Mis-Education | The Missing Chapter In The 1619 Project
The Power of Mis-Education
The power of miseducation is having the ability to deprive a group of racialized people of the knowledge of their own factual history, identity, and culture in an educational system that seeks to derive and maintain power over that group. Regarding theory, white supremacists dehumanize African Americans while simultaneously safeguarding their own white race from their past and present dehumanization practices in an educational system to sustain a racist society. It is a society that is using education as a powerful tool for destruction rather than instruction.
Dr. Na’im Akbar, a professor of psychology at Florida State, defines power as having the ability to influence the environment consistent with one’s self-interests. The word education is derived from the Latin word educare, which means to bring out. With that being said, the objective of education is to “bring out” the potential greatness within individuals. This implies that every human being has a natural born potential and a prerequisite for their development is a success-oriented environment. Therefore, the objective of miseducation is to suppress any potential greatness within a human being provided by deplorable environments. Miseducation was coined in the early 1930’s by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the second African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. Woodson showed how African Americans lacked knowledge of themselves in education systems across the world in his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro. The power of miseducation has implications for the domination of people. It was in the interest of slaveholders and the government to keep their enslaved laborers ignorant. They were fearful that, if their enslaved laborers could read and write, they could escape to freedom. This is evident in the aftermath of the largest slave rebellion in British North America, “The Stono Rebellion.”
I imagine it was a cool summer day on the morning of September 9, 1739, in South Carolina when Jemmy, an educated slave, assembled a group of twenty slaves near the Stono River. With freedom on his mind, Jemmy wrote the word, “Liberty,” on banners for his vanguard to hold up when they would begin their journey to the promised land of Spanish Florida. They knew of runaways from South Carolina who were rewarded with freedom and land upon arrival. They needed protection before they set out on their journey, so Jemmy led his men to a nearby gun shop taking guns and weapons and killing two white shopkeepers in the process. I imagine they were collateral damage on this journey to freedom. Jemmy and his men marched ten miles south and killed approximately 25 white people before reaching the Edisto River where they encountered the South Carolina militia. They were shot dead and some of the men escaped only to be executed and sold to markets in the West Indies. They never reached the promised land. They never got to experience the word that was displayed on their banners, the word that they bellowed in unison on that cool summer day. It appears only white men and women can relish in liberty.
South Carolinians convened at their General Assembly the following year and passed legislation that enacted the Negro Act of 1740, prohibiting privileges to enslaved African Americans. These nefarious prohibitions stated that slaves could not earn money, assemble in groups, grow their own food, and learn to read English. This piece of legislation is the beginning and development of the miseducation of African Americans which made it the first anti-literacy law. It is a law that protects the power of white men by limiting the consciousness of Blacks, suppressing any thought of providing for their families, and of pursuing liberty. In figure 1, you will find a list of anti-literacy laws that followed the Negro Act of 1740 after America gained its independence from Britain.
Akbar says, “Power is intended to put people into the unique position that they can obtain and achieve within the context of their environment those things that maximize their survival and the continuation of themselves to the best of their ability. In a world of plentiful resources as this one is, such power does not require arming oneself as a predator of other human beings” (Akbar 35). The environment that Akbar speaks of is the physical environment. It provides human beings with the necessities to survive on earth which are food, clothing, and shelter. However, slaveowners are predators towards African Americans. They had the power to determine their socioeconomic environment. They had the power to determine what food they ate, what clothes they wore, and how they should be sheltered. Frederick Douglass said:
The men and women slaves received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork, or its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of cornmeal. Their yearly clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts, one pair of linen trousers, like the shirts, one jacket, one pair of trousers for winter, made of coarse Negro cloth, one pair of stockings, and one pair of shoes; the whole of which could not have cost more than seven dollars…There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket be considered such… (Douglass 21).
Then the slaveowners had the audacity to use their power further to enforce hard labor upon them from sunup to sundown. It is amazing how strong African Americans were to have survived such deplorable environments. Miseducation as power has put African Americans in subservient roles to position white men and women into high social classes in all areas of human endeavors (economics, education, law, war, etc.). Education is the instrument that should equip people to gain control over the physical resources of the environment (Akbar 36). White Americans had been using miseducation to gain control over a very valuable physical resource at that time, enslaved African American labor. It was the economic engine that developed American capitalism.
Mehrsa Baradaran has researched that, “The effects of the institution of slavery on American commerce were monumental — 3.2 million slaves were worth $1.3 billion in market value, almost equal to the entire gross national product” (Baradaran 10). Miseducation is lucrative. Slaveowners used these products from enslaved labor to trade and exchange with other slaveowners and businessmen, this was the basics of the Southern economy. It had a major effect on the minds of African Americans concerning knowledge and power. They lacked the power to influence the environment and to negotiate trade. The slave was removed from the effective negotiation of his/her skills because their skills belonged to someone else; the slave had been robbed of access to education, s/he could only develop the skills that gave their owner the privilege of trade (Akbar 37).
It is widely known that this purposeful miseducation has been perpetuated to/ in future generations. According to CNBC, African Americans had $1.4 trillion in buying power in 2019. African Americans are the biggest consumers in the world. They do not know how to negotiate their skills to operate from a place of self-sufficiency. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, “As a people, we must become producers and not remain consumers and employees. We must be able to extract raw materials from the earth and manufacture them into something useful for ourselves. This would create jobs in production.” But how can they when their labor and skills were exploited to the point of normalcy? How can they when they lacked equal access to economic knowledge and land? In America, African Americans make up about 13% of the population and own less than one percent of this nation’s wealth.
Why would white people give up this power, the power to control the environment, the power to control African Americans? Miseducation is lucrative.
In approximately 1830, nearly a hundred years after the first anti-literacy law was enacted, Frederick Douglass understood the power of miseducation on his journey of learning to read and write. Douglass had been bouncing around from slaveowner to slaveowner and finally arrived in the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Auld in Baltimore, Maryland. Mrs. Auld, his new mistress, had never assumed the role of a slaveowner before. She was kind and treated Douglass like a human being. Douglass said, “I scarcely knew how to behave towards her. She was entirely unlike any other white woman I had ever seen” (Douglass 37). Out of curiosity about her kindness, Douglass asked her to teach him how to read and she was more than happy to. Soon after, Douglass mastered the alphabet and could spell words of three or four letters. Mrs. Auld was excited about his progress and expressed her intentions to keep teaching him to her husband. Mr. Auld had the opposite reaction and told Mrs. Auld to cease instructing Douglass.
In Mr. Auld’s own words, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master — to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world…if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master” (Douglass 37–38). You can feel the fear in Mr. Auld’s words as he explains his philosophy of slavery to Mrs. Auld. The fear of losing valuable property. The fear of losing miseducation as a weapon and Douglass realized this in his agony. Douglass said, “I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty — to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man…From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (38). Exposure leads to expansion and Douglass was exposed to a whole new world. A world of learning and education — power that the white man wants to keep for himself. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “A man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” Douglass saw the idea of freedom in his mind after he realized he was being miseducated, and he turned that idea into reality in 1838 when he escaped.
After the Civil War, there was a great concern about how to educate African Americans after they received their citizenship in the 14th Amendment. Former President Rutherford B. Hayes convened a conference called, “The Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question” in Lake Mohonk, New York. The conference took place on June 4–6, 1890. The attendees of the conference were educators and ministers from the U.S. and Britain, yet African Americans were not allowed at this conference concerning their educational fate. Anthony T. Browder, a historian, said:
The general consensus among Mohonk Conference attendees was that blacks “were to be given, ‘industrial education’ to fix their caste position, ‘moral education, ‘for pacification,’ and ‘Western education’ in order to instill in them a sense of inferiority and a belief in white supremacy.” The Mohonk Conferences plotted the course for the miseducation of the negro which has endured for over 100 years. (Browder 140)
Much like how a child progresses from K-12, African Americans’ miseducation can progress from being forbidden to read and write to being forbidden to have an academic education. Why? It was simple, the powerful had to adapt to new laws while simultaneously keeping the same objective — to control the minds of African Americans. One of the most interesting things said at the conference by Rutherford B. Hayes was his false knowledge of African History. Hayes said, “They had no skill in any kind of labor, no industrious habits, and knew nothing of any printed or written language” (Barrows 10). If I remember correctly, if it were not for enslaved African labor and principles, the United States would not exist.
The purposeful miseducation of former President Hayes is not only injurious to African Americans but also to White Americans. If White Americans today knew of the rich history of Africans and all their contributions to humanity, then maybe they will have a different perspective towards African Americans, one that is not inferior. As for language, Mdw Ntcher is Africa’s and the world’s oldest recorded writing system (Ptahhotep 8). This writing system was developed in the Nile Valley in North Africa, the earliest record of life and knowledge. Today it is known as hieroglyphics. White scholars know the true history of Africans but purposely colonize the information. Akbar says, “…the environment of ideas is even more important than the physical environment…those who influence ideas literally control the minds of the people within the environment of those ideas” (Akbar 38).
Hayes had the idea that African Americans could overcome their deplorable environments through education and religion. The first step was to get every African American to understand and learn to speak the English language. Dr. Amos Wilson, a psychologist, suggests that language is directly related to power. Wilson states, “The languages that people learn and speak are most frequently directly related to the power relations between them…Because the people who speak or spoke those languages were or are in ascendance or in power at that or this time…People tend to learn first their native language, whatever language is spoken by the people in power” (Wilson 23). African Americans have no idea that speaking English is a symbol of submission to their oppressors.
The model of negro education based on moral and character development through labor was pioneered by the American Missionary Association (AMA). They were an abolitionist group founded in 1846 that focused on the abolition of slavery and the education of African Americans after emancipation. AMA founded the Hampton Normal Institute in 1868 (present day Hampton University) and instructed General Samuel C. Armstrong to go there and carry out their principles of education. General Armstrong was a prominent figure at the Mohonk Conference regarding his industrial training methods of African Americans. His emphasis on labor as a great moral and educational force was the basis of his speech. Armstrong stated, “The Negroes are a laboring people. They do not like work, however, because they had it forced on them…They work under pressure. The great thing is to give them an idea of the dignity of labor; that is, to change their standpoint” (Barrows 13).
Even though the AMA and General Armstrong had good intentions to educate African Americans, they did more harm than good. Imagine picking cotton for twelve hours a day and after receiving your freedom, you must find dignity in hard labor as a form of education. That is industrial education. That is the process, in a large measure, to keep African Americans mentally a slave. To train them in the industries of agriculture, mechanics, and household to become assets for prominent white men. Armstrong expressed his real intentions to miseducate African Americans by stating, “The training that our pupils get is an endowment. An able-bodied student represents capital of perhaps a thousand dollars. We propose to treble that. When they learn a trade, they are worth threefold more in the labor market” (Barrows 14). There is a distinct difference between training and education. Dr. Akbar explained it perfectly when differentiating between an educated dog vs. a trained dog, “The dog that learns how to bark to scare away its enemies, to defend itself by biting its attackers and to hunt and to feed itself is an educated dog. The dog that learns how to stand on its hind legs and wear a dress and dance to the music of its trainer is actually a trained dog” (Akbar 2). African Americans are the trained dogs, and their trainers are the oppressors.
Notwithstanding the little wages that are obtained, African Americans are being trained away from academic education and from participating in the American Economy. This training does not afford them the ability to take care of themselves and their families. They are being miseducated because they can perform industrial duties at the command of their bosses and are not being taught the knowledge to command themselves to create/build their own special line of industries. This kind of miseducation exploits their labor once again for profit by their bosses who were once their masters.
General Samuel C. Armstrong, who oversaw this miseducation at Hampton Normal Institute, made the biggest impression on Mr. Booker T. Washington who took this model of education to the next level at the Tuskegee Institute. Washington had nothing but high praise for General Armstrong, he loved him like a father. “I have spoken of the impression that was made upon me by the buildings and general appearance of the Hampton Institute, but I have not spoken of that which made the greatest and most lasting impression upon me, and that was a great man — the noblest, rarest human being that it has ever been my privilege to meet. I refer to the late General Samuel C. Armstrong” (Washington 37). Dr. Carter G. Woodson warned us about this type of influence when he said, “If you can 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” (Woodson 84).
In May of 1881, General Armstrong was asked to recommend a white man to fill a position in Tuskegee, Alabama to start a normal school for colored people. Although Washington was colored, General Armstrong asked him if he could fulfill the position and Washington obliged. Thus, on July 4, 1881, the Tuskegee Normal Institute was founded. The General did not have to worry about the education that African Americans were going to receive at Tuskegee under the tutelage of Washington because he had instilled industrial education in his mind. Washington said:
From the very beginning at Tuskegee, I was determined to have students do not only the agriculture and domestic work, but to have them erect their own buildings. My plan was to have them, while performing this service, taught the latest and best methods of labour, so that the school would not only get the benefit of their efforts, but the students themselves would be taught to see not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity… (Washington 103).
Although students in that capacity had the ability to extract from the physical environment whatever they needed for survival, which was power, they lacked the encouragement to develop beauty and dignity of themselves which is true power. It is the kind of power that can eradicate racism and miseducation. It is power that can master their environments and perpetuate self and group respect so that they can practice counter-racist behaviors to achieve liberation. It is power that allows African Americans to think and do for themselves.
Resources
Akbar, Naʼim. Know Thyself. Mind Productions & Associates, 1999.
Baradaran, Mehrsa. The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019.
Barrows, Isabel C. Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question. United States, G. H. Ellis, 1890.
Browder, Anthony T. From the Browder File: 22 Essays on the African American Experience. Institute of Karmic Guidance, 2007.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Other Works. Canterbury Classics, 2014.
Ptahhotep. The Teachings of Ptahhotep: The Oldest Book in the World. Blackwood Press, 1987.
Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Signet Classics, 2010.
Wilson, Amos N. The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness: Eurocentric History, Psychiatry and the Politics of White Supremacy. Afrikan World InfoSystems, 2014.
Woodson, Carter Godwin. The Mis-Education of the Negro. African American Images, 2000.
