From exclusion to excellence, you are what you learn!

ABSTRACT

I will argue here, as one who was born in the London borough of Lewisham to Jamaican parents, that to present an alternative take on what it means to be educated in an institutionalised and systemically racist society, is crucial to conversations on so-called “black underachievement” and anti-racism in the UK. Drawing on aspects of my biography, anecdotally and lyrically in an auto-ethnographic way,¹

¹ Autoethnography is an approach to research that enables the author to interconnect, the personal, social, cultural and autobiographical, in novel and interesting ways.

will make known the journey of a child deemed uneducable, who was expelled from school at fifteen and from college at sixteen. Doing so will permit me to reason on the validity and viability of alternative sites of learning, that are in essence black led, grassroots, and community-based spaces for holistic edification. Indeed, it was my exposure to black studies during the 1970s, in the Southeast London-based Moonshot Youth and Community Centre, that inspired my life-journey from exclusion to excellence, as evidenced here.

KEYWORDS:

• Africentric
• blackness
• anti-racism
• mis-education
• underachievement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Autoethnography is an approach to research that enables the author to interconnect, the personal, social, cultural and autobiographical, in novel and interesting ways.

² “Windrush Generations” has become a trope for the arrival of West Indians in England, 21 June 1948 (the passengers disembarked on 22 June 1948) on the SS Windrush that docked at Tilbury Port.

³ See Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality.

⁴ Overstanding is used by Rastafari to explain why seeing the full picture is crucial to a holistic world view, because as Africans we have been under the stand for centuries, as the main recipients of European racism.

⁵ According to Rastafari teaching, livity, encompasses all aspects of everyday life on an experiential level.

⁶ “Just William” was a series of books, published between 1922 and 1970, by the female author Richmal Crompton.

⁷ Henry, William. “Son, School and Father.” Paper presented at the 3rd Annual Conference for the International Institute Of African Research, on 13th September 1996, Reading, England.