considering the gaps in our education
/To hear Dr. Kellett read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/FZMeFdefPFA
I am the victim of an incomplete education. Most of us are. I attended fabulous schools (Go Spartans! Go Deacs! Go Canes!) and am grateful for the many ways I was invited into excellence, rigor and curiosity; however, like most Americans, I was exposed primarily to curricula written, sourced and designed by white Americans. The last two and a half decades have revealed the large gaps in my knowledge and the work I must do to find a complete education. Having now encountered the incredible diversity of thought that functionally shaped America, I realize the insularity—the poverty even—of our educational norms. We can do better! As curricula designers continue to grapple with laws banning conversations about how views of racial difference shape and shaped opportunity in America, I am more aware than ever that we are each responsible for who we read and listen to as we learn to be neighbors. We have an incredible wealth of cultural, literary, historical and artistic legacies from every race, and we are diminished as a people when these voices are not actively taught in our schools.
Here is the problem: When we are primarily exposed to American history and literature through the work of white folks, we are taught to privilege white perspectives. We begin to believe important cultural trends and innovations come exclusively from one segment of society. This narrow exposure lays a foundation for cultural racism, suggesting that people of color are physical in nature, while white people, with their higher order thinking and artistic expressions, meaningfully impact our national narratives, our literary heritage, and the production of culture.
American culture and history have been shaped by the voices, inventions and perspectives of a rich variety of people from all walks of life. The idea of American democracy suggests that every person has value and is capable of contributing to our whole in necessary ways. It is disingenuous for us to believe this while also pretending as if every important contribution to the common good came from one race of people. See the gap in our ideals and realities? Although this hypocrisy that affirms equality while codifying systems of inequity is one of our great national habits, America itself has nevertheless been deeply influenced by contributions from all types of people. Like our food, music, fashion, politics, storytelling, and theologies, American literature as we know it would not exist without African American literature. Black cultural production is American cultural production.
In the South we love to think about our culture as one of genuine hospitality, gorgeous grounds, fine food and excellent music. Because we have a legacy of erasing or diminishing the contributions of people of color, our educations failed to teach us that so many Southern traditions only exist because Black folks worked independently of or collaboratively with white folks to create norms of hospitality in settings we cherish. In many famed Southern kitchens, Black cooks created the recipes published by white chefs, now beloved as Southern heritage. Here in Tennessee, whiskey distilling was mastered by enslaved men. Indeed, Jack Daniel’s Distillery now explains that Jack himself learned to distill from a Black man named Nearest Green (Buy it! Uncle Nearest is our whiskey of choice). Best practices in agriculture, building, husbandry, sewing and carpentry were perfected by people of color. I offer these anecdotes to remind us any American historical narrative that does not include the contributions of African Americans is incomplete.
Most of us understand that our musical heritage is not complete without the contributions of jazz and the blues, pioneered by Black musicians. Jazz and rock n roll were largely commodified by whites but created by Black Americans; indeed, Elvis became famous by publishing songs first performed by musicians of color. We sacrifice creative pride and cultural dignity when we erase the role of Black cultural production in America’s story. What do we forfeit if we investigate our cultural understanding of ourselves to make room for all those who contributed? I’d say only a toxic mythology that hurts all of us! Our educational norms often fail to reflect our entire heritage, and states that ban any teaching that could be loosely attributed to Critical Race Theory or even racial difference are actively attempting to erase American history. We need not remain in ignorance.
Some of our best early links between literature, sociology and ethnography were established by Black writers like Zora Neale Hurston. A gifted writer of fiction in her own right, Hurston travelled through Florida recording the stories of African Americans as they experienced the world. Hurston helped prove that anthropology is incomplete without ethnography and auto-ethnography. Many of us were taught to celebrate early writers who noticed such cultural differences through travel like Herman Melville or Mark Twain. Black writers like James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin and Paule Marshall, far less read, continued and advanced this style of writing about the helpful collaborations and differences one discovers as s/he travels at home and abroad. Acknowledging the pull of diaspora while claiming our full history speaks powerfully into our current discussions about identity and the ways that we explore national loyalties. If such voices were celebrated in education, we might be better equipped now to face a world in which citizenship, migration and nationality seem to clash in violent ways.
In school, many of us were exposed through literature to the tension women face as they struggle to position themselves as whole subjects with needs, wants and the agency to act on those needs and wants. We read Emily Dickinson or Kate Chopin or Sylvia Plath, celebrating the singularity of their voices. Most of us were not exposed to writers like Nella Larson or Maya Angelou, though, who wrote compellingly of the intersection of gender and race in a woman’s desire for agency. Larsen’s work is accessible, exploring the life choices of a disappointed upper class woman in a way that Chopin’s work cannot. Activists like Sojourner Truth revealed the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that the voices of black women were diminished, doubted and ignored. She was a forerunner to feminism, asserting that gender and racial binaries can be used to silence women who do not conform to cultural norms.
So many voices shape American identity, and there is no need to diminish one voice in order to make room for another. Education is a place where a variety of voices can be elevated not in order to rewrite history, but instead so that we can embrace and elevate the conflicting voices who shaped our history. The need to learn from many voices is a core foundation of discourse, rhetoric and a liberal arts education! Our cultural norms, heritage, conceptions of self, and identities are, in fact, shaped by the many brown, black and white voices in America. Our educational norm is to celebrate and memorialize the white voices, rather than to openly teach a wide variety of perspectives, recognizing the myriad voices that shaped American culture, literature and history. We are not products of Black labor and white innovation; we are the culmination of many voices expressing their God-given giftedness to help us translate and understand experiences of life in America. Historical erasure ensures that we are victims of this incomplete education. As the school year continues, the hope of this moment is that voices of color have always existed, we only need to recognize our deficits and do the work to complete our education. Ask to see your child’s syllabus, and ask how many Black, Indigenous or Writers of Color are included. Contact me and ask for recommendations if you want to expand your education!
