Destructive Public Education through a Nationwide Eurocentric Curriculum

“Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children” -Malcom X

Malcom X is probably still shouting this at us from his grave today. As an advocate for freedom schools within the Black community, every time I go home to Detroit it gives me the opportunity to reflect on how my growing up in this city has greatly contributed to the reason why I am a strong educated Black woman. I would without a doubt credit my academic, and consequently impact success. Although there were no freedom school to attend in my community, my mother steered clear of the basic public school education. She paid thousands of dollars for me to attend a Black founded and operated private school in the suburbs of Detroit. For high school I was able to test into a university preparatory school. This along with fact that I was raised in a majority Black area meant that I had an overwhelming amount of Black educators invested in my success, including Black history and literature in my curriculum. 


Recently I came across a list challenge that listed 100 Must Read African-American books. The list included several familiar titles, but I was surprised that after going though all of the list the amount of texts I’ve read in their entirety wasn’t very high. The fact that’s I’ve only read about 10% of 100 books was disappointing. The average score for users was 17% out of hundreds of thousands of people, that’s not even an F- We need to do so much better. 

I’m thankful to have attended schools that did not completely white-wash my education. Many of these books that I read were in high school. My teacher, Ms. Lewis, assigned books like Black Boy, Invisible Man, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings for her students to read. I didn’t realize that my love for reading grew from the fact that I saw myself in the narratives because of my ability to relate to the characters, until that love was dampened when I was forced to switch high schools. I moved from Detroit’s suburbs to a tiny town in Washington State for my 12th grade and the first day of class my new teacher, a middle-aged white woman, assigned for us to write a book report on one from of a list of books that she provided. There was nothing on the list that I’d ever read, when I told her she mocked, “You’ve never read Of Mice and Men? What school did you go to?” It was as if she belittled my education, telling me that her list of books are what colleges are looking for and that not having read those books will put me at a disadvantage. After lecturing me, she allowed me to write my report on a book I’d read at my previous school but I’ll always remember how unprepared I felt that day. I now realize that the expectation to have read those books was not one that I should have been held to. 

People crave to learn about themselves and their history through the perspectives of people who they can relate to. This is the only way that we can grow, by knowing of the stories of the people who came before us, fought for us and learned the hard lessons, writing them down for us. A literal gift from the past. Reading about the stories of other Black youth sharpened my reading skills while sharpening my relationship with race and race relations as a young Black person. Those themes that you can find in the Western ‘classics’ are themes we see in texts by Black authors that will also include subjects that are relevant to our own viewpoints. This is why I have the book sypnosis section of SwariMi, to introduce books by authors of color, majority Black writers, that I’ve read and this list of 100 books is a great reference to find more incredible titles. We have been starved of our own narratives so we must seek knowledge that will uplift and strengthen us.How prepared are you? How many Black authors have you read? 

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