A grammar for black education beyond borders: exploring technologies of schooling in the African Diaspora

Abstract

Education has been a technology used to sustain black abjection across the African Diaspora. Employing Mills’ Racial Contract and Althusser’s theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) through a racial lens, this article will discuss how white supremacist education has been used to promote the misrecognition of black subjects as sub-human. German colonizers’ recruitment of Booker T. Washington to develop cotton schools in Togo, West Africa will be explored to highlight this phenomenon. Beyond this, the article demonstrates how members of the Diaspora have resisted white supremacist education, through what I have termed as Educational Diasporic Practice. This concept will be explored through the work of Chinua Achebe and Carter G. Woodson. Ultimately, this article recommends a global language of blackness as context for educators and researchers concerned with schooling experiences of black students.

Keywords:

• Black education
• African Diaspora
• white supremacy
• Educational Diasporic Practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Black abjection refers to the ontological space of dehumanization imposed upon black people. This abject experience is a result of their exclusion from citizenship and peoplehood along racial lines, which posit blackness as antithetical to whiteness, and whiteness as inherently superior.

2. Dispossession connotes the means by which members of the African Diaspora have been denied the ability to be self-determined. Colonialism stripped Africans of their land and resources, while at the same time positing African cultures as inferior and less than European’s. Slavery stripped Africans away from their homeland, strangled their cultures, while at the same time dispossessing them of control over their bodies and rendering them less than human.

3. Self-recognition is the consciousness facilitated when Diasporic subjects come to recognize their truer self, beyond the hegemonic notions of black sub-humanness and irrationality produced and maintained by white supremacist ideology. Diaspora is the imaginative space that allows for this consciousness to be reached (Rahier, Hintzen, and Smith 2010).

4. Armstrong was born in Hawaii on the island of Muai, where his parents were missionaries – heavily involved in the religious, social, and educational affairs of the island. This experience of his influenced the colonial educational model he would later create with Hampton (Watkins 2001).

5. Woodson’s personal library has been acquired by Emory University (Woodson Collection, Emory University Woodruff Library, Special Archives and Manuscripts collection).