By Dwayne Moore
Contributing Scribe
Miles Davis once said, “Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery”. As a citizen of the United States, public education is free until 12th grade, but what you are learning, and how you are taught is critical, especially as an African American, to understand the significance of your skin, and how it has been used against you throughout history. We study with textbooks that lack any acknowledgment of the contributions of African societies to the world, but highlight glorified, fictional accounts of Christopher Columbus, or endless white leaders who were racist, misogynistic, sexist and, homophobic, and whose names sit atop buildings with much respect. This kind of education denies black students the opportunity to learn about the world and their place in it from a perspective that isn’t manufactured by the greats in the annals of history. The education system, riddled with white nationalist sympathizers and blatant lies, only gives one perspective in which we all have to cope. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her famous TED talk The Dangers of a Single Story “The consequence of the single story is that it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult and it emphasizes that we are different rather than how we are similar.” In “Between the World and Me”, Ta-Nehisi Coates goes into depth to show through poetry and literature, he was able to empower himself as a black man in the world by gaining knowledge and breaking free of the single story that plagues many of the world today.
In her speech, Adichie spoke in detail about how dangerous only getting one perspective to a story could be to such a malleable naive mind. Adichie goes into depth about how as a young reader, she absorbed many of images that she saw as a child within her books. Living in Africa, the books that were readily available were written by Europeans or Americans and had images of white people that she internalized. She would draw images and yearn for experiences that her surroundings could not offer. She realized the power in literature and imaging. Her perception started to change when she was able to obtain literature from Africa that featured people who looked like her accomplishing amazing feats. She said
“What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in the literature. I started to write about things I recognized.”
Simply, the story that is told plays a huge role in how we develop to perceive our surroundings, our country, and ourselves. Viewing only white people in books, especially being of color, from a lower socioeconomic background, can be very damaging to the self-confidence of a child growing up. James Baldwin wrote in his book “ The Last Interview and Other Conversations”, “One is born in a white country… when you open your eyes to the world, everything you see: none of it applies to you. You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are metaphors for your oppression and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.” Coates discusses the reality many black families endure when attempting to shield their child from imaging that may have a negative impact on their psyche. Many White Americans do not have to think twice about seeing faces like theirs resembled in books about kings and queens, white doctors and lawyers, and images that reaffirm their worth and place in the world. That reality does not exist for many black families. Black people usually are depicted in stereotypical roles that reaffirm their inferiority, while glorifying white faces in all areas of power and wealth. Coates wrote in his book
“Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people as sentimental “firsts” – first black five-star general, first black congressman, the first black mayor- always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white.”
There is a question to be asked for how a child internalizes their skin always being connected to a “first”. Where people of that color never worthy of these positions? Is there a defect from birth that withheld us from these positions? And if not, what took the country to realize our value and greatness? Many children innocently adopt the notion that they are inferior challenging their skin as not being light enough, hair not being straight enough, and lacking the ability to be great. Many black children are given a single story on what the black experience encompasses. Coates points out within his book the danger of a single perspective by stating “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.“ This argument is validated by taking a closer inspection of the educational system.
While many students learn that Thomas Jefferson is accredited for drafting the Declaration of Independence, and laying the groundwork for the Louisiana Purchase, they do not learn that he was also a racist who owned over 175 slaves and fought against equality, according to the New York Times article “The Real Thomas Jefferson” by Paul Finkelman. He wrote “ As president, he acquired the Louisiana Territory but did nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast “empire of liberty.” Jefferson told his neighbor Edward Coles not to emancipate his own slaves because free blacks were “pests in society” who were “as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” And while he wrote a friend that he sold slaves only as punishment or to unite families, he sold at least 85 humans in a 10-year period to raise cash to buy wine, art, and other luxury goods.” Stories like this are all too common within the pages of American textbooks. The education system only gives one view that glorifies the accounts of their impact on history, to the detriment of the country, specifically, those already most vulnerable. In an article by Bill Quigley called “Public Education in America: A Pillar to Institutional Racism” he wrote
“ Disparate educational standards are the rule in present-day America, broken down by way of race and income. These inequities are more race-based than they are class-based. For example, even so-called “well to do American-born Africans” that reside within predominantly white suburban communities, are strongly persuaded to worship white supremacists, slaveholders, and murderers like George Washington (owned over 300 African slaves), Andrew Jackson (murdered countless of Seminoles) and Christopher Columbus (murdered tens of thousands of indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere). These students must learn to accept and admire repugnant white historical figures, regardless of the pain and damage they inflicted upon enslaved Africans and indigenous people. This is nothing short of white supremacy in the raw.”
It becomes very difficult as a person of color to find your true history and self-worth unless it is researched. Baldwin said “All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and recreate yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact — this may sound very strange — you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you” Coates found this space in the Mecca. ” Coates wrote “Through the Mecca, I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways the Western world itself.” Howard University, an HBCU, “The Mecca” as Coates refers to it, was the place where Coates was able to find himself, and be surrounded with various forms of the black aesthetic that broke the single story he was given. There was where he saw the power of his skin, the true history of his existence and began to empower himself.
Coates names different works and authors like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and The Source & The Vibe Magazine that contributed to giving him a different, more accurate view of the history and himself. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X explains how in his life, the single perspective he learned skewed how he viewed himself and others. He grew up as a child despising himself and wanting to conform to Eurocentric identities. He wrote about his experiences bleaching his hair and valuing white woman over himself. He felt that educational system, the teachers, and the country reinforced his inferiority. He wrote
“Later, I remember, we came to the textbook section on Negro history. It was exactly one paragraph long. Mr. Williams laughed through it practically in a single breath, reading aloud how the Negroes had been slaves and they were freed, and how they were usually lazy and dumb and shiftless.” He also wrote “ It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn’t, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently, I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be”
Malcolm’s school experiences played a detrimental role in how he saw himself as a black boy evolving into a man in America. Many people are not aware of the toll a microaggression can have on an individual. Malcolm, as a student was not surrounded by stories of successful black individuals, or the true history of the major role different African societies, full of people that looked like Malcolm, contributed to the world. Instead of allowing Malcolm’s dreams to run lucid, the single perspective of blackness, and its limitations that the textbook and teachers held plunged him into a place of self-hate and denial.
To combat the single story, Malcolm, while in prison begins to read and empower himself. He begins to realize his flaws and their causes and uses the knowledge obtained to fix them. He said “I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” The story of using reading as a way to access knowledge to free yourself is one that Coats read on his journey to also gain a new perspective on the world.
Adichie’s powerful central theme uncovers a false reality that many people around the world accept. We live in a world where the story of the oppressed is told and dictated by their oppressor. We are only given a single perspective on the environment we are born into. Many Americans live in segregated neighborhoods, ignorant of the realities that plague the people who live 5 minutes away, in the ghettos of America, nevertheless across the world. The single story that is taken as fact is nothing more than the poison that runs rampant throughout society. Adichie spoke about when a group has power, it is able to dictate your reality, leaving you absent from your own story. She said
“ Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.”
Power creates the ability to omit and add To gain out true individual power, we must read about ourselves, educate one another about our hidden history and write to tell our own story.
