In a perfect, color-doesn't-matter world, everyone is the same, everyone is equally handicapped by the monster of complacency that has let our children down, and the problem of miseducation is one of equal injustice. In the REAL world, black neighborhoods get less funding, less qualified teachers, have lower standards. For every four public schools where Black children are warehoused like cattle and whose curricula is made up of various gym and dance classes there is a private school too expensive for them to attend where white kids are learning physics and trigonometry. In the real world, white teachers have biases and prejudices where they believe Black kids are less deserving of a quality education, compassion, and where they don't have a clue as how to relate to children of color and could care less or respect that they have different experiences that require a more inclusive approach to teaching. In the real world, Black and white teachers alike see dark skinned children as having less value and worth than light skinned children. In the very real, racist world, Black children are expected to be stupid. Our Black scholars and academics don’t come from the hood, not anymore. Whereas in days gone by Black people could excel in a Black school system, today, those of us who excel are educated in a school system where we are the minority.
I attended predominantly white schools for 16 years. In my 30s, I decided to go to grad school. I wanted to attend an HBCU because I wanted to have that Black experience, I wanted to connect to my peers, plan the revolution. What I found was an entire university of undereducated students. I sat in classrooms with adults who hadn't learned the basics that I'd learned in junior high. I was continually frustrated with the lack of the ability of students in graduate school, who were paying a LOT of money for Masters and Doctorate of Philosophy degrees, to even use sound reasoning or logic for the elementary concepts with which we were being assigned.
I've had people ask me to read their papers for college. College students, adults all of them, have emailed me papers that I wouldn't accept from a 7th grade student. The evidence is there in black and white every day. Black people who create their own language, those who can't form a compound complex sentence, who don't know the basics of punctuation, and those who can't comprehend that writing actually has rules of grammar are the hard evidence. We have people who think any barely literate collection of words is deserving of praise.
There are those who want to believe in a world where everyone has equal access to education and that those Black people who don’t have the basic skill set of an elementary education have just chosen not to learn, not to apply themselves but I’m here to tell you that is not the case. Black people are intentionally under and miseducated to keep us an oppressed, working class.
