Transcription
Thank you so much, brother Hip Hop President. Uh, to Dr. Jones and the other platform guests, our MC's, Sister Christina Davis, and most of all to those of you who joined us this evening. Uh, it's a delight, uh, to see you here. Uh, I, this is certainly not my first time to Little Rock and it certainly isn't my first time to Philander Smith. It is my first time speaking on the campus while visiting the campus and I'm certainly very, very highly honored to be here, uh, with brother President Kimbro and to be with you all this evening. Uh, and most of all, I guess that this series really represents something really significant and I'm aware of those who have preceded me, uh, in this position. Uh, I'm aware of some of those who are to follow me in this position and I must say I'm highly honored to be among that number of very distinguished speakers who will be blessing this mic. I hope this mic will bless me so that I won't be out of line in the process. So, thank you so much for your presence and I certainly thank you all for this invitation and for this, uh, opportunity.
Um, I'm going to try to cut to the chase. I, I've, I've got a, a, a very deeply embedded, uh, southern Christian and black Muslim background, both of which are very long-winded. Uh, when we start talking, whether it's in the black church or in the Muslim mosque, we don't always know when to stop until the spirit stops us. Uh, one thing that I found out this evening from your president is that he believes in starting things on time and my itinerary had me out of here on a certain time, too. So, I think with that in mind, I've got to sort of cut to the chase, make my point, and sit down and shut up.
I want to talk very briefly from the idea of the power of self-knowledge. The power of self-knowledge. And I want to approach this idea by appropriately, I think, making reference to the fact that the founder of what's being celebrated this month as Black History Month was initiated by a distinguished historian who I hope most of you know, Dr. Carnegie. Puts it over 70-some years ago, he started a celebration of Negro History Week and his purpose in trying to initiate this activity of Negro History Week that evolved during the 60s and the 70s to Black History Month and hopefully during the 21st century will evolve to black history year. We still need to keep in mind what his rationale was for establishing this still very, very significant celebration in Dr. Woodson's document, which I believe is a classical document that I believe that everybody who considers himself educated, even a little bit, needs to be familiar with and that is *The Miseducation of the Negro*. He laid out the concept that if you control a people's thinking, you won't have to worry about their behavior because their thinking and what they have been taught to think will determine what they will do. You won't have to tell them to go to the back door. They will go willingly. And if there is no backdoor, they will in fact make one because the thinking that they have been given requires them to have a backdoor to come through.
He laid out for me a very significant idea because as a psychologist, I am one who was very, very interested and concerned about the thinking of people. In fact, I tell people all the time that my primary reason for wanting to be a psychologist was wanting to know, "Why are black people crazy?" And my entire career has been geared towards trying to determine why is it that black people are crazy. Now, you don't have to laugh. The reason that there is a field of psychology is because white people wanted to know why white people are crazy. And they therefore created a field of study that involved them with various ways of being able to measure and being able to therapeutize and being able to do the kind of research to be able to understand what led to the kind of proper functioning that would be able to create the kind of behaviors that would in fact be able to make them more functional and when they became dysfunctional, be come up with various therapeutic interventions by which they could begin to reverse the behavior so they could make them more functional, therefore operate more in their own self-interest. Ain't no big thing. Not only were they interested in understanding what made white people crazy, they even studied white rats. Now, in my community, we didn't have no white rats. And so, I knew that there was something irrelevant about the psychology I was being taught. At least they should have some brown or some gray rats if they're going to be understanding how the rats in my neighborhood operate.
Be that as it may, Dr. Woodson, who was a historian, really laid out, I think, in a very significant way, the key to my work that I've tried to understand with my colleagues over the last 30 years to really understand what accounts for the behavior of black people. What accounts for the behavior of people, period, and that is that people operate consistent with what they've been taught. He understood in a very critical way, as early as 1930, based upon his own Harvard education, that the major problem that black people faced in the world, particularly in America, and the reason that progress seemed to consistently elude us was a consequence of this miseducation. He hypothesized very meaningfully that it seemed that the more of our people who got degrees and got educated, the more backwards we went. So there was this paradox. It seemed that those people who were educated the most served the least. He was also struck by the paradox that the more of our people who supposedly became educated, the less progress we were making. And in many ways, we were becoming progressively worse off as we moved into the 30s and the 40s than we were 50 years before when it was illegal for black folks to even read, write, and do arithmetic.
And so his conceptualization that we were in fact not being educated but being miseducated laid the foundation for understanding what we needed then and what we need now. And it's a very simple idea. The simple idea is this: that if you are going to be properly educated, then it requires you to know who you are. If you don't know who you are, then you are, by definition, improperly educated. What Carter G. Woodson identified was the fact that our people who were going to colleges and universities and even at the high school level were receiving information, were receiving supposed education, but it wasn't education about them. They were learning the educational information that empowered the people who had power to continue to stay in power. And therefore, our educated people, in their desire and in their aspiration to be better, to be effective, to be good, to be Americans, to be people, was to simply be something other than themselves. This miseducation had them convinced that if I'm going to be great, I must be white. If I'm going to be effective, I must be like somebody other than myself. His idea was that miseducation then was working counterproductive to the very needs that we had as a community. So the more people we had trained in history, the less we knew about our history. The more people we had in economics, the least econ, less economically effective we were. In fact, the more people we even had trained in theology, the less we were able to appreciate the power of our own faith.
So he laid out this idea that if you are going to in fact actually effectively empower and properly educate people, you have got to teach them about themselves. So in his very feeble way, in 1930, he says, "Let's at least set aside one week out of the year, one week in the shortest month of the year, five days out of the week, that we will call Negro History Week." And in that week, we are going to concentrate on helping Negroes know something about themselves. Now, we look back on that and say, "My God, what a feeble, tiny effort." But in retrospect, it was a profound remedy because in 1930, we didn't have any black psychologists who began to understand what made black people crazy. But he understood why we were crazy and had laid out a therapeutic intervention as early as 1930 from an historical perspective with very little or no knowledge of what psychology was all about and begin to lay a pro, lay a process that we still need to master even today. And that is, he understood that if we were going to be free from oppression, we would have to first of all free our minds. That in fact, ultimately oppression was not what somebody did to you. It wasn't what the lynching noose did to you. It wasn't what the plantation did to you, but the ultimate process of oppression was what it did to your mind. It took away your mind. And what was worse, gave you an alien mind and rather than making you be motivated and inspired to be the best you could be, you wanted to be anything but you.
So what he laid out was a very interesting formula that I like to call tonight, the, the denigration of the black mind. Quote me on that. He laid out a formula for the, and I just invented that concept. You won't find it written down anywhere. But if the hip-hop generation can use this word in a derogatory and destructive way, I can take it back and try to use it in a therapeutic way and call it my form of psychotherapy, which is the denigration of the black mind. And how do you do this? You do this by first of all making sure that people begin to systematically appreciate who they are. To appreciate themselves at their best, not a personality worship or a personality cult. It wasn't about somehow trying to get on the basketball court to out-slam dunk the basketball players, outrun the track runners, outplay the musicians, out-sing the songsters. It was really about using the personalities of those ancestors who had come before to demonstrate certain types of characteristics of the people that served as the foundation to inspire you to more effectively become the best that you could be.
He understood the principle that existed in western education. He understood why in the teaching of American history, American history began when Columbus showed up. He understood that the European-American, uh, curriculum that world history began when Europeans began to come into some enlightenment and therefore they began to put the Greeks and the Romans as being those who were the patriarchs of all kind of education and Herodotus was called the father of history and, uh, uh, Hippocrates was called the father of medicine and therefore the whole conceptualization of what was called democracy and philosophy and all the concepts of science and mathematics and all those other kinds of beginnings of the beginning of knowledge, the dawning of understanding, the epistemological foundation of all being was when Europeans began to understand that and left everything out that preceded their discovery of those things, forgetting that there was a place called Africa, forgetting that there was a place called China long before they came out. But he understood that they understood that in order to begin to make a generation of powerful people, they had to be educated into understanding who they were at their best. And in doing that, he simply adopted the formula that they had used for themselves and that all people had used for themselves because we have subsequently discovered that it was not something Europeans discovered about education, but written across the portals of the pyramids, actually thousands of years before the Greeks ever established an educational system. The Africans who laid the foundation for Nile Valley civilization had already put across there, "Man, know thyself," as the foundation for knowledge.
So he understood that self-knowledge was the foundation of all learning. So he suggested in this formula, in this prescription for trying to re-educate the miseducated, was that we should be able to somehow be exposed to know something about our greatness. It doesn't mean that we didn't have weaknesses. It didn't mean that we had, didn't have liabilities, but in order to somehow build in each generation an aspiration to be the best they could be, they needed to know something about who they were. So he suggested that we should use during this Negro History Week the examples of people who had shown certain human qualities that would make them stand out as, uh, images and icons for the kind of education we should aspire for. So he wanted an image of those people who were courageous. So he said that we should celebrate during Negro History Week people such as Frederick Douglass. Why? Frederick Douglass had been able to demonstrate a certain level of courage. He'd been able to take his situation that was a situation of oppression and death and he'd been able to defy those circumstances of death and destruction and actually broke away from his own captivity and then gave his entire life to the liberation of other people like him. He said we should begin to hold in our celebration of history icons and emblems of people such as Harriet Tubman, a woman who's never was able to master the basics of literacy herself. But because of her courage and her ability to appreciate the courage and the sanctity of her own life, she then became a liberator for many people who had literacy but didn't have courage. She then became an icon for the kind of education that we needed to teach each generation because if we would grow as a people, if we could become maximally human, if we could become maximally effective, then we would need people who could exemplify the highest standards of courage.
Now, let me put a little footnote in that for a minute. No different than Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and all the other heroes in the other history book. But we wanted to get heroes and she could demonstrate the real process of courage that represented the best that we could be. So he then saw that we should begin to not only know and be informed, but to begin to celebrate those people who were the best of what we could be. So he then wanted us to begin to internalize the qualities of courage because he understood that a people would never be free until they had courage. And intimidated, terrified people who went to the back door to create a back entrance when there was no sign requiring them to go there were a people who had no courage. But a people who had learned that the only powerful heroic people who'd ever come along were people other than themselves could do nothing more or nothing less than to go to the back door and to train their children to do the same thing. But if we were going to ever have to build a front door, a mighty entrance with columns to herald awakening and a herald I coming in, we would have to be able to internalize an education to appreciate the importance of courage.
He believed that during this Negro History Week, we should have people who personified competence. Competence, skills that were remarkable, skills that somehow no one could ever take from you. So he pointed to those people who later became, uh, images such as the George Washington Carvers, scientists who understood that science was not something that they gave you in school, but it came from the inspiration and the creative aspiration of the God-given inquisitiveness that was put into the human being. And here was a man who was able to somehow understand more about a peanut than all those people who understood all that was un-understandable about botany and herbology and all the other kinds of things they were able to study at the University of Iowa. He was able to outdo his own professors from the University of Iowa because he had an aspiration of how to begin to use those very things that were part of his own experience. But he was able to see there was significance in that and found that by divine guidance, that there was scientific understanding and being able to understand all that the peanut could do. And he could understand that God was at, but was in working through him to give him the power to appreciate the power of his own scientific promise. And so he then wanted us to look at examples of the kind of competence of people who gave in their work service to their people. So George Washington Carver became an image of competence because he never gave any more than that which could benefit the people who he was a part of. He didn't deprive others from his skills. He didn't deprive others from his competence. But they tell us that he never even took payment for his, uh, professorial services, which puts him a little bit out of line for me because I have to get paid for my professor work. But somehow he was so devoted to learning, had such a great love for knowledge, had such a great love for understanding, had such a great love for being able to appreciate the scientific principles that were in fact underlying the working of nature and the world that he lived in, he lived in that he comfortably gave his entire life to developing competence for competence' sake.
So these heroes, these sheer heroes, these images were gradually teaching us who we were. We were not the ones who were forbidden from learning. We were not the ones who were prohibited from mastery. We were not the ones who were kept away from access. We were, in fact, those who were endowed by certain qualities that were able to transcend the circumstances and go on and do their best. Anyway, he then wanted to point to others who somehow created the capacity for transcendence. That is, that people who were not to be made or prohibited by circumstances. He wanted us to be able to appreciate in knowing who we were that we were a people who understood the power to transcend. That is, that no matter how bad the circumstances were, we were able to point to the Paul Robesons, the Marian Andersons, and those people who were able to make their talents heard, appreciated, and received by the world that they lived in regardless of the barriers that were put there. Refusing to accept anyone's limitations on their ability to be all that they could be.
He then began to somehow see in our, uh, uh, uh, exposure to these kinds of images of greatness, we could begin to get the ties and the networking and the relationship that long before there were Greeks or Romans or Germans or English or a French polymath, French, that there were Africans building civilizations long before that time as well and to understand that we had not always been slaves, but that slavery had been a transient possibility, a transient situation that not only had brought us from our greatness, but that we were able to rise above even the circumstances of that barbaric oppression known as human enslavement. He understood that if we could begin to appreciate that no matter how destructive may be the intention of those who would hold you down, that if you understood who you were, if you understood your true identity, if you were properly educated, then you could begin to understand that nothing could hold you down, no matter what kind of barriers were created.
So it was from that kind of introduction that he never was able to get his Harvard education with his Harvard PhD. They never told him who were the true builders of the pyramids. He never was able to learn in his education, who was here building America long before Columbus got here. He never somehow was able to learn in his PhD from Harvard that all those philosophers who somehow claimed to be the progenitors and the patriarchs of the world knowledge were no more than, in fact, those who followed along a path that had been established before them. So it was only when you began to appreciate your capacity to transcend, to rise above circumstances, to rise above conditions, that you were able to begin to discover your true power and effectiveness as human beings.
And the last quality that he wanted us to begin to see as he gave us these prototypes for the denigration of the black mind was to show the power of faith and to show that faith that worked was not faith that kept you somewhere sitting on your knees waiting for solutions to come. But he wanted us to see the kind of faith of a Harriet Tubman who had her Bible in one hand and her pistol in the other. And she didn't have to use the pistol on anybody except the denigrated minds who didn't have sense enough to have the courage to get free. And she used the Bible as an inspiration to know that if Moses was able to serve as an emissary for freeing his people, that if Joshua could bring down the walls of Jericho, that all of these other people who had suffered captivity in the allegorical analogies of the biblical experience, that somehow they had to get up off their knees and hit the road and get out of captivity and do it on your own and use faith as a certainty, you can make the difference.
As he began to communicate this understanding, he didn't have to say these things. Guess what? People began to learn those things. So the Fannie Lou Hamers, who had limited information, was able to get enough information to know that if you wanted to change the situation in Mississippi, you'd have to confront the situation in Mississippi and do something about it. That there was a Martin Luther King Jr. who'd gone to Morehouse College who'd been able to be exposed to those people who had been exposed to those people who had had that exposure to Negro History Month and Negro History Week and those historians who had begun to understand something about courage, competence, transcendence, and faith, and they were able to be able to take those principles of faith and courage and competence and transcendence and confront the situation to be able to transform a social reality that never would have been transformed if we somehow thought that faith was something you got in the sweet by and by rather than confronting the circumstances that face you in the end.
That somehow he somehow understood that in this proper education. And believe me now, as he began to try to infiltrate the denigration, that there were a whole lot of miseducated negroes who were at war with him about trying to get those ideas out there. Because remember now, miseducation is like a disease. It spreads and when people become miseducated, they become absolutely committed to their ignorance and they will fight you to make their ignorance persist. And just like Martin Luther King, who had to confront his colleagues who were supposedly his mentors, colleagues, and leaders, he had to quit their organization to be able to challenge a situation that brought about a change that made it possible. Like today, there were the miseducated types such as Clarence Thomas, who sat in the same seat as the educated Thurgood Marshall. So here were two people, same exposure, same ideas, sitting in the same position, one of whom completely transformed American society. Not just for people who look like him, but made opportunities available to women, to immigrants, to Hispanics, to non-black people, to all other people other than the people who had positions of power. He opened up doors that had never been opened up before simply because he understood something about what his real calling was and he understood what his true identity was. And he didn't forget who he was. And he didn't somehow put on that black robe and thought the black robe would obscure his black face and obscure his black identity. And he began to pretend to be somebody other than himself. And he used that position to absolutely transform America and make America become what America ought to be. But even in spite of what he did, the person who inherited his position went and got in the same chair to try to take us back to the plantation that he died to get us off. It shows us then that the principle of miseducation ain't dead. It still lives today. And even though there are tremendous opportunities and certainly lots of educated negroes, they are completely denigrated in their inability to understand that truly educated people engage in transforming themselves, transforming the society they live in, and making the world a better place.
We then can celebrate the Dr. Martin Luther Kings. We can celebrate the Coretta Scott Kings. We can celebrate the Rosa Parks. We can celebrate these people because these were people who understood that education is not something that makes you comfortable to sell out your resources for someone else's plantation, but empowers you to take your own plantation and begin to create a better world for everybody. Well, you say, "Well, isn't that a form of reverse racism? Why were they just concerned about that?" You crazy. You don't understand how many people receive privileges as a result of the work that they did. It is because of what Dr. King did that Hillary Clinton can truly be a serious presidential candidate today. Had there not been a change in the perspective in the paradigm of America that was brought about by an educated person who challenged America and made America become what it was supposed to be to somehow destroy the hypocrisy that was laid out by those people who said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equally and endowed by the creed and assertable rights that among these life, pursuit of happiness," while simultaneously having slaves in the background and having Sally Hemings in the backyard, and therefore treated her like she was a plain piece of ownership and therefore declaring that she was free at the same time. But it was the kind of freedom of those people who somehow took those principles of understanding who they were to somehow challenge the social structure and make America become what America claimed to be, but was incapable of being because of the hypocrisy built into the very principles that made her somehow defy what she wanted to become.
We then suggest to you that as we begin to know who we are, we don't simply make the world a better place for us. We can give a little bling-bling. Ain't nothing wrong with Oprah being a billionaire. Ain't nothing wrong with Bob Johnson being a billionaire. But suppose Bob Johnson was an educated billionaire as opposed to a miseducated big. Then that powerful educational communications network called BET that has come to serve as the major tool to drive us crazy and make us begin to believe that being the N-word is something reputable, that somehow has dignified calling our women the B-word, when we struggle to somehow beget women and get our men from being seen as less than men and less than women and we now celebrate and scream and Jay-Z and do all the other Z's and Beyoncés and do our do and become the that and all the other kind of stuff and he then sold that mechanism while systematically taking out those people who somehow could have used that mechanism to transform, formed the thinking not only of the people who were doing what they did. Suppose Public Enemy had been able to be in, continue to do what they did. How could we have ever imagined that Flavor Flav would lose his mind again after wearing a clock around his neck 30 years ago almost? Wearing a clock that meant it's revolution time. It's change time. We are public enemies to transform this. We have a rhyme of the hip-hop generation to herald us to transform this society. Who would have thought that Flavor Flav would end up fighting over, uh, uh, New York, New York and New York would then get her spin-off from that and Flavor Flav would have crazy people fighting over him to see who could be more insane than he was insane. But their idea was that it's because of the miseducation of those who gain access to opportunity and resources that gave them tools that are now taking us backwards rather than taking us forward.
So my challenge to you this evening is that we need to pick up, we need to pick up the prescription that our elder brother and ancestor Dr. Carter G. Woodson laid down. We need to understand that black history is not a luxury. It is not something that you do a few days out of the year. One of the wonderful things about your president and what Philander Smith represents here at the beginning of this 21st century is a recognition that we now don't just do black history on February. But you have people coming here to help you understand who you are. Blessing the mic and being blessed by the mic and being Mikey the bless and blessing you in the pro-transformation process to give you a proper education. Because it is only with the education that goes along with what you get in a curriculum that gives you its relevance to you and how you begin to make it relevant to you and to your situation and how you begin to take what it is that you learn in terms of certain types of formulas, in terms of certain types of concepts, to begin to translate those concepts in terms of how to be able to transform a social reality to be able to get, make the world consistent with those things that are in your, your best interest and to do what education is supposed to do. Ultimately, education should empower people to influence the environment consistent with their own self-interest. And if you don't know what yourself is, then you won't be able to influence the environment. You can only be able to recreate plantations. And we must understand that Philander Smith has made a commitment this day and in this time that it's going to be about a place of transforming America to be a place that will be the best for all of human beings. Thank you very much.