The School-To-Prison Pipeline

All my school teacher friends are back at work now. Many sound as excited and optimistic as their charges do. M pal Roland spent a whole day over the weekend at a teacher supply store buying stuff for his kids. He said they're an especially wonderful group this year… but he says that every year. And he means it every year. He already broke my heart with one story though. One of his kids, a little boy living with a foster family, seems tightly wound and ready to fight. I think he's 7 or 8. His dad's in prison, which has got to be hard on a kid that age. And his mother shot him in the back with a shot gun. Yeah-- she tried to kill him. Ever experience rejection? The skin on his back is all torn up-- and so is his young mind. She's in prison too. So how's Roland going to teach him?

Writing yesterday for Bruce Dixon's Black Agenda Report, Solomon Comissiong asked, provocatively, if Black children can survive an educational system whose chief purpose is to destroy minds.

The United States’ system of public education is one of the most unequal institutions in a profoundly unequal society. Students from socially and economically neglected communities routinely face educational challenges associated with inflated classroom sizes, severely underfunded schools, dilapidated school infrastructure and a disproportionate array of under-qualified teachers-- often supplied by gimmicky organizations like Teach for America. Conversely, many of the ardent and qualified teachers within these communities are under-supported and often find themselves under constant attack by a relentless charter school scam.

A disproportionate number of students from economically impoverished areas are of color. Many students are fed directly into the voracious mouth of the United States’ prison system. The school-to-prison pipeline has a penchant for youth of color. US society has a long, tainted reputation of profiting from the exploitation of people of color. Whether it was the theft of indigenous land or the evil institution of chattel slavery, Euro-American society has a wretched history of terrorizing people of color.

Unity against the scourge of poverty and capitalism is important; however all poverty is simply not equal. Impoverished white communities ultimately have their white skin to shield them from the societal plagues of institutional racism and white supremacy. For example, white parents do not have to deal with incessant police terror and brutality. Despite the fact that Africans/blacks, Euro-Americans/whites and Latinos use drugs at roughly the same levels, it is the communities of color that are subjected to a draconian police state and vastly disproportionate rates of incarceration.

It is true that capitalism is a disease that negatively impacts impoverished people from all backgrounds. However, capitalism, coupled with white supremacy, has committed genocide on people of color throughout the globe. Like two evil comic book villains, chattel slavery went hand and glove with capitalism. Capitalism helped sustain the African slave trade and it was chattel slavery that helped give birth to the US industrial revolution. Plain and simple, capitalism is riddled with racism. Poor whites have not had to deal with this consistent persecution people of color face-- regardless of the socioeconomic status. If you are an African/black person in this country you are profiled on the basis of your skin color, not your bank account.



These harsh realities are lessons African/black parents must teach their children. Simply put, they are rules for survival. In the United States you can lose your life merely for being African/black. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Renisha McBride are three of myriad recent examples. They lost their lives due to the fact that they were African/black within a vicious white settler colony.

As if worrying about your children being profiled and brutalized by the police were not enough, parents of color often worry about the impact the United States’ educational system will bear on their impressionable children. The United States’ system of policing has a vicious habit of destroying African/black lives; the US educational system habitually destroys minds.

The United States is a society awash in false propaganda, indoctrination and revisionist “history.” Most Americans have been unwittingly victimized by a system that instructs them to hate the oppressed and love those carrying out the evil act of oppressing. They have been taught to extol that which is loathsome. From Christopher Columbus to Ronald Reagan, Americans mindlessly celebrate these kinds of nefarious characters by naming holidays, monuments and airports in their honor. If the legendary football coach of Penn State, Joe Paterno, can have his statue torn down (rightfully so) by that school’s officials for not coming forward to report the crimes of a pedophile on his coaching staff, then how can there exist a US holiday celebrating the life of Columbus-- a man who murdered and mutilated countless indigenous children? That was a bit of a rhetorical query, however the answer rests on the foundation that the US is a quagmire of hypocrisy. Despite the fact that Christopher Columbus began the genocide against the native men, women and children of the Americas, he is force-fed to children throughout the US.

No child should be taught to think of Columbus as anything but a monster, however it is even more insidious that youth of color are indoctrinated with lies that paint his ilk as noble human beings. It should be considered mental cruelty to brainwash African/black students to revere slave masters like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as “Founding Fathers.” These reprehensible hypocrites, who spoke of “liberty” for all men, clearly did not intend for that message to carry over to anyone who was non-white. The shiftless slaveholding class framed the US Constitution explicitly for white people. There should be little doubt that the African/black youth of today would have been held captive as slaves if they were anywhere within the vicinity of those “Founding Fathers’” plantations.

Despite the sick and twisted nature of this kind of education (mental programming), many Americans see nothing wrong with it because they, too, were indoctrinated in the same manner. They are completely oblivious to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by numerous Euro-American historical icons. Allowing the truth to be told within America’s public school system would unmask the true nature of what the United States was founded upon, and in the process, explain why myriad injustices continue to fester throughout its manufactured borders.

Any parent (regardless of cultural background) knowledgeable of the above-mentioned facts, who has their humanity intact, would understandably be concerned about the prospects of these white supremacist narratives invading their children’s mental space.  However, that level of concern is elevated several notches in regard to African/black parents. This is one of the reasons more and more African/black parents are turning to homeschooling as an alternative to what passes for education in the United States. However, not all parents can afford to homeschool their children.

This is where community homeschooling can be rather useful. This would enable parents to collectively homeschool neighborhood children on a rotating basis, without everyone taking the entire week off from work. Another alternative is for communities to create afterschool/weekend neighborhood children’s history collectives where a much more balanced, culturally relevant and honest approach to history is taken. There is a children’s history and theater company in Washington DC called, “Mass Emphasis,” that, in my estimation, is one of the best. Mass Emphasis is a paragon within this realm. Parents are engaged and involved. Historian, veteran organizer and playwright, Obi Egbuna, Jr., teaches the children comprehensive African history and politics.

In order to better educate our children, we must re-educate ourselves. Books like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, James Loewen’s, Lies My Teacher Told Me, and John Henrik Clarke’s, Christopher Columbus and the African Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism, are good points of departure along that lifetime quest for knowledge and truth. The more we know, the more we can teach others, as we build a movement towards a more humane and equitable society.

Until we are able to collectively change the dynamics of public education within our own communities, we must create viable alternatives to counter the mentally deleterious themes that pollute institutional education, and to make up the growing deficit in subjects like history, politics, social studies and geography. We must create the spaces in which children are taught to admire, not the warmongers, slavemasters and profiteers, but people who fought for peace, human rights, justice and equity.