"I Will Not Let Them Take You"

For Jawara, By Opal Palmer Adisa, from I Hear a Symphony: African Americans Celebrate Love

 

tell them

them them loud and clear

i will not let them

take you

tell them

tell them your mother is

a crazy jamaican woman

who will wage war

for her children

so tell them

tell them now

i will not surrender

you to the streets

i will not give you over

to the dope dealers

i will not relinquish

you to the cops

who target you because

you are black and male

i will not let

you slip through

the school system

which acts as if

you are unteachable

so tell them

tell them

you have a mother

who remembers

all the fears

all the pain

all the discomfort

she endured in getting

you here

and she will not give you up

will not give you up

to no one but the love

of life and to help shape

the dreams

of our people

 

tell them

 

As Opal Palmer Adisa's poem points out, people of African descent are given certain freedoms in the world today, but are we really free?  There are so many pressures and threats to our, as African Americans, living a "free" life.  I mean, for example, that there are jails being built today so that our children and their children can be housed by the time they reach adulthood.  This is a reality. Blacks make up only 12-14% of the population in America, yet, in many prisons they make up more than 90% of the prison population.  Our children have to be extra careful because society tends to have lower expectations of them, scrutinizes and monitors them more closely, and usually does not give them any breaks.  In my opinion, children of color today are not doing too many things that are any different from what white children are doing.  But it's the way our society is structured-to monitor, single out, and be as punitive as possible toward children of color in a way that many mainstream American folks may find difficult to believe.  Here are a few statistics to illustrate the disparities in the breaks that white kids get versus children of color:  A report released by the National Justice Policy Institute (2000, "The Color of Justice"), and summarized by the New York Times, provides shocking data:

 

Minority youths are more likely than their white counterparts to be arrested, held in jail, sent to juvenile or adult court for trial, convicted and given longer prison terms.  In some cases, the disparities are stunning.  Among young people who have not been sent to juvenile prison before, blacks are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced by juvenile courts to prison.  For those young people charged with a violent crime who have not been in juvenile prison previously, black teenagers are nine times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison.  For those charged with drug offenses, black youths are 48 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison.  Similarly, white youths charged with violent offenses are incarcerated for an average of 193 days, but blacks are incarcerated an average of 254 days and Hispanics are incarcerated an average of 305 days...These disparities accumulate, and they make it hard for members of the minority community to complete their education, get jobs and be good husbands and fathers.  (The New York Times, 2000, reporter Fox Butterfield)

 

Minority youth also report the highest rates of racial profiling while driving.  In a 1999 Gallop Poll survey (The Gallop Poll Monthly, 1999, No. 411), 72% of the African American male respondents age 18-34 indicated that they felt that they were stopped by the police just because of their race or ethnic background, while only 6% of the white male respondents indicated that they felt that way.  Similarly, most police state that they disapprove of racial profiling (The Gallop Poll Monthly, 1999, No. 411), yet that does not prevent it from happening at alarming rates.  These kinds of inequities suggest that freedom for black youth is under fire more than ever.

 

In order to explore the concept of 'freedom under fire', first let's figure out what is meant by 'freedom,' as well as what is meant by 'education.'  Freedom is defined in Webster's dictionary as 1. the state of being free; 2. political independence; 3. personal liberty; 4. exemption or immunity; 5. ease or facility of movement or action; 6. frankness, as of speech; 7. a right, as of citizenship or membership. 8. the right to frequent [or participate], enjoy or use at will.  The Bible says that if "the Son makes you free, then you are free indeed," where St. John talks about a freedom that comes in the spirit, and not dependent on anyone or anything on this earth.  Harriett Tubman said that sometimes we think we are free, but yet we are still enslaved in the mind when she said in 1865,

"I freed thousands of slaves, I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves".  She also suggested that finding physical or even mental freedom can be a lonely experience at times.  She said "I was free, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land."

 

The type of freedom that I want to focus on and relate to education is the one defined in Webster's dictionary as "personal liberty," beginning with freedom of the mind (which is often under fire for Black folks).  I want to discuss freedom of the mind and it's relationship to the need for education today.  W.E.B. Dubois said in 1914 that "Freedom is a state of mind: a spiritual unchoking of the wells of human power and superhuman love."  This is consistent with what I said earlier about how the Bible defines freedom, when it refers to a spiritual freedom that comes through our creator.  These kinds of freedom allow our spirit to stand in spite of what others try to teach us, show us, tell us, or do to us to bring us down.  Along this line, Rev. Howard Thurman in the book Meditations of the Heart says, "To be free means to deal with the realities of one's situation so as not to be overcome by them." 

 

Concerning freedom, Amy Garvey, in a book called Garvey and Garveyism said,

"The most rewarding freedom is freedom of the mind."  Toni Morrison, in the novel Beloved says that "Freeing yourself is one thing, [but] claiming ownership over that freed self [is] another."  In other words, freedom has to begin on the inside, so that we do not allow ourselves to just accept the status quo or the narrow expectations that society sometimes has of us as African Americans-especially as young African Americans today.

 

So not only do we have to work on changing laws and policies so that Blacks are not inappropriately singled out and disproportionately monitored and punished, but we must also work on our minds-we must work on and adjust the way that we think about ourselves and others and our various roles in society.  This is where education comes in.  If we are not either informally or formally educated, then we will not know what we need to work on nor how to work on it.  Education (through any number of resources) is the key.

 

When I speak about "education" however, I must define it as well, because I do not want my definition of education to be confused with what some folks think of as "schooling."  Schooling is your classic book learning.  It's for what we go to school, and it's very important.  We need to go to school and learn the things that will prepare us for our futures.  We are going to need that schooling in order to get into college or to go into a trade or whatever we may want to do.  But make no mistake, schooling in America usually involves perpetuating the status quo.  In other words, it is not geared toward helping black youth feel or become empowered in large numbers.  But rather, schooling is geared toward promoting the notion that blacks have a certain "place" in the world, and that place is not usually consistent with the above definitions of freedom or personal liberty.  Unless a particular educational system is one that is very progressive, it tends to start early with status-quo maintaining things like teaching children that Christopher Columbus discovered America and was friendly with the supposedly savage, animalistic natives.  From what many of us have come to learn, Christopher Columbus and his crew took full advantage of the Indians, exploited them economically, and down-right abused them.  These more valid explanations of history are well documented in books by scholars such as Howard Zinn, James Loewen, and Ivan Van Sertima.  As these books point out, there is a whole pedagogy that leaves children of color feeling like our people have contributed very little (except maybe during the month of February), and that our role in history was that of a supporting character, back seat character, victim, villain, or just plain ole' invisible or absent.  Constant bombardment of these images and ideas can contribute in negative ways to every one's socialization processes.

 

Status-quo maintaining ideas do not just come from formal and informal schooling, but also from media images all around us, messages on television, on the radio, in video games, on the computer, etc..  There is a whole system of conscious and unconscious schooling all around us.  While schooling is very much needed in order to succeed in this society, it often does not contribute to the personal liberty of the traditionally disenfranchised.  Thus, regular schooling tends to maintain the status quo, keeping the privileged in a state of seemingly high self esteem and greater privilege, and the less privileged more likely to spiral further away both in terms of capturing resources for oneself and one's family as well in terms of improving one's sense of a place in this society.

 

What is needed then?  Education is certainly one thing that is needed. We still need schooling as well, but schooling without education can be a dangerous thing.  I captured this idea when reading a book called, Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education: A Paradox of Black Life in White Societies, by Mwalimu Shujaa.  In his introductory chapter, "Education and Schooling: You can have one without the other," Shujaa defines the difference between schooling and education suggesting that education is a form of learning that questions the status quo and is geared toward empowering the student.  This doesn't mean that we do away with schooling in favor of education, but rather, both are needed.  Thus, we need the schooling (as flawed as it can be sometimes) to survive, but we need education in order to thrive.  Many schools are finding ways to educate their students.  Educating students involves not only teaching them the basic things that they need to be academically competent, but also incorporating methods, materials, and curricula that invite the student into the process of learning in an inclusive and empowering way.  Therefore, very progressive school systems are making sure that their students have materials, books, posters, computer learning programs, etc. that have images and issues to which the students can relate.  Authors such as Lisa Delpit, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Eleanor Lynch and Marci Hanson, and many others have given us various formulas such as this for reaching all of our kids and educating them.

 

Many years ago, Carter G. Woodson in his classic book, Miseducation of the Negro (1933), warned us concerning what could happen to folks who are not provided some form of true education (be it formal or informal) rather than promoting the status quo, "If you control a man's thinking, you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think, you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself.  If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one."

 

Unless a child is blessed with very progressive teachers, administrators, mentors, etc., their formal and informal schooling experiences will encourage them to accept the status quo.  We watch many youth accepting mediocrity and just barely getting by.  As caregivers, we may watch it, not understanding our rights as caregivers, nor understanding our role as educators to our children.  Caregivers have as much right to educate children as teachers do.  Our elders have the right to educate our children as well.  In fact, sitting at the feet of our elders and listening to them preach to and teach us and our children should be the norm in our society.  Many of us have overlooked the very rich resources that we have in our elders as educators of our children.  We have so many resources of all ages in our homes, in our families, in our communities, in our schools, in corporations, in our churches, synagogues, and mosques, but we often overlook these resources assuming that schooling is the main thing that matters.  Yes, schooling matters, but without critical thinking and an education inclusive of our many resources, contributions, and skills, we may simply follow a narrow path that does not have our best interest or self-esteem at heart.  I feel that we must teach our children to embrace the spirituality that exists within our ethnic cultures, the respect for family and extended kin (of blood relation and often not of blood relation), the love for and wisdom of the elders, the inspiration, the creativity, the survival skills (the ability to take a little bit of nothing and make something wonderful, nourishing, or beautiful out of it), the talent, the beauty, the rhythm, the love, the sexiness, and the greatness of who WE all are.  If we do not teach children these things, they will not know.  And if they don't know, then they will just follow the status quo.  This is the education that I am talking about; the kind of education that will lift heads, grasp hearts, and inspire our children to be all that God intended them to be. When our children are discouraged, it may help to have an elder, or a parent, or a teacher, or a principal, or a neighbor, take their faces into their hands and tell them that they have to go on.  That they can go on.  That our spirits and the spirits of all the ancestors are with them; that's education too.  Zora Neale Hurston said in 1939 that "[No one] can make another free.  Freedom [is] something internal. The outside signs [are] just signs and symbols of the [person] inside. All you [can do is] give the opportunity for freedom, and the [person herself] must make [her] own emancipation."  James Cone, in his book Black Theology and Black Power says that "A man is free when he can determine the style of his existence in an absurd world. A man is free when he sees himself for what he is and not as others define him."

 

In these instances we must move beyond the negative and inaccurate stereotypes that constantly bombard us, the low expectations, the structural things that try to hinder us (while constantly working on these hindrances), and we must press forward by faith, determination, and perseverance.  Young people we won't let them take you!!! Remember that Freedom (of the Mind) is the door, and Education is the Key.  Grab it, and don't let go!