THE SEAT OF THE PROBLEM
The "educated Negroes" have the attitude of contempt for their own people because in their schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Tueton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negroe high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence.
The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies. If he happens to leave school after he masters the fundamentals, before he finishes high school or reaches college , he will naturally escape some of this bias and may recover in time to be of service to his people.
As another has well said , to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his stuggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills ones aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime. It is strange , then, that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom have not risen up against the present propaganda in the schools and crushed it. This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?
When a negro has finished his education in our schools, then, he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized of Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain. He goes forth to play his part in life, but he must be both social and bisocial at the same time. while he is a part of the body politic, he is in addition to this a member of a particular race to which he must restrict himself in all matters social. While serving his country he must serve within a special group. While being a good American, he must above all things be a "good Negro"; and to perform this definite function he must learn to stay in a "Negroes place".
For the Arduous task of serving a race thus handicapped, however, the Negro graduate has had little or no training at all.
The seat of the trouble.........
excerpts from Carter G. Woodson"s "Mis-education of the Negro"
The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies. If he happens to leave school after he masters the fundamentals, before he finishes high school or reaches college , he will naturally escape some of this bias and may recover in time to be of service to his people.
As another has well said , to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his stuggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills ones aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime. It is strange , then, that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom have not risen up against the present propaganda in the schools and crushed it. This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?
When a negro has finished his education in our schools, then, he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized of Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain. He goes forth to play his part in life, but he must be both social and bisocial at the same time. while he is a part of the body politic, he is in addition to this a member of a particular race to which he must restrict himself in all matters social. While serving his country he must serve within a special group. While being a good American, he must above all things be a "good Negro"; and to perform this definite function he must learn to stay in a "Negroes place".
For the Arduous task of serving a race thus handicapped, however, the Negro graduate has had little or no training at all.
The seat of the trouble.........
excerpts from Carter G. Woodson"s "Mis-education of the Negro"
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