wakanda forever

If community is to be part of the educational process, and it must be, then schools must understand the role of community.

As discussed by Woodson, the culturally biased education that most African Americans experience trains them to sever ties with Black communities and cultural activities. It trains us to have no interest in making a commitment to the uplift of other African Americans less fortunate than ourselves for we have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Black community people see this as “thankin’ that you betta than somebody.” When this occurs, “the educated” Black person is ostracized from Black communities. This is the phenomenon of “sellin’ out” or “acting white” as students in Fordham and Ogbu’s 1986 work attest. It appears that many readers of Fordham and Ogbu’s analysis overlook the concept of White supremacy. And that omission is crucial to understanding student rejection of so-called achievement. In this sense, achievement equals assimilating to something that is anti-Black. Students can’t give us the critical historical explanation, that African Americans who have internalized White supremacist ideologies are those who have been “educated” away from the communities of their nurture. People are rejected in Black communities when their behaviors are seen as self-serving. We all have to play the game to some extent and are complicit or co-opted from jump street if we are to survive and if we need the system. The question is one of commitment to a community.

We know from education research that working class/working-poor Black and Latin[x] students are more likely to have instruction delivered to them from the most underpaid, novice, and/or uncertified teachers.

To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership.

...rhetoric that served to "other" Obama by indicating that he thinks too well of himself re-inscribes the racist notion that there is a proper and prescribed role for a Black man in society - even a free Black man who happens to be president of the United States.

...white America has always had an intense interest in black culture. Consequently, the fact that a significant number of white teenagers have become rap fans is quite consistent with the history of black music in America and should not be equated with a shift in rap's discursive or stylistic focus away from black pleasure and black fans. However, extensive white participation in black culture has also always involved white appropriation and attempts at ideological recuperation of black cultural resistance.