation led us to rediscover ourselves in contrast to the negative image of Black women, represented, for example, by the hideous Aunt Jemima stereotype (“Ain’t cha mammy black? Ain’t cha mammy on the pancake box?”). By listening to each other’s stories, we discovered that Black and White people had called our foremothers “aunt” as a sign of profound respect for their special status and power in the community. The realization that “Aunt Jemima” could symbolize Black women’s power rather than our degradation was so compelling and energizing that it became a generative theme for the women’s leadership development group. We called our group: “The Jemima Circle.” The experiential curriculum I developed involved a culturecentered examination of our skills, Cultural Knowledge, and lived experience. I have used this kind of community praxis or research-as-pedagogy to recover our Cultural Knowledge, to keep us from forgetting who we are as Africandescent people, and to enable us to realize what more we are capable of achieving. As the African proverb says, “Knowledge is another name for strength” (King, 1992). The analysis of this learning experience will focus on the use of African American Cultural Knowledge in adult learning, women’s development, and community change. In conclusion, the community-family values and cultural expression of the Black folk tradition that have kept our humanity intact and the Black intellectual critique of white supremacy/racism have been integral to my search for ways to make education and research tools for liberation. This chapter illustrates my liberatory praxis of education and research, yet it is well to remember that “the half has not been told.”

Notes 1

Urban Black males, for example, face a 10 percent chance of death by homicide (for whites, it’s 1 in 80); 27 percent decline in average real income for black men in their 20s from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s; during roughly the same period, they filled just one out of every 1,000 new jobs created; white life expectancy is still rising, but life spans for black males declined four years in a row in the 1980s, dipping below 65. . . . Black males account for one in four cases of AIDS, 46 percent of all prisoners in the United States; they are jailed at a rate four times higher than in South Africa. . . . In Milwaukee, black males account for less than 30 percent of the students, but they face 80 percent of the suspensions and over 90 percent of the expulsions. Less than 2 percent of black males maintain an A or B average and less than 20 percent sustain a C average or better. (Karp, 1991, p. 87)

2 Trinidadian scholar-activist and organizer, C. L. R. James lived for a time in the U.S. A culture and social change theoretician and revolutionary strategist and thinker, he wrote a history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1963), from the perspective of the enslaved Africans.

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3 St. Clair Drake (1987) explicated the importance of the Black Experience and studying it from a Black Perspective in Black Folk Here and There. Drake was one of my mentors at Stanford University. As head of the African and Afro-American Studies Program, he introduced a generation of Black students to the Black intellectual tradition and to rigorous, independent thought in our own interests. See the dedication to his memory in, “In search of African liberation pedagogy: Multiple contexts of education and struggle,” which I wrote as guest editor for this theme issue of the Journal of Education (Volume 172, number 2, 1990, pp. 3–4). 4 A schema is “a mental codification of experience that includes a particular organized way of perceiving cognitively and responding to a complex situation or set of stimuli” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary). I discuss this pedagogy in greater detail in: “ ‘Thank You For Opening Our Minds’: On Praxis, Transmutation and Black Studies in Teacher Development” (King, 1997). 5 Sylvia Wynter discusses the meaning of alterity in several publications, including the Dictionary of Multicultural Education (Grant & Ladson-Billings, 1997). 6 In an article that describes my analysis of and involvement in California’s controversial history textbook adoption in 1991, I use the term lieux de mémoire to refer to the practical-critical research context that I constructed to investigate parents’ and teachers’ understanding of the Black Studies critique of racism in these texts (King, 1992). 7 A number of publications dating from this period questioned the bias of the social science disciplines, particularly sociology and psychology. See Alkalimat (1969) and Ladner (1973). 8 Space does not permit me to discuss the significance of interpersonal relationships and values such as reciprocity and respect for example, with regard to the communal nature of Black life. See the discussion of mutuality and reciprocity in Black family relations in Black Mothers to Sons (King & Mitchell, 1995) and the discussion of AlasalTarey, a Songhay (West African) cultural concept, in “The Purpose of Schooling for African American Children: Including Cultural Knowledge” (King, 1994). Also, urban anthropologist Elijah Anderson’s research demonstrates the importance today of respect among Black youth, whose “code of the streets” emphasizes not being “dissed” or disrespected (Anderson, 1990). 9 Elsewhere I define “limited and distorted understanding my students have demonstrated about inequity and cultural diversity” as “dysconsciousness” that is, “. . . an uncritical habit of mind [including perceptions, attitudes, assumption, and beliefs] that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given” (King, 1991a, p. 134).

References Alkalimat, A. H. (1969). The ideology of a Black social science, Black Scholar, 4(2), 28–35. Anderson, E. (1990). Streetwise: Race, class and change in an urban community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ballenger, C. (1992). “Because you like us”: The language of control. Harvard Educational Review, 62(2), 199–208. Boggs, G. (1974). Education: The great obsession. In Institute of the Black World (Ed.), Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the colonized world. Harvard Educational Review, 2, 61–81. Boggs, J. (1963). The new American revolution: Pages from a Negro worker’s notebook. New York: Monthly Review Press. Breitman, G. (Ed.). (1965). Malcolm X Speaks. New York: Grove Press.

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Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming critical: Education, knowledge and action research. London: Falmer Press. Childs, J. B. (1989). Leadership, conflict, and cooperation in Afro-American social thought. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Clark, V. (1991). Developing Diaspora literacy and Marasa consciousness. In H. Spillers (Ed.), Comparative American identities (pp. 40–61). New York: Routledge. Collins, P. H. (1991). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge. Cuny, W. (1923). No images. In J. W. Johnson (Ed.), The book of American Negro poetry (p. 283). New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Drake, S. C. (1987). Black folk here and there. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for AfroAmerican Studies. Dubell, F., Erasmie, T., & De Vries, J. (Eds.). (1980). Research for the people: Research by the people. Linkoping, Sweden: Linkoping University. Ellison, R. (1972). Remarks at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Conference on the Negro American, 1965. In A. Chapman (Ed.), New Black voices: Criticism (pp. 402–408). New York: The New American Library. Eyerman, R. (1981). False consciousness and ideology in Marxist theory. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Fanon, F. (1990). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. Fasheh, M. (1990). Community education: To reclaim and transform what has been made invisible. Harvard Educational Review, 60(1), 19–35. Fay, B. (1975). Social theory and political practice. London: George Allen and Unwin. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum Press. Gay, G., & Baber, W. L. (Eds.). (1987). Expressively Black. New York: Praeger. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in sociological theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gordon, E. W., Miller, F., & Rollock, D. (1990). Coping with communicentric bias in knowledge production in the social sciences. Educational Researcher, 19(3), 14–19. Grant, C., & Ladson-Billings, G. (1997). Dictionary of multicultural education. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press. Hacker, A. (1994, April 4). The elusion of equality. The Nation, 258(13), 457–459. Hamilton, C. (1992, March). A way of seeing: Culture as political expression in the works of C.L.R. James. Journal of Black Studies, 22(3), 429–433. Harper, F. E. W. (1892). Iola Leroy, Or shadows uplifted (3rd ed.). Boston: James H. Earle. James, C. L. R. (1963). The Black Jacobins. New York: Vintage Press. James, C. L. R. (1970). The Atlantic slave trade and slavery: Some interpretations of their significance in the development of the United States and the western world. In J. A. Williams & C. F. Harris (Eds.), Amistad I (pp. 119–164). New York: Vintage Books. James, J. (1993). African philosophy, theory and “living thinkers.” In J. J. Farmer & R. Farmer (Eds.), Spirit, space and survival: African American women in (White) Academe (pp. 31–46). New York: Routledge. Karenga, M. (1993). Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karp, S. (1991, June). Is black male all right? Z Magazine, pp. 86–88. Kilminster, R. (1979). Praxis and method. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. King, J. E. (1988). A Black woman speaks on leadership. Sage, 5(2), 49–52. King, J. E. (1991a). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the miseducation of teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146.

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King, J. E. (1991b). Unfinished business: Black student alienation and Black teachers’ emancipatory pedagogy. In M. Foster (Ed.), Readings on equal education. Volume II: Qualitative investigations into schools and schooling (pp. 245–271). New York: AMS Press. King, J. E. (1992). Diaspora literacy and consciousness in the struggle against miseducation in the Black community. Journal of Negro Education, 61(3), 317–340. King, J. E. (1994). The purpose of schooling for African American children: Including cultural knowledge. In E. R. Hollins, J. E. King, & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Teaching diverse populations: Formulating a knowledge base (pp. 25–44). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. King, J. E. (1995a). Culture-centered knowledge: Black studies, curriculum transformation and social action. In J. A. Banks & C. M. Banks (Eds.), The handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 265–290). New York: Macmillan (First Edition). King, J. E. (1995b). Nationalizing the curriculum or downsizing citizenship? In E. Eisner (Ed.), The hidden consequences of a national curriculum (pp. 119–144). AERA Presidential Public Service Monograph. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association. King, J. E. (1995c). Race and education: In what ways does race affect the educational process? A response. In J. L. Kincheloe & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Reframing education’s conversations (2nd ed.) (pp. 159–179). New York: Peter Lang. King, J. E. (1996a). Bad luck, bad blood, bad faith: Ideological hegemony and the oppressive language of hoodoo social science. In J. Kinchloe, S. Steinberg, & A. Gresson (Eds.), Measured Lies: The Bell Curve re-examined (pp. 177–192). New York: St. Martin’s Press. King, J. E. (1996b). Race/ethnicity. In J. Jones et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of AfricanAmerican Education (pp. 380–384). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. King, J. E. (1997). Thank you for opening our minds: On praxis, transmutation and Black Studies in teacher development. In J. E. King, E. R. Hollins, & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Preparing teachers for cultural diversity (pp. 156–169). New York: Teachers College Press. King, J. E., & Mitchell, C. A. (1995). Black mothers to sons: Juxtaposing African American literature with social practice (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang Publishers, Inc. King, J. E., & Wilson, T. L. (1990). Being the soul-freeing substance: A legacy of hope in Afro humanity. Journal of Education, 172(2), 9–27. Ladner, J. (1973). The death of white sociology. New York: Vintage Books. Lester, J. (1969). Black folktales. New York: Grove Press. MacLeod, J. (1991). Bridging street and school. Journal of Negro Education, 60(3), 260–275. Maiga, H. (1995). Bridging classroom, curriculum, and community: The Gao School Museum. Theory into Practice, 34(3), 209–215. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness in the literary imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. National Alliance of Black School Educators. (1984). Saving the African American child. Washington, D.C.: Author. Nyerere, M. J. K. (1964, May 12). Unpublished speech. Retrieved November 15, 2014, from http://msechuonpolitics.blogspot.com/2009/09/right-to-education-in-tanzania. html. Reeves, J. K. (King, J. E.). (1974). An experimental evaluation of a behavior change curriculum for Black high school students (Unpublished doctoral thesis). Stanford University. Reeves, J. K. (King, J. E.). (1983, April). A comparison of mothers’ and teachers’ educational practice by race and social class: A dialectical research strategy. Paper presented at the American Educational Research annual meeting. Montreal, Canada.

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Robinson, B. J. (1990). Africanisms in the study of folklore. In J. E. Holloway (Ed.), Africanisms in American Culture (pp. 211–224). Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Shujaa, M. J. (1994). Too much schooling, too little education: A paradox of Black life in white societies. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Watkins, M. (1971). The lyrics of James Brown: Money won’t change your lickin’ stick. In J. A. Williams & C. F. Harris (Eds.), Amistad 2 (pp. 21–43). New York: Random House. Woodson, C. G. (1933). The miseducation of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers. Wynter, S. (1989). Beyond the word of Man: Glissant and the new discourse of the Antilles. World Literature Today, 63, 637–648. Wynter, S. (1992a). Do not call us Negroes: How multicultural texts perpetuate racism. San Francisco: Aspire. Wynter, S. (1992b). “No humans involved”: An open letter to my colleagues. Voices of the African Diaspora, 8(2), 13–16. Wynter, S. (1992c). Re-thinking aesthetics: Notes toward a deciphering practice. In M. Cham (Ed.), Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean cinema (pp. 237–279). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Wynter, S. (1995). 1492: A new world view. In V. L. Hyatt & R. Nettleford (Eds.), Race, discourse, and the origins of the Americas (pp. 5–57). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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3 CRITICAL AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN TEACHER EDUCATION A Blues Epistemology for Cultural Well-Being and a Reason for Knowing

Defenders of white blues are often proponents of “color-blindness” as the ultimate weapon of anti-racism, but many of these color-blind whites are really resisting the importance of consciousness of race and race matters, with all the nagging reminders of racism contained therein. They believe that by refusing to use race as a criterion for anything, they are being the ultimate non-racists, but they are actually blinding themselves to the complexity of racial issues. (Garon, 1995, p. 66) I think we’re at a moment now in which a blues nation has to learn from a blues people. (Cornell West, Interview with Toni Morrison, 2005) People who have no choice but to live their life in their black skins know racism when they see it. Racism is never subtle to the victim. Only White people say race doesn’t matter. (Carrie Morris, Pathways School Faculty Member, 1996)1 Nobody’s coming to get us. . . . Nobody’s coming to get us. (Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, 2005)2 But can you expect teachers to revolutionize the social order for the good of the community? Indeed, we must expect this very thing. The educational system of a country is worthless unless it accomplishes this very task. (Carter G. Woodson, 1933)3

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Introduction A growing body of teacher education research documents the fact that many experienced and future teachers resist a critically transformative understanding of race and racial inequity. This resistance, which can be understood as a result of miseducation, is an ongoing challenge for the profession and for teacher education research. Emergent inquiry-based pedagogical approaches that use the knowledge traditions and lived experiences of marginalized and oppressed groups in teacher learning (and un-learning racism) with community members suggest possible ways out of this knowledge crisis. However, research on teacher education has yet to address the belief structure of race in ideologically biased school/academic knowledge and research that contributes to the miseducation of teachers, although a tradition of Black scholarship has long recognized this epistemological problem (McDaniels, 2006). Writing nearly a century ago in 1917, for example, Black sociologist, lawyer, and historian, George Washington Ellis, pinpointed the hegemonic role of ideological knowledge in maintaining the mythology of race and perpetuating racial injustice. For Ellis “scholarly activity had to be moved from the ideological position of racism to the ideological position of democracy” for the benefit of the entire society (Childs, 1989, p. 87). A few years later, the research of another Black historian, educator, and activist scholar, Carter G. Woodson, who founded “Black History Week/Month” in 1927, showed how ideological school knowledge obstructs democratic community in the U.S. His analysis of mis-education, that is, how ideologically biased school knowledge systematically teaches Whites to feel superior and Black people to feel inferior, led Woodson (1933) to call for teachers to “revolutionize the social order” (p. 145) The integrity of Black culture, including its African roots, was fundamental in these scholarly challenges that Ellis, Woodson, and others have launched to combat the hegemony of ideologically biased knowledge (Gleason, 2006; King, 1992, 1995). Scholarly defense of Black culture and heritage has been necessary, not solely to set the historical record straight on behalf of African Americans, but also as an investment in human freedom from dehumanizing supremacist ideologies. The “convergence of critical thought and action” (King, 2004, p. 351) and the inextricable connection between the general welfare of humanity and Black people’s cultural well-being are defining qualities of this Black intellectual tradition that have been carried forward in the modem discipline of Black Studies (Gordon, 1990, 1995). A Black Studies theoretical analysis is employed in this chapter to consider how (and how well) critical and qualitative research (and practice) in teacher education produces knowledge, understanding, and social action for racial-social justice. This hyphenated term is used in order not to lose sight of Black people’s group survival needs, that is, the “requirements for black existence,” in transformative visions of equity and democratic inclusion (Cone, 1972, p. 27).

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Focus of the Chapter This chapter focuses on four inter-related genres of critical and qualitative research in teacher education with racial-social justice aims: (1) critical race theorizing, (2) whiteness studies, (3) critical ethnography, and (4) practitioner inquiry, including action research “in, on, and for” teacher education (CochranSmith & Lytle, 2004). The Black Studies theoretical analysis that informs the discussion of these modes of inquiry focuses analytical attention on the belief structure of race in ideologically biased knowledge in schools and academe and epistemologies and indigenous knowledge traditions from the ideological position of democracy. One example, the epistemology of the Black experience embodied in the African American blues tradition, will be used as a heuristic framework to suggest cultural well-being as a measure of what/how these modes of research can contribute to equity and democratic inclusion in education and society. It will be argued that a crisis of knowledge in teacher education research (and practice) exists because of the absence of marginalized and oppressed people’s epistemologies as a foundation of knowledge for teacher learning and for teaching. Thus, the discussion of these genres of research goes beyond a focus only on the miseducation of teachers. Rather, the emphasis also is on producing knowledge for the benefit of marginalized communities and the general society’s welfare. Several overlapping questions will illuminate this missing cultural well-being framework: (1) What/whose social vision does research honor and project? (2) Is the cultural well-being of marginalized groups a consideration? (3) What is missing in the theory and methods of these genres of inquiry, given these group survival needs, that is, the “requirements of black existence,” for example? (4) Can research informed by the blues epistemology of the Black experience advance understanding of the interconnections among Black people’s cultural well-being, positive inter-group relations, and humanity’s general welfare?

Organization of the Chapter The chapter is divided into four parts. The first part, “Epistemologies and Knowledge Traditions for Cultural Well-Being,” introduces the Black Studies analysis of the ideology of race and the blues epistemology of the Black experience. “Decolonizing” methodology and theory articulated and used by indigenous peoples that complement the blues epistemology are also presented. The second part of the chapter, “From Critical Social Theories/Theorizing to Critical Research Methods,” briefly reviews the genealogy of critical theory and methods in the social sciences and teacher education. The research examples discussed illustrate various critical methods, including Critical Race Theory, critical ethnography, as well as investigations of the discourse of “whiteness,”

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and feminist research approaches. The third section of the chapter, “A Continuum of Practitioner Inquiry: Learning to Teach for Social Change,” examines the use of various qualitative research methods in teacher education research— from individual narratives to ethnography to action research in community settings. The final section, “Beyond the Crisis of Knowledge in Teacher Education Research and Practice,” presents teacher education methods that incorporate community knowledge and new roles for community members that support mutually beneficial teacher learning and development.

Epistemologies and Knowledge Traditions for Cultural WellBeing In spite of a burgeoning body of multicultural education literature (Banks & Banks, 2004; Goodwin & Swartz, 2004; McAllister & Irvine, 2000), teacher education research has produced no accepted consensus about what teachers should “know, be able to do and be like” to promote and safeguard the cultural well-being, sense of belonging, and agency of African American learners (King, 1994; Lee, 2001) or other marginalized students. Murrell (2001) offers this cogent description of “capable” urban teachers who: must be aware that there is a deep and profound violence embedded in the fabric of American popular and institutional culture that is a significant and toxic part of children’s school experience. Where there is not an antiracist awareness and explicit pedagogy for working with African American children and families, there persists an insidious violence that even the most well-meaning teacher will be a participant in despite beliefs and values to the contrary. (p. 75) In this vein S. King and Castenell (2001) assert: “the task of fighting racism has to be the bottom line” if educational institutions are going to prepare “teachers with the will and the strategies to teach all children” (p. 10). Assaults on “blackness as a cultural reality,” as in the following example, is one form that racism takes (Murrell, 1997, p. 33). A student teacher related in one of my courses how a White teacher at an award-winning elementary school described the Black children in her classroom. The teacher said that there were two groups of Black children in her assigned classroom: the “black-Blacks” and the “whiteBlacks.” The teacher informed her that attempting to teach the “black-Blacks” would be a waste of time because they have “Black values.” Teaching the “white-Blacks,” on the other hand, who have “White values,” would be worthwhile.4 The student was shocked and chagrined because she was among those credential candidates who had resisted the focus on racial inequity in the required cross-cultural communications course.

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Knowledge for Cultural Well-being: A Task for Research To combat such beliefs Murrell (2001) calls for a pedagogy “grounded in the history, traditions, and cultural heritage of African Americans” (p. 33). However, this will require rewriting academic and school knowledge (Loewen, 1995; Stevens, Wineburg, Herrenkohl, & Bell, 2005; Wynter, 2006). Following are three examples of ideologically biased academic/school knowledge, including misrepresentations of slavery in textbooks and classroom discourse that contribute to the miseducation of teachers and assaults on cultural Blackness. First, an ethnographic investigation in predominately White suburban middle school classrooms reveals the limits of the White teachers’ knowledge and pedagogical skills regarding teaching about the enslavement of African people and the heritage of Native Americans. Classroom discourse renders African Americans “present in the curriculum” but only as slaves, and, thus, “absent in history” (Wills, Lintz, & Mehan, 2004, p. 107). Second, in my work with teachers I ask if anyone can name the three universities that existed in West Africa before Columbus arrived in the Americas (Gao, D’jenné, and Sankoreé at Timbuktu in present-day Mali). Nearly always the response is: “No.” Kincheloe (2004) reports a similar experience when he asks whether teachers have studied “the story of the European colonization of Africa and the effects of the slave trade” (p. 1). In fact, the structure of knowledge in the discipline that separates African history from American history circumscribes what teachers (and their students) can learn about Africa, slavery, and the development of U.S. society. Teachers learn little if anything concerning the vital role not just of African labor but also the sophisticated knowledge and skills African people possessed that made the nation’s development and wealth possible (Carney, 2001). Fragmentation of historical knowledge thus obstructs the critical understanding teachers need to explain African descent people’s continuing impoverishment given the nature and function of global capitalism—then and now (Maiga, 2005). The devastation of urban communities has undermined traditional African American culture, community viability, and beneficial socialization practices—conditions that are portrayed as a “culture of poverty” and as culturally deficient “black values” (Heath, 1989; King & Wilson, 1994). A third example is the way “dysconsciousness,” the term I introduced to describe such “limited and distorted understandings” of racial inequity, is used in multicultural teacher education and critical race scholarship (King, 1991a). Though it is often cited in discussions of racism, none of these publications reference the key finding of the original study of dysconsciousness: pre-service teachers typically explained racial inequality “as a historically inevitable consequence of slavery or as a result of prejudice and discrimination” (King, 1991a, p. 138), which they also linked to slavery. None of their explanations showed any recognition of the systemic nature of racism (Duncan, 2004) or the “structural underpinnings of inequity” (Cochran-Smith & Davis, 2004, p. 956).

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Generating forms of knowledge and effective pedagogy that teachers need to address such ideological constructions of race is a task for teacher education research. As Hilliard (2001) cautions, however, researchers have unfortunately been “following the detour of race rather than the ideology that propels it” (p. 2). In a Black Studies analysis of the ideological belief structure of race Wynter (2003, 2006) argues that racism is a logical outcome, an effect of “lawlike” societal cultural rules and ideas that govern our behaviors and shape our perceptions of reality (King, 2005b). This system of knowledge and representation defines “conceptual Blackness” as the “alter ego” of “conceptual whiteness” (Wynter, 2003). Although “whiteness” studies have begun to proliferate, this understanding of what “race” does and which grasps the epistemic roots of assaults on cultural Blackness, is undertheorized in education (Bush, 2004; Ignatiev, 1995; Jensen, 2005; Kent, 1972; Prager, 1982; Roediger, 1998).

The Blues Epistemology of the Black Experience The task of fighting racism, then, entails the production of knowledge to combat this system of representation. It seems reasonable to expect that such research would benefit from the inclusion of epistemologies of marginalized peoples. Researchers of color recognize the intimate connection between epistemology and methodology when justice is the objective (Bernal, 1998; Pizarro, 1998). The African American blues tradition, discussed next, offers such an epistemological vantage point from which to document, interrogate, and transmit knowledge of the existential Black experience. This discussion is intended to illuminate four key characteristics of the blues epistemology that: (1) embraces the contradictions in the Black struggle for being; (2) functions as a unifying impetus for community building; and (3) provides clarifying social explanation, political knowledge, and spiritual understanding that is not solely for race consciousness but also (4) to connect Black suffering with the universal ideal of the human spirit of freedom. The following historical overview presents the rich, underutilized potential of this epistemology for teacher learning and research about and also through African American cultural perspectives.

Critical Social Explanation/Theorizing McLaren and Farahmandpur (2001) define theory as a “living aperture through which specific histories are made visible and intelligible” (p. 301, cf. Grande, 2004, p. 28). The blues tradition constitutes a form of critical Black working class theorizing or social explanation. Woods (1998) argues that the blues constitutes an epistemology of African American thought that embodies “African American daily life, social explanation, [and] social action,” that is, “how to act,” solve problems, and behave (p. 101). Blues lyrics, which typically address themes of love and mistreatment, have often been misinterpreted as a “music of

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resignation.” On the contrary, as Titon (1990) posits, the core of the blues is about “freedom from mistreatment, not submission to it” (p. 2). Whereas Black people have been subjected to unspeakable dehumanization, the blues response is love. The record of African American cultural resilience and critical social thought conveyed in the blues contrasts with the culture of poverty deficit “theories” of Black life and culture that emerged in the social sciences in the U.S. around the same time that the blues moved along with Black people from rural areas of the Mississippi Delta to the urban north. Woods provides this illuminating account of the emergence of the blues tradition of “cultural transmission and social explanation”: Emerging out of the rich tradition of African song-centered orature, and under conditions of intense censorship, secular and sacred songs became fountainheads of cultural transmission and social explanation. Furthermore, as a result of the extremely hierarchical class structure of Southern plantations, African-American working class thought would come to find its fullest expression in the blues: a “collective expression of the ideology and character of Black people situated at the bottom of the social order in America.” (Woods, 1998, p. 56, cf. Barlow, 1989, p. xii) Black Studies scholarship recognizes in the “historic commitment to social and personal investigation, description and criticism present in the blues” a resource for critical knowledge and a source of theory (Woods, 1998, p. 30). In one program teacher educators and future teachers have studied blues culture, history, lyrics, and the lives of blues performers as aesthetics education (Asher, Fairbank, & Love, 2006; Love, 2006). Considering the subjugated knowledge traditions of Black people (or any other marginalized cultural group) as an epistemological resource for pedagogy, theory, or methodology in research, however, requires a revolutionary break with the dominant societal episteme or system of knowledge.

A People’s Marginalized History The blues emerged in the 1890s during the violent repression following the brief period of “freedom” between the end of the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction. Political “compromise” and betrayal resulted in the removal of Black troops and militia (“the Black and Blues”) and the reinstatement of planter power and racial terror throughout the south (Cone, 1972; Woods, 1998). It was during this period that the “hollers” that became the central elements of the blues emerged, as the formerly enslaved were savagely forced back to labor (again) in unfreedom on the levees, in the “fields, prisons, docks and

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streets” (Woods, 1998, p. 82). Levine (1977), in Black Culture and Black Consciousness, situates this blues tradition within the heritage of Black community building: Black secular song, along with other forms of oral tradition allowed [Black people] to express themselves communally and individually, to derive great aesthetic pleasure, to perpetuate traditions, to keep values from eroding, and to begin to create new expressive modes. Black secular song revealed a culture which kept large elements of its own autonomous standards alive, which includes a rich internal life, which interacted with a larger society that deeply affected it. (p. 297, see Woods, 1998, pp. 56–57) As the following passage explains, the blues represents a collective response to this repression in the form of the “conscious codification of African American folk wisdom” and knowledge out of which other musical forms also evolved: The derivative of these forms such as jazz, gospel, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, funk, and rap all refer back to these anchors and their insights. These new musical genres are documentary in nature. That is, they must still explicitly, or implicitly, address African American consciousness of this period and the intellectual/performance traditions that emerged during it. (p. 83) As an indigenous “American” art form (native to this country), which remains deeply rooted in an African ethos (values, functionality, and worldview) that survived among African Americans, the blues constitutes a unique social vision and critique of injustice that has been marginalized in, if not totally erased from, history. A wholly authentic but often maligned and misinterpreted musical form through which Black people have expressed a refusal to accept mistreatment, the blues can be understood philosophically as a “black point of view in song” (Davis, 1995, p. 69). The educational relevance of the blues is suggested in one artist’s understanding of the meaning of the blues: To me, the blues is a literary and musical form and also a basic philosophy. When I get ready to study the mystical aspect of black people, I go to the blues, then I feel like I’m in touch with the root of black people. (Palmer, 1982, pp. 276–277) According to Woods (1998), this blues epistemology represents “the beginnings of a method of investigation” (p. 21, emphasis added) that can recover “heroic movements” of Black cultural resistance that have been purged from “both

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historical texts and popular memory” (p. 4). This critical knowledge tradition is a cultural constant in Black music, including the blues as well as some forms of rap music and “conscious” hip-hop (Fisher, 2003, 2006). In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example, hip-hop artist Kanye West’s criticism that President George Bush “doesn’t care about Black people” has been “sampled,” widely disseminated, and immortalized in a rap video/song via the Internet. In Blues People Jones (1963) explains that “the most expressive [Negro] music of any given period will be an exact reflection” of Black existence (p. 137). Following this line of reason, this chapter explores theoretical and methodological implications of this epistemology for group-affirming research in teacher education.

More Than a Musical Genre If language refers to a shared system of communication used by a nation, a people, or other distinct community, the blues “speaks” a communal language of the lived culture, material reality, and existential philosophy of Black existence. The blues gives voice to Black cultural ideals in a spoken record of Black suffering and transcendence that remains relevant and instructive. When visiting the Maori people in New Zealand, Bernice Johnson Reagon, African American historian, cultural activist, and founder of the incomparable female a cappella ensemble “Sweet Honey and the Rock,” offered this insightful observation about Black music that also applies to the blues. Taking part in a discussion of “the significance of land to Maori identity,” Reagon described the African American community “as one held together by song rather than by territory” (L. T. Smith, 1999, p. 126). Reagon’s research and performances have revealed the deeper meaning embodied in the language of the African American sacred song tradition. When Christianity was being used explicitly to justify Black people’s enslavement, for example, sacred songs—“Negro spirituals”—made use of Christian religious language and concepts with great critical insight and intelligence to repudiate this dominant ideology. A profoundly meaningful verse, “Everybody talkin’ bout heaven ain’t going there,” in one of these “sorrow songs,” “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” illustrates the subversive “reading” of the “Word” and the world encoded in these songs.5 The injustice that Black people have suffered has also given blues singers and songwriters opportunities to explore universal human themes made “specific through the African American experience” (Titon, 1990, p. 11).

The Blues Vision The vision of social, cultural, interpersonal, economic, and racial justice in the blues implies certain conditions of freedom from mistreatment. As expressed, for example, in the blues song, “Further on up the road . . . someone is gonna hurt you like you hurt me,” the blues conveys a universal philosophy of how people

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should be treated. The spirit of love in the blues honors humanity’s triumphal capacity to transcend dehumanization without diminishing or relinquishing the “space of being” in which Black people exist (Grande, 2004). Whether expressed in the determination to overcome heartbreak or hopelessness (“Been down so low, down don’t bother me . . .”), the refusal to accept mistreatment (by a lover, a sheriff, or a boss man) affirms the singer’s “somebodiness,” that is to say, Black people’s humanity (Cone, 1972). This vision of inclusion (in the human family) is neither “raceless” nor distorted by the mythology of race. Like the proverbial “crossroads” of the “deep blues,” where the most accomplished performance of the art that any artist aspires to achieve is possible, the blues vision of humanity suggests a powerfully transformative reason for knowing: to honor individuality, group heritage, and human freedom—all at the same time—in spite of the depredations heaped upon one for being Black and poor. This is the essence of the unique democratic contribution of the blues.

The White Blues A long-standing controversy in the music world about the “White blues” concerns whether, given the traditional themes and content of the lyrics, the blues as played by White performers is “authentic.” Some White performers argue that race should not matter in appreciating a virtuoso performance. Music critics and musicians remain at odds. This debate recalls persistent ruminations regarding “color-blindness” in teacher education literature. Within a guilt/innocence either/or mindset White pre-service teachers may profess to being and may prefer to remain “color-blind.” These teachers resist the goals of racial-social justice teaching by proclaiming racial innocence and a commitment to a notion of raceless equity with no vision of an end to racial oppression. For another example, in research and teaching contexts, critical theorizing that privileges social class and capitalist relations of production posits a class versus race theoretical explanation that, in effect, privileges “hybrid” conceptions of being and identity as opposed to Black identity and cultural integrity. Researchers or practitioners who embrace “color-blindness” call to mind the standpoint of “White blues” aficionados who “refuse to see race as a criterion for anything” (Garon, 1995). The “decolonizing” research methods of indigenous peoples, as discussed below, affirm transformative research possibilities that aim to ensure cultural well-being, free from racial mistreatment, “annihilation and absorption into the democratic mainstream” (Grande, 2004, p. 172).

Decolonizing Methodology/Indigenous Epistemologies The importance of identity, cultural rights, community building, and belonging in the Black intellectual tradition is mirrored in methodological and epistemological alternatives to denigrating culture that indigenous education offers

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(Loveland, 2003). For example, “decolonizing” research methods and scholarship in Maori, Native Hawaiian, and Indian education and research practice prioritize community and student well-being in the context of a communal future, a sense of peoplehood, and indigenous people’s culturally sovereign “space of being” (Grande, 2004; Kana’iaupuni, 2005; Kaomea, 2005; G. H. Smith, 2004; L. T. Smith, 1999). In these approaches educational purpose goes beyond the traditional value system promulgated in U.S. public schools that emphasizes competitive individualism and individual academic success, high stakes test scores, materialism, etc. These outcomes imply values that are deemed “alien” to the culture of achievement of indigenous peoples as well as African Americans (Murrell, 1997). Proponents of the cultural rights of dispossessed and indigenous peoples in education use methods that are intended to illuminate and recover “curricular silences” regarding the cultural and historical circumstances of indigenous communities and their collective heritages. Kaomea (2005) notes that such knowledge has been “buried, written over, or erased” and sometimes distorted beyond remembrance or recognition. One consequence has been the alienation of indigenous peoples from their own identity and heritage (Rollo, 2006). Native Americans and other indigenous educators, including the Maori of New Zealand, are using their heritages, languages, and other forms of “local knowledge” as pedagogical and methodological resources to: counter alienation, provide direction to research, preserve their culture, foster student achievement, and to ensure their collective survival as distinct peoples. L. T. Smith describes Kaupapa Maori, or research by Maori people of New Zealand, for example, as more than a “paradigm.” That is to say, it is also a social project “related to being Maori” that is “connected to Maori philosophy and principles” and “takes for granted the validity and legitimacy of Maori.” The reason for knowing in Kaupapa Maori research also concerns Maori people’s struggle for autonomy and “cultural well being” (L. T. Smith, 1999, p. 185). Kaupapa Maori does not exclude non-Maori researchers but provides opportunities for their participation via equitable, authentic relationships with Maori partners. Along these same lines, as Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, Yupiak Elder and professor of education at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks observes: “The tide has turned and the future of indigenous education is clearly shifting toward an emphasis on providing education in and through the culture, rather than about the culture. Critical to such indigenous approaches to education and research is language, which is “the living artifact of a culture” (Loveland, 2003). Grande (2004), another indigenous scholar, clarifies the difference between indigenous people’s cultural well-being and the vision of social change/equity/ democracy in progressive/revolutionary/critical theory and pedagogy. From the epistemological vantage point of “Red pedagogy,” according to Grande, regardless of the choices of particular individuals: “what distinguishes the indigenous struggle for (group) self-determination from others is . . . their collective effort

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to protect the rights of their peoples to live in accordance with traditional . . . ancestral ways” (p. 172). Moreover, “this allegiance to traditional knowledge,” including the preservation and use of indigenous language that conveys the peoples’ “thought-world,” has protected American Indians from total “annihilation and absorption” into the homogenizing, “democratic” European-centered “mainstream.”6 Given that White teachers are the majority in the teaching force and given the various ways many White teachers (and parents) resist equity in education, it is not surprising that so much social justice-oriented teacher education research is directed toward understanding the “ideologies of privilege” of White teachers (Oakes, Rogers, & Lipton, 2006, p. 95). These efforts typically focus on the needs of experienced and prospective White teachers (e.g., their resistance or cultural encapsulation). One alternative is to create authentic research partnerships and methods of inquiry as “communities of practice” in which the epistemologies of community people are made relevant in the assessment of these efforts (Murrell, 2001). The problematic belief structures of White teachers can also be addressed via theory, research methods, and pedagogy that illuminate the “ideologies of otherness” that are at the epistemic root of race-based inequities in schools and society. Before examining this epistemic problematic using the conceptual tools of Black Studies, the trajectory of critical social theorizing from social science to educational approaches is discussed next.

From Critical Social Theories/Theorizing to Critical Research Methods In contrast to positivism, critical research approaches share a connection with the emancipatory aims of critical social theories (e.g., neo-Marxist, feminist, postcolonial). Qualitative educational research has common roots in the interpretive traditions in sociology and anthropology that bear the influence of various post-positive theory and methods, including phenomenology, structuralism, semiotics, hermeneutics, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology (DeMarrais & LeCompte, 1999).

Critical Roots in Common Carr and Kemmis (1986) made a relevant distinction between critical social theory and critical social science. Critical theory is the result of a process of critical analysis. Critical social science is a form of practice in which consciousness (the enlightened human agency of individual social actors) “comes to bear directly in their transformed social action” (p. 144). Critical educational theory has been criticized for a “tendency toward social critique” without theorizing action that practitioners can use to “develop a ‘counter-hegemonic’ practice” to challenge domination (Anderson, 1989, p. 257). Other scholars view critical

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educational research as a mode of inquiry to collect data about “schooling practices and their relationship to the social order” of power in order to “ultimately undermine and transform that order” (Morrell, 2004, p. 42). However, racecentered and feminist theorists criticize the lack of attention to racism, cultural sovereignty, and women’s oppression in critical approaches. Critical social science rejects the epistemology, ontology, and determinism of logical positivism. The goal of positive social science is to explain social life, while the alternative offered by interpretive social science is to facilitate understanding of domination and alienation. Following Marx, critical social science is informed by a moral obligation to understand social reality in order to change it. Thus, the dual aim of critical social science is simultaneously to explain and to combat dominating relations of power in favor of democracy and human freedom. The notion of “critical” applied to theory and methods of inquiry and in education (and teacher education) can also be traced to Marx’s understanding of the necessity of “ideology critique” for social change. Critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1988; Sleeter & Bernal, 2004), which is the analytical tool of critical theory applied to pedagogy, is indebted also to the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire (1970/1993). Critical consciousness is a goal of Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy of liberation. In addition to these European, Euro-American, and Latin American roots of critical and qualitative research methods and theory, this chapter draws on the work of a number of scholars of color whose scholarship is influenced by the principles of critical social science. Table 3.1 compares the common central features and distinct assumptions and concerns of critical social theory with feminist, critical multicultural, and race-central methods, theory, and pedagogy in social and education research. Feminists and scholars of color criticize the lack of explicit attention to gender, race, ethnicity, and cultural sovereignty of indigenous peoples in critical theory and critical pedagogy (Ellsworth, 1998; hooks, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 1997; Leonardo, 2004; Lynn, 1999). However, critical theorists strenuously reject the allegation that in giving primacy to social class, critical theorizing fails to address forms of oppression other than that of social class (McLaren, 2000; Scatamburlo-D’Annibale & McLaren, 2004). These critical theorists assert that such “misguided” criticism incorrectly assumes the working class is White. Also, within a class-based (e.g., class-first) radical political economy framework the meanings of socially constructed categories of difference or subjectivities (e.g., gender, race, and ethnicity) are produced by the class-based relations of production that define the capitalist system. Thus, these categories of lived experience and identity are interrogated and interpreted through the lens of the material (objective) relations of social class, power, and privilege linked to the relations of production (Scatamburlo-D’Annibale & McLaren, 2004, pp. 188–189). Ongoing class versus race (or gender) debates illustrate the complexity of competing theories of social change. A radical Black Marxist tradition also exists that posits a class-first analysis. Multicultural and feminist approaches offer

“Feminists’ pedagogy should present students with a language of critique and possibility . . . that challenges racist assumptions and calls into question taken for granted definitions of gender and other forms of domination” (Brady, 2000, p. 372).

CST distinguishes between past and present, largely characterized by domination, exploitation, and oppression, and a possible future rid of these phenomena . . . The future society can be realized through concerted political action. The role of CST is to raise consciousness about . . . oppression and demonstrate the possibility of a qualitatively different future society.

2. A Social Role for the Knowledge Research and Theory Produce

continued

“Story telling is a significant part of the law and disenfranchised people have different stories and ways of telling them than enfranchised people(s). Counter stories can raise consciousness to challenge dominant ideology, initiate the necessary cognitive conflict to ‘jar dysconscious’ racism and stimulate action” (Ladson-Billings, 2000, p. 366).

CRT opposes “color-blind” critical social theory and affirms the centrality of race and racism and their intersectionality with other forms of subordination. CRT examines the roles of race and racism as a central feature in the social and economic organization of the United States and, therefore, in education.

“Feminist (liberal/socialist) theorizing identifies/describes women’s oppression, its foundations and effects to conceive ways to generate strategies for women’s liberation” (Brady, 2000, p. 369). “This entails identifying and articulating both objective oppression in practices and relationships and the male blindness to women’s experience” (Weiler, 1988, p. 59).

Critical Race Theory Pedagogy and Methodology

Critical Feminist Theory Pedagogy and Methodology

CST opposes positivism . . . (a moral obligation).

Critical Social Theory

Comparison of Critical Social Theory and Critical Approaches in Education

1. General Aims

Table 3.1

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CST argues that structures of domination are reproduced through people’s false consciousness, promoted by ideology (Marx), reification (Lukacs), hegemony (Gramsci), one-dimensional thinking (Marcuse), and the metaphysic of presence (Derrida) . . . CST pierces false consciousness by insisting on the power of agency, both personal and collective, to transform society.

4. Conceptions of Consciousness

Critical Social Theory

CST argues that domination is structural. That is, people’s everyday lives are affected by larger social institutions such as politics, economics, culture, discourse, gender, and race. CST illuminates these structures in helping people understand the national and global roots of their oppression.

Continued

3. Explanatory Constructs

Table 3.1

Critical Race Theory Pedagogy and Methodology

Women should reject male supremacist thinking: to be female is to be a victim— and embrace their shared commonalities, the ability for self-determination and communal agency (Brady) . . . Students should be offered the knowledge and the skills that allow them to reclaim their voice and their history . . . to enable them to name new identities . . . to assume ownership and become active agents in their own lives (Brady, 2000).

Elites act against racist behavior in society only when it serves them, thus a critique of Liberalism’s belief in steady but incremental processes of social change is an important component of CRT.

A critical feminist pedagogy intersects a Race is a social construct, not postmodern feminism with critical praxis biological. understood within the context of economic, politic and cultural constructs (Brady). A critical feminist methodology can illuminate the dual process of social and cultural reproduction and resistance— as in critical educational theory (Weiler, 1988, p. 59).

Critical Feminist Theory Pedagogy and Methodology

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Characteristics ascribed to a particular race will change for example, African American people have been called “happy go lucky and childlike” historically in order to rationalize slavery, but are now most commonly called “threatening and criminal” in order to rationalize increased control through police, etc. People have intersecting identities, i.e., there is more than one way that they are affected by disenfranchisement or inequality. We all have multiple lenses through which we experience the world (and are experienced by others).

Feminist research emphasizes lived experience and the significance of everyday life (Brady). The contradictions of everyday life and consciousness can become the focus of a radical pedagogy (Weiler, 1988, p. 23).

Postmodern feminism represents a politics in which people actively participate in the shaping of theories and practices of liberation by acknowledging both diversity and unity, focusing on people who work and live in a multiracial and multicultural society (Brady).

Following Marx . . . CST conceptualizes the bridge between structure [structural determinants] and agency [individual consciousness] as dialectical. That is, although structure conditions everyday experience, knowledge of structure can help people change social conditions. CST builds this bridge by rejecting economic determinism.

By focusing on the dialectical connection between everyday life and structure, CST holds people responsible for their own liberation and admonishes them not to oppress others in the name of distant future liberation . . .

6. Conceptions of Justice

7. Implications for Social Struggle

Sources: adapted from Agger, 1998; Brady, 2000, pp. 369–374; Weiler, 1998 and from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_ race_theory.

Racist behavior is not an aberration, but is normal practice.

Feminist anti-racist teachers and administrators hold certain beliefs about justice and equality that they try to put into effect in their work to redefine the curriculum and social relationships (e.g., feminist counter-hegemony) (Weiler, 1988, p. 101).

5. Key Assumptions CST argues social change begins . . . in people’s everyday lives—sexuality, family roles, workplace . . .

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various interpretive frameworks to transcend this debate. Given that race is a social construction, scholars also posit that “hybridity” is a more useful conceptualization of being and identity than race (McCarthy, 1998). African-centered theorists and indigenous scholars, on the other hand, give primacy to peoplehood (Bernal, 1998; Grande, 2004; L. T. Smith, 1999). Identifying with one’s group heritage is considered neither an epiphenomenon of social class (or gender), a reactionary form of in-group solidarity, false consciousness born of societal exclusion (Hilliard, 2001; King, 2005b), self-deceptive “fictive” kinship, nor misguided, romanticized identification with “dead civilizations” on foreign continents (King, 2005b). In fact, recent research documents the power of “race-ethnic self-schema” to buffer students from the racial vulnerabilities of alienating schooling (Oyserman, Kemmelmeier, Fryberg, Brosh, & HartJohnson, 2003).

Critical Race Theory and Methods According to Lynn (1999), in asserting that critical pedagogy had “failed to adequately address the question of race,” Tate (1997) and Ladson-Billings (1997) helped put “race back into critical pedagogy” (p. 153) by applying the principles of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education. First articulated by legal scholars, then applied to education, Critical Race Theory is an analytical lens developed by scholars of color to place race at the center of social analysis (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Parker & Stovall, 2004; Solórzano, 1997). Four precepts, delineated by Ladson-Billings (2005), define CRT in education. CRT: (1) presumes that racism is normal not an aberration; (2) employs storytelling as a mode analysis; (3) necessarily includes a critique of liberalism; and (4) points out that Whites have been the primary beneficiaries of liberal/reform efforts (LadsonBillings, 2006, pp. 300–302). In their introduction to a theme issue of Qualitative Inquiry, for example, Lynn, Yosso, Solórzano, and Parker (2002) describe CRT as an “ontological and epistemological framework with which to analyze race” (p. 5). Sleeter and Bernal (2004) emphasize that CRT, in addition to addressing the “intersectionality of racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of oppression,” challenges Eurocentric epistemologies and dominant ideologies (e.g., meritocracy, objectivity, and neutrality) using “counterstorytelling as a methodological and pedagogical tool” (p. 245). Also, Pizarro (1998) uses a CRT framework to develop research methods that are consistent with a Chicano/a epistemology. A theme issue of Race and Ethnicity considers the impact of CRT in the ten years since the publication of Ladson-Billings and Tate’s seminal article on Critical Race Theory in education and teacher education (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005). While CRT theorists criticize the idealized standpoint of “colorblindness” in the dominant discourse (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005; LadsonBillings, 1997), other scholars who have studied race and ethnicity in the social

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sciences argue for some degree of caution with respect to use of the construct race. The concern is not to argue for a class-first analysis but to emphasize that focusing on race as an analytical category can displace a needed critique of supremacist ideology and thereby reify a false, ideological construct (Hilliard, 2001; Stanfield, 1993). However, critical race theorists argue back that CRT illuminates the “everyday-ness” of racism and values and represents the voices, strengths, and complexity of the experiences of people of color (Chapman, 2005, p. 28; Lynn, 1999). Proponents of CRT use methods such as narrative inquiry, counterstories, historical ethnographies, autobiography, autoethnography, critical ethnography, and portraiture in teacher education research. In the passage below Duncan (2005) describes links between the use of these methods used by critical race theorists and Freire’s liberation pedagogy: The centrality of narrative and storytelling in critical race approaches to educational research is consonant with Paulo Freire’s (1995) view that changing language “is part of the process of changing the world” (pp. 67–68). Along these lines proponents of CRT in general emphasize aesthetic and emotional dimensions in their stories to stimulate the imagination and to inspire empathy to allow others to imagine the mind of the oppressed and to see, and perhaps vicariously experience, the world through their eyes. (p. 102) Thus, these scholars argue that Critical Race Theory has the capacity to convey to others “insider” knowledge of race as difference.

A CRT Framework for Qualitative Inquiry Critical Race Theory also provides a framework for qualitative inquiry in teacher education (Duncan, 2002; Ortiz & Rhoads, 2000; Parker, Deyhle, & Villenas, 1999; Sleeter & Bernal, 2004; Smith-Maddox & Solórzano, 2002; Solórzano, 1997). Emergent CRT “offshoots” include “critical race pedagogy” (Lynn, 1999) and “critical race ethnography” (Duncan, 2005). CRT has also generated a number of other complementary “connecting parts”: LatCrit (Latina/o Critical Race Theory), Tribal Crits, FemCrits (critical race feminists), Asian American poststructural critical legal positions, and critical race feminism (Brayboy, 2005; Parker & Stovall, 2004; Sleeter & Bernal, 2004). Following are examples of how Black, Latina/o, as well as White teacher educator-researchers employ the CRT framework to study their professional practice. These researchers use “counterstories” and narratives to analyze their experiences teaching mostly White future teachers. For instance, Duncan (2002) describes pedagogical strategies he employed in an urban ethnography course that “rendered race visible.” That is, CRT has the power to bring “subtle forms of racial

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oppression . . . into bold relief ” (p. 102). Other frameworks that are combined with CRT include Freire’s problem-posing method (Smith-Maddox & Solórzano, 2002), portraiture (Chapman, 2005), and Black feminism, which is discussed in the next section.

Black Feminism and CRT in Teacher Education In an article titled “The Burden of Teaching Teachers” Williams and EvansWinters (2005), two African American women teacher educators, use the “lenses” of both Black feminism and CRT in reflective narratives of teaching White students. Reflecting on this experience they ask: (1) [H]ow can those of us, who are on the side of social justice, bring race talk back into the public forum of the teacher education classroom and (2) how can we get the message to be digested, interpreted, and critically examined by teacher education students who benefit from systematic inequality? (p. 202) The authors describe Black feminism/womanism as an ideology and political movement “that examines issues affecting African-American women in the United Sates as part of the global struggle for women’s emancipation” (p. 204). Black feminism and CRT are presented as “the hope for teacher education.” Black feminism (BF ), as an extension of critical social theory, is concerned with “fighting against economic, political, and social injustice for Black women and other oppressed groups” (pp. 203–204; also, Collins, 2000, p. 9). The authors use these frameworks in a complementary fashion to examine their professional practice. These researchers take a morally engaged, activist stance toward “the powers that be” (department chairs, academic deans, provosts) and concerns that arose when their mostly White female student teachers and their supervisors questioned, “interrogated and dismissed” their teaching practices. Their recommendations to improve the climate for Black women professors engaged in social justice-oriented teacher education include suggestions for: (1) an alternative method of evaluation that takes students’ retaliatory resistance into account; (2) mentoring to support the retention of faculty of color; and (3) holding open discussions about “learning from and with faculty of color” to address “who [which professors] students resist and why” (pp. 216–217). Challenging and changing institutional practice fulfills an important principle of CRT and is a central tenet of critical social science. As Dixson and Rousseau (2005) note: It is not enough to simply tell the stories of people of colour. Rather the educational experiences revealed through these stories must be the subject

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of deeper analysis using the CRT lens. Furthermore, CRT mandates that social activism be a part of any CRT project. To that end the stories must move us to action and the qualitative and material improvement of the educational experiences of people of colour. (p. 13) The research examples discussed next illustrate critical ethnographic research methods in K-12 venues.

Critical Ethnographies: Engaging Xicana7 Teachers and Urban Youth According to Anderson (1989), the “overriding goal of critical ethnography,” unlike other interpretivist research in sociology and anthropology “is to free individuals from sources of domination and repression” (p. 249). Two examples of critical ethnographic research, which provide opportunities for empowering learning in high school contexts, illustrate very different conceptualizations of race in critical research for educational and social change. Xicana high school teachers and Black and Latino/a “urban” students who are trained as “apprentices” study their own experiences using a combination of critical ethnography and participatory research (Carspecken, 1996).

Xicana Teachers as Agents of Change Berta-Avila (2004) combines the methods of critical ethnography and participatory research to provide an environment for self-identified “Xicana” teachers to participate in an emancipatory “dialogic process.” This research experience illuminates connections between these teachers’ identity and their mode of critical (raza/race) pedagogy. Berta-Avila uses dialogues, journal entries, and observations to understand how these teachers perceive their role in the classroom when teaching Raza students. Language and (collective) self-identity emerged as important considerations in exploring these practitioners’ self-conceptualization of being “critical Xicana” teachers. They view how and why they teach as a “political act for social transformation and the teacher to her “Xicana” identity in a way that embraces her ethnicity, including her “indigenous roots”: Xicana is how I identify myself culturally, historically, politically, and socially. I would expect a person who identifies him/herself as Xicana/ Xicano to know her/his history and take pride in their indigenous roots. I would expect them to have a sense of responsibility to their community and be an advocate for those who have no voice and are silenced. I would expect them to understand what being political means . . . (p. 70)

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Berta-Avila concludes that “grounding themselves in pedagogy for social change” and engaging the issues of race, class, and gender enables these teachers to expand their role in the classroom. Beyond being a “role model,” who uncritically emulates a Euro-dominant consciousness and individual upwardly mobile success, these teachers see themselves as “change agents,” who “critically challenge and address power relations” that affect their students and their communities (p. 68). As another teacher explains: If a Xicana/Xicano enters the classroom and has no social and/or political understanding of the institutions they are entrenched in, they then lack the skills needed to understand how educational systems and the dominant society are intertwined. He or she falls into the danger of perpetuating messages that Raza life experiences are not valid and they should forsake their identity in order to succeed in the United States. Thus, Xicana/Xicano identity influences the relations between these teachers, their students, and the students’ parents, from whom they learn and for whom they choose to serve as advocates and cultural models. For these teachers, then, “it is not enough to be just a teacher of color.” The descriptions of the “critical Xicana” practitioners in this study are consistent with other researchers’ reports of the political clarity of teachers of color (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999; Irvine, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 2000; Lynn, 1999). On the other hand, the research literature also describes Black and Latina/o educators (and researchers) who favor assimilation and who are highly critical of their own culture and language (Wills, Lintz, & Mehan, 2004). Parents, too, who favor assimilationist goals, may adopt the dominant unfavorable view of their home language and culture. Berta-Avila does not represent this study of Xicana teachers as an explicit investigation of or for teacher learning and development. However, the participatory research methodology employed afforded opportunities for these practitioners to reflect on their practice together and to examine the data and share their observations with each other. These opportunities for reflection engaged the teachers and the researcher in intentional and unanticipated mutual learning. This study also indicates another important ability that scholars emphasize as essential for social justice outcomes for African American students and other marginalized students: developing students’ race-ethnic identities and identification with their communities and heritage are important resources for academic engagement (Oyserman et al., 2003). In the next example, however, high school students experience “becoming critical” without such a strong emphasis on race consciousness.

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Urban Youth Becoming Critical Researchers Morrell (2004), Morrell and Collatos (2002), and Oakes et al. (2006) describe participatory social inquiry and organizing activities as learning opportunities that build communities of practice for pre-service and in-service teacher education, urban school reform, and community change using critical research methods. These collaborative research activities engage practitioners and community members as well as students in significant roles as co-researchers/change agents. For example, Morrell and Collatos (2002) trained a multi-racial team of urban high school “student sociologists” who participated in this program of: “critical teacher education that forefronts authentic dialogue between preservice teachers and urban teens . . . who have been trained in the sociology of education [and who] provide mentoring to pre-service teachers enrolled in a teacher credential program” (p. 61). In this four-year project Black and Latino/a urban high school students studied social theory and completed “critical research projects related to equity and access to education” (p. 63). This critical ethnography of students’ literacy learning is situated within a postmodern cultural studies analysis of popular culture (e.g., neo-Marxian and Freire-influenced theories). Because racial “essentialism” is a concern Black and Latino/a youth are described as “members of multiple cultures and communities” (Morrell, 2004, p. 5). Although Morrell affirms the existence of racial inequities and the utility of culturally relevant and multicultural pedagogy, this researcher argues against “conceptions of culture as mono-racial identity” (p. 39). In fact, a somewhat color-blind category, “popular culture”8 is one object of analysis. The question/dilemma Morrell poses for “critical educators who seek to educate for empowerment and access” is: “How do we effectively educate marginalized students in a way that addresses the impact of race yet transcends the social construction of race . . . and unifies rather than divides?” (p. 15). To summarize, research employing the framework of Critical Race Theory and critical ethnography is contributing to a growing knowledge base on teacher education with critical social justice aims. We know less, however, about the design and effectiveness of teacher preparation experiences that contribute to the coherence of pedagogy, identity, and political understanding, particularly for teachers of color. This includes knowledge about how such learning experiences can intervene against internalized racism to “empower students of color to see the specific ways that whiteness causes them to think less of their individual and collective selves” (Allen, 2004, p. 128). A related problem is the support needed by faculty and “accomplished practitioners” who supervise and mentor these future teachers (Quiocho & Rios, 2000). Research is also needed that addresses how teachers and teacher educators can thrive in increasingly constraining and hostile educational contexts in schools and teacher preparation programs where technicist rationality and assimilationist priorities predominate

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(Kincheloe, 2004; King, 2005b; Okpodoku, 2003; Scott, 2003; West-Olatunji, 2005; Wilson, 2005). The change agent role the Xicana teachers in Berta-Avila’s study embrace suggests particular implications for teacher preparation. It would have been interesting to know something about how these Xicana teachers experienced their professional preparation. Did study of critical pedagogy, for example, inform their practice and shape their identity as Xicana teachers? Did Chicano Studies play any role in their professional development and identity? Morrell’s student co-researchers studied sociology of education texts. Would learning about racism through the lens of a Black Studies analysis of the blues epistemology, or studying Mexican corridos (ballads) that express Chicano values and history enhance the students’ abilities as mentors of pre-service teachers (Garcia, 2000; Pizarro, 1998)? Can studying such forms of cultural expression illuminate important points of intersection in the social histories of people of color?9 In the research that concludes this section the focus is on how teachers can learn about racism. White women teacher educators use Critical Race Theory in studies by White women professors who situate the pre-service and experienced teachers’ learning within the academic discourse of “whiteness studies.”

Interrogating the Discourse of Whiteness An emerging genre of critical qualitative research for teacher learning interrogates “whiteness” and ways that critical pedagogy and practitioner inquiry can contest unearned white privilege. This genre of “whiteness studies” includes critical and qualitative inquiry methods-journal writing, reflective dialoguefocused on “enlightening” participants regarding the educational implications of “white racial identity” and “white privilege.” The focus of these studies is the limited ways in which many White teachers understand issues of race and systemic racism, including their own racial identity and “privileged positionality” (Marx, 2004; McIntosh, 1988; McIntyre, 1997, 2002; Ortiz & Rhoads, 2000). This genre of research, which is an outgrowth of critical “whiteness” studies in education, labor, and cultural studies, as well as Critical Race Theory (CRT), interrogates the discourse of “whiteness” using practitioner and narrative inquiry. These studies can be situated along a continuum of focusing on teachers’ “cultural competency” (Irvine, 2003), critical multicultural education (Sleeter, 2001), critical feminist pedagogy (Brady & Kanpol, 2000; Weiler, 1988), and anti-racist pedagogy (Berlak & Moyenda, 2001; Kailin, 1994; Urrieta & Reidel, 2006; Zeichner, 1996). Typically the data in these studies is collected using qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups, student reflections/ narratives) collected in single courses to document pedagogical impacts on future teachers’ self-identification and their understanding of societal or systemic (as contrasted with acts of interpersonal) racism. Data has also been gathered from multiple student cohorts, field placement experiences, and students’

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collages, for instance. Two examples of this genre that describe three research contexts will be discussed in this section.

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Becoming Critical of Whiteness McIntyre (2002) has analyzed 95 collaborative collages created by 450 students in 19 (four undergraduate and 15 graduate) education courses. McIntyre’s students have constructed these collages and presented them in class to represent and explain their understanding of what whiteness means. In addition, two graduate courses also afforded the opportunity to engage students in critical readings and participatory community action research. One finding McIntyre reports is that many students came to “see whiteness as an integral aspect of discourse” and they became aware of its impact on education. In another study Marx and Pennington (2003) employed a CRT framework to explore the racialized, culture-deficit thinking and identity issues that limited the ability of White teachers “to meet the needs of students of color.” These authors analyze their separate but complementary exploratory efforts as self-described White teacher educators, who have “taken to heart the call of critical race theorists and critical whiteness scholars to open up a White discourse on White racism” (p. 92). Based on their understanding of the existing literature and their previous experiences teaching White student teachers, Marx and Pennington created “pedagogies of CRT that would draw the attention of White pre-service teachers to their own positionality and help them to become critical of it” (p. 92). These teacher educator-researchers indicate that they were cognizant of White (student teacher) resistance and resentments against “cultures of color.” They interpreted this resistance and resentment as markers of an (unproductive stage of White racial identity development that is “mired in White guilt, fear or anger.” (Such resistance, as discussed earlier in this chapter, continues to be a focus of the research of teacher educators of color, as well.) These experienced teacher educators engaged 12 White student teachers in two different settings in “supportive, trusting dialogical conversations” about the “taboo subjects” of race, “whiteness,” and “white racism.” Marx and Pennington describe the “sincere changes in attitudes” of student teacher/participants in these studies, their adoption of “new language,” their ability to see, name, and reject racism within themselves, and deficit thinking (about the children) “in everything from their teacher education classes, to the media, to their own home lives” (p. 105). Three student teachers participated in Pennington’s study. These future teachers apparently were stymied in their development by the realization that they “lacked the cultural knowledge to be effective in the classroom and to be effective in interacting with parents” (pp. 104–105). By contrast, Marx’s group of nine student teachers reportedly had empowering experiences by confronting racism in their teaching placements.

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It deserves mention that the researchers in these three studies justify their pedagogical interventions on moral grounds rather than on the basis of demonstrated long- or short-term individual or institutional changes. The researchers do not report impacts on the actual practice of these future teachers nor are learning outcomes for the students they taught (and tutored) described. Despite student resistance, unsupportive university colleagues, and the warnings McIntyre received from a “disgruntled” administrator, she affirms her responsibility “as a white educator . . . to continue to provide prospective teachers” with opportunities to “see whiteness as a ‘center stage problem’ ” Marx and Pennington also articulate an explicit moral commitment to this “controversial work” on behalf of children of color: Much of the work on Whiteness implies that the construct is too controversial, too risky, too complex to be used with undergraduates. . . . We also see the effect on the children. . . . Only when we are brave enough to undertake this kind of controversial work with our students and to fortify ourselves with the knowledge and skills we need to lead, will we be able to foster the necessary changes. Without this courage, our children of color will continue to be the ones left to absorb the truly destructive effects of White racism. (p. 107) The committed stance of these teacher education practitioner-researchers mirrors the politically engaged practice of other scholars that will also be discussed in this chapter.

Unexamined/Unintended Implications: Intersectionalities of Race/Gender/Identity One implication of researchers’ attempts to address White teachers’ “colorblind” thought through pedagogical interventions and practitioner inquiry is that the focus on “whiteness” may obscure other relevant identity considerations like gender (Gore, 1993). Much of the research on “whiteness” in teacher education is reported by White women teacher educators/researchers who are teaching mostly White female students. Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2004) recounts her experience of becoming critically aware of her own “blind vision” regarding the continuing significance of race and racism in her teaching and research. Upon reflection, however, she was able to gain the insight that White women teacher educators need to address the intersections of race and gender identity issues that are inherent in social justice teacher education. What Cochran-Smith recalls with regard to her own practice is worth noting: “We,” I came to realize, often referred not to “we who are committed to teaching elementary school differently and improving the life chances of

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all children,” but to “we White people (especially we White women) who are trying to learn how to teach people who are different from us.” (Cochran-Smith, 2004, p. 98, emphasis added) Cochran-Smith acknowledges that when the perspectives and experiences of the oppressed are not “sufficiently present” to inform the work, “blind-vision” can impair the efforts of White teacher educators to address issues of race, diversity, and social justice. She recalled, for example, discussions that had clearly focused attention on race in her work with future teachers. However, hindsight provided some understanding of what had escaped her vision and was missing in her approach: “It is clear to me now, though, that these discussions [in the teacher education program] were framed primarily for the benefit of White students who were invited to learn more about racism through stories of other people’s oppression” (p. 92). Two other research contexts are relevant in illuminating perspective blindness with respect to race/gender intersectionalities. First, in revisiting the data presented in their book, The Feminist Classroom, Maher and Thompson Tetreault (1997) acknowledge that they lacked the interpretive framework needed to “see” the ways that a (feminist) “pedagogy of positionality” must also excavate whiteness (p. 322). Using whiteness/race as a lens, their re-analysis reveals what had previously escaped their vision. Second, Berlak and Moyenda’s (2001) collaborative analysis of a classroom encounter with “whiteness” precipitated a reflective dialogue between the two women—a White Jewish radical teacher educator and a “militant” Black teacher. Their dialogue represents a unique examination of the intersectionality of race, identity, and gender in a teacher education context. Black and Latino/a teachers and teacher educators too often bear the “burden” of seeing what Whites often do not see regarding the “taboo” work of dealing with race, often without adequate support from their White colleagues and administrators (Jervis, 1996). This discussion of the intersectionality of race, gender, and identity suggests needed directions for research. For instance, do White women teachers and teacher educators experience racialized anxieties, “resentments” or “blind vision” in gendered ways that differ from the experiences of White males? Do these dispositions affect their ability to work with families and communities of color? With boys and girls in their classrooms? Do Black women and Black men working with White women in teaching and research contexts experience particular antagonisms or vulnerabilities with regard to “whiteness” (or “Blackness”) that are exacerbated by their differing historical experiences of race and gender? Finally, critical social theory defines ideology as “an organized belief system that represents social change as impossible, even if it suggests modes of individual betterment within the frame of reference of the existing social system” (Agger, 1998, p. 8). Sleeter and Bernal (2004) refer to ideology as “consciousness formation” of individuals, “particularly their consciousness about

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how the society works” (p. 242). Do educators—no matter what their background—who are using a critical theoretical framework envision a collective future for children of color? Examples of practitioner inquiry in which the focus is on teachers learning to teach for social change in urban and culturally diverse communities are presented the next section of the chapter.

A Continuum of Practitioner Inquiry: Learning to Teach for Social Change The genre of practitioner inquiry usually refers to practice-based research conducted by practicing teachers. Also included is the study of practice for teacher education by teacher educators. The forms of practitioner inquiry discussed below include collaborative action research partnerships and guided communitymediated inquiry experiences to support pre-service and in-service teacher learning. These research approaches can be located along a continuum of practice-centered knowledge about teaching and teacher learning (in schools and teacher preparation programs) from individual self-study to collective action research to guided community-based inquiry in which learning from and with community members takes precedence. Several major analyses of the various types of practitioner inquiry have been done (Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 1994; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2004; Zeichner & Noffke, 2001). Practitioner inquiry, that is, “systematic, intentional inquiry by teachers” (Lytle & Cochran-Smith, 1990, p. 84), is the term Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2004) use as a “conceptual and linguistic umbrella” to cover a number of research genres and modes of inquiry in which teachers engage in practicecentered investigation. This extensive review of the literature demonstrates multiple and varying descriptions of forms of practitioner inquiry. Included are genres of research focused on teacher knowledge about teaching, pre-service teachers’ experiences while learning to teach (Britzman, 1991), collaborative investigations with practitioners and teacher educators, as well as the practice of teacher educators as the focus of inquiry. Rosiek and Atkinson (2005) identify three practitioner inquiry approaches related to understanding teacher knowledge and the process of learning to teach: (1) narrative inquiry/analysis, (2) action research, and (3) teacher research. These categories of practitioner inquiry are discussed below.

Narrative Inquiry Narrative inquiry, also referred to as self-narrative inquiry (Garcia, 1997), is multifaceted and includes various methods of practitioner inquiry, such as teacher reflective writing (in journals and diaries, for instance) and autobiographical writing. Autoethnography can also be included in this genre (Olesen,

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2000). Forms of narrative inquiry such as teachers’ stories and life narratives reveal aspects of teacher knowledge and the experience of learning to teach in different contexts (Clandinin & Connelley, 1990, 2000). For example, these methods have been used to explore the experiences of teacher support groups for novice teachers (Stanislaus, Fallona, & Pearson, 2002) and the learning trajectories of pre-service teachers in “inner-city” teaching situations (Kea & Bacon, 1999; Rushton, 2004). Narrative inquiry reveals rich details of practical teacher knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learning. Like other forms of practitioner inquiry, studies of teacher learning using narrative forms seek their validation in the ways that “inquiry transforms practice” (Rosiek & Atkinson, 2005, p. 425; see also Feldman, 2003). As the following journal reflection demonstrates, however, practitioner inquiry studies may show no evidence of teacher learning to transform their practice from the point of view of the lived experiences and epistemologies of diverse “others.” Consider the lack of insight, empathy, and critical understanding in this journal entry, for example: What do you do with children who will not do their work, and every time somebody even brushed them they “explode in anger” but yet you know that their daddy is a drug dealer and they probably only get two hours of sleep a night? (Rushton, 2004, p. 74) This study reports this student teacher’s “unfavorable” classroom journey in an inner-city school resulted in a decision not to pursue a teaching career. Several studies by Cochran-Smith (1991, 1995, 2000), which have been collected in the volume Walking the Road: Race Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Education, represent powerful examples of learning to teach for social change (CochranSmith, 2004) in ways that address such deficit thinking. In this body of work Cochran-Smith draws on teacher narratives to document the experiences of teachers learning to “teach against the grain.” The narrative accounts of these future teachers demonstrate how they come to see themselves as “both educators and activists.” Cochran-Smith provides a coherent theoretical rationale for this pedagogical approach. Practitioner (narrative) inquiry research that documents the “voice” of preservice teachers working in inner city schools, in particular, which has frequently involved single case-studies, is limited with respect to developing broader theoretical understandings (or generalizations) across contexts and situations (Rushton, 2004). Although forms of practitioner research have gained considerable ascendancy, this genre of research remains engaged for the most part with a “narrow range” of theory (Noffke, 1999). Indeed, largely missing from pre-service practitioner inquiry studies are forms of teacher knowledge and practice-centered theory generated from within the cultural realities and

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epistemologies of students of color, their families, and communities. CochranSmith’s (2004) research documents teacher learning in this direction. She suggests that teacher educators-researchers may also need to rethink what and how they teach in this regard and notes that “theories of practice developed by and about persons of color, as well as rich and detailed analyses of successful teachers of children of color, particularly poor children of color . . .” were missing from her work (p. 97, originally published in 2000). Alternatively, Ball’s study of the knowledge teachers need to effectively teach writing to African American vernacular English speakers recognizes the need not only for high expectations in the dominant society’s terms “but also standards of the students’ subcultures” (Ball, 1999, p. 243). Finding ways to draw upon and incorporate the perspectives and lived experience of community members in teacher learning and practitioner research in community contexts is an important dimension of the example of action research that is discussed next.

Action Research as Community-Mediated Inquiry Action research, which can take many forms, has provided opportunities for both experienced teachers and future teachers to gain access to and to learn from community knowledge and perspectives (Gore & Zeichner, 1991). Noffke, one of the leading practitioners of action research in the field of teacher education, describes action research as “political, theorized practice” (Noffke, 1995, p. 3). This method of practitioner inquiry consists of a cyclical process of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. Noffke and Somehk (2005) identify three types of action research: (1) the professional action research (focused on “improving services in a professional setting”), (2) the personal (focused on attaining “greater self-knowledge” and “a deeper understanding of one’s own practice”), and (3) the political (focused on “social action to combat oppression”). The example of action research that will be discussed here is Hyland and Noffke’s (2005) long-term collaborative teacher education action research program. These teacher educator-researchers have studied their own practice with White pre-service teachers by combining teaching with two levels of practitioner inquiry focused on: (1) their own practice and (2) the learning-to-teach for change experiences of their pre-service students. Hyland and Noffke state that their aim was to deepen their understanding of “how community-based pre-service work may be used to develop a critical multicultural approach to the teaching of social studies” (p. 370). In collaborative inquiries in their social studies methods courses, taught in their respective teacher education programs at two different institutions, Hyland and Noffke use examples of the students’ learning as well as focus group discussions, journal writing responses to assigned critical readings, and community inquiry experiences as data. These teacher educator-researchers use these multiple data sources to ask about the impact of

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“critical study of injustice in history, politics, economics, and geography” (p. 371). They ask, for example, “In what ways do community inquiry assignments influence pre-service teachers’ understanding of marginality?” And “how do students see themselves in relation to the communities they investigate?” According to Hyland and Noffke, teachers “need to understand and interrogate oppression in order to act against it in their classrooms.” Their action research program also demonstrates their belief that “teachers need to become allied with marginalized communities in the fight for social justice” (p. 379). For instance, they asked students at one of their institutions to develop a relationship with a community member and to collaborate on a lesson that used the perspective, life history, knowledge, talents, or interests of the community member in that lesson. By using learning-to-teach experiences that involve community-mediated practitioner inquiry, Hyland and Noffke consciously model for their students some of the ways that curriculum and teaching can address social justice goals. These researchers report new understandings of ways to incorporate inquiry methods into their own teaching.10 Developing pre-service teachers’ self-understanding (and self-efficacy) in relation to teaching students from “historically marginalized” groups is one goal of the community-mediated inquiry activities Hyland and Noffke studied through collaborative action research. They note the fundamental importance of gaining “historical perspective” about the group being investigated for “making sense” of these inquiry experiences. They assign critical readings to provide “authentic perspectives of the group being studied” that are “essential to the inquiry experience” (p. 378).11 Some level of prejudice reduction among the student teachers is one result of these inquiry experiences that is documented in students’ oral and written narratives, collaborative reflections, and seminar discussions. However, these researchers also call attention to an important drawback in their approach. In their efforts as critical educators who are conscious of gender issues from a feminist perspective, Hyland and Noffke attempt to resolve the contradiction of power and authority in their classrooms by giving their pre-service students the freedom to choose (comfortable) “cultural boundaries” to “cross.” They acknowledge that students sometimes choose the least “challenging” cross-cultural community inquiry experiences. In addition, Hyland and Noffke report that community learning experiences can re-inscribe various forms of privileged positionality related to the student teachers’ race, gender, and class identity. In fact, pre-service students’ fear of going into urban neighborhoods is a recurring theme in the literature (Buck & Sylvester, 2005; Duncan, 2002; Swartz, 2003). Moreover, practitioner inquiry focused on teachers learning to center students of color in their own cultural identities and heritages, as well as the needs of their communities, is still largely missing from this genre of research (Goodwin & Swartz, 2004). Practitioner inquiry also tends to neglect teachers’ cultural and historical knowledge, that is, the miseducation of teachers that contributes to the problems of “whiteness”

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and dysconsciousness. A number of teacher educator-researchers with considerable experience using anti-racism approaches in their courses speculate that college-level teacher preparation may actually be too late to change the deficit thinking and dysconsciousness of some future teachers (Berlak & Moyenda, 2001; King, 1991a; McIntyre, 2002; Swartz, 2003). As will be discussed below, in contrast to course-based learning, teacher inquiry in the context of ethnographic study groups, learning communities, and communities of practice seem to provide support for more critical learning.

Ethnographic Methods and Practitioner Inquiry and Communities of Color Ethnographic research that engages experienced practitioners as co-researchers (Allen & Labbo, 2001; Bernal, 2002; Moll & Gonzáles, 2004) has generated forms of practical knowledge for teaching that build upon the “funds of knowledge” in the households of marginalized students (Gonzáles, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). This research recognizes that successful teachers of low-income students and students of color respect, have knowledge of, and establish relationships with students’ home communities (Irvine, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Moll & Gonzáles, 1997; Zeichner & Melnick, 1996). As Moll and Arnot-Hopffer (2005) have noted: “Teacher education is . . . a matter of developing not only technical competence and solid knowledge of subject matter but also sociocultural competence in working with the diversity of students that characterizes contemporary schooling” (p. 244). Torres-Guzman, Mercado, Quintero, and Viera (with Moll, 1994) are among a new breed of researchers of color who have designed new roles for students, parents, and teachers to participate in collaborative ethnographic research projects in New York City and Puerto Rico, and supported both teacher and student learning in and about Puerto Rican communities in new ways. Moll and Gonzáles have led this program of collaborative ethnographic practitioner research for more than two decades in Arizona and other locales. Practitioner inquiry experiences are combined with ethnographic home visits in order to identify social and cultural practices that can inform classroom instruction. Researchers and their practitioner co-researchers report that these forms of collaborative inquiry deepen teachers’ understanding of structural inequities by positioning them to “view urban communities as reservoirs of strength, possibility, and talent” (Buck & Sylvester, 2005, cited in Moll & Arnot-Hopffer, 2005, p. 246). This is an important dimension of the way the cultural “funds of knowledge” research program makes the intellectual, social, and cultural assets in families “pedagogically viable.” In summary, the growing acceptance of teacher education research produced in collaboration with practitioners represents a “hard-won paradigm shift” in the field (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2004). Significant strides have been made in

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giving “voice” to teachers as researchers of their own practice, including accomplished teachers and teacher educators of color. In addition, with varying results practitioner inquiry mediated by community knowledge takes many forms using various methods. For example, Allan and Labbo (2001) as well as Hyland and Noffke (2005) report that action research in urban communities has positively impacted prospective teachers’ learning when they use what they learned from self-reflective, community inquiries to develop lessons. Relatively brief excursions and more extensive immersion experiences include both observation and inquiry activities designed to “shake up” students’ deficit views in order to foster more critical awareness and understanding (Bernal, 2002; Duncan, 2002; Garcia, 1997; Wiest, 1998). Hyland and Noffke (2005) stress an important dimension of the need for such approaches in teacher education: “Unless our White, heterosexual students learn to understand diversity in new ways, the children from these [underserved] groups in their classrooms will continue to have to live within the dominant culture everyday of their schooling” (p. 378). Assets or strengths-based approaches are gaining coherence in a growing body of research and scholarship that demonstrates the value of community-mediated inquiry experiences for teacher learning (Boyle-Baise & Sleeter, 2000; Oakes et al., 2006). Less systematically developed, however, are modes of inquiry in which full-fledged reciprocal research partnerships incorporate community knowledge and perspectives in the purposes and conduct of collaborative inquiry. A vision of critical and qualitative research in teacher education for the cultural survival of marginalized students and their communities, as well as for teacher learning, is taken up next in the last part of the chapter.

Beyond the Crisis of Knowledge in Teacher Education Research and Practice Teacher education research is only beginning to address the complexities that developing theory and practice in authentic democratic partnerships among researchers, teachers, and urban/indigenous community members entails. Noffke’s (1999) observation is worth repeating: “Theory generated within the work and lives of people of colour has only marginally been addressed” in teacher education research (p. 27). Murrell (2001) has made a similar observation that remains pertinent: the failure of educators “to draw on the local knowledge, perspectives, and cultural frameworks of people of color in diverse urban communities” is nothing less than a crisis of knowledge in urban education (p. 20). As Zeichner and Noffke (2001) point out, teacher education research is inherently connected both to conceptualizations of teachers’ work and also to “debates about the overall goals of education in society” (p. 298). Preparing teachers who have the knowledge, competence, and the will to meet the needs of underserved students of color in K-12 classrooms and who can center their students’ learning in the epistemological perspectives of their

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families and communities remains beyond the purview of the high-stakes standardized testing regime’s “conservative agenda to produce ‘highly qualified teachers’ ” (Banks, 2004, p. ix; Malveaux, 2005).

Valuing/Using Community Knowledge: A Task for Liberatory Research The “community nomination” method that Ladson-Billings (1994), following Foster (1991), employed to identify successful teachers of African American students illustrates how researchers can honor community knowledge, goals, and perspectives on education. Ladson-Billings relied upon the knowledge of community members to identify the criteria she used to select the teachers in her study of culturally relevant pedagogy. These criteria imply educational goals and pedagogy that transcend “conventional notions of the students getting good grades, scoring well on standardized tests, graduating from high school, going on to college, and securing good jobs” (Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 147). The parents Ladson-Billings interviewed “expressed an interest in an education that would help their children maintain a positive identification with their own culture.” As one parent stated: “I just want [my child] to hold his own in the classroom without forgetting his own in the community” (p. 147). This parent’s goal, which expresses the communal ideal and social vision of the epistemology of African American achievement, can be understood as a “requirement for black existence.” Whether in the classroom or a blues performance, the traditional African American cultural ideal values individual accomplishment in the context of community well-being. This ideal contradicts prevailing conceptions of educational purpose and quality (Murrell, 1997). Boggs’s (1974) classic description of Black “education to govern” for the benefit of a transformed, more just, democratic society is consistent with Tedla’s (1997) articulation of “community mindfulness” as a goal of Black education and socialization. Following are examples of teacher education practice that value and use community knowledge in various ways and which suggest research questions and modes of inquiry for cultural well-being that are missing in “mainstream” teacher education research and practice. First, in the “Community Teacher” model for effective urban teaching that Murrell (2002) has developed teachers, parents, school leaders, and community members participate as full-fledged partners in ongoing, collaborative practicebased community-mediated inquiry that supports teachers’ and African American students’ learning. Second, Hyland and Meacham (2004) propose a Community Knowledge Centered model of transformative teacher education that is centered on the “important and vital knowledge” that community members possess and that educators can learn them (p. 123). “Community Scholars,” a project of New Ways to Learn, is a third model for teacher learning from and with community members. In this project (summarized in Box 3.1) “low-income” public housing

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BOX 3.1: THE COMMUNITY SCHOLARS PROGRAM: A PROJECT OF NEW WAYS TO LEARN Community Scholars was born out of the cross-cultural growth pains among low-income residents of publicly subsidized housing in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California, USA/Turtle Island, North America. At a training meeting conducted by Featherston & Associates, Jean Ishibashi, one of the participants, asked: “Do you want to teach the teachers in the schools of your family members how to cross-culturally respect you and your families?” The overwhelming answer was “YES.” Dean Perea of San Francisco State University asked Acting Chair of the Department of Administration and Interdisciplinary Studies, Vanessa Sheared (currently the Dean of the School of Education at California State University, Sacramento) if there were any classes that could include such a project in its curriculum. A multicultural/cross-cultural and bilingual education class was identified. The methodology for the Community Scholars project is oral her/his/ ourstory where low-income residents—parents, significant adults, guardians, extended family members—share and document stories of what worked and did not work for them in their formal schooling experience/s and what they are experiencing in relationship to the schools now with their children and grandchildren. It is significant that most of the Community Scholars are and have been mothers who face the challenges of the schools and the toll of mainstream oppression on their and their children’s lives. The toll of racism and its intersection with class, gender, sexual orientation, religion/spirituality, family structure, language, dis/abilities and more are documented in stories that include ways that the m/others have been able to survive the attacks on their dignity and humanity. These attacks have included intergenerational poverty, drugs, and guns, and institutional policies that have targeted their families and communities and rarely benefited anyone from their communities. In addition, the oral his/her/ourstories methodology in this project is participatory action research where the dialogues, conversations, and storytelling challenge, name, and transform perspectives of teachers and teacher candidates so that cross-cultural respect can be present in the classroom. The oral his/her/ourstory methodology includes emotional knowledge and cross-cultural knowledge that is often made invisible in printed form. Therefore, its potential to transform by speaking to the whole person is great. Body gestures/postures, tones, rhythms/cadences, silences, and facial expressions are significant indicators of how or whether or not cross-cultural respect is present. These indicators are often ignored much to the detriment

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of the student, the learning environment, and the greater community. Most schools of education do not include cross-cultural or critical multicultural curriculum where these critical indicators are taught, addressed, and presented by low-income community members. Power imbalances, often the root of disrespect, are not addressed. The cultural naming of policies such as “No Child Left Behind” is made invisible so that the master (universal) narrative becomes the one and only game in town. Freedom of choice and intellectual rigor are left outside the classroom door.

residents: (1) teach the teachers and teacher candidates how to respect lowincome family members in schools and (2) decide to become schoolteachers themselves. Ishibashi describes this program: Between 2002–present several classes of established teachers, teacher candidates, and aspiring teachers in classes at San Francisco State University and the City College of San Francisco have experienced learning with and from Community Scholars. In collaboration with tenant associations in publicly subsidized housing, educational organizations, public schools, service learning and mentoring programs, partnerships have created collaborative spaces where “low-income” community members teach the teachers how to respect them, their children, and extended family/community members, and they decide to become formal (credentialed) education teachers themselves. (Jean Ishibashi, 2006, personal communication)12 What distinguishes these three teacher education program approaches just discussed from the research in previous sections of this chapter? With the possible exception of the “funds of knowledge” ethnographic research collaboratives, each incorporates “authentic cultural knowledge of students’ home communities” (Hyland & Meacham, 2004, p. 114) through sustained, reciprocal engagement with community participants’ knowledge and ways of being. To the extent that community knowledge is salient as both content and process, these model approaches demonstrate important tenets of teacher education practice for cultural well-being. As such, these teacher education approaches represent emergent venues for cultural well-being research informed by the blues epistemology of the Black experience. Research within a cultural well-being framework from this epistemological perspective: benefits both teachers and the community; connects teaching and teacher education with the “Black struggle for being”; creates social inquiry spaces for (teachers and communities to be engaged in) the mutual investigation of the epistemic roots of the ideology of race (e.g., assaults on cultural Blackness); and community building and social action in alliance with other groups are thus grounded in group-affirming Heritage Knowledge.

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Finally, these social inquiry spaces will provide opportunities for critical social and political investigation of community needs, for spiritual ways of knowing and healing for Black consciousness and to identify with humanity’s struggle for freedom. The crux of the matter is whose social vision prevails in racial-social justiceoriented research and how can this research be a liberating resource for social change? That is, what is the role of culture, heritage, and identity in research to combat the system of knowledge that propels racism and other forms of oppression? This question must be asked of various collaborative research-for-change efforts that engage students, teachers, and families as “critical” co-researchers (Cahill, 2004; Hammond, 2001; Morrell, 2004). My own research, which has not been identified in earlier publications using the terms “cultural well-being,” has created “research-as-pedagogy” contexts that have engaged educators, parents, and researchers in reciprocal inquiry activities that have helped to illuminate the “requirements of Black existence” understood as a condition of the general welfare (King, 1991b, 1992; 2005a, 2006; King & Mitchell, 1995). An important consideration in this body of work, as noted below, is to devise research methods that afford opportunities for critical investigation of community needs and cultural practice as well as teachers’ knowledge and pedagogy: This methodology recognizes that particular knowledge of the world contained in people’s daily cultural practice and social experience is not merely distorted by the dominant ideology. Rather, knowledge generated from and grounded in people’s culture and experience can be liberating as well. (King & Mitchell, 1995, p. 67) Black Studies and Ethnic Studies programs, an under-utilized resource for teacher learning and research, can provide opportunities for future teachers to engage community knowledge traditions and to interrogate the limitations of dominant knowledge. For example, Kiang (2004) describes a range of programmatic strategies using Asian American studies in a K-12/university partnership program that engaged Asian American prospective teachers in the recovery and affirmation of their cultural heritage. This program also provided African American and other teachers of color with valuable lessons about cultural diversity. Kiang concludes that “ethnic studies programs can lead and sustain powerful interventions in these areas precisely because of their foundational commitments to educational equity and social justice and their holistic relationships to diverse students, families, and communities” (p. 221). Oakes et al. (2006) developed and describe various university-supported social “design experiments” that involve collaborative public inquiry and organizing for school and community change. This “learning power” program includes numerous examples of teachers, teacher educators, researchers, parents,

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and students engaged in sustained, “empowering” inquiry-based learning and “teaching for change” using critical and qualitative methods of research. (Morrell’s [2004] critical ethnography is a previously discussed example.) These scholars cite the democratic grassroots organizing of civil rights movement leader/teacher Ella Baker as a model for this “learning power” approach. However, Baker’s democratic social change methodology included coalition building from a “strong autonomous” African American community base (Ransby, 2003, p. 100). In Baker’s practice this meant developing people’s knowledge of and appreciation of their own history, culture, and identity—in the worker education curricula and in the Freedom Schools that she inspired. As Woodson understood, such knowledge, from the ideological position of democracy, can facilitate multi-racial alliances but is required to support the “space of being” marginalized groups need in a democratic society. Teacher education research documents White teachers’ resistance to investigating their “emotional investment in particular beliefs, assumptions, and worldviews” (Urrieta & Reidel, 2006, p. 282) and their resistance adversely affects teacher educators of color and others who are committed to equitable education (Scott, 2003). However, framing teacher education research within the limited terms of a demographic imperative impelled by the predominate number of White teachers is an epistemologically inadequate “logic of inquiry” (Stanfield, 1993). Such a rationale risks remaining circumscribed within the limits of White teachers’ miseducation and dysconsciousness (King, 2005b). Teachers need knowledge and skills that will enable them to teach in ways that foster students’ intellectual and social development without diminishing the cultural identities, languages, and heritages of people of color. Educational and research purposes need to be broadened to include community perspectives. However, community participants involved in teacher learning also need opportunities to develop a critical understanding of their lived realities, cultural practice, and social histories. Researchers need methods of inquiry that can capture the beneficial effects of such knowledge and that provide support for community members’ roles in contributing to and assessing the social utility of teachers’ knowledge and pedagogical skills in the context of community change and survival needs (Pattillo-McCoy,1999). Knowledge of the societal episteme is required for all. The opportunity to use this liberating knowledge in inquiry-based partnerships for professional teacher preparation is akin to the mutuality between the audience and the blues performer. Such new forms of knowledge and accountability in collaborative teacher education research and practice within a cultural wellbeing framework have implications for “the very notion of knowledge and how our definitions of what counts as knowledge produce hierarchies of power that have both real and symbolic effects on people’s lives” (Hyland & Meacham, 2004, p. 177).

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Conclusion Through the lens of a Black Studies analysis of the ideology of race, this chapter examines selected examples of critical and qualitative research in teacher education with racial-social justice aims. A focus on the value of community knowledge and marginalized epistemologies informs the discussion of four interrelated genres of critical and qualitative research “in, on, and for” teacher education. The chapter considers how and how well critical and qualitative methods of teacher education research value and use the social vision and epistemological perspectives of people of color. Also considered are models for collaborative research and practice that engage teachers and parents and community members in mutual learning. The relevance of the blues epistemology for teacher education research is the authentic knowledge for cultural well-being this worldview perspective offers. The blues has been described as “a dispossessed people’s alternative to suffering and silence” (Davis, 1995, p. 84). What is missing in critical and qualitative teacher education research and practice? Effective ways to use the “subjugated knowledge” of the dispossessed as a liberating educational tool for cultural wellbeing and human freedom are lacking (Hyland & Meacham, 2004, p. 123). Also needed are spaces for social inquiry in which teachers, researchers, and community members can seek understanding in order to challenge the epistemic foundations of ideological racism in knowledge, research, and pedagogy. Historical understanding is crucial to address this crisis of knowledge in teacher education. At a time when “many people have lost hope in the possibility of liberal reform” in the U.S. (Bush, 2004, p. 11), West observes that it is time for a “blues nation to learn from a blues people”—Black Americans. Yet, Black people’s cultural survival has never been in greater jeopardy. Duncan (2002) remarks that it is “fashionable nowadays to downplay and even dismiss race as a fact shaping the quality of life in the United States . . . in favor [of] class-based and gender-based approaches to understanding social oppression” (p. 93). It is even more fashionable to eschew anything that has to do with humanity’s debt to Africa and the African heritage of African American people (Robinson, 2000). Critical educators, as well as liberals and conservatives share a concern about whether racial/ethnic cultural identification “unifies” rather than “divides.” Allen (2004) suggests a role for the subjugated knowledge of the oppressed in bringing about unity but within a transformed society: people of color must provide the major source of knowledge, inspiration, and sacrifice in humanity’s collective liberation from white racism. . . . As people of color around the world engage in the struggle against global white supremacy, they should work to humanize both themselves and whites, when strategic. They should avoid the pull to follow

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the white model of humanity and instead replace repression with radical love . . . (p. 124, emphasis added) This is the universal message the blues epistemology conveys regarding another possible way of “being in the world” (Reagon, 2001)—a way of being that is an urgently needed alternative to the “western bourgeois model” of the human (Wynter, 2006). This model falsely defines being human in terms of the anachronistic construct of race. The spectacle of a White man, a prominent community leader, weeping openly on national television because rescuers had failed to arrive in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to save not only Black lives but White people as well, suggests a vital lesson the blues has affirmed for quite a long time: If we are ever going to be a civilized [nation], we are going to have to begin to work as hard for the weakest and most maligned among us as we do for the strongest and most sympathetic. If we don’t, any of us could one day face the consequences. (Sothern, 2005, p. 22) Methods for transformative engagement with the Black experience, including study of the overcoming human spirit and conditions that continue to give rise to the hopeful determination of the blues, expressed in the most maligned of American languages (African American Home Language), offer a possible way out of the “utter terribleness of our new millennium” (Baker, 2001, p. 10). A “blues epistemology” for critical and qualitative teacher education research acknowledges Black people’s humanity, articulates cultural well-being as a reason for knowing, and allays a White discourse of guilt/innocence. We are all implicated.

Coda It’s all my fault/I musta/Did somebody wrong . . . Everything that’s happened/You know I am to blame. I’m gonna find me a doctor/Maybe my luck will change. My mother told me these days/Would surely come. I wouldn’t listen to her/Said I gotta have some fun. I musta/Did somebody wrong . . . (Elmore James, Blues Artist Extraordinaire)

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Notes 1 Jervis (1996, p. 2). 2 Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Interview with Tim Russert, “Meet the Press,” MSNBC, September 4, 2005. 3 Cited by Noffke (1999, p. 29). 4 This student-teacher shared this information in class, with an apology, after she and other students had vehemently complained that this “cross-cultural communication” course was a “waste of time.” See King & Ladson-Billings (1990). 5 This song is also titled “Going to Shout All Over God’s Heaven.” See www. negrospirituals.com. Retrieved November 6, 2006. 6 I use American Indian and Native American to refer to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, including the United States. 7 The “X” in the Xicana/Xicano movement, which replaces the “Ch” in Chicana/o, symbolizes the “all-encompassing” political and spiritual struggle connecting different indigenous peoples throughout North, Central, and South America, some of whom identify ancestral connections with the ancient Aztecs. A Xicana/Xicano movement “without borders” has evolved out of the Mexican American (Chicano/a) movement in the U.S. Southwest. “Raza” means race in Spanish. See Berta-Avila (2004), Note 1. 8 On the other hand, Elam and Jackson (2005) in Black Cultural Traffic examine “mass popular culture” using the category of “black popular culture” without denying aspects of its dynamic “hybridity.” 9 See Horne’s (2005) illuminating research on intersecting Black American, Mexican, and Mexican American histories in the U.S. and Mexico. Also, activist Yuri Kochiyama’s memoir illustrates Black and Asian relations in the struggle for human rights (Fujino, 2005; Kochiyama, 2004). See also www.aasc.ucla.edu/archives/passingitonpress.htm. Retrieved on November 1, 2006. 10 Buck and Sylvester (2005) report a similar approach using “community liaisons” to mediate pre-service students’ “entry” into urban communities. These community members facilitate pre-service students’ community ethnographies focused on identifying “funds of knowledge” or community assets. 11 “Blues in the Schools,” a program that is available in many schools, would also facilitate such learning. See www.blues.org/bits/index.php4. Retrieved November 1, 2006. 12 The Board of Directors are: Jacqueline Elaine Featherston (formerly Elena Featherston), Alexandra Featherston Gomez, Virginia R. Harris, Jean Ishibashi, Margo OkazawaRey, Gwen Orro, Sylvia Ramirez, Noemi Sohn, and Diana Vielmann. This group of women of color, including low-income women, named the organization: New Ways to Learn. The project name, “Community Scholars,” was suggested by the late Dr. Beverly Robinson, of UCLA, an oral historian from the San Francisco Bay Area (J. Ishibashi, personal communication).

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West-Olatunji, C. (2005). Incidents in the lives of Harriet Jacobs’s children—A reader’s theatre: Disseminating the outcomes of research on the Black experience in the academy. In J. E. King (Ed.), Black Education: A transformative research and action agenda for the new century (pp. 329–340). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Wiest, L. R. (1998). Using immersion experiences to shake up pre-service teachers’ views about cultural differences. Journal of Teacher Education, 49(5), 358–365. Wills, J., Lintz, A., & Mehan, H. (2004). Ethnographic studies of multicultural education in U.S. classrooms and schools. In J. A. Banks & C. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 163–183). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Williams, D. G., & Evans-Winters, V. (2005). The burden of teaching teachers: Memoirs of race discourse in teacher education. The Urban Review, 37(3), 201–219. Wilson, R. (2005, December 16). We don’t need that kind of attitude: Education schools want to make sure prospective teachers have the right “disposition.” Chronicle of Higher Education, LII (17), pp. A8–A11. Woods, C. (1998). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso. Woodson, C. G. (1933). The mis-education of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers. Wynter, S. (2003, Fall). Unsettling the coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its overrepresentation–An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Wynter, S. (2006). On how we mistook the map for the territory and re-imprisoned ourselves in our unbearable wrongness of being, of désêtre. In L. Gordon & J. A. Gordon (Eds.), Not only the master’s tools: African-American Studies in theory and practice (pp. 107–169). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Zeichner, K. M. (1996). Educating teachers for cultural diversity. In K. M. Zeichner, S. Melnick, & M. L. Gomez (Eds.), Currents of reform in pre-service teacher education (pp. 133–175). New York: Teacher College Press. Zeichner, K. M. (2003). Teacher research as professional development for P-12 educators in the U.S.A. Educational Action Research, 11(2), 301–326. Zeichner, K. M., & Melnick, S. (1996). The role of community field experiences in preparing teachers for cultural diversity. In K. M. Zeichner, S. Melnick, & M. Gomez (Eds.), Currents of reform in preservice teacher education (pp. 176–198). New York: Teachers College Press. Zeichner, K. M., & Noffke, S. E. (2001). Practitioner research. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed., pp. 298–330). New York: American Educational Research Association/Macmillan.

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REFLECTION Dysconscious Racism, Land of Immigrants, and Culturally-based Pedagogy—The Legacy of Joyce E. King Joel Spring

“Dysconscious racism” still echoes through my mind after hearing the words from Joyce King back in the 20th century. It made a lot of sense to me to label as dysconscious racism references to the U.S. as a “land of immigrants.” Seeing these words in the accompanying essays reminded me here of unmasking the land of immigrants rhetoric by pointing out that not all members of the U.S. population willingly immigrated to the U.S. or willingly embraced the U.S. government. To say the U.S. is a land of immigrants denies, as she asserts, that enslaved Africans were forced to U.S. shores. Dysconscious racism is exemplified by those referring to the U.S. as the land of immigrants and in the process forgetting that enslaved Africans never chose to make the trip. What about Native Americans, Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans? They were certainly not immigrants, but conquered peoples who were forced to join the U.S. What about Mexican-Americans whose nationality was suddenly switched from Mexican to U.S. after the Mexican American war? Residing in Northern Mexico, these Mexican populations eventually found themselves part of the populations of the U.S. states of Texas, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. Joyce King and I share a common linkage to these unwilling members of the U.S. Now calling each other “cousin,” we found out in a conversation that we are both of Choctaw ancestry. The Choctaws, a Southern tribe, ranged through the areas that are now Mississippi and Louisiana before their removal to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma, which is a Choctaw word for land of the red man). While we share this common ancestry, the rest of our heritage is different with Joyce also having an African heritage and my great-great-great-grandfather joining the tribe with a French background. It should be noted that my mixedblood ancestors resisted attempts by the U.S. government to take over their

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lands, but eventually were put on the Trail of Tears in the early 1830s and forced marched, experiencing extreme deprivations, to Indian Territory. Forcing our ancestors into the warm and inviting sounding phrase “Land of Immigrants” is an act of “dysconscious racism” that neglected the horrors of invasion (Europeans invading the Americas), brutality (forcing indigenous people off their ancestral lands), subjugation (enslavement), loss of cultures (African, Hawaiian, Native American), and loss of languages. Then came the American common school with its goal of nationalism and the attempt to create a common cultural background. Of course, enslaved Africans were denied by law the right to learn to read and write and then after the Civil War faced school segregation undercutting the goal of building a common national culture. Of course, African languages were neglected. In the quest to build allegiance to the U.S. among former enemies, such as North American tribes and Hawaiians, native languages were suppressed with the goal of making them all English-speakers. Puerto Ricans and Mexicans also felt the onslaught of cultural domination as U.S. schools attempted to replace Spanish with English. This is why Joyce King is so correct in her essays about the dysconscious racism of the current American school curriculum. Many people may have forgotten that the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was about more than school integration, but was also about language and culture. Part of the Civil Rights movement was a call for multiculturalism and bilingualism in the school curriculum. This unleashed a debate about language and the value of English that ended with the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and later Common Core State Standards. The standardized curricula emerging from these government actions ended discussions about multiculturalism in schools and made English the language of the classroom. Prior discussions of multiculturalism, as represented in King’s essays, included teaching from the cultural perspective of the students. Certainly, American history takes on differing perspectives when taught from the cultural experiences of enslaved, segregated, debased, and brutalized African Americans or the experience of genocide by Native Americans. Or, think of the experience of Puerto Ricans and Hawaiians who still struggle to maintain their cultures and home languages. Does it matter? Shouldn’t we all be happy that a standardized curriculum forces one culture and language on all to build a unified American nationalism? Isn’t this “one nation under God”? Unfortunately, as Joyce King’s work highlights, a curriculum to build “one nation under God” can leave many students wondering why their people continue to live at the bottom of the economic ladder and often face discrimination by police, other public officials, and in employment. Why are so many African American men in prison? Why is alcoholism and drug abuse an epidemic among Native Americans? Where is the so-called American dream in their lives?

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As Joyce King asserts, African American students learn little in school that helps them to understand their place in American society. In addition, there is no cultural content in the 21st century standardized curriculum to help students relate to their past and understand what was lost after subjugation by the U.S. government. In fact, I find current college students, while knowing about the history of slavery and the Indian wars, still espouse the theme that the U.S. is the land of immigrants and never think about the linguistic and cultural losses from American imperialism and practice of slavery. What happened to efforts to make the U.S. culturally responsive? Multiculturalism and bilingualism hit a brick wall with nationalist political leaders. First, there was the English Only movement that resisted efforts to have schools reflect the language of their students and claimed the superiority of the English language. Originally, bilingualism was tied to protecting the language of students’ homes, while teaching so-called Standard English. English Only won with the No Child Left Behind Act, which eliminated the Office of Bilingual Education and replaced it with the Office of English Acquisition. This reduced bilingual instruction to helping students learn English rather than also trying to maintain their home languages. Multiculturalism was reduced to the teaching of a standardized American culture as embedded in the curricula created by states under No Child Left Behind legislation and the Common Core State Curriculum advocated by President Obama’s administration. Multiculturalism appeared in learning about other cultures as if they were foreign cultures rather than cultures that might represent a student’s home. Joyce King is interested in an Afrocentric education for students of African ancestry so they understand their ancestors’ American experience and their own experience in dealing with other Americans. Also, an Afrocentric education would help students understand their cultural roots and cultural adaptation under the whips of slave masters. How would an Afrocentric education empower Black students? Molefi Asante, an Afrocentric educator whose theorizing has informed Joyce King’s scholarship, argues that “Afrocentrism directs us to . . . meditate on the power of our ancestors. . . . Afrocentricity is the belief in the centrality of Africans in postmodern history” (Asante, 1989, p. 32). Asante’s textbook Classical Africa represents the type of education King advocates in her essays. Throughout the textbook, students are told, “Each centered person becomes an owner not renter of knowledge. Center yourself ” (Asante, 1994, p. i). For example, the “Center Yourself ” exercise, the book’s first unit on the civilizations of Africa, asks students: “What traits, qualities, or characteristics of contemporary Africans would you compare with the ancient civilizations along the Nile River” (Asante, 1994, p. 19)? In Chapter 5 titled, “Kemet, The Black Land,” students are presented with a series of photographs of contemporary Egyptians who have black skin color. Two of the pictures are of Nubian Egyptians with captions

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indicating their resemblance to African Americans. Another photo shows a Nubian Egyptian girl next to a photo of an African American boy. All of the faces and skin color look the same. The final photo shows Asante standing between dark-skinned and light-skinned Egyptians with the caption: “Can you tell which is Dr. Asante?” In the same chapter, Asante writes, “The term Nubian has come to mean those Egyptians who have black skin. Of course, there is also a large Arab population in Egypt today with lighter skin tones” (Asante, 1994, p. 24). After establishing that ancient Egypt had large numbers of black-skinned people, he discusses the contribution of ancient Egypt to the development of math and science. If one assumes that Egyptian math and science influenced Greece, then later European developments in these areas can be traced back through Greece to Egypt. Asante’s chapter on “Early African Science and Art” provides another perspective on African development of geometry and astronomy. Asante’s image of African civilization changes perceptions of Africa as a land of “savages.” If American students are only presented with historical images of African Americans as enslaved and living on plantations, the whole historic contribution of Africans to the world’s civilization is lost. As Joyce King emphasizes, teaching from an Afrocentric perspective gives African American students not only a positive self-image but also helps them understand the cultural degradation caused by the American experience. Joyce King is also interested in language. As she notes, school curricula neglect the language developed among African Americans, which is referred to with differing terms, such as African American Vernacular English, Ebonics, or African American Home Language. Nothing better represents what I will call conscious racism then the rejection of African American Vernacular English as part of bilingual instruction. In 1996, the Oakland school system passed a resolution, which I consider well-reasoned, completely legitimate, and reflecting reality except for its reference to being “genetically-based,” which was deleted in an amended version (Board of Education Oakland, 1996). The resolution called for students whose home language is African American Vernacular English or Ebonics to be given bilingual classes to learn so-called Standard English. The most controversial part of the resolution was the proposal to teach “both in their primary language and in English” (Board of Education Oakland, 1996). For some, this gave legitimacy to Ebonics. The Oakland resolution is important and worth noting because of its recognition of language issues confronted by African American students: Whereas, numerous validated scholarly studies demonstrate that African American students as part of their culture and history as African people possess and utilize a language described in various scholarly approaches as “Ebonics” (literally Black sounds) or Pan African Communication Behaviors or African Language Systems . . . Whereas, the interests

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of the Oakland Unified School District in providing equal opportunities for all of its students dictate limited English proficient educational programs recognizing the English language acquisition and improvement skills of African American students are as fundamental as is application of bilingual education principles for others whose primary languages are other than English. . . . Whereas, the standardized tests and grade scores of African American students in reading and language art skills measuring their application of English skills are substantially below state and national norms and that such deficiencies will be remedied by application of a program featuring African Language Systems principles in instructing African American children both in their primary language and in English. (Board of Education Oakland, 1996) The resolution set off a firestorm of criticism, particularly because it suggested teaching Ebonics as part of a bilingual program. No one, at least that I can find, denies the existence of a grammar among some African Americans that is distinctly different from Standard English. Henry Louis Gates Jr., as the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, while dismissing the resolution as “stupid” because of its advocacy of teaching Ebonics in a bilingual program, was taken aback by “the intensity of the reaction” (Rich, 1997). While criticizing the resolution, Gates promoted his own co-authored Norton Anthology of African-American Literature with a statement that confirmed the importance of Ebonics: “I’d love for the book to be part of language training for inner-city black kids, so they could see a literary tradition created by people who looked like them in the mirror and spoke vernacular and mastered the King’s English” (Rich, 1997). Joyce King’s writings are a major contribution to understanding the cultural and language issues faced by African Americans in schools. Most importantly, she debunked the myth of the U.S. as a “land of immigrants.” She has added, at least to my vocabulary and thinking, the concept of dysconscious racism. Thinking from the paradigm of dysconscious racism, I find that when engaging in conversations about culture, language, and American institutions, I am constantly looking for what is not said or what racist thoughts might be lurking behind mine and other people’s descriptions of American society and schools.

References Asante, M. K. (1989). Afrocentricity. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Asante, M. K. (1994). Classical Africa. Maywood, NJ: The Peoples Publishing Group. Board of Education, Oakland, C. (1996, December). Original Oakland Resolution on Ebonics. Retrieved from Resolution of the Board of Education Adopting the Report

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and Recommendations of the African-American Task Force; A Policy Statement and Directing the Superintendent of Schools to Devise a Program to Improve the English Language Acquisition and Application. Retrieved November 17, 2014, from http:// linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics/ebonics-res1.html. Rich, F. (1997, January 8). The Ebonic plague. New York Times. Retrieved November 17, 2014, from www.nytimes.com/1997/01/08/opinion/the-ebonic-plague.html?.

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DYSCONSCIOUS RACISM Ideology, Identity, and the Miseducation of Teachers

They had for more than a century before been regarded as . . . so far inferior . . . that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. . . . This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing . . . and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it . . . without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion. (Dred Scott v. Sanford, in Howard, 1857) Racism can mean culturally sanctioned beliefs which, regardless of the intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated positions of racial minorities. (Wellman, 1977, p. xviii) The goal of critical consciousness is an ethical and not a legal judgement [sic] about the social order. (Heaney, 1984, p. 116)

Celebrating Diversity The new watchwords in education, “celebrating diversity,” imply the democratic ethic that all students, regardless of their sociocultural backgrounds, should be educated equitably. What this ethic means in practice, particularly for teachers with little personal experience of diversity and limited understanding of inequity, is problematic. At the elite, private, Jesuit university where I teach, most of my students (most of whom come from relatively privileged, monocultural backgrounds) are anxious about being able to “deal” with all the diversity

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in the classroom. Not surprisingly, given recent neoconservative ideological interpretations of the problem of diversity, many of my students also believe that affirming cultural difference is tantamount to racial separatism, that diversity threatens national unity, or that social inequity originates with sociocultural deficits and not with unequal outcomes that are inherent in our socially stratified society. With respect to this society’s changing demographics and the inevitable “browning” of America, many of my students foresee a diminution of their own identity, status, and security. Moreover, regardless of their conscious intentions, certain culturally sanctioned beliefs my students hold about inequity and why it persists, especially for African Americans, take White norms and privilege as givens. The findings presented herein will show what these beliefs and responses have to do with what I call “dysconscious racism” to denote the limited and distorted understandings my students have about inequity and cultural diversity—understandings that make it difficult for them to act in favor of truly equitable education. This chapter presents a qualitative analysis of dysconscious racism as reflected in the responses of my teacher education students to an open-ended question I posed at the beginning of one of my classes during the fall 1986 academic quarter to assess student knowledge and understanding of social inequity. Content analysis of their short essay responses will show how their thinking reflects internalized ideologies that both justify the racial status quo and devalue cultural diversity. Following the analysis of their responses and discussion of the findings I will describe the teaching approach I use to counteract the cognitively limited and distorted thinking that dysconscious racism represents. The concluding discussion will focus on the need to make social reconstructionist liberatory teaching an option for teacher education students like mine who often begin their professional preparation without having ever considered the need for fundamental social change (see also Ginsburg, 1988; Ginsburg & Newman, 1985). Critical, transformative teachers must develop a pedagogy of social action and advocacy that really celebrates diversity, not just random holidays, isolated cultural artifacts, or “festivals and food” (Ayers, 1988). If dysconscious racism keeps such a commitment beyond the imagination of students like mine, teacher educators need forms of pedagogy and counter-knowledge that challenge students’ internalized ideologies and subjective identities (Giroux & McLaren, 1986). Prospective teachers need both an intellectual understanding of schooling and inequity as well as self-reflective, transformative emotional growth experiences. With these objectives in mind, I teach my graduate-level Social Foundations of Education course in the social reconstructionist tradition of critical, transformative, liberatory education for social change (see Freire, 1971; Gordon, 1985; Giroux & McLaren, 1986; Heaney, 1984; Searle, 1975; Shor, 1980; Sleeter & Grant, 1988). In contrast to a pedagogy for the oppressed, this course explores the dynamics of a liberatory pedagogy for the elite. It is designed to provide such teacher education students with a context in which to consider

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alternative conceptions of themselves and society. The course challenges students’ taken-for-granted ideological positions and identities and their unquestioned acceptance of cultural belief systems, which undergird racial inequity. It should be noted that dysconsciousness need not be limited to racism but can apply to justifications of other forms of exploitation such as sexism or even neocolonialism—issues that are beyond the scope of the present analysis. Thus, the course and the teaching methods I use transcend conventional social and multicultural Foundations of Education course approaches by directly addressing societal oppression and student knowledge and beliefs about inequity and diversity. By focusing on ways that schooling, including their own miseducation, contributes to unequal educational outcomes that reinforce societal inequity and oppression, students broaden their knowledge of how society works. I offer this analysis of dysconscious racism and reflections on the way I teach to further the theoretical and practical development of a liberatory praxis that will enable teacher education students to examine what they know and believe about society, about diverse others, and about their own actions. Dysconsciousness is an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given. If, as Heaney (1984) suggests, critical consciousness “involves an ethical judgement [sic]” about the social order, dysconsciousness accepts it uncritically. This lack of critical judgment against society reflects an absence of what Cox (1974) refers to as “social ethics”; it involves a subjective identification with an ideological viewpoint that admits no fundamentally alternative vision of society.1 Dysconscious racism is a form of racism that tacitly accepts dominant White norms and privileges. It is not the absence of consciousness (that is, not unconsciousness) but an impaired consciousness or distorted way of thinking about race as compared to, for example, critical consciousness. Uncritical ways of thinking about racial inequity accept certain culturally sanctioned assumptions, myths, and beliefs that justify the social and economic advantages White people have as a result of subordinating diverse others (Wellman, 1977). Any serious challenge to the status quo that calls this racial privilege into question inevitably challenges the self-identity of White people who have internalized these ideological justifications. The reactions of my students to information I have presented about societal inequity have led me to conceptualize dysconscious racism as one form that racism takes in this post-civil rights era of intellectual conservatism. Most of my students begin my Social Foundations course with limited knowledge and understanding of societal inequity. Not only are they often unaware of their own ideological perspectives (or of the range of alternatives they have not consciously considered), most are also unaware of how their own subjective identities reflect an uncritical identification with the existing social order. Moreover, they have difficulty explaining “liberal” and “conservative” standpoints on contemporary social and educational issues, and are even less

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familiar with “radical” perspectives (King & Ladson-Billings, 1990). My students’ explanations of persistent racial inequity consistently lack evidence of any critical ethical judgment regarding racial (and class/gender) stratification in the existing social order; yet, and not surprisingly, these same students generally maintain that they personally deplore racial prejudice and discrimination. However, Wellman (1977) notes that this kind of thinking is a hallmark of racism. “The concrete problem facing white people,” states Wellman, “is how to come to grips with the demands made by blacks and whites while at the same time avoiding the possibility of institutional change and reorganization that might affect them” (p. 42, emphasis in the original). This suggests that the ability to imagine a society reorganized without racial privilege requires a fundamental shift in the way White people think about their status and self-identities and their conceptions of Black people. For example, when I broach the subject of racial inequity with my students, they often complain that they are “tired of being made to feel guilty” because they are White. The following entries from the classroom journals of two undergraduate students in an education course are typical of this reaction:2 With some class discussions, readings, and other media, there have been times that I feel guilty for being White, which really infuriates me because no one should feel guilty tor the color of their skin or ethnic background. Perhaps my feelings are actually a discomfort for the fact that others have been discriminated against all of their life [sic] because of their color and I have not. How can I be thankful that I am not a victim of discrimination? I should be ashamed. Then I become confused. Why shouldn’t I be thankful that I have escaped such pain? These students’ reactions are understandable in light of Wellman’s insights into the nature of racism. That White teacher education students often express such feelings of guilt and hostility suggests they accept certain unexamined assumptions, unasked questions, and unquestioned cultural myths regarding both the social order and their place in it. The discussion of the findings that follows will show how dysconscious racism, manifested in student explanations of societal inequity and linked to their conceptions of Black people, devalues the cultural diversity of the Black experience and, in effect, limits students’ thinking about what teachers can do to promote equity.

Findings Since the fall academic quarter 1986 I have given the student teachers in my Social Foundations course statistical comparisons such as those compiled by the

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Children’s Defense Fund (Edelman, 1987) regarding Black and White children’s life chances (e.g., “Compared to White children, Black children are twice as likely to die in the first year of life”; see Harlan, 1985). I then ask each student to write a brief explanation of how these racial inequities came about by answering the question: “How did our society get to be this way?” An earlier publication (King & Ladson-Billings, 1990) comparing student responses to this question in the fall 1986 and spring 1987 quarters identifies three ways students explain this inequity. Content analysis of their responses reveals that students explain racial inequity as either the result of slavery (Category I), the denial or lack of equal opportunity for African Americans (Category II), or part of the framework of a society in which racism and discrimination are normative (Category III). In the present article I will again use these categories and the method of content analysis to compare student responses collected in the 1986 and 1988 fall quarters. The responses presented below are representative of 22 essay responses collected from students in 1986 and 35 responses collected in 1988. Category I explanations begin and end with slavery. Their focus is either on describing African Americans as “victims of their original (slave) status” or they assert that Black/White inequality is the continuing result of inequity, which began during slavery. In either case, historical determinism is a key feature; African Americans are perceived as ex-slaves, and the “disabilities of slavery” are believed to have been passed down intergenerationally. As two students wrote: I feel it dates back to the time of slavery when the Blacks were not permitted to work or really have a life of their own. They were not given the luxury or opportunity to be educated and each generation passed this disability on [emphasis added]. (F6–21)3 I think that this harkens [sic] back to the origin of the American Black population as slaves. Whereas other immigrant groups started on a low rung of our economic (and social class) ladder and had space and opportunity to move up, Blacks did not. They were perceived as somehow less than people. This view may have been passed down and even on to Black youth . . . (F8–32) It is worth noting that the “fixed and universal beliefs” Europeans and White Americans held about Black inferiority/White superiority during the epoch of the Atlantic slave trade, beliefs that made the enslavement of Africans seem justified and lawful, are not the focus of this kind of explanation. The historical continuum of cause and effect evident in Category I explanations excludes any consideration of the cultural rationality behind such attitudes; that is, they do not explain why White people held these beliefs. In Category II explanations the emphasis is on the denial of equal opportunity to Black people (e.g., less education, lack of jobs, low wages, poor health

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care). Although students espousing Category II arguments may explain discrimination as the result of prejudice or racist attitudes (e.g., “Whites believe Blacks are inferior”), they do not necessarily causally link it to the historical fact of slavery or to the former status of Black people as slaves. Rather, the persistently unequal status of African Americans is seen as an effect of poverty and systemic discrimination. Consider these two responses from 1986 and 1988: . . . Blacks have been treated as second class citizens. Caucasians tend to maintain the belief that Black people are inferior . . . for this reason [emphasis added] Blacks receive less education and education that is of inferior quality . . . less pay than most other persons doing the same job; [and] live in inferior substandard housing, etc. (F6–3) Because of segregation—overt and covert—Blacks in America have had less access historically to education and jobs, which has led to a poverty cycle for many. The effects described are due to poverty [emphasis added], lack of education and lack of opportunity. (F8–7) In addition, some Category I and Category II explanations identify negative psychological or cultural characteristics of African Americans as effects of slavery, prejudice, racism, or discrimination. One such assertion is that Black people have no motivation or incentive to “move up” or climb the socioeconomic ladder. Consequently, this negative characteristic is presumed to perpetuate racial inequality: Like a vicious cycle, Whites then perceive Blacks as ignorant or as having “devalued cultural mores.” The following are examples of Category II explanations; even though they allude to slavery, albeit in a secondary fashion, the existence of discrimination is the primary focus: Blacks were brought to the U.S. by Whites. They were/are thought to be of a “lower race” by large parts of the society . . . society has impressed these beliefs/ideas onto Blacks. [Therefore] Blacks probably have lower self-esteem and when you have lower self-esteem, it is harder to move up in the world. . . . Blacks group together and stay together. Very few move up . . . partly because society put them there. (F6–18) Past history is at the base of the racial problems evident in today’s society. Blacks have been persecuted and oppressed for years. . . . Discrimination is still a problem which results in lack of motivation, self-esteem and hence a lessened “desire” to escape the hardships with which they are faced. (F8–14)

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In 1986 my students’ responses were almost evenly divided between Category I and Category II explanations (ten and 11 responses, respectively, with one Category III response). In 1988 all 35 responses were divided between Category I (11) and Category II (24) responses, or 32% and 68%, respectively. Thus, the majority of students in both years explained racial inequality in limited ways—as a historically inevitable consequence of slavery or as a result of prejudice and discrimination—without recognizing the structural inequity built into the social order. Their explanations fail to link racial inequity to other forms of societal oppression and exploitation. In addition, these explanations, which give considerable attention to Black people’s negative characteristics, fail to account for White people’s beliefs and attitudes that have long justified societal oppression and inequity in the form of racial slavery or discrimination.

Discussion An obvious feature of Category I explanations is the devaluation of the African American cultural heritage, a heritage which certainly encompasses more than the debilitating experience of slavery. Moreover, the integrity and adaptive resilience of what Stuckey (1987) refers to as the “slave culture” is ignored and implicitly devalued. Indeed, Category I explanations reflect a conservative assimilationist ideology that blames contemporary racial inequity on the presumed cultural deficits of African Americans. Less obvious is the way the historical continuum of these explanations, beginning as they do with the effects of slavery on African Americans, fails to consider the specific cultural rationality that justified slavery as acceptable and lawful (Wynter, 1990). Also excluded from these explanations as possible contributing factors are the particular advantages White people gained from the institution of racial slavery. Category II explanations devalue diversity by not recognizing how opportunity is tied to the assimilation of mainstream norms and values. These explanations also fail to call into question the basic structural inequity of the social order; instead, the cultural mythology of the American Dream, most specifically the myth of equal opportunity, is tacitly accepted (i.e., with the right opportunity, African Americans can climb out of poverty and “make it” like everyone else). Such liberal, assimilationist ideology ignores the widening gap between the haves and the have nots, the downward mobility of growing numbers of Whites (particularly women with children), and other social realities of contemporary capitalism. While not altogether inaccurate, these explanations are nevertheless partial precisely because they fail to make appropriate connections between race, gender, and class inequity. How do Category I and Category II explanations exemplify dysconscious racism? Both types defend White privilege, which, according to Wellman (1977), is a “consistent theme in racist thinking” (p. 39). For example, Category

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I explanations rationalize racial inequity by attributing it to the effects of slavery on African Americans while ignoring the economic advantages it gave Whites. A second rationalization, presented in Category II explanations, engenders the mental picture many of my students apparently have of equal opportunity, not as equal access to jobs, health care, education, etc., but rather as a sort of “legal liberty” which leaves the structural basis of the racial status quo intact (King & Wilson, 1990). In effect, by failing to connect a more just opportunity system for Blacks with fewer white-skin advantages for Whites, these explanations, in actuality, defend the racial status quo. According to Wellman, the existing social order cannot provide for unlimited (or equal) opportunity for Black people while maintaining racial privileges for Whites (p. 42). Thus, elimination of the societal hierarchy is inevitable if the social order is to be reorganized; but before this can occur, the existing structural inequity must be recognized as such and actively struggled against. This, however, is not what most of my students have in mind when they refer to “equal opportunity.” Category I and Category II explanations rationalize the existing social order in yet a third way by omitting any ethical judgment against the privileges White people have gained as a result of subordinating Black people (and others). These explanations thus reveal a dysconscious racism which, although it bears little resemblance to the violent bigotry and overt white supremacist ideologies of previous eras, still takes for granted a system of racial privilege and societal stratification that favors Whites. Like the Whites of Dred Scott’s era, few of my students even think of disputing this system or see it as disputable. Category III explanations, on the other hand, do not defend this system. They are more comprehensive, and thus more accurate, because they make the appropriate connections between racism and other forms of inequity. Category III explanations also locate the origins of racial inequity in the framework of a society in which racial victimization is normative. They identify and criticize both racist ideology and oppressive societal structures without placing the responsibility for changing the situation solely on African Americans (e.g., to develop self-esteem), and without overemphasizing the role of White prejudice (e.g., Whites’ beliefs about Black inferiority). The historical factors cited in Category III explanations neither deny White privilege nor defend it. I have received only one Category III response from a student at the beginning of my courses, the following: [Racial inequity] is primarily the result of the economic system . . . racism served the purposes of ruling groups; e.g., in the Reconstruction era . . . poor Whites were pitted against Blacks—a pool of cheap exploitable labor is desired by capitalists and this ties in with the identifiable differences of races. (F6–9)

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Why is it that more students do not think this way? Given the majority of my students’ explanations of racial inequity, I suggest that their thinking is impaired by dysconscious racism—even though they may deny they are racists. The important point here, however, is not to prove that students are racist; rather, it is that their uncritical and limited ways of thinking must be identified, understood, and brought to their conscious awareness. Dysconscious racism must be made the subject of educational intervention. Conventional analyses—which conceptualize racism at the institutional, cultural, or individual level but do not address the cognitive distortions of dysconsciousness—cannot help students distinguish between racist justifications of the status quo (which limit their thought, self-identity, and responsibility to take action) and socially unacceptable individual prejudice or bigotry (which students often disavow). Teacher educators must therefore challenge both liberal and conservative ideological thinking on these matters if we want students to consider seriously the need for fundamental change in society and in education. Ideology, identity, and indoctrination are central concepts I use in my Social Foundations of Education course to help students free themselves from miseducation and uncritically accepted views which limit their thought and action. A brief description of the course follows.

The Cultural Politics of Critiquing Ideology and Identity One goal of my Social Foundations of Education course is to sharpen the ability of students to think critically about educational purposes and practice in relation to social justice and to their own identities as teachers. The course thus illuminates a range of ideological interests, which become the focus of students’ critical analysis, evaluation, and choice. For instance, a recurring theme in the course is that of the social purposes of schooling, or schooling as an instrument of educational philosophy, societal vision, values, and personal choice. This is a key concept about which many students report they have never thought seriously. Course readings, lectures, media resources, class discussions, and other experiential learning activities are organized to provide an alternative context of meaning within which students can critically analyze the social purposes of schooling. The range of ideological perspectives considered include alternative explanations of poverty and joblessness, competing viewpoints regarding the significance of cultural differences, and discussions of education as a remedy for societal inequity. Students consider the meaning of social justice and examine ways that education might be transformed to promote a more equitable social order. Moreover, they are expected to choose and declare the social changes they themselves want to bring about as teachers. The course also introduces students to the critical perspective that education is not neutral; it can serve various political and cultural interests including social control, socialization, assimilation, domination, or liberation (Cagan, 1978;

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Freire, 1971; O’Neill, 1981). Both impartial, purportedly factual information as well as openly partisan views about existing social realities such as the deindustrialization of America, hunger and homelessness, tracking, the “hidden” curriculum (Anyon, 1981; Vallance, 1977), the socialization of teachers, and teacher expectations (Rist, 1970) allow students to examine connections between macrosocial (societal) and microsocial (classroom) issues. This information helps students consider different viewpoints about how schooling processes contribute to inequity. Alongside encountering liberal and conservative analyses of education and opportunity, students encounter the scholarship of radical educators such as Anyon (1981), Freire (1971), Kozol (1981), and Giroux and McLaren (1986), who have developed “historical identities” (Boggs & Boggs, 1979) within social justice struggles and who take stronger ethical stances against inequity than do liberals or conservatives. These radical educators’ perspectives also provide students with alternative role models; students discuss their thoughts and feelings about the convictions these authors express and reflect upon the soundness of radical arguments. Consequently, as students formulate their own philosophical positions about the purposes of education, they inevitably struggle with the ideas, values, and social interests at the heart of the different educational and social visions which they, as teachers of the future, must either affirm, reject, or resist. Making a conscious process of the struggle over divergent educational principles and purposes constitutes the cultural politics of my Social Foundations course. In this regard my aim is to provide a context within which student teachers can recognize and evaluate their personal experiences of political and ethical indoctrination. In contrast to their own miseducation, and using their experience in my course as a point of comparison, I urge my students to consider the possibilities liberatory and transformative teaching offers. To facilitate this kind of conscious reflection, I discuss the teaching strategies I myself model in my efforts to help them think critically about the course content, their own worldview, and the professional practice of teaching (Freire & Faundez, 1989). To demonstrate the questions that critical, liberatory teachers must ask and to make what counts as “school knowledge” (Anyon, 1981) problematic, I use Freire’s (1971) strategy of developing “problem-posing” counterknowledge. For example, I pose biased instructional materials as a problem teachers address. Thus, when we examine the way textbooks represent labor history (Anyon, 1979) and my student teachers begin to realize all they do not know about the struggles of working people for justice, the problem of miseducation becomes more real to them. Indeed, as Freire, Woodson (1933), and others suggest, an alternative view of history often reveals hidden social interests in the curriculum and unmasks a political and cultural role of schooling of which my student teachers are often completely unaware. Analysis of and reflection on their own knowledge and experience involves students in critiquing ideologies, examining the influences on their thinking and

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identities, and considering the kind of teachers they want to become. I also encourage my students to take a stance against mainstream views and practices that dominate in schools and other university courses. Through such intellectual and emotional growth opportunities, students in my course re-experience and re-evaluate the partial and socially constructed nature of their own knowledge and identities. My approach is not free from contradictions, however. While I alone organize the course structure, select the topics, make certain issues problematic, and assign the grades, I am confident that my approach is more democratic than the unwitting ideological indoctrination my students have apparently internalized. For a final grade, students have the option of writing a final exam in which they can critique the course, or they may present (to the class) a term project organized around an analytical framework they themselves generate.

Toward Liberatory Pedagogy in Teacher Education Merely presenting factual information about societal inequity does not necessarily enable preservice teachers to examine the beliefs and assumptions that may influence the way they interpret these facts. Moreover, with few exceptions, available multicultural resource materials for teachers presume a value commitment and readiness for multicultural teaching and antiracist education which many students may lack initially (Banks, 1977; Bennett, 1990; Brandt, 1986; Sleeter & Grant, 1988). Teacher educators may find some support in new directions in adult education (Mezirow, 1984) and in theories of adult learning and critical literacy which draw upon Freire’s work in particular (Freire & Macedo, 1987). This literature offers some useful theoretical insights for emancipatory education and liberatory pedagogy (Heaney, 1984). For example, the counterknowledge strategies I use in my Social Foundations course are designed to facilitate the kind of “perspective transformation” Mezirow (1984) calls for in his work. It is also worth noting that a tradition of critical African American educational scholarship exists which can be incorporated into teacher preparation courses. Analyses of miseducation by DuBois (1935), Ellis (1917), and Woodson (1933) are early forerunners of critical, liberatory pedagogy. This tradition is also reflected in contemporary African American thought and scholarship on education and social action (see Childs, 1989; Gordon, 1990; Lee, Lomotey, & Shujaa, 1990; Muwakkil, 1990; Perkins, 1986). As Sleeter and Grant (1988, p. 194) point out, however, White students sometimes find such critical, liberatory approaches threatening to their selfconcepts and identities. While they refer specifically to problems of White males in this regard, my experience is that most students from economically privileged, culturally homogeneous backgrounds are generally unaware of their intellectual biases and monocultural encapsulation. While my students may feel threatened by diversity, what they often express is guilt and hostility. Students

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who have lived for the most part in relatively privileged cultural isolation can only consider becoming liberatory, social-reconstructionist educators if they have both an adequate understanding of how society works and opportunities to think about the need for fundamental social change. The critical perspective of the social order offered in my course challenges students’ worldviews as well as their self-identities by making problematic and directly addressing students’ values, beliefs, and ideologies. Precisely because what my students know and believe is so limited, it is necessary to address both their knowledge (that is, their intellectual understanding of social inequity) and what they believe about diversity. As Angus and Jhally (1989, p. 12) conclude, “what people accept as natural and self-evident” is exactly what becomes “problematic and in need of explanation” from this critical standpoint. Thus, to seriously consider the value commitment involved in teaching for social change as an option, students need experiential opportunities to recognize and evaluate the ideological influences that shape their thinking about schooling, society, themselves, and diverse others. The critique of ideology, identity, and miseducation described herein represents a form of cultural politics in teacher education that is needed to address the specific cultural rationality of social inequity in modem American society. Such a liberatory pedagogical approach does not neglect the dimension of power and privilege in society, nor does it ignore the role of ideology in shaping the context within which people think about daily life and the possibilities of social transformation. Pedagogy of this kind is especially needed now, given the current thrust toward normative schooling and curriculum content that emphasizes “our common Western heritage” (Bloom, 1987; Gagnon, 1988; Hirsch, 1987; Ravitch, 1990). Unfortunately, this neoconservative curriculum movement leaves little room for discussion of how being educated in this tradition may be a limiting factor in the effectiveness of teachers of poor and minority students (King & Wilson, 1990; Ladson-Billings, 1991). Indeed, it precludes any critical ethical judgment about societal inequity and supports the kind of miseducation that produces teachers who are dysconscious—uncritical and unprepared to question white norms, white superiority, and white privilege. Myths and slogans about common heritage notwithstanding, prospective teachers need an alternative context in which to think critically about and reconstruct their social knowledge and self-identities. Simply put, they need opportunities to become conscious of oppression. However, as Heaney (1984) correctly observes: “Consciousness of oppression can not be the object of instruction, it must be discovered in experience” (p. 118). Classes such as my Social Foundations course make it possible for students to re-experience the way dysconscious racism and miseducation victimize them. That dysconscious racism and miseducation of teachers are part of the problem is not well understood. This is evident in conventional foundations approaches and in the teacher education literature on multiculturalism and

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pluralism which examine social stratification, unequal educational outcomes, and the significance of culture in education but offer no critique of ideology and indoctrination (Gollnick & Chinn, 1990; Pai, 1990). Such approaches do not help prospective teachers gain the critical skills needed to examine the ways being educated in a racist society affects their own knowledge and their beliefs about themselves and culturally diverse others. The findings presented in this chapter suggest that such skills are vitally necessary. The real challenge of diversity is to develop a sound liberatory praxis of teacher education which offers relatively privileged students freedom to choose critical multicultural consciousness over dysconsciousness. Moving beyond dysconsciousness and miseducation toward liberatory pedagogy will require systematic research to determine how teachers are being prepared and how well those whose preparation includes critical liberatory pedagogy are able to maintain their perspectives and implement transformative goals in their own practice.

Notes 1 It should be noted that dysconsciousness need not be limited to racism but can apply to justifications of other forms of exploitation such as sexism or even neocolonialism— issues that are beyond the scope of the present analysis. 2 I want to thank Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings, who also teaches at my institution, for providing these journal entries. 3 This and subsequent student comment codes used throughout this chapter identify individual respondents within each cohort. “F6–21,” for example, refers to respondent 21 in the fall 1986 academic quarter.

References Angus, I., & Jhally, S. (Eds.). (1989). Cultural politics in contemporary America. New York: Routledge. Anyon, J. (1979). Ideology and U.S. history textbooks. Harvard Educational Review, 49, 361–386. Anyon, J. (1981). Social class and school knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry,11, 3–42. Ayers, W. (1988). Young children and the problem of the color line. Democracy and Education, 3(1), 20–26. Banks, J. (1977). Multiethnic education: Practices and promises. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation. Bennett, C. (1990). Comprehensive multicultural education: Theory and practice. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Bloom, A. (1987). The closing of the American mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. Boggs, J. and Boggs, G. L. (1979). Conversations in Maine: Exploring our nation’s future. Boston: South End Press. Brandt, G. (1986). The realization of anti-racist teaching. Philadelphia: The Falmer Press. Cagan, E. (1978). Individualism, collectivism, and radical educational reform. Harvard Educational Review, 48, 227–266. Childs, J. B. (1989). Leadership, conflict and cooperation in Afro-American social thought. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Cox, G. O. (1974). Education for the Black race. New York: African Heritage Studies Publishers. DuBois, W. E. B. (1935). Does the Negro need separate schools? Journal of Negro Education, 4, 329–335. Edelman, M. W. (1987). Families in peril: An agenda for social change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ellis, G. W. (1917). Psychic factors in the new American race situation. Journal of Race Development, 4, 469–486. Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Harper & Row. Freire, P., & Faundez, A. (1989). Learning to question: A pedagogy of liberation. New York: Continuum. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Gagnon, P. (1988, November). Why study history? Atlantic Monthly, 43–66. Ginsburg, M. (1988). Contradictions in teacher education and society: A critical analysis. Philadelphia: The Falmer Press. Ginsburg, M., & Newman, K. (1985). Social inequalities, schooling and teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 36, 49–54. Giroux, J., & McLaren, P. (1986). Teacher education and the politics of engagement: The case for democratic schooling. Harvard Educational Review, 56, 213–238. Gollnick, D., & Chinn, P. (1990). Multicultural education in a pluralistic society. Columbus, OH: Merrill. Gordon, B. (1985). Critical and emancipatory pedagogy: An annotated bibliography of sources for teachers. Social Education, 49(5), 400–402. Gordon, B. (1990). The necessity of African-American epistemology for educational theory and practice. Journal of Education, 172(3), 88–106. Harlan, S. (1985, June 5). Compared to White children, Black children are . . . USA Today, p. 9–A. Heaney, T. (1984). Action, freedom and liberatory education. In S. B. Merriam (Ed.), Selected writings on philosophy and education (pp. 113–122). Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger. Hirsch, E. D. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Howard, B. C. (1857). Report of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States and the opinions of the justices thereof in the case of Dred Scott versus John F. A. Sandford, December term, 1856. New York: D. Appleton & Co. King, J. E., & Ladson-Billings, G. (1990). The teacher education challenge in elite university settings: Developing critical and multicultural perspectives for teaching in a democratic and multicultural society. European Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1(2), 15–30. King, J. E., & Wilson, T. L. (1990). Being the soul-freeing substance: A legacy of hope in Afro humanity. Journal of Education, 172(2), 9–27. Kozol, J. (1981). On being a teacher. New York: Continuum. Ladson-Billings, G. (1991). Beyond multicultural illiteracy. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 147–157. Lee, C., Lomotey, K., & Shujaa, M. (1990). How shall we sing our sacred song in a strange land? The dilemma of double consciousness and complexities of an Africancentered pedagogy. Journal of Education, 172(2), 45–61. Mezirow, J. (1984). A critical theory of adult learning and education. In S. B. Merriam

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(Ed.), Selected writings on philosophy and adult education (pp. 123–140). Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger. Muwakkil, S. (1990). Fighting for cultural inclusion in the schools. In These Times, 14(37), 8–9. O’Neill, W. F. (1981). Educational ideologies: Contemporary expressions of educational philosophy. Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear. Pai, Y. (1990). Cultural foundations of education. Columbus, OH: Merrill. Perkins, U. E. (1986). Harvesting new generations: The positive development of Black youth. Chicago: Third World Press. Ravitch, D. (1990). Diversity and democracy. The American Educator, 14, 16–20. Rist, R. (1970). Student social class and teacher expectations. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 411–451. Searle, C. (Ed.). (1975). Classrooms of resistance. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. Shor, I. (1980). Critical teaching in everyday life. Boston: South End Press. Sleeter, C., & Grant, C. (1988). Making choices for multicultural education: Five approaches to race, class and gender. Columbus, OH: Merrill. Stuckey, S. (1987). Slave culture: Nationalist theory and the foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press. Vallance, E. (1977). Hiding the hidden curriculum: An interpretation of the language of justification in nineteenth-century educational reform. In A. Bellack & H. Kliebard (Eds.), Curriculum and evaluation (pp. 590–607). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Wellman, D. (1977). Portraits of White racism. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Woodson, C. G. (1933). The miseducation of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers. Wynter, S. (1990, September 9). America as a “world”: A Black studies perspective and “cultural model” framework. [Letter to the California State Board of Education.]

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5 “[ART THOU] COME TO THE KINGDOM FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS?” Transformative Public Scholarship for Social Change

I knew nothing about my own historical reality, except in negative terms, that would have made it normal for me, as Fanon points out, both to want to be a British subject and, in so wanting, to be anti-black, anti-everything I existentially was. I knew what it was to experience a total abjection of being. (Sylvia Wynter [Scott, 2000, p. 188])

Introduction Knowing that the question in the title of my essay comes from a Biblical story is useful information. The story’s significance for me, however, is its power as a metaphor to remind us that we, too, in our roles in the academy are, like Queen Esther, obligated to respond to the life and death issues that are at stake for people today. This story reminds us to recognize the perilous “time” that we are in, and that we have power in our roles as privileged intellectuals, not in the King’s palace but in the academy, to make change happen on behalf of our communities. Queen Esther was called by her community to fulfill her obligation to them—a call that is a reminder to us of the partnerships that we must make with the communities we live in and which we are here in the academy to serve. Therefore, I will begin my essay with Queen Esther’s story to make the point that as academics we are facing critical times in the academic kingdom, as well. I will give some examples of what I mean by transformative public scholarship, which is one of the ways that I have found to answer this calling. I will describe my own intellectual journey toward this kind of scholarship—which blends a commitment to service and the production of knowledge on behalf of the community. Using examples from my life and my experience in the

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academy, I will also specify several arenas of social change that my scholarship has contributed to in different ways.

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We Are Called to Serve “Now it came to pass,” the Book of Esther says, “in the days of Ahasuerus,” the King who reigned from India to Ethiopia, that Vashti, who was Queen before Esther, refused to heed her husband when he commanded her to come and show off her beauty at his feast. This was sheer outrage. The King’s men told him he had to make an example of her. Wouldn’t all the other wives in the Kingdom think that they, too, could disobey their husbands? So, to punish Vashti for this display, the King commanded his people to bring all the fair young virgins in the land to him. When he saw Esther, he chose her to replace Vashti: “And the King loved Esther above all the women . . . so that he set the royal crown upon her head and made her queen instead of Vashti” (Esther 2:17): Sometimes we are “chosen” to fill a certain slot in the “academic kingdom,” and we may also find ourselves placed as a result in difficult situations that we didn’t create but we, nevertheless, have to deal with. Esther had no mother or father. Her uncle, Mordecai, who raised her, prepared her for this opportunity and he also advised her to hide her Jewish identity: Many of us are the first generation in our families to come into the academy and we are “undercover” in some ways. However, if you’re Black, it’s less possible to hide that part of yourself. Now it also came to pass that Haman, who was one of Ahasuerus’s favorite princes, decided that the Jews were a dangerous people. Haman convinced the King that all the Jewish men, women, and children throughout the kingdom should be killed. The King agreed and announced the murderous decree. “There was great mourning among the Jews and fasting and weeping, and wailing” (Esther 4:3). Mordecai went about in “sackcloth and ashes.” He also sent a servant to tell Esther that she must plead with her husband for her people’s salvation: Sometimes our colleagues don’t understand that we have these commitments that inform what we do as scholars and teachers. And we sometimes forget that we have come into the academy by virtue of historical circumstances and sacrifices that have been made on our behalf. Esther sent the servant back to Mordecai with the message that she couldn’t possibly do that—go to see the King. Didn’t he know the law? Didn’t he know

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that anyone who went in to see the King who had not been called by him would be killed? In the academic kingdom it’s “publish or perish.” Yet, in our privileged positions we are sometimes unaware of the life-and-death reality that people in our communities are facing. For example, although I have a PhD and my children’s father has a PhD, our degrees could not protect them when they were growing up in a community that had the highest per capita murder rate in the country. Mordecai sent the servant back to Queen Esther. His message was clear and unequivocal: “Don’t think that you can escape our fate just because you’re up there in the palace. We made it possible for you to be there. Now, the time has come and we need your help.” Conscious now of her call to serve, Esther found courage in solidarity with her community. She asked her people to pray and fast with her for three days. Then, she put on her “royal apparel,” and she said fearlessly: “I will go to see the King and if I perish, I perish.” Esther was able to save her people from the massacre that had been planned. In academia we cannot always be assured of such a happy outcome. We can be denied tenure or promotion, or we may have to move to another institution in order to continue our work. But Esther’s example can inspire us to develop the consciousness and find the courage to answer our call to serve. Such consciousness, however, is an achievement that depends on our ability to recognize and resist the hegemonic role of education. Sylvia Wynter explains our predicament: If you are intellectuals and artists who belong to a subordinated group, you are necessarily going to be educated in the scholarly paradigms of the group who dominates you. But these paradigms, whatever their other emancipatory attributes, must have always already legitimated the subordination of your group. Must have even induced us to accept our subordination through the mediation of their imaginary. (Scott, 2000, p. 189) Developing knowledge and understanding of alienating miseducation (Woodson, 1933) in solidarity with the community, a goal of transformative public scholarship, creates possibilities for resisting assimilation and choosing consciousness and fearlessness on behalf of those whom we are called upon to serve.

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Overcoming Alienating Miseducation In 1969, when I began my graduate studies at Stanford University, my path toward transformative public scholarship and social change opened before me in the classroom of an eminent professor of educational psychology. His explanation of why Black students did not succeed in school epitomized the dominant educational discourse: Black children’s mothers didn’t talk to them in the right (middle-class) ways and they had “no culture.” These explanations of Black children’s educational problems were based on the research of Stanford colleagues, research that contributed to the development of education interventions like the Head Start program that logically follow from cultural deficit assumptions. Although such programs continue to function, the assumption that giving lower-class mothers middle-class parenting skills will improve Black children’s achievement is wearing thin as the “achievement gap” persists (The College Board, 2000). For example, a New York Times article entitled, “What No School Can Do,” concluded that the children of the poorest parents may well be beyond the reach of schools (Traub, 2000, p. 2). “How powerful can this one institution be,” the author writes, “in the face of the kind of disadvantages that so many ghetto children bring with them to the schoolhouse door, and return to at home?” Actually this reasoning is not new. In the 1960s this pseudo-theory of the “culture of poverty” consisted of variations on the theme of Black people’s cultural deficiency: lack of culture, absence of culture, deficit of culture, and so forth. Now, thirty years later, the dominant discourse about the “achievement gap” continues to focus on Black people’s supposed deficiency rather than societal structures of race, class, and gender oppression. What is worse, scholars as well as the general public seriously entertain anachronistic notions that this gap is the result of cognitive or genetic deficits. My first encounter with this ideology of Black inferiority as a genetic lack occurred in graduate school. I still remember the shock I felt upon opening the envelope containing the doctoral program qualifying take-home examination. One of the questions required writing an analysis of and a response to Arthur Jensen’s recently published (1969) article in the Harvard Educational Review. In this article Jensen asserted that the Black-White “I.Q. gap” was a reflection of the “heritability” of I.Q. and, thus, an indication of Black people’s genetic inferiority. I couldn’t confer with anyone because this was a test and a “high stakes” test at that. Thus, as I wrote my qualifying exam using my own insights and drawing on my own good sense, I was writing in defense of my people, our mothers, and myself. My fellow students, on the other hand, were writing an academic essay. Can we really say that we experienced the same examination? It is also worth noting that Jensen’s thesis has been redeployed in the bestselling book, The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). In an article entitled “Bad Luck, Bad Blood, Bad Faith: Ideological Hegemony and the Oppressive

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Language of Hoodoo Social Science,” I have again challenged this belief structure (King, 1996). I wrote in defense of Black people’s humanity and our cultural integrity. An incident that occurred at a professional research meeting a few years ago illustrates the taken-for-grantedness of the ideology and how deeply it has penetrated the education research community. The keynote speaker, a prominent researcher, described the effectiveness of a cooperative learning intervention program that he designed for Black students, whom he referred to as “minority students.” An Asian American colleague asked if “model minority” students also benefited from this approach. When the researcher replied that he was not familiar with this term, my colleague informed him that Asian Americans are called “the model minority” because their school performance parallels that of White students. The researcher said that his findings only applied to Black students. “However,” he said, “now that I think about it, perhaps we should give the Black kids Japanese mothers!” As a burst of raucous laughter filled the room, another researcher yelled out: “No, let’s give ’em Jewish mothers.” This incident shows us that race and identity issues are not simply about the problematic attitudes of these students, as some researchers, who attribute the academic problems of these students to their “fear of ‘acting white’,” would have it. Rather, teachers and researchers hold culturally sanctioned negative views about Black people and about Black culture, which are far more pernicious than what the research literature identified years ago as teachers’ “low expectations.” Perhaps, as the rap artist Chuck D of Public Enemy put it, there is “fear of a Black planet.” At any rate, Hacker’s (1994) trenchant observation is illuminating: Whites continue to wonder . . . whether blacks are capable of real intellectual achievement. . . . At the heart of the matter is a belief once voiced freely, but no longer openly aired, that African genes do not provide a capacity for complicated tasks. (Hacker, 1994, p. 459) Invidious ethnic comparisons of Black students with other groups, including socalled “model minority” Asian American students, belie our society’s ignorance of and willful refusal to acknowledge humanity’s shared African heritage. School textbooks continue to place Egypt outside Africa, and while “our common human origins” may be acknowledged and correctly located in Africa, the “cradle of civilization” continues to be identified within an area between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers—anywhere but Africa. This relentless distortion of the historical record has been reduced in popular debate about Afrocentric scholarship to the simplistic question: “Was Cleopatra black?” The way Africa is represented in school knowledge is intrinsically related to belief structure of Black inferiority. In every academic discipline such biased knowledge contributes to the miseducation of both teachers and students.

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In sharp contrast, the Superintendent and the entire administrative cabinet of a school district in “Silicon Valley” in a northern California district that enrolls a large population of Japanese students (from Japan) was hosted for a ten-day stay in Japan by the Japanese government to sensitize these educators to Japanese culture. Who will propose and finance such educational enrichment on behalf of the descendants of the enslaved Africans? What would schools be like “if educators really loved Black children” (King & Wilson, 1990, p. 20)? Negative cultural constructs about “conceptual” Blackness have an impact on the lived experience of Black women. As the bearers of culture in our families (Dove, 1998), Black women also continue to be maligned by the scholarship of cultural and genetic inferiority. Black mothers have been characterized in social science and education research as “emasculating matriarchs” who are incapable of properly socializing Black children (Bush, 2000; King & Mitchell, 1990/1995). These allegations against Black mothers, like my educational psychology professor’s explanations, have been based on an entire arsenal of cultural-cognitive deficit research and scholarship that dominated in my graduate study and continues to inform the perspectives of education researchers. Popular culture imagery in the media supports a parallel ideological infrastructure in the societal curriculum. I cite the above examples to show that researchers come to the research task with the socially constructed consciousness they have internalized with respect to race, class, and gender. It is very difficult to wipe these cultural constructs out of your brain. In my work I have studied ways to help people develop a more critical consciousness of race, class, and gender. As feminist standpoint theory suggests, one’s consciousness depends to a great extent on “where you stand.” Developing research that functions pedagogically to enable people to overcome alienating miseducation has been part of my struggle for transformative public scholarship—to find ways to produce knowledge that is useful in the community, for the community, and with the community, rather than against the community. I have found that the best response to the kind of education for cultural annihilation that I have experienced along my intellectual journey is the pursuit of excellence in the spirit of “community mindfulness” (Tedla, 1995). Rather than concede to specious allegations such as those that have resurfaced in the “Bell Curve” paradigm or succumb to worry about whether we, as a people, were “qualified,” the 1960s gave my generation the idea that we could raise the standard. That we could find answers to questions that were not being posed—about societal injustice and identity consciousness—not our alleged inferiority. This is one legacy of the Black Studies Movement that came into the academy with my generation during the 1960s.

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Toward Consciousness and Transformative Public Scholarship My work in higher education has involved actualizing different forms of transformative public scholarship and social change within the academy. I have often undertaken this work in partnership with my community. In one publication, I describe my journey as a “search for a method for liberating education and research” (King, 1999, p. 101). This path toward the praxis (theory and practice) of transformative public scholarship includes activist research, teaching, professional service, and leadership as an academic administrator that has evolved over the years as I struggled for consciousness and resisted alienating education. My educational experiences have informed the perspective and the development of my scholarship. One example of the transformative and public nature of my scholarship is the book that I co-authored with Carolyn Mitchell, Black Mothers to Sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with Social Practice (King & Mitchell, 1990/1995). This book broke new ground using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the experiences and perspectives of Black mothers raising sons—in real life and in literature. In this book we offered a culturally grounded theoretical justification and epistemological rationale for an alternative research methodology that engaged the participants, a diverse group of Black mothers, in the study of their (our) social practice as partners in our inquiry process rather than as objects of a detached and supposedly “neutral” research process.1 As such, this participatory research provides an example of transformative public scholarship that challenges the assumptions and methods of positivist research. It is transformative because it functions as pedagogy to move the participants to new understandings of themselves and society. It is public because the participants are informed partners in the process. Thus, the research is expected to produce knowledge the community can use. A second example illustrates a different social change context for my work and public scholarship. From 1987 to 1991 I served on the California State Board of Education’s Curriculum Development and Supplemental Materials Commission. This Commission develops subject matter frameworks and a list of approved textbooks that schools are allowed to purchase with state funds. In 1991 I was involved in a controversial adoption of history textbooks that compelled me to take a stand against the mainstream, that is, the power structure that was represented by the State, the corporate media, and the billion dollar textbook industry. I raised questions about supposedly multicultural textbooks that, in my mind and in the minds of many other people, actually perpetuated racism. In a lengthy letter to the State Board of Education and in a journal article, I documented my opposition to the textbooks in a public way. Using my skills as a sociologist interested in how knowledge functions as ideology, I examined the roots of the controversy and analyzed the contradiction in the

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promotion of textbooks that are colorfully inclusive on the surface but culturally hegemonic (King, 1992). For example, these texts use the European heritage and experience of immigration as the normative model for all Americans. Thus, within this paradigm Native Americans are called the First Immigrants and African Americans are called “forced immigrants.” The textbook narrative reified the Bering Strait theory into a canonical Truth that any Native American child who has grown up with a consciousness of her cultural heritage would find alienating. Likewise, African American students experience a truncated sense of identity located in a narrative of enslavement instead of a fully developed sense of historical consciousness that begins with Africa’s gifts to the world. I have conducted workshops with hundreds of educators and community people based on my analysis of these contradictory and partial historical accounts. These workshops encourage participants to experience and rethink the fallacy of this paradigm. This workshop method, which I call “Critical Conversations,” is another form of participatory learning. The method grew out of the pedagogy I developed in my teacher education classes in order to help prospective teachers recognize and overcome their resistance to “diversity.” Finally, my work as a teacher educator and activist scholar has focused on enabling teachers and students of all backgrounds to develop critical consciousness of their own identity with regard to social justice, as opposed to what I have called the “dysconsciousness” that results from miseducation (King, 1991).2 Indeed, my students have described the experience as “opening their minds” (King, 1997). Thus, I have also learned some important lessons and written scholarly articles about preparing teachers for cultural diversity (King, 2000). For instance, teaching for global social justice is a moral obligation for all educators that is particularly challenging for White teachers who are often less aware of their own miseducation. Second, the Black struggle for liberating education is in fact in a battle for human freedom from alienating and hegemonic forms of knowledge that sustain the status quo.

What Time Is It? And Why Do We Need Transformative Public Scholarship? Consider the following: s

$URINGTHETENYEARSFOLLOWING THENUMBEROFPRISONSIN.EW9ORK State rose from 34 to 69. In [places like] Attica, Dannemora, Greenhaven, and Clinton, the number of inmates soared from 24,798 to 62,209, of whom 85% were Black and Latino, nearly all drawn from just seven neighborhoods in New York City. (Munford, 1996, pp. 326–327)

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s

3INCETHEEARLYS THEREHASBEENAPROGRESSIVECHANGEINTHETAXCODETHAT enriches the upper class while eroding wealth from the economic base of the middle and lower classes. For example, 2% of the U.S. upper class controls 48% of the nation’s wealth, while 51% of African American children live in poverty. . . . While the very rich corporations paid a minuscule percentage of their reported income in taxes, individuals with incomes between $13,000 and $15,000 paid taxes at a rate of 7.2%, or four times the rate paid by the Chase Manhattan Corporation, the New York-based global banking institution. (Bartolome & Macedo, 1997, p. 238)

s

4HE #OMMISSION FOR 2ACIAL *USTICE INVESTIGATED THE CONNECTION BETWEEN white racism and lethal (environmental) pollution . . . [N]either high income, nor high real estate values nor substantial home ownership have protected Black residential areas from poisonous dumping . . . and U.S. corporations have been shifting dirty, ecologically-damaging smokestack industries to the Third World for years. . . . Waste disposal, chemical, and other toxic pollution generating firms prefer to locate in and around lowincome Black and Latino communities. Three of the five largest hazardouswaste dumps are located in Black and Hispanic communities, and the percentage of Blacks living in jeopardized areas in the five worst-polluting states ranges from nearly 75% to nearly 90%. (Munford, 1996, p. 143)

s

! REPORT OF THE (ARVARD 0ROJECT ON 3CHOOL $ESEGREGATION ISSUED IN 3PRING 1997 found that racial segregation in the nation’s public schools has increased steadily over the last 15 years to a level greater than at any time since the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which authorized “forced busing” to achieve racial balance. (Loury, 1998, p. 22)

There is continuing debate among scholars about whether our social concerns regarding matters such as these should influence our scholarship—whether “political matters” should be separate from our academic and intellectual agenda.3 One of the ways that I have been able to keep myself grounded in the reality of my community, which these social facts represent, is to reject this ideology of supposedly “detached” or “neutral” scholarship advocated in the “academic kingdom.” That is to say, we are told that—as scientists—we should engage in “disinterested” research if we want to be taken seriously. However, I have incorporated transformative public scholarship, which is a hallmark of the discipline of Black Studies, in my work. This activist orientation is rooted in the real concerns and needs of my community, particularly the concerns of Black women. The Jemima Leadership Circle that I organized is a case in point. The Jemima Circle, a women’s leadership development group that I formed with

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other women in East Palo Alto, California, served as a public “evening school” context for our struggle for consciousness and social change agency. I am keenly interested in the theory, curriculum, and pedagogy of consciousness and agency—that which enables us to free our minds and to take action to change our circumstances. This requires self-knowledge and historical consciousness and includes the ability to use our spiritual traditions. I called women in my community together to create the Jemima Circle after I heard a traditional African priestess present an interpretation of the Aunt Jemima stereotype that “blew my mind.” This is what she said: The first women who were called Aunt Jemima were African priestesses of the Yoruba religion who, once they understood what was happening to the people who were being enslaved in the Americas, permitted themselves to be taken into captivity and willingly boarded the ships bound for the Middle Passage so that they could come here to look after us, to care for the people. [The ethic of care and personal accountability has deep cultural roots in the Black community.] These women have left a legacy throughout the African Diaspora; in the Caribbean and Brazil they are called Yemaya or Yemoja. Here in the U.S., these women were called Aunt Jemima. When I recounted this story to several women in my community who had been talking about forming “some kind of group” for a while, they, too, were stunned by this counter-image of ourselves. We were so inspired that we convened the Jemima Leadership Circle, which met regularly for four years like the women’s missionary circles in the Baptist Church that are named after women in the Bible: that is, “Esther’s Circle” or “Ruth’s Circle.” At each meeting the hostess “brought” a topic and we also shared a “potluck” supper together. After the first meeting, my mother, who was a participant, told me another powerful story. She said that our discussion about strong women whom we had known in our lives, our topic that evening, reminded her of the women she had known growing up who were “so strong and powerful that they could do just about anything.” Because they were Black women, they couldn’t be called “Mrs.” This term of respect (“Mrs.”) was reserved for White women. My mother said: “These women commanded so much respect through their life example and they were so powerful that even the White people couldn’t call them by their first names. We called these [Black] women ‘Aunt’.” Now I had never heard this information before; it exploded in my mind and literally expanded my consciousness. Like everyone else, I had accepted the belief that “Aunt” represented the negative stereotype that had come to be associated with “Aunt Jemima.” When I told the women in the Jemima Leadership Circle what our meeting had prompted my mother to remember, we began to

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realize the extent to which our historical consciousness, self-identities, and possibilities have been denied to us and thereby diminished. We also began to realize the untapped power of collectively reconstructing and “re-membering” our story. We were Black women of various ages and educational backgrounds and we were all changed by the collective memories and stories we shared—about ourselves, the condition of the community, and possible ways that we could make change happen in our families, in our neighborhoods, and in society. Out of this process of turning the Jemima stereotype right-side-up (Manring, 1998), the women began to see themselves and the community differently and they took action to make changes in the community and in their lives. This is not to say that the Jemima process was the only pertinent factor, but the experience certainly contributed to a number of positive developments. One of the participants became the mayor in our town. She had asked the group’s advice when she began to consider entering politics. Another Jemima Woman established a program for battered women and children; another created a community foundation that supports scholarships and after-school programs for youth. My mother, who was very ill when we began, recovered her health and hope and began a new job. This experience reinforced my commitment to developing educational experiences that permit us to recover our Cultural Knowledge, collective memory, and historical consciousness. Through this culturally grounded, woman-centered leadership development experience, I learned more about the pedagogy of teaching for consciousness and social change in a community setting or “lieu de mémoire” (place for memory).4 Creating the conditions for collectively recovering cultural memory and knowledge that is freed from and frees us from dominant controlling imagery (Hill Collins, 2000), and facilitating dialogue about our lived experience through conversation that is steeped in an ethic of care and personal accountability, to use the language of Hill Collins’s Black feminist epistemology, are important elements in the performance of this research-aspedagogy methodology.

Conclusion In conclusion, the story of Esther shows us the possibility and importance of challenging societal roles, rules, and expectations. The King’s men had warned him, “You can’t let her get away with that. What will these women do next?” In collective work and struggle we can find support for change in our time. It’s not a struggle that concerns only books or theory, publishing or perishing in the academic kingdom. Rather, what is at stake is the quality of our lives and our obligations to live for justice. To paraphrase Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi: “We must be the change that we want to see in the world.”

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Notes 1 It is interesting to note the close correspondence between the alternative research methodology we articulated in this book and the alternative Black feminist epistemology that Patricia Hill Collins (2000) delineated about the same time: lived experience as a criterion of meaning; the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims; the ethic of caring; and the ethic of personal accountability. 2 This article has been reprinted several times: see Delgado and Stefancic (1997, pp. 128–132; 640–641) and Stone (1993, pp. 236–248). 3 See also Shariat (2000, p. A18). 4 In the analysis of the textbook controversy (King, 1992), I wrote about the importance of creating such “lieux de mémoire” as sites or contexts for recovering our consciousness. This analysis draws on Vévé Clark’s (1994) use of the concepts lieu de mémoire and milieu de mémoire—which refer to settings for researching and remembering the “history of the Other.” Clark adapted these constructs from an essay by the French historian Pierre Nora (1984, 1994). In Black Mothers to Sons we issue a call for similar research contexts that we describe as “anticipatory pedagogy” (King & Mitchell, 1990/1995).

References Bartolome, R., & Macedo, D. (1997). Dancing with bigotry: The poisoning of racial and ethnic identities. Harvard Educational Review Symposium: Ethnicity and Education, 67(2), 222–246. Bush, L. (2000, Fall). Black mothers/Black sons: A critical examination of the social science literature. Western Journal of Black Studies, 24(3), 145–155. Clarke, V. (1994). Performing the memory of difference in Afro-Caribbean dance: Katherine Dunham’s choreography, 1938–1987. In G. Fabre & R. O’Meally (Eds.), History and memory in African American culture (pp. 188–204). New York: Oxford University Press. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (Eds.). (1997). Critical White Studies: Looking behind the mirror. Philadelphia: Temple University. Dove, N. (1998). Afrikan mothers: Bearers of culture, makers of social change. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Hacker, A. (1994). The delusion of equality. The Nation, 258(12), 457–459. Herrnstein, R., & Murray, C. (1994). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press. Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Jensen, A. R. (1969). How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement? Harvard Educational Review, 39(1), 1–123. King, J. E. (1991). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the mis-education of teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146. King, J. E. (1992). Diaspora literacy and consciousness in the struggle against miseducation in the Black community. Journal of Negro Education, 61(3), 317–340. King, J. E. (1996). Bad luck, bad blood, bad faith: Ideological hegemony and the oppressive language of hoodoo social science. In J. Kincheloe, S. Steinberg, & A. Gresson (Eds.), Measured lies: The Bell Curve re-examined (pp. 177–192). New York: St. Martin’s Press. King, J. E. (1997). “Thank you for opening our minds”: On praxis, transmutation, and

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Black Studies in teacher development. In J. E. King et al. (Eds.), Preparing teachers for cultural diversity (pp. 156–169). New York: Teachers College Press. King, J. E. (1999). In search of a method for liberating education and research: The half (that) has not been told. In C. A. Grant (Ed.), Multicultural research: A reflective engagement with race, class, gender and sexual orientation (pp. 101–119). Philadelphia: Falmer Press. King, J. E. (2000, Fall). White teachers at the crossroads: A moral choice for white teachers. Teaching Tolerance Magazine, 14–15. King, J. E., & Mitchell, C. A. (1990/1995). Black mothers to sons: Juxtaposing African American literature with social practice (2nd ed., rev.). New York: Peter Lang Publishers, Inc. King, J. E., & Wilson, T. L. (1990). Being the soul-freeing substance: A legacy of hope in Afro humanity. Journal of Education, 172(2), 9–27. Loury, G. (1998). Integration is yesterday’s struggle. Crisis, 104(3), January. Manring, M. M. (1998). Slave in a box: The strange career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Munford, C. J. (1996). Race and reparations: A Black perspective for the twenty-first century. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Nora, P. (1984). Entre mémoire et histoire, la problematique des lieux. In P. Nora (Ed.), Les lieux de mémoire (pp. xvii–xxiv). Paris: Gallimard. Nora, P. (1994). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. In G. Fabre & A. O’Meally (Eds.), History and memory in African-American culture (pp. 84–100). New York: Oxford University Press. Scott, D. (2000, September). The re-enchantment of humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe, 8, 119–207. Shariat, J. (2000, May 19). Taking Black Studies back to the streets. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Stone, L. (Ed.). (1993). The education feminism reader. Boston: RKP. Tedla, E. (1995). Sankofa: African thought and education. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, Inc. The College Board. (2000). Reaching to top: A report on the National Task Force on Minority Achievement. New York: Author. Traub, J. (2000). What no school can do. New York Times, Web Archives. Retrieved September 14, 2014, from www.econ.brown.edu/fac/glenn_loury/louryhomepage/ teaching/Ec%20137/Ec%20137%20spring07/Traub.pdf. Woodson, C. G. (1933). The mis-education of the negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers.

PART II

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Afrocentric Praxis Liberating Knowledge for Human Freedom

Through praxis, oppressed people can acquire a critical awareness of their own condition, and, with their allies, struggle for liberation. (Freire, 1968, p. 36) If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. (Mao Tse-Tung [Zedong], 1937, pp. 299–300) Building on the work of Cruse, Nkrumah, and Karenga, Asante defines Afrocentricity as a paradigmatic intellectual perspective linking research to ethical praxis. (Henry, 2007)

Introduction Ongoing debate about national curriculum standards, the “common core,” or core knowledge must also address what is morally wrong with our system of education and our economic system, for that matter. To resolve the problems we are facing as a nation, we must create and defend authentic bottom-up processes that will permit us to draw upon our heritage and our cultural memory to liberate knowledge, thus ensuring broad public participation in the development of real solutions to our complex problems that are suitable for a 21st century pluralistic cultural democracy. Indeed, the crisis of our educational, economic, and the political system as well, is actually a crisis of knowledge, which represents an opportunity for this society to live up to the (as yet unrealized) democratic ideals that have inspired others around the world.

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Equally urgent is the need to repair what Molefi Asante (2007) describes as the “fringeness” of the African presence and the distortion and disparagement of the Black Experience: Africans have been negated in the system of white racial domination. This is not mere marginalization, but the obliteration of the presence, meaning, activities, or images of the African. This is negated reality, a destruction of the spiritual and material personality of the African person. Therefore, the African must, to be conscious, be aware of everything and seek to escape from the anomie of fringeness. (Asante, 2007, p. 41) Part II illustrates the application of Diaspora Literacy, Heritage Knowledge, and Critical Studyin’ and demonstrates my use of Sylvia Wynter’s theoretical analysis of the “nihilation” of Blackness (negation of African humanity) from research to policy to pedagogical contexts. I employ Afrocentric ethical praxis across these contexts using research-as-pedagogy within a Black Studies theoretical paradigm to liberate or rewrite knowledge. This praxis includes critique of ideological representations in textbooks, curriculum, and pedagogy that contribute to this “fringeness” of the African presence—which ultimately also blocks human freedom for everyone. Thus, from the vantage point of the African American experience of racial subordination, the six chapters in Part II present my research and pedagogical responses to the “always already” de facto national curriculum that is not just an artifact of textbooks but is endemic within the broader culture. Part II includes a Reflection by Senegalese historian, Ibrahima Seck, and Susan Goodwin, a veteran Social Studies teacher and teacher educator, followed by an “Epilogue.” One example of my praxis (see Chapter 9) is the Songhay Club, a culture and heritage after-school program for middle school students (and some of their parents), which doubled as a pedagogical research site for my Georgia State University doctoral students. The Songhay Club demonstrates the power of liberating knowledge to change reality. African American students learned that the Songhay Empire (a.d. 1492–1591) that encompassed ten modern African nation states was a cosmopolitan civilization in which diverse ethnic groups shared a common language and heritage. For example, The UNESCO General History of Africa reports that the administrative structure of the Songhay Empire included a Ministry of White Foreigners and Minorities—the Korei Farma (Cissoko, 1984, p. 198; Maiga, 2010, p. 143). The curriculum and pedagogy my doctoral students and I implemented in the Songhay Club also introduced students to a powerful feature of Songhay language: positive meanings of Blackness in Songhay culture that are powerfully healing for us today with regard to the wounds of white supremacy racism deeply embedded in the English language and U.S. culture. When students experience the deep understanding of the

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humanism in the African worldview through Songhay language and culture study, they feel relieved of the “burden” of “Blackness” that has been distorted in this society (Asante, 2007). As one student, who was quite a “challenge” for us wrote in the Songhay Club’s collectively produced book: “The few weeks I was in Songhay, I learned to respect others, respect myself, and to give off positive energy.” Songhay Club lessons (e.g., the Atlanta Race Riot) underscored the need for pedagogical research to undo the de facto hegemonic curriculum that is supported by corporate media and other influences that exists in the minds of students, teachers, parents, and researchers (King, Goss, & McArthur, 2014). Below is a photo of the historical marker at the site of the town of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, “A Stop on the Underground Railroad,” established in 1825 by freedmen and women with the support of Quaker allies.

Figure PII.1

Timbuctoo, New Jersey, “A Stop on the Underground Railroad.”

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These formerly enslaved Africans most likely named their community after the ancient historic town of Timbuktu in Mali, West Africa—known for the famous “manuscripts of Timbuktu.” The Songhay Club pedagogy—“From the Nile to the Niger to the Neighborhood”—situates this ancient center of learning and diversity within a cultural-historical trajectory that begins with humanity’s African origins, proceeds to the Nile Valley civilizations (East Africa), then the classical Nile River Songhay civilization (West Africa) followed by engaging the students in “Critical Studyin’ ” in their own neighborhood. Archaeological analysis of the “settlement pattern used by the residents of Timbuctoo, New Jersey” that “manifested the need for protection and communal identity” suggests that they “used the landscape and cultural institutions to resist and persevere” (Barton, 2009, pp. 3–4). Research-based pedagogy that remembers such historically important but little known examples of African agency demonstrated by those who built this community, their record of collective armed self-defense during the slavery era, and their self-determination in claiming their African identity1 illustrates the power and relevance of Afrocentric praxis. Stories that my mother, Mrs. Mable King, remembered about my grandmother’s agency and resistance influenced my thinking about this pedagogical praxis. When she was interviewed by a student researcher at Spelman College, my mother reported this vivid memory of my grandmother’s resistance: my brothers were working on the stalk cutter and my mother decided one day: “My two sons are not getting paid what the men are getting paid.” And this day, when they were going to work, she said to the owner: “These horses are not moving today.” My mother was calling a strike and that was brave because we needed the money. . . . We were so proud of her. (The SIS Oral History Project, 2004, p. 108) My mother’s brothers were not even in their teens but they were doing the work of grown men. My grandmother’s resistance literally paid off. In contrast to our heritage of resistance and courage, however, ideological school knowledge makes it difficult for many teachers and students to imagine fundamental alternatives to the racial status quo. This de facto national curriculum shapes what teachers know and believe about their own teaching practice as well as what they believe about Black children, their heritage, identity, what constitutes justice and equity, and the possibilities for social transformation. Consider, for example, the following incident reported by one of my students at Santa Clara University, when I taught there from 1982 to 1994: To orient a new student teacher to her classroom a White teacher in an “exemplary” suburban school describes the Black children in her class this

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way: “Now, there are two groups of Black children here: The White-blacks, who will benefit from your teaching, because they have white values and the Black-blacks, who will not. They are less capable intellectually and will have behavior problems, because they have black values.” (King & Ladson-Billings, 1990, p. 17) This is the ongoing challenge and the crisis of knowledge this volume tackles.

The Chapters Chapter 6, “Diaspora Literacy and Consciousness in the Struggle Against Miseducation in the Black Community,” demonstrates what ideological knowledge does in education. This exploratory case study of a controversial California history/social studies textbook adoption focuses on the representation of slavery in selected textbooks. Using theoretical constructs in the disciplines of Black Studies and Sociology (e.g., Diaspora Literacy and alienation), educators and parents engaged with a Black Studies critique of ideology in the textbook controversy, which is not simply about textbooks. The study demonstrates the positive uses of controversy to educate parents and that Black Studies research, theorizing, and social action agendas should be informed by the concrete experiences of educators, parents, and students. Chapter 7, “ ‘If Justice Is Our Objective’: Diaspora Literacy, Heritage Knowledge, and the Praxis of Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom,” asks a series of questions. Is equal access to a faulty curriculum justice? What pedagogical alternatives are available, if academic scholarship and school knowledge are flawed by the ideology of white supremacy racism? If racial division is learned, does our vocation as educators call for the critical moral agency to realize the unfulfilled hopes of Brown v. the Board of Education? In other words, “if justice is our objective,” how can we educate for true human freedom? Thus, Chapter 7 presents the praxis of Critical Studyin’ as a morally engaged pedagogical approach and defines the importance of Heritage Knowledge and Diaspora Literacy. Chapter 8, “Who Dat Say (We) ‘Too Depraved to Be Saved’? Remembering Katrina/Haiti (and Beyond): Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom,” demonstrates the analytical power of these constructs. This chapter, which analyzes representations of Blackness following the disastrous events in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and Haiti’s earthquake, attempts to interrupt the societal calculus of human (un)worthiness and to repair the collective cultural amnesia that are legacies of slavery that make it easy—hegemonically and dysconsciously—for the public to accept myths and media reports, such as those about the depravity of Hurricane Katrina and Haiti’s earthquake survivors. Examples of Black Studies scholarship within a Critical Studyin’

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framework recover and “re-member” the common historical roots of the African heritage of resistance and revolution in New Orleans and Haiti. Within this framework, teachers, students, and parents can combat ideologically biased knowledge, disparaging discourses of Blackness, and dehumanizing disaster narratives. Chapter 9, “Transformative Curriculum Praxis for the Public Good,” calls for more and better research on transformative curriculum for students’ cultural well-being as a human right. In contrast to policy and research that equates assimilation with equality, this chapter asks: Does the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child provide a policy framework for research on the healing potential of curriculum praxis that advances both students’ group belonging and cultural democracy for the public good? Examples discussed include the banned Tucson Ethnic Studies curriculum and the Songhay Club after-school culture and heritage program. In a conversational style, Chapter 10 examines “Cultural Knowledge,” one of seven constructs of effective teaching of children of color (Goodwin & Swartz, 2004). This chapter asks, “Education for what?” and illustrates how I have used this construct in teacher preparation and research on Cultural Knowledge embodied in our lived community practices and opportunities for alternative performance-based assessments of cultural excellence. Contributions other scholars have made to the development of Cultural Knowledge as a form of educational excellence are also discussed. The chapter explores using Cultural Knowledge to center students in their learning—a principle of Afrocentric praxis. Chapter 11, “ ‘Thank You for Opening Our Minds’: On Praxis, Transmutation and Black Studies in Teacher Development,” returns to an early period of my work preparing mostly White pre-service teachers at Santa Clara University—building the capacity of “allies” in the struggle. Graduates of the Santa Clara University (SCU) teacher education program often described the intellectual, professional, and personal development they experienced during the program as “opening” their minds. This aptly describes the focus of my teaching in a foundations course sequence and student teaching seminars (from 1982 to 1994). My pedagogical praxis focused on enabling credential candidates to change the cognitive and affective schemata that limit their understanding of and commitment to the possibilities of transformative teaching. The final chapter, “Epilogue—Black Education Post-Katrina: And All Us We Are Not Saved,” responds to these questions: What is the state of Black education “post-Katrina”; what is at stake; and what is to be done? The dire condition of public education in New Orleans serves not as metaphor but as context for framing the complexities of Black education as a civilizational crisis: mass Black criminalization and incarceration, the school-to-prison track, and the dismantling of public education. The government’s apparent abandonment of the most impoverished Black New Orleanians is a national pattern of systematic

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neglect in jobless urban ghettos that is better understood as the racialized privatization of public spheres—notably schools and prisons.

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Conclusion Afrocentric praxis makes liberating knowledge possible in various contexts, as shown in Part II: teaching African American middle school students to connect with their heritage, engaging educators and parents in a Black Studies inquiry/ critique of ideology, “opening” the minds of White teacher education students, and transformative curriculum policy and analyses. A note from a teacher I taught recently at Georgia State University illustrates the power of this Afrocentric praxis presented in this volume.

A Coda Dear Dr. King, I wanted to let you know that your . . . class really changed me. Since I finished my degree in May, our discussions and assignments have stayed fresh in my mind. This summer I have spent a great deal of time researching the issues we talked about in your class, as well as other issues of equality and injustice throughout U.S. history. I will be teaching 5th grade ELA and Social Studies in the fall, and our year begins with a unit on slavery and the Civil War. I have read several slave narratives, some historical fiction novels told from the perspective of slaves, and I’m also making my way through Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with learning the stories I was never taught earlier in my education. In short, you really motivated me to become a more informed educator and to teach the history that is not included in our textbooks. I am so grateful to have my eyes truly open now, and to feel like the education I’ll be providing this year will be more meaningful than it ever has before. I appreciate your support throughout the spring semester, and I hope to stay in touch with you now that my time at GSU has ended. . . . If you have a blog or other site where you post, I’d love to follow it . . . I thank you again for the lessons you taught me. Sincerely, CG

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Note

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Timbuctoo was founded by freed blacks and escaped slaves in the 1820s. It was probably named after Timbuktu, the town in Mali near the Niger River, although researchers are still trying to find out how and why it got its name. The neighborhood still exists in the township of Westampton, N.J., about a 45-minute drive northeast of Philadelphia, an enclave of many acres, so tiny and tucked away that when you ask someone at the store two miles away, he tells you he has no idea where it is. (Brown, 2010)

References Asante, M. K. (2007). An Afrocentric manifesto: Toward an African renaissance. New York: Polity. Barton, C. P. (2009, December). Antebellum African-American settlements in southern, New Jersey. The African Diaspora Archaeology Network Newsletter. Retrieved January 12, 2013, from www.diaspora.uiuc.edu/news1209/news1209.html. Brown, D. (2010, August 3). Excavation of sites such as Timbuctoo, N.J., is helping to rewrite African-American history. Washingtonpost.com. Retrieved May 13, 2012, from www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080205217. html. Cissoko, S. M. (1984). The Songhay from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. In D. T. Niane (Ed.). UNESCO general history of Africa. Volume IV: From the 12th to the 16th century (pp. 187–210). Berkeley: University of California Press. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Goodwin, S., & Swartz, E. E. (Eds.). (2004). Teaching children of color: Seven constructs of effective teaching in urban schools. Rochester, NY: RTA Press. Henry, C. (2007). Review of M. Asante, An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance. Retrieved September 10, 2014, from www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/ WileyTitle/productCd-0745641024.html. King, J., Goss, A., & McArthur, S. (2014). Recovering history and the “Parent Piece” for cultural well-being and belonging. In J. King & E. E. Swartz (Eds.), Re-membering history in student and teacher and learning: An Afrocentric culturally-informed praxis (pp. 155–188). New York: Routledge. King, J. E., & Ladson-Billings, G. (1990). The teacher education challenge in elite university settings: Developing critical perspectives for teaching in a democratic and multicultural society. European Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1(2), 15–30. Maiga, H. O. (2010). Balancing written history with oral tradition: The legacy of the Songhay people. New York: Taylor & Francis. The SIS Oral History Project (2004). “Mrs. Mable King,” In SIS (Ed.), Their memories, our treasure (pp. 108–122). Atlanta, GA: SIS-Spelman College. Tse-Tung (Zedong), M. (1937). On Practice: On the relation between knowledge and practice, between knowing and doing. In M. Tse-Tung: Selected Works, Volume I. Peking: Foreign Language Press. Retrieved September 10, 2014, from www.marxists. org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm.

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REFLECTION Forbidden Knowledge Ibrahima Seck

These subordinate agents were submitted to a pure French educational training. They had to be convinced of the exclusive superiority of European culture from which they had the privilege to receive a few scraps. (Jean Suret-Canale) Us didn’ have no schoolin’. Us could go to school wid de white chillun if us wanted to, but didn’ nobody teach us. I’s educated, but I aint educated in de books. I’s educated by de licks an’ bumps I got. (Susan Snow, former slave, Alabama)

In his article (“Ending the Slavery Blame-Game”) featured in the New York Times of April 22, 2010, Henry Louis Gates Jr. certainly acted as an apologist of the opponents of reparations for the victims of slavery. The many outraged reactions to that article were a perfect illustration of the relevance of Dr. Joyce King’s struggle against the miseducation of the Black people in America. Other examples from the colonial system (the French in this case) and the “peculiar institution” of the U.S. South also sustain the validity of Dr. King’s work. In those two systems, the denial of education was a powerful tool for the control of the people put to work against their will. The denial of education would lead to cultural alienation and total submission of the victims. According to French historian Jean Suret-Canale, the colonial school was designed to serve the colonial project by imposing the culture of the invaders. But this schooling had to be limited to providing only scraps good enough to usher them into accepting domination and to produce the goods and services needed by the conquerors. Like Jim Crow, the judiciary arsenal backed the exploitation of the colonies through “forced labor” and the “code de l’indigénat,” two cynical institutions

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that reinvented slavery and the black code in the 20th century. The colonial school banned any knowledge potentially dangerous for the system and codified “useful knowledge” destined to convince the colonial subjects of the superiority of European culture. This is why the colonial ideology excluded Africa and Africans from the field of history and decreed that Africans could not claim any other history before the European colonization. The design of the colonial project had its parallels in the slave societies of the U.S. South. The system of slavery had also clearly defined the knowledge forbidden to its victims. Slaves could neither read nor write. Any endeavor regarding this matter was severely punished. Slaves could learn the use of figures in order to better serve their masters. Later, in post-slavery time, their descendants were taught that their history did not go beyond the middle passage. Slavery was a system in which the bondsmen were raised to be beasts of burden or docile servants at the Big House. The enslaved women were also raised to carry on hard work but they were also expected to be good breeders and their children were raised to serve on the plantation or sold away like cattle. This system was sustained by horrendous violence but the denial of education was the most devastating tool used for the control of the enslaved people. Before even the stolen freedom and wages, this crime against humankind, which lasted many centuries, should be the first item on the long list of reparations legitimately owed to African Americans in this country and elsewhere. The miseducation of the African American continues today and is a major source of division. Even a great scholar like Henry Louis Gates Jr. showed limited knowledge of the tricky system of the Atlantic slave trade when he argued in his widely contested article that advocates of reparations for the descendants of the slaves should stop doing their job because of the significant role that Africans played in the slave trade in which he saw a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike. According to Dr. Ron Daniels, when leading scholars like Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Leonard Jeffries, Dr. Charshee McIntyre, Dr. James Turner, Sonia Sanchez, Dr. Molefe Asante, Dr. Maulana Karenga and a host of others were contending that the goal of Black Studies/Africana Studies must be “education for liberation,” it was Professor Gates who sided with the academic establishment in castigating this approach. Dr. Michael A. Gomez explained how West and West Central Africa became theaters of increasing violence and warfare from the 15th to the 19th centuries and how Europe and America fueled the transatlantic slave trade by providing the capital, building and commanding the ships, providing the weaponry, and creating the plantations that absorbed the captives. But, I would argue, the African continent did not become the leading source of that labor by just being located between Europe and the Americas. Millions of laborers were needed in the New World and skills related to the development of tropical lands were much welcome. More importantly, the use of European indentured servants proved to be inefficient and penal colonization through the deportation of

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the underprivileged soon became a threat to social and political stability in Europe. Since the Native Americans were too hard to control in their own environment and since they were also deeply affected by warfare and by the diseases brought from the Old World, the final solution came from Africa. Religion and racism were again brought into play in order to justify the enslavement of Africans. At the time of their arrival in the mid-15th century, the European sailors discovered slave markets so far mostly linked to the Muslim World. Although slaves were exported across the Sahara desert many centuries before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, the exploitation of a pre-existing slave market was far from being able to implement the huge demand of the Americas. The Africans were more inclined to selling products such as cowhides, gum Arabic, beeswax, gold, fabrics, wood, and food, and getting essential commodities like good quality iron to make tools. Since slaves were obtained mainly through wars, the only reliable solution to the problem was to generate permanent warfare between nations. To a local level, political successions were turned into civil wars in which the European companies supported the contenders whom they would later use as unconditional allies for the slave trade. To put this debate to an end, let’s hear a voice from the past, that of French philosopher and political activist Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794): It is the infamous commerce of the brigands of Europe that generates between the Africans almost continuous warfare which only motive is to make prisoners destined to the trade. Often the Europeans themselves foment those wars with their money or their intrigues, which make them guilty not only of the crime of enslaving people but also of all the murders committed in Africa in preparation of this crime. (Marquis de Condorcet, 1781) This voice always reminds us that the African warlords were backed by external forces on which African Peoples did not have any control. This is also quite reminiscent of Postcolonial Africa when many leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Lumumba were either exiled or killed by coups d’état orchestrated by foreign economic interests. The denial of education was certainly the highest crime committed against people of African descent in America. It undermined the humanity of the enslaved people and disconnected them from their origins. It has generated long-lasting effects well into the present. Even the Federal Reserve cannot repair this crime because, more than money, this is above all a serious matter of commitment to mend the minds of people whose lives were totally disrupted by slavery and segregation. In 1831 the North Carolina legislature passed a bill to outlaw the teaching of slaves to read and write. In the preamble, the legislators raised concerns that the teaching of slaves to read and write would excite

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dissatisfaction in their minds and produce insurrection and rebellion. The bill provided that any free person caught teaching any slave to read or write, the use of figures excepted, or giving or selling to slaves any books or pamphlets, shall be liable to indictment. The punishment for a White man or woman would be time in jail or a fine of 100–200 dollars. A free person of color would be fined, imprisoned, or receive 20–39 lashes. The sentence for a slave caught teaching other slaves was 39 lashes on the bare back. According to Professor Quintard Taylor this legislation was typical of Southern laws designed to prevent slaves from reading abolitionist newspapers, forging passes, or simply knowing too much. Throughout the South the masters also had their own ways of punishing slaves who attempted to learn to read and write. Gordon Bluford of South Carolina still remembered in the 1930s that “[they] didn’t have a chance to learn to read and write, and master said if he caught any of his slaves trying to learn he would skin them alive.” The masters tolerated the use of figures for practical reasons. According to Sam McAllum of Mississippi, he was only allowed to learn how to count so he would not give to the mules a number of ears of corn that would hurt them: My young master learned me out of his speller, but Mistis whipped me. She say I didn’t need to learn nothing except how to count so I could feed de mules without colicin’ ’em: “You give ’em ten ears of corn to de mule. If you give ’em more, it would colic’ ’em and dey’d die. Dey cost more than a Nigger would!” Dat were de first whipping I ever got. The system of slavery was designed to generate permanent confusion in the minds of the victims. The following discussion between Father Braguez and a Vodun priest in Ouidah (Benin) is used here to serve as an illustration of the importance to know who you are and to not let strangers to your culture govern your own life. According to Reverend Labat, Father Braguez, a French Catholic proselytizer, visited Ouidah toward the end of the 17th century. There he witnessed a ceremony of divination involving the local king. According to Father Braguez, the king alone with the priest of the country entered into the enclosure where, after much bowing, prayers, and ceremonies, the priest approached a well where there was presumed to be a snake. He spoke on behalf of the king asking questions concerning the number of vassals who would be coming the following year, about the war, the harvest, and other subjects. As the snake replied, the priest gave the answers to the king who stayed at a distance from the well, on his knees in a posture of supplication. Later, Father Braguez approached the Vodun priest and asked him why his people worship a snake. The African priest told him the worship was indeed rendered to the Supreme and Only God by the mediation of the snake. Had God chosen a man as the depository of His secrets, the man would have quickly forgotten his low estate and would have wanted to be the equal of his Lord, or at very least to be

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above all other men. By learning the will of his Creator through the mouth and mediation of a creature so abject (the snake) he can not but recognise his own nothingness and how far he is from even the least perfection of the One with Whom he would have the temerity to compare himself. This anecdote could be used in the blame game against the African kings involved in the slave trade. But, more importantly, it is a perfect demonstration of the monotheistic character of the traditional African religions and how far away Africans are from the so-called fetishism or idolatry imposed on their beliefs by outsiders. A young Haitian would find in the previous lines a response to the American evangelists who made the assumption that Haitians faced so many natural disasters because they had signed a pact with the Devil. This is why it is very important to reconstruct the affected personalities through culture-centered education. Cheikh Anta Diop always supported the idea that members of the African Diaspora need to reconnect with their motherland just like the other communities from the Old World are connected to their origins. This will allow them to be stronger and to stand on firm ground and claim their rights in a society that takes into account their own genius and worldview. Culture-centered education means less confusion in the minds of Africans and African-descended people. It means fewer dropouts in Black schools and fewer Black men in jail. Joyce King is absolutely right when she asserts that “in this post-Civil Rights Era, social cohesion, the cherished ‘Unum,’ can only be realized if their education permits Black students to become literate in and construct social identities grounded in their actual history.”

Bibliography Daniels, R. (2010, May 4). Repudiating an Apologist: Skip Gates’ “End the Slavery Blame-Game” Nonsense. Retrieved November 17, 2014, from http://blackagendareport.com/content/repudiating-apologist-skip-gates%E2%80%99-end-slavery-blamegame-nonsense. Diop, C. A. (1974). African origins of civilization: Myth or reality. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Gates Jr., H. L. (2010, April, 22). Ending the slavery blame-game. New York Times. Retrieved June 16, 2014, from www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Gomez, M. A. (2010, April 27). When it comes to the slave trade, all guilt is not equal. Retrieved June 14, 2014, from www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2010/04/historian_challenges_henry_louis_gates_jr_on_reparations.html. Hall, M. G. (2005). Slavery and African ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the links. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Labat, J. B. (1931). Voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique (Antilles) 1693–1705, Vol. 2. Paris: Editions du Chartre. Marquis de Condorcet (1781). Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres. Neufchatel: Société typographique. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with

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Former Slaves. The WPA/FWP Files. South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi Narratives. The Library of Congress. Suret-Canale, J. (1958). Afrique Noire Occidentale et Centrale, Volume 2, l’ère coloniale (1900–1945). Paris: Editions Sociales. Taylor, Q. (2000, Fall) The African American experience: A history of black Americans, from 1619 to 1890. Department of History, University of Washington. An online reader. Retrieved June 26, 2014, from http://unitus.org/FULL/afro-1.pdf.

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6 DIASPORA LITERACY AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MISEDUCATION IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY1

Evaluation of the Slaves that Arrived from Benguela on the . . . of April, 1738: Young Women and Children: Mama/Cambia, with child dying Bissoa/Bivalla, with child walking Banba/Caceyo, child dying Tembo/Cabeto Quimano, no child—died on the path Banba/Sonbi, child at the breast—almost dead Nhama, open sores on both legs Camia Cahunda, no child—died in the bush Sungo, small girl Ullunga Tembo, old woman Singa, defects on the toes of both feet Bienba/Sungu, child at the breast Sanga/Bienba, child walking—dying

6$000 8$000 4$000 8$000 3$000 3$000 $500 5$000 5$000 2$000 6$000 12$000 3$000 7$000 3$000

Child, name unknown as she is dying and cannot speak, male without value, and a small girl Callenbo, no value because she is dying . . . [Partial] Summary of an inventory of slaves turned over to the government in the aftermath of a military expedition against Caconda [Angola] in 1736 . . . authenticated and described as a “just war” . . . (Miller, 1988, p. xiii)

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If you talk about the slave trade, for example, you have to point out that the slaves came over to the New World primarily because Africans enslaved them first or captured them in war and sold them to the Europeans. They weren’t picked up by Europeans in the depths of Africa, they were brought by Africans and you have to say that [and] that the whites were the ones, of course, that traded for them and brought them here and found them extremely useful . . . (Degler, 1991)2

Introduction The Transatlantic slave trade that caused the displacement and death of untold millions spanned nearly four centuries. Our understanding of this African Holocaust comes not only from modern scholarship and its representation in school texts and children’s books but from orature such as tales, narratives, and traditional music as well as fictional literature (Adams, 1987; Fox, 1973; Georgia Writers’ Project, 1940; Haley, 1976; Johnson, 1990; Lester, 1968; Levine, 1977; Mellon, 1988; Winter, 1988). For example, Courlander’s (1967) novel, The African, relates the ordeal of a Fon youth who is captured by soldiers near his village and sold into slavery by the King of Dahomey, who, in doing so, betrayed his own people. This youngster survives the deadly Middle Passage to America where he grows into manhood. His eventual escape is possible in part because neither the Middle Passage nor slavery obliterated his cultural memory—including proverbs like the following, by which his people affirmed their humanity and taught him to apprehend the world: “Knowledge is another name for strength” (p. 149). This chapter focuses analytical attention on ideological representations of the Middle Passage and how slavery began, as depicted in classroom textbooks utilized by public schools in the state of California. It also explores the clash that ensued in California over the adoption of these controversial textbooks, the end result of which was proclaimed by state and national education officials and mainstream scholars as a “victory” for multiculturalism. In this chapter and in my interactions with parents and multicultural education specialists who participated in the present study, I use the beginnings of the Middle Passage in the African context as a milieu de mémoire to decipher alienating covert texts. These texts seek to explain slavery but, by omitting or distorting certain cultural signs, they preclude forms of knowledge and perspectives that are enabled by “Diaspora Literacy,” which Busia (1989) describes as “an ability to read a variety of cultural signs of the lives of Africa’s children at home and in the New World” (p. 197; see also Clark, 1989, 1991).3 Following Sylvia Wynter’s (1992b) explication of Black Studies as a “deciphering practice,” the present study is an attempt to construct a lieu de mémoire or alternative standpoint from which to recover both memory and history. According to Wynter, Black Studies is a new mode of inquiry that “seeks to decipher what the process of rhetorical mystification does . . . not what texts and their signifying practices mean but what they

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can be deciphered to do” (Wynter, 1992b, p. 266). My intention herein is to decipher, as ideological forms, both the re-presentations of “modem” historical scholarship in California’s textbooks and the ways in which this scholarship has been justified as accurate and valid knowledge. I am writing about these matters not as a historian or a learning or reading specialist but as a sociologist interested in the sociology of knowledge that functions as ideology. My use of the term “ideology” follows Giddens’s (1979) explication and critical analysis of ideology as understood by Marx, Mannheim, and Habermas; and as it concerns “what counts as a valid claim to knowledge” (p. 173) and “the critique of domination” (p. 187). Related to this is a concern about the “social domination of ideas” (p. 170) and consciousness as well as the role of the intellectual in “partisan struggles of political life” (p. 174).

Black Studies as the Critique of Ideology It is normally in the interests of dominant groups if the existence of contradictions is denied or their real basis obscured. (Giddens, 1979, p. 194) Because traditional textbooks also preclude forms of ideology critique that consciousness—that is, critical comprehension of the essential nature of society, its myths, and one’s own interests—requires (Apple, 1979), this chapter attempts to stimulate discussion about the role of Black Studies as ideology critique in the struggle against what Woodson (1933) termed the “mis-education of the Negro.” It describes an exploratory case study of parent and educator responses to critical analyses of the textbook controversy, and explores the practical usefulness of an intellectual perspective for collective social action. Such efforts to seek theoretical validation in social practice (Giddens, 1979) and to make more of the “social totality” the object of study (Eyerman, 1981) are two of the guiding tenets of both dialectical social theory and the African American intellectual tradition (James, 1948/1980; King & Mitchell, 1990). I used an exploratory case study approach (Yin, 1984) to examine the responses and reactions of parents and educators to a Black Studies ideology critique. That critique included: (1) my own analysis of the textbook controversy; (2) presentation of examples of textbook distortions; (3) discussion of Wynter’s (1990, 1992a) essay-critique of American textbooks; and (4) viewing of a onehour-long videotaped lecture/discussion in which Wynter presents her Black Studies “cultural model perspective” (King & Wynter, 1991). Participants in the study heard a brief presentation which included analyses and examples of the textbook controversy and textbook distortions similar to those presented in this chapter; additionally, each received a “viewer’s guide” to the videotape, which included a time-line, an outline of critical themes, vocabulary terms, and a list of the scholars Wynter cites in her taped discussion. I conducted two group

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discussion/interview meetings with eight Black parents of high school students (who met as a support group) and with four Black multicultural education specialists. (A vice principal, three teachers, and five students were also at the parent group meeting.) Four parents and one of the educators also participated in 30–50-minute follow-up interviews to solicit their feedback regarding the presentation and the videotape. By bringing the views of parents and educators into the discussion of textbooks and what they do, I have attempted to decipher the socially constructed “appearances” of the controversy surrounding the textbook adoption in California. I wanted to know (1) the extent to which and/or whether Black parents and activist educators recognize what school curricula actually do; (2) if a Black Studies ideology critique is of interest to these parents and educators; and (3) if such an intellectual perspective expresses what they think, feel, and experience with regard to the struggles for education in Black communities. How important to educators and to the Black community-at-large is a “sophisticated” theoretical understanding of what Wynter (1990, 1992b) calls the “rules” that “institute the social order” and its “regime of truth”? Does it illuminate the social contradictions involved in education under conditions of racial domination? Is a theoretical approach helpful, for instance, in their real-world struggles against miseducation? Does it stimulate reflection, social analysis, or action?

Theoretical Background: Diaspora Literacy and Human Consciousness Malcolm: The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals.You have to wake people up first; then you’ll get action. Miss Nadle: Wake them up to their exploitation? Malcolm: No, to their humanity, to their own worth, and to their heritage. (Breitman, 1965, p. 198) As Busia (1989) explains, Diaspora Literacy, or knowledge of “our story” of Black people’s “cultural dispossession,” can start one on the “journey of selfrecognition and healing” (p. 197). The sociohistory of school knowledge, on the other hand, maintains destructive consciousness of class, race, ethnicity, and personality that constricts the human spirit and perpetuates violence and inhumanity (King & Wilson, 1990). Given the traditional cultural hegemony, which enshrines dominant group values and perspectives in school texts, and notwithstanding the strength to be gained from cultural “re-memory” or Diaspora Literacy, we Blacks can “know” our story in ways that are partial and distorted (Anyon, 1979; Mattai, 1992; Sims, 1982; Wa Thiong’o, 1986; Woodson, 1933). Thus, we need a human consciousness to complement the Cultural Knowledge of what Kohl (1992) has called our “multiple narratives.”

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As a social relations construct, human consciousness is more dynamically and transformatively inclusive than any single category of existence. In comparison to class, race, or gender consciousness, for example, human consciousness grasps “the essential nature” of society, including Black people’s multiple identities as well as the specific ways that racism and other “isms” work. As such, it requires the mediation of new categories of analysis in nonsynchronous, mutually reinforcing race, class, or gender terms (Jones, 1992). I do not use this construct to privilege or obliterate specific forms of difference, nor do I seek to rule out what McCarthy (1990) terms the “collective-identity politics” people need to apprehend the world both in its particularity and “social totality.” However, in departing from the way Marx theorized about class consciousness per se (Ollman, 1971), I nonetheless want to use his theoretical insights to suggest that human consciousness encompasses Eyerman’s (1981) definition of class consciousness as “a political and social awareness that grows out of a common experience; perceived common interests and shared self-knowledge and selfdefinition” (p. 283). As Eyerman continues, human consciousness also “implies an awareness of others, of those who are similar and those who are different with regard to their long-term interest, and an awareness of the social structure that makes this difference real” (p. 283). Just as Diaspora Literacy enables us to repossess “our story” (including our cultural identity as “Africa’s children”), human consciousness permits us to retrieve our humanity from distorted notions of the conceptual “Blackness” that is the alter ego of the socially constructed category of “whiteness” (King & Wilson, 1990; Wynter, 1990). This process of self-repossession and cultural recovery from alienation is the universal human interest in the Black struggle for authentic “self-knowing” and collective identity that, like Black Studies, challenges the interests the dominant ideology conceals in myths about “we the people.” For those Black people who do not “sleepwalk inside America’s myths” (Strickland, 1974, p. 140), alienation can bring the gift of this transcendent human consciousness. The alternative to self- and cultural alienation engendered by these myths is not just unconsciousness but “dysconsciousness”— one way ideological justification(s) of racial domination, that is, the status quo, shape(s) people’s perceptions and ideas about themselves and society (King, 1991). If Diaspora Literacy aids the recovery of self-knowledge and cultural memory, human consciousness is an achievement, a spiritual discovery that recovers authentic being from fragmented knowing, acting and being (King & Mitchell, 1990, p. 82).4

The Context: The California Textbook Controversy Our ancestors did not wade through rivers of blood so that we might surrender the interpretation of their lives into the hands of others. (Harding, 1974, p. 10)

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The State Board of Education in California, a textbook adoption state, relies on an advisory body to recommend textbooks and other instructional materials for adoption that schools can buy with state funds. As a member of this advisory body, the California Curriculum Development and Supplemental Materials Commission, from 1986 to 1990, I participated in the development of the California History/Social Science Framework (1988) and the 1990 history textbook adoption. I publicly opposed this adoption because in my view the textbooks the commission recommended contained “egregious racial stereotyping, inaccuracies, distortions, omissions, justifications and trivialization of unethical and inhumane social practices, including racial slavery” (King, 1990a). In my letter to the commission I also stated that “as a result of these shortcomings, these books fail[ed] to meet the standards set by the Framework for cultural diversity, ethical literacy, historical accuracy, opportunities to examine controversial issues and to develop critical thinking and democratic social participation skills.”5 After several tense public hearings with armed guards present; unprecedented attendance that reflected a groundswell of public concern, opposition, and divided opinions; and a direct appeal from the Black Caucus of the state legislature to postpone the adoption decision, the Board of Education adopted one K-8 series and an additional eighth-grade history text. The concerns I raised about the textbooks were the same ones that I raised in 1987 about the inclusion of diverse perspectives when early drafts of the Framework were circulated for public input and review. Even though the Framework writing committee incorporated some of the changes I suggested into the final version of the document, the textbooks the state ultimately selected following this curriculum guide mirrored its fundamental conceptual flaws and biases. Not surprisingly, none of the history textbooks reviewed, including those that were eventually adopted, received higher than “moderate” ratings for “cultural diversity,” one of the Framework’s 17 “characteristics” for evaluating the texts. This brief account belies other developments, which can only be briefly mentioned here. First, State Department of Education officials and the publisher of the textbook series launched a massive public relations campaign that shaped public opinion and distorted the issues surrounding this controversial adoption. The Superintendent of Public Instruction, who was selected as “Man of the Week” by a major network, denounced critics of the texts on national and local television shows. The media helped spread the dire warnings that critics of the textbooks would launch the society into “tribal warfare” if their criticisms prevailed. Second, there was an effort to virtually “anoint” these books as “multicultural” despite their moderate evaluations on this criterion. The books were repeatedly compared to existing texts rather than to the evaluation criteria. In addition, the State Department of Education, the curriculum commissioners, and the Board of Education held an unusual joint press conference in July 1990 to praise the recommended textbooks even before the Board voted to adopt them in October 1990.

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This chronology does not address the third aspect: the longer-term politics involved in the displacement of social studies in the curriculum by the “historygeography-centered” focus of the California Framework and its incorporation into the effort to establish national curriculum standards and tests for this subject. At the local level, with the state’s official endorsement of the adopted textbooks as sufficiently multicultural, many hoped the controversy would disappear as schools were left with practically no choice but to buy these books. Thus, there is the deeper crisis of democracy and the de-skilling of teachers. Moreover, this imprimatur of state adoption has made dialogue about the flaws in these texts difficult at the community level. Teachers and parents have often been pitted against each other; however, while skilled and knowledgeable teachers can use even the worst texts and the Framework to inspire critical learning, teachers with the skill and the concern to do so are increasingly rare (King, 1991, 1992). It is even less likely that teachers, especially those in predominantly White communities, will bother to question these texts or attempt to develop counter knowledge when using them (Heyser, 1991). Sustained resistance to the texts has been taken up by parents and school board members in at least five communities that have refused to buy the books in California (Butte County; East Palo Alto [Ravenswood City Schools]; Hayward; Oakland; and San Jose [Alum Rock]) (Epstein & Ellis, 1992; Heyser, 1991). The Los Angeles Unified School District agreed to purchase the books on condition that the publisher supply specially written supplemental materials for teaching about specific racial/ethnic groups and cultural diversity. Over strong community opposition, the San Francisco and Berkeley school districts bought the books, but they are relying on the supplemental materials as well. The desires of teachers prevailed in the latter instances. The controversy continues unabated as communities throughout the state and the nation circulate materials to support alternatives.6 Among the many letters of support I received, the essay-critique by Stanford University’s Sylvia Wynter (1990), “America as a World,” has proved most useful in the education and social action efforts the controversy has stimulated.7 Harding’s admonition (cited at the beginning of this section) seems rather prophetic in hindsight. Indeed, recent public criticism of school texts and curricula has re-catalyzed Black Americans’ struggle around education issues (Sanford, 1990). Not surprisingly, community activism and academic curriculum challenges have become targets of a specious backlash that appropriates a particular version of “multiculturalism” to ward off this challenge (Hughes, 1992)—as will be explained below. Although strong opposition to California’s controversial K-8 history textbooks failed to prevent their adoption in that state, wide exposure of the clash that took place over these books has stimulated increased public reaction across the nation. Conferences have been convened, alternative curricula have been created, and legal actions for educational redress have been taken.

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Ideology/Domination/Alienation: The Central Clash Over the Textbooks In defending California’s chosen history textbooks as “accurate” and in the way they characterized the clash over the textbooks, state officials and the textbook developers used their power and the media to conceal the real basis of the controversy (Reinhold, 1991; Waugh, 1991). The clash in California is about ideology, not ethnicity; it is about how curricula and school knowledge support dominating power relations through historical narratives that alienate Black students and other students of color. To protect their interests, the dominant groups who hold power in American society choose to portray this controversy as a threat to national unity, to “E Pluribus Unum” itself. Yet, their rationalizations merely serve to justify the way in which these adopted history texts marginalize and suppress the Black struggle for justice and human values in this country—a struggle which Harding (1990) claims, if presented with truthful integrity, might awaken more of the nation’s newly arrived immigrants and native Whites, the downwardly mobile in particular, to America’s myths. To recognize the major ways ideology “operates” in any society, Giddens (1979) suggests we look for the “modes in which domination is concealed as domination” and “power is harnessed to conceal sectional interests” (p. 193, original emphasis). According to Giddens, ideology works in the following ways: (1) sectional interests are represented as universal; (2) societal contradictions are denied or transmuted; and (3) the present is naturalized or reified. Each of these aspects is evident in the California textbook controversy.

Particularistic Sectional Interests Versus the Public’s Democratic Interests Throughout California’s controversial textbook adoption process, state officials claimed that self-interested ethnic and religious groups objected to the textbooks simply because they wanted to impose their own “personal knowing” on the curriculum. The Superintendent of Public Instruction, a self-described liberal Democrat, proclaimed: “These groups only want the bad side of our history told; they want a glorified version of their [italics added] history in the books.”8 Thus, in national and local media accounts and education articles, the educational bureaucracy and dominant powerful groups denied their own particularistic, sectional interests (and the social contradictions involved), and instead repeatedly accused ethnic and religious groups critical of the textbooks of being “self-interested.” This theme was frequently and derisively reduced to the notion of “ethnic cheerleading.” The California curriculum commission’s Textbook Adoption Recommendations report (1990), which it submitted to the California State Board of Education, even dismissed public opposition and scholarly criticisms of the books as mere filiopietism. In this, the official account

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of the controversy, “special interest groups” are reported to have mistakenly elevated—for the sake of “children’s self-esteem”—their “ancestral” identities above the common interests of the “Unum” (p. 7). The state board thus decided that adopting the texts recommended by the commission would preserve this “shared” culture. Thus, these officials used their power to validate their choices as being the “latest authoritative historical research” of “established” scholars whom they deemed ostensibly guided by the search for truth.9

Contradictions Denied/Racism Transmuted Into Ethnic Conflict Many educators and parents expressed concerns about the textbook treatment of issues related to racial injustice. (One textbook equates racism, for example, with ethnic or “cultural” prejudice.) Threatening slogans warning of “balkanization and impending “tribal warfare” repeated by scholars and media commentators further distorted the central clash over the issue of perspective bias in the textbooks and transmuted it into a problem of “ethnic conflict.” Repeatedly, the question was asked: “Can’t a white man write accurately and with sensitivity about the experiences of other groups?” The answer, of course, is yes; the issue, however, is the social interests of the perspective from which any scholar writes, regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion, etc. Yet, because the problem of scholarly perspective surrounding this controversy was adroitly denied and redefined in ethnic conflict terms, the books were “verified as accurate,” with a few minor changes, but with no change in the predominant intellectual perspective.

The Reification and Naturalization of the Immigrant Experience California’s changing demographics provide a most appropriate context for understanding how the traditional perspectives of the adopted American history textbooks conceal the domination of the nation’s subordinated non-White groups. These texts present assimilation and acculturation as the appropriate path to success for these populations by reifying the experiences of the diverse groups of European ethnics who “came” through Ellis Island to become “Americans,” thus making the immigrant experience a template for all other groups. Portraying this historical European immigration and assimilation as the quintessential American Experience permits the texts to define African Americans as “forced immigrants” who “came in chains,” as though our “coming to America” was somehow analogous to their immigration. It also allows for the description of Native Americans as “the first immigrants,” who came across the Bering Straits—notwithstanding the perspectives of indigenous Native Americans regarding their origins, the colonizing motives of the earliest founding settlers, or the contradictory and troublesome presence of a captive African population in the “land of the free.” Even if we leave aside the meaning of the word “immigrant” as one who chooses to relocate, the idealized “immigrant

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perspective” distorts the historical continuity of African Americans, Native Americans, and the indigenous peoples now known as Chicanes, Hispanics, or Latinos, who did not come to America in search of material gain or freedom but were conquered by European American settlers (Wynter, 1990). Significantly, however, California’s chosen textbooks invite Black, Red, and Brown people—and other non-White, non-European newcomers (Asians, for example)—to identify with the selective interpretation of the history of European American immigrants. Just as this immigrant (even if “multicultural”) “national identity,” in which ethnicity becomes an option, displaces racial identity in these (and other) American history texts, this “ruling idea” of the American “Unum” leaves racial hierarchy unacknowledged and unchallenged (Sleeter, 1992). What does this reification of the Euro-immigrant past do? It naturalizes the particular social, political, and economic interests of dominant Whites by making the interests of newly arrived, non-White immigrants appear to be identical to theirs. Further, it suppresses the identification of these groups with Black Americans’ transformative aspirations and historic struggles for justice (or with those of indigenous peoples). Hamilton (n.d.) contends that this divideand-rule strategy is a characteristic of the new “Unum” politics in California. As “minorities become the majority” there, manifestations of this strategy’s effects are clearly evident in conflicts between non-White groups. Clearly, this reified immigrant experience is inclusive and multicultural only if “we” are all immigrants. Precisely because this is not the case, the textbooks (and the California Framework) insist that “the United States is a nation of immigrants.” However, the leitmotif of the immigrant experience in America (and elsewhere) has been the appearance of individual opportunity for upward mobility and economic advancement, more so than collective struggle for justice.10 For the descendants of indigenous peoples forced off and forced to give up their lands, one political consequence of accepting this ideology is the forfeiture of any basis of collective claims for redress and justice. On the other hand, to identify with one’s collective interests is not “excessive veneration of one’s ancestors” (i.e., filiopietism), but a logical antidote to domination and alienation.

The Consequences of Misequating the Middle Passage With Ellis Island Everything is all messed up here with the black people, they forget everything they know. (Courlander, 1967, p. 173) Black students’ ancestral origins are doubly tainted within the cultural model framework that naturalizes the immigrant experience: Not only did their

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ancestors “come” to this land as slaves, but the masses of Black folk still live in poverty. The reality of the African presence, then and now, contradicts the myth of America as a land of freedom, justice, and equality of opportunity for all individuals; yet, the subtext of White immigrant identity, manipulatively linked increasingly with “model minority” immigrant “success,” inherently implies that Black people’s failure is a failure to assimilate and acculturate (King, 1994). The immigrant bias in the textbooks obscures the contradictions occasioned by racial injustice and misequates the Middle Passage with Ellis Island, thus distorting the African Diaspora experience and making it an anomaly rather than a paradox of the American reality. To place themselves within the immigrant paradigm, Black students must construct an attenuated identity that can only originate with the degraded status of their enslaved African ancestors who arrived not by Ellis Island, that nowcelebrated gateway to the land of “our” dreams, but by the horrors of the Middle Passage route.11 Forcing this reified immigrant identity upon Black students further stigmatizes the rupture between them and their ancestors, who did not choose to come to America. Educators and parents are painfully aware that many Black students are traumatized and humiliated when reading about slavery or other topics concerning their ancestry. They often report that Black students do not want to discuss slavery or be identified with Africa (King & Mitchell, 1990), and many admit that they lack the conceptual tools to intervene in this dangerous dynamic (Hawkins, 1990). Moreover, there is generalized silence about it in disciplines and fields of pedagogical inquiry that might otherwise be of help to them. What is at stake is not just that all students are expected to internalize the Euro-immigrant ideological perspective and identity insisted upon in the approved textbooks. Nor is it just that questioning this assumption has generated alarm and countercharges of “disuniting” racial separatism. More, this ideological perspective, and school texts that endorse and promote it, obviate the need for any social analysis of the persistent racial inequity that already disunites America. Such textbooks cannot enable Black students or others to understand the root causes of the historical and contemporary injustices people continue to endure, nor can they prepare them to participate in the continuing struggle for social transformation. Notwithstanding, California’s history curriculum Framework, these textbooks, and, implicitly, the politics justified therein, are being promoted as a model for the nation.12

Misrepresenting the Beginnings of the Middle Passage in the African Context in History Textbooks My pa tell me dat ’way back in slavery time—’way back in Africa—dere been a nigger. . . . He been de chief er he tribe, an’ when dem white folks was ketchin’ niggers for slavery, dat ole nigger nuse to entice ’em into

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trap. He’d get ’em on boat wey dem white folks could ketch ’em an’ chain ’em. White folks nused to gee him money an’ all kind er little thing, an’ he’d betray ’em. (excerpt from “The King Buzzard,” in Adams, 1987, p. 121) The fictive tale of King Buzzard, an African leader whose spirit is condemned to wander in the swamps for betraying his own people, coincides with narrative recollections of the ways people were kidnapped, captured, and tricked (sometimes with red cloth, for example) onto ships bound for the Middle Passage (Georgia Writers Project, 1940; Lester, 1968). It also reveals the moral judgment of those who were thus betrayed. On another level, it concurs with standard historical explanations (Rodney, 1967). However, as Rawley’s (1981) work points out, the majority of slaves were not kidnapped: “Slaves were supplied to white traders by Africans, who procured their supplies by making war, consigning unfortunates for sale, and condemning criminals” (pp. 432–433). Does this suggest that indigenous people in Africa were less “civilized” and had less human feeling for one another than their contemporaries in Europe had for each other? Was the Transatlantic slave trade primarily Blacks’ own fault? Whether or not these questions are ones historians seek to answer, they dominate the popular imagination and wreak havoc in the classroom. The Transatlantic slave trade went through several phases. However, it did not begin with chiefs selling their own people to Europeans; and before it ended, Europeans engaged in outright wars in Africa and made military alliances to capture their own prisoners of war for sale (Miller, 1988). In addition to variations in the trade over time, the diversity among the African peoples involved is a factor of major significance that is generally overlooked. Indeed, as Wynter (1990, 1992a) notes, there was no concept of “Africans” among these diverse peoples at that time; rather, the peoples of Africa identified with their lineage (family or kinship), clan, or descent group, and not with the continent. Following Miller (1976), she concludes that initially slavery could not have been a simple matter of “Africans selling Africans.”13 The historical and literary record is replete with details regarding specific cultural differences among the captives that were well known to the White traders, who likewise did not see themselves in Pan-European terms before the advent of racial justifications of the slave trade. Davidson (1961) stresses that greater inquiry into “the mind of the European and the conditions in Africa” is needed (p. 6). For example, though most textbooks acknowledge that slavery in Africa differed from plantation slavery in the Americas; they do not compare, as Davidson does, African slavery with European slavery, serfdom, and vassalship. Differing conceptions of slavery—that is, of the varieties of “unfree” labor, servitude, subjugation, and tribute among the diverse people of Africa and Europe—are not examined. The following

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textbook explanations of how the slave trade began in the Kongo in Africa show why such an analysis is needed. The seventh-grade textbook adopted by the state of California, Across the Centuries (Armento, Nash, Salter, & Wixson, 1991a), includes a section entitled “Slaves, Guns and Civil War,” which describes the “friendly relations” between the kings of the Kongo and Portugal. Their initial cordial and mutually respectful relations degenerated as the slave trade became “a profitable business” for the Portuguese. The text explains: “The Kongo had no gold” and slaves were “what the Portuguese wanted as payment” for the “luxury goods” (status symbols) the King of the Kongo (the Mani-Kongo Nzinga Mbemba) obtained from them. The lesson explains that the Kongolese king, pictured wearing his “favorite” imported boots, converted to Christianity and opposed the slave trade, though later he “even decided to support” it for reasons of “wealth and power.” One of his many letters to Portugal’s rulers pleading for an end to slavery is excerpted in this chapter. The text describes the “brutal” actions and profit motives of the Portuguese who “stopped at nothing to get slaves” and treated them “like beasts of burden” in contrast with the “different notion of slavery” in Africa. Portuguese “merchants,” it relates, “destroyed Kongo’s trade in goods and replaced it with trade in human beings” and encouraged civil wars among the Kongolese such that “villages staged raids against each other to capture slaves and sell them to the Portuguese” (p. 153). The lesson concludes by emphasizing that the Kongolese (and other) rulers were “trapped in a tangled web” of trading slaves to get guns for protection from “slave raiders.” While this text’s account is neither factually inaccurate nor totally wrong, what it omits or fails to examine closely makes it only half true. It reinforces ethnocentric stereotypes, particularly with respect to judgments and conclusions students are expected to form.14 Further, indigenous cultural values associated with kingship, vassalship, and tribute in the African context are not examined, although the captioned illustration of the Kongolese king mentions such factors. The text focuses on the “gifts” and trade goods the king gives to and receives from the Portuguese, his “governors,” and “subjects” as proof of their “loyalty” or as tribute to his power and authority (p. 151). However, it neglects to explain that, within the traditional system of social relations in African societies, gift giving symbolizes and concretizes the communal values of mutual responsibility and reciprocity—not just political tribute (Miller, 1988). Without an analysis of Kongolese conceptions of “generosity” associated with gift giving and trade that places this notion within its proper cultural context, students will be hardpressed to understand or to judge either the Kongolese people’s behavior or their king’s “varying motives” using the standards and viewpoints of that society. Moreover, the text implies that the king’s desire for luxury goods on easy credit terms impelled him into slave trading with the Portuguese. Discussing the social value of these goods only as political currency in the king’s selfinterest is a limited focus for understanding the beginnings of the slave trade and

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the Middle Passage in the African context. Additionally, after pointing out that the Portuguese destroyed preexisting Kongolese “trading practices,” the text asks students to consider how the Kongo changed after the arrival of the Portuguese. What it fails to explore are the cultural values that were displaced by the trade in human beings and replaced by those of the Portuguese. In this lies the possibility of appreciating the humanity of both groups as well as how people in each group came to violate their own cultural norms. Wynter (1990) deciphers the “cultural mode of rationality” in the worlds of the enslavers in both Europe and Africa to discover the “prescriptive rules” of each social order that encoded, for example, moral and ethical justifications for slavery. Thus, what Wynter calls a “cultural model perspective” is needed to determine whether, from the standpoint of the Kongolese people themselves, the king’s actions represent “an exceptional case of despotism found in every country” (as Martin Delaney once observed [Davidson, 1961, p. 18]), or social breakdown in contrast to earlier periods of Kongolese history when the “power of kings” was “qualified by tribal equality” (Davidson, 1961, p. 29). Another missing element is a discussion of the role of lineage in Africa, for kinship affiliation determined one’s status and identity in local communities or villages (Miller, 1976, 1988). Without comprehending the significance of lineage and kinship differences, students may not understand the attitudes of the Kongolese regarding slavery. Domestic and other “diverse kinds of servitude” and slavery existed in communities bound together by mutual obligation and internally differentiated along kinship lines (Rawley, 1981). As a political unit, the Kongolese kingdom was composed of diverse groups who shared varying degrees of kinship, and in other regions lineage ties created greater or lesser degrees of affinity. Villagers who raided other villages in the same region or political unit did not perceive themselves, necessarily, as one people (but then, neither did the Gauls, Vandals, or Visigoths of Europe). The text also omits any explanation of the “just wars,” sanctioned by the Catholic Church, which gave the Portuguese (and other Europeans) the “right,” within the terms of their own cultural values and religious belief system, to foment and participate in wars and to buy and sell captive Kongolese prisoners as slaves (Miller, 1988, p. xiii). Wynter (1990) notes that the historical significance of the “just war” as a legitimation for slavery among Christians can hardly be overstated. Moreover, King Manual of Portugal’s “royal brother,” as the Mani-Kongo called himself (he was baptized as Dom Affonso), appealed to a succession of Portuguese kings, on the basis of their common Christian brotherhood, for assistance to develop the resources to participate as an equal trading partner with the Portuguese. This is not made clear in the excerpt of one of his letters presented in Across the Centuries (Armento et al., 1991a, p. 144). The Teachers’ Edition of Across the Centuries suggests the following lesson activity at the conclusion of this section on the Kongolese slave trade:

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have students imagine they live in a Kongo village in the year 1577; . . . debate whether to sell slaves to the Portuguese . . . [and] discuss political, economic, and moral aspects of the issue. (p. 152) In my public statement to the California curriculum commission (King, 1990a), I critiqued this particular role-playing exercise as “Eurocentric,” noting that the text failed “to raise the question of whether the Portuguese were right or wrong to buy Africans and promote warfare to get slaves” (p. 7). In rebuttal, one of the co-authors of Across the Centuries explained that the intended purpose of this exercise was to get students “to understand the dilemma created for the ManiKongo by the actions of the Portuguese.” He further contended that “to have in that context stopped and asked the students to think instead from the point-of-view of the Portuguese would indeed have been Eurocentric!” (Ridley & Nash, 1990). Yet, the text is Eurocentric precisely because it focuses on a one-sided discussion that forecloses critical examination of relevant information students need to place the reasoning and actions of the Portuguese, and thus the dilemma they helped create, in historical context. Further, to avoid “blaming the victim,” students need counterknowledge of the well-documented debates that took place in Spain and Portugal about the “justness” of the slave trade—events that significantly affected the decision to use enslaved Africans instead of Indians in New World plantations. They must also be informed that the Portuguese ignored the Mani-Kongo’s repeated requests, not only to halt the illegitimate enslavement of people from within the protection of the lineage and from noble families, but for technical assistance as well. Moreover, to understand fully the dilemma faced by and the options available to the people of the Kongo, students need to understand why the Portuguese ignored the Mani-Kongo’s appeals. To consider options from the perspective of the Kongolese, it must be possible for students to examine the motives and reasoning, not just the actions, of the kings of both Portugal and the Kongo. The scenario depicted in Across the Centuries implies that the people of the Kongolese kingdom were free to choose a course of action. However, students role-playing this historical situation must be able to bring the cultural mode of rationality of the Portuguese into the discussion. Only then can they begin to reflect the parameters of action available to the Mani-Kongo, parameters that are inherently linked to why he (or the villagers) faced such a choice in the first place. Effective role-playing requires exploration of relevant viewpoints involved in human dilemmas in their social contexts. The errors of omission and bias in this lesson are symptomatic of the entire history textbook series adopted by the state. Students are likely to grasp only partial and limited understandings from it. As a systematic and deliberate process of forced cultural amnesia, the slave trade and the Middle Passage are apt metaphors for the travesty of alienating

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texts that suppress the Cultural Knowledge students need. The consequences when “black people forget everything they know” (Courlander, 1967, p. 107) continue to be disastrous. If the loss of cultural memory aided the process of chattel slavery, textbooks aid contemporary processes of mental enslavement by making the “anarchy and terror” slavery engendered seem to be a natural state of existence for African people. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, and other forms of societal violence among Black people today thus seem equally “natural” if not “just” to many within our present cultural mode of rationality (Wynter, 1990).

Parents and Educators Respond What I have been fighting for and am still fighting for is the possibility of black folk and their cultural patterns existing in America without discrimination; and on terms of equality. If we take this attitude we have to do so consciously and deliberately. (DuBois, 1973, p. 150) To explore the usefulness of a Black Studies scholarly critique of ideology in California’s adopted textbooks, I convened two meetings, one with a group of Black parents and another with a group of Black multicultural education specialists. The responses of the participants after a presentation of my critique and after viewing the videotape of Wynter’s lecture can be grouped this way: (1) self-reflection regarding their own educational and social experiences (e.g., with racism) and the needs of students/children; (2) reflections on experiences of struggle (collective and individual action) and strategies to use the information presented; (3) social analyses of schooling and power in society; and (4) disagreement with some aspect of the content of the videotape. Prior to viewing the videotape I asked each group the following questions: “What comes to mind when you think of the Middle Passage; that is, do you think of Ellis Island?” No one did. One of the multicultural educators said: “I just see people huddled together on ships being whipped.” I then asked if they had heard about Africans selling each other into slavery. Everyone had. No one in either group mentioned the diversity among the captives or the various ways Africans may have been enslaved in Africa. At the meeting with the educators, for example, one retired teacher said: “All we knew about in school was slaves. We were taught nothing about Africa. All I knew was they [people] jumped from tree to tree with their wild and wooly hair and thick lips. That’s what our white teachers taught us. But when we got to Fisk University, [Professor] Lorenzo Turner told us there are over 1,000 African words in the Indian languages. We didn’t even understand what that meant then.”

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Viewing the video seemed to galvanize these educators, who talked excitedly about it for almost an hour-and-a-half. They discussed how they could work more effectively with other teachers using this information, and they exchanged ideas about presenting it strategically in ways that would be of practical interest to those of their colleagues who are “tired” of hearing about “multiculturalism.” The tape also stimulated discussion of critical insights about society. For example, several of the educators described personal experiences with discrimination in school as well as in such places as department stores. They also suggested that “our ministers” view the videotape as well because, as one teacher noted, “We need to get them educated.” Initially, the parents talked about how over they are “just chipping away at it.” A mother who said she felt overwhelmed by how long the struggle has been going on shared her concerns about what her grandchildren will experience in school. “Mary McLeod Bethune died,” she said, “thinking this battle had been won.” Soon the conversation turned to talk about the kinds of collective and community action group members were engaged in or that is needed to protect the children from biased texts and racism in education. Several parents talked about the need for strategies to help students resist subtle racism in school, e.g., a curriculum for learning about stereotypes and providing students with counter-knowledge such as that described in the textbook critique and the videotape. Parents and teachers alike suggested Saturday schools for parents and students. In a follow-up interview, one mother complained that the support group’s focus was too oriented toward “success” rather than on preparing students to “deal with racism strategically.” As she explained: We don’t mention the ‘R’ word, but I’m happy to know someone cares and is working on this. I don’t pay enough attention to what is being taught and I need to know more myself. What you presented is what our group should really be about. In follow-up conversations, parents told me that the lecture was difficult to understand. “There’s so much there!” one said. However, these discussions reveal that “lay” people do immediately relate their own experiences to such presentations. While none indicated feeling intimidated by the material, some suggested ways to make it more understandable. One mother, who said she has not “studied everything the Professor is talking about on the tape,” succinctly summed up Wynter’s discussion of Carter G. Woodson’s (1933) analysis of what the curriculum does to “de-motivate” students: “This is about the way they are manipulating our kids’ psyches. That’s why the Black males end up hanging out together in school.” She continued, “I don’t know about all this, but I can feel it in terms of what is happening to my children.” Another mother explained: “My daughter tells me, ‘they [teachers] try to invalidate me as a person, when I try to share what I know about our history’.” This mother stated bluntly,

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“They know what they are doing. This is about the perpetuation of white supremacy.” Similarly, the parents talked about the publishing industry and why state officials “ignored” my critique of the textbook controversy. “This shows,” said one parent, “that they are not ready to deal with a total change in the culture. And here are all these kids riding around with guns—and it’s the White kids, too.” Evidently, parents and teachers are interested in this Black Studies ideology critique because it serves as an effective framework for discussing concrete experiences and issues they want to understand better and deal with more effectively. They see themselves within the perspective of society that the critique presents and they want to develop alternatives. Parents and teachers want opportunities to understand the theoretical concepts in a presentation format that is “digestible” but not “watered down.” However, one parent participant, a retired college biology teacher, objected to Wynter’s critique of her discipline and call for a rewriting of the knowledge in all the disciplines. “The information was totally fallacized,” she told me. “Anyone with a science background would reject it out of hand.” She further commented that the information Wynter presents is “too complicated for the average parent” and added that “they [parents] are not interested in this anyway.” (She left before the discussion period.) I later discussed this participant’s comments in a follow-up interview with a multicultural educator, who had also viewed and discussed the videotape, who said: We have to remember that educated specialists have been taught to think the way they think. They have to come to terms with the falsehood in their own disciplines. And we need respect for the common person; respect for the human spirit made it possible for us to survive slavery. . . . This is truly revolutionary because our people have built their lives on these lies and they are threatened by the truth.

The Positive Uses of Controversy: A Change Is Gonna Come As far as the great masses or classes of people learnt anything, they learnt it concretely in struggle against some concrete thing. ( James, 1948/1980, p. 93) This exploratory study, while it focused the attention of parents and educators on the textbook controversy, reveals a deeper crisis of legitimacy within the disciplines and in the nature of schooling itself. In the case of California’s recent textbook adoption controversy, the issues have been so distorted that the decision may appear to be a victory for bureaucracy and manipulation and a defeat for popular resistance to miseducation. The deeper issue underlying this controversy is Black survival, that is, how Black people will live in this society.

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For one paradox in this post-Civil Rights Era is that social cohesion, the cherished “Unum,” can only be realized if their education permits Black students to become literate in and construct social identities grounded in their actual history. (Witness the identification, cohesion, and belonging gangs provide.) This collective identity is integral to their human consciousness and is not to be confused with “essentializing” or “totalizing” racial nationalism. By contrast, the adopted textbooks are likely to promote individualistic assimilationist strategies that will undermine community solidarity and leave corporate interests and racism unchallenged. For the Black struggle for justice to continue, it must be collective and community based. Moreover, all students need educational opportunities to identify with “communities of interest” that sustain life and humane values (Alinsky, 1971; Orr, 1991,1992). This requires rethinking representations of our history, particularly within the African context, that effectively deprive Black students of a rational basis for identification with their African heritage and with their local and global “communities of destiny” (Silva, 1992). Appeals to “well-grounded canons of historical scholarship” in defense of half-true historical explanations are beside the point. According to Alinsky (1971), people are often not concerned enough to act unless there is a controversy (p. 117). He notes that “when people have a genuine opportunity to act,” they begin “to think their problems through” and then “they have a reason for knowing” (p. 106, original emphasis). Some of the parents and teachers I met with had been active in the struggle against the textbooks. Viewing and discussing the videotape critique gave them an opportunity to think through the critique of the textbooks, opportunities they sorely need to address such issues and discover possibilities for resistance and struggle. The present study suggests some ways this might happen and how Black Studies scholarship and intellectuals can help (Harding, 1974). A frequently posed question regarding the textbooks is: “If these books aren’t good enough, how do we create multicultural textbooks?” (Translation: “What do Blacks want now?” Answer: “Liberty and justice for all.”) It is also often said that “these books are so much better than the ones we had before.” Clearly, this judgment depends on the measurement standard used. Parents who do not have precise knowledge of the curriculum are acutely aware of how harmful schooling is for their children based on their concrete efforts to help them achieve and survive racism in education. Therefore, standards for measuring the progress of educational change need to reflect not what was but what education is for now. This exploratory study suggests that Black Studies research and social action agendas should be informed by the concrete experiences of parents and students and should focus interdisciplinary attention on all subjects. As Weinburg (1991) concludes, we know too little about “challenging students’ beliefs about history” (p. 518). This applies equally to teachers and to scholars who write textbooks (Ladson-Billings, 1991a, 1991b). Black Studies scholars need to be wary of invitations to “join the consensus” and concentrate on generating

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deciphering social analyses that help people differentiate between competing educational reform agendas using this standard-for-the-standards. The Middle Passage is somewhat analogous to current social realities. In many ways, the violence in African American communities today recalls the violence of slavery (Miller, 1988). If the overseas passage into enslavement of African people is analogous to “abductive schooling,” the problem now, as Woodson pointed out in 1933, is one of mental slavery to the dominant intellectual paradigm and school knowledge that promotes assimilation and selfabnegation (King & Wilson, 1990). This hegemonic intellectual paradigm slanders people of African descent, causes Black children to dis-identify with their history, deprives them of their heritage and distorts their humanity as well—all of which is a postmodern “way of death” of the psyche, if not a physical one (Miller, 1988). What are children learning about the Middle Passage, the origins of the Transatlantic slave trade, and the African Diaspora “here and there”? Further analysis of the empirical relationship between ideology, domination, and alienation is needed to understand the educational experiences of Black students and the role of textbooks under conditions of racism. Educators, parents, and students could benefit from studying these issues together. Indeed, one role of intellectuals is to uncover ways ideology conceals domination and supports alienation in the educational process. This will make a vital contribution to the realization of the historical potential of Black struggle that depends on “self-knowing subjects” (Wynter, 1991, 1992b) whose authenticity is not obliterated by alienating school knowledge. Both Diaspora Literacy and consciousness are needed to decipher the regime of truth represented in school texts. From the perspective of dialectical social theory, the validity of the Black Studies perspective must be determined in the practical application of the ideology critique and social action this intellectual perspective generates. Hopefully, then, the sojourn of Africa’s children in the New World will transcend the enduring vestiges of slavery and global racism, and out of the Middle Passage a radically more human mode of being and “world-class standards” for an equitable and just social life will emerge.

Notes 1 The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Professor Sterling Stuckey (1987), a University of California-Riverside historian, with the research on historical sources for this chapter. This research was supported by funds from the James Irvine Foundation grant to Santa Clara University’s “Excellence Through Diversity Initiative.” The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the University or the sponsor. 2 Degler is noted for advancing the proposition that people with darker skins (i.e., Africans) have been universally “looked down upon.” See Drake (1990) for a refutation of the “Degler-Gergen propositions.” 3 Busia borrows the concept of “Diaspora Literacy” from Clark (1989), who recently defined it as “the ability to comprehend the literature of Africa, Afro-America, and the

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Caribbean from an informed, indigenous perspective” (Clark, 1991, p. 42). I also draw on Clark’s use of the concepts lieu de mémoire and milieu de mémoire—which refer to settings for researching and remembering the “history of the Other” that are adapted from an essay by the French historian Pierre Nora (Clark, 1989; Nora, 1984). See Hamilton’s (1992) discussion of “authenticity” in the work of C. L. R. James. Human consciousness is consistent with the possibilities for authentic self-knowledge within Afrocentricity (not to be confused with ethnocentrism or ethnic chauvinism) as I have discussed it elsewhere (King & Mitchell, 1990; King & Wilson, 1990; see also Asante, 1991). I took a public stance against the adoption by mailing my letter and textbook critique to educators and citizens throughout California and in New York and Texas, two influential states also scheduled to make textbook decisions. The Rochester (NY) Public Schools Multicultural Office, TACT (The Association of Chinese Teachers in San Francisco), CURE (Communities United Against Racism in Education in Berkeley), TACTIC (Taxpayers Concerned About Truth in the Curriculum in Sacramento), NABRLE (National Association of Black Reading and Language Educators in Oakland), and the Rethinking Schools Collective (in Wisconsin) are some grass roots groups in which teachers, parents, and students have been working collectively around these issues. In 1992, Wynter’s essay was reprinted and published for a lay audience as Do Not Call Us Negros: How Multicultural Textbooks Perpetuate Racism. (Note: “Negros” is the Spanish language spelling of the word.) Comments made on “The Peter Jennings News Hour” (ABC-Television), September 14, 1990. One of these established scholars, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1991), defends the California textbook decision, warning that one of the “bad consequences” of the “eruption of ethnicity” is that “fragmentation and apartheid” will replace “America’s historic purposes” of “assimilation and integration” (p. 7). Confessing a nostalgia for a “unifying American identity,” the idealized “melting pot,” Schlesinger claims that the “rising rate of intermarriage across ethnic, religious, even (increasingly) racial lines” is a “telling indicator” that the majority of people prefer this “Unum” of “one people,” to what he calls the “cult of ethnicity” or the “artificial ethnic chauvinism” that is “disuniting” America (p. 11). Hughes’s (1992) article in Time magazine, “The Fraying of America” is another recent example of mainstream reaction to the epistemological challenge Black Studies represents. This was seen in the recent civil insurrection in Los Angeles following the trial of the White police officers accused of brutally beating Black suspect Rodney King. Hacker’s (1992) observations support this analysis of relations between Blacks and Koreans. As Hacker notes, “when its rolls need expanding, the white majority is ready to absorb upwardly mobile Hispanics and Asians, who are already being encouraged to separate and differentiate themselves from black Americans” (p. 202). Yet, Hacker points to “political motives for stressing the immigrant origins of certain white citizens” which can be “useful for politicians who seek to divert attention from economic issues” (p. 176). He states that the manipulation of “white ethnic” identity has been a “favored strategy of the right”—deployed by presidents Reagan and Bush. Consider one exercise many teachers in elementary and secondary schools use, which asks students to trace their family’s “immigrant roots.” Black students cannot answer questions like: “What country did your ancestors come from?” “When did they first arrive?” These questions also appear in the fourth-grade Houghton Mifflin text Oh, California (Armento, Nash, Salter, & Wixson, 1991b, pp. 138–139). It is noteworthy that teachers are advised to have children who are adopted or whose “biological families have gone through painful experiences” to participate in discussion of these questions “at any level that is comfortable for them” (Teacher’s Edition, p. 139).

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12 See National Council on Education Standards and Testing’s (1992) report to Congress, the Secretary of Education, the National Education Goals Panel, and the American people, entitled “Raising Standards for American Education”; see also Leo (1989). 13 Miller’s (1988) recent analysis of the slave trade in Angola describes this diversity and attempts a portrayal of the trade “from the virtually unrecorded perspectives of the slaves themselves” (p. xv; see also pp. 23–39). 14 As Giddens (1983) contends, “an ethnocentric conception . . . takes the standpoint of one’s own society or culture as a measure to judge all others” (p. 42). It also involves using one’s own terms as the standpoint from which to interpret the experiences and actions of others (Asante, 1991).

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Fox, P. (1973). Slave dancer. New York: Bradbury Press. Georgia Writers’ Project. (1940). Drums and shadows. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in sociological theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1983). Sociology: A brief but critical introduction. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Hacker, A. (1992). Two Nations: Black, White, separate, hostile, unequal. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons. Haley, A. (1976). Roots. New York: Doubleday. Hamilton, C. (1992). A way of seeing: Culture as political expression in the works of C. L. R. James. Journal of Black Studies, 22(3), 429–443. Hamilton, C. (n.d.). Apartheid in an American city: The case of the Black community in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Labor/Community Strategy Center. Harding, V. (1970). Beyond chaos: Black history and the search for the new land (Black Paper No. 2). Atlanta: Institute of the Black World. Harding, V. (1974). The vocation of the Black scholar and the struggles of the Black community. In Institute for the Black World (Ed.), Education and Black struggle: Notes from the colonized world (Harvard Education Review Monograph 2) (pp. 3–31). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Harding, V. (1990). Hope and history. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Hawkins, J. A. (1990, June/July). The cries of my ancestors: The “uncomfortable” story of slavery must be told honestly. Teacher, pp. 8–9. Heyser, H. (1991, July 19). New text survives bias debate. The Peninsula Times Tribune, p. A1, ff. Hughes, R. (1992, February 3). The fraying of America. Time, pp. 44–49. James, C. L. R. (1948/1980). Notes on dialectics: Hegel–Marx–Lenin. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill. Johnson, C. (1990). Middle passage. New York: Atheneum. Jones, K. B. (1992, January). Authority and representation: Sisterhood is complicated. Paper presented at the Jing Lyman Lecture Series, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. King, J. E. (1990a, July 11). [Unpublished letter to the California Curriculum Development and Supplemental Materials Commission, Sacramento, CA]. King, J. E. (Ed.). (1990b). In search of African liberation pedagogy: Multiple contexts of struggle [Special issue]. Journal of Education, 172(2). King, J. E. (1991). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity and the miseducation of Teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146. King, J. E. (1992). Unfinished business: Black student alienation and Black teachers’ emancipatory pedagogy. In M. Foster (Ed.), Readings on equal education (Vol. 11: Qualitative Investigations into School and Schooling) (pp. 245–271). New York: AMS Press. King, J. E. (1994). African American cultural knowledge and social practice: Implications for pedagogy, teacher preparation and assessment. In E. R. Hollins, J. E. King, & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Teaching diverse populations: Formulating a knowledge base. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. King, J. E. & Mitchell, C. A. (1990). Black mothers to sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with social practice. New York: Peter Lang. King, J. E., & Wilson, T. L. (1990). Being the soul-freeing substance: The legacy of hope in Afro-humanity. Journal of Education, 172(2), 9–27.

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King, J. E., & Wynter, S. (1991). Diaspora literacy and curriculum change: A Black Studies perspective [Videotape]. Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA. Kohl, H. (1992, April 6). Rotten to the core. The Nation, 254(13), 457–461. Ladson-Billings, G. (1991a). Beyond multicultural illiteracy. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 147–157. Ladson-Billings, G. (1991b, November). Distorting democracy: Social studies curriculum development and textbook adoption in California. Paper presented at the National Council of Social Studies, Washington, D.C. Leo, J. (1989, November 27). Teaching history the way it happened. U.S. News and World Report, p. 73. Lester, J. (1968). To be a slave. New York: Scholastic Books. Levine, L. (1977). Black culture and Black consciousness. London: Oxford University Press. Mattai, P. R. (1992). Rethinking the nature of multicultural education: Has it lost its focus or is it being misused? Journal of Negro Education, 61(1), 65–77. McCarthy, C. (1990). Race and curriculum: Social inequality and the theories and politics of difference in contemporary research on schooling. New York: Falmer Press. Mellon, J. (1988). Bullwhip days. New York: Weidenfield & Nicholson. Miller, J. C. (1976). The slave trade in the Congo and Angola. In M. Kilson & R. Rotberg, The African diaspora (pp. 75–113). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, J. C. (1988). Way of death. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. National Council on Education Standards and Testing. (1992, January 24). Raising standards for American education. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Nora, P. (1984). Entre mémoire et histoire. La problematique des lieux. In P. Nora (Ed.), Les lieux de mémoire (pp. xvii–xiii). Paris: Gallimard. Ollman, B. (1971). Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society. London: Cambridge University Press. Orr, D. W. (1991). What is education for? In Context, 27, 52–55. Orr, D. W. (1992). Ecological literacy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rawley, J. (1981). The transatlantic slave trade. New York: W. W. Norton. Reinhold, R. (1991, September 29). Class struggle. New York Times Magazine, pp. 26–29, 46–47, 52. Ridley, J., & Nash, G. (1990, April 21). [Unpublished letter and appendix to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Sacramento, CA]. Rodney, W. (1967). West Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House. Sanford, A. (1990, August). An education agenda. Essence, p. 126. Schlesinger, A., Jr. (1991). Reflections on a multicultural society. Washington, D.C.: President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Silva, P. B. G. (1992, April). Black-women-teachers’ resistance to racism in Sao Carlos (Sao Paulo, Brazil). Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco. Sims, R. (1982). Shadow and substance: Afro-American experience in contemporary children’s fiction. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Sleeter, C. (1992). The White ethnic experience in America: To whom does it generalize? Educational Researcher, 21(1), 33–36. Strickland, W. (1974). Identity and Black struggle: Personal reflections. In Institute of the Black World (Ed.), Education and Black struggle: Notes from the colonized world

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(Harvard Education Review Monograph No. 2) (pp. 137–143). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Stuckey, S. (1987). Slave culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Textbook Adoption Recommendations. (1990). Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education. Wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonizing the mind: The politics of language in African literature. London: James Currey. Waugh, D. (1991). California’s history textbooks: Do they offend? California Journal, 22(3), 121–127. Weinburg, S. (1991). On the reading of historical texts: Notes on the breach between school and academy. American Educational Research Journal, 28(3), 495–519. Winter, J. (1988). Follow the drinking gourd. New York: Knopf. Woodson, C. G. (1933). The mis-education of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers. Wynter, S. (1990). America as a world: A Black Studies perspective and a cultural model framework. Letter and essay to the California State Board of Education. Wynter, S. (1992a). “Do not call us Negros”: How multicultural textbooks perpetuate racism. San Jose: CA: Aspire Books. Wynter, S. (1992b). Re-thinking aesthetics: Notes toward a deciphering practice. In M. Cham (Ed.), Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean cinema (pp. 237–279). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Yin, R. (1984). Case study research: Design and methods. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

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“IF JUSTICE IS OUR OBJECTIVE” Diaspora Literacy, Heritage Knowledge, and the Praxis of Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom

The capacities of men [and women] were constantly leaping out of the confinements of the system. ( James, 1970, p. 135)

The visionary social struggle that resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision did not take into account the ways ideologically distorted knowledge sustains societal injustice, particularly academic and school knowledge about Black history and culture. This delimited vision of equal justice raises a number of questions of concern to this chapter: “Is equal access to a faulty curriculum justice” (King, 1995c, p. 123)? What pedagogical alternatives are available, if academic scholarship and school knowledge are flawed by the ideology of white supremacy racism? If racial division is learned, does our vocation as educators call for the critical moral agency to realize the unfulfilled hopes of Brown? In other words, “if justice is our objective,” how can we educate for true human freedom? This chapter presents a morally engaged pedagogical approach that has evolved from my teaching and research on race, ideology, and education: the praxis of Critical Studyin’, which addresses these questions (King, 1995a, 1995b, 1997). Four key points delineate the logic of this pedagogical praxis and the conceptual tools—Diaspora Literacy (culturally informed knowledge) and Heritage Knowledge (group memory)—that define it. The first key point is that African people’s humanity has been totally denied. As a result, the next generation is alienated from their identity and heritage and unprepared to participate in the struggle for justice. Second, the cost of this dehumanization, alienation, and Black people’s assigned alter-ego role as

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the penultimate “other” to whiteness—as slaves, second-class citizens or the post-Brown jobless, miseducated, criminalized underclass—is the attenuation of White people’s humanity as well (Jensen, 2005; King, 2000, 2005; Wynter, 2006). Third, within this cultural framework in which to be White is to be more intelligent and more civilized, thus more human, a mode of black thought exists that is alternative to these “rationalizations” of Western thought and the white “monopoly” on humanity (Wynter, 2006, p. 162). Finally, educators have a moral obligation to counteract alienating ideological knowledge that obstructs the right to be literate in one’s own heritage and denies people the rights of “cultural citizenship.” Such literacy does nothing to detract from being an American, but is fundamental for the “promotion of the well-being and preservation of particular groups” (Aoishima Research Institute, 2005) and genuine participation in a true democracy (Flores & Benmayor, 1997). The praxis of Critical Studyin’ demonstrated in this chapter makes the traditions of black thought and ways of being, normally negated by ideological distortion and denial of black humanity, available to support human freedom. Critical Studyin’ takes its name from the thinking/theorizing of enslaved African Americans who, when they were “contemplating their enslaved existence and how to be free,” stated they were “studyin’ freedom.” S. E. Anderson suggests the term Critical Studyin’ to update the context of culturally grounded “practical-critical activity” (Kilminster, 1979), or praxis, that nurtures human freedom (Anderson, 1995; personal communication, July 16, 2003). This means becoming cognitively and emotionally free of ideological constraints on knowledge, thought, and morally engaged action or pedagogy. Studyin’ (pronounced stud-un) in African American Home Language or Ebonics can mean acquiring knowledge or thinking autonomously or giving consideration to someone or something. Roediger (1998) uses a similar “Black vernacular English” (BVE) definition of “study,” (i.e., “academic study and hard thought undertaken in much less formal contexts”) to situate a collection of essays by Black writers writing on “what it means to be white” within the tradition of black thought (p. xii). This chapter demonstrates liberating knowledge for human freedom gained through Critical Studyin’ in classroom and community contexts from within a Black Studies theoretical perspective. By deciphering the implications of ideological conceptions of “Blackness” (and socially constructed “whiteness”), Critical Studyin’ offers a pedagogical alternative to alienating knowledge that rationalizes injustice, corrupts scientific reasoning, and obstructs critical moral agency.

Pedagogical Implications of the Ideology of Racial Reasoning You have really educated me today. I didn’t know any other people had been slaves except Black people. (California teacher, 1992 Textbook Adoption Committee)

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As a form of knowledge, ideology bears a relationship to power and agency for domination or for human freedom. Following Karl Marx’s “critique of ideology,” and as further developed by Karl Mannheim, Jurgen Habermas, Paul Ricouer, and Anthony Giddens, I understand the antithesis of dominating ideological knowledge, which alienates people from themselves and their own best interests, to be liberating knowledge (King, 1992, 1995b). Before Brown challenged the legal infrastructure of the ideology of white supremacy racism (without eradicating it), the national mythology of black inferiority, a legacy of slavery, was normalized in history, religion, politics, science, aesthetics, and ethics—all academic disciplines. This ideology was institutionalized in every aspect of society, from inequitable educational practice and antiliteracy laws to the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Plessy upheld as national policy the Jim Crow system of racial apartheid that gave legal sanction to the fiction of “separate-but-equal” public institutions and facilities. The nation still needs to be liberated from ideological myths, masquerading as objective scientific or academic knowledge, that rationalize and obscure dominating power relations.

The National Mythology of Black Inferiority The mythology of inherent black inferiority that justified African enslavement still has relevance today. How else could The Bell Curve, a book arguing that Black people are genetically inferior to White people, “remain on the New York Times best seller list for 15 weeks and sell a million copies within the first 18 months of its publication” (Banks, 2006, p. 148)? How else could the general population remain silent about the massive incarceration of Black people in the U.S. since the Brown “victory”? This myth is an expression of the belief structure of race that has long contaminated knowledge of Africa, black experience, and the meaning of “civilization” (Munford, 2001). An essay published in the North American Review (a journal of “literature and culture”) defended slavery to its readers as late as 1896. Entitled “A Southerner on the Negro Question,” the passage below presents the gist of the essay’s argument that slavery was beneficial to African people and was, therefore, morally just: The Negro has not progressed, not because he was a slave, but because he does not possess the faculties to raise himself above slavery. . . . Where the Negro has thriven it has invariably been under the influence and by the assistance of a stronger race. These wanting, he has inevitably and visibly reverted toward the original type. . . . Slavery, whatever its demerits, was not in its time the unmitigated evil it is fancied to have been . . . to the Negro it was salvation. It found him savage and in two hundred years gave seven million of his race a civilization, the only civilization it has had since the dawn of history. (Mays, 1967, p. 342)

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This racial reasoning made centuries of kidnapping and enslavement and decades of lynching seem morally justified and perfectly normal in the South and the North. That such dysconsciousness (King, 1990) or impaired thinking hinders the critical thought that moral agency requires becomes clear when the “Southern viewpoint” (abetted by Northern complicity) is compared to the empirical record and the experiences of those who were enslaved (Farrow, Lang, & Frank, 2005; Lester, 2005). According to theologian James H. Cone (1972), slavery meant: being snatched from your homeland and sailing to an unknown land in a stinking ship . . . [it] meant being regarded as property, like horses, cows, and household goods. For blacks the auction block was one potent symbol of their subhuman status. . . . Slavery meant working fifteen to twenty hours a day and being beaten for showing fatigue. It meant being driven into the field three weeks after delivering a baby. It meant having the cost of replacing you calculated against the value of your labor during a peak season, so that your owner could decide whether to work you to death. It meant being whipped for crying over a fellow slave who had been killed while trying to escape. (p. 21) The belief structure of race, discussed in greater detail below, blocks understanding of the costs of this racial reasoning for all people, that is, for Western “civilization.” Critical Studyin’ affirms this understanding of human freedom, which the ideology of white supremacy racism negates.

Slavery, Ideology, and Pedagogy One of the most damaging, ideologically biased narratives of the black experience in academic scholarship and school knowledge concerns slavery. The trauma Black students experience when the subject comes up in schools is a continuing legacy not only of slavery but also of the culture-systemic belief structure of race, which Brown’s emphasis on legal equality did not dislodge. As I have noted (King, 1992): Educators and parents are painfully aware that many Black students are traumatized and humiliated when reading about slavery. They often report that Black students do not want to discuss slavery or be identified with Africa and many admit that they lack the conceptual tools to intervene in this dangerous dynamic. Moreover, there is a generalized silence about it in the disciplines and fields of pedagogical inquiry that might otherwise be of help to them. (p. 328)

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Historian Peter H. Wood (2003) also concludes that, after decades of scholarship: the heart of the enslavement experience and its deepest moral and social implications still seem to elude us. This is especially true in the classroom, where even our best books and articles, lectures, and films too often continue to fall short of the mark. (p. 20) In the absence of scholarly support for a clear pedagogical consensus, state and local politicians are attempting to legislate how slavery and the black experience are taught. In Philadelphia, for instance, a new required course in African American history has been installed. New York’s legislature established the “Amistad Committee” to make recommendations to the legislators and the governor for curriculum and textbook changes. This committee will “examine whether slavery and the ‘physical and psychological terrorism’ against AfricanAmericans in the slave trade is adequately taught in schools and textbooks” (Gormley, 2005).

What Is Wrong With Our Education? The degradation of men costs something to both the degraded and those who degrade. (Du Bois, 1909/2001, p. 17) In the early 1990s a group of Sylvia Wynter’s students at Stanford University organized themselves as the Institute N.H.I., or “No Humans Involved,” the code the Los Angeles police reportedly used when answering a call involving Black or Latino youth. In a “Knowledge for the 21st Century” reader and workshops the students posed this question: “What is wrong with our education?” (King, 2006). A controversial textbook adoption process was occurring in California during this time, and many examples of conceptual flaws in knowledge came to light. Examples such as those below demonstrate all too clearly “what is wrong”: s

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“Our” human origins in Africa. The sixth grade narrative of “our early human origins” opens with a description of “naked, dark-skinned” proto-humans on the plains of East Africa millions of years ago eating the “marrow oozing from a bloody bone.” The Teacher’s Edition of the text directed the teachers to say that a cave-dwelling European Cro-Magnon Man with a “larger brain” (than that of the proto-humans in Africa) in one text’s illustration “looked just like us.” The first immigrants. American Indians, described in the texts as “the first immigrants” who “came” to the Americas across the Bering Strait,

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questioned the presentation of this Western scientific theory as fact. Ignoring the wide range of scholarship (and indigenous knowledge traditions) about the origins of indigenous people in early America fundamentally denies their humanity. Human sacrifice. A Chicana (Mexican American) teacher tearfully confided to me her reservations about presenting the chapter on the Aztecs of ancient Mexico to her Mexican American students because the text mentioned their religious practice of “human sacrifice” without discussing the indigenous cultural viewpoint. Africans selling their own people into slavery. African enslavement was represented as a story of how “forced immigrants came” to America: their greedy local rulers participated in the Transatlantic slave trade in order to buy “luxury” items from the Europeans. Not examined was the long tradition of slavery in Europe, the very different nature of lineage-based domestic bondage and indentured servitude among indigenous “African” peoples, or the cultural logic that permitted the Catholic Church to approve socalled “Just Wars” that Europeans then instigated among rival rulers to sustain a constant flow of captives for this “trade” and secure the profits this global enterprise produced.

These examples illustrate conceptual flaws in history textbooks that a diverse array of parents, other educators, and I opposed when the California State Curriculum Commission (on which I served) considered them for adoption (King, 1992). Despite opposition from concerned parents in a number of communities, many teachers who reviewed the textbooks were eager to have them adopted and made available to the schools for purchase. Although the textbooks were eventually approved with some minor revisions, teachers who supported the adoption chose to ignore the ideological perspective bias the above examples demonstrate. These teachers defended the normative monocultural (white) point of view in the textbooks as “multicultural.” State officials and the corporate media deceptively reframed community opposition to the texts as an “us versus them” ethnic conflict. Somewhat cynically, official spokespersons asked: “Can’t a White author write accurately and with sensitivity about the experiences of other groups?” This question artfully dodges issues of ideology and the social interests any author’s (or educator’s) perspective can represent. In my experience, teachers who are constrained by the mindset of “whiteness” often do not consider that there is anything wrong with the United States or with their own education. For example, the mostly White pre-service teachers I taught in California for 12 years generally accepted the myth of the United States as a white nation that was just becoming more diverse. Upon entering the credential program, they also believed that their mission as teachers was to help these diverse “others” to be like them (King, 1997). These student teachers struggled with the realization

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that white supremacy racism not only denies equitable education to the poor and students of color, but also that miseducation for domination denies White teachers and students opportunities to realize their full humanity (Woodson, 1933). Many White teachers (and scholars) who equate “equality” with assimilation and “color-blindness” dismiss the idea that Black (and Latino) students can benefit from educational experiences that connect them with their African heritage and identity. Nor do those holding this view, including some Black teachers, understand how U.S. society might benefit from Black people’s development along these lines. A teacher in an “urban education” master’s degree program dismissed a presentation I made recently on the subject this way: “Why should I talk to my Black students about their African heritage when some of them don’t even know who their daddies are?” One reason is that research and practice show positive benefits of such identity development for Black student achievement (Glenn, 2003; King, 2005). The way Africa and Black experience and culture are normally taught institutionalizes a dangerously incomplete conception of what it means to be African and what it means to be human, which obstructs Black students’ opportunities to identify with their heritage. Others are denied opportunities to grasp fully the implications of the degradation of Blackness for society and their own well-being.

Critical Studyin’ From Practice-to-Theory The problem here is that few Americans know who and what they really are . . . most American whites are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it. (Ellison, 1986, p. 584) Critical Studyin’ from practice-to-theory is inspired by the organizing-aspedagogy tradition and education theory of activist educators like Myles Horton (Horton, 1990), Septima Clark (Brown, 1968), Ella Baker (Ransby, 2003), and Paulo Freire (1971). Learning for consciousness transformation is common to the educational practice Horton developed at Highlander Folk School, in the Citizenship Schools that Clark developed as Highlander’s Education Director, in her earlier adult education pedagogy, and in the Freedom Schools that Baker’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee protégés organized (Payne, 2000). In addition, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Wynter’s (1992) “deciphering praxis” of Black Studies are important theoretical influences on the praxis of Critical Studyin’. “Practice-to-theory” refers to remembering or theorizing how to reconnect the dismembered existential reality of African descent people. The goal is to recover historical consciousness, identity, and collective memory from ideologically biased narratives of significant historical-cultural junctures in black

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experience and culture. At these junctures in the “making of America,” the knowledge, labor, and spirituality—in essence, the culture of African descent people—has been “stolen” or rendered invisible or inaccessible for Black people’s group benefit and society’s moral and ethical development. A Black Studies theoretical lens, Diaspora Literacy, makes it possible to decipher these “codifications” to foster what Freire describes as an “encounter with the world,” but from an alternative vantage point of Black Heritage Knowledge. This praxis of teaching through culture contrasts with pedagogical approaches that emphasize “Cultural Knowledge,” that is, what teachers can be expected to know about students (King, 2004), or with forms of “critical pedagogy.” This approach adapted Freire’s methods to the U.S. context; however, it cultivates the “critical consciousness” of individuals and subsumes matters of race and culture within a class analysis (Leonardo, 2002).

Diaspora Literacy Busia (1989) borrows the concept of “Diaspora Literacy” from Vévé Clark’s (1991) definition: “the ability to comprehend the literature of Africa, AfroAmerica, and the Caribbean from an informed, indigenous perspective” (p. 42; King, 1992, p. 318, n. 2). My use of the concept refers to reading the “word and the world” for the benefit of humanity through various cultural signs in the lived experiences of Africa’s people here and there in the world. Diaspora Literacy means decoding “concrete situations of alienation” or “coded existential situations” (Freire, 1971) in “the culture of everyday” black life (Ransby, 2003) from a culturally informed perspective. Critical Studyin’ focused on these significant historical junctures (situations) can develop Heritage Knowledge that permits African descent people to make connections with the African family and with larger issues of social justice in the world. Others develop more complete historical knowledge, critical thinking skills, and self-knowledge.

Heritage Knowledge Heritage Knowledge is a cultural birthright of every human being. Equating heritage with a group’s memory of their collective history, Clarke (1994) explains that unless a people “take pride in its own history and loves its own memories, it can never fulfill itself completely,” adding that the “ultimate purpose of heritage and heritage teaching” (or Heritage Knowledge) is liberation “from the old ties of bondage” (p. 86). Clarke uses a poignant metaphor for this way of teaching/knowing: “A person’s relationship to his heritage, after all, is the same as the relationship of a child to his mother.” Also, Heritage Knowledge permits “a people to develop an awareness and pride in themselves so that they themselves can achieve good relationships with other people” (p. 86). Good relationships are possible by overcoming the constraining effects

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of the ideology of white supremacy racism on our collective memories, historical consciousness, and on knowledge.

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Theorizing Black Experience: Alterity and Identity At this level of Otherness the “negro” was not even considered, since he was not imagined to have languages worth studying, nor to partake in culture, so total was his mode of Nigger Chaos. (Wynter, 1984, p. 36) bell hooks (1998) equates “theorizing black experience” with seeking to “uncover, restore as well as to deconstruct our history and our culture” so that “new paths” can lead to “complete self-realization” (pp. 46–47). However, these paths are blocked by academic and corporate media misrepresentations that connect African descent people to all manner of imagined “Nigger Chaos” (Wynter, 1984). So, it is not surprising to hear African American students declare, “I ain’t no African.” Robinson (2000) situates group self-realization within a cogent analysis of the Black problem with Blackness: Far too many Americans of African descent believe their history starts in America with bondage and struggles forward from there to today’s second-class citizenship. The cost of this obstructed view of ourselves, of our history, is incalculable. How can we be collectively successful if we have no idea or, worse, the wrong idea of who we were and, therefore, are? We are history’s amnesiacs fitted with the memories of others. Our minds can be trained for individual career success but our group morale, the very soul of us, has been devastated by the assumption that what has not been told about ourselves does not exist to be told. (p. 7) The praxis of Critical Studyin’ locates the black struggle for group “selfrealization” and equal justice within the project of advancing human freedom (Wynter, 2006). Baldwin (1996), in a “Talk to Teachers,” written 40 years ago but still relevant, explains the white problem with whiteness, and why White teachers need to be liberated from its myths and privileges: The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated . . . and a price is demanded to liberate all those white children— some of them near forty—who have never grown up, and who will never grow up because they have no sense of their identity. What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. (pp. 219, 224–225)

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Indeed, the dominant conception of “our national identity” is one of the most potent myths that constrain the moral agency of teachers, that is, their ability to identify with social justice as a legitimate part of their vocation (King, 1990). Missing in the scholarship and in the broader understanding of the unfinished business of Brown is a focus on the pedagogical implications and the conceptual tools needed to address this obstacle, which prevents individual and collective success for African descent people and also distorts white identity.

A Way Out: The Perspective Advantage of Alterity White supremacy racism idealizes “human beingness” as a White, middle-class “mode of being.” Black people (and others) who are sub-ordinated to this dominant “paradigm of value and authority” experience a “psychic disorder and cultural malaise” that results from the sense of “nihilated identity” this (racial) subordination produces (Wynter, 1989, p. 639). Derived from the French words “néant” or “néantiseé,” “nihilated” means the total denial of one’s identity (as a human being). Negating conceptions of Blackness (e.g., black and evil, blackhearted, blacklist, black sheep of the family, blackballed, etc.) are commonplace in English and in the languages and metaphors of other societies as well. In Brazil, for example, I was given a list of terms for conceptual Blackness in Portuguese that included “Dia do Branco”: Monday is a “White Day”—a “day of work”—because (it is believed that) Blacks don’t (want to) work. Another example demonstrates the underlying biological conception of Blackness as genetically defective. A self-described “racial realist,” a White professor in an Australian university, wrote to a local paper warning that the settlement of Sudanese refugees in Sydney would lead to “a surge in crime and violence.” The university administrators repudiated the professor’s claims that “subSaharans” with “lower IQs and high levels of serum testosterone” enhanced the “risk of all these problems,” and canceled his classes (“Australian Professor,” 2005). Wynter argues that within the cultural framework that these examples illustrate, any “sign of Blackness” (or N.H.I.) denotes an “ontological lack,” the total “absence of true (human) beingness” (Wynter, 1984, 1997, 2006). The willingness of so many to believe the widespread (but false) reports of Black people engaging in savagery (e.g., raping babies) in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exemplifies the “rules” that govern behavior and perception with regard to “conceptual Blackness” and “conceptual whiteness” (King, 2006; Wynter, 1992). Paradoxically, this imposed liminal status of alterity gives Black people a particular “perspective advantage” that is akin to W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness or Black people’s “second sight” behind the “veil” of oppression (Wynter, 1997). The perspective advantage of alterity can also be seen in the geopolitical controversy that erupted between Mexico and the United States when Mexico’s

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“beloved” Black child comic book character, “Memin Penguin,” was immortalized in a series of commemorative postage stamps in 2006. An international racial hullabaloo erupted and charges of racial stereotyping as demonstrated by Memin Penguin’s “exaggerated” features were lobbed at Mexico and its leaders. President Vicente Fox and his government “flatly rejected” complaints from prominent U.S. Black leaders and the White House. Quite surprisingly, an organization that represents some 50,000 Black Mexicans living on the Pacific coast, the Asociacion Mexico Negro, injected their (alterity) perspective and black identity into the debate. In a letter to Fox, the Black Mexicans stated that Memin Pinguin is indeed stereotypical and racist. Lacking the perspective advantage of the Black Mexican experience of racism, other non-Black Mexicans stressed the “innocence” and “artistic value” of this cartoon (“Sixto Valencia Burgos,” 2005). (Note: This is not to argue that no Black Mexican would see things from this dominant perspective.)

The Will to Blackness It had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black— with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful. (Baldwin, 1955, pp. 128–129) The remainder of this chapter presents various examples of the knowledge and insights Critical Studyin’ can generate. It would seem that 50 years after Brown and after Baldwin wrote the above lines, a focus on the “beauty” of Blackness would be unnecessary. However, the examples of liberating knowledge in this chapter are intended to illustrate the alterity perspective that recovers and reclaims Blackness, as well as Black thought, social explanation, and theorizing, from ongoing ideological distortion and omission. The knowledge tradition and alternative vision of society that Diaspora Literacy reveals as Heritage Knowledge can be “read” in Black experience and cultural practice, in Black Studies theorizing, and in Black creative expression. For example, coded meanings and cultural signs are found in Black music (the spirituals, the blues, and hip-hop), folk humor (e.g., Langston Hughes’s Jesse B. Semple character) and folklore, minstrelsy, theater, film, and today’s Spoken Word Movement (Fisher, 2003). Woods (1998), for example, has this to say about the blues as a form of popular Black working class theorizing: “Emerging out of the rich tradition of African song-centered orature, and under conditions of intense censorship, secular and sacred songs became fountainheads of cultural transmission and social explanation” (p. 56, emphasis added). “The Boondocks” comic strip, created by the young Black cartoonist, Aaron McGruder, shows the educational potential of the younger generation’s vision and thought. Though not without controversy, this comic strip appears in over

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250 syndicated newspapers (with over 30 million readers) and is now televised. The radical educators of Rethinking Schools (2001/2002) recommend it as a teaching resource: “The Boondocks comic strip has been critical and profound during a period when much of American popular culture seems cowed by conformist pro-war pressures. Excellent to use with students.” Several Boondocks strips discussed below demonstrate not just a nonconformist critique, but a black alterity perspective in which a satirical critique of the nation’s leaders is embedded in black cultural signs. In the July 4, 2003 strip, Caesar reminds his best friend, Huey Freeman, the precocious Black-militant child-scholar, that July is “Black English Month.” The July 17 strip is an exaggerated account of President George W. Bush delivering his widely publicized (and criticized) “Bring ’em on!” speech in Ebonics. An unseen television reporter’s commentary delivered in standard English sets the context for this portrayal of the president “acting black” (King, 1995b): “After more U.S. soldiers were killed and wounded in Baghdad, President Bush taunted the Iraqi insurgents, saying he was thus far ‘unimpressed’ with the casualty figures.” In the next panel, using language of the “street” the way urban Black youth might challenge each other to a fight, the president says to the Iraqi “Guerilla Fighters”: “Is that the best you can do? A few dead? A few injured? Big Whup! Y’all shoot like my blind one-armed grandmother!” In the last panel, the television reporter speaks in Ebonics and his “finger snap” in the final caption is another clearly recognizable “sign of Blackness”: “The president then informed the Guerilla Fighters that ‘they had betta bring it like it ain’t neva been brought!’ and snapped his fingers twice” (emphasis added). This Black speech mode is also associated with the braggadocio and ritualized aggressive style of some forms of hip-hop music and rap performance. Many urban Black youth and the acting black White “wannabes” who emulate them adopt this loud, loquacious, exaggerated performance style. This bravado recalls earlier flamboyant Black male personalities and performers who (unlike Bush) were masters of the spoken word, such as Little Richard (a rambunctious, style-setting singer) and Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali, the poetic world champion boxer). The highly visual metaphor (“like my blind one-armed grandmother”) is another “cultural sign” of Blackness or everyday Black language that is a staple element of the “Dozens,” an indirect form of playful ritual “insult” perfected to a high art by consummate BVE speakers (Smitherman, 1986). Portraying the president “acting Black” perhaps satirizes or “signifies” on his lack of actual combat experience. The “finger snap,” the way Black females may punctuate their speech, introduces an indirect critique of the president’s “manliness.” While ostensibly a critique of the war, this panel actually reveals the hypocrisy of the (white) power structure: society’s criminalization of young Black males associates them with ever-present violence and aggression. However, the subtext of this comic strip presents the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful nation as having the attitude and demeanor of a petulant,

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volatile, to-be-feared urban street combatant. This is minstrelsy without masking (blackface). Understood from a culturally informed point of view, the (implied) swaggering braggadocio also hints there may be more talk than substance in the taunt: “Bring ’em on!” In another Boondocks strip that encodes a black alterity perspective in Black language and cultural signs, (then National Security Advisor) Condoleezza Rice’s authenticity as a Black person is questioned. Caesar, Huey’s young friend who identifies totally with urban “street” subculture, asks Huey a question about Rice—a question that implies that Rice might not be culturally black. “Girl talk” among the “Sistahs” (Black women who are close friends) serves as a metaphor that signifies autonomous black critical thought and authentic (chosen) Blackness. Caesar reasons that if Rice doesn’t talk with other Black women the way Black women usually talk among themselves, as (real) Black people do, maybe she is disconnected from Black people’s ways of being (and from a black alterity perspective). “Reading” these comic strips from a culturally informed perspective can serve an educative function. They also convey an important understanding about Blackness from a black alterity perspective: the “will to Blackness” (Dubey, 1994) or chosen Blackness is an alternative to nihilated identity. Staying “culturally black” is an achievement that Critical Studyin’ can facilitate. The first of the “Ten Vital Principles for Black Education and Socialization” delineated by the American Educational Research Association’s Commission on Research in Black Education is relevant: “We exist as African people, an ethnic family. Our perspective must be centered in that reality” (King, 2005, p. 20). If such socialization is the primary responsibility of parents and communities, teachers can nevertheless learn how to recognize and counter alienating school knowledge that negates the choice to identify with Blackness.

Rewriting Knowledge/Rethinking Education for Human Freedom But can you expect teachers to revolutionize the social order for the good of the community? Indeed, we must expect this very thing. The educational system of a country is worthless unless it accomplishes this very task. (Woodson, 1933, p. 106) Historians acknowledge that how history is written influences both the way history is taught (or not taught) and historical understanding (Fitzpatrick, 2002; Loewen, 2005; Weinburg, 1991). I teach and write about such matters, not as a historian but as a sociologist interested in the “sociology of knowledge that functions as ideology” (King, 1992). What follows are six examples of Heritage Knowledge that Critical Studyin’ generates through a Diaspora Literacy “reading” of significant historical-cultural junctures in the black experience.

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These examples demonstrate: (1) indigenous perspectives on African people’s cultural practice before the Holocaust of enslavement; (2) how indigenous knowledge, including the oral tradition, enables the recovery of the existential reality of African descent people from negative stereotypes like Aunt Jemima; (3) the stolen knowledge, stolen labor, and stolen culture of Black people; and (4) a significant “generative theme” of Critical Studyin’: rewriting knowledge for human freedom.

Pre-Holocaust African Beginnings To interrogate the black experience before the Holocaust of enslavement that Europeans institutionalized and globalized, Critical Studyin’ acknowledges humanity’s origins in Africa (White et al., 2003) and uses African language, Songhoy-senni, to examine indigenous cultural practices before the arrival of Europeans. (Songhoy, Songhay, and Sonrai refer to “the people”; “senni” means language.) The Songhoy Empire is known for the universities that were developed in ancient Mali and for the manuscripts of the fabled libraries of Timbuktu written by indigenous African scholars in Arabic, Songhoy-senni, and other local languages. African languages bring the indigenous perspective to bear on the examination of one of the most alienating and divisive narratives about the black experience (King, 1992): “Africans sold their own people into slavery.” Songhoy-Senni, which conveys the worldview of the Songhoy people, is used to decode the concept of “slave” and the meaning of lineage from the African point of view. Academic scholarship and textbooks fail to give adequate attention to the significance of “lineage” in the African context when explaining how European enslavement of Africans came about. Also excluded is adequate discussion of the indigenous systems of indentured and domestic servitude on the continent that preceded European and Arab slavery. Usually, it is acknowledged that African peoples engaged in various forms of bondage, servitude, and enslavement that differed significantly from the European system of chattel slavery-for-life (Bailey, 2005; Carney, 2001). However, as Davidson (1961) has suggested, greater inquiry into both “the mind of the European and the conditions in Africa” (King, 1992, p. 329) is required. The significance of lineage is evident in the meaning of the word “slave” (barnya) in Songhoy-senni: “someone who doesn’t even have a mother” (H. Maiga, personal communication, June 1, 2003). That is, freeborn men and women who were captured in war were no longer protected by their lineage—their mother’s clan. These “lineage-less” persons were never regarded as less than human and could also recover their freedom. They sometimes even rose to prominence among their captors. Hearing this explanation in community workshops, African Americans immediately connect this information with the lamentation our enslaved ancestors expressed in the “sorrow song”: “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,

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a l-o-n-g w-a-y-y-y from home” (Drake, 1977, p. 12). Through African language study, a neglected resource that offers educators unique access to the indigenous African worldview, teachers can learn to make connections to enable Black students “to recognize and affirm their collective identification” with African people (King, 1994, p. 24).

Aunt Jemima: Oral Tradition and African Spirituality A counternarrative of the Aunt Jemima stereotype represents another example of Heritage Knowledge that Critical Studyin’ generates. As opposed to the hurtful taunt, “Aunt Jemima, Ain’t yo’ mama black?” the oral tradition identifies “Jemima women” as caring, commanding spiritual community mothers who descended from Ifa priestesses of the Yoruba people of West Africa. In various locations, these women (Orixá) are called Yemaya, Yemanya, or Iemoja. According to the oral tradition, once these priestesses learned the truth about what was happening to those who were captured and sold into slavery, they voluntarily allowed themselves to be captured and sold so they could come to the Americas to look after and protect their people. In Brazil Yemanya is the Yoruba (African) deity associated with motherhood and rivers and thus with the Middle Passage—and slavery. “Re-membering” African women as spiritually empowered protectors and responsible leaders in this way evokes healing, cathartic emotions, and memories. Perhaps this narrative is so evocative because the “psychic malaise” many Black people experience is the absence of a sense of “belonging” and care. This personification of African womanhood negates the distortions of Black women reified in fiction, film, and the fantasy world of commercial advertisement. Compared to the “half true,” partial narrative of greedy African kings who betrayed and sold “their own people” into slavery for European luxury goods, this potent symbol valorizes African spirituality and leadership.

Carolina Gold: The Making of America The rice grown and processed by enslaved Africans and the foundation of one of the wealthiest of America’s colonial economies is known as “Carolina Gold” (Carney, 2001). African women’s sophisticated indigenous system of knowledge made Carolina and Georgia rice cultivation and processing possible and extremely profitable. To recover this heritage from ideological distortions of African womanhood and academic narratives of Africans who supposedly “arrived” here empty-headed and empty-handed requires knowledge of cultural signs (Diaspora Literacy) that pertain to centuries of indigenous rice cultivation in West Africa (Wood, 2003). Carney documents in Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas how Europeans falsely took credit for this fundamental African knowledge and complex technical know-how:

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The knowledge and the expertise to adapt cultivation of a preferred [African] dietary staple to New World conditions proved among the scant “possessions” remaining to slaves pressed into slavery from rice-growing regions. . . . Key aspects of rice culture embodied specialized knowledge systems, often the domain of African women. (pp. 97, 107) “Carolina Gold” is one of innumerable examples of stolen knowledge, stolen labor, and stolen culture, the “love and theft” (Lott, 1993) dynamic in the “making of America.” In his essay “What Would America Be Without Blacks?” Ellison (1986) notes that Americans (and American popular culture) are culturally “part Negro.” Critical Studyin’ questions such as these have allowed the many students, teachers, and community educators I have taught for 25 years to see the need to rewrite knowledge and to rethink their own education: “What would the United States be like today if African people were just arriving?” and “What can Black Americans be proud of?” The most illuminating responses acknowledge the hidden achievements of African people as well as Whites like John Brown, Mother Jones, and many others who struggled for justice.

Elvis: Acting Black The pattern of appropriating and mimicking black culture, including White artists “acting black,” offers other historical-cultural junctures in which Diaspora Literacy develops consciousness transforming Heritage Knowledge. For example, Critical Studyin’ deciphers the identity marketing of Elvis Presley as a White black singer (“The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”) without recognition of his apprenticeship to black music. “Elvis’s immersion in black culture, both the blues and gospel,” as George (1998) observes, “was as deep as his Mississippi background would allow” (p. 225). This analysis of Elvis’s “white negroism” (a term George adapts from Norman Mailer’s essay on the “White Negro”) pinpoints his appropriation of various elements of black style, including his clothing (purchased at a black store) and his greased-back hair styled like the “negro conk” hair straightening “process.” George also notes the irony that the “conk” look Elvis adapted was intended to make black hair look and act like white hair. Eminem, a contemporary incarnation of this “love and theft” phenomenon, is promoted as the most lyrically adept White black rapper, a judgment that depends upon elevating verbal virtuosity (lyrics), one element of rap, over the holistic art of Spoken Word performance (Fisher, 2003).

Abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown Critical Studyin’s focus on the fight against slavery also illustrates the need to rewrite knowledge and rethink the kind of authentic education required to

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address the unfinished legacy of Brown. If Frederick Douglass is most often portrayed in school textbooks as a lone Black hero who escaped from slavery, John Brown has usually appeared as a lone White “madman” whose crazy scheme to disrupt slavery failed (Loewen, 2005). The totality of the system of thought that justified slavery is difficult to imagine from the vantage point of the 21st century. Historical accounts generally fail to connect the critically engaged moral agency of these abolitionists—one Black and one White—with African American ways of knowing and being that helped to inspire their radical break with white supremacy racism. Frederick Douglass. Although slavery meant that no enslaved person could legally learn to read, Frederick Douglass did learn to read and to write, and before his escape he taught others to read as well. Literacy gave him hope; it instilled in him a “life-giving” determination to reclaim his humanity (Douglass, 1963, p. 84). Douglass presented his own life experience as a public testimony of the truth about the barbarity of slavery. His life also represented the enslaved community whose cultural resistance nurtured his defiance. As an internationally prominent abolitionist orator, writer, and newspaper publisher, his eloquent and courageous speechmaking refuted claims about the innate incapacity of Africans and their willing acquiescence to enslavement. Missing from standard narratives of Douglass’s life is any reference to the collective nature of his coming to consciousness or the cultural signs that make his extraordinary accomplishments intelligible as African. These cultural signs would include, for instance, the deep bonds of communal affection and ties of reciprocity and mutuality that existed between Douglass and his enslaved compatriots as they furtively and collectively contemplated freedom. Another sign of this communal cultural reality can be “read” in Douglass’s reverent encounter with African spirituality, in the form of a root given to him by Sandy, an older Black man who befriended and advised him. (To grasp the full meaning of this incident knowledge of indigenous African and African American “root-work” or spiritual-healing practices is needed.) Explaining the significance of this incident, Drake (1977) quotes Graham’s (1947) account that describes Sandy giving Douglass a bag containing “Soil of Africa.” After initially rejecting the bag’s contents as “voodoo,” saying, “I’m a Christian,” Douglass reverently accepts this spiritual protection, feeling “as if a great hand lay on his heart” (Drake, 1977, p. 21). John Brown. A contemporary of Frederick Douglass, John Brown acted decisively, violently, and without remorse, but also with religious conviction, to abolish slavery. Although Brown was White, he identified with Black people’s suffering, so much so that he dedicated his entire family to a blood feud to fight to their deaths against it. Missing from standard textbook narratives is attention to Brown’s profound understanding of the “price of repression” (Du Bois, 1909/2001); that is to say, the “culture-deep” (Muwakkil, 2005) problem slavery and racism posed for White people. Also omitted is information about

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Brown’s practice of seeking advice from Black leaders and from his Black neighbors, among whom he chose to live at a time when Black people were thought to be less than human. What might John Brown have learned from Black people like those in the free black farming community of North Elba, New York—Black farmers who, according to one source, had the temerity to name their community “Timbuctoo” after the fabled city of the Songhoy Empire in West Africa (Du Bois, 1909/2001, p. 21)? His serious study of black history and culture, particularly black slave revolts, informed his conception of justice and propelled his abolitionism to the point of outright war against the slave system (Reynolds, 2005). In his biography of John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois (1909/2001) argues that Brown’s emulation of black culture and self-liberation, by the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s rebellion, for instance, marked his greatness. Minimizing these understandings deprives students and teachers of opportunities to understand how black culture and resistance have repeatedly ignited the struggle for justice and human freedom. Diaspora Literacy and Heritage Knowledge illuminate these systematically neglected aspects of the empirical record. Black cultural influences shaped both Frederick Douglass’s self-determination and John Brown’s moral agency. Critical Studyin’s focus on deciphering such examples is essential for rethinking education for human freedom.

Conclusion: The Unfinished Legacy of Brown In order to construct societies based on social and economic justice, a new form of consciousness must emerge. (Woods, 1998, p. 2) The examples of Diaspora Literacy and Heritage Knowledge in this chapter show what and how students, teachers, and community educators can learn about the black experience in order to join efforts to fulfill the promise of Brown (Bell, 1992). The novelist John O. Killens (1971), a leading intellectual activist in the Black Arts Movement that coincided with the Civil Rights Movement, identified the “white problem” that Critical Studyin’ addresses: “The Western world deliberately made black the symbol of all that was evil and ugly. Black Friday, blacklist, Black Plague, black look, blackmail . . .” (p. 388). Speaking directly to non-Black America, Killens summarized the crux of the argument for a liberatory praxis of Critical Studyin’ for human freedom: This distorted image of the Negro has its negative effect on your children, too. It gives them a distorted picture of this earth and of human potential and ill-equips them to live in a world, three-quarters of which is colored and fast becoming free and independent. (p. 388)

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Both culturally informed memory work for liberating human consciousness from society’s myths and rewriting knowledge are fundamental for human freedom. If justice—the goal of paramount importance to Ella Baker, the revered master teacher—Fundi—of the Black Freedom Struggle—is our objective, the praxis of Critical Studyin’ offers a proven, morally engaged pedagogy for human freedom to “unbrainwash the entire American people” and the world (Killens, 1971, p. 379). This remains our challenge more than 50 years after Brown.

References Anderson, S. E. (1995). The Black Holocaust for beginners. New York: Writers & Readers. Aoishima Research Institute. (2005). Cultural literacy and the restoration of traditional values among youth. Retrieved September 30, 2005, from www.aoishima-research. com/custom.em?pid=206198. Australian professor sparks racial flap. (2005, August 12). Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A-42. Bailey, A. C. (2005). African voices of the Atlantic slave trade: Beyond the silence and the shame. Boston: Beacon. Baldwin, J. (1955). Notes of a native son. Boston: Beacon Press. Baldwin, J. (1996). A talk to teachers. In W. Ayers & P. Ford (Eds.), City kids, city teachers: Reports from the front row (pp. 219–227). New York: The New Press. Banks, J. A. (2006). Democracy, diversity and social justice: Educating citizens for the public interest in a global age. In G. Ladson-Billings & W. F. Tate (Eds.), Education and research in the public interest (pp. 141–167). New York: Teachers College Press. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York: Basic Books. Brown, C. S. (Ed.). (1968). Ready from within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement: A personal narrative. Navarro, CA: Wild Tree Press. Busia, A. (1989). What is your nation? Reconstructing Africa and her diaspora through Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the widow. In C. Wall (Ed.), Changing our own words (pp. 196–211). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Carney, J. A. (2001). Black rice: The African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clark, V. (1991). Developing diaspora literacy and marasa consciousness. In H. Spillers (Ed.), Comparative American identities (pp. 41–61). New York: Routledge. Clarke, J. H. (1994). Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan holocaust: Slavery and the rise of European capitalism. Brooklyn, NY: A & B Publishers Group. Cone, J. H. (1972). The spirituals and the blues: An interpretation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Davidson, B. (1961). Black mother. Boston: Little Brown. Douglass, F. (1963). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: An American slave. Garden City, NY: Dolphin Books. Drake, S. C. (1977). The redemption of Africa and Black religion. Chicago: Third World Press. Dubey, M. (1994). Black women novelists and the nationalist aesthetic. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

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Du Bois, W. E. B. (1909/2001). John Brown. New York: The Modern Library. Ellison, R. (1986). What would America be like without Blacks? In R. Ellison (Ed.), Going to the territory: Essays by Ralph Ellison (pp. 104–112). New York: Random House. Farrow, A., Lang, J., & Frank, J. (2005). Complicity: How the North promoted, prolonged and profited from slavery. New York: Ballantine. Fisher, M. (2003). Open mics and open minds: Spoken word poetry in African diaspora participatory literacy communities. Harvard Educational Review, 73(3), 362–389. Fitzpatrick, E. (2002). History’s memory: Writing America’s past, 1880–1980. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flores, W. V., & Benmayor, R. (1997). Latino cultural citizenship: Claiming identity, space and rights. Boston: Beacon Press. Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. George, N. (1998). On white Negroes. In D. Roediger (Ed.), Black on White: Black writers on what it means to be white (pp. 225–232). New York: Schocken Books. Glenn, D. (2003). Minority students with complex beliefs about ethnic identity are found to do better in school. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on June 2, 2003, from http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/06/200306020ln.htm. Gormley, M. (2005, August 11). Legislature again delves into racism lessons in schools. Newsday, p. 1. Graham, S. (1947). There once was a slave: The heroic story of Frederick Douglass. New York: Julian Messner. hooks, b. (1998). Representations of whiteness in the Black imagination. In D. Roediger (Ed.), Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be white (pp. 38–53). New York: Schocken Books. Horton, M. (1990). The long haul: Myles Horton, an autobiography. New York: Doubleday. James, C. L. R. (1970). The Atlantic slave trade and slavery: Some interpretations of their significance in the development of the United States and the Western world. In J. A. Williams & C. F. Harris (Eds.), Amistad 1 (pp. 119–164). New York: Vintage Books. Jensen, R. (2005). The heart of whiteness: Confronting race, racism, and white privilege. San Francisco: City Lights. Killens, J. O. (1971). The Black writer vis-à-vis his country. In A. Gayle, Jr. (Ed.), The Black aesthetic (pp. 378–398). New York: Doubleday. Kilminster, R. (1979). Praxis and method: A sociological dialogue with Lukács, Gramsci and the early Frankfurt School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. King, J. E. (1990). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the mis-education of teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146. King, J. E. (1992). Diaspora literacy and consciousness in the struggle against miseducation in the Black community. Journal of Negro Education, 61(3), 317–338. King, J. E. (1994). The purpose of schooling for African American children: Including cultural knowledge. In E. R. Hollins, J. E. King, & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Teaching diverse populations: Formulating a knowledge base (pp. 25–44). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. King, J. E. (1995a). Culture-centered knowledge: Black studies, curriculum transformation and social action. In J. A. Banks & C. M. Banks (Eds.), The handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 265–290). New York: Macmillan. King, J. E. (1995b). Race and education: In what ways does race affect the educational process? In J. L. Kinchloe & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Thirteen questions: Reframing education’s conversation (pp. 159–179). New York: Peter Lang Publishers.

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King, J. E. (1995c). Nationalizing the curriculum or downsizing citizenship? In E. Eisner (Ed.), The hidden consequences of a national curriculum (pp. 119–144). AERA Presidential Public Service Monograph. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. King, J. E. (1997). “Thank you for opening our minds”: On praxis, transmutation and Black Studies in teacher development. In J. E. King, E. R. Hollins & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Preparing teachers for cultural diversity (pp. 156–169). New York: Teachers College Press. King, J. E. (2000). A moral choice. Teaching Tolerance Magazine, 18, 14–15. King, J. E. (2004). Cultural knowledge. In S. Goodwin & E. Swartz (Eds.), Teaching children of color: Seven constructs of effective teaching in urban schools (pp. 53–61). Rochester, NY: RTA Press. King, J. E. (Ed.). (2005). Black education: A transformative research and action agenda for the new century. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. King, J. E. (2006). Perceiving reality in a new way: Rethinking the Black/White duality of our times. In A. Bogues (Ed.), Caribbean reasonings: After Man toward the human. Critical essays on Sylvia Wynter (pp. 25–56). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers. Leonardo, Z. (2002). The souls of White folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness, and globalization discourse. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 5(1), 29–50. Lester, J. (2005). Day of tears. New York: Hyperion Books. Loewen, J. W. (Ed.). (2005). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong (2nd ed.). New York: The New Press. Lott, E. (1993). Love and theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American working class. New York: Oxford University Press. Mays, B. (1967). Born to rebel: An autobiography. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Munford, C. J. (2001). Race and civilization: Rebirth of Black centrality. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Muwakkil, S. (2005, August 1). So very sorry. In These Times, p. 13. Payne, C. M. (2000). Education for activism: Mississippi’s Freedom Schools in the 1960s. In W. Ayers, M. Klonsky, & G. Lyon (Eds.), A simple justice: The challenge of small schools (pp. 67–77). New York: Teachers College Press. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Ransby, B. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A radical democratic vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rethinking Schools. (Winter 2001/2002). Resources for 9/11. Retrieved on May 26, 2006, from www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/sept11/16_02/reso162.shtml. Reynolds, D. (2005). John Brown, abolitionist: The man who killed slavery, sparked the Civil War and seeded civil rights. New York: Knopf. Robinson, R. (2000). The debt: What America owes to Blacks. New York: Dutton. Roediger, D. (1998). Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be white. New York: Schocken Books. “Sixto Valencia Burgos” (2005). CNN.com. Retrieved on July 24, 2005, from www. cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/07/05/mexico.stamps.reut/. Smitherman, G. (1986). Talkin and testifiyin: The language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Weinburg, S. (1991). On the reading of historical texts: Notes on the breach between school and academy. American Educational Research Journal, 28(3), 495–519. White, T. D., with Asfaw, B., DeGusta, D., Gilbert, H., Richards, G. D., Swua, G., & Howell, F. C. (2003, June 12). Pleistocene homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. Letter to Nature, 423, 742–747.

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Wood, P. H. (2003). Slave labor camps in early America: Overcoming denial and discovering the Gulag. In C. Payne & A. Green (Eds.), Time longer than rope: A century of African American activism, 1850–1950 (pp. 17–36). New York: New York University Press. Woods, C. (1998). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso. Woodson, C. G. (1933). The miseducation of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers. Wynter, S. (1984). The ceremony must be found: After humanism. Boundary 2, 12(3), 19–70. Wynter, S. (1989, May). Beyond the word of Man: Glissant and the new discourse of the Antilles. World Literature Today, 63(4), 637–647. Wynter, S. (1992). Rethinking “Aesthetics”: Notes toward a deciphering practice. In M. Cham (Ed.), Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean cinema (pp. 237–279). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Wynter, S. (1997). Alterity. In C. Grant & G. Ladson-Billings (Eds.), Dictionary of multicultural education (pp. 13–14). New York: Oryx. Wynter, S. (2006). On how we mistook the map for the territory and re-imprisoned ourselves in our unbearable wrongness of being, of désêtre. In L. Gordon & J. A. Gordon (Eds.), Not only the master’s tools: African-American studies in theory and practice (pp. 107–169). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

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8 WHO DAT SAY (WE) “TOO DEPRAVED TO BE SAVED”? Re-membering Katrina/Haiti (and Beyond): Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom

Mutilations were common, ears, limbs and sometimes the private parts. . . . Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match . . . these bestial practices were normal features of slave life [in Saint Domingue]. (James, 1963, p. 12) Evidence indicates that black female slaves were often placed in sexual relationships with men not of their choosing with the intention of producing children, as one might breed domesticated animals for profit. (Goodwin, 2008, p. 16) It’s just unbelievable . . . how people are behaving [in New Orleans], with the shootings and now the gang rapes and the gang violence and shooting at helicopters who are trying to help out and rescue people. (Tiger Woods, at a golf tournament in Boston, September 2, 2005) Since the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, women and girls living in the internally displaced persons (IDP) camps face alarming rates of rape and other gender-based violence (GBV). (Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti et al., July, 2010)1

Introduction Two years into the historic administration of the first Black American president, in Atlanta, where I live, Black American males’ saggin’ pants have reached a new low. On any given day, able-bodied but most likely never-employed Black males can be seen waddling down the street with their pants cinched around

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their thighs—below their behinds—artfully and carefully exposing colorful undershorts. My generation—the Sixties-Black-Studies-Building-Hope-of-theRace folk—often feel . . . exasperated. From our vantage point of the Black Freedom Struggle (Ransby, 2005), we see invisible chains that shackle their feet (and their minds). Perhaps by saggin’ their pants they are resisting their abject disposability, thereby turning what was a jailhouse mandate into a fashion statement. Applying Carter G. Woodson’s (1933) observations about the effects of miseducation for second-class citizenship to this context, it would appear these young Black men are willfully joining what amounts to a twenty-first-century slave coffle, shuffling along, going nowhere if not to jail. Saggin’ now violates local ordinances in several cities, including indecent exposure laws.2 Thus, this youthful expression of agency and collective identity is controversial and problematic. Is it possible, however, that these are the same type of young Brothers, whom the media depicted as rapists, who mobilized to aid their neighbors, and were the first responders in New Orleans and Haiti? In September 2005, just weeks after our government’s inept and wanton abandonment left thousands of New Orleans’s most vulnerable residents devastated, demonized, and dying in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, rumors of marauding young Black men “murdering, looting and raping” women, young girls, and babies “flew across the globe via at least 150 news outlets, from India to Turkey to Spain” (Welch, 2005). In my class at Georgia State University, one of the White women students—a teacher—told us she and her friends had received the same anonymous e-mail: “The Katrina rapists are here in Atlanta. Beware.” She shared this information, and her fear, with us during a discussion of hegemony and structural racism—key concepts that I teach in the social foundations of education course. I used the global corporate media’s distorted depictions of Black people’s supposed depravity during the Katrina crisis in New Orleans to illustrate students’ own ideological knowledge (or lack of knowledge). The point was to demonstrate to them how they are affected by hegemony in education and society and, thereby, to make their outrage and resistance as educators more possible—not only out of concern for others but also for their own freedom and well-being. I asked if anyone had read or heard news reports about Black males raping babies, women, and young girls in the New Orleans Superdome and the Ernest Morial Convention Center. The entire class confirmed: they had all heard about this and believed it was true. Indeed, New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass asserted on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “We had little babies in there [the Superdome]; some of the little babies were getting raped” (Flaherty, 2010, p. 34). At the Convention Center, where thousands had gathered or were dropped off— hoping to be rescued—it was rumored that a young girl had been raped, murdered, and left with her throat cut and that as many as 40 dead bodies were stuffed in the freezers inside. Yet none of these salacious headline-grabbing

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reports were proved to be true: no babies were raped, nor was it confirmed that stranded residents shot at helicopters—a rumor that even the police and soldiers believed (Welch, 2005). This is not to argue that if babies were not raped, then reports of sexual assault during the Hurricane Katrina crisis—and in Haiti as well—must, therefore, be suspect (crooked7, 2010; Lakhani, 2010). Indeed, in a number of publications, women residents of New Orleans, feminist-activist scholars, and domestic violence prevention advocates have written about reports of rape that surfaced after Katrina, including sexual assaults that occurred in host homes outside of New Orleans (Burnett, 2005). These published reports indicated that “sexual violence was perpetrated both by officials of the state (such as the police, the National Guard and the FBI) and by men and boys of the New Orleans community” as well as by strangers and gangs (Bierra, Griffin, Liebenthal, & INCITE!, 2007, p. 34; see also Burnett, 2005; White, 2005). With regard to teaching and learning beyond the disaster narratives of Katrina/Haiti, my concern is about curriculum and pedagogy that can address the ideological knowledge problem of hegemonic miseducation and collective cultural amnesia that undergird denigrating discourses of Blackness/Africanness insofar as the humanity of African people is concerned. These discourses also overshadow and obscure economic, political, and cultural realities of Black people’s dispossession. Thus, my lesson objective was validated when my students indicated that everyone had heard about the “Katrina rapists” but no one had read or heard any of the statements of government officials or journalists who disavowed that particularly depraved acts of sexual violence, which were widely reported as fact, had actually taken place (Garfield, 2007; Gray, 2006). Moreover, my students were unaware of the real reason the television news captured those painfully disturbing images of helpless women, crying dehydrated babies and young children, as well as sick and elderly people suffering and dying in the sweltering heat outside, in front of the Convention Center. Why were the most vulnerable there? Because young Black men had actually organized the people who had made their way to the Convention Center. They were told that buses were coming to evacuate people, so these unheralded first responders made sure the women and children, the sick and the elderly—the most vulnerable—were out front, ready to be picked up first. As I told my class, eyewitnesses—my friends and family—described to me how young Black men had played heroic roles during these “saddest days” (King & Robertson, 2007). This account has since been reported in the news and in at least one book (Flaherty, 2010; Moore, 2005). Questions to consider, however, are: Why is the “Black rapist,” a standard trope of racist rationalizations of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, such a preponderant theme in the media’s stories about Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti at this time in our history? Why are women and children in Black communities—or anywhere—likely to be victimized in disasters nowadays?

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I want to underscore two points here. First, the young Black men who aided their families, neighbors, and, in many cases, strangers were acting in concert with the best of traditional Black cultural ideals, such as generosity, respect for women and elders, and collective care for the community’s children—that is, a community-minded consciousness—ideals that are actually under assault by the broader society’s politics of abandonment (Asante, 2009; Chang & Cool Herc, 2005; Heath, 1989; Tedla, 1997). Despite exponentially high rates of incarceration, intensifying poverty, gentrification and joblessness, these cultural ideals— which are simply human values—had not been totally obliterated from Black life in pre-Katrina New Orleans. This is particularly so among the Black Mardi Gras Indians—warriors—who remain deeply rooted in their neighborhoods and Black community traditions and who “do not bow down” (Kennedy, 2010; Sublette, 2009; Woods, 2010).3 My second point is that the heroic acts of young Black men (and women) were overshadowed by the exaggerated reports of sexual assaults that projected racialized and sexualized representations of Black men. As such, these representations that dehumanized the Black community were not only possible to imagine, but also were so readily believed—even by Black people—because of the historical distortion and erasure of the “African presences” from the nation’s cultural heritage and its public memory (Young & Braziel, 2006). This historical erasure, akin to what Joseph Young and Jana Braziel refer to as “racial cultural amnesia” (2007, p. 2), undermines our ability to mobilize in the long tradition of the Black Freedom Struggle. This assault on Black people’s collective cultural memory and identity must be added to the loss of lives and livelihoods, as well as the “traumatic stress reaction” to “forced displacement” and the loss of community life that is so central to all New Orleanians (Fullilove et al., 2008, p. 305). Psychiatric researcher Mindy Fullilove (2008) calls this reaction “root shock,” a concept that recognizes that the harm caused when people lose their emotional ecosystem goes far beyond the loss of their “human habitat” (p. 305). Such loss remains incalculable. Another inestimable cost of this tragedy for Black people, the Gulf Coast region, and the nation is the idea that Black New Orleanians were “unworthy victims”—too depraved to be saved—an idea that has historical roots that still linger in the public’s imagination long after the floodwaters have receded (Garfield, 2007).

Who Dat Say (We) Too Depraved?4 This chapter attempts to interrupt this calculus of human (un)worthiness and to repair the collective cultural amnesia, both of which are legacies of slavery— legacies that make it so (hegemonically and dysconsciously) easy to accept the depravity myth as an explanation for the Black predicament in New Orleans and in Haiti as well (King, 1991). First, I revisit and recover historical connections between New Orleans, an important cradle of the Black Freedom

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Struggle, and Haiti, the first independent Black Nation in the Western Hemisphere. Second, in contrast to the discourses of socially constructed Blackness that existed prior to Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti, I recall and make more visible certain truths about the humanity and historical freedom struggles of African-descent people, truths that are overshadowed in the narratives of these disasters as well as in school curricula and textbooks, in teacher education, and in popular perceptions. I make these missing dimensions of the cataclysmic disasters in New Orleans and Haiti the focus of what I have discussed elsewhere as critical studyin’. This morally engaged approach to curriculum and pedagogy is a form of praxis that takes its name from the “thinking/ theorizing of enslaved Africans who, when they were ‘contemplating their enslaved existence and how to be free’,” stated they were “studyin’ freedom” (King, 2006a, p. 338). S. E. Anderson (1995) suggested the updated term, critical studyin’, which refers to the process of “becoming cognitively and emotionally free of ideological constraints on knowledge, thought and morally engaged pedagogy” (p. 338). That is to say, “Educators have a moral obligation to counter-act alienating ideological knowledge that obstructs the right to be literate in one’s own heritage and denies people the rights of ‘cultural citizenship’ ” (p. 338). The praxis of critical studyin’ generates knowledge of African people’s heritage that can engage teachers, students, and parents in culturally grounded critical reflection and analysis within the Black Studies intellectual tradition in the interest of the group well-being of African-descent people. Adapted from John Henrik Clarke’s (1994) understanding of heritage teaching; I have conceptualized Heritage Knowledge as an outcome of critical studyin’; it is a group’s memory of their history—a cultural birthright that “permits ‘a people to develop an awareness and pride in themselves so that they can achieve good relationships with other people’ ” (Clarke, 1994, p. 86; cited in King, 2006a, p. 345). Diaspora Literacy, which is the “ability to read certain cultural signs” in the lived experience of African-descent people, is also a dimension of critical studyin’ that generates Heritage Knowledge and consciousness of being part of the larger Black community (King, 1992). Third, the examples of Heritage Knowledge for re-membering Katrina/Haiti (New Orleans and Haiti) are proposed to support learning beyond these disasters—that is, to combat ideological conceptions of Black people as depraved/ inferior as well as collective cultural amnesia regarding African people’s humanity. Both are legacies of slavery. This chapter is intended, therefore, as an intellectual and pedagogical contribution to Black community healing and human freedom from ideological discourses and disaster narratives that denigrate and dehumanize Blackness/Africanness.

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Interrogating the Untenable Calculus of Human (Un)Worthiness In Teaching What Really Happened, James Loewen (2008) explains that racism is a legacy of slavery—a legacy that has permeated American culture in two ways: through the structural inequality that mitigates against the equitable inclusion of Black people in the society and through beliefs about Black inferiority. However, scholarship in the Black Studies tradition—by Black scholars and others—takes this analysis further. History records European fascination with African sexuality in their earliest encounters on the continent and the changing conceptions that occurred with the advent of slavery (Jordan, 1969). Within the context of slavery, the belief in their inferiority meant believing that Africans were subhuman, which permitted one group of (White) human beings to “breed” other (African) human beings like animals. Thus, slavery’s legacy includes enduring, always-already, and deeply held conceptions of Black males’ innate sexual prowess (e.g., “the Katrina rapists”) as well as the innate promiscuity and lasciviousness of Black women and girls (e.g., from plantation “Jezebels” and concubines to “welfare queens” and “bootylicious” video vixens) (Jewell, 1993; White, 1999).5 These conceptions were the stock-in-trade of the business of slavery and “slave breeding,” and they continue to influence media representations of Black males and females as well as the commercial success of hip-hop, which shapes the identities and aspirations of so many young people (Charnas, 2010). It is also ironic that the image of the Black male as rapist is a predominant part of the story of the disasters in these two historic sites of memory that represent pivotal moments in the Black Freedom Struggle—the Haitian Revolution in 1804 and the largest slave uprising in U.S. history, the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt (also known as the “Deslondes slave revolt of 1811” or the “German Coast Uprising”) in St. John the Baptist Parish along the German coast of the Mississippi River (James, 1963; Paquette, 1997). In addition, the way slavery is typically taught in the United States (e.g., “your own African brothers and sisters sold you into slavery”) alienates Black students by nihilating their identities and identification with their ancestral African heritage (King, 1992). A story reported in The Root is indicative of this: Nikko Burton, a 10-year-old student at Chapelfield Elementary in Ohio, says he was humiliated by his teacher when she tried to demonstrate what it was like to be a slave on an auction block. Burton, one of two black students in his class, was chosen to be a slave. Students who were the “masters” inspected the “slaves” to see if they would be able workers. “The masters got to touch people and do all sorts of stuff,” Nikko said. “They got to look in your mouth and feel your legs and stuff and see if you’re strong and stuff.” (Evans, 2011, para. 1–2) While history and history teaching may be sanitized, or the quest for “historical thinking” (Loewen, 2008) may take precedence over morally engaged critical

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analysis that includes the point of view of the enslaved, a number of my colleagues—who are social studies and history teachers, teacher educators, parents, counselors, and community organizers—responded to an informal poll I conducted about the teaching of enslavement at the elementary and secondary school level. These colleagues agree that slavery and its brutality should be taught. But at what age? Using which pedagogical methods? Where is the research to inform our teaching? Would such a pedagogical approach help these young men “pull up their pants,” as one parent suggested? Would learning about the sexual violation of our foremothers affect the attitudes of young Black girls who say only the boys who are saggin’ can even talk to them? Moreover, considering the epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter, a number of questions arise. How might ongoing debates among historians about “slave breeding,” for example, inform teachers’ and students’ thinking and learning (Bennett, 1966; Goodwin, 2008)? Should these matters be left to historians? Should such important learning be reserved only for high school students? Would learning about how their ancestors’ spirituality was embedded in their sacred and secular music and enabled them to endure the brutalizing dehumanization of slavery help Black students identify with the humanity of their African ancestors and empathize with the plight of the victims of Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti? Would learning about the atrocities and bestiality of the “world the slave traders made” (Blight, 1991), as well as the world that made them, enhance teachers’ critical engagement with the knowledge production process and their capacity for empathic, socially engaged teaching, as some progressive educators urge (Masur, 2005; McLaren & Jaramillo, 2007; Porfilio & Watz, 2008)? Should parents be involved in determining what “difficult knowledge” is developmentally appropriate and in assessing their children’s learning and development (Marshall & Toohey, 2010)? How might younger children learn about the history of the nation and this hemisphere from the perspectives and experiences of both the most vulnerable and the most powerful? Even young children experience damaging, stereotypical images of Africa and African people (Keim, 1999). In addition, they are overexposed to sexual messaging and violence—in music, videos, video games, and other forms of popular culture (Villani, 2001)—so what exactly should children be taught about the sexual violence that took place during and after slavery, in the aftermath of these disasters, and about that which they see in the media as well as that which is likely occurring in their own neighborhoods? Is the universal phenomenon of sexual and genderbased violence during disasters any more predominate in Black people’s history than it has been among other populations? These questions have implications for the practice of teachers and teacher educators as well as their research. However, the societal context in which teaching and learning occurs includes discourses and myths about Black people that are legacies of slavery of which many teachers/teacher educators are unaware (King, 1991, 2004; Loewen, 2008).

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Disaster Narratives of Depravity/Inferiority Post-Katrina/Haiti disaster narratives of depravity melded seamlessly with discourses of Black (un)worthiness that existed prior to these crises (Garfield, 2007). For example, a predominant narrative asserts that willful nihilism is why Black people in the United States have such high rates of incarceration (Alexander, 2010), such pervasive unemployment, and such low levels of academic achievement. What is not usually included in the litany of Black people’s deficiencies (at best) or depravity (at worst) is any concern about Black children’s and adolescents’ racial socialization, group belonging, and identity needs. Yet, there is growing evidence in psychology, counseling, educational sociology, social work research, and the arts that academic achievement and psychological well-being are a function of positive racial socialization (Caughy, O’Campo, Randolph, & Nickerson, 2003; Hughes et al., 2006; King, 2005; Mandara, 2006; McKay, Atkins, Hawkins, Brown, & Lynn, 2003; Oyserman, Kemmeilmeier, Fryberg, Brosh, & Hart-Johnson, 2003; Sanders, 1997; Smith, Atkins, & Connell, 2003; Stone-Hanley & Noblit, 2009; West-Olatunji, 2010). But when Blackness itself is so reviled—also one of slavery’s legacies in the United States and in Haiti—chosen “self-owned Black consciousness” (Robinson, 2007) and any Pan-African sense of self, belonging, or peoplehood cannot be assumed. For example, the people of the (Super)Dome and the Convention Center were vilified and terrorized; they were called “refugees,” identified as “looters,” criminalized, “shot on sight,” turned back from bridges that lead out of the city by gunfire, and then blamed for not getting themselves out of harm’s way. While New Orleans evacuees were welcomed and aided in various communities, many were also treated like pariahs in cities with large Black majorities (like Atlanta, Houston, as well as neighboring Baton Rouge), where even Black residents succumbed to the racially inflected propaganda of depravity and shunned Katrina survivors (King & Robertson, 2007). Children who had evacuated from New Orleans to other cities were traumatized and teased in their host schools. For example, at one high school, students from New Orleans were greeted by resident students wearing T-shirts with the message: “Learn to swim” (Lewis & King, 2009). In addition, as a result of “security concerns” that were exacerbated by media reports, emergency aid workers in New Orleans and medical personnel in Haiti were at times afraid to provide their services to the poor who were branded as dangerous (CNN, 2010; Polman, 2010). In fact, Haitians have been subjected to racialized “othering,” demonization, and discrimination for centuries since the 1804 revolution (Robinson, 2007; Umoja, 2011). The racism Haitians have experienced in the neighboring Dominican Republic, which is emblematic of what Sylvia Wynter (1984) has analyzed as the White/ normative belief structure of race, is legendary and fundamentally anti-African (Danticat, 1999; Schwartz, 2002). As Wynter (2003) has aptly observed, the

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incorporation of some of us into the “ethno-White” middle-class mainstream conception of what it means to be human continues at the expense and extrusion of our brothers and sisters who are inexorably relegated to the Cité Soleils and prison archipelagoes of the modern Western world.6 Following Wynter, I have proposed that this nihilation (e.g., total abjection) of Blackness is inherent in the U.S./Western cultural model of what it means to be human/civilized/worthy of life (King, 2006a; Wynter, 1992, 2003). Whites also pay a cost for this socially constructed Black/White duality: the attenuation of their own humanity (King, 2005, 2006b). This theoretical conceptualization of nihilated Black identities offers an alternative to social theorizing that emphasizes Black people’s: s s s

NIHILISMDEPRAVITYIRRESPONSIBILITY#OSBY0OUSSAINT 7EST   HYBRIDIDENTITIESTOTHEEXCLUSIONOFCULTURALLYAFlRMING GROUP BASED"LACK identity and consciousness (King, 2004); SPECULATION ABOUT THE UN WORTHINESS OF "LACK LIFE IN PROVOCATIVELY RACIST political punditry, such as the proposition former U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett advanced on national television in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina: “If you want to lower crime . . . abort every black baby” (CNN, 2005).

This notion of “life unworthy of life” (Wynter, 2003), which was also central to Nazism, is at the heart of explanations that blame the Haitian people themselves for having the highest rate of poverty and “societal dysfunction” in this hemisphere. The enormity of the cataclysmic January 2010 earthquake in Haiti—arguably one of the worst natural disasters in the Western Hemisphere—captured the world’s attention and an outpouring of sympathy, however briefly. Amidst this continuing catastrophe, there are reports of women and girls being brutalized and raped while they are struggling to survive in overcrowded makeshift camps where more than a million internally displaced people remain, mostly without even the most basic necessities and security. Meanwhile, aid for rebuilding— like the buses in New Orleans—has been stalled or just not delivered. For example, a mere 19% of the promised assistance for reconstruction from the international community was actually provided in 2010 (UN News Centre, 2010). While one might reasonably be skeptical of media exaggeration, as was the case in New Orleans, an official investigative team has documented increasing gender-based violence against women and girls in Haiti one year after the earthquake (Amnesty International, 2011; Thomas-Richard & Levasseur, 2011; UNICEF, 2010). This collaborative investigation identified circumstances that have contributed to these sexual assaults. These include the prolonged societal upheaval of ongoing displacement and the breakdown of security and civil

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authority—all of which have exacerbated the particular vulnerability of women and girls. Following Hurricane Katrina, irresponsible news coverage and racially biased rumormongering contributed not only to the wide dissemination of the most sordid fabrications of socially deviant behavior, including gender-based violence, but also made the normal difficulty of documenting sexual assaults even worse (Welch, 2005). Not mentioned, moreover, in the disaster news coverage is that such genderbased violence is a predictable (and preventable) dynamic in natural disasters. From tsunamis to earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods across the globe, the most vulnerable are more likely to be victimized in disasters (Bergin, 2008; Zack, 2009). Lacking such contextualization of human behavior in the wake of natural disasters, as well as wars, the stereotypical image projected in the aftermath of both Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake is the Black male’s craven depravity and inhumanity—the proverbially “wilding” Black rapist. However, immediately after the earthquake, Haitian men, young and old, like Black men of all ages in New Orleans, performed heroic deeds as community-minded good Samaritan first responders.

Dis(re)membered African Roots, Resistance, and Revolt The continuing tragedy of the disasters in both New Orleans and Haiti also involves the denigration of their shared but dis(re)membered African roots. Curricula and pedagogy are needed to address this fundamental problem. Ongoing disasters and large-scale humanitarian crises in Africa and the Diaspora periodically garner superficial media attention, if not broad-based public empathy or sustained concern (e.g., Darfur, Rwanda, the Congo). Before Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake, the media represented both New Orleans and Haiti as iconically dangerous, crime-ridden places. When I lived in New Orleans in the 1990s, airport tourist brochures advised visitors not to venture into the Lower 9th Ward for their own safety. Haiti is denigrated for its poverty, abstracted from the historical and continuing processes of imperialism’s economic, cultural, and political domination that have impoverished the Haitian people. One scholar observed that “Haiti appears in the North American media as the furthest extreme of poverty, dysfunction and savagery” (ACLS, 2010, para. 4)—metaphors for Blackness (e.g., Africanness) that applies just as well to popular images of pre-Katrina New Orleans before the city was racially “cleansed.” Scholars and citizen activists pointed out that the demolition of public housing after Katrina—much of which was undamaged and habitable—effectively denied Black people, who are mostly poor, and mostly women and children, the right to return (Harden, Walker, & Akuno, 2009; Moorehead, 2007). According to Tanya Williams (2009), “The U.S. government has developed policies and practices that specifically prevent internally displaced African American residents of New Orleans and the Gulf

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Coast region from returning home through an unprecedented scheme of privatization” (p. 27). Criminalization, or the thug-ification, of Black males, to be more precise, justified this policy as well as fictions about the benefits of Black removal. Furthermore, as in the case of the imagined exoticism of New Orleans that is rooted in the city’s Vodou (Voodoo) African religious heritage, Haiti has been seen as the place of “Voodoo and Zombies, something to be feared” (ACLS, 2010, para. 4). Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau’s house on Bourbon Street and her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 are popular tourist stops where dis(re)membered African spirituality/humanity remain marketable, even without the presence of the people whose heritage made both the city and this “exotic” tourism possible.7 Vodou (also spelled Voudou or Vodun), which means “spirit” or “deity” in the Fon language of Benin, West Africa (formerly Dahomey), is one of Haiti’s official religions (Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.; Mulira, 1990). Some condemn Haiti’s African religious heritage, such as right-wing religious leader and television show host Pat Robertson, who demonized the Haitian people when he quipped on his show that the earthquake was the result of their “pact” with the devil. Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.” True story. And so the devil said, “O.K., it’s a deal.” (Fletcher, 2010, para. 2)8 What was Robertson referring to? The article in Time in which Robertson’s statement appears offered this explanation: The theory that Haiti is a nation built on a pact with the devil has circulated on a number of websites, each tracing back to an apocryphal tale of Haitian voodoo priests sacrificing a pig and drinking its blood in 1791 in order to secure Satan’s aid in expelling the French occupation. In return, the priests are said to have promised Haiti to Satan for the next 200 years. The French were soon beat back, and in 1804, Haiti became an independent nation. But even if you believe the story (something many historians doubt), Satan’s lease on the tiny island nation should have expired in 1991. (Fletcher, 2010, para. 3) Which historians doubt what? That the authenticity and power of an indigenous African religion served as a source of spiritual resilience and inspiration to

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revolt? That enslaved Africans had the intelligence, military prowess, and courage to defeat the most powerful armies of the French colonial regime without making a pact with the devil? Why is belief in their own human right to be free not considered plausible, inasmuch as the French had also articulated the “Rights of Man” in their own fight for freedom? Even though the French Revolution’s concept of “Man” excluded the enslaved Africans, their mindset, nonetheless, included precisely this “self-owned Black consciousness” (Robinson, 2007) and sense of their own humanity as well as a sacred pact with their god. As Trinidadian scholar C. L. R. James (1963) reported in The Black Jacobins, his quintessential account of the Haitian Revolution from the point of view of enslaved Africans: Voodoo was the medium of the revolt. . . . The plan was conceived on a massive scale and they aimed at exterminating the whites and taking the colony for themselves. Boukman, a Papalo or High Priest . . . was the . . . first of that long line of leaders whom the slaves were to throw up in such great profusion and rapidity in the long years that followed. (p. 86) The following section revisits the themes of African people’s supposed sexual/ spiritual depravity in examples of contexts for critical studyin’ to re-member Katrina/Haiti as sites of struggle for human freedom. In contrast to the aspersions regarding Haiti’s history and African religious roots that Robertson’s theorizing cast on all Haitians—that denigrate their African heritage and deny their humanity—Alan Gilbert, an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellow, rightly asked educators to think about “how high school students, particularly blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites, would react to learning the story of 50-year-old black slave Toussaint L’Ouverture’s defeat of Napoleon as an event fundamental to the history of the Americas?” (ACLS, 2010, para. 6, emphasis added). Framed in this way, Gilbert’s question would actually enable us to contextualize teaching and learning about the history of the Americas—the crisis in Haiti as well as historical connections to New Orleans—within the Black Freedom Struggle. This is also an opportunity to engage students beyond the discourse of depravity/inferiority and with African people’s humanity within the context of the struggles to end slavery in Haiti and New Orleans. However, students cannot fully appreciate the humanity of African people if they meet them in the curriculum first and only as slaves. That is why African-centered education theory within the Black Studies intellectual tradition posits that it is imperative that we begin the stories of Haiti and New Orleans not with the disruption slavery wrought but with African people’s life, cultural ideals, and social vision as part of the story of human history (Asante, 2007; King & Goodwin, 2009). This means we should also consider how Haitian students, for example, might

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benefit from recovering history that contextualizes their nation’s past and their future within African people’s story of human progress.9 Here I offer examples of the Heritage Knowledge and critical understanding required. The disasters in New Orleans and Haiti constitute important and urgent historical-cultural junctures, or sites of memory that, within a critical studyin’ framework, can give Black students, in particular, and all students the opportunity to recognize and make a personal connection with African people’s humanity (King, 2006a). This framework also includes the African cultural continuum wherein connections between the past and the future become more visible and available to inform the present (e.g., from the philosophical ethos of justice and harmony, that is, Ma’at in ancient Egypt, to African retentions in the Americas [Karenga, 2003; Mulira, 1990; Walker, 2001]). Available curriculum resources about the Katrina crisis include “Teaching The Levees” (Crocco, 2007), based on Spike Lee’s HBO documentary film, “When the Levees Broke,” and a smattering of Web-based lesson materials. Teaching for Change (n.d.) also offers a comprehensive document online, “Teaching about Haiti,” and Akinyele Umoja’s (2011) article “Hating the Root: Attacks on Vodou in Haiti” provides a concise update on historical and political developments there. While relevant scholarship focused on “learning through disasters” emphasizes educational goals such as “critical literacy” and “critical analytic” and “compassionate global citizenship,” support and direction for curriculum and pedagogy that can combat ideologically biased knowledge and collective cultural amnesia reflected in the predominate narratives of Katrina and Haiti are lacking (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Patton, 2008; Porfilio & Watz, 2008).

The Praxis of Critical Studyin’: Re-membering Katrina/Haiti in the Black Intellectual Tradition The praxis of critical studyin’ generates Heritage Knowledge through a Diaspora Literacy “reading” of certain “cultural signs in the lives of Africa’s people” on the continent and in the Diaspora—that is, cultural retentions or cultural continuity (King, 2006b). For example, what can we learn about the extant values among Black males—the ones who might very well be saggin’ their pants? A number of scholars lament the disappearance of the Black community, including traditional values and community coherence (Heath, 1989). How shall we understand the collective responsibility demonstrated by the local first responders, the Black males in New Orleans and Haiti? Is this a sign of the African cultural value of collective responsibility? The morally engaged praxis of critical studyin’ is a pedagogical approach that seeks answers to such questions centered within the Black Freedom Struggle in the political interest of African-descent people and human freedom (King, 2006a, p. 338). For students in the United States, in New Orleans, in Haiti, or elsewhere, what would teachers (and teacher educators) have to know about theory and pedagogy for centering

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students’ learning within an authentic engagement with the African (Black) experience? What kind of student materials and learning experiences would be needed given the ideological bias in existing (American) textbooks, the limitations of teachers’ (and professors’) knowledge, and students’ post-disaster emotional needs in New Orleans and Haiti (King, 1992, 2006a; King & Robertson, 2007; Swartz, 2007)? What can we learn from the way that Black males are represented in the Katrina/Haiti disaster narrative to best prepare students for a world they did not make but will inherit? (Warren Crichlow, personal communication, March 3, 2011). Ellen Swartz (2007) has developed a methodology for producing student materials, which she calls “re-membered” texts, to recover, rewrite, and reconnect fragmented, omitted, and distorted historical knowledge for teaching social studies. Grounded in the praxis of Afrocentric theory (Asante, 2007; Karenga, 2003), as well as culturally responsive principles (inclusion, representation, accurate scholarship, indigenous voice, critical thinking, and collective humanity) and Black Studies scholarship, the methodology Swartz (2007) has developed for re-membering history—that is, “putting members of history back together”—can support and enhance critical inquiry instruction (p. 173). For example, Susan Goodwin and Swartz (2009) include re-membered texts in an instructional guide for “Document-Based Learning, Curriculum, and Assessment,” which make this pedagogical approach more accurate and comprehensive. Swartz posits that it is the praxis of Afrocentric theory, guided by these culturally responsive principles, that consciously locates and centers African people “as subjects, participants, and agents in history.” However, this is a “humancentric model that is open and applicable to other cultures and groups” (Swartz, personal communication, March 2, 2011). Thus, Swartz’s approach is more rigorously inclusive than simple historical “perspective taking” or teaching for “critical literacy,” which, if not centered in the political interests of the marginalized, remain monocultural (Swartz, 2009). This praxis includes: (1) identifying relevant groups involved in a particular historical moment or process (e.g., Americans, Native Americans); (2) drawing on indigenous scholarship that theorizes and represents the diverse traditions of these identity groups (actors); (3) developing and comparing narrative themes that represent the distinctive experiences, knowledge, principles, and/or actions of each identity group; and (4) illuminating the “perspective advantage” that their inclusion makes possible (King, 2006a, p. 346). Accordingly, King and Swartz (2014, p. 54) is worth quoting at length: It is important to note here that the process of historical recovery is political work. Notwithstanding the increased accuracy and comprehensiveness of “re-membered” texts, the writing of history is a political process that selects from among numerous pieces of data to produce an account

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contextualized by the worldview and political interests of its authors. The national grand narratives presented in standard social studies materials since their inception are clearly political—even though textbook publishers . . . continue to claim objectivity and neutrality as their hallmark. Acknowledging that the writing of “re-membered” texts is also political work avoids making the same error of claiming objectivity. The next section presents additional examples of the Heritage Knowledge that critical studyin’ generates. These examples are focused on the theme “Shared African Roots, Resilience, and Revolution” and incorporate the praxis of integrating Afrocentric theory, culturally responsive principles, and the Black intellectual tradition to re-member the cultural and historical roots of resistance and revolution that New Orleans and Haiti have in common.

Learning Beyond Disasters: Recuperating Nihilated Blackness A critical studyin’ framework within which to re-member Katrina/Haiti beyond these disaster narratives in order to recuperate nihilated Blackness is a threefold task that involves: (1) re-Africanizing New Orleans and Haiti; (2) generating Heritage Knowledge through reading the cultural signs of African humanity in the lives of the people and sites of memory; and (3) recovering history from myths of objectivity and neutrality. Re-membered Heritage Knowledge contextualizes the crises of Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake within the African and Diaspora experience and makes visible the ways not only Africans but also Native Americans and others interacted and contributed to the forward flow of human freedom. What follows are examples of sites of memory, or significant culture-historical junctures for generating Heritage Knowledge that can combat ideological representations of Blackness as well as the omissions in what is taught about New Orleans and Haiti. Teachers, students, parents, and teacher educators who become knowledgeable about these junctures will be better prepared to address ideological biases and omissions in the curriculum (Wynter, 1992). Using the three examples of Heritage Knowledge and Critical Studyin’ detailed in the following subsections, educators can generate a list of additional actors/groups and contexts in which re-membering can and should occur.

African Influences on the Haitian Revolution African influences on the Haitian Revolution should be well understood—in the indigenous religious tradition of African people and their conception of human freedom in addition to the influence of the French Revolution. This illustrates the principles of Authentic Scholarship and Inclusion. Afrocentric scholarship such as The Black Jacobins (James, 1963) provides the point of view

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of the Africans as well as other groups. Not only did this revolution end slavery and establish the first independent Black Nation in the Western Hemisphere, it also shook the foundations of slavery in the United States. In 2011 New Orleans celebrated the 200th anniversary of the 1811 slave revolt, the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in the history of the nation, which very likely took inspiration from the Haitian Revolution (Geggus, 1997; Lewis, 2011). However, this significant event is omitted from standard historical accounts (Rasmussen, 2011; Thrasher, 1996). As noted above, we can teach beyond the predominant dehumanizing narratives of Katrina and Haiti by making the implications of the freedom struggles for people of the Americas and the world visible. Key actors would include Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines (in Haiti) and Charles Deslondes (in Louisiana), as well as French and American actors and Native American allies. Questions worth considering are: What human values informed the future African peoples envisioned during the Haitian Revolution and Louisiana’s 1811 slave revolt? What factors led to the richest colony in the Americas becoming so impoverished?

The Slave-Breeding Industry The “slave-breeding industry” replaced the importation of African captives after 1808. The dynamics of plantation life changed accordingly. The race and gender-based sexual violence and terror inflicted on Black women, men, and children during their enslavement and also later, in the Jim Crow South, provide a relevant site of memory for deciphering the trope of innate Black inferiority/depravity, given the sexual predations of White men (McGuire, 2010; Murakami-Ramalho & Durodoye, 2008). Ned Sublette (2009) asks us to consider why the slave trade was banned in the United States in 1808, the earliest moment allowed by the Constitution. He concludes that it was because “South Carolina’s massive importations of slaves from Africa had ruined the market for Virginia-bred slaves. But the prohibition was packaged as antiterrorism, and sold as keeping out the fiends who had burned down Santo Domingue [Haiti]” (p. 227). This is an important connection between Haiti and New Orleans that should be understood. Indeed, uprisings of the enslaved challenged ideological justifications for slavery based on the fiction that slavery was beneficial, and the notion that slavery prevented Africans from reverting to their natural state of bestiality and sexual depravity is a predominate ideological representation that undermines African people’s humanity and nihilates Black identity. As James (1938) noted, however, in A History of Negro Revolt: Of 130 Negro revolts that took place between 1670 and 1865 in America, there is not a single case recorded of a white woman being raped by the

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revolting slaves. In the West Indies, since the abolition of slavery, there has not been one single case of rape or sexual assault by a Negro against a white woman. While of the thousands of cases of Negroes lynched in America during the last half-century, charges of rape have been made in only twenty percent of cases. With what justification some of these charges have been made the Scottsboro case has within recent years given a glaring example. (p. 65) Thus, students also need opportunities to understand the nature of the sexualized and racialized brutalization of women, the profit motives involved, and the justifications that are part of slavery’s past as well as the ways in which economics and ideology continue to influence the degradation of Black women and men that remains a part of our present reality. Sublette’s (2009) observation about what is taught (and not taught) in schools is instructive: The child’s version of U.S. history . . . did a very poor job of explaining slavery and certainly never mentioned this aspect of it [the “slave-breeding” industry]. Partly that’s because slavery is not a subject fit for children. It’s embarrassing to have to explain what it consisted of. It gets into things we would prefer children not know about—middle-aged men fornicating with adolescent girls, women used for breeding purposes, children sired and sold, black men dehumanized, and families routinely shattered. (p. 223) Ironically, NightJohn (Paulsen, 1993), a story situated on a Georgia plantation and then in New Orleans just after the Civil War, and its sequel Sarny: A Life Remembered (Paulsen, 1999), both written for children as young as the fifth and sixth grade, deal more forthrightly and directly with the issue of “slave breeding” than any student textbook. The story begins, from the perspective and experiences of a 12-year-old girl, Sarny, whose mother, a “breeder,” was sold away. A Teacher Guide presents lessons that include “breeder” in the vocabulary list (Herman, 2006). However, suggested discussion questions address the topic of breeding only from the point of view of the “Master”; as such, this approach is not a good example of re-membering or critical studyin’. Both novels (and the lesson ideas and learning activities offered to teachers) present the courage of the characters to resist their enslaved condition, and the violence of slavery is presented in graphic detail. However, the Teacher Guide offers little guidance about teaching students in particular school settings about slave breeding. Should a teacher’s pedagogy vary if the children come from different racial backgrounds? What social knowledge do students bring with them to such topics (Epstein, 2009), and how might these topics be troubling for different populations?

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Additionally, while the story does attempt to include the viewpoint of the enslaved community regarding African spiritual beliefs, this dimension, which consists of references to “witchin,” is fragmented and somewhat superficial, given the available scholarship on the retention of African spirituality in the Diaspora (Cone, 1992; Hall, 1990). Thus, developing lessons that re-member African American spirituality as a context for critical studyin’ requires a deeper engagement with authentic voices and scholarship. Finally, a central character in Sarny (Paulsen, 1999) is a free woman of color with money, property, and power—gained through her relationships and business dealings with White men of influence. Marie Laveau, whose real life in New Orleans was regarded as saintly by some and by others as morally depraved, embodies the contradictions and ambiguities of freedom in a slave society (Ward, 2004). Her story represents a context for interrogating the complexities of women’s power as practitioners of traditional African spirituality—women who were demonized and feared but who also wielded both their economic and spiritual power to defend and aid the Black community (James, 1963; Mulira, 1990).10 In summary, the first example of a site of memory for rewriting knowledge and recovering history from ideology makes visible connections between the Haitian Revolution and the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt (Rasmussen, 2011; Thrasher, 1996). The second context points to contradictions between the reality of the sexual predations of slaveholders (including “slave breeding”) and dehumanizing myths about Black men’s and women’s sexuality. A related example provides a context for recovering and rewriting the lives of free women of color. Some were “mistresses” or concubines or, like Marie Laveau, were business women and practitioners of African spirituality, which was a “heritage of power” (Bibbs, 1992).

Further Examples That Recover Heritage Knowledge Other Actors/Groups: 1.

2. 3. 4.

Songhoy emperors Sunni Ali Ber and Askya Mohammed (Maiga, 2010); Emperor Napolean Bonaparte, Haiti’s King Henri Christophe, and Simon Bolivar, who received money and soldiers from Haiti to lead the fight for the independence of Latin America from Spain. Slave owners, slave traders, and their wives; Black and White abolitionists; and free people of color (Baker, 2009; Lester, 2005). Boukman, a Haitian Vodou priest (Papaloi) and revolutionary leader (James, 1963). Black Mardi Gras Indians (Big Chiefs and Big Queens) and Native Americans, whom this tradition honors (Kennedy, 2010; Sublette, 2009), as well as other African-descent peoples who “mask” in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Hooley Hooray of Songhoy culture in Mali (Fournillier, 2009; Maiga, 2010).

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Other Sites of Memory 1.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

African educational excellence traditions, such as the systems of learning in ancient civilizations of Egypt and the universities in Djenne, Sankore, and Gao in West Africa’s 15th-century Songhoy Empire (Maiga, 2010). African language as repositories of African conceptions of the world and other linguistic sources of Heritage Knowledge, such as Black Language (Smitherman, 1994/2000), Haitian Creole, and the linguistic heritage of New Orleans, including the language tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians (Kennedy, 2010). African music and dance legacies—from Congo square to jazz, gospel, the blues, and hip-hop—as sites of cultural authenticity, African retentions, and collective resistance (Cone, 1992; Gottschild, 1998; Jabir, 2010; Sublette, 2009). Indigenous systems of domestic servitude, social control, and punishment in Africa (and Europe) and in prisons in the United States, especially the experiences of prisoners in New Orleans and Haiti.11 Organizing traditions, including acts of resistance and revolt in Africa (e.g., on slave ships) and plantations; civil rights mobilizations (e.g., Plessy v. Ferguson [1896], the Deacons for Defense and Justice [Hill, 2006], the Peoples Fund for Hurricane Relief ); citizen’s action campaigns for voting rights (Scott & Brown, 2003), equitable educational opportunity (King, 2009) and the right of return;12 democratic economic participation (Gordon Nembhard, 2005) in Louisiana; and sustainable development versus “disaster capitalism” dependency in Haiti (e.g., sweat shops, maquilladoras, and the dumping of genetically engineered seeds on vulnerable Haitian farmers).

Incorporating Authentic Voices The incorporation of authentic voices as a culturally responsive principle is important in the Black Studies intellectual tradition for centering teaching and learning within the interests of African and Diaspora people. By collapsing time and geography, as shown in the lists above, it is possible to remember their experiences more accurately and authentically. Contextualizing the perspectives and experiences of African descent peoples and others with whom they interact(ed) within a cultural continuum—one that moves backward to illuminate connections with the past, make these connections more visible, and bring them forward to connect to the present—can give students an opportunity to imagine their roles and future more fully informed by history recovered and remembered (King, 2006a). In accord with the principle of Collective Humanity, for example, this continuum identifies critical cultural-historical junctures in the lived experiences of and interactions among the peoples of Europe and Africa

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(as they became White/“Europeans” and Black/“Africans”) as well as the indigenous peoples of the Americas—such as the Tainos of “Ayiti” and Pawnee and Sioux warriors (of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show that visited New Orleans) and the Choctaw and Blackfoot, who are native to the New Orleans area (Louisiana and Mississippi) and also inspired the New Orleans Black Mardi Gras Indians. The “child’s version” of history fragments the collective human experience. Resources for addressing the problem include African American adult and children’s literature (Courlander, 1970; Dickerson, 2005; Hamilton, 2004; Lester, 2005; Paulsen, 1993; Walker, 1999) as well as the tradition of the Black Arts Movement. The periodization of history (before 1860 and after slavery) separates “new” world developments from the “old” worlds of Europe and Africa. Yet, a re-membered teaching approach makes it possible to grasp the complexity of African/Diaspora and American experiences across time and geography. In contrast to a simple critical reading of historical events that does not address the ideological meaning and function of Blackness (as [un]worthiness), remembered Heritage Knowledge and Diaspora Literacy can facilitate the reclamation of nihilated Black identities and illuminate the worlds (cultural models) that made and dehumanized both conceptual whiteness and Blackness (King, 2006a; Wynter, 1992). Developing what teachers and parents together determine to be age-appropriate instructional materials and learning experiences can evoke the humanizing question, what has happened? Teachers are understandably focused on teaching standards-based content that is aligned with the student assessments for which they will be held accountable. However, parents and teachers need to work together to incorporate a broader set of standards, including those based on universal human rights conventions, for example, that underscore the importance of students’ cultural identity and capacity for engaged citizenship. This, too, is the meaning of human freedom. While the African Union recognizes the Diaspora as the Sixth Region of Africa, there is very little in the formal experience of schooling in the United States that encourages a Black child to “enjoy his or her own culture,” as Article 30 of the UN Human Rights Convention on the Rights of the Child states, if the referent is our African cultural heritage and identity.13

Conclusion Former first lady Mildred Aristide, who was interviewed on her return to Haiti with the former president Jean Aristide after seven years of forced exile in Africa, remarked: I would stop talking about the past if it were not so present. . . . And I think what I’ve learned from Africa is how much Africans carry the past with them, and the past being lessons from their ancestors, the lessons

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from their culture, all of which happens in time, in a time space. So it’s not that you live in the past, but you carry the lessons and the good . . . experiences of the past. (Democracy Now, 2011) What can truths about Europe’s and Africa’s historical development with respect to slavery, African-descent people’s resistance, and our humanity in the vibrant cultural milieu of New Orleans and Haiti contribute to human freedom and the well-being of all? Answers to the questions this chapter poses will be found within the communities affected by the policies and politics of cultural, economic, and political dispossession that are beyond the narratives of disaster. The praxis of critical studyin’ offers cultural-historical contexts in which to recover Heritage Knowledge and critical tools for “studyin’ freedom” in this moment. As the passage that follows from a play about Marie Laveau reveals, there are “cultural signs” to be deciphered and collective memory and identity to be recovered within the Black Studies intellectual tradition in the African heritage that New Orleans and Haiti share. What educators, in partnership with students and communities, learn should interrogate but also go beyond the hyperbolic distorted discourse and even racist responses to Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti to address the historical and cultural contributions of these two interrelated sites to the ongoing Black Freedom Struggle.

Coda: Who Dat Say? Legend has it that Marie Laveau was last seen in the eye of a storm, flying in her little house over Lake Pontchartrain, partying with High John the Conqueror, Baron Samedi, Frieda Erzulie, and a host of family, friends, and lovers. High John the Conqueror is the champion of displaced persons, of little people oppressed by power. He soared alongside the slave ships, reminding the people that once they could fly . . . I wonder what Madam Laveau would have to say . . . (Dickerson, 2005, p. 614)

Notes 1 See also Transafrica.org and Lakhani (2010). A comment following this news item, also reported on CommonDreams.org, is worth noting: I hate to be skeptical about rape allegations but remember all the reports by the media of rape in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that for the most part turned out to be false. There is a very racist tendency in the U.S. media (that was very evident in the reporting from Hurricane Katrina) to exaggerate or falsely report violence, rape, etc., when the reported perpetrators are not white. I am not saying this is necessarily the case here, but I do have to wonder given the track record. (crooked7, 2010)

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2 “Georgia Mayor to Sign Law Making Saggin Pants Illegal,” News One for Black America, September 6, 2010, http://newsone.com/nation/newsonestaff4/georgia-mayor-tosign-law-making-sagging-pants-illegal/. See also “Long Beach Tells Teens to Pick Up Saggy Pants,” CBS Los Angeles, February 3, 2011, http://losangeles.cbslocal. com/2011/02/03/long-beach-tells-teens-to-pick-up-saggy-pants/; and “Sagging Pants Now Banned in Florida Schools,” BlackAmericaWeb.com, March 11, 2011, www. blackamericaweb.com/? q=articles/news/moving_america_news/26787. 3 Clark (1999) writes: “The Black Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans are a unique subculture of a highly diverse and complex group of the local population. The tradition of these masking Indians dates back to the 1700s” (para. 3). 4 The catchphrase “Who dat say?” dates back to minstrel shows in which White actors in blackface mimicked and mocked the speech of enslaved Africans—whom they depicted (in a racist manner) saying, “Who dat say, ‘Who dat?’ when I say, ‘Who dat?’ ”—when Black people supposedly saw a ghost. The callout “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?” became the anthem when the New Orleans Saints played in the 2010 Superbowl and was featured as the closing, syncopated choral chant in Spike Lee’s second documentary film about Hurricane Katrina, “If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise.” That title is also phrased in local New Orleans “vernacular” Black speech. 5 For a discussion of stereotypes of Black women in the history of the United States, see Jewell (1993) and “Jezebel Stereotypes,” The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel/. 6 Cité Soleil is described in a UNICEF “At a Glance-Haiti” publication as “one of the most violent neighborhoods in the Western hemisphere” (Skoog, 2006). It is described in a Wikipedia (n.d.) entry as an “extremely impoverished and densely populated commune” located in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area in Haiti with 200,000–400,000 residents, the “majority of whom live in extreme poverty . . . with virtually no sewers, stores, electricity, health care or schools.” 7 See New Orleans official Historic Voodoo Museum website, which provides a history of the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, www.voodoomuseum.com/index. php?option=com_content&view=ar ticle&id=15. 8 Also worth noting are recent attacks on Vodou practitioners by Christians in Haiti. Historian Akinyele Umoja (2011) reports: “Assaults on Haitian Vodou are an attack on the African roots of Haiti and the very essence of the Haitian identity, culture and personality” (para. 17). 9 A recent report titled “Education and Conflict in Haiti” proposes that Haitian students should study peace education and “develop a plural identity” grounded not in their African heritage but “based on the concept of Créoliteé” (Luzincourt & Gulbrandson, 2010, p. 14). 10 A contemporary of Marie Laveau in San Francisco, California, Mary Ellen Pleasant, provides a comparative case (Bibbs, 1992; Hudson, 2008). 11 A recent ACLU report revealed that thousands of prisoners at the Orleans Parish Prison, including juveniles, were abandoned by the authorities—left in locked cells as the flood waters rose (Onesto, 2006). Kofi Anyidoho, Distinguished Scholar of the African Humanities Institute at the University of Ghana, explained to the DeWolf family, visiting the Cape Coast “slave castle” in Ghana: Before the European presence we did not have prisons. The first prisons from the colonial period were located in the slave forts . . . In my own language, the word for prison is slave fort and the word for government is slave fort. (DeWolf, 2008, p. 95) The slave forts or dungeons along the West African coast are incorrectly called “castles”; the slave ships functioned as floating prisons (Rediker, 2007). No indigenous word for “prison” exists in the Songhoy language of Mali (Maiga, 2010) either. Domestic

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servitude, an indigenous form of bondage or indenture, and military impressment served as functional systems of social control in Africa instead of prisons before the European presence. 12 The International Katrina-Rita Tribunal, “We Charge Genocide,” organized by the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, is one example of citizen mobilization using the universal human rights conventions. Among the human rights of “internally displaced persons” that the tribunal investigated are mass forced deportation with no right of return and military occupation versus humanitarian aid (Moorehead, 2007). 13 U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 30, states: In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or persons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to profess and practice his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language. (www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm, emphasis added)

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Luzincourt, K., & Gulbrandson, J. (2010). Education and conflict in Haiti: A special report. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace. Maiga, H. O. (2010). Balancing written history with oral tradition: The legacy of the Songhoy people. New York: Routledge. Mandara, J. (2006). The impact of family functioning on African American males’ academic achievement: A review and clarification of the empirical literature. Teachers College Record, 108(2), 206–223. Marshall, E., & Toohey, K. (2010). Representing family: Community funds of knowledge, bilingualism, and multimodality. Harvard Educational Review, 80(2), 221–241. Masur, K. (2005). The world the abolitionists made: Reconsidering the domestic slave trade. Reviews in American History, 33(4), 518–526. McGuire, D. L. (2010). At the dark end of the street: Black women, rape and resistance—a new history of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the rise of Black power. New York: Knopf. McKay, M. M., Atkins, M. S., Hawkins, T., Brown, C., & Lynn, C. (2003). Inner city African American parental involvement in children’s schooling: Racial socialization and social support from the parent community. American Journal of Community Psychology, 32(1/2), 107–114. McLaren, P., & Jaramillo, N. (2007). Pedagogy and praxis in the age of empire. The Netherlands: Sense. Moore, D. (2005, September 6). What REALLY happened in New Orleans: Denise Moore’s story. Daily Kos. Retrieved August 31, 2010, from www.dailykos.com/ story/2005/9/6/211436/8987. Moorehead, M. (2007, September 5). Int’l tribunal on Katrina and Rita: We charge genocide. International Action Center. Retrieved September 15, 2010, from www.iacenter.org/archive-2007/new-rleans0907.html. Mulira, J. G. (1990). The case of Voodoo in New Orleans. In J. E. Holloway (Ed.), Africanisms in American culture (pp. 34–68). Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Murakami-Ramalho, E., & Durodoye, B. A. (2008). Looking back to move forward: Katrina’s Black women survivors speak. Feminist Formations, 20(3), 115–137. Onesto, L. (2006). Government’s post-Katrina program: Blaming the victims of murderous neglect. Revolution, 60. Retrieved September 5, 2010, from http://revcom. us/a/060/katrinalies-en.html. Oyserman, D., Kemmeilmeier, M., Fryberg, S., Brosh, H., & Hart-Johnson, T. (2003). Racialethnic self-schemas. Social Psychology Quarterly, 66(4), 333–347. Paquette, R. L. (1997). Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the making of territorial Louisiana. In D. B. Gaspar & D. P. Geggus (Eds.), A turbulent time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (pp. 204–225). Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Patton, L. D. (2008). Learning through crisis: The educator’s role. About Campus, 12(6), 10–16. Paulsen, G. (1993). Nightjohn. New York: Bantam Doubleday. Paulsen, G. (1999). Sarny: A life remembered. New York: Laurel Leaf. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Polman, L. (2010, January 18). Fear of the poor is hampering Haiti rescue. The Sunday Times. Retrieved January 31, 2010, from www.timesonline.eo.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article699l697.ece. Porfilio, B. J., & Watz, M. (2008). Promoting critical literacy in social studies classrooms: Guiding students to remake themselves and their world through a critical analysis of

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Victorian world’s fairs and the neoliberal ordering of today’s social world. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 1(2), 129–147. Ransby, B. (2005). Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A radical democratic vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Rasmussen, D. (2011). American uprising: The untold story of America’s largest slave revolt. New York: Harpers. Rediker, M. (2007). Slave ship: A human history. New York: Viking. Robinson, R. (2007). An unbroken agony: Haiti, from revolution to the kidnapping of a president. Philadelphia: Basic Civitas Books. Sanders, M. G. (1997). Overcoming obstacles: Academic achievement as a response to racism and discrimination. Journal of Negro Education, 66(1), 83–93. Schwartz, S. B. (2002). Black Latin America: Legacies of slavery, race and African culture. Hispanic American Historical Review, 8(3), 429–434. Scott, J. H., & Brown, C. S. (2003). Witness to the truth: My struggle for human rights in Louisiana. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Skoog, C. (2006). Dropping guns for books in Haiti. UNICEF. Retrieved December 1, 2010, from www.unicef.org/infobycountry/haiti_35958.htrnl. Smith, E. P., Atkins, J., & Connell, C. M. (2003). Family, school, and community factors and relationships to racial-ethnic attitudes and academic achievement. American Journal of Community Psychology, 32(1/2), 159–173. Smitherman, G. (1994/2000). Black talk: Words and phrases from the hood to the Amen corner. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Stone-Hanley, M., & Noblit, G. W. (2009). Cultural responsiveness, racial identity, and academic success: A review of the literature. Pittsburgh: Heinz Endowments. Retrieved December 23, 2010, from www.heinz.org/UserFiles/Llbrary/Culture-Report_ FINAL.pdf. Sublette, N. (2009). The world that made New Orleans: From Spanish silver to Congo Square. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Swartz, E. (2007). Emancipatory narratives: Rewriting the master script in the school and curriculum. Journal of Negro Education, 3(2), 173–186. Swartz, E. (2009). Diversity: Gate keeping knowledge and maintaining inequalities. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 1044–1083. Teaching for Change. (n.d.). Teaching about Haiti. Retrieved January 3, 2011, from www.teachingforchange.org/publications/Haiti. Tedla, E. (1997, Spring/Summer). Sankofan education for the development of personhood. Raising Standards: Journal of the Rochester Teachers Association, 5(2), 19–25. Thomas-Richard, L., & Levasseur, P. (2011, July 7). Sexual violence “still rising” in Haiti quake camps. France 24. Retrieved July 8, 2011, from www.france24.com/ en/20110107-amnesty-cites-rampant-rape-earthquake-refugee-camps-haiti. Thrasher, A. (1996). On to New Orleans! Louisiana’s heroic 1811 slave revolt. New Orleans: Cypress Press. Umoja, A. (2011). Hating the root: Attacks on Vodou in Haiti. Retrieved July 1, 2011, from http://adiama.com/ancestralconnections/2011I01/23/hating- the-root-attacks-onvodou-in haiti/#more-1490. UN News Centre. (2010, September 13). Haiti: UN launches new campaign against rape and gender-based violence. Retrieved October 15, 2010, from www.un.org/apps/news/ story.asp?NewslD=35900&Cr=haiti&Cr 1. UNICEF. (2010, February 12). UNICEF situation update: Children in Haiti one month after. New York: Author.

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Villani, S. (2001). Impact of media on children and adolescents. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 40(4), 392–401. Walker, G. L. (1999). Shades of Memnon: An African legends adventure. Posen, IL: Seker Nefer Press. Walker, S. (2001). African roots/American cultures: Africa in the creation of the Americas. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Ward, M. (2004). Voodoo Queen: The spirited lives of Marie Laveau. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press. Welch, M. (2005, December). “They shoot helicopters, don’t they?” How journalists spread rumors during Katrina. Reason.com. Retrieved January 1, 2011, from http://reason. com/archives/2005/12/01/they-shoot-helicopters-dont-th. West, C. (2001). Race matters. Boston: Beacon Press. West-Olatunji, C. (2010). Parenting practices among low-income parents of academically successful fifth grade African American children. Multicultural Perspectives, 12(3), 138–144. White, D. G. (1999). Ar’n’t I a woman: Female slaves in the plantation south. New York: Norton. Originally published 1985. White, J. L. (2005, November). New Orleans women of color: Connecting the personal and the political. Satya. Retrieved January 1, 2010, from www.satyamag.com/nov05/white. html. Williams, T. (2009). Natural disasters, displacement, national minorities and human rights: The case of the U.S. Gulf Coast. In S. F. Lewis (Ed.), Historical inevitability: The role of Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans saga (pp. 2–18). Madison, WI: Omni Press. Woods, C. (2010). Upholding community traditions: An interview with Cherise Harrison-Nelson. In C. Woods (Ed.), In the wake of Hurricane Katrina: New paradigms and social visions (pp. 213–222). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Woodson, C. G. (1933). The miseducation of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers. Wynter, S. (1984). The ceremony must be found: After humanism. Boundary 2, 12(3), 19–70. Wynter, S. (1992). Do not call us Negroes: How “multicultural” textbooks perpetuate racism. San Francisco. Aspire. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after “Man,” its overrepresentation—an argument. New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Young, J. A., & Braziel, J. E. (Eds.). (2006). Race and the foundations of knowledge. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Young, J. A. & Braziel, J. E. (Eds.). (2007). Erasing public memory: Race, aesthetics, and cultural amnesia in the Americas. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Zack, N. (2009). Race, class and money in disaster. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 47(S1), 84–103.

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REFLECTION Teaching and Learning Informed by a Culturally Grounded Practice Susan Goodwin

Dr. Joyce E. King’s work and engagement with Pre-K-12 teachers has been instrumental in helping us at the Rochester Teacher Center (RTC) establish a responsible and responsive environment for professional and individual learning. Her writing on “Cultural Knowledge” and “Heritage Knowledge” represent a platform for teacher learning. Her articulations about race and culture are revealing clarifiers about the context in which educators and students consistently experience teaching and learning in the United States and other parts of the Diaspora. These understandings remain unavailable to most teachers who are typically unexposed to culturally centered, socio-political, and historical knowledge in their academic training. Dr. King’s insights provide a context for the ways in which cultural and heritage knowledge, high academic standards, and the modeling of Kwanzaa Principles such as Collective Work and Responsibility and Creativity are characteristics that teachers need to experience in their dayto-day work (Karenga, 1998; King, 2004, 2006). These understandings make critical thought and systemic analysis possible and serve to effectively reveal how racially framed perspectives and practices so thoroughly encapsulate the educational and political landscapes in which teachers try to do their best work. Without this knowledge and insight, educators are at a loss, leaving students at a disadvantage. Historically, school districts have relied on administrative department heads and textbook companies to provide teachers with in-service training about teaching practices, new program adoptions, and newly purchased textbooks. Within the last 20 years, state education departments and school districts have shifted their attention to learning, teacher quality, and research-based instructional approaches as subjects for professional development. This approach has resulted in numerous changes in many districts, with some new directions in

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professional development as well as the creation of state learning standards and nationally driven evaluation systems for teachers. In many districts, new and first year teachers are now provided mentors as part of induction programs. Other forms of support include peer review, demonstration teaching, and coaching. In urban districts, student outcomes have been consistently less than parents and communities desire or expect. These outcomes, along with teacher quality, have been an impetus for adopting more authentic professional learning models based on research about what promotes continuous adult learning and effective practice (Darling Hammond, 2007). However, as this major push was providing teachers with more substantive support for improving teaching, an emerging socalled reform movement was engaged in teacher bashing, attacks on teacher unions, and the creation of a parallel public school system as seen in charter schools (Ravitch, 2013). The “reforms” that have been implemented continue to remain grounded in an outsider, often adversarial, Eurocentric view of teaching and teachers, students, and their parents and communities. This becomes clear when administrators at local and state levels, without the expertise of teachers, parents, or Black and Latino scholars, continue to be the framers of the discussion about educating urban children. This absence of scholarly expertise stifles the discussion about how culture and race serve as the medium through which instructional goals and practices are formulated. As a result, most teachers remain virtually on their own when it comes to determining what knowledge and skills they need to have in order to be more effective in meeting the needs of students of color. The Rochester Teacher Center (RTC), a teacher union initiative, has responded to this predicament in which teachers find themselves in a number of ways. Primarily, we view research-based professional development standards and approaches to professional learning as a basic requirement for effective Professional Development (Learning Forward, 2011). We agree that the elimination of single workshops and the implementation of mentoring, peer evaluation and review, and coaching are all effective reforms, as are job-embedded models like collegial learning circles and supporting the development of teachers with specific kinds of expertise. However, improving the learning outcomes for students of color requires that these professional development models, while essential, incorporate a lot more. What do teachers need to know, be able to do, and be like in order for students of color to flourish? This question is rarely considered, even in school districts where children are overwhelmingly of African heritage. In general, students of color, their families, and communities are seldom at the center of discussions about how education and schools can serve their individual, cultural, and community needs. Race and culture continue to remain outside the “table of contents” of knowledge needed, as if the learning outcomes of children of color can be effectively addressed without knowledge of who they are and how they have come to remain positioned at the bottom of social, political, and instructional frameworks.

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In this context, the work of Black scholars focused on student acquisition of cultural and academic excellence has been glaringly absent from K-12 school reform discussions, planning, implementation, and professional learning programs. So, while job-embedded learning, authentic assessments, and multiple and extended sessions where teachers experience feedback on their work products represent improvements in PD models, these conceptualizations can only work for all students to the extent that they are grounded in cultural and heritage knowledge, racialized insight, critical thought, authentic scholarship, and systemic analysis (Goodwin & Swartz, 2004; King, 2006). As a fundamental approach for enriching professional development, RTC brings this kind of awareness through the knowledge and expertise of Black scholars who represent the heritage of students and communities served by urban school districts. Teaching and learning informed by cultural and heritage knowledge—which is at the center of Dr. King’s work with teachers and parents—represents the generally unexplored solution to improving outcomes for all students in general and African American and Latino students in particular. Viewing teaching and learning in this way and applying this focus to current professional development models represents a new paradigmatic approach for learning how to be an effective teacher with all students. Dr. Joyce King, as an intellect, researcher, and author in the tradition of Black Studies scholarship, demonstrates how this tradition is a resource to educators who experience student needs as the nexus of their professional work. Dr. King’s considerable body of work in demonstrating the relationship between systemic analysis, racial/cultural formations, and epistemic systems of knowledge formation provides a context for teachers to see students and their communities as the subject of their practice and planning. By serving as a resource to teachers’ professional development, Dr. King, through her person and her work, provides examples of the knowledge base, worldview, and ways of being that can be accessed by teachers to support, and in many ways energize them and the children and communities they serve. Her paradigmatic framing includes all peoples and describes and documents people of color as contributors for different and improved ways of thinking and educating. This has been liberating for teachers who are seeking to be released from a narrow view that excludes them and their students and their families from deliberations about what is happening to them in schools and classrooms. In discussing Dr. King’s contributions to the professional development program of the Rochester Teacher Center, we can look at examples of RTC initiatives in which she and her research, published texts, and modeling of culturally oriented ways of being and working have been instrumental in advancing teachers as professionals. For example, Dr. King consistently models Collective Work and Responsibility. She collaborates with RTC in fostering teachers’ learning about concepts such as indigenous voice, perspective, and diverse worldviews as concepts needed for knowing and pedagogically connecting to

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students. Through presentations and seminars and her considerable writings, Dr. King provides historical and cultural content and other forms of knowledge that allow educators to perceive their own level of need and understanding about the cultural groups represented in their classrooms. Teachers are enabled to assess the caliber and perspective of the curricular materials they are using in various disciplines. Through Dr. King’s demonstrations and critique of instructional materials, teachers can see their practice as a series of continuous instructional choices. Dr. King’s work on dysconscious racism (King, 1991) is revealing and clarifying to practitioners who are enabled to observe that there are no good or logical reasons for their students not to see themselves or their People as topics of study or as subjects in the stories used for reading instruction. Dysconscious racism as a barrier to effective teaching becomes visible and therefore discussable as teachers seek to apply a more informed and therefore more professional lens to their work. Making race—and the racism that is present but unacknowledged—visible to teachers allows them to decide for themselves whether they will professionally develop or be complicit in the myopic reduction of ideas still employed as solutions for reaching underserved students. The Criterion Standards for Contextualized Teaching and Learning about People of African Descent that Dr. King and I co-developed exemplifies her contributions to teachers’ in-service learning (King & Goodwin, 2006). We developed these standards as part of a collaborative effort to guide the work of educators, parents, and community members who were ready to move beyond assessing the quality, accuracy, and authenticity of curriculum to producing omitted and very much needed student and teacher professional development materials. King’s extensive knowledge about culture, Heritage Knowledge, and systemic analysis have not only been topics of her presentations and seminars, but most importantly, these constructs are reflected in the instructional practices she employs in her work with teachers. Consequently, this work always includes parents and community as active voices and agents. Through this modeling, educators have been able to expand their ideas about what parent and community engagement means in a culturally grounded practice. King’s concept of accessing students’ and families’ cultural ideals and assets brings visibility and meaning to culture as a dominant factor in all arenas and reveals its particular power in relation to teaching and learning (King, Goss, & McArthur, 2014). In that dysconscious racism makes cultural assets of communities of color invisible, thereby inaccessible, her work with teachers in this area is emancipating. While Black practitioners may have experience with many assets of their own culture, bringing this knowledge into the workplace for both Black and White teachers takes a certain amount of expertise, consciousness, and courage that is supported by knowledge of students’ and families’ cultural ideals and assets. Teacher research projects grounded in cultural and heritage knowledge supported by Dr. King have served to give evidence of the effectiveness of

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coherently connecting culturally informed education theory with practice. Accessing the worldview of communities of color shifts the ground by bringing a different paradigm to the fore. Used as a resource for instructional problemsolving, decision-making, and creativity, an African worldview represents something markedly different from current models even in their newly modified forms. Dr. King’s research projects conducted with teachers have allowed them to acknowledge and develop meaningful ways for parents/families to be connected to the instructional program. Working directly with Dr. King has influenced teachers’ and parents’ ideas about their own capacity for continuous learning and for using their own thinking, cultural assets, and professionalism as sources for creating instructional solutions. Joyce King’s publications with teachers, illustrating parent engagement through instruction and research, are one example of the kind of culturally authentic assessments of learning she advocates for students (Campbell, 2014; King et al., 2014). Culturally authentic assessments are a culturally informed approach to evaluation that acknowledge the community’s desire and responsibility to observe, evaluate, and contribute to the learning process of all its members— students as well as teachers. Working with Dr. King and the RTC has allowed teachers to witness the responses of students and families as they experience teachers applying their professional learning in public contexts. Joyce King’s contribution to education and community building is steeped in the cultural and heritage knowledge that guides the Black Studies legacy and intellectual tradition. Her work on acquiring consciousness, culturally and historically informed theorizing and practice, authentic and conscious presentations of knowledge, and the modeling of an African-centered worldview put to the service of all, represents ways of thinking and doing that are tools for designing and building free thought and environments for teachers, students, their families, and their communities.

References Campbell, L. (2014). Austin Steward: “Home-style teaching,” planning, and assessment. In J. E. King & E. E. Swartz (Eds.), “Re-membering” history in student and teacher learning: An Afrocentric culturally informed praxis (pp. 105–120). New York: Routledge. Darling Hammond, L. (2005). Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Goodwin, S., & Swartz, E. E. (Eds.). (2004). Teaching children of color: Seven constructs of effective teaching in urban schools. Rochester, NY: RTA Press. Karenga, M. (1998). Kwanzaa: A celebration of family, community, and culture. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. King, J. E. (1991). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the miseducation of teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146. King, J. E. (2004). Cultural knowledge. In S. Goodwin & E. Swartz (Eds.), Teaching children of color: Seven constructs of effective teaching in urban schools (pp. 53–61). Rochester, NY: RTA Press.

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King, J. E. (2006). “If justice is our objective”: Diaspora literacy, heritage knowledge and the praxis of critical studyin’ for human freedom. In A. Ball (Ed.), With more deliberate speed: Achieving equity and excellence in education—Realizing the full potential of Brown v. Board of Education (pp. 337–360). National Society for the Study of Education, 105th Yearbook, Part 2. New York: Ballenger. King, J. E., & Goodwin, S. (2006). Criterion standards for contextualized teaching and learning about people of African descent. Rochester, NY: Authors. King, J. E., Goss, A. C., & McArthur, S. A. (2014). Recovering history and the “parent piece” for cultural well-being and belonging. In J. E. King & E. E. Swartz (Eds.), “Remembering” history in student and teacher learning: An Afrocentric culturally informed praxis (pp. 155–188). New York: Routledge. Learning Forward. (2011). Facilitator guide, standards for professional learning. Retrieved August 1, 2014, from http://learningforward.org/docs/pdf/facilitatorguide.pdf?sfvrsn=2. Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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9 TRANSFORMATIVE CURRICULUM PRAXIS FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD1

Speak Truth to the people. (Evans, 1970, p. 91) The most durable way to improve schools is to improve curriculum and instruction and to improve the conditions in which teachers work and children learn . . . (Ravitch, 2010, p. 225) Can’t you replace that map of Africa with a globe of the world? (Advice from one teacher to another)

Introduction Education research knowledge/interventions are produced within policy frameworks that delineate and direct our attention as researchers to certain problems, while other issues are ignored or deemed out of scholarly bounds. Consider the universal policy framework for the protection of “minority” students’ cultural rights and identities set forth in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 30, which has important implications for our understanding of “the public good,” states: In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or persons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to profess and practice his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language. (www2.ochchr.org/english/law/crc/htm)

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Research and Policy for Cultural Democracy Banks (2008) makes this observation about a pertinent problem that arises within the logic of the policy framework for diversity—a problem that merits the attention of education researchers and that concerns the uses of education research: “A major problem facing nation-states throughout the world is how to recognize and legitimize difference and yet construct an overarching national identity that incorporates the voices, experiences and hopes of the diverse groups that compose it” (p. 129). Thus, if in multicultural societies, as Banks argues, both cultural democracy and cultural citizenship are needed in this global age, this chapter asks: Can the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 30) serve as a policy framework for education research on transformative curricula that can be used to advance the cultural well-being of students and cultural democracy in our society? From a vantage point within this policy framework, the research problem is to provide curricula and pedagogical strategies that safeguard students’ human right to enjoy their own culture in community with other members of their group. This problem-focus on students’ cultural well-being as a human right may be neglected by researchers working within a policy framework that gives primacy to the “disadvantages associated with how poverty affects children’s ability to learn” (Ravitch, 2010, p. 28), their “dysfunctional families” (Kelly, 1998, p. 4), or how to teach the nation’s “common cultural heritage” (Ravitch, 2010, p. 223)—to the exclusion of any consideration at all regarding how representations of students’ cultural heritage in the curriculum (and teacher preparation) might also disadvantage them, affect their academic engagement, opportunities to learn, and their development. In addition, there are continuing disagreements among scholars about curriculum content, as well as among policy makers, teachers, and even students who disagree about the curriculum approach and learning conditions that can best improve education—whether for the benefit of “minority” students in particular, as well as in the interest of the public or the common good. It is often assumed that contested school knowledge, visions of education, and conceptions of the public good can be resolved by appealing to “valid” scholarship, and these profound disagreements have been mischaracterized as “culture wars” (of the past). But such an ostensible appeal constitutes a failure to recognize or acknowledge possible ideological interests in the very scholarship that is held as a neutral, objective arbiter. A case in point is debates about “whether Egypt is an African civilization” or not, debates that were strategically deployed to question the scholarly legitimacy of Afro-centric education (Asante, 1998; Dei, 1994; King, 1995/2004). As a state-board appointed member of California’s Curriculum Commission during the “curriculum wars” of the 1990s, I protested (among other issues) the representation and location of Egypt in the “middle East” in the California

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History-Social Studies curriculum materials and textbooks that were developed based on this curriculum policy framework. Now, two decades later, in a social studies textbook in use in Atlanta, Georgia schools, Egypt is no longer in the Middle East nor is it in “Africa” (depicted visually as the land below the Sahara). Rather the book’s maps and unit organization situate Egypt in a region that “is on two continents: Africa and Asia.” So Egypt is in the region called “North Africa, Southwest Asia and Central Asia”! (Boehm, Armstrong, Hunkins, & Zike, 2008, p. 431).

Epistemological Panics and School Knowledge Thus, the “culture wars,” which I described elsewhere as “epistemological panics” (King, 1995/2004) have neither dissipated nor disappeared. Instead contested school knowledge, that academics like ourselves produce in the academy, as well as contested visions of educational purpose, including the role of cultural rights—as human rights—in a democracy, have merely been sublimated and displaced by a seeming consensus that inheres in the now dominant high-stakes testing regime. Ravitch (2010) is right to insist: “if we want to improve education we must first of all have a vision of what good education is” (p. 230). But whose vision will prevail? Neither the Common Core state standards (www. corestandards.org) nor a voluntary national curriculum, which ignore the problem Banks poses, can address the educational vision the United Nations human rights policy framework represents. In this regard, the scholarly critiques of policy interventions such as the Common Core standards and CORE Knowledge (Buras, 2008; Spring, 2013), including critical commentary developed by the National Black Education Agenda (www.blackeducationnow.org/ id17.htm) seem like “voices in the wilderness” given the power and influence of the inter-locking “schools-for-profit” network that is dismantling public education (Schneider, 2014). Is there a role for research in the resolution of the curriculum implications of differing conceptions regarding the importance of students’ group (racial) identity, their identity as individuals, and their national identity? I think there is. However, researchers have to know much more about what they do not know about what the curriculum does—knowledge that has been available in the Black Studies intellectual tradition at least as far back as Carter G. Woodson’s (2000) critical exposé on the “mis-education of the Negro” in the 1930s. If that understanding had been widely embraced in the academy, however—among the scholars who produce the knowledge that ends up in student textbooks— the modern Black Studies movement, the Chicano Studies movement, and other transformative heritage studies curricula efforts in schools and higher education would not have erupted and endured since the 1960s (Brown, 2007; Harris, 2011; King, 1992). I was among that generation of students whose “demands” spurred the establishment of transformative Black Studies curricula

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in the 1960s. When I was involved in the curriculum struggles about teaching history-social studies in California, I voted not to adopt textbooks framed by California’s history-social studies curriculum policy framework in which the United States was defined as a “nation of immigrants”—but not because “minority” histories were excluded (Cornbleth & Waugh, 1995; King, 1992, 1995/2004; Wynter & King, 2010). On the contrary, as a teacher on one of the Commission’s textbook evaluation panels observed (in response to my complaints), people of color were literally “jumping off the pages” of these books. My objections were about the flawed conceptualizations, however, in which we were included, for example: Native Americans were the “first immigrants” and African Americans were “forced immigrants” (Hilliard, 1998; Wynter, 1992/2012). In this chapter “transformative curriculum” refers to heritage studies—Black, Mexican American/Chicano/Chicana, Native American studies, etc.—that permit students and teachers to “enjoy” and embrace their cultures, languages, and pan-ethnic identities, such as “La Raza” in the case of Mexican Americans, for example, and Diaspora identities among African-descent people. This tradition of intellectual independence and group consciousness in these communities has generated sustained attack, particularly regarding curriculum, which recent events in Tucson, Arizona illustrate. The K-12 Mexican American studies curriculum the state legislature and the school district banned is designed to support Mexican American students’ identity and “Raza” consciousness. Teachers and scholars whose pedagogy and research support this transformative approach have to wonder if we are going to be targeted next. Scholarly and public discourse alike identify “minority” students’ embrace of a pan-ethnic identity as a problem, which blocks their academic and social advancement. This popular narrative, which critiques African-centered curriculum approaches that nurture students’ racialized identities as “essentialist,” “separatist,” and anti-democratic (Buras, 2008; Ginwright, 2004; Merry & New, 2008; Ravitch, 1990), persists as well in Toronto, Canada, where an Africancentered public school established in 2008 has garnered both intense criticism and high academic achievement scores. Likewise, Tucson’s Mexican American studies curriculum is charged with being “divisive.” A growing body of research in several disciplines (child development, Black psychology, and social work), which is consistent with a human rights/cultural well-being policy framework, but that is not yet widely cited or funded in education research, indicates various ways in which racial identification actually supports students’ academic and social development. This extant scholarship reports positive academic impacts of culturally responsive approaches linked to students’ racial identification (e.g., Altschul, Oyserman, & Bybee, 2006; Bowman & Howard, 1985; Chavous et al., 2003; Davis, Aronson, & Salinas, 2006; Hilliard, 2003; King & Swartz, 2014; Lee, 2005; Lewis, Sullivan, & Bybee, 2006; Nasir, 2012; Nasir & Hand, 2005; Oyserman, Harrison, & Bybee, 2001; Smith-Maddox, 1998).

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An alternative to deficit theorizing about Black education, this research paradigm also extends to African-descent populations in other diaspora contexts such as Canada and the Caribbean (Codjoe, 2006; Herrero, 2006; HudicourtBarnes, 2003). In contrast to the role a number of highly influential foundations are playing to advance policy frameworks and education agendas that effectively undermine culturally oriented education approaches, the Heinz Endowments commissioned a review of the literature on cultural responsiveness, racial identity, and academic success “grounded in the belief that America’s urban schools must employ a child’s culture so that the child might be motivated to learn in the face of significant adversity” (Hanley & Noblit, 2009). What is their conclusion? That culturally responsive pedagogy and positive racial identity can play major roles in promoting academic achievement and resilience. On the other hand, what might be called a hyper-assimilationist mindset within an ostensibly patriotic-national-identity policy framework disparages and discourages students’ pan-ethnic identification with cultural heritage and identity groups beyond the U.S. borders—whether Africanity, Indigeneity, or “Raza” identity and consciousness are involved (Ravitch, 1990). Notwithstanding the important emphasis on “making the political more pedagogical” and mobilizing “collective outrage and collective action,” promoting students’ group or racial/ethnic identity is also not a primary task for critical pedagogy. According to Giroux (2012) critical pedagogy is about “transforming knowledge as part of a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice” (emphasis added). Arizona’s HB 2261 law frames the problem differently; it “prohibits . . . courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the United States Government or promote resentment toward a race or class of people” (Thorne, 2010). This claim that curriculum that connects students to their heritages necessarily promotes racial resentment has not been the focus of any systematic research of which I am aware but this ideological position clearly affects education policy and the problem these policies frame that need research applications. On the other hand, policy attempts to establish more truthful (and valid) curricula have gained little traction in educational practice or among researchers. In the last decade state-level legislation in the U.S. such as Florida’s Statute 1003.42(h), Title XLVIII of the Education Code, § “Required Instruction,”2 as well as the Amistad Commissions established by the New Jersey Department of State in 2002, the New York State Department of Education in 2005, and the Illinois State Department of Education in 2004,3 illustrate curriculum policies that require the teaching of African American history, particularly African enslavement, in public schools. Florida law emphasizes teaching about the African heritage before enslavement (e.g., “the history of African Americans, including the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery”). Likewise, a district-level policy in Philadelphia mandated African American history as a high school graduation requirement since the

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1970s. However, Traoré (2009) observed that Black Studies “intervention” is required because the mandate remains largely unfulfilled: “Many students of African descent still struggle to be reconnected to the rich African traditions from which they originated” (p. 663). As compared to these faltering policy interventions, the recent controversial policy decision that bans the Mexican American studies program in Tucson high schools is opposed by advocates of the program on the grounds of evidence of positive impacts of this transformative curriculum for Mexican American students’ motivation, learning, and educational attainment (Lacey, 2011). Yet such positive evidence is generally not widely known or cited. In Brazil, on the other hand, the Black Movement has succeeded in securing a national policy making the teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian culture and heritage a requirement at every level of the education system (Gonçalves e Silva, 2005; King et al., 2011). In the U.S. the fear that transformative curricula that permit students to “enjoy” their cultural heritage and develop group-based racial identities will inevitably produce racial resentment and rage may reflect the impending minority status of White Americans (Wise, 2012) but is also not to be dismissed outof-hand. My research team and I are also engaging parents in collaborative research on culturally authentic assessments to identify their standards regarding what (and how) their students should be learning about their heritage (King, Goss, & McArthur, 2014). As we discussed the fifth-grade historical novel, Nightjohn (Paulsen, 1995), which deals with issues like a 12-year-old girl waiting to be sent to the “slave-breeding shack,” one parent commented that she feels “enraged all over again” any time she watches films like Roots. However, she also talked about the importance of taking her children on civil rights marches so they can appreciate the sacrifices their ancestors made for them. What is needed is serious investigation of the healing potential of transformative curriculum interventions, as Traoré (2009) documented in her research in the Philadelphia public schools: tensions between African American and African immigrant students dissipated when they learned together about their shared heritage. This curriculum praxis has potential to be used to address inter-group and intra-group relations among Asian, Black (African American, African, Caribbean), Native American, and Latino/a students. How would Black students (U.S.-born and from Caribbean nations) treat Haitian immigrant students (who are called names like H.B.O. – “Haitian Body Odor”), if they knew the real story of the Haitian revolution (King, 2011)? How would African American and Mexican American students relate to each other if they knew the larger story of the African presence in Mexico (not only the standard master narrative that the Aztecs committed “human sacrifice” and Africans “sold their own brothers and sisters into slavery”)? How would White students appreciate their own anti-racist heritage if they knew more about John Brown’s collaboration with free African Americans (DuBois, 1909/2001; King, 1992, 2006). How

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would all students understand humanity’s debt to Africa if Africa’s impoverishment was truthfully explained and if African American history did not begin with the truncated representation of slavery but with Africa’s gifts to world (King, 1991, 1992; Wynter, 2005; Wynter & King, 2010)? Such questions suggest an important role for Black Studies in the preparation of educators at all levels and education researchers, who need to be able to critically assess the policy frameworks within which we produce our research, that is, what counts as improvements for teaching and learning and what purportedly serves the public good. The transformative research and action agenda that AERA’s Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE) formulated is a useful resource for this deciphering task. This agenda also accords with the human rights/cultural well-being policy framework presented in this chapter. AERA endorsed the CORIBE agenda in 2001 and published it in its landmark volume Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century (King, 2005). The Commission (CORIBE) recommended: s

0UBLICPOLICYDEVELOPMENTINFORMEDBYINTERNATIONALCOMPARATIVERESEARCH that enhances the education, survival, and advancement of African descent peoples. This includes: s

s s

!SSESSINGTHEIMPACTOF!FRICANLANGUAGE CULTUREANDHERITAGESTUDYIN motivating student effort and engagement as well as teacher knowledge and development in various African and Diaspora contexts. %XAMININGANDSUPPORTINGWAYSPEOPLEOF!FRICANDESCENTRESISTDOMInation and societal exclusion. )NVESTIGATING THE EXTENT TO WHICH SCHOLARS OF !FRICAN DESCENT WHO embrace a cultural orientation and resistance in their work experience role strain and scholarly alienation, and promoting research that addresses ways to alleviate this problem. (King, 2005, p. 355)

The latter recommendation remains especially timely given recent rancorous public and scholarly discourse supporting policy frameworks that contest or ignore students’ human right to education for cultural well-being (King, 2008, 2010, 2011; King & Swartz, 2014). Discussing each of these recommendations is beyond the scope of this chapter, but one example is worthy of mention. For two years, a team of my doctoral students at Georgia State University (and one community teacher) developed and implemented an after-school program for Black middle-school students called the Songhoy Club. This program doubles as both supplemental academic instruction and as a pedagogy lab for pan-ethnic (African) identity and consciousness, or Diaspora Literacy, within a cultural well-being research paradigm (King, 1992; King, Goss, & McArthur, 2014). The transformative curriculum and pedagogical approach that shapes the Songhoy Club was first developed as a CORIBE Demonstration

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Research Project in 2000 that produced multi-media online Songhoy language lessons (www.coribe.org). Students (and participating parents) learn about the Songhoy Empire, which encompassed ten modern African nations, as a cosmopolitan civilization, one in which many ethnic groups shared a common language and African heritage. For example, the UNESCO General History of Africa reports that the administrative structure of the empire included a ministry of White Foreigners and Minorities—the Korei Farma (Cissoko, 1984, p. 198; Maiga, 2010, p. 143). The Songhoy Club implements a powerful feature of Songhoy language that Malian education researcher, Hassimi Maiga, and I discovered some years ago: Songhoy-senni (the language) illustrates extraordinarily positive meanings of Blackness in (African) Songhoy culture (Maiga, 1996/2003, 2005) that are enormously healing with regard to the wounds of white supremacy racism that are deeply embedded in our language and culture.4 Contrary to the way conceptual Blackness (e.g., “black sheep,” “black lie,” “behind the 8-ball,” etc.) functions as the “alter ego” (Wynter, 2006) of conceptual whiteness (“little white lie”) in our consciousness, in the Songhoy language, Blackness is extremely positive (Wayne bibbi: Black sun; Hari bibbi: Black water, etc.). An interactive multimedia lesson on the CORIBE website demonstrates this liberating cultural phenomenon (see www.coribe.org).5 When students experience the deep understanding of the African worldview that is part of their heritage through Songhoy language and culture study, they begin to feel relieved of the “burden” of “Blackness” as it has been distorted in this society. As one student, who was a real “challenge,” wrote in the Songhoy Club collective book: “The few weeks I was in Songhoy I learned to respect others, respect myself and to give off positive energy.” This is an innovative use of research on heritage language and Heritage Knowledge for African descent students (King, 2006). The implications for Black education throughout the diaspora (Canada, the Caribbean, the U.K. as well as Latin America) deserve further study. However, predominate conceptualizations of “what is wrong” with Black students (everywhere) within deficit policy frameworks do not fit this pan-ethnic identity diaspora studies research paradigm (Drake, 1982). Fortunately, the Songhoy Club is able to use the innovative Songhoy lessons that CORIBE developed and that AERA has maintained on its web server. The Songhoy Club is also using new interactive iPad learning tools that incorporate original research on Songhoy language and culture (Maiga, 2010) as curriculum resources, e.g., a highly interactive multimedia game based on Songhoy indigenous writing (ideograms) used before the Arab or European presence in the area (King, 2014). The Songhoy Club is also a site for youth-led research focused on African American Heritage Knowledge, which the young people contribute to and can then incorporate into supplemental digital curriculum materials that teachers and parents can access online. This application of transformative Black Studies curriculum and pedagogical

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praxis offers new possibilities for knowledge production and uses of research that are responsive to connections that researchers have established between academic achievement and identity (Nasir, 2012; Wakefield & Hudley, 2007) and forms of miseducation African descent people share in common (King, 2005). As a research training site for doctoral students, the Songhoy Club also provides an antidote to “scholarly alienation” in the academy, which my doctoral students and I have documented (King, Goss, & McArthur, 2014). Scholars (and teachers) who equate “equality” with assimilation and “colorblindness” dismiss the idea that Black (and Latino/a) students can benefit from such educational experiences that connect them with their African heritage and identity. In fact there are a number of intersections among diverse students that can be explored in transformative curriculum research (Anae, 2006; Cuevas, 2004; Horne, 2005). Nor do those holding this view, including some Black teachers, understand how U.S. society might benefit from Black people’s development along these lines (Semmes, 1981). A teacher in an “urban education” program dismissed a presentation I made on the subject this way: “Why should I talk to my Black students about their African heritage when some of them don’t even know who their daddies are?” One reason is that research and practice show positive benefits of such identity development for Black student achievement (King, Akua, & Russell, 2014). The way Africa and the Black experience and culture are normally taught, however, institutionalizes a dangerously incomplete conception of what it means to be African and what it means to be human, which obstructs Black students’ opportunities to identify with their heritage. Others are denied opportunities to grasp fully the implications of the degradation of Blackness for society and their own well-being. The White, Latino/a, Asian, Native American, and immigrant teachers and school leaders in my classes at Georgia State University also learn to appreciate the deep wounds in their own identities and consciousness caused by the fictions of white supremacy racism (Asante, 2009; Jensen, 2005). In nations with a shared history of African enslavement as well as different, though arguably similar, legacies of anti-black racism, people of African descent globally and the researchers who intend to produce useful knowledge to improve education need not only policy frameworks for educational equity and national unity but also truthful curriculum and culturally competent teachers in order to develop forms of identity and consciousness to overcome centuries of racial injustice. This chapter is a reminder that AERA’s landmark Black Education volume (King, 2005), which embodies the U.N. human rights convention’s conception of education and cultural well-being, is a resource that can serve broadly to advance such a policy framework to promote more culturally democratic research and curriculum praxis nationally and internationally.

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Notes 1 This chapter is a substantially revised version of a grant proposal developed with K. L. Buras, Georgia State University, which was further developed as an invited presidential essay published on the American Educational Research Association website (www. aera.net) in 2007. 2 Retrieved February 2, 2007, from www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm/Ch0499/ index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=1000-1099/1003/ Sections/1003.42.html. 3 See, for example, the New Jersey Amistad Commission and the American Institute for History Education online interactive textbook: http://njamistadcurriculum.org/. It is worth noting that New York’s Commission is “stalled.” Retrieved February 8, 2007, from www.bnyee.org/blackhistorynow.htm,. The Illinois Amistad Commission is now defunct. 4 Psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing documented the fear and antipathy toward Blackness in her “Cress Theory of Color Confrontation” (Welsing, 1989, 1991). 5 On the CORIBE website, see Demonstration Research Projects: Songhoy Lessons: “The People Who Could Fly.”

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Merry, M. S., & New, W. (2008, November). Constructing an authentic self: The challenges and promise of African-centered pedagogy. American Journal of Education, 115(1), 35–64. Nasir, N. (2012). Racialized identities: Race and achievement among African American youth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nasir, N., & Hand, V. (2005). Exploring sociocultural perspectives on race, culture, and learning. Review of Educational Research, 76(4), 449–475. Oyserman, D., Harrison, K., & Bybee, D. (2001). Can racial identity be promotive of academic efficacy? International Journal of Behavioral Development, 25(4), 379–385. Paulsen, G. (1995). NightJohn. New York: Doubleday. Ravitch, D. (1990). Diversity and democracy. American Educator, 14(1), 16–20ff. Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books. Schneider, M. K. (2014). A chronicle of echoes: Who’s who in the implosion of American public education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Semmes, C. E. (1981). Foundations of an Afrocentric social science: Implications for curriculum-building, theory, and research in Black Studies. Journal of Black Studies, 12(1), 3–17. Smith-Maddox, R. (1998). Defining culture as a dimension of academic achievement: Implications for a culturally responsive curriculum, instruction and assessment. The Journal of Negro Education, 67(3), 302–317. Spring, J. (2013). Common Core: A story of school terrorism. North Charleston, SC: Create Space Independent Publishing. Thorne, A. (2010, May 13). Arizona ends divisive Chicano studies in schools. National Association of Scholars Newsletter. Retrieved February 12, 2012, from www.nas.org/ polArticles.cfm?doc_id_1321. Traoré, R. (2009). More than 30 years later: Intervention for African American Studies required. Journal of Black Studies, 38(4), 663–378. Wakefield, W. D., & Hudley, C. (2007). Ethnic and racial identity and adolescent wellbeing. Theory Into Practice, 46(2), 147–154. Welsing, F. C. (1989). The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation and Racism (white supremacy): A psycho-genetic theory and world outlook. Washington, D.C.: C-R Publishers. Welsing, F. C. (1991). The Isis papers: The keys to the colors. Chicago: Third World Press. Wise, T. (2012). Dear white America: Letters to a new minority. San Francisco: City Lights. Woodson, C. G. (2000). The mis-education of the Negro. Chicago: African American Images. (Original work published in 1933). Wynter, S. (2005). Race and our biocentric belief system: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. In J. E. King (Ed.), Black Education: A transformative research and action agenda for the new century (pp. 361–366). Mahwah, NJ: Routledge. Wynter, S. (2006). On how we mistook the map for the territory, and re-imprisoned ourselves in our unbearable wrongness of being, of désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project. In L. R. Gordon & J. A. Gordon (Eds.), Not only the master’s tools: African American Studies in theory and practice (pp. 85–106). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Wynter, S. (1992/2012). “Do not call us negroes.” How “multicultural” textbooks perpetuate racism (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Aspire. Wynter, S., & King, J. E. (2010, April). Freedom dreaming in the urban south: After Katrina and the scape-goating of teachers as the new “Welfare Queens,” re-imagining human freedom. A conversation with Sylvia Wynter. Paper/Video presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, New Orleans, LA.

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Introduction I first came across the construct of Cultural Knowledge in the work of Beverly Gordon. I thought it was very powerful as a way of locating the problem I was having—of naming what was not working in the classroom. I came up in the 1960s and went to graduate school in the early 1970s, when the deficit model prevailed. Moving from culturally deprived to the consideration of Cultural Knowledge was an incredible shift. Since then, I have worked on a better understanding of how to use that construct in teacher preparation and in my own research, and I have been deeply satisfied. I have experienced joy and a kind of liberation by being able to explore the reality of Cultural Knowledge in community practices. So, the notion that knowledge is only in the university or in books is expanded with the concept of Cultural Knowledge as present in the community—in the lives, understanding, and wisdom of people who may or may not have been formally educated. This has been very liberating for me. Another person whose work was helpful early on was Jean Anyon. When I was teaching back in the early 1980s, she published her study about curricular knowledge and how it is class-based. So, for example, when we look at texts and consider knowledge that is represented in them, that is a part of Cultural Knowledge that can be learned. Looking at the knowledge that people like me embody when we represent our community in institutions and in the academy is another part of Cultural Knowledge—unless, of course, the process of education has eradicated or annihilated it. The idea of assimilation is that you become educated in another body, not only in a body of knowledge, but in another actual body. You walk differently; you present a different way of being. So Cultural Knowledge provides an opportunity for you to be your own self.

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However, if you want to succeed in the mainstream society, whether in the academy or at work, there is a process whereby you are supposed to know and become like those representatives of that regime. This body of knowledge is like the coin of the realm. It’s what gives you access, but the psychological damage is tremendous.

Cultural Knowledge/Excellence/Assessment The cutting edge with respect to Cultural Knowledge is to provide examples of this construct in action, particularly with respect to assessment. When I experienced my first examples, I realized that assessment is where we need to be because people will marginalize Cultural Knowledge simply by saying, “Well, yeah, it’s fine that you know that, but you can’t assess it. And even if you can assess it, the kinds of assessments that really count now are standardized tests.” What is clear to me is that the notion of Cultural Knowledge goes along with cultural excellence, meaning that there is a way in which you want to master your own culture at a level of excellence so that you grow and evolve. You can speak a language that is your language, but not be able to articulate or explain your own cultural artifacts. There is everyday knowledge and practice, and then there’s the higher level or classical expression of it, which comes through conscious contemplation and study. About five or six years ago, maybe longer, I had an experience that has helped to think about assessment and cultural excellence. Sylvia Wynter had a two-day conference in which she brought together intellectuals, academics, and some of her students who had been working with her for many years. The conference was called “The Two Reservations.” It was focused on the work of Harold Cruse, particularly his book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. It’s a challenging book. There is so much in it that you can wonder if you really understand what this man is saying. So, Harold Cruse was there. There were other luminaries, the big names in academia participating alongside the students. The mix of people included professors and graduate and undergraduate students—all from different places. One student was accompanied by his father. People presented conventional academic papers, but there was a kind of camaraderie and the students were like young investigators going around interviewing their elders. I remember Carlos Moore, the Cuban exile who has translated some of Cheikh Anta Diop’s work and who has lived outside of Cuba for almost 30 years. His presentation had to do with the global reality of the crisis of the African intellectual. So, imagine two days of this really stimulating talk with Cruse himself present and commenting on people’s comments—the energy was just high. The last day of the conference, I remember Carlos coming in and saying, “Oh, God these students kept me up until 4:00 this morning talking to me. Oh,

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I’m just tired.” We were on the top level of a big amphitheater and I was sitting next to Carlos, Clyde Taylor, and others who had made presentations. The students took the floor; they went up to the stage and said that they had a plenary presentation to make. There were five or six undergraduate students with drums on stage, performing an improvised rap they had begun to put together that morning, which was also being created as they performed. Their rap was a synthesis of everything that had been presented at the conference. So, when somebody’s paper or theme was touched on in the performance, you could see that person down in the audience just jump like electricity was going through the room. Each person knew what she or he had presented, but to have it come back to you creatively, artistically—as a piece of art that you’ve got to understand at a higher level—that’s the excellence I’m talking about. So that’s the first example of Cultural Knowledge that I thought about. It is related to performance, which is a big piece of how we “be.” That’s why you see the music, the sports, public speaking, and preaching, and so many cultural forms of expression that are performance-based. Gloria Ladson-Billings wrote an article about effective Black teachers as performers. Performance is an authentic example of Black people’s cultural excellence—so, it can be authentically assessed. It’s not an abstraction or an approximation of an experience. It’s holistic; all modalities are present, and the energy of creativity is released. Thus, it is also not controlled and predictable. To see these students perform the thematic content of the conference was just astounding to me. It was a brilliant performance, and it was obvious that they understood the content. What could make you feel better than to know that you were understood through a heart-filled presentation, especially about a topic that you care about and felt challenged by? This was the electricity going through the theater. The four of us were sitting at the very top, and when the performers hit Carlos, he jumped. I’m not expecting to jump myself, but then they hit my piece, and I just marveled at their genius. In terms of assessment, there needs to be space in the debate around standards for considering the state-mandated standards as the minimum, and using Cultural Knowledge to create opportunities for the expression of cultural excellence, thus creating a higher standard. There are other examples of this in the research base, such as the work of Carol Lee. She uses African American rhetorical forms like the Dozens to teach students to understand the complexities of literature, which she demonstrates through empirical research. Bob Moses has an “African Drums and Ratios” curriculum project that includes African drumming to teach algebra, which also creates a higher standard of learning. The project’s curriculum developer went to Africa and studied with master drummers for a year, so that when he returned he was able to incorporate traditional rhythms into his math curriculum. The students who are involved in the project go far beyond the rudimentary level of completing worksheets and taking

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paper-and-pencil tests. Thus, mastering subject matter within your own cultural context represents a higher standard—one that is more genuine and meaningful, and one that allows you to bring more of your self to the task. Now we know that there is little interest in this type of genuineness and genius in the current educational regime, but the Algebra Project is based on the premise that the way to change is through what Moses calls “the demand side of the equation.” He parallels his project with a strategy of the civil rights movement. Civil rights workers helped people registered in Southern states so that the myth that African American people did not want to vote was destroyed by the efforts people were making to register. It was through their struggle to register, and in some cases their death, that this lie was exposed. Bob Moses knows that learning math has to be at this level and with this kind of engagement, which means working on the “demand side”— that is to get the students to demand the kind of learning that matches their potential. There’s also an organizing element to the Algebra Project, which is essential for any type of change movement in urban schools. We saw this in an Afrikaner education. It’s only when someone identifies and represents the possibility of an alternative that the mobilization of desire can support the reality of that alternative. So, teachers, have to say, “I’m not satisfied assessing my students this way.” Parents have to say, “This test doesn’t measure our children’s abilities. They can finish with that test and they need to go on.” It’s not the regime that sets the expectation; it is your own liberated sense of what is possible that creates cultural excellence. Now, where will this intensified work happen? It can happen at home, it can happen in the church, it can happen on Saturday, and it can happen in the classroom. And, just like Kwanzaa, once it is happening, the regime will come looking for it. I have used the construct of Cultural Knowledge in preparing teachers because there is no doubt that it is essential to effective teaching in urban schools. When preservice teachers, especially White teachers, come to teaching with very little experience and knowledge about other cultures, they quickly recognize that there are other realities that they have been deprived of, and they begin to make choices. It becomes a litmus test: Do you want to work in a new way or do you want to work in the old way? Exposure to Cultural Knowledge represents an opportunity for new teachers to make different choices. I’ve also used the construct of Cultural Knowledge in community-based education and in research settings in which I’m organizing with parents and others in the community. Some parents come in thinking that what they need to do is to decorate the teachers’ lunchroom to help teachers feel better about teaching their children. (You know, “Let’s welcome teachers and tell them that we are supporting them.”), as opposed to being able to conceptualize and contribute to what kind of learning what kind of learning is going on in the

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classroom. Working in the community becomes another opportunity to work toward a different notion of education. Yet, I’m a little worried about the formulaic way that we have begun to think about Cultural Knowledge. I use Wade Boykin’s concept of nine dimensions of African American expression and Molefi Asante’s concept of cultural centering to make the point that there is a cultural reality that’s identifiable, but I’m not sure that we have an accurate reading on where we are today in terms of our families and our living cultural practices. The construct of Cultural Knowledge needs to be studied to see what is really happening because culture is not static; it changes, and things are moving very fast today. Current popular culture does not represent the total reality of African American life and experience. For instance, popular music like hip-hop and rap illustrates the corporate media’s manipulation of youthful African American cultural expression that is being used for other people’s purposes. Popular culture forms of “urban” or Black expressive style have also become global commodities that are disconnected from the reality of our continuing social and economic oppression. Young people confuse “ghetto fabulous” consumerism that is so aggressively displayed in the media and in the behavior of superstar personalities with real liberation and cultural excellence in the interests of our human development. So, who is doing research from a perspective that would increase our knowledge and understanding of our concrete or object conditions? For example, how do young people recognize Wade Boykin’s nine dimensions (which are 20 years old, yet represent timeless values and qualities of African cultural existence) in their own way of being and doing? What forms of representation might those nine dimensions take today as an intergenerational distillation of cultural expression? While Cultural Knowledge is a given, we need more study of its current forms and how they are threaded to our identities, our cultural history and our potential as human beings. The need for this research is fundamental. My daughter Yetunde is involved in community outreach projects with her students in the community where she teaches. As I attempt to assist her, I want to know that the assistance I am giving is relevant to where the community actually is today. If there’s something new going on, I need to learn about it from conversations with parents, teachers, and students. That’s a way of being oriented by the Cultural Knowledge construct, as opposed to seeing it as something you pull off the shelf and tell people about as though they’re getting ready for a visit to a foreign land (“Oh, this is something you might see on the tour”). Cultural Knowledge needs to inform our every waking moment in order to understand whom we are working with and whom we are working for.

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Education for What? If Cultural Knowledge is embodied in our teaching practices or our research, then we’re working with students from a standpoint of the cultural reality that they can learn to produce rather than consume knowledge—to be liberated as opposed to positioned as empty vessels or approximations of humans (what Sylvia Wynter calls the “mode of the human” in the dominant regime) (Scott, 2000). So, as consumers of knowledge, students are lacking and deficient. The knowledge they are consuming is the mechanism of their assimilation. They are brought into the regime as an approximation; they can’t really be the total being that they are because they are always attempting to be adequate. That’s the deficiency model, and that’s what keeps us off base. It’s not just students of color; it’s everybody, because the essence of the dominant regime is to tell everybody that they are inadequate. Otherwise, you have no reason to consume. So you consume in order to make up for what’s missing. If you are White, there’s something wrong with your color and you need a tan. If you have straight hair, you need curly hair—and so on. You always need something you don’t have. You are never okay. You always have to purchase something, or try to rectify something, correct some defect. And this applies to knowledge. How can you be a producer of knowledge if you are deficient? Deficient people don’t produce, and it wouldn’t be valued if they did. So, without the grounding of Cultural Knowledge, children can become convinced at an early age that their purpose is to consume the knowledge of others. Consumption of knowledge is inherent in the mode of being human that has now become the dominant regime for the world—an extension of colonial domination that has constructed this modern world. When it comes to effective and learning in urban schools, teachers need to be able to create a context for Cultural Knowledge in the classroom. But teachers aren’t a homogeneous group. Their identities an individual life experiences vary, and there is a wide range of where teachers are as learners with respect to knowledge about culture. However, bringing Cultural Knowledge into the classroom is critical because it answers the question, “Education for what?” If it’s education for assimilation, then students must internalize the Cultural Knowledge of the regime. If it’s education for liberation, Cultural Knowledge becomes a resource for unlocking your own potential and that of your students.

Conclusion I recently taught a class with adult community students who come together in a study group because they want to know more about the Cultural Knowledge of the African American experience. I put an empty chair in the front of the classroom and I said:

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Imagine that you are sitting in this chair. What’s in you is part of the curriculum for this course, not just what’s on the syllabus or in the textbook. You are also the subject matter for the course. So where you begin is with yourself. Cultural Knowledge supports this centering of students, and in so doing, creates pathways to cultural excellence, which is educational excellence.

Reference Scott, D. (2000, September). The re-enchantment of humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe, 8, 119–207.

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11 “THANK YOU FOR OPENING OUR MINDS” On Praxis, Transmutation, and Black Studies in Teacher Development

Introduction A schema is “a mental codification of experience that includes a particular organized way of perceiving cognitively and responding to a complex situation or set of stimuli” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary). Santa Clara University (SCU) teacher education program graduates often describe the intellectual, professional, and personal development they experience during the program as “opening” their minds. This aptly describes the focus of my teaching in a foundations course sequence and student teaching seminars (from 1982 to 1994) on enabling credential candidates to change the cognitive and affective schemata that limit their understanding of and commitment to the possibilities of transformative teaching. This chapter illustrates modes of narrative inquiry and selfreflective, experiential learning processes that constitute a praxis of transmutation of cognitive and affective schemata. This praxis, or “practical-critical activity” (Kilminster, 1979, p. 20), in my courses is designed to bring about changes in the intellectual, emotional, social, and professional development of teacher candidates.1 The term praxis denotes more self-consciously reflexive teaching processes and learning experiences than the term practice suggests (p. 17). A reflexive process changes as the knowledge, thinking, and abilities of the students change (Carr & Kemmis, 1986) and thus has the capacity to enable new forms of competence. The grounding of this praxis in a Black Studies theoretical perspective also is discussed. “Black Studies is critical and corrective of the inadequacies, omissions and distortions of traditional white studies” (Karenga, 1993, p. 18). The discipline’s theoretical perspective consists of an epistemological critique of school knowledge and practices that transcends multicultural approaches. Wynter’s (1995)

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application of this conceptual paradigm deciphers the cultural rules governing the “symbolic representational systems” and the “conceptual-cognitive categories” (p. 13) of the social order that govern (and limit) our thought and behavior. This includes the roles of conceptual “Blackness” and “whiteness” in our society (King, 1995; Morrison, 1992). Thus, Wynter’s (1992) “deciphering practice” of Black Studies aims to advance human freedom from the “specific perceptual-cognitive processes by which we know our reality” (Wynter, 1995, p. 13).

Interrogating Ideology and Identity Schemata Student teachers usually begin the program without any critical comprehension of societal injustice (King, 1991) or awareness of the constitutive role of teachers, schooling, and school knowledge in the production of school failure and the reproduction of inequity. Teacher candidates usually have not recognized or reflected critically upon the ideological quality of their knowledge and their own miseducation and alienation from the struggle for justice; they have no concrete understanding of or commitment to teaching for change (King, 1991). Social Foundations of Education and Interpersonal/Cross-Cultural Communications—courses taught fall and winter quarters, respectively—address the educational ideology and identity schemata of credential candidates that often include the beliefs that: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

They are either “conservative” (or “liberal”) and that “liberalism” (or “conservatism”) is suspect; there are no viable alternatives to these positions; and their particular outlook is the result of their own choosing. “Whiteness” is not itself a conceptual category but is normative and is tantamount to “We the people,” that is being an American; being an American means being “just like us” (them); and assimilation is an unquestioned aspiration of diverse (non-White and non-middle class or affluent) “others” and is the normal goal of teachers. Schools are benevolent and beneficent institutions; schools are the way elementary credential candidates remembered them when they “played school” as children; their own schooling experience is typical, so schools must, therefore, provide access to the “good life” for all. “The American Dream” is a reality and continuing possibility for all individuals who work hard enough; education is the route to a good job; the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned, or jobless have merely to put forth the right kind of effort to benefit from the meritocracy. The children they will teach love teachers who “love children” as they do; or adolescents will love their subjects as secondary teachers do. Emphasizing cultural dimensions of learning and recognizing students’ racial and ethnic identities constitute acts of prejudice; and racism and prejudice

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are characteristic of “human nature,” so teachers should avoid enacting such prejudice. An African American teacher education professor who teaches about “white privilege” (McIntosh, 1989) and distinguishes between prejudice and racism as “power plus prejudice” (Rothenberg, 1988, p. 6), for instance, or a Mexican American professor who teaches about the benefits of bilingual education and community agency are anti-White, biased, selfinterested, and possibly anti-American. Teachers (including teacher education professors) who question any of these beliefs are necessarily indoctrinating students.

Not every student holds these beliefs, or holds them to the same extent; nor do all respond to the courses in the same way or change their beliefs. The praxis that I developed while teaching at SCU addresses the limited cognitiveperceptual ability of credential candidates to question basic assumptions about self, society, and cultural difference, as well as their willingness to engage in socially transforming teaching. Informal interviews with practitioners and graduates, and exit interviews affirm the significance of the pedagogical praxis demonstrated here.

A Pedagogical Response to Miseducation and Dysconsciousness Biased and distorted knowledge in the academic disciplines and school texts that reflects the “representational or cultural system” (Wynter, 1995) of the social order contributes to the miseducation of the relatively privileged class (King, 1991). Elsewhere (King, 1991) I have defined the “limited and distorted understandings my students have about inequity and cultural diversity” (p. 134) as “dysconsciousness.” This term refers to “an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given” (p. 134). Dysconsciousness, therefore, “involves a subjective identification with an ideological viewpoint that admits no fundamentally alternative vision” (p. 135) of either self, teaching, or society. It is a form of thought that not only reflects a lack of critical judgment against society and schooling as well as a lack of “social ethics” (Cox, 1974) but also is closely tied to self-identities and emergent professional identities that include emotionally aberrant responses to cultural diversity. The praxis described in this chapter is a pedagogical response to miseducation and dysconsciousness that enables me to model consciously the relevance of culture for learning. My approach avoids dogmatism and disrespect for students, especially those who have had little opportunity to analyze the cultural system in which they have been socialized, to experience the strengths of diversity, or to question their own miseducation and cultural encapsulation. For example, SCU credential candidates often view themselves as homogeneously “White”

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or “White-identified” culturally) and middle class, if not affluent. Writing on critical pedagogy that focuses on liberating the “oppressed” does not address the needs of these students. However, “reading the word” and the “world” in my courses involves students in examining their own knowledge, assumptions, life experiences, educational ideology, and teaching philosophy. This praxis facilitates recognition that the school/academic knowledge as well as the personal and Cultural Knowledge that students bring into the classroom, including their ethnic, racial, and gender identity, and so forth, can and should inform teachers’ judgment about what needs to be taught and how, what students need to learn and why. This pedagogical response to dysconsciousness and miseducation is grounded in a Black Studies theoretical perspective.

Using a Black Studies Theoretical Perspective Black Studies recognizes a dialectical link between intellectual and socio-political emancipation and is ethically committed to knowledge for human freedom from the social domination of ideas as well as institutional structures. Thus, Black Studies “challenges the interests the dominant ideology conceals in myths about ‘we the people’ ” (King, 1992, p. 321). The Social Foundations of Education course embodies the Black Studies theoretical approach to knowledge and social change by focusing on the practical-critical comprehension of society and alternatives to the complicity of educators in the reproduction of societal injustice (Cagan, 1978; Kozol, 1975; MacLeod, 1992; Weiler, 1988). Credential candidates analyze certain cognitive perceptual categories, such as their understanding of “ideology,” the “American Dream,” the social interests of school knowledge, the social purposes of education, and so on. Candidates are assessed in terms of their ability to reflect critically upon perceptions and beliefs about social and educational inequality and to articulate their own philosophy of education taking this self-reflective analysis into account in their teaching practice. In Interpersonal/Cross-Cultural Communications credential candidates further examine and extend their awareness of self and society in relation to teaching (e.g., beliefs and assumptions about racism, sexism, and culture). The focus is on the relevance of culture and cultural competence for effective classroom communication, using community resources, selecting instructional content, and goals for students’ cognitive and affective development, particularly in diverse classrooms. Candidates are assessed in terms of their ability to develop and demonstrate informed empathy, that is, an understanding of the effects of white supremacy/racism on themselves as well as on diverse “others.”

Theory-Practice Linkages Course assignments in field placements in contrasting wealthy, suburban, and predominantly White versus racially, socioeconomically, and linguistically

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diverse schools complement the theoretical perspectives presented and student learning in the foundations courses. For example, at a middle school for “newcomers” Mexican American junior high students challenged a Mexican American student teacher to accept his own identity before they were willing to accept him and learn from him. In fact, his “crew cut” made him appear to be Asian American. In a class project on cross-cultural communication, he incorporated this experience and his understanding of the difference between his experience growing up as “the only one” in an affluent white community and their “newcomer” experience of becoming the (unwanted, if not despised) “majority” in an English-only political climate. The theoretical focus on understanding the “black-white” dynamic in society and how the racial hierarchy affects other groups was also a factor in his ability to address these issues and to understand their relevance to student learning and development (including his own).

Modes of (Self ) Narrative Inquiry We use narrative inquiry as a mode of student learning that engages credential candidates in thinking critically about their cognitive and affective schemata in relation to their teaching practice. These schemata include narratives or stories that shape and are shaped by the way they perceive self, society, and others, and often are based on their lived experience under white supremacy/racism. Various modes of narrative inquiry (film analysis, reading fiction, writing personal essays, and guided reflective journal writing/dialogues with me, etc.) help them to recognize unacknowledged societal contradictions (Cagan, 1978, p. 244) and societal myths, and to decipher the narratives they carry in their minds and bodies.2 For example, students have revealed traumas and crises of identity—which are apparently personal but have a social basis—that influence their idea of teaching, their responses to diversity, and in some cases their resistance to the SCU program’s emphasis. One White woman student shared painful memories of being called “Nigger Coon” as a child because she had “frizzy” blond hair (before she “discovered mousse”). After reacting the novel Donald Duk (Chin, 1991), about a Chinese American boy who hated being Chinese until he learned to value his heritage, another credential candidate developed lessons to help students affirm their ethnic and racial identity—an approach he initially opposed. In guided journal reflections on the novel, the student teacher discussed how he, like the character Donald Duk, grew up hating his Italian name and feeling ashamed because his immigrant parents spoke only Italian. That his experience and aspiration to assimilate were not exactly the same as Donald Duk’s, however, because of the way racism works in our society, was a significant realization. Still another student, who also criticized the focus in my courses, eventually admitted that she harbored a deep fear of Black students after

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attending inner-city schools on the east coast where she grew up. The following are examples of generative concepts, themes, and practical-critical learning experiences in the two foundations courses that extend narrative inquiry and self-reflection toward cognitive and affective cross-cultural competence and teaching skills.

Generative Course Concepts and Course Themes The praxis of transmutation is an ethically imperative pedagogical process. Generative concepts, themes, and questions used to guide critical reflection and analyses model social justice teaching for change (Center for Economic Conversion, 1992; Wolf-Wasserman & Hutchinson, 1978). A central generative theme in the Social Foundations of Education that reflects the Black Studies theoretical perspective is drawn from Kozol’s (1975) passionate declaration of the ethical obligations of teachers: “Education is not . . . neutral” (p. 108). Other concepts elaborate this theme and focus analytical attention on the social purposes of schooling, educational ideologies and philosophies, and hidden curriculum (Vallence, 1977); school indoctrination (Anyon, 1979; Kozol, 1975); the “IQ myth,” teacher expectations (Rist, 1970), and teacher socialization, organizational change and school reform; and the social interests of the curriculum and economic exploitation. Films, such as The Business of America, illustrate unacknowledged contradictions in the notion of “meritocracy,” for instance. Such course material juxtaposes the reality of economic exploitation with the ideal of the “American Dream” and its limits, even for White Americans who have become victims of de-industrialization. Reading Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (1991) provides what for some students is shocking evidence of the reality of societal injustice.

Individualism Versus Collectivism Cagan’s (1978) essay “Individualism, Collectivism, and Radical Educational Reform” is a pivotal course reading in Social Foundations of Education that explores connections between social justice and education. Contrasting socialism and capitalism, it suggests that socialist education and the value of cooperation and altruism are needed alternatives to competitive individualism and the U.S. value system. Cagan argues that true freedom and individuality are possible only through participation in a human community. The author also critiques the cycles of radical and liberal school reform in the 1960s and 1970s that “failed to consider that education under capitalism has an essentially undemocratic function—the perpetuation of social inequities and the ideologies that rationalize them” (p. 244). Cagan suggests that radical school reformers must define their work as part of a larger political movement that seeks to change society as well as the schools. Reading and discussing this material introduce students to a

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critical conception of teaching for change that transcends the dualism of liberal versus conservative sociopolitical and educational approaches. Also, through observations and analyses of ethnographic research on school change, candidates examine changing rationales and social purposes of schooling and school reform. The course returns to the generative theme of teachers’ responsibilities as change agents in greater depth in the work of Giroux and McLaren (1986), MacLeod (1992), and Weiler (1988).

Ideology, Hegemony, and School Knowledge During the first Social Foundations of Education class, the concept of ideology is introduced to credential candidates in a way that permits them to re-experience consciously not only what ideology means but what it does (to them), both cognitively and affectively. Not surprisingly, when I ask them to describe how they feel about the word, not what they think it means, many say the word makes them feel “uncomfortable.” During the discussion, I explain that they are conflating ideology and indoctrination. This practical-critical learning experience demonstrates that “ideas have consequences”: Ideas influence students’ cognitions as well as their actions and affective responses to the world. Students also read empirical research on ideological curriculum bias at work in U.S. history textbooks and school knowledge (Anyon, 1979), against the backdrop of Kozol’s (1975, 1981) ethical exhortations against societal injustice and examples of “hidden” social justice struggles, such as a graphic account of working people’s exploitation and resistance in a biographical sketch of labor organizer Mother Jones (Nies, 1977). Three educational documentary films about inequity and injustice in different historical periods, Labor Comes of Age, Hunger in America, and The Business of America, narrate ideological positions about the unemployed, the poor, the hungry, and the labor movement. By comparing the explanations of working people’s lives, struggles, and economic exploitation in these films with the historical information in the biographical sketch of Mother Jones and in Anyon’s research, and their own knowledge, candidates deconstruct the social class interests in these “educational” resources. In one film, poor Mexican American children are said to be hungry “because they [sic] daddies just won’t work.” In another, a poor White man, who blames himself because his wife and children are malnourished, says: “I don’t need no hand-out from the government . . . that’s for bums.” Such lessons contribute to the historical knowledge of credential candidates and also demonstrate that ideological positions can be sincerely believed by the people who have been induced to accept these worldviews. As credential candidates examine empirical examples of how hegemony and ideology work—that schooling fosters certain ideas and forms of knowledge and not others, often in accord with the social class and racial backgrounds of students (Anyon, 1981; Kozol, 1991)—they also begin to wonder whether

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teachers (like me) who want to challenge what students know and believe, can avoid indoctrination. Making my praxis explicit and linking it with analyses of critical pedagogy (McLaren, 1995; MacLeod, 1992) as a response to ideology, miseducation, and hegemony are helpful in addressing this concern.

“White Is a State of Mind; It’s Even a Moral Choice” The African American author James Baldwin made the above statement in a public speech entitled “The View from Here,” which students hear and respond to in discussions and journals in Interpersonal/Cross-Cultural Communications (National Press Club Library, December 10, 1986). “Conceptual whiteness” is a generative theme of the course. Understanding the concept—about which many of our students are and prefer to remain oblivious—is elemental to interrogating the celebratory narrative of (white) American identity. The following are examples of concepts and competence developed in this course through readings and learning activities designed to explicate and transmute this cognitive-perceptual category. These include novels (see Note 2), films (Racism 101 and In the Eye of the Storm), reflective group discussion, journal writing exercises, and community-based assignments that require the students to interact with community people of diverse backgrounds. Informed empathy versus sympathy is a type of competence that reflects knowledge of how societal cognitive-perceptual categories shape our perceptions and beliefs; it requires reflective self-knowledge of one’s own experiences as well as those of others with whom one interacts or whom one teaches. The course materials, activities, and my lectures emphasize that such self-knowledge—a foundation for informed empathy—requires accurate knowledge of the culture and society as a basis for awareness of how one’s relations with others are affected by race, culture, and other forms of difference. This includes understanding the difference between the immigrant experiences of European Americans and the particular experiences of people of color. The course begins with readings on America’s development from the perspective of diverse “others” in books like Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980). Worldview encompasses the way a culture group perceives people and events and the way culture shapes perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, and selfperceptions. Particular emphasis is placed on racism, prejudice, alienation, and assimilation. In addition to Baldwin’s taped lecture, which is a sharp historical critique of the dominant U.S. worldview, students are exposed to other literature, such as the autobiographical book of essays by the Native American artist Jamake Highwater. In The Primal Mind, Highwater (1981) embraces his identity and describes his alienation from the dominant society’s value system as a “precious gift”: Being acculturated in two cultures allows people to discover their common humanity (e.g., “a cherished alienation”). Through such material, students not only explore their own cognitive and affective responses to racism,

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prejudice, alienation, and assimilation; in addition, they encounter culturecentered perspectives that oppose their own worldviews regarding diversity, difference, and their idea of America and being American. Each year some students indicate that they are very uncomfortable with the “facts” of American history that Zinn, Highwater, and Baldwin, for example, present, that is, with those authors’ perspectives—and my point of view as well. Some express their resistance in these terms, when invited to comment on the course: s s s s s

h(ISTORY CANNOT BE CHANGED SO WHY NOT LIVE FOR TOMORROW INSTEAD OF hanging on yesterday?” h7HYDOWEHAVETOsee color? Aren’t we all the same?” h)FEELLIKE)SHOULDAPOLOGIZEFORBEINGBORNINTOTHEUPPERWHITEMIDDLE class. I don’t think I should be made to feel this way!” h)MBEINGACCUSEDOFCRIMES)DIDNTCOMMITv h)FEELASIFLMBEINGINDOCTRINATED)STHATTHEINTENTIONOFTHISCOURSEv

Presenting such reactions (without names) to the class for discussion acknowledges these perspectives while also providing another reflexive teaching moment. Specific journal writing assignments permit me to be responsive to student development through ongoing dialogue with students as they work through issues that challenge their self-definitions, knowledge, and perspectives; assess changes in their perceptions and competence; and, when necessary, respond critically to their resistance. I pose provocative questions like, “What can White Americans be proud of?” (given the Black Studies critique of knowledge and “hidden” facts of American history). My method of teaching tests students’ ability to recognize and transcend the predominant worldview and to embrace a personal and professional identity not grounded in the assumptions and beliefs of white supremacy/racism or the goal of assimilation. Personalizing the course by including additional readings further facilitates clarifying dialogue. American cultural patterns, such as racism, social class, and gender oppression are presented not as aberrations but as forms of inequity that have characterized the development of the nation since its inception. In recent years, I have found it necessary to provide students with basic definitions of racism and prejudice so that they can distinguish between these terms. Even students who majored in history and ethnic studies conflate racism and prejudice or argue that “racism is just part of human nature.” The implication that I challenge is that, “therefore we can’t do anything about it.” Both courses, but particularly Interpersonal/Cross-Cultural Communication, also challenge the dualistic discourse of multiculturalism: that people of color who do not embrace an identity based on the notion that “we are all the same” because “we are all multicultural” are therefore espousing separation and

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segregation (in popular parlance), a view that supposedly reflects an “essentialized and narrow politics of ethnic identity,” (in the language of scholars). The Black Studies theoretical perspective transcends this simplistic duality.

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Reflections of Participants Interviews with several practitioners who have participated in the program and graduates as well as the exit interviews of credential candidates indicate the effectiveness of the praxis described here. Selected examples of their reflections follow. (Pseudonyms are used in each case.)

Reflections of a Practitioner Mr. Brown is a bilingual central office administrator in a school district in which 93% of the students are not White. His district has hired a number of SCU graduates. Mr. Brown emphasized how well prepared SCU graduates are in his district and that they are “just more able to deal with all the changes that are going on” because they have a “sound methodology for teaching.” He has been involved in the SCU program for a number of years as a supervisor, and he also has taught Interpersonal/Cross-Cultural Communications with me and on his own. Mr. Brown stressed how important it was that “this was not a multicultural class, giving student teachers rules about how to relate to the Vietnamese, for example.” Mr. Brown continued: Ninety percent of them [credential candidates] did not have experiences with diversity. The class made them confront certain feelings. I met some of them after the class—for pizza—they were more open with me outside of class. They admitted that they didn’t like some of the course—that it was difficult for them because of their background. They hadn’t been exposed to that. What hit them was Racism 101 [a documentary film]. That was something that they couldn’t deny. It was there; it made them think. Even though some of them didn’t change, it made them think. But some of them changed in the sense of how they approached certain situations. Mr. Brown commented on the course materials and, without naming it, affirmed the relevance and effectiveness of the Black Studies theoretical perspective: The selection of material—novels and films—was outstanding, a good mixture. It gave them a lot of things they needed to think about. . . . We served them the real stuff . . . because the black/white [dynamic] is much more realistic . . . it’s what they grew up with. The foreigners [immigrants]

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come and that is easier for them to deal with. It’s exotic and is not as threatening . . . I think words like “multicultural” and “diversity” are thrown around because they’re easier to use—they’re nice. Mr. Brown also observed that my course design was appropriate for the students’ background. He said, “Exposing them to this material was very interesting and challenging because . . . these students . . . were more willing to say that you [the professor] are biased. But you had to do it.”

Reflections of a Graduate One program graduate vividly recalled specific learning experiences, including metaphors that I used, that he said enabled him to recognize, rethink, and change certain beliefs, attitudes, and practices—changes that made him more “open-minded.” Paul, a White male graduate of the secondary credential program, whom I recently interviewed, said: “I often go back to the onion— that each person is multilayered and the levels of the onion make up the identity of the student.” (I used this metaphor to describe students’ multilayered, complex levels of thought and behavior in contrast to the way credential candidates identified themselves non-complexly and one-dimensionally as being “a conservative,” for example.) Paul has been teaching English for 10 years in the same racially and linguistically diverse and less than affluent high school where he completed his student teaching. Sixty-two languages are spoken at his school and he is the director of a Teaching Academy that is preparing high school students to become teachers. He explained that his initial “idea of teaching” changed through the “provocative stuff ” we read and “all the processing that we did” in the foundations courses and the student teaching seminar. When I queried Paul about whether and how these courses specifically influenced his teaching, he said: . . . I was going to recreate myself—create small versions of myself—a really arrogant point of view. The program got me to understand that the students come to school already with their characters intact—that my job as a teacher is to take who they are and help them to define themselves culturally and personally and to develop their gifts and give that to the world. . . . [In your classes] you would, without any fear, challenge people’s ideas—politely but strongly—and get us to support our ideas, get us to reconsider what we believed. I ended the year being more openminded than I started, and I took my job as a teacher more seriously. I also realized that I had more to learn, as much as the students.3 The personal and professional journey from arrogance to informed empathy, in some cases, or self-doubt to increasing confidence, and greater cultural, critical

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self-awareness, often involves supporting the development of credential candidates by provoking their discomfort.

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Reflections of Credential Candidates In (audiotaped) self-narrative exit interviews two students recalled trajectories of personal and professional growth that indicate that they entered and completed the program at different stages of development. While their commitments also diverge, their emphasis on the affective and cognitive needs of students is consistent with the praxis in my courses. Both had student teaching experiences in culturally diverse, urban high schools. Alex, a 22-year-old White male student, shares his ambivalence about teaching: It was like a step into adulthood. I was blown away by the enormity of it. . . . Because you’re not just doing the subject. . . . Gosh! You’re dealing with people’s lives. There was one girl this year who had sex for the first time. She got pregnant, she lost the baby, and now she’s going out with this guy who’s in jail. Good heavens! But what we’ve learned, Dr. King said it perfectly: “Every student comes in with a big suitcase full of their previous education experiences but also their lives and they plop that big suitcase up on the desk and you just have to address it.”. . . . My ideal was to be this dynamic person—you know, do it all. [But] I don’t know if teaching is for me. It’s just so much work and there’s not a lot of glory in it. There is and there isn’t. . . . When I think about writing screenplays for Star Trek, there’s glory there, that’s tangible. The pay [for teaching] isn’t that bad, it’s working for an audience that really doesn’t care if you’re there or not. It’s frustrating . . . I come in with my lesson plan and I think: Don’t they know they should be enjoying this? But teaching is about being fulfilled with your best effort, I suppose. It’s kind of like boot camp. If you survive it, you can survive anything. Fran, a “re-entry” student, had a successful 12-year career in a health profession before entering the teacher education program. She was more confident and certain of her decision to become a high school science teacher. Also, she was not dismayed about the need to support students’ academic and affective development: There was really no other place that I’d rather be. This was a startling realization, that maybe I was on the right path, doing some good. . . . The other day—as I was presenting some information on decision making and about talking to their peers and boy/girl friends about issues related to reproduction—a girl said, “I wish someone had given me this information a year ago.” Maybe I am having an impact . . . I guess I really love

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interacting with my students. . . . Half the time I feel like I’m teaching social skills, and that’s OK, all the better. Then they’ll feel better and come back more ready to learn, and we can spend more time on our science subjects. And what really great is when they get really involved and ask more questions. . . . That’s the purpose of it all, to get them thinking.

Conclusion Despite apparent differences in age, sex, race, or previous experience, most of the students we have taught at SCU share cognitive dominant culture schemata that limit their knowledge and consciousness of themselves, society, diverse “others,” or teaching for change. Credential candidates are required to infuse in their lessons the Cultural Knowledge and awareness they gain in the program and in my courses. I introduce them to the praxis of teaching for change or transmutation experientially in a way that includes conceptualizing not only the realities of racism, poverty, and so on, but a role for themselves in the struggle against this reality. This praxis of transmutation is guided by epistemological and ethical considerations grounded in a Black Studies theoretical perspective that aims to move credential candidates beyond arrogance and alienation toward teaching for change. One student acknowledged this in her exit interview by saying, simply, “Thank you for opening our minds.”

Notes 1 According to Jane Fried (1993), university faculty need pedagogical methods that “connect emotion and intellect” (p. 123) when the curriculum discourse emphasizes “illuminating the dynamics of power in society” (p. 124) because “discussion of cultural, gender and class differences” that often challenges the cognitive understandings and personal constructs of “culturally encapsulated Anglo-Americans” (p. 123) also evokes strong feelings. In response to the “culturally reproductive function of education” that contributes to such encapsulation, Kenneth A. Sirotnick (1990) calls for a “process of critical socialization” that is a “deliberatively educative experience grounded in ethics of inquiry, knowledge, competence, caring, and social justice” (p. 309, original emphasis). 2 The novels used in this course present accurate historical information about the experiences of particular groups that fills in gaps in student knowledge; these readings also present the culture-centered perspectives (King, 1995) of diverse groups (e.g., Beloved, Donald Duk, Love Medicine, Pocho, Rain of Gold). 3 Paul is a 1985 graduate of the SCU program. He teaches English and is head of both the Gifted and Talented Program and a Teaching Academy, which be helped to establish, at his urban high school. In the latter program, high school students return to middle and elementary schools as tutor/mentors.

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References Anyon, J. (1979). Ideology and US history textbooks. Harvard Educational Review, 49(3), 361–386. Anyon, J. (1981). Social class and school knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry, 11(1), 3–42. Cagan, E. (1978). Individualism, collectivism, and radical educational reform. Harvard Educational Review, 48(2), 227–266. Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming critical: Education, knowledge, and action research. London: Falmer. Center for Economic Conversion. (1992). Sustainable economics: A supplementary curriculum for high school economics courses. Mountain View, CA: Author. Chin, F. (1991). Donald Duk. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press. Cox, G. O. (1974). Education for the Black race. New York: African Heritage Studies. Fried, J. (1993). Bridging emotion and intellect: Classroom diversity in process. College Teaching, 41(4), 123–128. Giroux, H., & McLaren, P. (1986). Teacher education and the politics of engagement: The case for democratic schooling. Harvard Educational Review, 56(3), 213–238. Highwater, J. (1981). The primal mind. New York: New American Library. Karenga, M. (1993). Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Kilminster, R. (1979). Praxis and method: A sociological dialogue with Lukács, Gramsci, and the early Frankfurt School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. King, J. E. (1991). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity and the miseducation of teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146. King, J. E. (1992). Diaspora literacy and consciousness in the struggle against miseducation in the Black community. Journal of Negro Education, 61(3), 317–340. King, J. E. (1995). Culture-centered knowledge: Black studies, curriculum transformation and social action. In J. A. Banks & C. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 265–290). New York: Macmillan. Kozol, J. (1975). The night is dark and I am far from home. Toronto: Bantam. Kozol, J. (1981). On being a teacher. New York: Continuum. Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York: Harper Perennial. MacLeod, J. (1992). Bridging street and school. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 260–275. McIntosh, P. (1989, July/August). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom, 10–12. McLaren, P. (1995). Critical pedagogy and predatory culture. New York: Routledge. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness in the literary imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nies, J. (1977). Seven women. New York: Penguin. Rist, R. (1970). Student social class and teacher expectations. Harvard Educational Review, 40(3), 411–451. Rothenberg, S. (1988). Racism and sexism. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sirotnick, K. A. (1990). Society, schooling, teaching and preparing to teach. In J. I. Goodlad, R. Soder, & K. A. Sirotnick (Eds.), The moral dimensions of teaching (pp. 296–327). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Vallence, E. (1977). The hidden curriculum: An interpretation of the language of justification in nineteenth century educational reform. In A. Berlak & H. Kliebard (Eds.), Curriculum and Evaluation (pp. 590–607). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

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Weiler, K. (1988). Women teaching for change. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Wolf-Wasserman, M., & Hutchinson, L. (1978). Teaching human dignity: Social change lessons for every teacher. Minneapolis, MN: Education Exploration Center. Wynter, S. (1992). Re-thinking aesthetics: Notes toward a deciphering practice. In M. Cham (Ed.), Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean cinema (pp. 237–279). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Wynter, S. (1995). 1492: A new world view. In V. L. Hyatt & R. Netteford (Eds.), Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas (pp. 5–57). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Zinn, H. (1980). A people’s history of the United States. New York: Harper & Row.

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EPILOGUE Black Education Post-Katrina—And All Us We Are Not Saved1

Remember the Kongo saying, “It hurts to lose certain traditions.” The more a society moves away from its traditions, the more its people and system become physically and spiritually weak and disoriented. To lose one’s cultural traditional values is not only to terrorize oneself but to ridicule oneself in the eyes of the world. (Bunseki-Fu-Kiau & Lukondo-Wamba, 2000, p. 23) How can we be successful if we have no idea or, worse, the wrong idea of who we were and, therefore are? . . . Our minds can be trained for individual career success, but our group morale, the very soul of us has been devastated by the assumption that what has not been told about ourselves does not exist to be told. (Robinson, 2001, p. 16) The Maafa gave rise to a single world-wide strategy among our oppressors: prevent African families and communities from educating their children. (The Millions More Movement Education Task Force Report, 2006, p. 3)2 Katrina accomplished in a day . . . what Louisiana school reformers couldn’t do after years of trying. (American Enterprise Institute)3 . . . [A]ll that is public, including schools, is under attack. (Quinn & Meiners, 2009, p. 102) The lower classes are worth more to private corporations when they are in prison than when they are free. (Dedon Kemanthi)4

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Introduction This Epilogue asks: What is the state of Black education “post-Katrina”; what is at stake; and what is to be done? The dire condition of public education in New Orleans in the aftermath of the 2005 Gulf coast storm serves not as metaphor but as context for framing the complexities of Black education as a civilizational crisis.5 This crisis includes mass Black criminalization and incarceration and the school-to-prison track (e.g., prison industrial complex) as well as the dismantling of public education. What has appeared simply to be the government’s abandonment of the most impoverished Black people in New Orleans is a pattern of systematic neglect in jobless urban ghettos across the nation that is better understood as the racialized privatization of public spheres—notably schools and prisons. Moreover, as Quinn and Meiners (2009, p. 102) observe: “All that is public . . . is under attack.”

Beyond Rescue Wynter (2006) argues that fundamentally this is a crisis of knowledge: Western civilization’s best minds and academic disciplines are deeply implicated in the belief structure and ways of (not) knowing that systematically jeopardize Black lives. However, this destruction of Black life (“as life unworthy of life”) also diminishes white America’s humanity (Rimstead, 2001). And while democracy, human rights, justice, and our planetary environment are at stake, civilization also hangs in the balance (King, 2005). Following are indications of this civilizational knowledge crisis. First, Black people in America have been “beyond rescue” in the nation’s schools, cities, and prisons long before Hurricane Katrina—a marginalization that has been justified in part by the neglect and distortion of African descent people’s history. The current state of Black education, for example, differs drastically from the historical record of Black accomplishments and educational excellence—from the specialized knowledge of the African ancestors who built the pyramids in ancient Kemet and the Songhay Empire’s universities at Sankoré, Gao, and D’Jenné in West Africa, to clandestine “slave schools” and African Free Schools in early America, Citizenship schools and Freedom Schools during the Civil Rights movement as well as independent Black institutions (Anderson, 1988; Butchart, 1980; Dannett, 1965; Hilliard, 1997). Second, “rescue” via prevailing education policy, practice, theory, and research is doubtful if the systemic causes of this racially rooted civilizational crisis are not addressed. Instead, as the crisis is normalized and those who suffer are blamed, the true nature of the crisis is denied, distorted, and hidden in mystification and euphemism. For example, Black people’s poverty is the focus of analysis instead of systemic white supremacy/oppression; success and inclusion actually require some form of complicity and self/group abnegation;

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dismantling public education is called “restructuring” locally and “structural adjustment” globally and “a new national model of a market-based system of education” obfuscates the transfer of public resources into the hands of private entities. Third, the condition of education in New Orleans and the mass incarceration of African Americans provide inter-related vantage points from which to grasp the relationship between Black education “post-Katrina” and the public good, that is, what is at stake for “all us we.” Tate’s (2007) analysis of the need for societal investments in education and employment opportunities—opportunity expansion—for urban youth identifies concrete material benefits that would accrue to the entire society, but which remain unrecognized and “hypothetical” (Banfield & Levin, 2007; Day & Neuberger, 2002). Thus, the larger policy context and arena for action must include the knowledge crisis and the need for transformative possibilities that address the systemic connection between education, racialized domination, and real democracy and freedom.

Inclusion/Complicity and Negation/Nihilation at What Cost? Part of what often remains just beyond recognition, understanding, analysis, and action is Black nihilation (or non-being) as a requirement of white America’s supposed well-being.6 In his description of White America’s sense of self, for example, Wacquant (2002) captures part of this dialectical interconnection in terms of how social class interacts with race. That is, White America senses itself as “profoundly unlike and distinct from the Black and unworthy poor” (p. 55). This complex racialized “alter-ego” relationship between “white” being and “black” negation appears now to be associated with the unworthiness/unfitness of “the Black poor” (in mostly black “failing schools,” failing “ghetto” cities like New Orleans and their “extensions in the prisons”). But it also extends to all of the continent of Africa and is a condition of (the idea/ideal of ) “whiteness” as a privileged mode of being (more human).7 One cost of this privileged (“white”) sense of self is the attenuation of white America’s humanity. The benefits of privileged (and “honorary”) “whiteness” and the associated worthiness of (White) middle-class acceptability lull the rest of us into a false sense of security, success and well-being: In every era, Blacks have been viewed as apart, inferior and unworthy, as fringe players in the American narrative. But in the last 35 years the Black communities have been stripped of jobs, seen their poor isolated, resegregated, and redefined as unworthy and inherently dangerous. Government, the state itself has been refashioned into a punitive and carceral machine whose main function is to contain and control this unworthy, dishonored and dangerous poor and black population. (Dixon, 2007)8

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“All us we are not saved,” however, if people of African ancestry anywhere remain culturally and spiritually dislocated, economically dispossessed, and politically marginalized by the mythology of race and its economic, cultural, and political inequities/iniquities. The standpoint, that Black Americans “exist as an African people, an ethnic family,” is not usually considered in prevailing education policy, research, theorizing, and practice (King, 2005, p. 20).9 Ironically, Black academics and opinion leaders who publicly castigate the (Black) “lower socioeconomic people” (Bill Cosby’s phrase) and exhort them to do better and be better tacitly acknowledge Black people’s shared identity and communityfamily connections (Cosby & Poussaint, 2007).10 Perhaps that is why neoliberals and conservatives alike emphasize divisions and difference among middle-class African Americans and “the Black poor.”11 Yet, in the arenas of public policy and education transformative possibilities that address the racialized roots of our predicament and that build on our collective legacy of democratizing and humanizing public spheres long dominated by white supremacy racism are curtailed. The need for group-based solutions for African Americans typically is unacknowledged, even by the most progressive observers. Certainly, this is the case with respect to the “shocking” and “awful” state of Black education in “post-Katrina” New Orleans, where nihilating academic knowledge has also played a pernicious role.

Shocking and Awful: Erasing Public Education in New Orleans In The Shock Doctrine, award-winning investigative journalist Naomi Klein documents how governments, following economic strategies devised by the renowned economics professor, Milton Friedman, and his Chicago School of “fundamentalist capitalism,” have used disasters as a pretext to experiment with drastic “free market” reforms at the expense of the public good. Klein begins her analysis of this “disaster capitalism” with the example of the near total “erasure” of public education in New Orleans and its almost complete replacement by a system of privately run but publicly funded for-profit charter schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In the turmoil and panic of natural and government instigated disasters such as the lack of adequate response to the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina—various populations have been “shocked” and “awed” into acquiescing to largescale (and profitable) emergency economic, political, and social “reforms” that are rapidly implemented and then quickly made permanent. Professor Friedman, also an advisor to presidents (and dictators like General Pinochet in Chile) and “grand guru of unfettered capitalism” in the “hypermobile” global economy, was an ardent and influential supporter of school vouchers. He advanced the notion that Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans represented a fortuitous opportunity. In an op-ed in the New York Times three months after the hurricane, Friedman wrote:

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Most New Orleans schools are in ruins . . . as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system. (Klein, 2007, pp. 4–5) A Nobel Laureate, Friedman’s ideas have exerted an enormous influence on public policy in the U.S. and the foreign policy elites who studied with him at the University of Chicago. Primarily, he emphasized the “preservation and extension of individual freedom.”12 Klein notes that for Freidman a “state-run school system reeked of socialism.” He passed away on November 16, not before his scheme was seized upon by the George W. Bush administration and “a network of right-wing think tanks . . . that descended upon the city after the storm” (Klein, 2007, p. 5): Friedman’s radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction on rebuilding and improving New Orleans’ existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subsidized by the state. (p. 5) Before the storm, the New Orleans public school system, like other resourcestarved urban districts, was chronically ineffective in serving the mostly poor African American students who attended the city’s 123 schools. (Nevertheless, White students were relatively well served.)

Unfit/Unworthy: Narratives of Blackness In 2003, in accord with the accountability requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the Louisiana Department of Education created the “Recovery School District” (RSD) to take over its “failing schools,” which at the time of the storm in 2005 numbered 23.13 As the online Parents’ Guide to Public Schools (Fall 2007) in New Orleans states: “The Recovery School District is a state-wide, intermediate school district created by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to take over and operate failed schools.” These are “low-performing schools that do not meet state-set goals for academic improvement for four or more consecutive years.”14 Within a neoliberal business model, such school “takeovers” are portrayed as rescue and reform to “save” mostly Black and Latino/a children from “failing” urban schools. To the extent that this federally prescribed top-down school “restructuring” effectively ends democratic governance in urban schools and communities, these accountability maneuvers mean a loss of liberty for the society. For another example, the

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teachers’ union contract was dissolved after the storm and all 4700 professional educators in New Orleans were summarily fired. After the storm the number of charter schools, which are mostly managed by the Recovery School District, jumped from seven to 31. The locally elected New Orleans Public School board (NOPS) currently serves more than 20,000 students. It co-exists with this parallel “governance” structure and operates only five public schools but oversees 12 charters operating in buildings that were previously public schools. The “sale” of public lands and property, forced relocation of working-class and poor/inner-city families, and gentrification are all part of a pattern of economic and political dynamics that are at stake in urban school “reform.”15 Elites have allowed urban schools to atrophy in deteriorating ecological environments, while the life-blood is drained from their surrounding jobless communities. However, mismanagement by “unfit,” “incompetent,” and “corrupt” leadership is suggested as justification for the transfer of public wealth to private interests. For example, Ralph Adamo (2007), a New Orleans journalist (who is also a parent), concluded at the end of the second school year since the hurricane (2006–2007), that the “mismanaged and undersupplied” Recovery School District that was responsible for 22 schools and about 9,500 mostly African American students, was “nothing as much as a failed experiment.” His news report decries privatization running “amok” in New Orleans: The story of the RSD is, in part, a story of how the idea that public entities (either systems or individuals) that were not fit or competent to run public schools came to dominate the reconfiguration of public education in New Orleans. That narrative was combined, of course, with the narrative that only private, market-driven forces can effectively improve school performance and carry on the tasks of public education. (Adamo, 2007) However, locals can read a racialized subtext in this narrative. Prior to Hurricane Katrina New Orleans schools served 63,000 students: 93% were African American and 75% were “low-income” (see note 11). Therefore, “lowperforming” (mostly Black) schools are in “New Orleans,” which is also mostly Black, in contrast to “metropolitan New Orleans,” which consists of six other “whiter” parishes. Thus, a decoded narrative reads: The idea that public entities where Black people were predominate were not fit or competent to run public schools came to dominate in the reconfiguration of public education in New Orleans. Similarly unspoken, spatially coded language operates in the racial discourse in other locales. In Atlanta, Georgia, for another example, when some Whites say

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“the city of Atlanta” or “Fulton County,” they really mean “Black people” as opposed to references to surrounding (“whiter”) “Gwinnett” or “Henry” counties. (On an airport bus I overheard one non-Atlanta resident say to another: “Whenever I need documents from the court in Atlanta, I know it’s going to be hassle. They are so disorganized, I just go to Gwinnett where I don’t have any problem.”) Likewise, “urban” and “inner city” (as compared to “rural”) are erstwhile spatial markers that connote racially coded meanings making them “near-synonymous with black in policy making as well as everyday parlance” (Wacquant, 2002, p. 55). In these racialized reconfigurations the interests of Black middle class educators and homeowners, as well as White people are expendable “collateral damage” given the larger goal of controlling/relocating/exploiting the dangerous/unworthy/unfit “Black poor,” who frequently occupy prime urban real estate or school property (Tate, 2007). The economics and politics of urban school reform involve discourses and disparities of power that are evident not only in the “achievement gap” but also the wealth gap, the health gap, and the incarceration gap. In fact, Meiners (2007) cites the complicity of educators as a cost of the link between schools, prisons, and the normalization of mass incarceration, that is, the “making of public enemies.”

Mass Black Criminalization and Incarceration Before Hurricane Katrina New Orleans was like no other American city; even with its “exotic” blend of French, Spanish, African, and Anglo-American cultures, it was acknowledged to be America’s “most African city” city as well. In fact, the major contours of the Black Experience in the Americas can be observed in the history of New Orleans, from the depredations of marketdriven African enslavement, the deceptions of freedom and Reconstruction, the shortfall of integration, and current Black dispossession from their homes and schools by 21st century “market-driven forces.” New Orleans has been a crucible of Black educational excellence and resistance as well. However, mass Black criminalization and incarceration—which the Children’s Defense Fund has dubbed a “cradle to prison pipeline”SM—have surpassed mass mobilizations for justice. The online Black newspaper, BlackCommentator.com (2004) observes: “Mass incarceration is by far the greatest crisis facing Black America, ultimately eclipsing all others.”

Who Benefits? Today, almost 2.25 million Americans are incarcerated in local, state, and federal prisons—more than any other nation and over seven times the international average. African Americans and Latino/as are disastrously over-represented in this number. As a result of this national policy of mass criminalization and

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incarceration of Black Americans, liberty and democracy for all are also called into question. Virginia Senator Jim Webb chaired a historic Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Senate hearing on October 4, 2007 that examined this unprecedented question: “Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost?” The JEC hearing testimony addressed reasons why: s s s s s

THEINCARCERATIONRATEHASCONTINUEDTORISEDESPITEFALLINGCRIMERATES INSTITUTIONALIZATIONRATESHAVESKYROCKETEDFOR"LACKMEN "LACKMALEHIGHSCHOOLDROP OUTSHAVEMUCHGREATERRISKOFENDINGUPIN prison than other demographics; THE53INCARCERATIONRATEISTHEHIGHESTINTHEWORLD THE INCARCERATION RATE FOR "LACK MALES REMAINS MUCH HIGHER THAN OTHER demographic groups.16

Economics Professor Glenn C. Loury’s testimony made the racialized interconnection between criminal (in)justice policy and the skyrocketing incarceration of African Americans explicit: What all this comes to is that, to save “our” middle-class kids from the threat of their being engulfed by a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time drug incarceration began rapidly rising in the 1980s, we criminalized “our” underclass kids.17 Shockingly absent, nevertheless, is any serious national debate about what Senator Webb described as the “alarming” numbers of incarcerated African Americans in “one of the largest public policy experiments” in the nation’s history. Unfortunately, the word “experiment” is often used to refer to public policy that has adversely targeted Black people. For example, the infamous “Tuskegee Experiment” involved studying the effects of denying Black men medical treatment for syphilis. New Orleans Black parents advised the new Recovery School District superintendent not to use that word in describing the city’s charter school “reforms.”

Privatization, Profits, and Disparities of Power A study by Roberts (2004) describes the social impact of this policy on young Black men and their communities: The extraordinary prison expansion involved young black men in grossly disproportionate numbers. Achieving another historic record, most of the people sentenced to time in prison today are black. On any given day, nearly one-third of black men in their twenties are under the supervision of the criminal justice system—either behind bars, on probation, or on parole . . . African Americans experience a uniquely astronomical rate of imprisonment, and the social effects of imprisonment are concentrated in their communities. Thus, the transformation of prison policy at the turn

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of the twenty-first century is most accurately characterized as the mass incarceration of African Americans. (p. 1271) While the public and educators are led to focus on the “dysfunctional” behavior of Black youth and to speculate about the deficiencies of Black culture, Dixon (2007) argues that “Physical isolation of the Black poor enables racially selective policing, prosecution and imprisonment without the need of special laws explicitly targeting blacks.” Therefore, we should not be deceived because segregation is no longer the law of the land. As Wilder (2000) has also concluded, racism continues in various institutionalized structures: Social relations can undergo revolutionary change without impacting the power dynamics of the society. . . . Racism continues to reflect a disparity of power and it is as egregious today as it was in the eighteenth century because the advent of less dramatic forms of dominance is not progress. More insidious in modern social relations is the fact that white people do not have to expressly target black people in order to exploit them. They only have to locate their interests in private and public policies that have disparate impact. Freed from involvement in color-specific political decisions and specific acts of racial oppression, white Americans can more easily imagine the injustices of their society to be natural or irrational. (pp. 240–241, original emphasis) The policy of unprecedented prison proliferation and mass incarceration coalesced in the 1980s with a shift to private for-profit prisons that have replaced state-run institutions—just as private for-profit schools have begun to replace public schools in New Orleans and other urban districts. Similar nonracial but racially coded narratives normalize both. Private prison corporations are a multibillion dollar business; they are involved with other providers of “health care, phone, food, and other services in correctional facilities” as well as economic development in rural, mostly white communities. These “free market” forces aggressively recruit new prison construction and work “actively to increase the number of citizens being locked up.”18 In a well-documented essay entitled, “Prison Profit and Slave Labor,” Blogger “NdicaBud” examines ways that privatization is again “encroaching ever further on what had been state responsibilities, and prison systems are the target of private interests.” This analysis, which illustrates how corporations and service-related businesses benefit from the prison industry, is worth quoting at length: The shift to privatization coalesced in the mid-1980s when three trends converged: The ideological imperatives of the free market; the huge increase in the number of prisoners; and the concomitant increase in

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imprisonment costs. In the giddy atmosphere of the Reagan years, the argument for the superiority of free enterprise resonated profoundly. Only the fire departments seemed safe, as everything from municipal garbage services to Third World state enterprises went on sale. Proponents of privatized prisons put forward a simple case: The private sector can do it cheaper and more efficiently. This assortment of entrepreneurs, free market ideologues, cash-strapped public officials, and academics promised design and management innovations without reducing costs or sacrificing “quality of service.” In any case, they noted correctly, public sector corrections systems are in a state of chronic failure by any measure, and no other politically or economically feasible solution is on the table.19 Data compiled by the Children’s Defense Fund (2007) offers additional insight regarding the inter-connection between education “failure” and incarceration: s s s

s

"LACK !MERICANS CONSTITUTE  OF THE POPULATION BUT HALF THE NATIONS prisoners. "LACK YOUTH ARE ALMOST lVE TIMES AS LIKELY TO BE INCARCERATED AS 7HITE youth for drug offenses. 'OVERNMENT DATA SHOWS "LACK STUDENTS FACE MUCH HARSHER DISCIPLINE AND are put out of school more often than any other ethnic group for similar offenses. 3OMEOF"LACKCHILDRENAREBORNTOSINGLEMOTHERS AMAJORCAUSEOF youth delinquency.20

Finally, it is also important to note that women are now the fastest growing prison population and many are young mothers with children (Talvi, 2007).

Education and Socialization for Cultural Well-Being The above statistics suggest that the condition of our youth as well as the state of Black education are far removed from the traditional culture of achievement of people of African ancestry. After the defeat of the Songhay Empire in 1591, the European Transatlantic enslavement enterprise interrupted this legacy of educational and cultural excellence. For instance, when it was illegal to teach our ancestors to read, they hid their counter-knowledge and societal critique in the words of “sorrow songs” like “everybody talking ’bout heaven ain’t going there”—songs that document their refusal to acquiesce to the inhumanity and ideology of enslavement. During Reconstruction “free people of color” in Louisiana and other Black leaders who had obtained some schooling participated in rewriting state constitutions in the South to provide free public schools for all children (Anderson, 1988). Such educational provisions constituted a watershed in the Black

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freedom movement that benefited the society as a whole. However, the reestablishment of plantation power with northern complicity meant disenfranchisement, Jim Crow terror, lynching and segregated, unequal education—for nearly a century—but not without continuing resistance that is part of our cultural excellence tradition. The African American legacy of cultural excellence and resistance to oppression includes the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the modern Civil Rights Movement, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community control movement, the Black Studies movement, and the establishment of Africancentered schools and curricula, as well as independent Muslim and Christian schools (Lee, Lomotey, & Shujaa, 1991; Muhammad, 2005), to cite a few examples. It remains to be seen whether the education system’s current gambit—school takeovers, high stakes testing, and dismantling public schools with the promotion of vouchers and charters as the only viable alternative to chronically failing schools—will permit Black people to continue to carve out enough “liberated space” for authentic Black education and socialization for our cultural well-being (King, 2008).

What Really Happened in New Orleans? In 1960 four Black girls braved hysterical crowds of “angry white women in pin curlers and toreador pants” during what has been called “the Second Battle of New Orleans”—the hundred-year struggle to integrate the public schools (Baker, 1996, p. 2). A Norman Rockwell painting shows one of them, six-yearold Ruby Bridges, walking alone past armed Federal marshals on her way to “integrate” Frantz Elementary School. At another school, McDonough 19, Tessie Prevost, Gaile Etienne, and Leona Tate were also “protected” by Federal marshals. This movement to integrate the schools in New Orleans was a sustained collective action on behalf of the entire Black community-family. There is no hint of this heritage of collective action and “community capacity” (Gordon Nembhard, 2014; Roberts, 2004) in the images and news reports that were broadcast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Rather, the media vilified and dehumanized those who were left stranded in New Orleans in grotesque tales of wanton savagery, supposedly inflicted by young Black males (e.g., raping babies and elderly women). While the authorities later denied the veracity of these widely circulated tales, no one reported why the elderly and mothers with babies were gathered together outside at the front of the Morial Convention Center. Anecdotal “Word” from the community and evacuees, on the other hand, indicates that traditional Black cultural values prevailed during this crisis: The young men gave the elders and women the utmost respect. They organized the people at the Convention Center; they directed the elders and mothers with children to the front so they could be rescued first when the buses they had been told to wait for finally arrived.

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What Is to Be Done? Research documents that mass incarceration destroys “social citizenship” (Roberts, 2004). At this time of crisis in Black education and the society, what do students, teachers, and community educators have to know if Black youth are to learn in ways that enable them to care about their communities and to contribute to community-building rather than the pursuit of education and individual “freedom” only as a one-way ticket out? Post-Katrina Black education challenges include what educators are learning (or not learning) about Black students, about our culture, and about our African heritage, which contributes to educational inequity and policies and practices implicated in the “school to prison pipeline” (Dance, 2002; Duncan, 2000; Ferguson, 2000; Meiners, 2007). One possibility discussed in this volume, Black economic literacy, can also incorporate Black-community-family consciousness (Gordon Nembhard, 2008). Questions that should inform such literacy include: Why are Black communities so poor and why is Africa poor/underdeveloped? What have African people given to the world? How can we restore community capacity and make a living in this era of de-industrialization, other global changes in the economy, and prevailing “market forces”? These are the kinds of questions Black youth (and their teachers) should be able to answer and they should be able to develop solutions for such systemic problems. In teacher education, curriculum development, and community outreach, there is a critical role for Black Studies in addressing the crisis of knowledge that undermines Black educational excellence (Gordon Nembhard & Forstater, 2008; Ward & Marable, 2003). Systemic and historical thinking is rare regarding social issues like the legacy of slavery, poverty and oppression, African American group identity, consciousness, and identification with our African heritage as well as the mechanisms of white supremacy racism. Bill Cosby’s widely publicized criticisms (and concern about) poor Black people fail to link the systemic impoverishment of Black communities to the institutionalized privilege and advantages of White middleclassness. In response, for example, Dyson asks: Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? (Dyson, 2006).21 “Longtime entertainer/activist/freedom fighter” Harry Belafonte has also provided a trenchant analysis from the perspective of the revolutionary role that artists can and should play. However, his remarks have received little to no publicity. Also blocked from mainstream news is the mass “Gathering for Justice” Belafonte founded that brought Black youth together with other young people—allies of diverse backgrounds from across the U.S. and other countries—to consider ways to address their pressing issues, including mass incarceration (Davey D, 2007). However, as Rudy Lewis, editor of the ChickenBones online Black literary magazine/website, notes sardonically: “Those who commerce in the pathologies of the Negro always get the headlines.”22

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The failure of public education to serve Black youth is a form of human rights abuse—the 21st century Maafa. While the “terrible consequences” of racialized disparities are life threatening for the Black community-family, they actually call into question the values of the society, including democracy, freedom, and justice for all. Education professionals and policy makers focus on high stakes testing and “teacher quality and accountability” to the exclusion of other possibilities that engage youth in active learning and doing for democratic citizenship (Lipman, 2003; McLaughlin, Irby, & Langman, 2001) and cultural well-being (King, 2008). Lipman’s research links accountability to “racialized social control” and needed community-based strategies for social change. As Lipman argues: “Policy responses are conditioned by the relative strength and mobilization of social forces (e.g., organizations of civil society, working-class organizations, popular social movements)” (p. 12). Our ability to address the challenges of this era depends on opportunities that we create to educate, to socialize, and to mobilize the next generation. In conclusion, the state of Black education “post-Katrina” challenges us to educate all children, including “other people’s children,” to build a world in which “all God’s chillun got shoes.” That is to say, our humanity places certain obligations upon us—to be responsible for ourselves—for our own spiritual, intellectual, and economic integrity and cultural well-being, and to understand how our society really works. The education “reform” that has been engineered in New Orleans faster than the broken levees could be repaired has been lauded in the press as “the nation’s preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools” (Klein, 2007, p. 6). However, public school teachers there have described this massive experiment with the futures of our children as a “land grab” (Klein, 2007, pp. 6–7). After visiting New Orleans recently, the President of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, concluded that: “A major part of the reshaping of the city’s ethnic face has been played out on the stage of New Orleans public schools” (Weingarten, 2007). Our obligation is to be proactive especially on behalf of those who suffer (King, 2006). Safeguarding public education would seem to be an important part of that obligation. Saving our children requires both quality education and appropriate community-family socialization. We require creative community-based solutions for this responsibility—solutions that transcend the knowledge crisis that blocks our transformative human possibilities (King, 2005). One such possibility is the study of African language to access core values and African social practice and organization—before European values intruded—is one possible venue for the recovery of valuable traditions and the reunification of the African family. For example, in Songhoy-senni (language) and classical Songhoy society and the empire that encompassed ten modern African states there was no word for “prison” because other social institutions worked to harmonize society (Maiga, 2007). In response to mass Black incarceration and criminalization we need a mass movement for educational, social, and economic justice that includes

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investment in our communities and in people. The future of public education and livable communities is what is at stake for African Americans, the nation, and the world when Black children in a public education system in a major American city become pawns in a massive experiment in “crisis exploitation” in order to persuade an unsuspecting nation to accept privatized, for-profit rather than public education at our expense.

Notes 1 In Trinidad and Jamaica, “all ah we” means “all of us,” so “all ah we” is one. “We are all one people.” Personal communications, Janice B. Fournillier, Annette Henry, and Ashley Hamilton-Taylor, November 10, 2007. In Jamaica, one might also hear: “All ah we no save.” Personal Communication, Sylvia Wynter, November 11, 2007. “All us we” incorporates a Black American inflection and includes humanity in general. 2 Marimba Ani (1994; Richards, 1989) introduced this Kiswahili term, Maafa, which means “disaster” or “terrible consequence,” to describe the disconnection, displacement, and dislocation African people have suffered through 500 years of enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, invasions, and exploitation. 3 Cited in Klein (2007, p. 6). 4 “Prison profit and slave labor.” Retrieved 11 January, 2007, from www.yahooka. com/forum/politics-current-affairs/22956-prison-profit-slave-labor.html. 5 The concept “civilizational” is adapted from Munford’s (2001) definition of “civilizational historicism”: a system of thought, a philosophy, an explanatory model with a specific purpose—“a worldview of use to Black folk” (p. 1). 6 Annihilation and nihilation are related but distinct social processes. Wynter (1989) describes the concept of nihilation (from the French word: néantisé) as the total negation of being. See also King (2005). 7 Sylvia Wynter (2006) explores the interconnections between our “unbearable wrongness of being,” “the epistemology of knowledge,” and the “liberation of people” (p. 113). 8 Dixon summarizes Wacquant’s (2002) analysis. 9 This is the first of “Ten Vital Principles of Black Education and Socialization” advanced by the Commission on Research in Black Education established by the American Educational Research Association (www.coribe.org). 10 A rash of hate crimes, including events that recently occurred in Jena, Louisiana, have invigorated mass mobilizing—spurred by Black radio commentators who address listeners as “family.” 11 See Henry L. Gates’s discussion of the “historical basis of black poverty and dysfunction” and culture of tenancy vs. the virtues of home ownership and middleclass culture. “Forty acres and a wealth gap,” New York Times, Op Ed, November 17, 2007. Retrieved December 1, 2008, from www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/ opinion/18gates.html?_r=2&oref_slogin&pagewanted=print. 12 Hoover Institution, Stanford University press release, November 16, 2006, “Milton Friedman noted economist, Nobel laureate, and Hoover senior research fellow, dies at 94.” Retrieved November 9, 2006, from www.hooveSr.org/pubaffairs/ releases/4667846.html. 13 Lucy M. Steiner (2005). “School Restructuring Options Under No Child Left Behind: What Works When: State Takeovers of Individual Schools.” Washington, D.C.: Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement. Retrieved November, 2007, from www.centerforcsri.org/pubs/restructuring/KnowledgeIssues1StateTakeovers.pdf.

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14 The Parents’ Guide states:

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In New Orleans, the RSD operates 24 schools and oversees 20 charter schools. RSD is run by a superintendent who is appointed by the state Superintendent of Education. An advisory board was established to advise the superintendent on matters pertaining to the RSD.

15

16

17 18 19 20 21

22

Retrieved November 1, 2007, from www.nolaparentsguide.org/Parents’%20Guide% 20Aug07.pdf. It can also be argued that the provisions of NCLB permit local and national “effective school” models and charters, including African-centered schools, to provide communitydesigned, if not controlled, alternatives. The issue of disenfranchisement and dismantling of public education remains, however. The sale of public lands and buildings when school enrollments in deteriorating areas are allowed to drop and threaten public schools’ economic viability is another example. See “Chronology of California School District Takeovers, Youth Strategy Project.” Retrieved November 1, 2007, from www.datacenter.org/research/oaklandtakeover.pdf and “Dismantling a Community” provides a New Orleans privatization timeline. Retrieved November 1, 2007, from www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/publications/dismantling_20061026/ dismantling_200 61026.pdf. Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress, Washington, D.C., October 4, 2007. Retrieved November 3, 2007, from http://jec. senate.gov/Hearings/10.04.07EconomicCostofIncarceration.htm. Data presented included these statistics: Although African Americans constitute 14% of regular drug users, they are 37% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 56% of persons in state prisons for drug crimes. African Americans serve nearly as much time in federal prisons for drug offenses as Whites do for violent crimes. A Black male who does not finish high school now has a 60% chance of going to jail. One who has finished high school has a 30% chance. “Mass Incarceration and American Values,” JEC Testimony, October 4, 2007. See Adamo (2007). Retrieved November 2, 2007, from www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/ prisons/print_overview.html. See also Blankenship and Yanarrell (2004). Retrieved November 1, 2007, from www.yahooka.com/forum/politics-currentaffairs/22956-prison-profit-slave-labor.html. Children’s Defense Fund, reported in T. Powell, “Prioritizing Education over the Penal System,” Diverse, November 1, 2007, 11. It is worth noting that Dr. Cosby’s attention has shifted away from a compelling research, policy, and government agenda that he cogently advanced in his book with Dwight Allen, entitled American Schools: The 100 Billion Dollar Challenge, in which he called for a massive federal investment in research. Retrieved June 30, 2001, from http://ipublish.com. “Harry Belafonte Keeps It Real at the Gathering,” Breakdown FM blog and podcast. Retrieved November 30, 2007, from http://odeo.com/audio/17369513/ view. See also R. Lewis’s comments in the discussion on Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes, titled: “Economic Status of African Americans.” Retrieved November 30, 2007, from www.nathanielturner.com/ economicstatusofafricanamericans.htm.

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References Adamo, R. (2007, August 15). NOLA’s Failed Education Experiment: Privatization runs amok in the post-Katrina New Orleans school system. The American Prospect. Retrieved October 30, 2007, from www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=nolas_failed_ education_experiment. Anderson, J. (1988). The education of Blacks in the south, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ani, M. (1994). Yurugu: An African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Baker, L. (1996). The second battle of New Orleans: The hundred-year struggle to integrate the schools. New York: HarperCollins. Banfield, C. R., & Levin, H. M. (2007, August). The economic losses from high school dropouts in California (Policy Brief 1). Santa Barbara, CA: The California Dropout Research Project, University of California at Santa Barbara Gevirtz Graduate School of Education. Black Commentator (2004, June 17). Mass incarceration and rape: The savaging of Black America. Issue # 95. Retrieved November 1, 2007, from www.blackcommentator. com/95/95_cover_prisons.html. Blankenship, S., & Yanarell, E. (2004, June). Prison recruitment as a policy tool of local economic development: A critical evaluation. Contemporary Justice Review, 7(2), 183–198. Bunseki-Fu-Kiau, K. K., & Lukondo-Wamba, A. M. (2000). Kindezi: The Kongo art of babysitting. Baltimore: Black Classics Press. Butchart, R. E. (1980). Northern schools, Southern Blacks, and reconstruction: Freedmen’s education, 1862–1875. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Children’s Defense Fund. (2007). America’s cradle to prison pipeline. Washington, D.C.: Author. Cosby, B., & Poussaint, A. L. (2007). Come on people: On the path from victims to victors. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. Dance, L. J. (2002). Tough fronts: The impact of street culture on schooling. New York: Routledge/Falmer. Dannett, S. L. (1964). Milla Granson: “Slave teacher.” Negro Heritage Library. Vol. I 1619–1900. Yonkers, NY: Educational Heritage, Inc. Davey D. (2007). Harry Belafonte ain’t nothing to f&%k with (just ask Colin Powell). Breakdown FM w/Davey D. Retrieved November 30, 2007, from http://odeo.com/ audio/17369513/view. Day, J. C., & Newberger, E. (2002, July). The big payoff: Educational attainment and synthetic estimates of work-life earnings (Population Division No. P23–210). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau. Dixon, B. (2007, October 13). Black mass incarceration is now a political issue. Dissident. Retrieved November 1, 2007, from www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/10/black-massincarceration-is-now-a-political-issue/. Duncan, G. A. (2000). Urban pedagogues and the ceiling of adolescents of color. Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, 27, 29–42. Dyson, M. E. (2006). Is Bill Cosby right? Or has the Black middle class lost its mind? New York: Basic Civitas Books. Ferguson, A. A. (2000). Bad boys: Public schools in the making of Black masculinity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Susan Goodwin is Director of the Rochester Teacher Center (RTC). The

Teacher Center plays a pivotal role in teacher learning and professional development in the City School District in Rochester, New York. Her work focuses on culturally connected, emancipatory curriculum and instructional practices, teacher research, and teacher union reform. She has produced a body of publications for teachers’ professional development and student learning, including the journal, Raising Standards, Raising Children and professional learning texts, Teaching Children of Color: Seven Constructs of Effective Teaching in Urban Schools and Document-Based Learning: Curriculum and Assessment. Dr. Goodwin is a permanently certified teacher and teacher union leader. Annette Henry is a professor of Education in the Department of Language and

Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship examines race, class, language, gender, and culture in socio-cultural contexts of teaching and learning in the lives of Black students and Black women teachers’ practice in Canada, the U.S., and the Caribbean. She has written extensively about diverse feminisms and conceptual and methodological research issues especially in culture-specific contexts. She has received several awards including the Jason Millman Promising Scholar award from Cornell University, the AERA Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity Research Award (SAGE), and the AERA Scholar of the Year Award (Research Focus on Black Education). Current projects include an ethnographic study in an inner city school in Trenchtown, Jamaica; guest editorship of a special issue of the Caribbean Journal of Education with Dr. Loraine Cook at the University of West Indies; a life history study of Black women in Vancouver; a 20-year retrospective of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in

Contributors

289

Canada; biographical study of Stuart Hall’s early years in Jamaica and the United Kingdom.

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Ibrahima Seck is a faculty member of the Department of History at Université

Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. He is a former Fulbright Fellow at the University of Mississippi and the University of New Orleans where he conducted research on African cultures and slavery in the Lower Mississippi River Valley. His teaching is mostly focused on the Atlantic slave trade and African American culture. He has taught many generations of Senegalese students as well as American students enrolled in study abroad programs in Senegal. He is currently the director of the Whitney Heritage Plantation Museum of Slavery located in St. John the Baptist Parish near New Orleans. This museum offers a unique interpretation of slavery and its legacies in the U.S. South. Dr. Seck is the author of many articles on the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in Louisiana. His most recent publication is a book entitled Bouki Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750–1860 (New Orleans: UNO Press). This book traces the route of the enslaved Africans and African Americans to the German Coast of Louisiana, describes their daily life on the plantation, and discusses their various contributions to the making of the Afro-Creole culture of Louisiana. Dr. Seck is also a certified teacher of History and Geography and has taught for two decades in high schools in Senegal. He is the co-author of textbooks on African history and cultures for students in Switzerland and the Canary Islands. Joel Spring is a professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City

University of New York, whose scholarship focuses on educational globalization policies, the politics of education, and multicultural education. He is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. He has published over 20 books on American and global school policies. His most recent scholarly works include Globalization of Education: An Introduction (2nd Edition); Political Agendas for Education: From Race to the Top to Saving the Planet; Corporatism, Social Control, and Cultural Domination in Education: From the Radical Right to Globalization; with Anthony Picciano, The Great American Education-Industrial Complex: Ideology, Technology, and Profit; and Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace, and the Digital Mind. His textbook American Education is currently in its 16th edition.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote tables, those in bold denote figures. A History of Negro Revolt (James) 215–16 “A Southerner on the Negro Question” (Mays) 180 abductive schooling 172 abolitionists 193–5 academic demands vs. community involvement 23 academic racism 6–7 acculturation 161 Across the Centuries (Armento et al) 165–6 acting Black 193 action research 82–4 activism, as education 43 activist leadership 23 Adamo, R. 275 Adams, E. C. L. 164 Africa: exclusion from history 148; population diversity 164; as source of labor 148–9 African American blues tradition 56, 59 African American community, similar to an African village 31 African American cultural expression 252 African American Cultural Knowledge 36, 49 African American culture, as inferior 33–4 African American Home Language 92, 108–9 African American tales 43 African beginnings 191–2

African cultural continuum 212 African Diaspora, reconnection 151 “African Drums and Ratios” curriculum project 250–1; see also Moses, B.; The Algebra Project African Holocaust 154 African priestesses 183, 192; see also Aunt Jemima African roots 209–12 African spirituality 192 African Union 219 African women 22, 192–3 Afrocentric praxis 139–45 Afrocentric theory 212 Afrocentrism 107–8 Agger, B. 79 agricultural labor 30–1 Akbar, N. 26 alienation 178–9; cultural recovery from 157; experience of 47; as gift 262–3; honors thesis research project 44; as lived experience 42; overcoming 129; by schooling 40–1; students 38 Alinsky, S. 171 Allen, J. 85 Allen, R. A. 91–2 alterity 37, 187–8, 189–90 alternative mode of thinking 179 American common school 106 American Dream 117 American Enterprise Institute 270

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Index

Amistad Commissions 239 Anderson, G. L. 65, 73 Anderson, S. E. 179, 204 Angus, J. 122 answering an ancestral call 13–14 Anyon, J. 261 Anyon, Jean 248 Aristide, Mildred 219–20 Arizona, HB 2261 law 239 Armento, B. 165–8 Arnot-Hopffer, E. 84 Asante, M. 107–8, 140, 141, 252 Asian American studies 89 assimilationism 8, 74, 117, 161, 171, 184, 239, 243, 248–9 Atkinson, B. 80 Atlanta 275–6 Aunt, as term of respect 135–6 Aunt Jemima 49, 135–6, 192 Austin, D. 20 authentic voices 218–19 autobiography 20 autoethnography 80 Baber, W. L. 22 Baker, E. 90, 184, 196 Baldwin, James 186, 188, 262 Ball, A. 82 Banks, J. A. 236 Baraka, Amiri 41 Bartolome, R. 134 Barton, C. P. 142 battles, choosing 27 beauty 188 being in the world 92 Belafonte, Harry 281 beliefs: challenging 171; educational ideology 256–7 Benin 210; divination ceremony 150–1; see also Dahomey, King of Bennett, Bill 208 Bering Strait theory 133 Berlak, A. 79 Bernal, D. D. 79 Berta-Avila, M. I. 73–4, 76 bias: ideological 55, 58, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 261; intellectual 121 Biblical references 32 bilingualism 106, 107, 108–9 Black academics, defining role 24 Black Arts Movement 41, 195, 219, 280 Black church 20, 36 Black communities, destruction 42 Black Education: A Transformative Research

291

and Action Agenda for the New Century (King) 241–2, 243 Black Experience 36; reality vs. representations 31, 186; theorizing 186–7 Black feminism, and critical race theory 72–3 Black Freedom Struggle 196, 203–5, 211–12, 220 Black inferiority 129; mythology 180–1 Black intellectual tradition 212–14 Black lives, destruction 42 Black Mardi Gras Indians 203, 217–19, 221n3 Black Mothers to Sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with Social Practice (King & Mitchell) 38, 39, 132 Black people, representations of 33–4 Black Perspective 36 Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Carney) 192–3 Black scholarship 231 Black Sociology of Knowledge 47 Black speech 189 Black Studies: access to courses 5–6; critical role 37; as critique of ideology 143–5, 155–6; deciphering practice 154–5; deciphering praxis 36–40; fragmented networks 8; goal of 148; influential figures 3; in teacher development, 144; sees with “Indian eyes” 7; theoretical analysis 56; theoretical paradigm 140; theoretical perspective 258–60 Black survival 171 Black teachers, participatory investigation 39–40 Black/White duality, cost of 208 Black women, maligning of 131 blackness, 188–90; power of 36; Blackness/Africanness 202; see also conceptual, “Blackness” blind-vision 79 blues epistemology 56, 59–63, 88, 92 blues music 188; emergence of 60–1; interpretations of 59–60; as more than genre 62; vision 62–3; White blues 63 Bluford, Gordon 150 Boggs, G. L. 47, 86 Boggs, J. 41, 47; see also Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (Boggs) book: aim of 7; organization 10 Book of the Dead 13–14 Boykin, W. 252

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Index

Boyte, H. 26 Braguez, Fr. 150 Braziel, J. 203 Brazil 27, 240 Breitman, G. 48, 156 Broussard, A. 54 Brown, James 36, 47 Brown, John 194–5 Brown v. Board of Education 178, 180, 181 browning 112 Bunseki-Fu-Kiau, K. K. 270 Burton, N. 205 Bush, George W. 274 Busia, A. 154, 156, 185 Cagan, E. 259, 260–1 California Curriculum Commission 236–7 California State Board of Education’s Curriculum Development and Supplemental Materials Commission 132–3 Cappe, Mary 26 Carney, J. A. 192 Carolina Gold 192–3 Carr, W. 65, 255 Castenell, L. 57 categories of difference 66 celebrating diversity 111–14 Children’s Defense Fund 279 Choctaws 105 Christianity 62 church, experiences at 41 Civil Rights movement 106 civilizational crisis 271–2 Clark, S. 184 Clark, V. 185 Clarke, J. H. 185, 204 class 66–7, 248 class consciousness 157 co-analysis 39 coalition building 90 Cochran-Smith, M. 78–9, 80, 81, 82 Cohen, Elizabeth G. 47 Coladarci, A. 46 collaborative collages 77 collaborative ethnographic practitioner research 84 collaborative research 90 Collatos, A. M. 75 collective action 280 Collective Humanity 218 collective identity 171, 201 collective-identity politics 157 collective memory 36, 135–6; of lived

realities 47; mobilization 45; recovery of 184–5 colonial schooling 147–8 color-blindness 63, 78–9, 184, 243 Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE) 241–2 Common Core standards 106, 237 Common Core State Curriculum 107 communities of destiny 171 communities of interest 171 communities of practice 65 community: as inspiration 38; solidarity and values 48 community capacity 280 community involvement vs. academic demands 23 community knowledge, valuing and using 86–90 Community Knowledge Centered model 86 community learning experiences 83 community-mediated inquiry 82–4 community mindfulness 86, 131 community nomination method 86 Community Scholars project 86–8 Community Teacher model 86 community well-being, and individual accomplishment 86; see also well-being complicity 272–3 conceptual: “Blackness” 187, 242, 256; whiteness 219; conceptual–cognitive categories 256 Condorcet, Marquis de 150 Cone, J. 63, 181 consciousness 113, 122; class consciousness 157; destructive 156; developing 132–3; and Diaspora Literacy 156–7; recovery of 184–5; socially constructed 131; transformation 184 continuum of women’s work 27 contradictions: confronting 26; resolution 46 Cosby, Bill 273, 281 counter-knowledge 120–1 Courlander, H. 154, 162 Cox, G. O. 113 credibility 25–6 criminalization 42, 276–9, 281, 282–3 crisis of knowledge 85–90, 139 crisis of legitimacy 170 Criterion Standards for Contextualized Teaching and Learning about People of African Descent (King and Goodwin) 232 critical consciousness 113

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Index

Critical Conversations 133 critical ethnographies 73–6 critical pedagogy 66 critical perspective 27 critical race theory: and Black feminism 72–3; discourse of whiteness 77–8; intersectionalities 78–80; and methods 70–3; overview 70; precepts 70; qualitative inquiry 71–2 critical research 65–70, 75–6 critical skills 123 critical social science 65–6 critical social theory, compared to alternative approaches 67–9 Critical Studyin’ 143–4, 204; abolitionists 193–5; acting Black 193; African beginnings 191–2; alterity 187–8, 189–90; Aunt Jemima 192; Carolina Gold 192–3; as framework for teaching 212; Katrina and Haiti 212–14; key points 178–9; origin and definition 179; practice-to-theory 184–6; problems of education 182–4; racial reasoning 179–82; recuperating nihilation 214–18; rewriting/rethinking 190–5; summary and conclusions 195–6; theorizing black experience 186–8; will to Blackness 188–90 critical theory 46, 59–60, 65–6 critical transformation, resistance to 55 Cruse, H. 249 cultural amnesia 204 cultural appropriation 193 cultural authenticity 233 cultural deficit paradigm 47, 117, 129–31 cultural democracy, research/policy for 236–7 cultural expression 36 cultural hegemony 156 cultural ideals and assets 232 cultural integrity 55 Cultural Knowledge 45, 49, 144; context and overview 248–9; excellence/ assessment 249–52; organization for implementation 251; purpose of 253; summary and conclusions 253–4; use of construct 251–2 cultural memory: preservation of 154; recovering 136 cultural mode of rationality 166 cultural model 7, 74; cultural model perspective 166; see also Black Studies; Wynter, S. cultural patterns 263

293

cultural politics 119–21 cultural reality 252 cultural theft 185 cultural well-being 14, 54, 57–9, 63, 86, 88–92, 144, 236–8, 241, 243, 279–80, 282 culturally grounded practice, reflection 229–33 culture: as political expression 47; White dominance 35 culture-centered education 46, 151 culture of poverty 129 culture-systemic analysis 37 Cuny, Waring 42 current status of Black education 144–5; beyond rescue 271–2; challenges 282; civilizational crisis 271–2; context and overview 271; criminalization and incarceration 276–9, 281, 282–3; cultural well-being 279–80; future action and development 281–3; New Orleans 273–4; privatization 277–9 curricula: Common Core State Curriculum 107; cultural content 107; de-motivating 169–70; disagreements over 236; mandated teaching 239–40; national curriculum 139, 237; neoconservative 122; role of research 237; standardized 106; transformative 144, 237–8; see also transformative curriculum praxis curricular knowledge, class basis 248 curricular silences 64 curriculum resources 212 curriculum wars 236–7 Dahomey, King of 154; see also Benin Davidson, B. 164, 166, 191 Davis, Angela 27 Davis, F. 61, 91 deciphering practice 37, 256 deciphering praxis 36–40 decolonizing methodology 63–5 deficit ideologies 6, 7 deficit theories 60 deficit viewpoint 57, 142–3, 242, 253 Degler, C. 154 democracy: American 26; opportunities for 139; participation 179 democratic ethic 111–12 democratic social change methodology 90 depravity myth 203–4; depravity/ inferiority discourse 208, 211, 215; sexual 215

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294

Index

design experiments 89–90 destructive consciousness 156 Detroit 23 developmentally appropriate teaching 206 dialectic of alienation and resistance 41 Diaspora Literacy 45, 154, 185, 192, 195–6, 204; and human consciousness 156–7; Katrina and Haiti 212–14 Diaspora, recognition of 219 Dickerson, G. 220 dis-enfranchisement 5 disaster capitalism 273 disaster narratives of depravity/inferiority 207–9 discourse of whiteness 76–8 disempowerment 5 dis(re)membering 209–12 diversity: African peoples 164; celebrating 111–14; as threatening 121 divination ceremony 150–1 Dixon, B. 272, 278 Dixson, A. 72–3 doctoral research 44, 46–8 documentary films, as teaching material 261 Dodson, H. 8–9 doing things well 32 domestic manufacture 32–3 Douglass, Frederick 193–4 Drake, St. Clair 3, 7, 16, 41, 46, 47, 50n3 Dred Scott v. Sanford 111 DuBois, W. E. B. 42, 121, 168, 187, 194–5 Duncan, G. A. 71–2, 91 dysconscious racism 109; celebrating diversity 111–14; context and overview 111–12; cultural politics 119–21; discussion 117–19; educational intervention 119; Reflections 105–9; research findings 114–17; study of 6; summary and conclusions 122–3 dysconsciousness 15, 48, 58, 90, 113, 119, 123, 133, 157, 181, 257–8 Dyson, M. E. 281 Ebonic see African American Home Language economic literacy 281 education: breadth of 33; cultural wellbeing 279–80; denial as control 147–8, 149–50; for freedom 143; liberation of 7; moral problems 139; not neutral 260; purpose of 7–8, 9; as responding to and creating the world 16; responsive 46; vs. schooling 43; vision 237

education to govern 86; see also Boggs, G. L. Educational Policy Studies 6 educational sites, non-traditional 20 educators, moral obligations 179 Egyptians 42, 107–8; see also Kemet Ellis, G. W. 121 Ellison, R. 184, 193 emancipation generation 5 emancipatory pedagogy 38–40 Eminem 193 empathy 258, 262–3 encouragement, selective 34 English Only movement 107 epistemological panics 237 epistemologies 57–8, 63–5 equal opportunity 117–18 equality, misunderstanding 184 equity, resistance to 65 Esther 127–8, 136 ethic, of good work 32 Ethnic Studies, opportunities 89 Eurocentrism, textbook controversy 167 European immigration 161, 162 Evans, E. 205, 235 Evans-Winters, V. 72 excellence, expectation of 32 exploratory case study approach 155–6 Eyerman, R. 45, 157 faith 22 family, as inspiration 38 fan quilt 2 Fanon, F. 40 Farahmandpur, R. 59 Fasheh, M. 46 Fay, B. 45 fear 83 feminism 79 filiopietism 160–1, 162 films, as teaching material 261 Fletcher, D. 210 Florence, experiences 42 Florida Statute 1003.42(h), Title XLVIII of the Education Code 239 folklore 45, 188 folk tales and nursery rhymes 43–4; see also Native American Indian Coyote tales forbidden knowledge 147–51, 194 forced immigration 161 fragmented knowledge 58 freedom: education for 143; struggle for 5–9 Freire, P. 40, 66, 71, 120, 139, 184, 185

Index

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Fried, J. 267 Friedman, M. 273–4 fringeness 140 Fullilove, M. 203 funds of knowledge 84, 88 future action and development 281–3 Gandhi, Mohandas 136 Gao School Museum 46 Garon, P. 54 Gates, H. L. Jr 109, 147, 148 Gathering for Justice 281 gender 78 genetic defectivity 37 George, N. 193 Giddens, A. 45, 155, 160 Gilbert, A. 211 Giroux, H. 239 global crises 16 Gomez, M. A. 148 Gonzales, N. 84 Goodwin, R. 200 Goodwin, S. 212, 229–33 Gordon, B. M. 39, 248 Gore, J. 78 Grande, S. 63, 64–5 Grandma Lena 32 grandmother see Harrell, Elrena Ellis Grant, C. 121 Greenleaf, R. 24–5 grounded pedagogy 58 groundings: context and overviews 13–16, 19–21; Reflections 19–21, 105–9; theoretical 36–7; values 32 group identity 8 Hacker, A. 7, 37, 130 Haiti 143–4, 204, 207, 208–9; in Black intellectual tradition 212–14; curriculum resources 212; exoticism 210; learning beyond disasters 214–18; see also unworthiness Haitian Revolution 205, 210–11, 214–15 Hamilton, C. 162 Hanley, M. S. 239 Harding, V. 5, 7, 157, 159, 160, 171 Harlem Renaissance 42 Harper, F. E. W. 1 Harrell, Elrena Ellis 3–5, 14, 30–1 Harvard Project on School Desegregation 134 “Hating the Root: Attacks on Vodou in Haiti” (Umoja) 212 Head Start program 129

295

healing 14, 242 Heaney, T. 113, 122 heart, weighing 13–14 hegemonic intellectual paradigm 172 hegemony 35, 261–2 Heinz Endowments 239 Henry, A. 19–21, 139 heritage: alienation from 64; devaluing 117; fragmented knowledge 4; identification with 70, 171; learning about 184; literacy within 179 Heritage Knowledge 8–9, 88–9, 185–6, 190–5, 204, 220; abolitionists 193–5; acting Black 193; African beginnings 191–2; Aunt Jemima 192; Carolina Gold 192–3; Katrina and Haiti 212–14; re-membered 214–18; summary and conclusions 195–6; use of research 242 Highwater, J. 262–3 Hilliard, A. G. 9, 13, 59 hip-hop 252 historical consciousness 42 historical-cultural junctures 212 historical determinism 115 historical perspective 83 historical thinking 205, 281 history: alternative views 120; distortion and erasure 203; fragmented knowledge 4, 58, 219; marginalized 60–2; resources 219; sanitization 205; writing of 190 honors thesis research project 44 hooks, b. 186 Horton, M. 184 human consciousness 156–7 human rights 219 humanitarian crises 209 humanity 179 humanity, denial of 178 Hurricane Katrina 143–4; in Black intellectual tradition 212–14; curriculum resources 212; effects on education 273–4; evacuees 207; first responses 202–3; learning beyond disasters 214–18; media representations 201–2, 209, 280; reports of sexual violence 203; see also Katrina rapist; New Orleans; unworthiness; hybridity 70 Hyland, N. E. 82–4, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91 hyper-assimilationism 239 identity: alienation from 64; and alterity 186–7; awareness of 184; challenging 122; collective 171; development of 74,

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Index

identity continued 243; and educational achievement 184; formation 41; immigrant 163; national 187; pan-ethnic 238; patriotic-national 239; professional 76; racialized 238; reclaiming 219; recovery of 184–5; and relationships 74; subjective 113; young people 201 identity schemata 256–7 ideological bias 55, 58, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 261 ideological knowledge, effects of 143 ideological perspectives 119 ideologies: Black inferiority 129–30; challenging 112–13; colonial 147–8; neoconservative 112; of privilege 65 ideology: critique 155–6; defining 79–80; distortion effect 178; educational 256–7; as knowledge 180; teaching about 261–2; use of term 155; ways of working 160 ideology critique 66 Ifa 14, 192; see also African priestesses; Yemaya/Yemoja immigration: categorization 161–2; conflating of experiences 162–3 inbred incapacity 7 incarceration 133, 276–9, 281, 282–3 inclusion 63, 272–3 indigenous epistemologies 63–5 individual accomplishment, and community well-being 86 “Individualism, Collectivism, and Radical Educational Reform” (Cagan) 260–1 indoctrination 262 inequities 25 informed empathy 258 inquiry-based learning 89–90 inquiry-based partnerships 90 inquiry-based pedagogical approaches 55 inquiry methods 48–9 inspiration, sources of 38 Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti 200 Institute N.H.I. 182 institutional racism 278 integration 280 intellectual bias 121 intellectual heritage 41 intellectual labor, roots of 3 internally displaced persons 209–10 Interpersonal/Cross-Cultural Communications 256–7, 258, 263–4

intersectionalities 78–80, 117–18 I.Q. gap 129–30 Ishibashi, J. 88 James, C. L. R. 36, 170, 178, 200, 210, 215–16 James, Elmore 92 Jemima see Aunt Jemima Jemima Circle 49, 134–6; see also Aunt Jemima Jensen, A. 129 Jhally, S. 122 joblessness 119, 203 Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Senate 277 Jones, L. 62 journal writing 263 junior high school, memories of 35 just wars 166 justice: building 38; implications of aim 143 K-12 Mexican American studies curriculum 238 Kaomea, J. 64 Karenga, M. 37, 41, 255 Katrina rapist 202–3 Kaupapa Maori 64 Kawagley, Angayuqaq Oscar 64 Kellogg National Fellowship 24 Kelly, R. D. G. 1, 5, 236 Kemet 13, 107, 271; see also Egyptians Kemanthi, D. 270 Kemmis, S. 65, 255 Kiang, P. N. 89 Killens, John O. 195–6 Kilminster, R. 255 Kincheloe, J. L. 58 King Buzzard 164 King, J. 89, 129–30, 142–3, 181, 212–13, 237, 241–2, 243, 257; family stories 142; focus of teaching 255; legacy 105–9 King, Mable 142 King, S. 57 kinship affiliation 166 Klein, N. 273–4 knowing why 44–5 knowledge: community knowledge 86–90; context of 45; crisis of 85–90; for cultural well-being 58–9; forbidden 147–51, 194; ideological bias 55; ideological distortion 178; school knowledge 237; social 216; subjugated

Index

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91–2; teachers’ needs 90; theft of 192–3; see also Cultural Knowledge knowledge gaps 7 knowledge traditions 57–8 Kohl, H. 156 Kozol, J. 260, 261 Labbo, L. 85 labor, productive 32–3 Ladson-Billings, G. 70, 86, 142–3, 250 land of immigrants 105–6, 109 language: African American Home Language 92, 108–9; African languages 191–2; Black speech 189; cultural role 64; Ebonics 108–9; Mardi Gras Indian language tradition 218; Songhoy-senni (language) 192, 221n11, 242, 282; suppression 106; use of 3 language of oppression 8 Laveau, Marie 217, 220 leadership: ambivalence 24; challenge of 23; context and overview 22; goal of 26; relevance 28; summary and conclusions 48–9; vision 26, 27–8 learning power program 89–90 Lee, C. 250 Levine, L. 61 Lewis, R. 281 liberation 30 liberatory pedagogy 112–13, 121–3 lieu de mémoire 136 life experiences, and academic work 20 life unworthy of life 208 liminality 37 lineage 166, 191–2 Lipman, P. 282 literacy: forbidden knowledge 147–51, 194; within heritage 179 Loewen, J. 205 Louisiana slave revolt 205 Loury, G. 134, 277 Louvre 42 Lukondo-Wamba, A. M. 270 Lytle, S. 80 Maafa 282, 283 Macedo, D. 134 MacLeod, J. 46 Maher, F. A. 79 Maiga, H. 46, 217, 218, 221, 242 Mali 17n2, 46, 58, 142, 191; 217n4, 221n11; see also Timbuctoo, N.J., underground railroad; Timbuktu Mao Tse-Tung (Zedong) 139

297

marginalized history 60–2 Marx, K. 66, 157 Marx, S. 77–8 “Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost?” 277 mathematics, critical community-based approach 46; see also The Algebra Project Mays, B. 180 McAllum, Sam 150 McCarthy, C. 157 McGruder, A. 188–90 McIntyre, A. 77–8 McLaren, P. 59 McLeod Bethune, M. 1 Meacham, S. 86, 88, 90, 91 media representations: Black sexuality 205; Haiti 209; Hurricane Katrina 201–2, 209, 280; New Orleans 209 Meiners, E. R. 270, 271, 276 Memin Penguin 188 memory: collective 36; sites of 218; see also lieu de mémoire men, nature of work 33 mental slavery 172 meritocracy 260 methodology 45–6, 63–5 Mexican American studies 240 Mezirow, J. 121 Middle Passage 135, 148, 162–8, 172 migrant labor 31 Miller, J. C. 153, 172 miseducation 90; analyses of 121; continuing 148; effects of 122–3; overcoming 129; response to 257–8; of teachers 83–4 Miss Laurine 33 Mississippi 46, 105, 150, 193, 205, 219; Mississippi Delta 60 mistrust, of leaders 26 Mitchell, C. 39, 89, 132 Moll, L. C. 84 Monk, Thelonius 5 monotheism 150–1 Moore, C. 249 moral obligation 133, 179 moral problems 139 Morrell, E. 66, 75 Morris, C. 54 Moses, B. 250–1 Mother Jones 261 mothers: activism 25; representations of 38; social practice/pedagogy 38–9 Moyenda, S. 79

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298

Index

multicultural education, as gatekeeper 5 multiculturalism 106, 107, 263–4 multiple narratives 156 Munford, C. J. 133, 134 Murrell, P. C. Jr 57, 58, 85, 86 music 59–63, 206 mythology: black inferiority 180–1; of depravity 203–4; of race 38; U.S. as white nation 183–4 narrative inquiry 80–2, 259–60; see also practitioner inquiry narratives, unworthiness and unfitness 274–6 National Alliance of Black School Educators 33–4 National Black Education Agenda 237 national curriculum 139, 237 Native American Indian Coyote tales 43 negation 272–3 Negro spirituals 62 Nembhard, J. G. 281 neoconservative curriculum 122 neoconservative ideology 112 neutrality, of researcher 39 New Orleans 143–4; Black Freedom Struggle 203–4; education integration 280; exoticism 210; see also Hurricane Katrina New Orleans Public School board (NOPS) 275 NightJohn (Paulsen) 216 nihilation 140, 187, 208; costs of 272–3; recuperating 214–18; recuperating nihilation 219 nihilism 42, 207; see also depravity myth nine dimensions of African American expression 252 No Child Left Behind Act 106, 107, 274 No Humans Involved 182 Noblit, G. 239 Noffke, S. E. 82–4, 85 non-neutral inquiry 45–7 norms, White 112 North Carolina, bill to prohibit education of slaves 149–50 novels, as teaching materials 262–3 Nyerere, M. J. K. 40 Oakes, J. 75, 89–90 Oakland resolution 108–9 objectivity 39, 46 opening minds 144, 145; see also Social Foundations of Education

opportunity expansion 272 oppression, awareness of 122 oral tradition 61, 191–2 Orixá 192; see also Ifa otherness 37 Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (Boggs) 41 Pan Africanism 19–20 pan-ethnic identity 238 paradigm shift 84 Parents for Positive Action 25 participant reflections 264–7 participatory investigation 39–40 participatory social inquiry 75 patriotic-national-identity policy framework 239 Paulsen, G. 216–17 Pedagogy: of consciousness 135; culturally relevant 86; culturally-based 105; emancipatory 38–40; grounded 58; liberatory 112, 121, 123; of social action 112; research-as-pedagogy 89; see also Red pedagogy Pennington, J. 77–8 performance 250 personal prestige 25, 27 personalities, reconstruction of 151 perspective advantage 187; see also alterity perspective transformation 121 Pettaway Randolph, L. 1 Philadelphia public schools 240 place for memory 136 Podhoretz, N. 8 policy frameworks 235–6, 239, 243 pollution, and racism 134 popular culture 31, 38, 75, 131, 189, 193, 206, 252 positivism 39, 46, 66 poverty 6, 7, 209, 271–2 power: of blackness 36; and leadership 22 powerlessness 22 practical-critical activity 36, 39 practitioner inquiry 80–5 pragmatic adaptation 26 praxis of transmutation 36–7, 260 praxis, use of term 37, 255 prejudice reduction 83 Presley, Elvis 193 “price of repression” 194 prisoners 133, 276–9, 281, 282–3 privatization 277–9 privilege 76, 112, 113, 114, 117–18 “problem-posing” counter-knowledge 120

Index

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productive labor 32–3 professional vocabulary 35–6 public good 272 public participation 139 publish or perish 23 qualitative inquiry, critical race theory 71–2 qualitative research 65 Queen Esther 126–8, 136 quilting 1–4, 32; see also fan quilt Quinn, T. 270, 271 race: belief system 181; mythology of 38 racial cultural amnesia 203 racial reasoning 179–82 racial resentment 239 racial-social justice: action research 82–4; blues epistemology 59–63; chapter structure 56–7; community knowledge 86–90; context and overview 54–7; crisis of knowledge 85–90; critical ethnographies 73–6; critical race theory and methods 70–3; critical research 65–70; decolonizing methodology 63–5; discourse of whiteness 76–8; ethnographic methods 84–5; focus and argument 56; indigenous epistemologies 63–5; intersectionalities 78–80; narrative inquiry 80–2; prevailing vision 89; summary and conclusions 91–2; teaching for social change 80–4 racial socialization 207 racialized identities 238 racism: institutional 278; as legacy of slavery 205 Rastas, groundings 19 rationality, cultural mode 166 Ravitch, D. 8, 235, 236, 237 Rawley, J. 164 Reagon, Bernice Johnson 62 reality vs. representations 31 reasonings 19 rebellion, academic 27 recognition 25 Recovery School District (RSD), Louisiana 274–6 Red pedagogy 64–5 reflection 39, 120–1, 255; course participants 264–7 Reflections 3; Annette Henry 19–21; Ibrahima Seck 147–51; Joel Spring 105–9; Susan Goodwin 229–33 reification, of immigrant experience 162

299

relationship building 185–6 re-membering 144, 192, 200, 204, 212–123, 216 reminiscences 31–2 research: application to practice 241–3; approach to 45–6; areas of 38–9, 44–5; collaborative 90; foundations of 45; influences 40, 41, 43; inquiry methods 48–9; lack of 239; as leadership and 23; liberating methods 38; partnership 48; as pedagogical 39; questioning dominant paradigm 43; role of 237; strategy 45 research-as-pedagogy 39–40, 89 research methodology, critiquing 43 research projects 232–3 researchers, needs 90 resistance 40–1; to critical transformation 55; to other perspectives 263; to selfinvestigation 90 respect 30–1, 33, 34 reward 25 rewriting/rethinking 190–5 rhetorical forms 250 rice 192–3 Rice, Condoleezza 190 rights, standing up for 14 Roberts, D. E. 277–8, 281 Robertson, Pat 210 Robinson, B. J. 45, 91, 270 Robinson, R. 186 Rochester Teacher Center (RTC) 229, 230–2 Rodney, W. 19–20 Roedigger, D. 179 root shock 203 Rousseau, C. K. 72–3 Roziek, J. 80 Rushton, S. 81 sacred song tradition 3, 62 sacrifice 14 saggin’ pants 200–1, 212 San Francisco State University 7, 42 Sarny: A Life Remembered (Paulsen) 216–17 Savage Inequalities (Kozol) 260 “save our sons and daughters” (S.O.S.A.D.) 23 scales of judgment 13–14 schemata 255 scholarship, personal discovery 47 school activism 25 school knowledge 237

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300

Index

schooling: alienating 40–1; Black students’ experiences 8–9; colonial 147–8; and racialized identity 238–9; social purposes 119 schools, segregation 134 Seck, Ibrahima 147–51 Second Battle of New Orleans 280 Second Reconstruction 5 self-knowledge 262 self-narrative inquiry 80–2 self-realization 186 self-repossession 157 servant leadership 24–6, 127–8 sexual violence 201–2, 203, 206, 208–9, 215–16 sexuality 205 shock and awe 273–4 Silva, P. B. G. 171 Sirotnick, K. A. 267 SIS Oral History Project 142 sites of memory 218 Sizemore, B. 9 skills, teachers’ needs 90 slave breeding 205, 206, 215 slave culture 117 slave trade, misrepresentations 163–8 slavery: abolitionists 193–5; effects on education 279–80; extent of trade 154; forbidden knowledge 148, 194; justification of 150; and lineage 191–2; mental 172; pre-existing market 150; representations of 33; state control of teaching 182; teaching of 206; textbook explanations 165–8; and warfare 150, 164; see also textbook controversy slaves, monetary value 153 Sleeter, C. 79, 121 Smith, K. T. 64 Snow, Susan 147 social change 23, 66, 70, 80–4 social citizenship 281 social cohesion 171 social control 276, 282 social ethics 113 Social Foundations of Education 112, 113, 114–15, 119–21; Black Studies theoretical perspective 258–60; challenging multiculturalism 263–4; conceptual whiteness 262–3; context and overview 255; course concepts and themes 260–4; cultural patterns 263; hegemony 261–2; ideology 261; ideology and identity 256–7; journal writing 263; narrative enquiry 259–60; participant

reflections 264–7; resistance 263; response to miseducation and dysconsciousness 257–8; summary and conclusions 267; theory-practice linkages 258–9 social knowledge 216 social order 117–19 social reconstructionist tradition 112–13 social science, approach to 45–6 social totality 155 socialization, cultural well-being 279–80 societal inequity 113 solidarity 48 Somehk, B. 82 Songhoy: emperors 217–18; society 191, 282 Songhoy Club 140–2, 241–3 Songhoy-senni 191–2, 242 sorrow songs 191–2, 279 Sothern, B. 92 spirit, power of 22 spiritual dynamics 13–14 spirituality 217; see also African spirituality sponsored mobility 41 Spring, J. 105–9 standardized curricula 106 standards-based content, as teacher focus 219 standards, importance of 32 standing up for rights 14 Stanford University 6–7, 41–3 Staples, R. 26 state education commission 27; see also California Curriculum Commission status quo 142 stereotypes 49 Stockton 4 Stuckey, S. 117 students: activism 42; critical skills 123; critical thinking 119; knowledge gaps 7; level of understanding 113–14; outcomes 230; protest 7; reflection 120–1; social knowledge 216 subjective identity 113 subjugated knowledge 91–2 Sublette, N. 216 Suret-Canale, J. 147 Swartz, E. 212–13 systemic thinking 281 “Talk to Teachers” (Baldwin) 186 Tate, W. F. 272, 276 Taylor, Q. 150 teacher education, critical race theory and Black feminism 72–3

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Index

teacher preparation 75–6 teachers: capable 57; critical and transformative 112; deficit viewpoint of 57, 142–3; miseducation 83–4, 90; needs 90, 112; personal experience of 34; research projects 232–3; standardsbased content 219 teaching: for change 90; developmentally appropriate 206; focus of 255; King’s approach 112–13; mandatory 239–40; requisites for 9; for social change 80–4 Tedla, E. 86, 131 Ten Demands 7 “Ten Vital Principles for Black Education and Socialization” 190 Textbook Adoption Recommendations report 160–1 textbook controversy 143, 182–3, 238; Black survival 170–1; conflating of experiences 162–3; context and overview 154–5; denial of contradictions 161; Eurocentrism 167; events and issues 157–9; explanations of slavery 165–8; exploratory case study approach 155–6; hope for change 170–2; ideological clash 160–1; misrepresentations 163–8; positive uses 170–2; responses of parents and educators 168–70; sectional interest vs. democratic interest 160; theoretical background 156–7; treatment of immigrant experience 161–2; see also slavery textbooks: multicultural 171; racist 132–3 The African (Courlander) 154, 162 The Algebra Project 251 The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray) 180 “The Boondocks” 188–90 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (Cruse) 249 The Millions More Movement Education Task Force Report 270 The Primal Mind (Highwater) 262–3 The Shock Doctrine (Klein) 273–4 “The Two Reservations” conference 249 “The View from Here” (Baldwin) 262 theoretical groundings 36–7 theorizing black experience 186–7 theory-practice linkages 258–9 Third Reconstruction 5 Thompson-Tetreault, M. K. 79 Thorne, A. 239 Timbuctoo, N.J., underground railroad 141–2, 141; see also Timbuktu

301

Timbuktu 58, 142, 146n1 Titon, J. T. 60, 62 toiling, choice of term 3 traditional African religions 150–1 transformative curriculum 144, 238, 240 transformative curriculum praxis: epistemological panics 237; policy frameworks 235–6; potential effects 240–1; research/policy for cultural democracy 236–7; Songhoy Club 241–3 transformative engagement 92 transformative heritage 237–8 transformative public scholarship: call to serve 127–8; context and overview 126–7; moving towards 132–3; need for 133–6; overcoming alienating miseducation 129; summary and conclusions 136 transmutation 260 Traoré, R. 240 Umoja, A. 212 UN Human Rights Convention on the Rights of the Child 219 unfitness 274–6 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 235, 236 Unum 151, 161, 162, 171 unworthiness: authentic voices 218–19; calculus 205–6; disaster narratives of depravity/inferiority 207–9; dis(re)membering 209–12; Hurricane Katrina 201–3; learning beyond disasters 214–18; narratives 274–6; overview 203–4; recovering Heritage Knowledge 214–17; sites of memory 218; summary and conclusions 219–20; see also worthiness urban youth, critical research 75–6 values: alien 64; of community 48; groundings 32 valuing, of people 35 violence 201–2, 203, 206, 208, 215–16 vision 237 vocabulary, professional 35–6 Vodou 210–11 Voodoo 194, 210; see also Laveau, Marie Wacquant, L. 272, 276 Walking the Road: Race Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Education (CochranSmith) 81

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302

Index

war against black males 34 warfare, and slavery 150, 164 Watkins, M. 47 wealth distribution 134 Webb, Jim 277 Weinburg, S. 171 Weingarten, R. 282 well-being 57–8; cultural well-being framework 88–9; education and socialization for 279–80; and individual accomplishment 86; knowledge for 58–9 Wellman, D. 113, 114, 117–18 Wells, Ida B. 3, 22 West, C. 54, 91 West, Kanye 62 western bourgeois model 92 “What Would America Be Without Blacks?” (Ellison) 193 “When the Gates Swing Open” (Dorsey) 10 White blues 63 White communities, need for change 23 White people: as danger 35; memories of 34–5 White supremacy racism: ideal of human beingness 187; impact 183–4; response to 5 White teachers, understandings 76 whiteness: as conceptual 262–3; costs of 272; discourse of 76–8; intersectionalities 78

whiteness studies 76 Wilder, C. S. 278 Williams, D. G. 72 Williams, T. 209 Wilson, Thomasyne Lightfoot xiii, 58 womanism 72 women, nature of work 32–3 women’s missionary circles 135 Wood, P. H. 182 Woods, C. 59–60, 61, 188 Woods, Tiger 200 Woodson, C. G. 36, 54, 90, 121, 155, 172, 190, 201, 237 Woodward, C. Vann 5 workshops 133 worldviews 262 worthiness 14, 272–3; see also unworthiness Wynter, S. 8, 37–8, 42, 47, 59, 92, 126, 140, 154–5, 157, 164, 166, 184, 186, 187, 207–8, 249, 253, 255–6, 257 Xicana/o teachers 73–4, 75 Yemaya/Yemoja 135, 192; see also African spirituality; Aunt Jemima Young, J. 203 young people: critical research 75–6; identity 201 Zeichner, K. M. 85