In Carter G. Woodson’s time, 3 generations after Emancipation, leaders who shaped educational policy for this nation did not accidentally forget to teach us the law. They did not accidentally close the law schools. They did not accidentally leave the Constitution out of the textbooks and then test us on the Constitution when we tried to register to vote. There is a legislative record. There are names attached to this. It was a plan.

This week I’m inside chapters 8 through 12 of The Miseducation of the Negro, and Woodson is painfully documenting the professional exclusion, political erasure, infiltrators placed inside our organizations, “misleaders” funded and elevated specifically to redirect us. He is naming the mechanism with receipts. And what is undeniable by the end of these five chapters is that the miseducation was not a side effect of racism. It was the point of it.

A people who do not know the law cannot defend their rights. A people who do not know their history cannot recognize what is being done to them. A people trained to fight each other for scraps will never have enough left over to build something that threatens the system.

Woodson also makes a distinction in these chapters that I have not been able to put down:

There is a difference between leadership and service.

And most of what has been sold to us as leadership has been a performance of elevation.

Not an act of building.

The misleader is on a high horse. The servant is in the work. And the system has always been better at funding the horse.

Reflection Questions for the Week:

Where have you been blocked from a professional or educational path without anyone ever putting that barrier in writing? What was the mechanism?
What did your formal education teach you about how power works in this country and what did it deliberately leave out?
Woodson says if you make a man feel inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, he will seek it himself. Where do you see that operating in your own life, past or present?
Who in your community or industry has been given the platform, the funding, and the visibility; and whose interests do they actually serve?
Have you ever been in a room where the most palatable version of Black leadership was being centered while the people doing the actual work were invisible? What does that cost?
What would it look like in your life to choose service over the performance of leadership?
Where are you still fighting for a position inside a system that was not built for you instead of building something that was?

You can check out the ">video version of this episode on YouTube.

Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Miseducation Pt. 3)