Here’s how (systemic) racism works.
African people were taken from their homes and brought to what would become the United States to be enslaved, where they’re severely punished for learning to read and write—because an education liberates both the mind and body. Upon their emancipation from enslavement, laws forced them to attend schools with lackluster resources, housed within inferior buildings.
Upon winning the right to an equality of facilities and access, Black students were made to assimilate into majority white schools. Schools with predominantly white teachers, support staff, and administrators, the vast majority of whom were anti-Black. This, because Black schools were closed and Black educators—many with master’s degrees and doctorates teaching K-12 because they couldn’t work anywhere else—were fired.
Anti-Black racism permeated the education of Black children. This included racist presuppositions about their intelligence, a lack of Black teachers, culturally incompetent instructional and assessment methodologies, and disproportionately applied punitive discipline measures. Due to these things, Black students performed worse than their peers of other racial and ethnic groups, across grade levels and schools.
To “support” improved performance, policymakers mandated that schools be treated like businesses, and assessment scores, specifically, statewide tests, began to resemble profit goals. They placed unrealistic expectations on students, including learning to read by kindergarten, reduced bathroom breaks, and the end of recess, along with 1 to 2 hours of language arts and math instruction, with rote memorization as the chief strategy.
Diagnosing children with behavioral challenges became incentivized by more funding for “support,” as well as the intended consequence of a “calm” learning environment improving overall scores. After all this, Black students still “perform” worse than their peers, continue to be disciplined disproportionately, are disproportionately diagnosed for behavioral disorders, and thus struggle with mental health challenges.
None of this includes the work done to remove Black history from classrooms and curricula.
So, when someone asks, “Are the children well?” the answer is “hell no” when it comes to Black children. Public schools are white institutional spaces and therefore never had the best interest of Black children in mind. They still don’t, and that’s true for both private and charter schools, unless they are governed, administered, and instructed by Black educators.
Jia Lynn Yang of the New York Times wrote an article examining the struggles of K-12 students as a result of the changing expectations of school, causing more anxiety, mental health concerns, and behavioral and disorder diagnoses that create high-stress circumstances for students in school.
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz once said, “Only a fool would let his enemy educate his children.” It is certainly easy to say that Black people have been foolish since emancipation from enslavement. Still, the context of Black education has always come under the authority of the white power structure, if for no other reason than because our liberation never came with land. Unlike our kinfolk throughout the diaspora, where independence movements saw the colonizer kicked out, ours wasn’t an independence movement but a liberation movement within the nation that oppressed us.
Thus, we sought freedom to be rather than freedom to be a nation.
A consequence of that reality is that Black education has relied upon public dollars to pay for our education, and when in the hands of an anti-Black racist power structure that facilitated the end of the first attempt at a multiracial democracy, it is no surprise that systemic racism maintains its lineage in Black education dating back to the birth of a nation.
In his book American Grammar: Race, Education and the Building of a Nation, Dr. Jarvis Givens shows that the system of public education was organized around the exploitation and control of Black (and Indigenous) people. Inequality has always been a defining feature. Black literacy was policed to the extent that it wouldn’t become a tool of liberation during enslavement.
The legacy of this history sadly shapes contemporary schooling, whereby Black children constantly test low, if not at the bottom of standardized tests for reading across grades when compared to other racial student groups. The other realities of systemic racism compounded upon that legacy have done a lot of harm to Black children that public schools are ill equipped or unwilling to repair over time.
But what do we do now, knowing what we know about the education of our community in America?
It’s unrealistic to think we can divest ourselves from public schools, lacking a plan and process to gather the fiscal resources and the community resolve to educate ourselves formally. Or is it? Black parents have divested their children from schools, choosing to teach them at home, now more than ever before. Maybe we don’t need a massive system of schools for Black children to be educated through, where leaders must be chosen, a curriculum must be developed and piloted, funds must be collected, and sustainability plans created.
Perhaps we can adopt the idea in education, as we do within the community, that we are all leaders and that we create our own Freedom schools where we can affirm and cultivate Black genius through education. It starts with a Saturday school at your home with your children or children in the neighborhood. From there, it can build into schooling every day after school and then during the school day as its own place of learning.
This could happen in every community where Black people breathe.
This isn’t a solution for tomorrow, but a long-term one. COVID was a chance for Black parents to divert from public schools to protect their children from the harm caused by the school environment. We shouldn’t wait for another pandemic or disaster to make more of us leave public schools and create our own learning spaces for our children. Just as many enslaved communities formed their own schools to teach one another, we can do the same. Instead of asking why, ask why not?
Otherwise, we can continue to watch and experience systemic racism work on us. I’d like to think that we’d much rather work over systemic racism.
