Empowerment

Race, Power, and Education.

I spent most of the past weekend in front of a computer screen editing sound.  The sound was of folks talking about prisons and state sanctioned murders and black liberation.  I was one of those voices.  After I got finished with it, I wanted to fight.  The sound was for a radio show called “On the Block.”  “On the Block” is about the injustices of the criminal justice system.

I didn’t aim to spin any truths.  I wanted other people to tell the truth.  I will edit the sound, arrange the chunks, and package folks’ truths up.  I did a good job of packaging, because when I listened to the excerpt myself, it made me want to do something about it.  I teach like that, I hope.  Inspiring folks along the way to fight. 

I empower.  Yes.  I drop kernels of knowledge into their brains--yes--that I hope will make them feel empowered enough to fight.  Yes.  It is just that urgent.  I drop in sentence structures and outlines of how to write an essay and stories of anti-slavery revolutionaries who inspired John Brown and white women who were killed because their mouths were too big.

My job as a teacher, as I see it, is not just to create life-long learning or to teach my students how to construct knowledge in community. That is not enough for me.  I am not Paulo Freire completely…. Because I say empowerment and speak of knowledge my students do not have and me having some of it and wanting to give it to them.  I bank, yes.  But I empower with what I got; and they give me what they got cuz we are a community of life long learners and we construct each other.

But my responsibility as a teacher of African American students is to bank ‘em up with fighting tools and tell them stories of people who fought so they will move with the stories of those folks swimming in their head�"informing their movement in the world, informing how they fight.  I want to be that teacher.

“I am that guy,” an elder from across the street says to me.  He banks me up with adages on how to be an OG.  In the company of elders we learn, and ancestors who have been there and back bank us up with their game plans.  So that we can win.  They told each other stories, passed messages through quilts, and sung directions through spirituals.  And empowered….those who wanted to win.

Behind me is a tradition of calling on ancestors for guidance, of deferring to the collective wisdom of a council of elders, and of sharing collective wisdom through proverbs and stories in community.  These stories helped to construct warriors.  They empowered�"feeding generations of black folks.  

But what of the white male teacher who aims to "empower"?  That is, admittedly, another tradition entirely and one that brings me some discomfort.  It brings to mind missionaries in Africa, Native American schools, movies like Dangerous Minds, Finding Forrester, and Blood Diamond--white folks saving blacks.  When it is used in that context, the connotations change.

Of course, I am not saying that white folks shouldn’t teach African American children. But they should be mindful that their presence in that role is, on some level, reinforcing that image in the minds of African American children of white person as savior and superior other.  Even for the most well-intentioned white teacher, those implications are likely inevitable.  Jesus Christ himself�"if he is white�"will be reinforcing the same social hierarchy preaching before a church full of Black folks.

Black Panther breakfasts, Garfield High and Jaime Escalante, Harriet Tubman, and Brotherman comics are examples of people of color taking their liberation into their own hands.  They feed themselves, teach themselves, physically free themselves. They see themselves as saviors, as warriors, as teachers--not someone else.  They replicate, they challenge systems that don't do the same, and they work to remake the world in their own image.  This is truly empowerment for revolution.  It will not recreate the power inequalities of the status quo; rather, it challenges them.

 

Reviews

[Davidgeo]

A very long time ago I had a professor named Jim Thomas for a 3 different sociology classes over a 3 year period. Your writing reminded me of him, not for any good reason other than the prison stuff. You're voice is very confident, you write quite well. About a real b***h of a topic. Say the wrong thing and you're a racist in eyes of one side or the other. Tight rope s**t.

[Calculus]

Thank u hans for ur thoughts. :)