Topic/Quotes For Discussion

The "Achievement Gap", Woodson’s "Miseducation" and
The Ethno-Class Centricity of "Man"

Towards a Humanism "Made to the
Measure of the World."

[A]t the very time when it often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism--a humanism made to the measure of the world " [Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1960]

"We have no philosophers or thinkers who... have reflected upon the fundamental problems... such as the nature of human knowledge and the meaning of or lack of meaning of human existence,...from the standpoint of the Negro's unique experience in the world [These intellectuals] have failed to study the problems of Negro life in America in a manner which would place the /ate o/1he Negro in the broad framework of the human's experience in this world. "

[E. Franklin Fraser, The Failure of the Negro Intellectual, 1962]

"What if we did not know where we are and who we are? What if all previous answers to the questions of who we are merely based upon the repeated application of an answer given long ago, an answer that does not at all correspond to what is perhaps asked in the question, now touched upon, of who we are? For we do not now ask about ourselves 'as human,' assuming we understand this name in its traditional meaning. According to this meaning, man is a kind of 'organism' (animal), that exists among others on the inhabited earth and in the universe. We know this organism, especially since we ourselves are of this type. There is a whole contingent of 'sciences' that give information about this organism–named man–and we collect them together under the name 'anthropology."'

[Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, 1981/1998]

"Reacting against the constitutionalist tendency of the late nineteenth century, Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. He substituted for a phylogenetic theory the ontogenetic perspective. It will be seen that the black man 's alienation is not an individual question. Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny And truly what is to be done is to set man free."

[Frantz Fanon, Black Skins/White Masks, 1967]

"ME: Culture, in my view, is what a human being creates and what creates a human being at the same time. In culture, the human being is simultaneously creator and creation. This is what makes culture different from both the natural and the supernatural; because in the supernatural we have the world of the Creator, and in nature we have the world of creations. The coincidence of these two roles in human being is what makes him a cultural being. . ."

EB: How does your model of transculture relate to the problem of ideology?

ME: Transculture means a space in, or among, cultures, which is open to all of them. Culture frees us from nature; transculture frees us from culture, from any one culture"

[Mikhail Epstein, Postcommunist Postmodernism: Interview, in Common Knowledge, Winter 1993, vol. 2, no.3]

"The indigenous peoples of the Congo," he wrote, "are all black in color, some more so, some less so. Many are to be seen who are the color of chestnut and some tend to be more olive-colored. But the one who is 0/ the deepest black in color is held by them to be the most beautiful. Some are born somewhat light-skinned, but as they grow older they become darker and darker. This occurs because their mothers make use of the artifice of an ointment. . .with which they anoint their infants, exposing them once they have been anointed; to the rays of the sun, then leaving them there for long periods, and repeating this action over and over... There are some children who although their parents are black, are born white skinned and although they anoint them and use all manners of artifice they can never be transformed into blackskinned people. And these are regarded by the Congolese as monsters. They have the same features and the same tightly curled hair as the black Congolese, but their skin is white and they are short-sighted... Given the fact that a black skin is so highly regarded among them, we Europeans appear ugly in their eyes. As a result, children in those areas, where a white has never been seen before, would become terrified, fleeing in horror from us, no less than our children here are terrified by the sight of a black also fleeing in horror for them.

But they do not want us to call them Negroes (negros) but Blacks (Prietos); amongst them only slaves are called negroes and thus amongst them it is the same things to say negro as to say slave."

[Teruel, Antonio de, Narrative Description of... the Kingdom of the Congo (1663-1664) Ms. 3533:3574/National Library, Madrid, Spain]

"To say that a procedure or point of view" Paul Feyerabend wrote, and as I earlier cited him, in part, "is objectively true is to claim that it is valid irrespective of human expectations, ideas, attitudes, and wishes. This is one of the fundamental claims which today's scientists and intellectuals make about their work. The idea of objectivity, however, is older than science and independent of it. It arose whenever a nation or a tribe or a civilization identified its ways of life with the laws of the physical and moral universe, and it became apparent when different cultures with different objective views confronted each other." [Paul Feyerabend, 1987]

"What is by common consent called the human science have their own drama. . .[A]ll these discoveries, all these inquiries lead only in one direction: to make man admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing–and that he must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to imagine that he is different from the other ‘animals.’

"This amounts to nothing more nor less than man's surrender. . .

Having reflected on that, I grasp my narcissism with both hands and I turn my back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism. . .And truly what is to be done is to set man free." [Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, 1967]

"Contrary to common opinion, the prime metaphysical significance of artificial intelligence is that it can counteract the subtly dehumanizing influence of natural science,. . . It does this by showing, in a scientifically acceptable manner, how it is possible for psychological beings to be grounded in a material world and yet be properly distinguished from ‘mere matter.’ Far from showing that human beings are 'nothing but machines,' it confirms our insistence that we are essentially subjective creatures living through our own mental constructions of reality. "

[Margaret Boden, Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, 1977: 473]

"Conscious processes are indeed different in kind from standard physical processes in the brain, being defined by what they are like for their subject. . . .[C]onsciousness is something over and above the neurophysiological facts that cause it; consciousness is not reducible to its underlying causal basis. . .In the case of consciousness. . .what we have is an unexplained mode of dependence. . .one that is unique in nature–a dependence of subjective facts on objective facts."

[Colin McGinn, "Can we ever understand consciousness?" in New York Review of Books, June, 1999]

"'Before life emerged, let's say four billion years ago, when the planet Earth was formed, there were presumably no minds of any kind at all.

It follows that four billion years ago the world was totally unexperienced and unknown. Nothing within it had ever been seen, heard, touched, smelled, thought about, represented, or described. And hence nothing within it, at that time, existed as a phenomenon for anyone. I am, I should say, using the term 'phenomenon' here in the old-fashioned way: a 'phenomenon' (from the Greek phainein, to appear) is an event as it appears to an observer, as distinguished from what it might consist of in itself. "

[Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness, 1992]

"The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worth while, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race. . . . The ‘educated Negroes’ have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. . . .In geography the races were described in conformity with the program of the usual propaganda to engender in whites a race hate of the Negro, and in the Negroes contempt for themselves. A poet of distinction was selected to illustrate the physical features of the white race, a bedecked chief of a tribe those of the red, a proud warrior the brown, a prince the yellow, and a savage with a ring in his nose the black. The Negro, of course, stood at the foot of the social ladder. The description of the various parts of the world was worked out according to the same plan In the teaching of fine arts these instructors usually started with Greece by showing how that art was influenced from without, but they omitted the African influence which scientists now regard as significant and dominant in early Hellas. They failed to teach the student the Mediterranean Melting Pot with the Negroes from Africa bringing their wares, their ideas and their blood therein to influence the history of Greece, Carthage, and Rome. Making desire fathter to the thought, our teachers either ignored these influences or endeavored to belittle them by working out theories to the contrary ."

[Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro. (first published in 1933), Africa World Press, 1990]

"The establishment of a royal cult (the Bakama) was an economically demanding development. None the less the political advantages accruing. . . appear to be substantial. This when added to the other ritual oppositions... neutralized the Bacwezi as a politico-religious force The (new) fundamental relationship can be reduced to: Bakama: Purity/and Safety, Culture. Bacwezi: Putrid/and Danger, Nature."

[Peter Schmidt. Historical Archaeology: A Structural Approach to African Culture ]

"I had always seen the Caribbean," Aimé Césaire said, "through other eyes (i.e. only through European cultural eyes). . .I realized that there were many things that astonished me in Martinique. I understood afterwards that they puzzled me because we did not have the keys and that those keys were elsewhere. They were in Africa. Let us take the case of the Martiniquan carnival: it is beautiful, it is intriguing. After visiting Africa, one realizes that so many of these masks that intrigued us in Martiniquan carnival are simply of African origin. For example, our carnival devil with its horns, its red body, and its constellation of mirrors had always puzzled me. Once, as I was in Africa with [André] Malraux and Senghor attending village festivities, all of a sudden I saw emerging from a path my Martiniquan mask. There it was, indeed. 'Fantastic! Oh! you have it too,' I said to a Senegalese. 'What do you mean? we have it too? It is our mask. It is themasks worn by our initiated,' he replied."

"Over there", Césaire continued, telling us of the nature of his revelation, "it (the oxhead mask), is the mask one wears when one is initiated. All this is very symbolic and does have a meaning. The ox horns are the symbol of wealth and plenitude. We are dealing here with an agrarian society: the more oxen one owns, the wealthier one is. And the mirrors are a symbol of knowledge. Marvellous! I learned this by chance. In other words, an initiated man is a rich man: he is rich materially and spiritua1ly. That is the meaning of the mask. Extraordinary! That masks became here in Martinique the devil because we are a Catholic country, and as we say here: the god of the vanquished became the devil of the vanquisher."

[Mary-Line Sephocle, "Interview with Aimé Césaire", in Exiles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, edited by Mbye Cham, 1992]

"As part of my opening statement, I would like to refer you to an essay by the late Dr. Du Bois (in What the Negro Wants, edited by Rayford Logan) where he reflects on his own experiences. . .He basically says that, up until the point that he really came to terms with Marx and Freud, he thought that 'truth wins.' But when he came to reflect on the set of lived experiences that he had, and the notions of these two men, he saw that if one was concerned. . .about 'the good life' and moving any society toward that, then you had to include a little something other than an interesting appeal to 'Truth ' in some abstract, universal sense."

[Gerald McWorter, "Deck The Ivy Racist Halls, The Case of Black Studies", Black Studies in the University: A Symposium, ed. by Armstead L. Robinson, Craig C. Foster and Donald H. Ogilvie, 1969]

"[A] form of discrimination became apparent which was already perceptible in the first book about the New World (De Orbe Novo by Pietro d'Anghiera, 1516) where 'white' Indians were contrasted with 'black' Ethiopians. It can also be seen in the first attempt at 'racial classification' (by François Bernier in 1684) when the Indians were assimilated to the white race. This discrimination still finds an echo in every European language since the contacts between Europe and the other continents gave rise, in the case of the Indians, to the term métis or mestizo, which is not in itself pejorative, while mulatto is derived from mule, and mulattos are therefore half-breeds who until the nineteenth century were commonly thought to be sterile, that is to say, impotent or emasculated.

Black men became the butt of merciless censure by the white man, from Noah's curse on Ham, whom first rabbinic and then Protestant exegesis considered responsible for the crimes of castration and incest, to the classification of Linnaeus and the descriptions of several philosophers of the Enlightenment. Blackness, and with it a great range of evil associations, was contrasted with whiteness, as was innocence with crime, vice with virtue, and bestiality with humanity."

[Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas in Europe, 1974]

"If current trends persist, today's multiracial hierarchy could be replaced by what I think of as a dual or bimodal one consisting of ‘nonblack’ and ‘black’ population categories, with a third, ‘residual,’ category for the groups that do not, or do not yet, fit into the basic dualism.

More important, this hierarchy may be based not just on color or other visible bodily features, but also on a distinction between undeserving and deserving, or stigmatized and respectable, races. The hierarchy is new only insofar as the old white-nonwhite dichotomy may be replaced by a nonblack-black one, but it is hardly new for blacks, who are likely to remain at the bottom once again."

[Herbert J. Gans, "The possibility of a new racial hierarchy in the twenty-first century United States," in Michel Lamont, The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries, 1999]

"But whatever happens, there will be no fighting with police officers or rangers, no pushing or shoving. Our goal isn't to get locked up. It's to force all these fine Middle Americans to think about what it's like to be poor and homeless, and what our own government is trying to do to us. All we have to do is be here, in plain sight."

[Cheri Honkala, Welfare/Poverty Activist, cited in David Zucchino, Myth of the Welfare Queen, 1997]

"Step up to the White House, "Let me in!"

What's my reason for being? I'm your next of kin,

And we built this motherfucker, you wanna kill me 'cause o' my hunger? . . .

I'm just a black man, why y'all made it so hard?

Damn, nigga gotta go create his own job,

Mr. Mayor, imagine this was yo backyard,

Mr. Governor, imagine it's yo kids that starve,

Imagine yo kids gotta slang crack to survive,

Swing a Mac to be alive,...

Extinction of Earth? Human cutdown?. . .

Tax-payers pay for more jails for black and latin faces,"

[Nasir "Nas" Escobar, CIA from the Album, "I Am...", 1999]

"Freud," Fanon wrote in Black Skins, White Masks, "insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. He substituted for a phylogenetic theory the ontogenetic perspective. It will be seen that the black man's alienation is not an individual question. Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny." [Fanon, 1967]

"If there are few specific ties to West African civilizations, generic resemblances are certainly present and shared ideas about certain reptiles as emblems of power may have informed the rise of some of the preferred motifs of coastal Georgian relief sculpture To point out with surprise that the tradition does not mirror the heroic nature of the aristocratic arts of Ghana, Nigeria, or Congo-Kinshasa is to suffer from historical amnesia. This was an art of slaves and the descendants of slaves. Their creative vision persisted in the face of a system designed to make children forever of men."

[Robert Farris Thompson, "African influences on the Art of the United States" in Robinson, Foster, Ogilvie, eds. Black Studies in the University: A Symposium, 1969.]

"Listening to rock, jazz, blues, reggae, salsa, samba, bossa nova, juju, highlife, and mambo, one might conclude that much of the popular music of the world is informed by the flash of the spirit of a certain people specially armed with improvisatory drive and brilliance.

Since the Atlantic slave trade, ancient African organizing principles of song and dance have crossed the seas from the Old World to the New. There they took on new momentum, intermingling with each other and with New World or European styles of singing and dance. . . .Flash of the Spirit is about visual and philosophic streams of creativity and imagination, running parallel to the massive musical and choreographic modalities that connect black persons of the western hemisphere, as well as the millions of European and Asian people attracted to and performing their styles, to Mother Africa."

[Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of Spirit, 1983]

"The reality in highly indebted countries is grim. Half of Africa's population--about 300 million people–live without access to basic healthcare or a safe water source. In Tanzania, where 40 percent of the population dies before age 35, the government spends nine times more on foreign debt payments than on healthcare. In 1997, before Hurricane Mitch, Nicaragua spent more than half its revenue on debt payments. Until recently, it has taken countries in structural adjustment programs six or more years to get debt relief. For lenders this seems like common sense–making sure the country has its economic house in order before canceling debts–but the human cost is tremendous. Six years is a child's entire elementary school education. If governments are forced to cut subsidies for public education and charge fees that make schooling too expensive for the poor, it cheats a whole generation of children."

[Robert W. Edgar, "Jubilee 2000: Paying Our Debts" in The Nation, April 24, 2000]

"Definitions of the intellectual are many and diverse. They have, however, one trait in common, which makes them also different from all other definitions: they are all self-definitions. Indeed, their authors are the members of the same rare species they attempt to define... The specifically intellectual form of the operation–self-definition–masks its universal content which is the reproduction and reinforcement of a given social configuration, and--with it--a given ( or claimed) status for the group."

[Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, post-modernity and Intellectuals, 1987]

"The intellectual's schizoid character stems from the duality of his social existence; his history is a record of crises of conscience of various kinds, with a variety of origins. In their ideologies the intellectuals cultivate certain particular interests until they have universalized them, then turn about and expose the partiality of those ideologies They articulate the rules of the social order and the theories which give them sanction, but at the same time it is intellectuals who criticize the existing scheme of things and demand its supersession."

[George Konrad, Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, trans. A. Arato and R. E. Allen, 1979]

"Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. " [Jean P. Sartre, Introduction to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, 1963]

"One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area--European culture since the sixteenth century--one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order,... only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was... the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. AS the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

[Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1973]

"In the past fifteen years," John Flateau writes, "the total prison population has doubled to 1.5 million. Form 1972-1994, New York's prison inmate population has quintupled from 12,500 to 68,000), with an additional 53,000 released on parole. (See Figure 1) The N.Y.C. Probation Department supervises an additional 80,000 adults and 4,000) youth. The N.Y.C. Corrections Department holds at anyone time nearly 20,000) detainees, and over l00,000) detainees per year pass through Riker's Island and borough detention centers. These are individuals who are not yet convicted of a crime. These numbers cumulatively exceed 250,000) and the vast majority of inmates are Black and Latino males between the ages of 18 and 39, from just a few New York City communities: . . .Blacks and Latinos are 49% of the city population but over 92% of the city inmates. They are 23% of the state population and over 85% of the state inmates.

Seventy-five percent (75%) of all prison inmates did not graduate from high school or earn a high school equivalency diploma. Sixty percent (60%) of all offenders sent to prison in 1993 were convicted for non-violent crimes. Forty-two percent (42%) of inmates are serving time for first felony convictions. Although crime has decreased in New York City, it appears that the unofficial policy of some politicians and the media has been to maintain high levels of fear concerning crime. Arrest rates remain consistently high for the central Brooklyn area. . . .Also, foreign-born blacks, specifically, young Caribbean immigrant males, are increasingly populating the city jails and the state prison system. These communities all have very high incidences of what sociologists define as 'crime generative factors ' (i.e. poor socioeconomic conditions)." [John Flateau, The Prison-Industrial Complex: Race, Crime, and Justice in New York. 1996]

"From Dubois to Garvey to Fanon," James concluded his talk, "there is a consistent sequence that tells not only the history of the development of the Black intellectuals, but the history of the development of ideas which are of the greatest value to civilization as a whole. Fanon calls his book Les Damnés de la Terre, it is translated as The Wretched of the Earth, but I prefer The Condemned of the World. I want to end by saying this: the work done by Black intellectuals, stimulated by the needs of Black people, had better be understood by the condemned of the earth whether they're in Africa, the United States or Europe. Because if the condemned of the earth do not understand their past and know the responsibilities that lie upon them in the future, all on the earth will be condemned. That is the kind of world we live in." [C.L.R. James talk, "From Dubois to Fanon", no date]