Bro Kwame,
I do not know the half that you say is right and the half that you say is wrong. But I know that I agree with you 200%. I agree with you 100% that academic achievement is important, otherwise why are we Professors? I also agree with you 100% that activism is important and we combine both 200% in the Africana Studies paradigm of scholar-activism exemplified by Du Bois, Wells-Barnet, Azikiwe, Diop, Fanon, MLK, Nkrumah, Malcolm, Cabral, Rodney, Davis, Asante, and many others. When I emphasize smart study skills, I do not mean to suggest that they are relevant only to academic success. They are life skills and the toughest tasks are always better accomplished by building smart teams rather than by going it alone according to the myth of Sisyphus. Together each achieves more (TEAM). The best athletes are always the ones to tell you that it is important to retain personal coaches to help them keep sharpening their skills. The miseducation of the people starts from the assumption that once you go through commencement, you have finished your education and no longer need to study and learn. Learning is fun everytime (LIFE). The best movements for social change are the ones that include political education such as the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Revolution and BLM is emulating this. The same applies to economic activities in which those who know teach the next generation; be it in music, agriculture, film making, research or in development activities. I also agree that more African students should be activists against racism, sexism and class exploitation but the majority of students anywhere are not trained to have such consciousness and commitment. Even among African Americans, the preference is for artisan degrees that would increase employment opportunities rather than the revolutionary field of study for obvious reasons. Moreover, the responsibility to oppose racism and white supremacy is not the responsibility of only students of African descent given that many students of European descent are comrades in the struggle precisely because white supremacy is a threat to humanity and has resulted in the deaths of millions of white people (some estimates put the deaths in the second European tribal world war at 60 million, mostly white). John Brown's body lies smoldering in his grave but his multiracial troops go marching on. Men also campaign against sexism that affects our sisters, wives, daughters and mothers if not us directly and we petty bourgeois scholars also campaign against class exploitation of the lumpen. You are welcome back home to Africa but do not restrict yourself to Ghana, claim the whole Peoples Republic of Africa which is currently being birthed by Africans through projects like the African Union Passport to enable free movement for all including the African Diaspora with a right to return in defiance of the door of no return and the ridiculous colonial boundaries. While I agree with you that Europeans are always the ones who manufacture the weapons and conspiracies to kill Africans, it is not true that only Europeans are to blame for there is indeed ethnic-class-gender prejudice that has resulted in genocidal rage across Africa while the African diaspora youth engage in 'homeycide' against brothers and sisters just as white kill whites in large numbers, not simply because old massa told them to do it or else. The smart study skills that I talk about will include programs in Love Studies to help our people to recover the revolutionary love that is implied by Ubuntu and by Mbari African philosophy of nonviolence and encapsulated in the Rasta philosophy of One Love. There are so many war colleges around the world but not a single Love College and not a single curriculum on Love Studies anywhere. Do Not Agonize, Organize!
Biko
On Tuesday, 24 October 2017, 07:16:54 GMT-4, kwame zulu shabazz <kwameshabazz@gmail.com> wrote:
Brother Biko,
I think you are half-right. Yes, institutional racism is an actual thing that African Americans have resisted and continue to resist and challenge. Recent immigrants to America benefit from Black America's unfinished business of racial justice for centuries of white racial terror. Simply learning better study habits isn't the point of all this. We must question what is being studied. Who sets the terms? Whose interests are being served? White knowledge was built on Black subordination. White America must be held accountable for centuries of white racial terror against its Black, Brown, and indigenous citizens. Getting good grades without raising your voice against white supremacy is a sort of assimilation that perpetuates the problem.
We must be clear that the aim of white supremacy, institutional or otherwise, is to destroy Black, Brown, and indigenous people and create passive assimilated bodies who don't challenge said systems. Indeed, the Movement for Black Lives is an example of a long continuum of Black resistance to domestic white terrorism. African American resistance to white racial terror was a necessary struggle in 1917 and it is no less necessary in 2017. The author's effort to gloss over that fact with the phrase "victimhood" is racist and offensive. There are Black political prisoners who have been in prison since the 1960s. Assata Shakur and others have been in exile nearly as long. Is it the author's position that Assata suffers from "victimhood"? What about 12 year-old Tamir Rice? Tamir was executed in less than two seconds by a police officer. Do we blame Tamir's murder on "victimhood"? There are millions of stories of black people who have been terrorized generation, after generation, after generation. The outcome of white racial terror are vast race-based inequalities that an educated immigrant can side-step by looking straight ahead, getting good grades, causing no controversies, and raising no uncomfortable questions with our white oppressors.
Talented Africans leave their homelands because their aspirations are crushed under systems that were imposed by white people and now managed by black "matadors" (to borrow Chinweizu's phrase). Ironically, many of them wind up migrating to the very source of their problem--Europe and America. Many talented African Americans, by comparison, are crushed in ghettos created by white American racists. I don't plan of dying in America. But I have been fortunate to develop a longstanding relationship with an African nation (Ghana). Most African Americans don't have that experience. America, the land that hates them, is the only home they will ever know. Who will treat the centuries of trauma that Africans stuck American have endured? How can you treat the trauma if the oppression is ongoing? Given these conditions, we have no option but to keep fighting. "Success," then, should not be measured solely by standards created by white people to maintain white power. A better standard is to what degree do students agitate against the institutions aimed at destroying them. Du Bois was a "success." But after centuries of vicious harassment by the US government, Du Bois quit America and died in Ghana. The brilliant Paul Robeson was a "success." But Robeson chose to speak out against US imperialism abroad and racism at home. Robeson was also viciously harassed and probably poisoned by the US govt under the MkUltra program. Dr. King was a "success." But the US government literally tried to force him to commit suicide. See the pattern? The pathological US government murders, incarcerates, smears our most talented leaders and then that same pathological government labels Black people pathological.
All Black Lives Matter,
kzs
On Thursday, October 19, 2017 at 2:05:22 PM UTC-5, Biko Agozino wrote:
A few have always risen against the odds and the few African African immigrant students who excel are not the rule. They come from populations with mass failures in examinations. About 80% of Nigerian students have been failing high school exams in Nigeria for decades. The theory of Chua and Rubenfeld missed this by overgeneralizing their convenient samples, one of their examples is Justice Sotomayor who was failing in high school until she asked a successful classmate to teach her how to study effectively. The missing link is lack of training in study skills. Our students are being given fish by teachers but they are not taught how to fish. Once students master study skills, they will excel even against the odds. African American students at Cornell cannot be labelled failures simple because they complain about institutional racism which is a reality that African African students should speak out against too. Any student at Cornell must be good enough to get there in the first place. The problem lies in the high school where every course is taught but not study skills. We have a proposal to experiment by working with failing high schools to teach study skills and then compare the learning results with control group of schools. We hypothesize that knowledge of smart study skills will achieve better results than the gospel of hard work. We have shared our action research design with many state governors internationally but no takers yet.
Biko
Cornell's Black Student Disunion
A radical group calls on the university to disfavor immigrants.
Photo: istock/Getty Images
Oct. 18, 2017 6:14 p.m. ET
A century ago, colleges cared if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Now some are demanding that when universities admit black students, they give preference to descendants of those who arrived on slave ships. Black Students United at Cornell last month insisted the university "come up with a plan to actively increase the presence of underrepresented Black students." The group noted, "We define underrepresented Black students as Black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country."
After widespread criticism—including a student op-ed with the headline "Combating White Supremacy Should Not Entail Throwing Other Black Students Under the Bus"—the group backtracked, sort of. It apologized for "any conflicting feelings this demand may have garnered from the communities we represent." But if the purpose of racial preferences is to promote "diversity," as the Supreme Court has held, why don't immigrants count?
The BSU argued that "the Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America."
There's a contradiction here. For years liberal writers have blamed black poverty and undereducation on racism—the experience of being more likely to be pulled over by police, to be looked at suspiciously in department stores, to be discriminated against in schools and the workplace.
But it doesn't seem to be the case, at least not to the same degree, among immigrants. "The more strongly black immigrant students identify with their specific ethnic origins, the better they perform [academically]," Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld observed in their 2014 book, "The Triple Package."
Anecdotal examples are easy to find. The website Face2FaceAfrica noted in April that Ifeoma White-Thorpe, a New Jersey teen born in Nigeria, had joined "a remarkable roll call of high-flying African-American students who were accepted into all 8 Ivy League Universities." Among them: Ghanaian-American Kwasi Enin, Somali-American Munira Khalif and Nigerian-Americans Harold Ekeh and Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna.
Why does racism not seem to keep black immigrants down? The answer is obvious: Black immigrant culture tends to value academic achievement and believe it is possible no matter what happened to your ancestors. As one business school graduate born to Nigerian parents tells Ms. Chua and Mr. Rubenfeld: "If you start thinking about or becoming absorbed in the mentality that the whole system is against us then you cannot succeed."
Groups like the Cornell BSU insist that the system is out to get them and they cannot succeed. This makes the presence of high-achieving immigrant black students inconvenient. Between diversity and victimhood as the highest good in today's academia, it's hard to know where to place your money.
Ms. Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.
Appeared in the October 19, 2017, print edition.
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
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Photo: istock/Getty ImagesByOct. 18, 2017 6:14 p.m. ETNaomi Schaefer Riley
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