| Commission on Research in Black Education |
AERA Commission on Research in Black Education
"Framing a Transformative Research & Action Agenda for the New Millennium"
Working Colloquium June 30-July 2,2000
Sea Palms Resort
515 N. Windward Dr.
St. Simons Island, GA 31522 (www.seapalms.com)
"Rethinking Origins/Knowledges/
The Achievement Gap: Black Education After 'Man'"
Sylvia Wynter in Conversation with Asa G. Hilliard III and Edmund W. Gordon
Black Education: Towards the Human. After "Man".
In the Manner of a Manifesto.
"No one would dream of doubting that its major artery (i.e. of the Black student's self -doubt and division) is fed from the heart of those various theories that have tried to prove that the Negro is a stage in the slow evolution of monkey into man. "
[Frantz Fanon, Black Skins/White Masks, 1967]
We who are gathered here, all actualize and embody ethno-class, Man, as the first purely secular or non-religious conception/mode of the human in history . Indeed, the fact that, whatever our religions and cultures of origin, we have all, as middle class academics and administrators, been socialized in the same "set of instructions" or mode of sociogeny, [Fanon, 1967] which institute us hegemonically, as human in the ethno-class (i.e. Western-bourgeois) terms of Man, is the fact that provides the indispensable condition of our being able to understand each other.
Because the laws that govern our cognizing behaviors as hybridly nature-culture beings are precisely analogous to those that govern the behaviors of purely organic species, we must, as ethno-class subjects, know our social reality in terms that are adaptively advantageous to the realization, production and reproduction of the mode of being human that we embody and actualize.
Further, because as academics and teachers, our task is to elaborate, guard and disseminate the kind of knowledge able to ensure the well-being of our present mode of the human, Man, one which represents its well-being as if it were that of the human itself, we cannot normally address the contradictions to which this over-representation leads. Yet the phenomenon called the achievement or I.Q. gap between White and Black, as well as between non-Black and Black, is a direct consequence of this over-representation, one of the central contradictions to which it leads.
The hypothesis here is that it is this over-representation, together with its corollary subordination of the well-being of the human as a species to the well-being of ethno-class Man, that a Black Education Project will have to call in question, dismantle and deconstruct. To do so in order to complete the Second Emergence of the human (that is, from our subordination, hitherto, to the hybrid nature-culture "set of instructions" that institute us as specific modes of the human, of the I and the of the We ), as an Emergence that the two scientific revolutions of the West have brilliantly set in motion, with a third scientific revolution. One which, moving beyond the limits of the Human Genome Project, and therefore, of the natural sciences, will take as its object of investigation our hybrid nature-culture, ontogeny/sociogeny modes of being human together with their resultant orders of consciousness, including the insights and blindnesses of our present ethno-class own, as its new object of knowledge and of inquiry .
In summary , if the scientific revolutions of the West began with the lay humanists of the Renaissance Europe going back to Greece and Rome, in order to find an alternative secular model of being human beyond the limits of the medieval order's then theocentric conception, so too, in order to find an alternative model to our present biocentric and ethno-class one, our intellectual revolution will begin by going back to the continent of Africa w here the event of singularity to which I give the name of the First Emergence--that is, our emergence from subordination to the genetic programs which prescribe the behaviors of purely organic life, and our entrance instead into the behavior-programming mechanisms of the Word/of Myth--first took place. Doing so in order to bring into existence what Aimé Césaire first proposed in 1946 as a science of the Word, in which the study of the Word (i.e. of the phenomenon to which we give the name culture), will condition the study of nature (of the neuro-physiological mechanisms of the brain); as a new science able to complete what he defined as our present "half-starved" natural sciences, and to thereby make possible a new "humanism made to the measure of the world."
Sylvia Wynter
June 30, 2000
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