The start of the school year brings new beginnings. It is also a good time to look back on our past to chart our future. Black history should be taught throughout the year, not only in February. So we can start teaching Black history as we hit the ground running this September.
We only have to go as far as last month. Last month, we celebrated Black August, the annual month-long observance honoring Black freedom fighters and political prisoners that recognizes the continuing global struggle for Black liberation. The month is not only a time to remember, but it is also a time to replicate their work. That work is reading AND studying.
Reading is important on its own. El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz said that education is the passport to the future. Reading is how you afford that passport. But preparing to use that passport requires study. Study is examining, investigating, and wrestling with a topic or point of interest. Reading is important, but it is not enough on its own. You must study. Black August taught us about study.
We must study because our oppressors do as well. They study who we are; our history, our experience in the West, and what they’ve done to us to continue doing us harm. So our study must be done as a countermeasure.
I have written before about how the Nazis studied how the United States government treated Black people. The author of the book ‘Hitler’s American Model,’ Yale professor James Whitman, shared:
“In the early 20th century, the United States was not just a country with racism. It was the leading racist jurisdiction—so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration…Segregation was the American version of the Nazi boycott. American racists employed Jim Crow Law ‘on all sides’ in order to raise American consciousness, just as Nazi thugs stood outside Jewish shops branding placards…and what the American example showed was that true race-based criminal law ought to be unapologetically racist criminal law.”
The Nazi’s studied how Black people were treated to craft fascist laws to harm European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust that killed over 6 million of them. Jews obtained law degrees here in the U.S. based on racist law, because there was no better teacher than the United States, which committed genocide via enslavement and Jim Crow against millions of African people, for how to harm a people. The Nazi’s knew to study American history. But even more sinister than that is the detailed study that went into the levels of fascism we see today.
One of the major fears of a second Trump presidency surrounded the notion of the implementation of Project 2025: a white nationalist document serving as a blueprint to restructure the United States as a conservative state rooted in whiteness, capitalism, and pseudo-Christianity, yielding a sort of technocracy where control would be in the hands of a few and austerity, oppression, and divisions would be the fate of the masses.
The author of this document is Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. Roberts has a doctorate in American history with a focus on African American history and slave kinship networks from the University of Texas at Austin. The title of his dissertation (2003) was Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791-1831, arguing that enslaved people in Louisiana weren’t just passive — they actively worked to survive and build community through two waves of massive cultural change, and in doing so, unintentionally helped cement a strict racial slavery system that lasted for decades.
His 1999 master’s thesis at Virginia Tech is titled African-Virginian Extended Kin: The Prevalence of West African Family Forms Among Slaves in Virginia, 1740–1870.
In short, he studied us.
He studied our culture, how we forged and formed networks, our resistance, and our resilience. He then took that information and became the president of a conservative think tank and created a blueprint to further oppress Black folks and other folks. He studied and used his knowledge to oppress.
We must do the opposite.
We must study in order to upend and dismantle the very institutions and systems established to keep us oppressed and dismayed. Black August reminds us that we must study… because they study. And when we study, we will win. Because our resolve is stronger and sturdier than their evil. Again, we will win, but not without study.
So to educators, I urge you to pick up a book written by a freedom fighter. Read the book, study the text, and DO NOT put the book down when you finish. Take the book to your classroom and read it with your students. Each of those books, whether written by George Jackson, Assata Shakur, or Walter Rodney, has a part to play in helping us find our role within the Black Radical Tradition. Read one or two chapters ahead of your students and read together. Learn together. Grow together.
Let’s make the most of the time we have to plot the plan to win. Because, to be clear, we and our history are under the study of those who mean us harm. Let’s be sure we’re ready to fight back. The revolution will not only be literate, but it will be scholarly.
