Teaching black kids about blackness

Going beyond “we are descendants of royalty”

Esperanza Spalding has this great song called, “Black Gold”. In the music video, a father picks his sons up from school and finds that they’ve been learning about Africa.

“We learned about Africa today and we’re going to learn about Rome tomorrow”, the boys tell their dad.

“Wait, wow, so one day for Africa?” he asks.

The boys tell their dad that they learned about pyramids and pharaohs, and also that a lot of plagues came from Africa (womp). The dad responds by telling them about all of the many kings and queens of Africa and essentially that “they’re black gold”.

While this message is a positive and potentially powerful one, and certainly one that I and likely many others have heard over the years, it limits a black child’s ability to participate in the African diaspora and to understand the complex role of our blackness in the modern world.

If you only know what Africa was like thousands of years ago, you miss out on understanding all of the great aspects of modern Africa (eg. businesses, technology, food, language, people). You also might struggle to connect how we went from this great time of royalty to the current mish-mash of rich and poor (and in between), of struggling governments and conversations of police brutality and oppression alongside wealthy business owners and athletes, and how we spread out all over the world.

If we only teach our children (and ourselves) about what Africa was like long ago, we leave the narrative of everything that happened since then to other people (ie. textbooks and mass media) to define. And we see how that turns out…

Here’s a new version of what we can teach our kids about blackness.

The Major Periods

There are 3 major periods that students should understand and explore.

1. Pre-colonialism
   This period covers the rule of the large and powerful African kingdoms (eg. Mali, Songhay, Kush) and what life was like in various parts of Africa before colonization.
   — Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” comes to mind.
2. Great Oppression
   This period covers life during and immediately after colonialism, including slavery and the fight for independence.
   — Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing” is great here because it follows a family’s journey from both sides — the ones that remained in Africa and the ones that were taken to the U.S. as slaves.
   — Watching “Roots” is a way to understand the experience of slavery in the U.S.
   — This animation shows the path of the Atlantic slave trade throughout the Americas
   — Learning about Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, and the Tuskegee Airmen
3. Modern diaspora
   This period brings us into exploration of our current, globalized culture and looks at the rise of power and wealth across the diaspora alongside the ongoing effects of the period of great oppression.
   — Reading “Americanah” by Chimamanda Adichie
   — Watching “Poverty Inc”, which explores how corporations and NGOs benefit from the exploitation of the poor (primarily focusing on the poor in Caribbean and African countries)

Essential Cultural Experiences

1. Eating!!
   It’s not enough to read about black history. We need to connect with black cultures around the world and one fun way to do that is through food. Go to an Ethiopian restaurant, a Jamaican restaurant, a Brazilian steakhouse, a West African restaurant. Try something new with each visit. Discuss the art on the walls. Ask the waiters where they’re from and to tell you more about the food. Every black kid should try jollof rice or curried goat at least once in their life.
2. Learning a language spoken by black people
   This list includes everything from Spanish and French to Swahili, Creole, Yoruba, and Xhosa. Connecting with a language teaches you a lot about the people who speak it and also help you to pronounce people’s names. There’s nothing more offensive than giggling when you pronounce someone’s name incorrectly or worse yet, giving up because you only know how to pronounce basic English names.
3. Travel (obviously)
   There’s no experience as powerful as actually being in an African or Caribbean country. To actually be in a country where everyone is black everywhere, where the businesses are run by black people and even the country itself is run by black people (and not just the President but all throughout the government), that is such an incredible feeling. But the key to success is to not just be a tourist. Go see the monuments, visit the museums, go on safari and see the slave castles. But then after that, go hang out at the beach or go to the mall. Stay in an Airbnb instead of a hotel if you can, so that you and your kids have to figure out where to buy groceries and how to get around the neighborhood. Live like a local as much as you can.
4. Meeting and interacting with black people from across the diaspora
   While not everyone can travel abroad, if you live in or near a medium to large city, there are black people there with recent roots in other countries that you can meet. I’ve had so many black students tell me that they’d never go to Africa or even touch an African because they have diseases :’-/ But if their soccer coach is Nigerian, their coding mentor is Haitian, or they go to camp with Ghanaian kids with British accents, then their picture of the world and of blackness evolves beyond the trifling messages in the media.

Building a Syllabus

Do you have resources (eg. books, links, documentaries, organizations) that could help a parent, teacher, or community group dig into these topics and experiences with students?