Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Carter G. Woodson has characterized the education-socialization process afforded to Africans in America as part and parcel of an institutional imperative for racial subordination. Woodson called this debilitating process mis-education and suggested that its effects permeated the social fabric of the African community. Over the last 30 years African-Centered scholars have echoed Woodson's contention by critiquing and offering alternatives to the conceptual and institutional framework of mis-education. In Intellectual Warfare Jacob H. Carruthers articulates the challenges and success of this effort. He demonstrates the inter-generational nature of this struggle and situates Woodson's ideas within the framework of the contemporary African-Centered paradigm. This paper endeavors at a synthesis of these two men's ideas and seeks to reflect an inter-generational dialogue regarding education-socialization and social change in the African community.
Introduction
All educated Negroes suffer from a kind of slavery in many ways far more subversive of the real welfare of the race than the ancient physical fetters. The slavery of the mind is far more destructive than that of the body. But such is the weakness and imperfection of human nature that many of those who bravely fought to remove the shackles from the body of the Negro transfer them to his mind.
Edward Wilmot Blyden (Carruthers, 1999, p. 253)
In 1872 Edward Wilmot Blyden commented upon the paradox of mental slavery. He had observed that although the chains of physical slavery had been removed from the limbs of Africans, that the slave mentality nonetheless persisted. In fact he argued that it was the "slavery of the mind" which was the most invidious obstacle to the empowerment of people of African descent.
It was this same problematic that Carter G. Woodson (1933) articulated over 60 years later in the Mis-Education of the Negro. Woodson asserted that:
The education of the Negro then must be carefully directed lest the race may waste time trying to do the impossible. Lead the Negro to believe this and thus control his thinking. If you can thereby determine what he will think, you will not need to worry about what he will do. You will not have to tell him to go to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door...