Thinking Black by Rob Waters

Author:Rob Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520293847
Publisher: University of California Press

REFORMING THE SCHOOL: BLACK STUDIES, ANTI-RACISM, MULTICULTURALISM, AND THE STATE

If black supplementary education and its associated practices of learning and self-narration were seen to promise the cultivation of a radical black political formation, this was in part because of the close ties between black education and the institutions of a radical black civil society—publishers, youth and cultural centers, bookshops, and political headquarters. Indeed, the promise of black self-expression through the black education movement was often that it brought the raw energy of black youth rebellion on the streets into contact with these institutions and offered the means of translating these experiences into a wider collective experience of blackness.130 The self-narration practices of the black education movement, in this thinking, could be both sustained by and a reinvigorating force for a wider black political formation. However, the drive for black self-narration also gained ground within mainstream education—as the editor of Oral History, another important organ in this revolution in self-narration practices in the postwar era, noted in 1980, “in a number of London schools, teachers have been encouraging black children to write their own life stories as a means of gaining confidence in self-expression.”131 Here, black radical activists were far more circumspect about its radical potential and alive to the possibility that it might be compromised into a soporific. In the protracted debates and controversies over the introduction of multicultural schooling in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, we can see both the diversity of positions on how to introduce black culture, history, and, sometimes, politics into the curriculum, and the manner in which such debates drew attention to the different understandings of “blackness” in play between the black education movement and the wider project of multicultural schooling.

In the 1970s, black studies became a significant presence in adult and further and higher education. In part, this was an organic dimension of college life, where the influence of black radical politics led to invited talks and students established reading groups. The Black Student Society at Ferdinand Dennis’s further education college in London’s King’s Cross area included many with experience in the Black Panther Movement. They invited regular guest speakers, including Darcus Howe, Cecil Gutzmore, John La Rose, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and held “intense, lengthy discussions on the ‘Black experience,’” swopping books by Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Eldridge Cleaver. “These heady books,” Dennis recalls, “gave me a language which helped to make sense of my situation which seemed to lack historical precedent and about which no books had been written.”132 At the same time as these organic developments, however, courses in black studies were being put together across London, and further afield. “These studies,” James Berry observed of the many courses begun in the 1970s, “were usually intense experiences.”133 The Organisation for Black Unity ran a black studies module at the University of Birmingham in 1970.134 From 1974 to 1976, the Polytechnic of Central London Centre for Extramural Studies offered a “Black Culture and Political Liberation” module.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.