Carter Godwin Woodson’s “The Mis-education of the Negro

CARTER GODWIN WOODSON’S THE MIS-EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO

I am fascinated by chance finds in second-hand bookshops. Favorite books that have shaped my life have often been objets trouvés, washed up by the tide, the same way Nietzsche found Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig in 1865, when the Lutheran pastor’s son was 21. “Something about the book”, he wrote, “told me to take it home…” Two of my three all-time favorite novels were bought from exactly the same charity shop in the London suburbs within three months of one another for an outlay of a couple of pounds. I consider myself well-read, but I had heard of neither book nor their authors – Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 – but they soon became favorites. How’s your luck?

There is little chance of this happening in exile in Costa Rica because there is no such thing as a charity shop or thrift store here. People here are too poor to give things to charity, which is a first-world luxury. They keep things until they break and then they repair them or they have them repaired. Nevertheless, the local town has a sort of pop-up store which features an ongoing rummage sale. I always find something useful for the apartment and dirt-cheap there, and recently I noticed a crate of English-language books which I went through in hope of finding a gem. No such Nietzschean luck, no amor fati for me. All the books were management tomes or computing manuals. Oh, well. But a month later I saw that there were a few new books in the crate, and the one perched on top was practically begging me to buy it. A slim, 70-page hardback volume in perfect condition, the book featured a dapper Black man in suit and tie on its cover, and was entitled The Mis-Education of the Negro (MN), by Carter Godwin Woodson. I paid 500 colones for it, a fraction under a dollar at the time of writing.

I had never heard of Mr. Woodson, but I elected to read the book first before investigating its author online. Rarely have I spent a dollar so fortuitously. Mr. Woodson was a teacher and educator, and was indeed the Black man on the cover. His introductory preface was written in 1933, and concerns Black education in American after the Emancipation and Reconstruction periods which followed the Civil War. It exemplifies two major points about Black education. Firstly, it’s the White man’s job. Secondly, the White man always gets it wrong. It is White mis-education that is the fault, never the negro.

The book’s preface sets out its program:

“Only by careful study of the Negro himself and the life which he has been forced to lead can we arrive at the proper procedure in this crisis”.

Woodson’s grounding premise is that White education given to Negroes simply proliferates a system which led to slavery, lynching, and the demotion of the negro to a position of second-class citizen. And yet there is a curious formula applied by which the negro is to be educated to remain precisely in the position natural to his race. The word “negro”, incidentally, is capitalized throughout the book, in much the same way as ‘Black’ now takes a capital in the Western Anglophone media and ‘white’ does not. Outside of textual quotation, I will give it a lower-case because I am not Black and I do not work for Associated Press, whose diktat led to this curious typographical apartheid. (TOO capitalizes both.)

 As an example of the paradox Woodson exemplifies, consider his appraisal of Blacks in the field of business:

“In the schools of business administration Negroes are trained exclusively in the psychology and economics of Wall Street and are, therefore, made to despise the opportunities to run ice wagons, push banana carts, and sell peanuts among their people. Foreigners, who have not studied economics but have studied Negroes, take up this business and grow rich”.

By this token, it is better to teach Blacks how to sell peanuts and bananas to other Blacks rather than attain the skills perfected by those who have attained what is surely an economic gold standard, an ultimate measure of success, by trading on Wall Street. A bespoke education for negroes, which is what Godwin would prefer to simply aping the education given to Whites, contains within itself the low expectations Godwin finds in White educational practices, which teach a Black that “his Black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is the worst sort of lynching”.

This smacks of the hysteria prevalent in Black rhetoric today. “Lynching” is the Black version of the Holocaust, despite the fact that, according to the Tuskegee Institute Archives,  between 1882 and 1968, of the 4,743 men who were lynched, 1,297 of them were White. It’s hardly a Holocaust.

The text occasionally foreshadows the current vogue for cultural relativism:

“There can be no reasonable objection to the Negro’s doing what the White man tells him to do, if the White man tells him to what is right; but right is purely relative”. [Italics added].

It should be noted that, while the Left insist on cultural moral relativism, this does not extend retrospectively but only synchronically between cultures. There is no statute of limitations on what university courses in the UK are now calling “the problem of Whiteness”.

Throughout MN, Woodson does not have anywhere near as much ire for the White man as he does for the “educated Negro”;

“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”.

What is curious about this is the virulence Woodson displays towards the “educated Negro”, his bête noire throughout MN. Also, it discounts any notion of the cultural attainment of quality, the meritocracy of the intellectual advantage attendant on studying “the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton”.  Whites are not taught to admire this tradition and despise the African. They are taught how to discover for themselves to admire the White tradition and discount the African. Why read the output of failed races when they hadn’t produced any literary works until they encountered White civilization? Stick with your own color, just like Black kids do in every high school and prison canteen in America.

In the end, the one question which will be ever-present in this book remains the same; What if the “inferiority” that Blacks are taught to feel is not the product of oppression, but an expression of a natural order? This is the question Woodson sets out to answer, although I don’t believe he knew that.

There is an inbuilt flaw in Woodson’s general argument. Industrial apprenticeships, for example, do not benefit Black men because they do not have the experience their White counterparts built up before Emancipation. But the author fails to consider the fact that those White apprentices still had to learn the job before they could gain that experience. Why cannot the Black man do the same? There exists in MN a constant undercurrent of cognitive dissonance, a now-familiar distaste Black academics have for Blacks adopting White educational practice while knowing in themselves that Whites are the only serious educators. We see it today in the dismissal of Blacks who push back against the racial politics of the Black caucus, like Thomas Sowell and Candace Owens, who are regularly described as “Oreos”, “Uncle Toms”, “house niggers”, and other childish epithets. And it is still prevalent today in schools at which Black students discourage other Blacks from learning, and thus “acting White”. A good friend of mine in England got out of the teaching profession, and one of the reasons he gave me was the dispiriting sight of Blacks using their college as a cross between a fashion-show catwalk and a gang den, while making sure none of their fellow Black students strayed off the path and tried some larnin’, that White man’s juju.

Towards the end of MN, Woodson contradicts statements made at its beginning, in which he points out what he sees as the pointlessness of a classical education for negroes:

“While such guidance as the Negro needs will concern itself first with material things, however, it must not stop with these as ends in themselves. In the acquisition of these we lay the foundation for the greater things of the spirit. A poor man properly directed can write a more beautiful poem than one who is surfeited”.

No doubt, and Woodson’s sister was a noted poet. But whereas Woodson dismissed a classical education earlier in MN, he now recognizes that such an academic grounding is not simply required to be a classicist, but that the classics themselves instruct the student about life by the extension of their influence on that student’s life. If you read and understand Plato and Suetonius, you will be better equipped mentally for just about anything else.

So, with the book read, it was time for the great reveal; Who was Carter Godwin Woodson? I imagine some readers will be surprised at (and hopefully forgive) my ignorance, because Carter G. Woodson was none other than “the father of Black history”. Born in 1875 in New Canton, Virginia, Woodson’s parents were freed slaves. This was the end of Reconstruction, and the hope was that the Black man and woman could now go it alone after Emancipation, on an equal footing with Whites as citizens, and in receipt of the financial help required to establish themselves in that citizenry. This new environment was one in which young Woodson flourished.

Although his early education was minimal due to the necessity for him to help with his parents’ farm, Woodson was an autodidact from an early age, and his self-education took him into a teaching career. He became principal of Douglass High School, from which he had gained his diploma in 1897. His later education was as cosmopolitan as any found today, and his path to his doctorate took him to Kentucky, the University of Chicago, and the Philippines before attending Harvard and becoming only the second African-American after W. E. B. DuBois to gain a PhD. His later career took him to Africa and Asia before studying at the famed Sorbonne in Paris. He was affiliated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and his inauguration of “Black History Week” in February of 1926 is seen as the precursor to Black History Month (BHM). February is the month the USA “celebrates” BHM, although the UK (along with Ireland and The Netherlands) marks this month in October, in the first week of which I chanced across Woodson’s book.

Blacks as a mainstay of the teaching profession is now a (rare) substantive part of the Harris/Walz official policy as they pledge to: “Support education training, and mentorship programs that lead to good-paying jobs for Black men, including Pathways [sic] to becoming teachers”.

Incidentally, Harris also wishes to legalize marijuana, a clear sop to Blacks who feel it necessary to avoid school “because I got high”.

Black men, of course, already have the same pathways to becoming teachers that every other person in the US has, but Blacks always seem to need additional help from the White man.

This is a fascinating book, and available on Amazon for a pittance. Carter G. Woodson benefited from the very system he himself criticized from the inside. Championed by both the Transatlantic Black caucus and their Leftist friends, he could not have criticized White educational practice without himself having been fortunate enough to benefit from that same practice. In the end, although this is a worthwhile book and a fascinating glimpse at history, it’s the same story of the eternal and paradoxically dependent Black attitude towards Whitey; Can’t live with him, can’t live without him.