This
communication is for those African Americans at the Davis Center (Minneapolis Public
Schools central offices, 1250 West Broadway) making the following salaries:
>>>>> $185,403
>>>>> $154,630
>>>>> $150,630
>>>>> $150,630
>>>>> $141,142
>>>>> $133,137
>>>>> $120,233
>>>>> $104,007
All of you are
African American staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools or staff
members of recent African origin.
You dwell in a
racist system in which you have nevertheless attained great monetary
remuneration and perceptible heights of professional status.
Inasmuch as the
locally centralized school district that pays you so well has the power to send
more powerful brains to prison--- or to
overhaul processes that allows those brains to contemplate the mysteries of the
cosmos, the determinants of human behavior, the intricacies of advanced
calculus, the wonders of musical composition, or the current relevance of
historical processes--- consideration of
those latter processes becomes of special importance and a matter of supreme
responsibility to you.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………….
You know the
first part of the story.
That part is the
familiar phase of a long history of mistreatment and goes as follows >>>>>
>>>>>
Approximately
12,500,000 human beings were sold by African kingdoms such as the Ashanti and
the Dahomey to eventually mostly British slave ship captains for transport to
the Americas. Of those, most slaves went
elsewhere than the areas now defined as the United States--- but by the time of the Civil War, there were 4.5
million African Americans in the United States, almost all (4.0 million) of whom
were slaves on the internment camps (euphemistically termed plantations) in the
American South. Abraham Lincoln was a
racist who wanted to send a people he considered troublesome back to Africa but
when Martin Delaney and others informed Lincoln that they were more American
than he, the dialectics of the historical moment impelled Lincoln to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation (1863) that freed some of
the slaves; by war’s end, what had
started as an effort to maintain the Union became also a vow to end slavery.
The slaves were
freed by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution; the 14th Amendment asserted that
all adults males (women would not gain full citizenship rights until processes unfolding
between 1920 and 1973) were citizens, regardless of ethnicity; and the 15th Amendment asserted
the right to vote on the same premises.
In an effort
termed “Reconstruction,” Radical Republicans during 1865-1877 made a real
effort to create those conditions that would enable African Americans to
prosper. This effort witnessed considerable
success in education, health, housing, suffrage, and political participation (with
many African Americans serving in state governments, fourteen (14) in the
United States House of Representatives, and two (2) in the United States Senate).
But the results
were insufficient and Republican dedication waned.
Now begins the
less publicized and certainly under-contextualized part of the story.
……………………………………………………………………………
The 1876
presidential election was in a stalemate, with electoral votes especially
disputed in Florida. The Republicans were
in transition to the party of Big Business and proved willing to cut a
pernicious deal: By the Compromise of
1877, Republicans agreed to withdraw the federal troops that had been protecting
African American citizenship in the South, for which the Democrats (then the
party of white racists) agreed to concede to the presidential victory of
Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel J. Tilden.
Political positions
were now lost.
The Ku Klux Klan,
Knights of the Golden Circle, and Midnight Raiders committed atrocities and
initiated lynchings that between 1877 and 1965 would number 4,600--- 1,900 more people than died in the 9-11
bombings.
The Supreme Court
continued its racist history via Plessy v
Ferguson (1996) and a series of rulings that made mockery of the
Reconstruction Amendments and facilitated the creation of the Jim Crow and Black
Codes systems. African Americans endured
conditions of the police state in the American South and faced restricted housing
covenants, redlining, and many indignities in the Northern urban destinations
to which they fled in the Great Northern Migration.
In a process
running from the Brown v. Board of
Education (1954) decision through the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights
Act (1965), and fair housing and equal employment laws of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, the most onerous formal legal impediments to citizenship were
removed.
But by 1968, Martin
Luther King knew that the great bulk of African Americans lived in poverty and
urban blight: He was planning the Poor
People’s March on Washington when James Earl Ray blew him away.
…………………………………………………………………………………..
Ironically, the
civil rights advances of the 1960 s and early 1070s created the conditions that
made the blight worse. Middle class African
Americans could now flee the urban core as whites did so famously. In Minneapolis, middle class African Americans
and Jewish residents (especially after the Plymouth Avenue riots in 1967) fled the
North Side, leaving behind a population that was much more economically
challenged. Then, when those from even
more challenged circumstances moved in from Gary, Indiana; South Side Chicago; Kankakee, Illinois; and Detroit, East St. Louis, and Kansas City; North Minneapolis and areas on either side of
Lake Street in Minneapolis faced conditions typical of inner city areas across
the nation from 1980 until today.
Crack cocaine hit
the streets in 1980, gang activity increased, and by 1992 the largest city in
Minnesota was dubbed “Murder-apolis.”
Until 1973 there
were no African American teachers or administrators in the Minneapolis Public
Schools; and to this day school staff in
the Minneapolis Public Schools is overwhelmingly white.
These insidious trends
accompanied the ascendance of a specious creed spouted by education professors
from the 1920s forward that had taken firm root by the 1970s, an approach to
education that undervalues the level of knowledge possessed by field experts
and promotes all manner of jargon-infested pseudo-philosophy that is all
education professors have to offer.
Anti-knowledge
curriculum hurts young people who have been historically abused or who are mired
in poverty the most. The Minneapolis
Public Schools educates no student well, but those from families with more
education and financial wherewithal get a bit more home-based academics and
certainly gain access to collegiate tracks more readily than those from
families whose assets are of a different type.
………………………………………………………………………………………
Those of you
identified above have enormous power if you opt to wield it.
You should recognize
the shallowness of the academic portion of the current MPS Comprehensive Design.
You should say
something on the order of the following to Superintendent Ed Graff, Executive
Director Aimee Fearing, and staff at the Department of Teaching and Learning:
Cultural relevance and cultural competence
should be assumed and vigorously pursued in actuality, not rhetoric.
But what should be presumed does not
constitute academic excellence.
We want for the African American young people of this school district that breadth and depth of education outlined in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) but that we suspect academic decision-makers and teachers of this district have no ability to impart.
Do not get too invested in academic differentiation,
projects assigned without proper contextual knowledge; and do not pretend that students can think
critically in the absence of an abundance of knowledge sets, or that teachers
who lack powers of critical analysis can turn our precious young people into
critical thinkers by continuing to hand out “packet” after “packet,” showing videos
unrelated to course content, or stationing them in front of computers in the absence
of vigorous classroom discussion that most of you lack ability to lead.
We want our young people to have that
knowledge that Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin
Luther King, and Malcom X. possessed.
We want our young people to go forth with knowledge
of mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics,
geography, literature, English usage, and the musical and visual arts.
We care more that history is taught as it
should be--- fearlessly, in full, with
an account of how people of
all ethnicities have fared in the highs and lows of this nation’s history and
that of the world.
We’ve noticed more and more African Americans
acting in Shakespearean productions at the Guthrie and at the Great River
Shakespeare Festival in Winona. We want
more of our young people to be grounded in the Western classics.
But we also want a condition addressed by
which our young people graduate without having read Lorraine Hansberry, Langston
Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, James
Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Te Nehesi Coates, Toni Morrison, and--- that greatest of all American playwrights--- August Wilson.
We want our African American youth to score in
the 21-36 range on the ACT, to receive more academic than athletic
scholarships, and to prosper as doctors, attorneys, business people, professors,
teachers, and whatever profession or trade to which they aspire. Do not track our young people on “pathways”
before they are given the knowledge and have the experience to make
determinative life decisions.
Get rid of the education professor rhetoric
with which you are infested.
Seek the help of genuine scholars of academic
fields.
Give our African American youth the education
that wealthy parents seek when they send their children to St. Paul Academy or
Brecht---- but better, with the goal of
being culturally enriched, civically engaged, as well as professionally
satisfied citizens.
…………………………………………………………………………………………
Those of us who
spend our lives at the urban core frequently hear two very different vows:
>>>>> “I’m
gonna get mines.”
>>>>> “I’m
going to give back.”
Right now there
are more people getting theirs than there are those giving back.
We need to
redress the imbalance.
Go to Ed Graff, Aimee
Fearing, and staff at the Department of Teaching and Learning and tell them
what they need to hear.
Band together.
Use your power.
You will create
the future, and the nature of that future will be determined by what you do or
do not do.
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