BLACKS ARE INFERIOR, LAZY AND DUMB.
WHITES ARE SUPERIOR, HARDWORKING AND INTELLIGENT.
BLACKS HAVE NO HISTORY AND SHOULD BE THANKFUL WHITES RESCUED THEM FROM SAVAGERY.
EUROPE IS THE MOTHER OF CIVILIZATION, AFRICA IS THE MOTHER OF PRIMITIVISM.
BLACKS CAN DO NOTHING FOR THEMSELVES.
BLACK FEATURES (NOSE, HAIR, SKIN COLOR…) ARE UGLY.
BLACKS SHOULD STRIVE TO BE LIKE WHITES.
EVERY MAN OR WOMAN HAS A PRICE.
SUCCESS IS MEASURED BY HOW THICK YOUR WALLET IS.
BLACK PEOPLE HOLD BLACK PEOPLE DOWN.
BLACKS CAN NEVER UNIFY.
BLACKS IN AMERICA HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON WITH BLACKS IN AFRICA.
BLACKS MUST DEPEND ON WHITES TO HELP THEM.
BLACKS ARE CUT-THROATS, THUGS AND WELFARE CHEATS.
With this picture, it is clear to see why young people, if we look at the numbers of dropouts, have been reluctant to embrace school. This, of course, isn’t the only factor for high dropout rates, but studies have shown, time and time again, that what is being taught is directly connected to focus, enthusiasm, and participation. As Dead Prez remembered:
Get your lessons, that’s why my moms kept stressin’
I tried to pay attention but they classes wasn’t interestin’
They seemed to only glorify the Europeans
Claimin’ Africans were only three-fifths a human being.
— DEAD PREZ, “THEY SCHOOLS,” LET’S GET FREE
It’s important to understand that challenging the mainstream school system is not antieducational, but actually, the contrary. This challenge reveals our deep concern with the educational process, forcing us to examine the social, political, and cultural role that curricula have on students of color. Additionally, it scrutinizes an educational tradition that is more invested in training a workforce of menials to follow instructions rather than teaching the critical-thinking skills necessary for individuals to empower their lives and communities. The tragic reality is that we have been disconnected from emancipatory education. We have been—in the United States and abroad—trapped in an educational system that has, by estranging us from our own culture and history, prepared us primarily for a subservient role in society. Whether you’re in Baltimore or Compton, Philadelphia or Accra, Ghana, this tragic phenomenon can be observed both in the actual schools and in the menial job markets graduates are forced into. As a result, many young people conclude that mainstream education is, like so many other things in society, designed, maintained, and controlled by another class/racial group to serve that group’s own socioeconomic interests.
I’m not suggesting that we should drop out of school. It’s a difficult and competitive world and it’s common knowledge that the farther one climbs educationally, the farther away one moves from poverty. My concern is psychocultural. How do we keep our minds? Carter G. Woodson, who wrote The Mis-education of the Negro, once remarked, “I went to Harvard for four years, and it took forty years to get Harvard out of me.” How do we avoid the Carter G. Woodson fate? This question ran through my mind as—
“It is my pleasure to welcome our guest, M. K. Asante, Jr.,” Eric Sanabria, senior class president and recipient of the Princeton Prize for Race Relations, introduced me to his fidgety classmates. Amid a light flutter of applause, I approached the microphone, disturbed by what Lisa had told me and unsure of what I would tell them.
I looked out into the audience and a thousand eyes, sunk in the beaming sockets of Black and brown boys and girls, looked back.
“Thanks for that, Eric. It’s an honor to be here,” I said, still searching for substance. In the front row, I saw the hungry blue eyes of Lisa. Then it hit me:
“I want to talk with y’all today about something I call ‘Two Sets of Notes,’” I announced as I pulled my first book out of my back pocket and opened it to the poem by the same name. I lunged my voice and body into the apropos stanzas:
TWO SETS OF NOTES FOR BLACK STUDENTS
I find myself feeling
As if I am ‘pan the ground & ceiling,
In institutions that disengage from healing
Instead, they simply warp open wounds
& Entrap me in rooms
where I am consumed by hypocrisy
& It occurs to me:
Greek philosophers didn’t author their own philosophy
& The statues on campus be watchin’ me,
Washington… Jefferson… Williams,
Clockin’ me—
As if to say ‘time’s up’
But I don’t run laps on tracks
I run laps around the scholars of tomorrow
Because new schools of thought
Are merely our histories borrowed
& They label me militant, and black national radical,
trying to put my learning process on sabbatical.
I don’t apologize,
Instead I spit truth into the whites of eyes infected by
white lies.
They even try to get me to see—
Their point of view from a brother that looks like me,
but that brother don’t—
walk like me
talk like me
or
act like me,
and that brother turned his head
when I asked if he was
black like me.
Mastering their thoughts
and forgetting our own
and we wonder why we always feel alone,
from the media to academia—
hanging brothers like coats
and in their schools….
I always take two sets of notes,
one set to ace the test
and
one set I call the truth,
and when I find historical contradictions
I use the first set as proof—
proof that black youths’
minds are being—
polluted,
convoluted,
diluted,
not culturally rooted.
In anything
except the Western massacre
and most of us are scared of Africa,
we view our mother’s land
Through the eyes of David Hume and Immanuel Kant
well
Immanuel kan’t tell me anything about a land he’s never
seen
a land rich with history
beautiful kings and queens.
They’ll have you believe otherwise
their history is built on high-rise lies
the pyramids were completed
before Greece or Rome were conceptualized,
then they’ll claim the Egyptians’ race was a mystery
you tell them to read Herodotus Book II of the histories
it cannot be any clearer….
Black children
look in the mirror
you are the reflection of divinity
don’t let them fool you with selective memory
walk high,
listen to the elders who spoke
Black Students,
Always take two sets of notes.
“Two Sets of Notes” grew out of my experiences in school systems that neglected to teach me crucial clusters of information connected to my identity. A system that made African-Americans and all non-whites an ethnic footnote in American and world history. This is no light matter as one’s identity is often forged through what we learn in school. This is what Baldwin meant when he said that white American identity “is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.” But we—African-Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, et cetera—don’t learn about our “heroic ancestors” apart from a context of white subjugation. For example, as students we learn that enslaved Africans were acquiescent to slavery. We are not taught, for instance, that in 1526, enslaved Africans and Spaniards founded a town near the Pee Dee River in South Carolina, and that, just months later, the Africans rebelled, killed ma
ny of their masters, and escaped to live with the Indians while the rest of the Spaniards fled to Haiti. Omissions such as these not only paint an inaccurate image of history, but adversely affect the way we view our ancestors and, in turn, ourselves. As Gen. Petro G. Grigorenko said in “Letter to a History Journal,” “Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people.”
Consider what Kwame Ture remembers about “concealment of historical truth” when he was a student in the West Indies:
The first one is that the history books tell you that nothing happens until a white man comes along. If you ask any white person who discovered America, they’ll tell you “Christopher Columbus.” And if you ask them who discovered China, they’ll tell you “Marco Polo.” And if you ask them, as I used to be told in the West Indies, I was not discovered until Sir Walter Raleigh needed pitch lake for his ship, and he came along and found me and said “Whup—I have discovered you,” and my history began.
We must begin to see why Ture never learned, for instance, the rhyme “In 1493 / Columbus stole all he could see.”
It is this kind of gross “concealment” that historically has led to events like the 1960s Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict in New York City, where African-American parents and other community members sought local control of the public schools in their neighborhoods. One of their major grievances was that the curriculum then, just like now, was not culturally relevant. This has also sparked a rise in African-centered schools like the Lotus Academy in Philadelphia whose mission is:
To provide an educational opportunity for our children that is founded on the basis of culture that is steeped in African culture, history and tradition. We feel that it is important for our students to be grounded and have a good understanding of who they are. The accomplishments of our ancestors and those who walked before us and all of the subject areas this particular foundation is reinforced, whether we’re teaching math or history, science or social studies, we infuse the African perspective. So Lotus provides an opportunity for students to learn, to think, communicate, and problem solve within a framework of an African perspective.
Schools like these recognize, as environmentalist Baba Dioum does, that, “In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.” If we want to continue the mighty contributions that we’ve made in art, culture, medicine, and science, it’s essential that we know our history.
“I want to show y’all how to survive in this system,” I told the students.
Some years ago, singer Lauryn Hill, speaking to a small crowd at the MTV studios in Manhattan, said “I had to be a living example… I’ve become one of those mad scientists who does the test on themselves first.” Similarly, “Two Sets of Notes” was something I’d applied at the high school, college, and graduate levels, so I knew it worked.
“As students of color, we have to take initiative with regards to our education, especially in classes like history. It may be presented to you through your history books that history is a fact. No, history is a debate. Napoleon said that ‘history is a lie agreed upon’—Agreed upon by whom? you must ask. Question, question, question. Challenge. Hit the library, the Internet, the bookstores, the elders, and find out who Garvey was, who Asantewaa was, who Rodney was. Then, once you find out, ask yourself and your teachers why you weren’t taught about these African giants.” Of course, however, you must pass the test. This kind of double note-taking is reminiscent of freethinking Soviet students who learned one set of facts at home but knew the facts they were required to regurgitate in school.
I explained to them that to take two sets of notes is not easy or fair. It requires reading books, articles, and documents that aren’t assigned in class; watching films that aren’t in movie theaters; and listening to music that’s not on the radio. One must become an active agent in one’s educational process.
“You should not depend upon school exclusively for your education,” I informed them. “Self-education is just as, if not more, important.” School can never be the be-all and end-all. At any level of formal school, self-education is also vital. In many ways, self-education moves against what we’ve been taught “education” is. Consider that self-education implies self-motivation as opposed to grade-motivation and careerism; it implies a willingness to engage in new activities and experiences as opposed to rote learning and uniformity; it allows one to recognize the teachers and lessons that are omnipresent rather than the hierarchy that assumes the teacher is all-knowing; it suggests acting on what is learned rather than simply memorizing and regurgitating information for quizzes and tests; it also implies the asking and reasking of questions, rather than the suppression of questions.
I reminded the students at King Drew that although self-educating might sound a bit daunting at first, the alternative is far worse.
“And remember what Felix Okoye, founder of the African and Afro-American Studies department at SUNY Brockport, said, ‘It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.’”
Students of color—any color—it is imperative that we take two sets of notes, if we wish to gain a clear and healthy understanding of the world. We must understand that, as James Baldwin told his students, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
Before I exited the stage, I left the students with a message from Buddha that I couldn’t agree with more:
Make the effort to obtain information that will allow you to best guide your destiny. Make your voice heard in the world through your life and works and do not be cowered into inaction by status, tradition, race, ethnicity, gender or affiliation. Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down to many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
As you move through the dense wilderness of formal education, trying, with all of your soul to retain your sanity, remember to always TAKE TWO SETS OF NOTES!
*It should be noted that I use the term “Katrina”; however, most of the damage down in New Orleans was caused by the breaching (or blowing up) of the levees after the hurricane, and not by Katrina itself.
The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is — it’s
to imagine what is possible.
— BELL HOOKS
The scene: A group of young men, hoodies hovering over their nodding heads, huddle to form a cipher in East Baltimore.
X: Yo, niggaz in my hood sell crack
Move weight, and clap back
I stay strapped…
X: Yo, yo, I know niggaz that kill for nothin’
Here, take these cracks and move somethin’
Take this gat, and body somethin’
X: I walk around with big guns
Niggaz in my crew’ll kill for funds
For fun, fuck bitches and run…
I used “X” not because I don’t know their names, but because by sounding so similar, they misplaced their identities. If I had simply shut my eyes at any given moment during their frenetic flows, their rhymes would have been indistinguishable.
After the cipher, I stuck around to dialogue with the aspiring rappers about their roles as Black artists in America.
“Do y’all consider yourselves artists?” I put out.
“I do,” one of the rappers declared.
“Okay, so as an artist, then, and especially as a Black artist, do you feel that you have a duty to use your art to uplift?” I asked him.
“I mean, I don’t know. The rhymes I spit, that’s reality, nahmean,” he shrugged.
“It’s like a mirror, m
an,” another rapper chimed in. “What you see is what you get.”
“That’s real,” another added, nodding his dome in confirmation.
Just as their rhymes were analog replicas, so were their justifications for spittin’ them. They were echoing not just an ideology that can be found in mainstream rap, but throughout the greater art landscape: film, visual arts, dance, literature.
I shared with them an edict that Paul Robeson once made: “The role of the artist is not simply to show the world as it is, but as it ought to be.” The idea that the filmmakers, rappers, painters, collagists, photographers, choreographers, and other artists of today—amid the arid abundance of desolation and despair—can simply show the ills of the world and then avoid personal responsibility behind the thin veneer of “I’m just a mirror” no longer holds weight.
Yo, anybody can tell you how it is
What we putting down right here is
how it is and how it could be.
— TALIB KWELI, “AFRICAN DREAM,”
TRAIN OF THOUGHT
“Yes, the mirror does reflect reality,” I concurred, “but the mirror is no passive instrument. It’s not as uninvolved as ‘what you see is what you get.’ No, the mirror gives us instructions about our appearance and offers us a chance to improve it—that’s what the mirror does.”
“At least a good mirror,” said one of the rappers in the trio as he gave me a pound and repeated, “Improvement.” And as the four of us, on the bitterly cold four-year anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, stood on a battered Baltimore block in a section of the city dubbed “Baghdad,” it became harshly seeable that there was no greater call for improvement than right now.
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Page 18
