An Institutional Exploration of Collectivism in African-Centered Education

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African Communitarianism as Black Student Motivation: An Institutional Exploration of Collectivism in African-Centered Education

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Bodunrin Oluwagbingus Banwo

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Dr. Peter Demerath, Advisor May, 2020

Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my dad, Bodunrin A. Banwo, who is no longer with us in physical form, but is with us every day in spirit and memory; my mom, Patricia Ann Banwo, who has been a consistent foundation of support and care. She was the first person I knew to fight for herself, her family, and her people, uncompromisingly. No matter the consequences or danger, watching her sue for racial discrimination as a child was an education that guided my life and understanding of who I am.

This work is also dedicated to my two brothers, Charles Tunday Foster and Adedayo A. W. Banwo. Both of these men are inspirations and were instrumental in the building of me.

Also my aunts and uncle, Mary, Linda, Robert Earl, Renee and Courtney: Your love and uncompromising care was special and incredible. I take your love with me wherever I go.

And finally, to everyone in the Nickles, Gibbons, Marshall and Banwo families, especially the ancestors: Amelia Easter, Robert Earl, Robert Lee, Mary Elizabeth, Bodunrin, Samuel Gibbon, Mary Nickles, Lisa Gibbons and Mary Gibbons... and the many, many others I am not listing here, particularly those who died of violence in north Florida, fighting for what you believed was right, whose souls are not at rest, and whose voices have not been heard. I hope with the little time I have on this earth that I can speak for you and, I hope, provide you some sense of peace and respite from a world that saw you as less than disposable. I pray that I can carry the load, for which you have so graciously passed, by simply allowing me to be in this world.

My mission is your mission, my life is your life, and my works will forever be on the shoulders of your work.

An Introspection

A principal advantage of an Afrocentric approach is that it compels the

researcher to challenge the use of the traditional Eurocentric research

criteria of objectivity, reliability, and validity in the inquiry process. The

researcher is expected to examine and to place in the foreground of the

inquiry any and all subjectivities or societal baggage that would otherwise

remain hidden and, hence, covertly influence the research activity

(Reviere, 2001, p. 710).

I was born in the 1980s but came of age in the 1990s, a period of time that seems to be oddly romanticized. From my point of view, it was a time defined by what had occurred before, the height of the boomers’ civil rights victory laps. Never mind they were buying into the neoliberal consciousness that, yes, celebrated their hard fight for racial inclusion (Ali at the ‘96 summer games), but simultaneously failed to protect their children from being criminalized and forced into the school-to-prison pipeline.

I sense when people look back at the 1990s, there is a perception of a multicultural movement, a longing for the feeling of optimism, a return to the hope that we had, that this “race” thing could and would be solved one day. Perhaps because I was a teenager during this time, I think many of those people overlook the very dark forces that undergirded American society at that time. It was not a great decade for many people; it was a dark, frightful time, and the genesis of many issues that we face today. I come from a political family that has been involved in the Black freedom struggle in

Florida since emancipation. As a child, this legacy was imprinted upon me by the elders of my social group.

My early years were characterized by a dynamic intergenerational kinship through an African-centered lens. These men and women, many of them members of the Nation of Islam, Moorish Science Temple, and the Black Panthers, encouraged us (the youth) to begin to examine our position as black people in a world that saw blackness in a particular light. This early introduction into a revolutionary consciousness led me to be socialized to understand the world in a particular Black ideological view. My participation in radical black spaces as a child was probably one of the most informative social encounters I experienced. These men and women socialized my friends and me into seeing the world through an African lens. We were encouraged to learn about ourselves, to visually perceive ourselves as a part of the black global freedom struggle.

Moreover, we were instructed to use history as a tool to plan and envision our future selves. The community leaders of my youth wanted to ground us in the past in order for us to carry our legacy forward. I cannot overemphasize how important it was for me to be socialized into the thinking that “ourselves,” our persons, our bodies were in service to beloved ancestors. This notion of ancestral worship was probably one of the most profound things from my childhood that I hold dear and carry forward and hope to one day pass along.

Another one of my orientation moments was my discovery, and embracing of

1990s Hip Hop, mainly gangsta rap. Gangsta rap, even for black kids in Florida, became an outlet for adolescent boys to express some kind of frustration or descent to the prevailing order. Gangsta rap artists who dressed like me, looked like me, and spoke like me were hated by the broader society “just like me.” In many ways, this music encouraged me to think about the world as a Black man and see though the multicultural

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façade that was so overwhelming during the ‘90s. Where, during this time, were national leaders forcefully identifying what we now call the “school-to-prison pipeline,” or where, during the 1990s, were the leaders identifying police brutality? Instead, we got old, black civil rights leaders condemning artists who were identifying significant problems in the

Black community. This condemnation fueled a schism between generations, and for me, began my disillusionment with boomers and their privileged position in the black political imagination. I still feel a sense of abandonment by boomers, and I still feel their judgment and criticism of my cultural productions. They failed to protect us!

Todd Boyd (2008), in his book African Americans and Popular Culture, describes the schism in terms of sports: “I think Jordan is the symbolic fulfillment of the civil rights movement, which has assimilation, accommodation and mainstream access as its ultimate goals. Hip-hop NBA players are symbolic of the current era, in which the ultimate goal is nonconformity and cultural insurgency” (Boyd, 2008, p. 15). Which goal has won out? I have watched since the early 1990s these political and cultural leaders fail to deliver for

African Americans. I have watched these leaders speak of the American project, while watching black institutions fall into despair, while those same leaders move their kids into safe white spaces. Having been a part of several independent black institutions, I have been able to witness black leadership exercise notions of black self-determination.

Schools, universities, neighborhoods and histories were all elements of that struggle, a struggle I find myself encountering today through my work with African-centered schools.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge my advisor and the members of my committee, Peter Demerath, Muhammad Khalifa, Tania Mitchell, Nicola Alexander, and Keith Mayes. Your hard work, help, and encouragement has been invaluable to me through this process. THANK YOU.

I also would like to thank the African-centered schools and leaders, who took me in, watched over me and helped me finish this research. It was you who made this dissertation possible, and it was you who allowed me so much freedom to explore, spread out, and tell our story in such a deep and powerful way. THANK YOU.

And a special THANK YOU to the Babas and Mamas who supported me along this journey: Baba Kofi Lomotey, Baba Molefi Kete Asante, Baba Fundi Sanyika Anwisye, Mama Joyce Piert, Mama Bernida Thompson, Mama Rasheki Kuykendall, Baba Kwaw Lester, Baba Andrew DuBois, Mama Jocelyn Mills, and Mama Alecia Blackwood.

In the spirit of Asante, I would also like to thank the children and other Babas and Mamas who participated in this research. THANK YOU.

And to my friends, Brothers Ezekiel Joubert and Rashad Williams, and to my friend Courtney Bell — thank you for always having my back. Also to Tiffany L. Smith, Shakita Thomas, Brandon Higgins and the rest of my doctoral cohort, I don’t think I could have had a better group of amazing colleagues and friends. Good luck on the rest of your journey. Also Sherri Hildebrandt for helping with the copy edit.

And finally to the people I did not name: Know you are in my thoughts and prayers. THANK YOU!

Abstract The dissertation presented is an examination of two African-centered educational institutions that are serving as a formal agent of student socialization. Moreover, these schools’ ideological foundation of Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism is a response to the harmful practice of socialization in the broader society. These schools, through their incorporation of radical politics, are an effort to understand and address the “inequality regimes” that surround black children in mainstream educational systems. Further, the politics of African centered schools are upfront, talked about, and visible for all to see, which the leaders regard as a process of socialization that orient black children into a process of white supremacy visibilization. Additionally, with this dissertation, I took an ethnographic approach to understand how African centered systems of education, centers race, and racialized histories at their organizational core. Moreover, I am particularly interested in how black students, whom I see as our society’s most vulnerable school-age population, experience a formal organization designed and tailored around their healthy social development. The dissertation also examines what I am calling imagined African cultural artisans and their role of imagining and crafting a black imagined community in their African centered school. I see their culture creation in a form of new cultural production. This cultural production seeks to be inclusive and supportive of all people of African descent. Moreover, this exploration of African cultural artisans is also the idea that members of the African Diaspora are “bound” together in a nationalist relationship brought about by a socially constructed idea of community or brotherhood, imagined by Africans who perceive themselves as a part of a familiar group. The concept is theorized from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept, “Imagined Communities,” which depicts a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by members of a shared social group. I shine a light into educational and political leadership discourse’s lack of examination of the “assumed” and “taken for granted” labor that is expected from racialized and organizationally vulnerable students and families. African-centered leaders and thinkers perceive the landscape of mainstream educational institutions as locations of politics and harm that have historically failed to investigate how the history of Africans in the United States has been undermined and harmed by the capitalist notion of black humanity. These thinkers also see that these harmful notions have not disappeared with the practices of societal growth and multiculturalism. They view harmful organizational practices as being embedded in mainstream schools’ histories and traditions. For them, only a total rethinking of institutions of learning will entirely excise practices and traditions of harm. Many school models attempt this excision, and this dissertation will contribute to those efforts.

Contents

Dedication i Acknowledgements v Contents vii List of Tables xi List of Figures xii Definitions xiii Chapter One: The Problem of Not Being Critical or Curious 1 Public Positioning of Race 4 Mainstream Schools and Anti-Blackness 7 Anti-Blackness and Social Institutions 11 Thoughts on the Origin of African-Centered Schools 17 African-centered Concepts Coming Out of the 1960s 21 The NGUZO SABA (The Seven Principals) 22 Chapter Two: Capitalism and Blackness as Slaveness 30 Blackness, Racialization, and Afro-Pessimism 31 Racialized Inferiority and Capitalist Critique 32 Origin of Anti Blackness and Dehumanization 37 Social Constructivism: The Construction of Culture and Blackness 44 Social Constructivism 44 Transmission of Culture in Society 48 Cultural Reproduction, Race, and Economics 51 Cultural Resistance 55 African Centered Education 61 Critiques of Mainstream Systems of Education 62 African-Centered Education and Ideology 65 Role Theory and Racialized Social Scripting 72 Dual Role Theory 75 Racialized Identity Formation 77 Dual Role Theory, Cross’s Model and Racialized Socialization Paths 79 Communitarianism as an Idea and Theory 80

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Communitarianism as a Praxis of Care 82 Chapter Three: Research Methodology 86 Research Design 88 Research Questions 91 Site Descriptions 92 Participants 92 African-centered Schooling Definition 94 Participant Interviews 96 Participant observation 97 Data Collection 98 Data Analysis 100 Trustworthiness and Validity Check. 101 Steve Biko Public Charter School 103 Steve Biko Public Charter School Goals and Mission 103 Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School 105 Mary McLeod Bethune Charter Goals and Mission. 106 MMBC Vision 106 Ethnographic Tour of Mary McLeod Bethune and Steve Biko Charter Schools 112 Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School: A Tour 112 A Day at Steve Biko Charter School 115 Chapter Four: Elders, Intergenerational Learning and Student Socialization 121 Vignette: A First Visit to Steve Biko Public Charter School 121 Section One: Kin, Intergenerational, and Familial Relations 125 Black Social Bonds in Black Spaces 131 Ancestors, Elders and Imagining History 134 Operationalizing Ancestor and Elder Histories 138 Section Two: Ancestor and Elder Co-Construction of Knowledge 142 Co-constructing the Self 144 Ancestors as Fictive Kin 146 Chapter Five: Black Organizational Cultures of Care and Communitarianism 152 Vignette: Black Cultures of Care & Group work 152 Mainstream Schools and Social Harm 154

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Section One: African Communitarianism and Social Cohesion 159 History as a Weapon 160 Communitarianism as a Praxis of Care 163 African-Centered Schools and Identity 170 Self-Discovery and Co-Construction 172 Section Two: Competition as a Practice of Social Harm 183 Competition in Steve Biko and Bethune 184 NGUZO SABA (Value Systems) and Competition 185 Competition and Social Bonds 187 Section Three: Organizational Responsiveness, Students’ Needs and Realities 189 Combating Dehumanization as a Social Condition 190 Teaching Histories of Dehumanization 196 Operationalizing Communitarianism and Social Bonds 198 Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) 201 Chapter Six: African-Centered Schools and their Centering of Blackness 204 Vignette: Black Cultures of Care - Enacted Through Intentional Black Cultural Practices 204 Section I: Ethno Cultural Responsiveness 207 The Political: The Ideology of African-Centered Education 219 Section II: Collectivity and Black History as Pedagogy 227 African-centered Schools and Student Motivation 230 Schools as Community and Communities as Care 235 Chapter Seven: Conclusion: Black Organizations Enacting Black Organizational Care 240 Group Care and Communitarianism 242 Social Organizations with a Political Core 245 Liberating Learning 253 What Mainstream Schools can learn from Ethnic Schooling 257 Serving the Vulnerable 260 References 265 Appendix A 279 Protocols 279

Code Book

281

List of Tables

Table 1: Participant Demographic Data ...... 93

Table 2: Intentional Leadership Quotes ...... 195

Table 3: Student Teacher African Communtiarism ...... 236

List of Figures

Figure 1: Original 1967 NGUZO SABA Poster ...... 28

Figure 2: 2019 Kwanzaa Celebration in Baltimore, Maryland ...... 28

Figure 3: Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development ...... 77

Figure 4: Ideological Logic Map ...... 87

Figure 5: Responsive School Leadership defined by Imagined Cultural Ideal ...... 212

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Definitions

Ideological state apparatus: A term developed by Louis Althusser (1971) to indicate the institutional transmission of social practices of order. These institutions are places like education, churches, family, media, trade unions, and law — locations Althusser sees as formally outside state control but that serve to transmit state values to maintain order in a society, above all to reproduce capitalist relations of production.

Social scripts: A series of behaviors, actions, and consequences that are expected in a particular situation or environment. These behaviors have particularly been written for people by larger society. Social scripting is an aspect of role theory (Mead, 1934; Linton, 1936).

Afrocentricity: Molefi Kete Asante’s (2009) theory or paradigm that understands the reclaiming of healthy black social relations and self-determined liberatory practices as a form of relocation that stresses the criticalness of Africans becoming the center of their cultural traditions, through a process of reclamation of their historical reality.

Organizational cultural artisan: The role leaders can play in cultivating and constructing culture and ways of being inside organizations. Their leadership practices define and shape an organizational picture, similarly to how a painter defines and shapes a piece of art.

Imagined African-centered community: The idea that members of the African

Diaspora are “bound” together in a nationalist relationship brought about by a socially

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constructed idea of community or brotherhood, imagined by Africans who perceive themselves as a part of a familiar group. The concept is theorized from Benedict

Anderson’s (1983) concept, “Imagined Communities,” which depicts a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by members of a shared social group.

Ethno-cultural responsiveness: The idea that an organization can be hyper-focused and responsive to an ethnic or social community’s needs and problems. I see ethno locations as homogeneous places or closed homogeneous networks. Think (Mennonite, Amish, rural small towns, Native American reservations) places where culture is uniformed, and organizational leadership can quickly shift organizational cultural practices, rules, and power dynamics without much social pushback.

Zone of dispossession: A location targeted for capitalist (money and resource) extraction. Think poor neighborhoods with high rental rates (rent extraction), think sacrifice zones (locations impaired by environmental damage and economic disinvestment). These are geographic areas that “capitalist” take resources from and leave the communities for the worse.

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Chapter One: The Problem of Not Being Critical or Curious

“Real education means to inspire people to

live more abundantly, to learn to begin with

life as they find it and make it better.”

Carter G. Woodson

The 2015 New York Times article “Race and Class Collide in a Plan for Two

Brooklyn Schools” by Kate Taylor raised issues of segregation and race in the Brooklyn

Heights area of New York City that sparked a national conversation about the political role of schools. This story is a tale of two schools, P.S. 307, a majority-black school, and

P.S. 8, a “recently” majority-white school, because of the influx of white residents into a once very ethnically diverse neighborhood. The 2015 article begins with the city of New

York attempting to solve the overcrowding of Public School (P.S.) 8; which had been operating far above its capacity and had begun placing families not in their immediate zone on a waiting list. For some observers, the solution seemed obvious: Move some students one neighborhood over to the neighboring school, P.S. 307, which was nearby and had room to spare. The proposal drew intense opposition from parents from P.S. 8, which prompted the New York City Education Department to hold a series of public meetings about the planned rezoning.

During town hall meetings, parents facing the prospect of moving spoke in the following language about their future school and its attendees: “If you are doubling the

classroom size, what are the plans regarding who you are hiring…. Who’s going to be training them (Taylor K. , 2015)?” At one particular town hall, one parent accused the department of downplaying the “academic challenges” of their potential new school, which he deemed “severely underperforming.” This prompted the department of education officials to respond, “We do not see problems at 307; we are seeing, and what we have heard from everyone is that it is a wonderful learning community (Taylor K. ,

2015).”

The New York Times article is one story about two schools in New York City.

Still, it is also symptomatic of the uneasy terrain racialized people in the United States find themselves interacting with when they encounter societal systems of politics and control. This dissertation is an examination of two African-centered educational institutions that are serving as a formal agent of student socialization. Moreover, these schools’ ideological foundation of Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism is a response to the harmful practice of socialization in the broader society. These schools, through their incorporation of radical politics, are an effort to understand and address the “inequality regimes” that surround black children in mainstream educational systems.

Further, the politics of African centered schools are upfront, talked about, and visible for all to see, which the leaders regard as a process of socialization that orient black children into a process of white supremacy visibilization. I explored with this dissertation a compelling process of schooling that takes a pedagogical approach that incorporates ideologies that challenge mainstream conceptualization of humanity and power. Additionally, with this dissertation, I took an ethnographic approach to understand how these systems of education center race and racialized histories at their organizational

core. Moreover, I am particularly interested in how black students, whom I see as our society’s most vulnerable school-age population, experience a formal organization designed and tailored around their healthy social development.

This dissertation also examines what I am calling imagined African cultural artisans and their role of imagining and crafting a black imagined community in their

African centered school. I see their culture creation in a form of new cultural production.

This cultural production seeks to be inclusive and supportive of all people of African descent. Moreover, this exploration of African cultural artisans is also the idea that members of the African Diaspora are “bound” together in a nationalist relationship brought about by a socially constructed idea of community or brotherhood, imagined by

Africans who perceive themselves as a part of a familiar group. The concept is theorized from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept, “Imagined Communities,” which depicts a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by members of a shared social group.

Additionally, I shine a light into educational and political leadership discourse’s lack of examination of the “assumed” and “taken for granted” labor that is expected from racialized and organizationally vulnerable students and families. African-centered leaders and thinkers perceive the landscape of mainstream educational institutions as locations of politics and harm that have historically failed to investigate how the history of Africans in the United States has been undermined and harmed by the capitalist notion of black humanity. These thinkers also see that these harmful notions have not disappeared with the practices of societal growth and multiculturalism. They view harmful organizational practices as being embedded in mainstream schools’ histories and traditions. For them,

only a total rethinking of institutions of learning will entirely excise practices and traditions of harm. Many school models attempt this excision, and I hope this dissertation will contribute to those efforts.

Public Positioning of Race

In cases like the Brooklyn example, it appears that members of the broader community failed to see the robustness and cultural importance of non-Eurocentric

“learning communities” — although the New York Time’s (2015) Brooklyn example ultimately ended with the zoning changed and a group of unhappy white parents sending their children to a “wonderful learning community.” Concerns persisted among the Black and Latino parents, with one parent stating on the opening day of school, “We need to have more conversations between parents and school leaders, particularly on the subject of integration. It’s so important to integrate the school, but not at the cost of the African

American and Latino community (Taylor K. , 2015).”

The Brooklyn example likewise demonstrates a real-life instance of what critical scholars see as the devaluation and silencing formal systems act upon on minority populations. There is a societal assumption at play that envisions Eurocentrism as a system that is always “virtuous” and “moralistic.” Even with knowledge of past systematic and ideological subjugation experienced by racialized members of the society, this notion is still permitted to exist. What we find with the Brooklyn story and in the wider society is a kind of cognitive dissonance that is preventing participants from exploring the destructive nature of accepting the universality and domination of eurocentrism. This lack of exploration positions racialized “non-European” persons as something outside the “collective” or “agreed” definition of normal humanity. While

reading the article, there was a question that I could not shake: Why were these parents so fearful of “elementary school children” and why was this article so concerned with the position of parents who have always enjoyed a privileged place in our political and economic system?

DiAngelo (2011) points out with her research on “white fragility” that whites consistently choose and enjoy racial segregation — living, working, playing in racially segregated communities. Moreover, DiAngelo theorizes that segregation is not unremarkable to whites, as long as it is not named or made explicitly intentional. Activist bell hooks (1992) also speaks on the representation of whiteness in the black imagination, observing, “White students respond with disbelief, shock, and rage, as they listen to black students talk about whiteness… White students respond with naive amazement that black people critically assess white people from a standpoint where ‘whiteness’ is the privileged signifier.” (p. 339)

Interestingly, many critics charge that African-centered schools are segregated and not welcoming places for non-African students. These critics, from my perspective, fail to reckon with the fact that a significant number of urban schools are already segregated; it is virtually impossible for African-centered schools to segregate their students any more than they already are (Merry & New, 2008). The question African- centered schools raised for me is why, for the sake of modernity, Africans have to participate in systems that have not fully metabolized notions of their full humanity. Or as leaders of the study put it, “Why are schools in the south side of Chicago and northeast

Washington, D.C., some of the most racially isolated places in their respective cities?

Why are we being tagged with the label of unwelcoming (Banwo, 2020)?”

The Brooklyn example also illustrates how conversations about race are positioned for public consumption in our society. Take, for example, how the racial conversations and the “perceived benefits” of school integration are viewed and positioned in the story (from the perspective of the parents from the dominant group).

This demonstrates how these public conversations have historically operated; “how are

‘these kids’ going to affect us; how are we going to be inconvenienced by this?” It is also interesting with the examination of how these “processes of being” have formed a particular social formation, Althusser’s (1971) notion of an “Ideological State

Apparatuses” comes to mind, the idea that “ways of being” are constructed imaginings of an all-powerful capitalist system that is socially scripting racialized people down a predetermined social path. The parents’ concerns might not be intentionally racist, but it is “racial,” because their social imaginings or “socialization” is to view blackness as contingent to wealth and social success; or to put it plainly, I see the middle classness of the story and the larger United States as the tendency to curate access to poor black people.

Look at the white Brooklyn parents: Are they not attempting to reproduce paths of success that have been issued to them by capital and the elite classes? Indeed, are not their economic imaginings constructed by an ideological state apparatus? At the heart of this societal positioning and this dissertation is a kind of “intersection of ideas”; of multiculturalism; integration; and neoliberalism and how these ideas combine to create experiences that produce cultures of mental and physical harm to racialized people.

This work endeavors to explore the failure of society to question “systems of socialization,” with deeply held public acceptance of ideologies that have knowingly

given privilege to specific groups. There is a question that flows throughout this dissertation: Are schools as currently constituted forms of social control, or places for liberation? Moreover, this introduction and following literature review seek to demonstrate that systems that decenter European histories and cultures can serve as structural tools to improve the educational experiences of racialized people in Western systems of learning.

Mainstream Schools and Anti-Blackness

Another example of black people interacting with formal systems of control in the

United States is the 2013 Normandy School District, which includes Ferguson, Missouri, when a kind of de facto desegregation plan, “the transfer program,” occurred, where children from the Normandy system were allowed to transfer to another school district

(Clayton). Again, similar to the New York City example, a public meeting with “all” parents involved in the “transfer program” was held, but at this meeting, parents would raise concerns about lower test scores and the possibility of violence. Keep in mind, though, that most of the students leaving Normandy were under the age of 12. Most disturbing about this public meeting was that parents and children from the Normandy

School District had come to meet their future fellow parents. In this case, the parents of

Normandy Schools had a choice to leave, at no cost to them, and bus their children five miles down the road to Clayton Public Schools, a school district that was predominantly white and regularly ranked among the top 10% of school districts in the state.

Alternatively, they could choose to stay in their current district, which was termed

“catastrophically underperforming” by the state. In the end, about a quarter (1,000 students) decided to leave, with some parents feeling that their children would be harmed

by attending the white district. Indeed, looking back at the earlier case in New York, one of the most significant concerns for the parents of P.S. 307 was: How would an influx of wealthy, mostly white families change “their” school, “their” learning community?

What is interesting about the Clayton Public Schools example was the lack of brotherhood and sisterhood showed to the black students and their families. One of the essential goals of African centered schools is the idea of trying to create healthy fictive relationships, black love, and unified community. Indeed, this drive for healthy black relationships is driven by African centered school foundational grounding in black nationalism and Pan Africanism, whose practice and idealogy stress familiar diasporic view of the world. For example, competition is seen by the schools as interfering with healthy relationship development, as a kind of disruption of groupness, so its discouraged. There is a drive to simulate an organizational family unit in hopes the students will be able to see each other as brothers and sisters. However, the question I had after researching Clayton Public Schools, where were the black students suppose to find love in their school system?

There is a question that white parents privately ask themselves when mentally exploring terms of integration: Is this “diversity thing” going to change me or my child’s economic and capitalist prospects in a system that has historically privileged me? Cedric

Robinson (2000) alludes to this as “racial capitalism,” which he described as:

The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society

pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a

material force ... racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures

emergent from capitalism. I have used the term ‘racial capitalism’ to refer

... to the subsequent structure as a historical agency. (Robinson, 2000, p.

Robinson and others viewed “racial capitalism” as a recognition that capitalism is racial; in a sense that capital can only be capital when it is accumulated, and it can only be gathered by producing and moving through relations of sharp inequality among human groups. However, in the real world, this notion of racial capitalism manifests itself in myriad ways, not just in personal responsibility, the “race relations” idea, but as structural inequality that appears to define “ways of being” for people in the target zone of capital dispossession.

Once more, consider the examples of minorities interacting with formal systems of control presented here. Curiously, in both cases, no one asked the minority or minoritized parents their opinion before decisions were made or zoning changed. Even in the reporting, the white families were positioned as the individuals most harmed by these changes. However, equally disturbing was an idea prompted by the New York Times, that merely having white children in close proximity to black children would serve as an ameliorating force, stating, “minority students who attend integrated schools perform better academically and go on to earn higher incomes and have better health than minority students who attend segregated schools (Taylor K. , 2015).” This lack of examination of the “terms of integration” masks the many problems that face racialized people when participating in American white/black or European/African multiracial communities. At no point did the article take the perspective of the black and brown students and question the numerous difficulties minorities face when interacting with formal systems the stress, loneliness, and sense of identity lost.

Stevenson (1997) found in his work that middle-class black men living in white communities have higher morbidity rates than their black male peers living in middle- class black neighborhoods, and that the higher their income went, the higher their morbidity rate rose. Stevenson’s research complicated the “assumptive” social view of whiteness as a privileged signifier that allows notions of whiteness to float around in the ether, silently but visibly influencing Western societies’ notion of multiculturalism. This assumption also positions whiteness as a universal or as a default culture.

This notion for schools is particularly problematic because it leads to an ideology of colorblindness, and according to scholars like Mills (1997), racial epistemologies that argue in favor of “white ways of knowing.” (Mills, 1997, p. 74) Additionally, African- centered scholars like Anwisye (2017) observe this lack of investigation of whiteness in formalized structures as a form of white cultural positioning as a universal. That is, cultural work behind the scenes seeks to obscure the social power and project of schools as an ideological agent reinforcing the idea that non-white students are made to see themselves and their group as the “acted upon” instead of as actors or members of groups with self-determination (Asante, 1991; Piert, 2015; Monteiro-Ferreira, 2014).

For example, during this research, elders displayed a type of reflectiveness when the subject of racial segregation came up. The elder of my study, of course, expressed sadness for the legal and forced separation of peoples, but there was also a centering or reflectiveness on what they described as “black culture and communal displacement” when they spoke about their lived experiences with school integration. Some elders even viewed the process of integration as a form of white community destruction that served to uproot healthy black cultural practices and continue a long line of public policy practices

designed at best to stymie black social relationships and, at worst, destroy black locations of black care and communal repair. These elders’ lived experience for me is an example of how black people, at times, view history and social practices as being acted upon them.

Yes, for some Africans, the process of integration was positive, but for many, this process still demonstrates pain and serves as an example of how policy-makers and historians fail to account for the totalizing effects of history and policy.

Anti-Blackness and Social Institutions

When viewing the positions of schools as social institutions of society, it provides a lens to explore the theory behind the legal and organizational realities we are asking children to participate in. Handel (2006) observes these systems as agents of socialization, a kind of orientation mechanism used by societies to “shape the behaviors and values of the less powerful members of our society.” (p. 400) Additionally, Handel views this process as the basis for the social construction of its cultural identity, theorizing that these institutions (church, family, and schools), are responsible for the transmission of traditions and values the broader society deemed necessary and important. However, this process of socialization does not happen in a vacuum. Societal attitudes and cultural traditions define which cultural norms are essential, and thus which norms are going to be institutionalized in organizational cultures and attitudes.

Organizational scholars like March (1991) see these formalized systems, particularly the organizational method of “Best Practices” as a way for organizations to learn, to remember and hold onto cultural cues that can inform future members of the organization. In other words, organizations can become “learning organizations,” which permits them to build cultures and maintain norms through multiple cycles of participants

and multiple years and decades of operations (Groysberg, Lee, Price, & Cheng, 2018).

With these cultural notions in mind, it raises the issue of minority and minoritized students’ participation and socialization in mainstream educational institutions that are rooted in Western societies with traditions of devaluations of blackness. Moreover, it raises questions for me about how African Americans are being socialized in the United

States, and if that process is occurring healthily and productively.

This dissertation is a more extensive exploration of how formal systems of power in the United States serve as instruments of white supremacy and capital. Moreover, the next will make plain the echoes of capital expropriation and domination in Western societies, particularly how people who are currently being racialized as non-white are connected to a long line of systems of dispossession and domination. I want to highlight with the following chapters how I regard the black organizational search for “belonging, care, and liberation” when interacting with formal systems grounded in ideologies that lift up racialized peoples’ identities and histories.

Moreover, the following literature review will first explore how the transatlantic slave trade altered European and Western perceptions of “Blackness.” It is an exploration of how Europeans first came to perceive people racialized as nonwhite with negative perceptions and how that view of blackness determined the very notion of humanity of

Africans in Western societies. Additionally, there will be an exploration of how “the project of racialization” was not just a project of racism, but a scheme of brute domination intertwined with an economic system that sought opportunities for capitalist exploitation and resource expropriation. I want to clearly lay out how I comprehend the

inception of the concept of blackness and how Western societies had come to perceive it in a negative light.

Subsequently, there will be a review of Berger and Luckman’s (1967) Social

Constructivism in an attempt to understand how ideologies of capitalist exploitation and racism were reproduced through the ages and how that reproduction has implications for the world’s racialized populations, particularly the people who interact with formal

Western systems of control. This section will also expand upon the idea that, if groups racialized as black lacked full humanity in the eyes of Western societies, does that view of dehumanization dissipate when institutions of legalized oppression end, i.e., chattel slavery; black codes and Jim Crow laws? I am particularly trying to answer with this section of the literature review: Can Western cultures go from regarding Africans as

“beasts of burden” to fully realized human beings, with rights and a common humanity, overnight? Or do historical echoes of the past and racialized attitudes enter and shape the world that is being socially constructed and reproduced?

Lastly the literature review will conclude with an exploration of African-centered education and liberating ethnic ideologies that seek to decenter european the formation of culture. For African-centered scholars, the process of decentering european construction of systems of education is a useful pedagogical approach to challenge operating notions of control and domination. These scholars in their belief that mainstream schools act as a formal agent of socialization, seek to create a process of socialization that embraces black students’ full humanity while simultaneously interrogating and challenging Western systems that seek to socialize racialized students into passive ideologies. For the

Afrocentric, this work is about creating healthy adults, people who will continue the 500-

year struggle for full humanity that racialized men and women have been on. This recognition is what was lacking in Brooklyn and Normandy, and it is also what was lacking in so many other places where Black, integration, and capitalism collides.

Following Chapter Two’s Literature Review, entitled Capitalism and Blackness as Slaveness and Chapter Three’s Research Methodology will be Chapter Four’s exploration of elders and intergenerational relationship formations. This chapter in two sections explored what it means for children to be socialized in a community that prioritizes healthy fictive and social relationships through practices of intergenerational learning and communication. Section one will demonstrate the social dynamism of

African-centered schools through their involvement in serving as black locations of black fellowship. Afrocentric theorizations task African-centered schools as being healthy agents of cultural socialization in communities that are rapidly becoming alienating spaces. It is the idea that as black communities become “zones of dispossession,” spaces for black communalism become more and more limited, which demands African- centered schools, with their sensitivity to healthy black social relationships, to step in and serve as communal spaces for the formation of healthy black relationships.

Further, section one examined how the framework of Bengtson and Roberts’s

(1991) “Six Elements of Intergenerational Solidarity Indicators” function in a formal system of intergenerational fictive kinship networks. I want to investigate how organizational cultures change when elders are welcomed, appreciated, and listened to.

How can African-centered reverence for elders and their history change how leaders lead and students learn? In section two, I examined how organizational members care for elders in their systems, how concerns like elder social isolation and loneliness are

handled and metabolized by leaders who are culturally focused on the health of the broader black community.

Chapter Five explored how African-centered schools perceive themselves as social locations of collective care. Moreover, the chapter investigates how an organizational ideology of communitarianism is socializing African children into healthy practices of social relationships. With Chapter Five, I demonstrate how a formal organizational culture, grounded in methods that value collectivism (particularly traditions of cooperation found on the African continent), serves to socialize black children into a healthy sense of self and self-efficacy.

Chapter Six considered black cultures of care in three parts. First is an exploration of African communitarianism as an institutional ideology. I examined how a praxis of communitarianism can particularly shift how institutional citizens experience, perceive, and maintain a black organization that centers black historical experiences and a sensitivity to the healing of black social bonds through a caring organizational environment.

Moreover, I examined how challenging practices of competition in the educational and socialization process can serve to advance two fundamental pillars of the

African-centered model, the first of which being the idea of learning in environments that promote and center “fictive kinships.” In the two schools of the study, the students are encouraged and socialized into the perception that their peers are their brothers and sisters. Lastly, I observed how the promotion of the theory of “ethno-culturally responsive” school leadership deepens the students’ and leaders’ organizational relationships, particularly how system actors ideological concern about community

harmony help leaders accurately and swiftly identify physical and sometimes psychological needs of their students.

For my last data chapter, I reviewed the cultural responsive leadership of the African-centered schools by mainly focusing on the concept of “ethno- culturally responsive practice.” The chapter explored the ideological and operational structures of African-centered schools in two sections. First, I looked at how the ideological principals of African-centered schooling inform their organizational structures, mainly how the practice of purposely centering the

Benedict Anderson’s concept of an “imagined cultural past,” in this case an

“imagined African cultural past,” generates a unique process of black socialization that I believe is disrupting the “social scripts” of African Americans in the United States. Additionally, this section revealed how black organizational leadership’s embrace of the concept of an imagined cultural past informs how black students in African-centered schools ideologically perceive themselves in the broader cultural milieu.

Next, I briefly theorized how leaders of closed cultural networks

(organizations) create organizational identities of ethno-cultural responsiveness through a process of operationalizing race in the learning process. I explore how

African-centered leadership’s unmasking of American myths socialized black children not only into healthy adults but healthy community members (with a healthy sense of selves) who feel a responsibility for the betterment and maintenance of their fictive communities. Finally, in the last section of my data chapters, I investigated how ethno-cultural responsiveness can be used as an

educational motivator. For example, how do African-centered schools’ politicization of learning fuel students’ sense of group or community achievement? It is a more in-depth exploration of how the operationalized and structured ideological instrument of African communitarianism serves as a fuel for student motivation.

Before the start of my literature review is a quick history of the origins of

African-centered education. This is a simplified version of how I understand African- centered thinking, history, and philosophical foundations. I want to provide an understanding of how Black Nationalist and Pan Africanist philosophical discourses have been a part of black social and political life since Africans arrived in the Americas.

Following the historical segment of African-centered schools is a section on the NGUZO

SABA (The Seven Principles) which serves as the philosophical foundation for African- centered institutions. NGUZO SABA are the seven principles of Kwanzaa (it is the themes of seven days of celebration) and serves to reconnect African Americans to their

African heritage by restructuring social principals derived from Africa, in the context of their experiences with racism, slavery, and forced participation in european cultural practices. Clear understanding of the NGUZO SABA is needed and is key to understanding the underlining philosophy and politics of African-centered schools. It is the reason they do what they do.

Thoughts on the Origin of African-Centered Schools

When discussing the origins of African-centered education in the United States, we must begin with the Maafa (Holocaust of Enslavement) and the collective actions taken by African peoples on and off the continent to reclaim their sense of self-

determination. Scholars regard this struggle of liberation and freedom of African peoples as a rough and ever-evolving structure of ideology that has been passed down through generations of Africans, leading to a powerful explosion of consciousness in the 1960s

(Asante, 1991; Piert, 2015). Although a lot of African American cultural practices can be traced back to the African continent, it was this nascent African centered moment of critical cultural consciousness that shaped much of how African Americans understand and perceive nationalism or pan-Africanism.

Piert and Asante state that African-centered education comes out of movements of black self-determination, particularly Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism, which is the idea that black people worldwide should aim to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between diasporic ethnic groups of African descent. Moses (1978) determined some of the earliest recorded thoughts of Pan Africanism and Black Nationalism dates back to the early 1800s to a few brave and heroic Africans resolved to improve the world for their brethren in and out of subjugation. Paul Cuffe, a devout Quaker and free African living in New Bedford, Massachusetts, became disillusioned with the hypocrisy of the

United States and founded the “The Friendly Society of Sierra Leone,” intending to help

American and Caribbean Africans return to West Africa for settlement in a free state.

Martin R. Delany was also a 19th-century Black Nationalist who advocated for the establishment of a black state in the Niger Valley, going so far as to negotiate agreements with several African kings to make his vision of liberation a reality (Piert, 2015).

Throughout the 19th and 20th century, there were many, some famous, others not, who were instrumental in carrying the ideology of Black Nationalism into the modern age. However, before the 1960s explosion of radical consciousness, I believe two figures

made a significant imprint on how the 1960s generation metabolized black radical consciousness. These two men were Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement

Association and African Communities League, and Elijah Muhammad of Nation of Islam

(NOI). These two men and their black organizations centered self-determination and racial uplift through the establishment of education and industrial opportunities for black people.

Garvey, who arrived in the United States during a period of intense postwar disillusionment after the 1919 Red Summer (a period of nationwide white violence toward African Americans), began quietly organizing chapters nationwide of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey brought into the black lower- and middle-class mainstream a sense of aspiration.

“I believed that black people can transform themselves through collective economic and cultural independence,” boomed Garvey’s voice. Hill (2020) describes “Garveyism” as transforming the American gospel of success into a new gospel of racial pride. Muhammad, using elements of Garvey’s moment years later, would continue the legacy of UNIA by advocating for black separation as a means to repair the black mind, body, and social position. NOI instituted rigid social and educational programs that were interested in constructing a new meaningful people through a social/cultural transformation—a new kind of Garveyism.

This idea of social transformation of consciousness would be a driving force for black activists leaving the university and other locations of black politics for the arena of education during the 1960s. Rickford (2016) observed that a

political shift occurred in the 1960s that moved black activists from an assimilationist civil rights position to a more radical understanding and position of

“human rights,” which was influenced by leaders such as Malcolm X, who came out of earlier black militant moments. With Malcolm stating,

They shed the vestiges of Cold War parochialism, trading the mantra of

“freedom”—an ideal associated with the quest for legal equality—for that

of “national liberation,” a concept that connoted black self-determination

and identification with the revolutionary world. (Rickford, 2016, p. 10)

Additionally, the concept of developing a social transformation of consciousness is one significant reason Rickford believes black activists concentrated on K-12 education, stating,

[A] host of battle-tested activists returned to the arena of education,

refining theories of liberatory pedagogy drawn from their experiences in

freedom schools, black studies campaigns, and student protests. Not all

these figures were associated with SNCC. Former or current members of

the Republic of New Africa and the Nation of Islam created Omowale

Ujamaa Northwest Community School in Pasadena, California. Abdullah

Abdur-Razzaq, who as “James Shabazz” had been a top Malcolm X aide,

helped his spouse, Ohra, establish the Al-Karim School in the Crown

Heights section of Brooklyn. The borough was also home to the 150-

student School of Common Sense, a venture founded by Sonny Carson,

militant director of Brooklyn’s breakaway Congress of Racial Equality

chapter. (p. 11)

Moreover, these radical thinkers and now school leaders saw these new institutions, such as the Black Panthers “liberation schools,” as an educational route to black empowerment. Rickford and Piert believe that these leaders of

African institutions begin to see this project of education as a project of permanence with the possibility of replacing mainstream educational institutions of the dominant culture. Additionally, these scholars begin to expand their theoretical base to include international intellectuals such as Freire and Nyerere who both advocated for the reconstruction of subjected peoples through a process of critical education consciousness (Rickford, 2016).

African-centered Concepts Coming Out of the 1960s

However, for purposes of this dissertation, there were some fundamental concepts and practices that came out of the movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s that still inform how we understand and “do” African-centered schooling. The first of these was Molefi Asante and his concept of Afrocentricity, which Schiele describes as emanating from the assumption that “any meaningful and authentic study of peoples of African descent must begin and proceed with Africa as the center, not periphery” (Schiele, 1994).

For the Afrocentric, this is about conceptualizing a multicultural and actually diversified society. That society is not just actualized and diversified in racial characteristics, but also in its philosophical foundations (Schilele, 1994). What made

Asante’s concept of Afrocentricity in education so potentially liberating for peoples of

African descent is the notion of putting history, culture, and community at the center of the educational process. For Asante (1991) the examination of “centricity” and

perspective-taking was the key to beginning to understand how transformative

Afrocentricity can be. He viewed American classrooms as places where white students are able to see themselves in leadership, pedagogical approaches, and curriculum.

Moreover, Asante was a student of the Black Studies protests of the 1960s and understood personally how important seeing yourself in the education process is to developing a social transformation of consciousness, a vision that many African-centered schools carry with them today.

The NGUZO SABA (The Seven Principals)

At the heart of African-centered thinking is a restructuring of African peoples into a worldview and cultural appreciation of Africanness. Cultural practitioners see the centering of Africa and its diasporic members as a form of reconnection that pierces the effects of racism and slavery on the development of

African people. However, Afrocentrism does not ignore the challenge of overcoming racism and thus restructures said culture and worldview in ways that can be processed and understood by those who are victims of such racism.

Karenga (1988) observes the application and widespread acceptance of Euro-

American student development serves as a kind of deculturalization of African

American students. Karenga, in examining the effects of African-centered thinking on college students, found that students unintentionally ignore theories based on African worldview and culture because of this process of denaturalization, which stymies black students’ knowledge and interest in things deemed African.

Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by scholar Maulana Karenga. It is a holiday and spiritual time for African Americans to celebrate heritage, honor the ancestral, and meditate and affirm the purpose of self and community (Houessou-

Adin, 1995) The Afrocentric theory from which the NGUZO SABA is derived is from Kawaida theory, which Karenga describes as emancipatory philosophy dedicated to cultural revolution, radical social change, and bringing good in the world (Johnson, 2001; Karenga, 2007). Further, he sees Kawaida as being shaped by its focus on culture and community as the basis and building blocks for any real movement for liberation. This means for him that culture is conceived as the

“crucible in which the liberation struggle takes form and the context in which it ultimately succeeds” (p. 1).

However when Karenga discusses the NGUZO SABA, he views it as a theory that teaches “all that is thought and done should be based on tradition and reason, which are rooted in practice” (p. 413), for which he used the African

American scholar Haki R. Madhubuti (1972) to illustrate his point that the concepts of self-determination and self-definition are integral to Kawaida:

Tradition is our grounding, our cultural anchor and therefore, our starting

point. It is also cultural authority for any claims to cultural authenticity for

anything we do and think as African people. Reason is necessary critical

thought about our tradition which enables us to select, preserve and build

on the best of what we have achieved and produced in the height of our

knowledge and our needs born on experience. (Johnson, 2001, p. 413)

Kwanzaa, according to Karenga, is a product of “creative cultural synthesis and a judicious mixture on several levels” (Karenga, 2008, p. 15). First, the concept of

Kwanzaa is a synthesis of continental Africa and the diaspora. Kwanzaa, for him, was a revolutionary way to connect Africa to contemporary political struggle and continued cultural and educational development (Johnson, 2001; Karenga, 1988;

Madhubuti, 1972). Secondly, Karenga wanted to infuse Kwanzaa’s “values and practices” to the broader Pan-African struggles, stating that the principals were a reflection of the peoples from all parts of Africa (Karenga, 1988). Finally, he wanted Kwanzaa to be based on tradition and reason, stating:

The origins of Kwanzaa on the African continent are in the agricultural

celebrations called the first-fruits celebrations and, to a lesser degree,

harvest celebrations. Kwanzaa gets its name from the Swahili phrase

matunda (fruits) ya kwanza (first). The first-fruit celebrations are recorded

in African history as far back as Egypt and Nubia and appear in ancient

and modern times in other classical African civilizations such as

Ashantiland and Yorubaland. These celebrations are also found in ancient

and modern times among societies as large as empires (the Zulu) or

Kingdoms (Swaziland) or smaller societies and groups such as the

Matabele, Thonga, and Lovedu, all of southeastern Africa. (Johnson,

2001, p. 414)

Johnson (2001) saw that there were five common values and practices central to the first-fruit celebrations he studied, and synthesized them down for the Kwanzaa celebration. These values are:

 Ingathering of the people

 Reverence for the creator and creation

 Commemoration of the past

 Recommitment to the cultural ideals

 Celebration of the good

However, the seven principles of Kwanzaa for its creators were conceptualized and derived from Africa and African American life and struggle. Moreover,

Kwanzaa for its practitioners serves four basic functions for the African American community. First, it reaffirms and restores African heritage and culture in the centered of black cultural life. Second, it is intended to introduce and reinforce the

NGUZO SABA. Third, it addresses the absence of non-heroic holidays in the

African American communal celebrations, and finally it serves as a regular communal celebration reaffirming and reinforcing the bonds between African

Americans as a people (Karenga, 1988, p. 415).

Moreover, the NGUZO SABA are the seven principles of Kwanzaa and serve to reconnect African Americans to their African heritage by restructuring social principals derived from Africa, in the context of their experiences with racism, slavery, and forced participation in European cultural practices. Indeed, the seven principles of the NGUZO SABA have become the basis of much of the

African-centered movement worldwide (Karenga, 1988; Warfield-Coppock,

1990). Moreover, it has also served as an organizational value plan for formal systems concerned with rooting out anti-Blackness in their organizations.

There are seven principles or values offered in Kwanzaa. According to

Karenga, these values were selected because of their relevance and recurrence in communitarian African societies; their relevance to the process of self- determination of African Americans, and according to Johnson (2001), “the cultural and spiritual significance of the number 7 in African culture, and the manageability of the number 7 in terms of teaching, memorization, learning, and emphasis” (Johnson, 2001, p. 415). These principles are:

NGUZO SABA

Umoja (unity): To strive for and maintain unity in the family,

community, nation, and race.

Kujichagulia (self-determination): To define ourselves, name

ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves instead of

being defined, named, created for, and spoken for by others.

Ujima (collective work and responsibility): To build and

maintain our community together and make our sisters’ and

brothers’ problems our problems and to solve them together.

Ujamma (cooperative economics): To build and maintain our

own stores, shops, and other businesses and profit from them

together.

Nia (purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and

developing of our community in order to restore our people to their

traditional greatness.

Kuumba (creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

Imani (faith): To believe with all our hearts in God, our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle (Johnson V. D., 2001, p. 416).

Figure 1: Original 1967 NGUZO SABA Poster

Figure 1: Penn State Digial Collection. Nguzo saba : the 7 principles. Https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/warposters/id/258/

Figure 2: 2019 Kwanzaa Celebration in Baltimore, Maryland

*Kimberly Lee, with her Grandmother Stacey L. Cruise and “Community Elders,” her great cousins (seated) lighting the Kinara for Kwanzaa. Bo Banwo is taking the photos

Chapter Two: Capitalism and Blackness as Slaveness

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a review of the literature relevant to the reasons why African-centered education is so crucial to healthy black student socialization. I plan to review the social influence of independent black institutions and the location of the concept of Blackness and Africaness within their organizational structure. Moreover, this review will explore how the intersection of social position and

Western political histories of African Americans are defined by histories and practices grounded in notions of capitalism. For me, these institutions provide African Americans a position in society for black scrutiny of social systems historically designed and codified to promote a particular model of power and control.

With this literature review, I will first explore the concept of blackness as slaveness. I want you to understand how the devaluation of people with dark skin has served as a marker of exploitation and sub-humanity. This understanding of blackness in a historical context will help you understand why the creation of a formal space of identity formation is such a significant component of healthy black socialization. I will also center ethnic school leadership and its unique critique of mainstream educational systems within the broader field of organizational theory. I want to demonstrate how social practices of white supremacy can embed themselves within our formal social systems, and because of black leadership’s unique view of oppression, they can build an organization in an anti-white supremacist frame. Again, I want you to understand that I believe schools organized around an ethnic identity is a critique of mainstream schools’ organizational and ideological practices.

Next, I will cover the literature on Black education history, followed by a review of African-centered institutions, its ideology, capitalism, and the negative experiences of

African peoples in formal organizations. I want, by the end of this section, for you to have a clear understanding of why African-centered organizations’ unique practice of unmasking American myths through the politicization of black education and traditional practices of care for black people and community serve to orient black people into a sense of liberation and group freedom. These institutions create unique organizational ideologies that infuse social and political care into a social system tasked with socializing black children into mainstream society. The question I raised before this review is: Why is this important for black people to do? Why do history and structural realities encourage black people to develop and grow social institutions of care? Which

Blackness, Racialization, and Afro-Pessimism

My interest in the historical positioning of blackness in formal systems of social control and domination emanates from a familiar view of the nefarious dance of “race and capitalism” in the United States and Africa. My mother’s family walked off a slave plantation in north Florida, a visible sign of white domination and violence, and settled into a new social order of black codes and Jim Crow, and a legalized continuation of forced participation in a formal system of white domination and violence, only a two- mile journey from the visible sign of their bondage. My Yoruba father’s family in Nigeria is from a small village east of Lagos. This side of the family was defined by “control and domination,” control from British colonists, whose mission was to enlighten these hapless, unfortunate people—people they saw as an impediment to their project of resource extraction.

This section is not about family histories. I refer to my genealogy merely as an example of ancestry that tells two very different stories about the vulnerability of

Blackness in systems of capital and race for people deemed non-european. On two sides of the ocean, separated by thousands of miles of water; attitudes and political orders about people racialized as black were being shaped, formed and codified in legal systems.

In almost the entire continent of Africa, colonialism, theft, and domination were the order of the day, while simultaneously in the Americas, capitalist projects of control and domination conspired to produce a governing ideology that stripped racialized people of their humanity. Understanding these histories of race and capital provide African- centered thinkers a lens to appreciate how these histories and attitudes become codified into ideologies that influence formal systems of socialization, such as schools.

Additionally, this lens of exploitation is a historical review of “processes” of the humanist devaluations of racialized people, and serves as a method to understand why centering histories of both “slave and colonial subject” within formal systems of control and domination could serve to understand better the precarious position in which racialized people currently find themselves.

Racialized Inferiority and Capitalist Critique

In 1859 on the United States Senate floor, Jefferson Davis referred to racialization as a marker or “a stamp of inferiority” stating, “We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our

Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority” (Jefferson Davis, 1859, p.7).

Davis’s statement about free black men and women petitioning their government for funds to establish a black public school system in Washington, D.C., reveals an intriguing

notion of race in the mind of the American political elite and its governing ideology. It demonstrates how race had become a type of “social ordering” that had taken on a somewhat neo-religious axiom.

This notion of race unique to the United States served to introduce two themes into the broader American psyche. The first of these was that “skin color” defined humanity. No longer did dark skin simply mean “Aethiops” the ancient Greek word for dark-skinned peoples living in Upper Egypt or beyond; it now meant a lower form of humanity. Second, it introduced the notion that skin color determined an individual’s position on the ladder of social order, that capitalism in the form of “slavery” was doing the Africans a courtesy and not that capitalism and its agents were doing what capitalism has historically done—locate weaker-positioned people, ripe for exploitation.

If Davis’s notion of inferiority is to be believed and analyzed from a critical perspective, particularly an Afro-pessimist perspective, themes of race and economics begin to emerge as projects of control. Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson, perhaps the most vocal proponents of the Afro-pessimist school of thought, interpret this view of capitalism and race as “parasitic twins” of ideology, tasked with fusing together notions of “Blackness” and “Slaveness” in the modern economic and political orders. For these scholars, understanding the actual project of capitalism and its underlining view of race is at the center of true liberating practice. For many scholars, this begins with an understanding of capitalism through its critiques, best articulated through Marx and

Hegel. Nancy Fraser (2016) observes Marx’s account of capitalism as the best interpretation to penetrate beneath the veneer of commodity production. Understanding this “level” is where Fraser feels readers can discover the secret of accumulation of

capital’s exploitation of wage laborers. Marx’s analysis of workers are as neither serfs nor slaves, but unencumbered individuals, free to enter the labor market and sell their

“labor power.” However, in reality, they have little actual choice in the matter; the means of production is derived from the workers, which forces them to secure the means of subsistence by contracting work from a capitalist in exchange for wages.

Marx’s critique of capital is a lens to see the menacing, destructive, and contradictory reality capitalism brings into social orders, particularly for individuals racialized in those orders. Similarly, the importance of Marxist theory serves as an acknowledgment of the freedom struggles of racialized people in the global South who observed theories of Marx and Hegel in proper context—as an instrument to advance discourses of the connective role of racism in systems of capitalism. However Rabaka

(2009) spoke to a lack of intersectional solidarity in Classical Marxism when searching for its relationship to race, stating that Classical Marxism privileges class and the proletariat as the agents of revolutionary and lens of understanding social transformation, while unwittingly neglecting the overlapping, interlocking, and intersecting nature of racism and sexism in capitalist and colonial societies. Here Rabaka is attempting to draw attention to the unique character of race in our society.

For him, race cannot be merely “boxed away” as one component of many forms of capitalist oppression. No! For him, race and oppression go hand and hand and must be explored as such. Similar to Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction,” Rabaka is making the case that social institutions that do not center on race will fall victim to racialized forms of exploitation. Rabaka goes on to highlight Douglas Kellner’s 1995 book, Media

Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern and the Post-

modern, which states that “classical Marxism exaggerates the primacy of class and downplays the salience of gender and race. Oppression takes place in many more spheres than just the economic and the workplace, so a radical politics of the future should take account of gender and race as well as class” (p. 20). Again, for Rabaka and Kellner’s perception of how racialized forms of exploitation were not somehow distanced or isolated from the publicly identified and agreed-upon locations of capitalist

“exploitation” (the workplace, the market), but that race and capitalism were interconnected to the very ways societal institutions were constituted. Which raises the question of how these racialized forms of capital are being interpreted in societies where the connection between “race and dehumanization” has crystallized. What is to be done with people dehumanized in these societies?

Barbara Fields (1990), when discussing how historians have positions, notions and ideologies of “race and capital” in America, finds that

“Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the

United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief

business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than

the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco” (Fields, 1990, p. 95).

Fields, whose work is in the cultural production of race as a signifier of a larger societal phenomenon, views this capitalist production as a duel system. She makes the

“Occam’s Razor” viewpoint that Europeans did not just enslave Africans merely as an act of racism or “racial separation,” it also was a project of brute capitalism. Indeed for

Fields, racism was the tool that permitted capitalist exploitation, because it is the endpoint of the lost humanity, which is the ultimate goal for the racist and systems of

capital. In the same essay, Fields highlights the racialization of the Irish by the English and Russian Peasants by the Russian Royalist class stating,

One historian has gone so far as to call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator.’

He does not ask why Europeans seeking the ‘ultimate’ method of

segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting

them across the ocean for that purpose when they could have achieved the

same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No one

dreams of analyzing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a

problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English

developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served nearly word

for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American

Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analyzing serfdom in Russia as

primarily a problem of race relations, even though the Russian nobility

invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as

preposterous as any devised by American racists. (Fields B., 1990, p. 95)

Again Fields is demonstrating a curious critique of capital with this section of her essay.

She does not speak about “whiteness,” who is allowed to be white, although that is an important idea when discussing race and capitalism in the United States. She instead points her attack on capitalism and its history as an ideology of division and exploitation,

“people Jefferson Davis referred to as stamped.” This notion connects Fields with traditions of racialized capitalist critiques and highlights the divisive nature of this system. Fields, similar to Rabaka and Du Bois, theorizes that wherever capitalism has

burrowed itself into a social order, you will find meaningless systems of political ordering based solely on the concept of division; what is best for moneyed people.

Origin of Anti Blackness and Dehumanization

Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson III raise the question of “Why Africa; why black people?” Why did Arab and European (mostly independent of each other) select

Africans as the people and Africa as the location for their capitalist project? For

Wilderson, it was a modern interpretation of Africans as other, as a part of a broader project of dehumanization. For Wilderson, if this project of dehumanization occurred, there had to be a process to develop ideologies of white supremacy—the creation of a self-actualizing population that eventually became known as “white” that served as a signifier for “human,” which painted non-Europeans as nonwhites, particularly populations in Africa with “darker skin,” as Black or a lesser form of humanity: “ape- like.” This expropriation of the humanity of people racialized as nonwhite served as a divider or a wedge of sorts between classes of people described by Fraser (2016) as the exploited and the expropriated. For Fraser, exploited workers had status as legal or free individuals, authorized to sell their labor power in return for wages. Once separated from the means of production and proletarianized, they were somewhat legally protected, at least in theory, from expropriation.

However, for the expropriated classes, she saw their status differ sharply from the exploited classes, whose labor, property, and persons were not vulnerable to expropriation, however for the slaves, their labor and persons were subject to conﬁscation on the part of capital. Indeed the people that were subjected to expropriation were defenseless or fair game to the most excesses of capital—again and again (Fraser, 2016).

Projects such as chattel slavery and colonialism created markers that were the genesis of the process of racialization for the global south; these practices also served to connect

“Blackness” to “Slaveness,” and helped to infuse markers of racialization that eventually became the sign of devaluation and debasement for generations not yet born, with

Hartman (2008) stating:

Imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and political arithmetic that

were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed

life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death,

incarceration, and impoverishment. (p. 6)

Curiously, both Hartman and Wilderson, in their attempts to discover how the devaluation of blackness occurred in the minds of european elites, spoke to the generational transfer of ideologies and opinions. Both scholars somehow viewed the world and its ideological processes of having the capacity of transferring fundamental notions of the humanity of racialized people; that they see are still playing themselves out or echoing in systems today. Indeed post-colonialist theoreticians like Fanon and Achebe saw these projects of racialization and transfers as projects of capital and colonialism with aims of domination. For Fanon (2005), descriptors such as Black-fashioned identities that exist for the sole purpose of distinguishing between european and non- european peoples, which for him similar to Fields, Rabaka and Du Bois served to create a two-track system that rewarded certain members of humanity, with the granting of “full humanity. Fanon explains that because of his blackness, his identity is a creation of another and on a “fixed” image; that very definition of himself is defined by another.

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2006) describe Fanon’s view of “Blackness” as a societal “uniform” which functions as a means to set apart and ultimately alienate the black man (p. 292). “Fanon, who was a dark-skinned Caribbean American from the former French colony of Martinique, expressed a long-observed tradition found in societies where notions of race and capital meet; racialization serves as a tool for capital to define someone’s place in the social order. Take, for example, the Spanish racial caste systems, casta, promulgated throughout Spanish America. So power entrenched was this system that even when it was beyond obvious that racialized notions of slave and master had broken down and were only used as tools for white and Spanish domination, white revolutionary Spanish Americans continued notions of black dehumanization into modern societies. It is interesting that as large and racially diverse as the Spanish

American empire was, (in some cases there were as many as 100 categories of possible racial variations), notions of anti-blackness somehow echo through the generations and continue to influence societies in the former Spanish colonies.

There is the vulnerability of racial capitalism that racialized people encountered in earlier Spanish colonial societies that saw their blackness as a marker of a lack of humanity and socialized them into a lower caste order that continues today. However, for other revolutionary American societies, such as Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela, embodied by

Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, this notion of vulnerability to Western systems of control are at the heart of their revolution practice, and provide a clear example of what happens when societies attempt to address issues of racial capitalism that they see as impediments to their societies having a sense of agency; a true cutting of the Eurocentric colonial string (Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 2011).

Achebe (1975) also provides some insight into this origin of “anti-blackness” in his 1975 speech, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’” Achebe argues that Africa has been “set up as a foil” to the Western world, one example being

Conrad’s choice of title “Heart of Darkness.” For him, this “Darkness” refers to the continent of Africa and constructed or reconstructed in the polar opposite of the

“antithesis” of consequently. Africa bears the burden of the negative attributes that have been “heaped upon it” by Westerners. This heaping upon, according to Achebe, explains how Westerners can see Africa as a place of inferiority that permits their society to “go forward” and appear “immaculate”; in other words, by imagining Africa and its inhabitants as lesser than that of Europe. Europeans situated themselves as greater than that which is non-European (Achebe, 1977; 1977).

Achebe finally sums up that this act was then justified by what “postcolonial theory” refers to as “the ‘difference” of the post-colonial subject, which is the “most direct and immediate way by which he or she can be ‘othered’” is felt through the

“superficial differences of the body and voice” (Ashcroft et al. 2006, p. 289). These differences refer to characteristics such as language, dialect, or, in the case of blackness, skin color. Fanon and Achebe, in exploring the intersections of identity in ideologies of white supremacy, demonstrate the mental toll racialized members of our society must face and how their “cultural gestures” are placed in opposition to “whiteness,” which places them at risk of being systematically deemed of lesser value. It is the notion of

“denial of agency” and “personhood” these scholars speak to, that the historical racialization process is also a process of systematic vulnerability.

Once more Wilderson sees this vulnerability of blackness as a fundamental element to the project of white supremacy. The lack of protection in his eyes or human compassion for black people should force black people to question modern conceptions of organizations and their ideologies. Again returning to Wilderson’s earlier question in the opening section,

Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world; and so is his/her

cultural “production.” What does it mean—what are the stakes—when the

world can whimsically transpose one’s cultural gestures, the stuff of

symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style?

(Wilderson III, 2010, p. 56)

What does it mean, when certain groups can devalue the humanity of another group’s cultural productions or even their position within the social normality? Sexton and

Copeland (2003) perceive this makeup is on a kind of spectrum of social ordering; “that is to be racialized, is to be pushed ‘down,’ toward blackness, and to be deracialized is to be pushed ‘up’ toward whiteness” (p. 57).

Sexton and Copeland are not simply reducing the world to merely two positions or two struggles—”blacks and whites”—but are theorizing the complexities of the struggle encountered by individuals racialized as black. By viewing ideology in these terms, it allows thinkers to see the black and white extremities; which they believe should be brought to bear on every discussion. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction in America” spoke to the “public and psychological wage” poor whites received in the 19th and early

20th centuries that relieved them of their vulnerable social status, which came in the form of their classification as “not-black.” This whiteness in Du Bois’ mind provided a

meaningful compensation for people otherwise exploited by the organization of capitalism. This notion connects with Wilderson’s idea that whiteness depends on the devaluation of black existence and thus whites currently and in the past enjoyed benefits that were not always strictly monetary.

Myers (2017), in exploring Du Boisian theorization about the “Gratifications of

Whiteness” and Du Bois’ views on antiblackness, finds Du Bois viewed white antiblackness verging on sadism, offering not just recompense but a genuine pleasure to whites. He also suggests that joy may be felt not only by perpetrators of violence but by onlookers as well. Myers commented on the current practice of documenting the killing and deaths of black people offered an interesting connection to Du Bois’ work. “Might this unsettling proposition offer purchase on a present in which spectacular images of anti-black violence and death are regularly produced, circulated, and consumed? (Myers,

2017, par. 12)”

In the three ideological perspectives (Marxist, Afro-pessimism, and post-

Colonial) reviewed in this section, each describes a world where Africa and Africans are positioned as a foil to european projects of domination and control. Each scholar in their way speaks to the vulnerability of the people racialized in this system as black. This notion was punctuated by Wilderson’s question to readers whom he views as participants in systems of control and domination: “What does it mean, what are the stakes, when the world can whimsically transpose one’s cultural gestures?” Although Wilderson was asking this question to the reader, I believe this is also a question that should be placed to leaders tasked with managing “systems of control” in our society. What does it mean to have racialized peoples’ experiences in the world so easily trespassed upon or devalued?

Moreover, is it so unfair for those people to demand a small part of the world be made in their image, a place not so vulnerable to “whimsically transpose?”

Khalifa (2010) and his work exploring “culturally relevant leadership” in schools found that leaders interacting with students positioned as “hyper-ghettoized” refused to accommodate and validate the capital these students brought to their educational system.

These leaders, similar to the earlier Brooklyn example, refused to appreciate how the parents, “whom I believe are the social influencers of the students,” viewed the school system differently, according to Khalifa:

families of the at-risk students did not use the educational system as a

means to attain a position or status in society. Generally, these families

had no position to maintain in society. Therefore, parents had no incentive

to interact or use schools to help their children. (Khalifa, 2010, p. 642)

The failure of the leaders highlighted in Khalifa’s research is symptomatic of the assessments highlighted in this section. There is a failure of leadership to value the cultural contribution of racialized people. Each scholar demonstrated how the devaluation of blackness was used to reproduce and transpose cultural assumptions and beliefs on racialized people.

Indeed “leaders” from these scholars’ perspectives were collaborators in the continued oppression of racialized people by systems they participated in—in some cases, control. These failures to question white supremacy and implement “disruptive practices” also implicate leadership in the reproduction of long embedded notions of race and domination that are foundational pillars of western cultural and economic societies.

The aforementioned requires scholars interested in liberatory pedagogical practices to understand how assumptions of Blackness and domination are crafted and embedded in social and economic systems, “systems of control,” and how these systems are continually being reproduced. The next section is about social reproduction and its implications for people racialized as black.

Social Constructivism: The Construction of Culture and Blackness

Bonilla-Silva (2014) views the cultural reproduction of colorblind discourses as occurring covertly in systems that make up society. There is an attempt for scholars who study social reproduction and social constructionism to understand how culture is produced and transferred from one generation to the other. Moreover, for critical scholars interested in disrupting notions of anti-blackness there is an additional exploration of how perceptions of Blackness, explored in the earlier section, enter systems and become institutionalized in cultures and practices. These cultural reproductions are a driver of life experiences and outcomes; they become mechanisms to sort racialized people into tracks of normality; similarly, they serve as a way to define certain cultural practices as abnormal. Additionally, Mueller (2017) views examination of social reproduction as an opportunity to see “the habitual and ostensibly unintentional routines of ordinary whites who reproduce racial inequality through ‘business as usual,’ with patterns that support color-blind discourse.

Social Constructivism

To fully appreciate social constructivism, we must begin with a thorough look at

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) seminal work, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann’s book is credited with the introduction of the concept

and coining of the term “social construction” for the modern social sciences. Berger and

Luckmann went on to attribute much of their thinking about the subject to philosophers and sociologists such as George Herbert Mead, Karl Marx, Alfred Schutz and Émile

Durkheim (Williams, 2012). With this acknowledgment, it takes us back to the idea of the interpretivist approach to studying the natural world; particularly their antipositivist notions and approaches (Schwandt 2003).

My understanding of interpretivist approaches to thinking requires us to see the difference between constructivism and interpretivism. Take, for example, George Mead.

Mead was one of the originators of the idea of “symbolic interactionism,” “the idea that people’s selves are social products and that the true test of any theory was that it had to be useful in solving complex social problems” (Griffin, Ledbetter, & Sparks, 2014, p.

54). To complicate the matter even further, we can look at the influences of cultural relativism and its idea that “culture is the principal source of the validity of a moral right or rule. In other words, the presumption is that rights (and other social practices, values, and moral rules) are culturally determined” (Donnelly, 1984, p. 401). It has become recognized that there is a link between constructivism, relativism, and interpretivism.

There is a shared philosophical root that should be acknowledged, but there is an apparent difference in approach to the natural world.

Berger and Luckmann’s social constructionism has become an instrument for researchers in the social sciences to appreciate and examine how societies organize themselves, particularly how relationships inform our society on the most intimate of levels. Berger and Luckmann, like their interpretivist heroes before them, saw the natural world in an antipositivist view. They viewed the society as “constructed realities” rather

than “out there” as some objective reality. They are concerned with how knowledge emerges and how it comes to have significance for society. Berger and Luckmann regarded knowledge as a creation or a series of interactions between individuals within a society (Schwandt, 2003), that society existed as both an objective and subjective reality.

Again, for Berger and Luckmann the objective reality was brought about through interactions of people within a social world—that the social world served as a kind of feedback loop that socialized others and in turn socialized the person who originated the process and thus it’s not an objective reality at all in the typical sense of the term. The

“feedback loop” resulted in “routinization and habitualization” of behaviors (Schwandt,

2003).

This reproduction, according to Berger and Luckmann liberates participants to partake in an agreed-upon culture and innovate on that culture, rather than starting everything anew. I want to be careful not to imply we choose to participate in the cultural milieu; that Berger and Luckman view culture as a kind of “hat we can easily take on and off; since reality is socially constructed, it can be easily changed” (Vavrus, 2017). “In other words, the background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation” (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 290 What I am suggesting is that freedoms become embedded as routines, forming a general store of knowledge and thus institutionalized by society to the extent that future generations experience this type of knowledge as objective, this objectivity is in turn continuously reaffirmed in the participant’s interaction with others.

Berger and Luckmann’s half-century-old research has become what Friedman

(2015) called a sociological mainstay. For Friedman, it is seen as a modern classic of

sociological thinking, so fundamental to the discipline of sociology that it can be seen as axiomatic when looking at the world and the cultural norms it produce. Nevertheless, as broadly discussed as the topic of “social construction” is in modern sociology, the

“process” or “mechanisms” of the social construction are far less discussed by students being introduced to the text. At the center of Berger and Luckmann’s research is a series of “why” ideas that function as jumping-off points for the researchers. How does society reproduce? Why does society reproduce? For whose benefit is this occurring?

These questions of “Why” advance similar notions of leadership within organizational culture, particularly if specific cultural practices or attitudes are being privileged in processes of social construction? If we know from Berger and Luckmann’s research that culture can be replicated, defined, and passed down to future generations, then according to researchers like March (1991), organizational learning can occur, which forwards the notion that organizations are capable of historizing their actions and incorporating those historical practices into their culture.

Moreover, this would also lead us to question the leadership in cultures contained within systems of white supremacy. Could systems within our society withstand larger social, cultural, and economic histories of racialized dehumanization? Moreover, could leaders, without clear attention to racial, social construction, create cultures that could withstand outside forces that reproduced ideologies of dehumanization? The answers to these questions are clear; we know from Khalifa’s research that leadership within the schools he studied failed to value the cultural contribution of black students, that these

“actors within systems” were collaborators in the continued oppression of racialized people.

When looking at this idea in practice, Social Constructivism forces sociologists and organizational thinkers to consider the cultural process of systems and how people are socialized within them, principally how does subjective reality comes to appear to the individual as objective or independent from him or her? (Friedman, 2015) To quote from the opening lines of Berger and Luckmann’s book: “The basic contentions of the argument of this book … are that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyze the processes in which this occurs” (p. 1). The exploration of

“society” and “social construction” as concepts make real the struggle for leaders who are attempting to change cultures and organizations. Berger and Luckmann demonstrate with their research that culture is not some arbitrary idea. On the contrary, they make plain that culture is planned, replicated, defined, passed down to future generations, which are socialized into it as a societal project. This process can be disrupted and politicized, particularly for scholars and leaders with a predisposition to critiquing modern socially constructed systems. The next section will explore those leaders and how their work has drawn attention to the socialization process and deepened the understanding of their fields and how systems are malleable to economic and social agents.

Transmission of Culture in Society

Saldaña (2013) views these agents of socialization as tools for the transmission of culture. For Saldaña, communities develop methods in the form of institutions to assist society with the transmission of norms and culture. Some of these agents of socialization are family, school, religion, mass media, peer group, etc. However, contemporary societies are defined by three similar, yet unifying agents of socialization, a kind of three- legged socialization stool. Saldaña calls these agents “traditional agents” that support

continuity of thought, morals, values, and other tenets the culture considers important.

These traditional agents are the family, the church, and the school. In the past, traditional agents such as religion and family had a more dominant position in our society. These two agents were able to determine large cultural practices and were seen by the broader society as defining agents of cultural construction; think Plymouth Colony of the historic

Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Alternatively, I think of Max Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic and how, although Weber is a rational thinker, he can still see the importance of religious institutions in the socialization process. Some might argue that Weber can see this role because he is a rational scientific thinker. Nevertheless, as society moved further away from the family and the church as the center of the process of constructing social life, educational institutions began to take on more socialization responsibilities that were once reserved or dominated by the other two legs of our socialization stool.

In 1932, George Counts, of Teachers College, in his book Dare the School Build a New Social Order? states:

Faced with any difficult problem of life, we set our minds at rest sooner or later

by their appeal to the school. We are convinced that education is the one unfailing

remedy for every ill to which man is subject, whether it be vice, crime, war,

poverty, riches, injustice, racketeering, political corruption, race hatred, class

conflict, or just plain original sin. We even speak glibly and often about the

general reconstruction of society through the school. (Counts, 1932, p. 2)

Counts was an early proponent of progressive education in the United States and a visionary at seeing the potential of educational institutions as an ascendant agent destined to dominate the socialization process in the United States.

Counts had been fascinated with Soviet-style educational systems and published two works on their methods of education and social construction. From his point of view, the communist society was attempting to eliminate two fundamental ideas when it came to society and education. The first was the idea of religious domination in the making of society (USSR Militant Atheism); and second, the idea of loyalty to a family or clan. (For the Soviets, loyalty was to the state.) Counts (1932) believed systems of education should be in the forefront of society and be driven by a force that transforms the rest of the social order, rather than being transformed or subordinate to the prevailing social order. He saw schools as places of “struggle and sacrifice,” and as arenas of politics and power that could not be entrusted to “romantic sentimentalists,” whom he theorized were unaware of their positions in the larger political system. Counts believed these people “should not be trusted to write our educational theories or programs because they would not move outside of their comfort” (Crutchfield, 2018, par. 3).

For progressive thinkers like Counts, modern-day socialist revolutions led to a radical rethinking of the purposes of schools and their position as agents of the state.

These thinkers, building off works done by earlier progressive educational scholars, pushed into the national discourse a curious notion of what if schools could become places for transformation, no matter what race or religion—what if systems of education could be a place where the progressive political battle is fought, excluding, of course, race in many cases? However, this notion was not first articulated by Counts, but greatly

informed his thinking and significantly influenced the rise of what we call the era of progressive education.

Counts also was one of the first examples of a white progressive educational thinker promoting the idea of school-based critical pedagogical approaches. Counts serves as a kind of bridge into thinking about education, race, and socialization in radical terms for this review. Besides Black Scholars of the time, very few white educational scholars saw systems of education as places that could be used to help or harm people.

Counts, for this review, connects the project of education to a larger “education international” project that sought to use education to create a new man, a progressive man, a man who could transcend the trivial prizes of clan and tribe. The goals were admirable. However, there was a failure to adequately account for the historical tripwire of race and racism in the American social order.

Cultural Reproduction, Race, and Economics

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’ (1977) research on the organization of schools as corresponding socializing agents of the capitalist system serves as a starting point for critically theorizing education systems. Bowles and Gintis (1977) theorized that schools served as a socializing force of capitalism that prepared students for structures, norms, and values of modern capitalism; that educational system reflects the inherent inequalities of the capitalist economy. Bowles and Gintis also theorized that the idea of

“work” cast a “long shadow” in education. Similar to that of Jencks (1972), research that theorized and suggested that if society wanted to reduce inequality, it should think about adopting policies designed to equalize “income” instead of attempting to equalize

opportunity in education, that schooling only affects incomes to a minor degree. Bowles and Gintis agree with Jencks concerning this point, but extend his argument to critique the authoritarian tendencies of schooling itself. This authoritarian tendency for Bowles and Gintis are found in the very structure of how Western schools are organized; in their view, as an agent of capital pushing children into the “long shadow.” Bowles and Gintis theorized that societal liberation from education was doomed to failure because capitalism demands and cannot survive without an obedient and subservient workforce.

Schools are designed to socialize students into that obedient and subservient workforce.

Willis (1973) in Learning to Labour, for class and cultural production and reproduction has been a cornerstone of critical insight into the nature of subcultures, social class, and masculinity. Willis’s research advanced the idea of social reproduction theory, which according to sociologist Christopher B. Doob (2012), refers to an emphasis on structures and activities that transmit social inequality from one generation to the next.

Willis found that the students in the all-boys school he studied, Hammertown Boys, developed a counterculture to that of the schools. The counterculture was built on a:

working class repertoire of privileging practical knowledge, life

experience, and street wisdom over theoretical knowledge, a glorification

of hard manual labor, displaying chauvinistic masculinity, challenging

obedience, an attempt to acquire non-formal control over the work

process, and attributing high value to the group (Fisher, 2011, p. 1).

What makes Willis’s book so profound is his finding that in the lads’ (students’) rejection of “formal knowledge and skills” of the school, the lads were only reproducing the class position they celebrated but also feared.

The lads viewed formal knowledge of schooling as something that would not serve them in life and would only get them a desk position which demands more of them but is symbolically less rewarding, think Marx’s idea alienation from work here. Willis contended that the lads were conscious of what ultimately determined the fate of their class; he saw it as not the acquiring of skills, as held by the individualist ethos, but the requirements of the labor market. The students’ view of the dominating, disciplinary mechanisms of school, as helping to seal their future outcomes as workers, which consequently enabled the social reproduction of class positions.

Willis concluded that schools are not all-powerful in reproducing class, but liberal educational policies must be integrated in regards to causing educational and socioeconomic inequality, schools are agents of mainstream society and are used as tools to serve the interest of that society. This status must be questioned if true liberation is to occur. “There may be a justified skepticism about liberal claims in education, but the

Reproduction’ perspective moves too quickly to a simple version of their

opposite. Apparently, education unproblematically does the bidding of the

capitalist economy by inserting working-class agents into unequal futures

... The actually varied, complex, and creative field of human

consciousness, culture, and capacity is reduced to the dry abstraction of

structural determination. Capital requires it. Therefore schools do it.

(Willis, 1981, p. 205)

The first three researchers highlighted establish a critical connection for this review between capitalism, education and social reproduction by asking the question, If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who or what produces the workers? For Bowles,

Gintis, and Willis, state educational systems served as a socializing tool or “producer” for capital and elites. That these reproductive systems are a part of a state socialization project that processes workers into a system of labor with the ultimate goal of serving the productive needs of capital and economics. Bhattacharya (2017), put it another way

“What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work, every day so that she can produce the wealth of society” (par. 2).

Bowles, Gintis, and Willis’s social reproduction critique is also interesting, coming some mere 40 years after Counts; and is an interesting reflection on how radical the imagination on the “role of schools” and its relationship to society had shifted. Kailin

(2002) theorized philosophical thinkers like Counts viewed education institutions as in a traditionalist 20th century paradigm of assimilation, chiefly, that school system were assisting immigrant children of european descent to shed off their “primordial” ethnic attachments. Although Counts was labeled a “red,” by his critics, he always identified as progressive which left him devoid of a capitalist critique of the systems he held so dear and worked so hard to bring about. In Dare the School Build a New Social Order?,

Counts advocated for the world that Bowles, Gintis, and Willis and other critical scholars of the late 20th century, now found so objectionable. He wanted “systems of education” to become the dominant force in the production of rituals of social order. Nevertheless

Bowles, Gintis, and Willis, judgment was a simple one, what is the society that progressive scholars like Counts sought to create? Bowles, Gintis, and Willis systematic criticism of schools observed the dangers of “capital cooptation,” and the danger of leaders not having a clear political ideology, centered in a Marxist or in an African- centered sense collectivist critique.

Philosophies of critical ideology bridge Bowles, Gintis, and Willis to a broader analysis of “systems of control” coming from marginalized communities. However, the philosophies of progressive scholars like Counts failed where so many policymakers fail; in not adequately centering histories and race and racial domination within systems of socialization. Critical scholars’ attention to race and its connection to systems as places of power advanced the question of how these systems operate as an “authoritarian role” in a student’s socialization process. It leads them to question why society is not placing

“significances” on histories of race and domination. What happens to a system, built by the state and designed to socialize certain segments of students to be “obedient and subservient workers” ripe for capitalist exploitation. What happens when students’ rebellion, i.e., “Willis’s Learning to Labour counterculture,” and what happens when a society is built and defined by the devaluation of blackness conceptualizes race and racism. How do systems of education and its role as a social reproductive instrument handle that phenomenon?

Cultural Resistance

Connerton (1983), viewed race as a central philosophical, economic and historical concept that formed and shaped traditions and histories of the world. Inferior, no longer merely meant different, it meant an exclusion by means of racialization. Gilroy terms this

“Raciology,” perhaps a lack of Weber’s idea of modernity and rationalization. Gilroy

(1993) attempted to demonstrate with his counter-history of modernity- beginning with the position of slaves and their descendants as the point of view. Gilroy (1999) theorized

that with the rise of the racialization, it transformed the national community which he terms “universal humanity” and shifted humanity’s viewpoints away from what he observed as complete negation and repudiation of politics as it had been practiced in the past. Gilroy (1999) observed that the effects of this new politics were not limited to the victims of raciology. Instead of solidarity or universality, a signifier of modernity, dating back to past european worker and peasant struggles, their consciousness was amputated

(Gilroy, 1999).

According to Gilroy in many circumstances, these supposed community members, brothers and sisters in the universal struggle for humanity, were offered an ideology of superiority, a kind of glamour of whiteness, or Aryanness. However, Haider

(2017), views this notion of Gilroy through another lens, for him, the failure of mass white solidarity is indeed a conception of buying into the Gilroin idea of “glamour of whiteness,” which he terms “white-skin privilege.” However, it is also a form of “capital cooptation.” These workers are just as oppressed as Black workers, exploited to a lesser degree, but still, exploited by a system of capital. In Haider’s opinion, these workers were given something akin to a “meaningless social status” in what people call “white privilege” that removed them from the liberatory struggles and recruited them to become defenders of a system that exploits everyone, except a small, wealthy elite.

Haider’s notion of whiteness as “meaningless social status,” and Willis work in

Hammertown presents a couple of themes, particularly the reproduction of white supremacy. Moreover how it is reproducing and embedding notions of anti-blackness into systems of control that are continuing the process of racialization. Returning to Willis, it is interesting that the working class lads in the school developed a culture that included

elements of “white-skin privilege.” It is also fascinating that these young men saw the educational and systemic failures that surrounded them. However, it appeared they were unable to rise above their skin and sex privileges to form solidarity with other marginalized groups in their system of socialization. Why is this? Why were these students’ who were victims of negative socialization and unfavorable labeling by formal systems; systems that ultimately controlled their lives, exploited their labor and sorted them into a world of “work,” that was visibility destructive to their “bodies and souls,” unable to find common ground? Could this be a case of communal norms being reproduced? Could this be a case of the students living in an English society that devalued blackness; could their “young” cultural imagination not extend as far as seeing the full humanity of their minority school peers? There is a similar question to be asked in the United States and other western societies, which Gilroy attempts to answer when responding to a question about the 2007 British Terrorist bombings. Gilroy writes,

“The fantasy of Britain as a beleaguered country perpetually fighting

Rourke’s Drift against an invading horde must be explicitly opposed. We

need leaders who will be brave enough to say not that we should stop

apologizing for the lost empire, but that it was the empire that made this

country what it is and that we are still dealing with the consequences (par.

11).”

Gilroy with this response, presents a critical critique that explores systems, culture, race, and schools; that racial discrimination is so embedded in our system that it has become nearly invisible. This invisibility in Gilroy’s opinion has made society susceptible to reproducing of traditions and customs grounded in socially constructive ideologies of

domination. Indeed from the criticisms I have read about Willis’s work, there appears to be an emphasis on the Hammertown students’ racial and sexist expressions and not on the idea that the young men saw the educational and systemic failures around them. That the students were witnessing the beginning of late-stage capitalism- yet they elected to continue to hold on to notions of “white skin privileges.” Which led me to wonder, why are so many scholars focused on the relational aspect of white supremacy?

Yancy & Feagin (2015) theorizes that many mainstream social scientists that focus on racism issues have relied heavily on what he calls, “inadequate analytical concepts like prejudice, bias, stereotyping and intolerance” (Yancy & Feagin, 2015, par.

5). He considers that these concepts are useful, but were crafted by white social scientists, focused on “individual racial and ethnic issues,” and not on “systemic racism,” what he determines is the major task of the moment. The sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian

Barbara J. Fields termed this phenomenon “Racecraft,” an idea that structural inequality has been replaced by a “neo-liberal” ideology of individualism and “personal responsibility” as the main explanation for “gross inequality.” While at the same time,

“attention to persistent and structural racism faded, supplanted by a focus on race and

“race relations” (Fields & Fields, 2015). For example, the nation became predictively upset with the white Starbucks manager who called the police on the two black men; however, there “was and still is” a failure for the nation to have a more substantial conversation and critique of socialization practices that inculcate fears of blackness in everyone. None of the outraged people on TV made a more substantial systematic critique that we should not feel anger for the Starbucks manager; she was doing what she was socialized to do?

Feagin (2009) similar to Fields and Fields introduces the idea of “The White

Frame” which builds on his concepts and theoretical frameworks generated from his previous work. Feagin (2009) views the white frame both as a product and producer of whites’ brute power and hegemonic dominance over people of color in shaping the modern world (i.e., slavery, colonization, and genocide); that the world is organized not only on “racist prejudices and stereotypes of conventional analyses” but also ideologies, narratives, images and emotions of racism (Feagin, 2015, par. 6). Additionally, Feagin theorizes, “that all whites, no matter what their racial prejudices and other racial framings entail, benefit from many racial privileges routinely granted by this country’s major institutions to whites” (Feagin, 2015, par. 6).

Wilderson III (2014) and Mbembe (2015) view black liberatory practices as a fight against systemic “anti-black identities.” Mbembe views this struggle in the sense of control of one’s person, in the most basic sense (life or death); an exploration of agency denied to members of the African diaspora, exclusively based on the idea of Blackness equals Slaveness. Indeed, for Afro Pessimist scholars, this denial and the subsequent search is a historical one, a metaphorical treasure hunt, that seeks to understand how the world has been organized and how has the evolutionary political path of “continental

Africa” been altered. These scholars view this evolutionary chain breaking at the moment

Arab traders walked Africans out of continental Africa, and european loaded Africans on boats, bound for a prophetic life of work in the new world and forced participation in a system of capitalism, unseen in human history.

This history for them drives the world of capital and social relations of peoples in modern society. Cedric Robinson (2000) theorizes that slavery created a kind of

schizophrenia in europe that led to a rationalization of the enslavement of “their fellow human.” This rationalization weakened the recognition of the humanity of Africans; which overwhelmed the earliest anti-slavery sentiment and literature, overwhelming the more constant and morally profound tradition of racism, which leads to a denial of the

African’s social order and history (Robinson, 2000). Why do Africans even matter, why do “Black Live Matter.” Slaves lost their social lives; Slavers lost their regard for the humanity of their fellow man—i.e., Orlando Patterson (1982) idea of “Social death” or for the purposes of this review, european “spiritual death.”

This fundamental racial and cultural consideration of the world is critical to my understanding of the world, and how I am attempting to justify why African-centered education is a cultural and educational revolutionary practice, that could serve as a kind of systemic anti-black antidote. We must understand how the world has come to be, before we can honestly give students the tools to fight back. If we return to Patterson and his view of the “transformed world,” In Slavery and Social Death, Patterson conjures a world that fits somewhat neatly into the Afro Pessimist tradition and is a clear starting point to explore how attitudes and views are seeded, grown and flowered into the world we are socialized into today. Patterson believes slavery and capitalism were fundamentally used to define the world we are in; this defining transformation and realigned societies based around domination, war, and blood. I think Patterson is asking the question- can the world just lay aside those tools of terrorism when the practices are no longer in state-sponsored use? For Patterson and this review, the idea that the entire society being affected by rituals of terror is an intriguing one and is why practices that decenter europe and whiteness is such a revolutionary idea for people racialized as black

with negative histories of capitalist exploitation. These systems could be a key for these communities to find agency and develop healthy social practices that has been so denied to black people over the centuries.

African Centered Education

Dr. Amos Wilson in 1984, speaking on what he saw as the crisis in African

American education saw the educational development of Black people as a process of years of miseducation and outright hostility; from a system he saw designed to socialize black children into a reactionary relationships with systems of control and domination.

Indeed during Wilson’s 1984 lecture, he spoke about his career as an agent of white supremacy; how his work history gave him a keen insight into how systems of control conspired to erect barriers to keep racialized people out of paths of success. These systems as he viewed them, were a combination of capitalism and cultural domination, assisted by hostile systems of socialization.

Wilson, who spent the bulk of his academic career as a psychologist and Pan-

African philosopher, posed a question in this lecture, how do we educate students to be reactive to “systems” or “structures” of white supremacy and not responsive to individual acts of racism whose only purpose is to serve to indoctrinate black students into accepting racist propaganda? In this Wilson saw a challenge, a kind of task that combined cultural socialization and projects that connected black children and families to a historical and cultural map of the Black experience in the United States and the world. This map for him also focused on connecting African Americans to the broader diaspora which he believed would fuse populations together through survival histories (Wilson, 1984).

Wilson’s lecture was also a recognition of the effects the socialization process have on our society’s most vulnerable members and acknowledge the psychological health Western system have on black children. This for him is done by questioning the effectiveness of “education and intelligence” in the project of Black Liberation. Wilson sees “education and intelligence,” merely as a tool to solve problems, particularly to that of a people or nation. Wilson and educational scholars like him saw the challenge of mainstream educational systems as critiques of ideologies and their systems of control.

Wilson viewed mainstream schools as tools of white supremacy; reproducing and transmitting negative notions of dehumanization into black children. He believed that if these notions were to be combated, it would require a project that uniquely targeted victims of such propaganda.

Critiques of Mainstream Systems of Education

I put forward that theories about particular claims or challenges are not new when exploring systems of education. I view models that challenge mainstream systems of education as critiques of those systems. Take, for example, Nancy Levit (1999), who saw the proliferation of single-gender schools in the 1800s and 1900s as a fix for traditions of denying women access to public education. Basically, the critique of society by the same- gender models, particularly “female schools” was a mechanism to right the wrongs of white male patriarchy. On the other hand, the Democratic educational model is centered on the ideas of participatory democracy. Shirky (2008) views participatory democracy as striving to create opportunities for all members of the population to make meaningful contributions to the decision-making process by broadening the range of people who have access to formal decision making.

At the core of democratic schools are two challenges to the mainstream school model. First, it questions the philosophical relationship of the “child” to the state and thus brings into question the social construction of the notion of childhood, adolescence and adulthood; which in our society has been socially constructed into two parts, the time before the age of majority (which is merely the acquisition of the legal control over one’s person) and adulthood. Secondly, it questions who should govern schools and can the

“element” of governance be a useful tool in the overall project of human development and socialization. Additionally, the Democratic Educational model seeks to create meaningful learning through genuine student participation in school governance. The quality of learning that takes place is facilitated through the students’ participation in governance. This participation is authentic because of the role the students play in the imagining of the system.

However when looking at African-centered Schools and challenges to mainstream systems of education, Asante (1998) while discussing the notion of the universality of

European literature, said, “just as fifteenth-century european could not cease believing that the earth was the center of the universe many today find it difficult to stop viewing europeans/ American cultures as the center of the social universe” (Asante, 1998, p. 73).

For Asante, the very idea of the “makeup of society” is a societal construction; that in its very nature is a form of western arrogance or a radical eurocentrism. Ana Monteriro-

Ferreira (2014) terms this “westernity,” which she uses to define Asantean europeans particularism and the social construction of that “europeans particularism” as a universal value.

Asante theorizes that there are distinct cultural differences between African and european peoples and that Western social science has negated the worldview or cultural reality of African people (Asante, 1998). For many the concept of Afrocentricity has been used to express many different ideologies, this has led to confusion and some to question the validity of the idea. This point is worth stressing, “Afrocentricity is a long and established intellectual discourse about the experiences of African-descended people…

Afrocentricity is not a Black version of Eurocentricity- A white supremacist notions whose purposes are to protect White privilege and advantage in education, economics, politics, and so forth (M’Baye, 2011, p. 39).”

Moreover, this educational model is not an ideology of black separatism.

Afrocentricity is an exploration of another theoretical framework of education, a framework that intentionally positions histories and practices linked to the African continent. For Afrocentric scholars an African-centered curriculum can be of as much benefit to whites as to blacks. For example, Asante points out that schools do not sufficiently cover slavery and its aftermath with the result that many Whites are unaware of African American culture and contributions. An Afrocentric curriculum would inform whites about this missing historical information and the cultural contributions of African-

Americans. However, much of the research about Afrocentricity emanates from the assumption that any meaningful and authentic study of peoples of African descent must begin and proceed with Africa as the center and not on periphery (Schiele, 1994). For the

African-centered person, this is about conceptualizing a multicultural and diversified society grounded in reality. That society is not just diversified in racial characteristics, but also in its philosophical foundations (Schiele, 1994).

What makes the concept of Afrocentricity in education, so potentially liberating for peoples of African descent is the notion of centering History, Culture, and

Community at the center of the educational and institutional process. Asante and other

African-centered scholars, view American classrooms as places where white students can see themselves in leadership, pedagogical approaches and curriculum. Moreover, that systems are made and modeled after these students’ histories and customs. For example, take Demerath, Lynch, and Davidson’s (2008) research of a middle-class Suburban High

School’s culture; they found that minority students failed to see themselves represented in the school where the study took place, a school with a majority white teaching staff.

Moreover, interestingly the black students felt they were unable to fully develop the confidence they “self-identified” as important to entering adulthood. “One African

American male student said in his senior year that having more black teachers would

‘give you more confidence’” (Demerath, Lynch, & & Davidson, 2008, p. 278).

For Piert (2015), educational experiences for many in classrooms are from approaches grounded in eurocentrism that prevents certain students from experiencing the socialization process of school in a healthy way. For both Piert and Asante, schools as currently constituted, are not environments free from ideology, that serve as neutral places for discovery and learning, but are places where non-White students are made to see themselves and their groups as the, acted upon.

African-Centered Education and Ideology

Again, if we return to the question in the introduction; why are there

assumptions that black parents wish to send their children into school

environments that inflict mental harm on their children?

We can see that “Afrocentric education is an educational model focused on proclaiming knowledge of one’s history and heritage, to create an identity that is not based on the views of others, but based on principles and cultural traditions of African and African American people in history” (Coley, 2008, p. 14). For Asante, the primary goal of African-centered education is to liberate African people’s suppressed and oppressed truths. This philosophical approach recalls Wilson’s idea of challenging mainstream pedagogical approaches that define the social construction of “education and intelligence,” particularly his assertion of exploring and deconstructing agents of anti- black ideology found in the student socialization process.

Again, this conception relates to Berger and Luckmann’s and Stankiewicz’s ideas of knowledge being socially constructed and shaped by specific sociocultural conditions and theory, and refined through reflection. What Wilson, Berger and Luckmann, and

Stankiewicz are describing is a process that creates healthy environments of “caring and belonging” that are intended to foster growth in students. African-centered scholars’ critique of mainstream schools are that these environments indeed foster growth, but fail to foster growth for all students; that there appears to be a unique harm being done to students racialized in systems of white supremacy. That the system Berger and

Luckmann and Stankiewicz theorized about is a system that has historically been a tool for the devaluation and continued exploitation of racialized people; that if this system is not disrupted it will lead to group destruction.

African-centered models are a challenge to the long-held consensus of collective intelligence and how that intelligence is fostered. Tom Atlee (2008), who is interested in fostering collective intelligence and participatory modes of governance, forwards the idea

of radically rethinking what it means to be a participant in a system that had cordoned off the “on-ramps” of achieving intelligence. Atlee asked,

What culture and education and social institutions are theoretically all

about -- they are also subject to (a) calcification into forms that resist

needed changes and (b) manipulation by power holders and others to

interfere with the full power of human consciousness and intelligence.

(Atlee, 2008, par. 5)

Baldwin (1980) theorizes that Afrocentricity seeks to disentangle the cultural notions of

African and european identities, and repair the historical devaluing of things deemed

“African.” That the model seeks to reclaim the value of Africa and Blackness by centering learning around the ideas of collectivity and spiritual perspective. This positioning is done in the midst of a hostile cultural environment that has historically devalued things deemed “African” and thus a lower form of humanity or thinking, a call back to Atlee’s (2008) notion of “cordoned off knowledge.” Asante see this process as a reclaiming of items deemed African as a source of agency and expression of consciousness. This, for him is vital, by making the political choice to position Africa and

Africans as his ideological center; he is challenging the objectivity, universalism, and overall imposition of Europe.

Additionally, for Asante, there is an ideological step African-centered thinkers have to take before a true liberatory process can occur: there must be a realization that histories and knowledge are based in part on narratives of “white superiority.” That as controversial as African-centered education appears to be to mainstream educational thinkers, African-centered practitioners must vigorously bring attention to the ideological

project of mainstream schools. Which he sees as awash in histories and practices of socially reproducing customs and histories, termed racial mythology stating,

“it is not color that creates problems in the Western world between

African descended people and whites, particularly Anglo-Germans. It is

rather a strange belief on the parts of whites that they are superior to

Africans, that they have a right to establish and maintain a hierarchy over

blacks by force of arms or customs or laws or habits (Asante, 2000).”

The African-centered model is in stark contrast to what scholars see as an individualist identity found in mainstream (Eurocentric) schools. Durden (2007) sees

Eurocentric models as placing great emphasis on physical and material attributes of people, instead of emphasizing the nonmaterial or intangible qualities, such as the collective or greater good. Additionally, this emphasis on communal well-being or mutual prosperity connects to research done on organizational change and care. The

African-centered model emphasizes culture and group advancement and utilizes culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy as a praxis for students’ socialization through intentional teachers’ instruction. On a side note, it is interesting for me, how close the notion of community building is to the phenomenon of “turnaround leadership in education”. I am a believer that turnaround leadership is mostly illusionary, but the emphasis on culture is an intriguing connection. Both leadership styles have a critique of the mainstream educational model, and both seek to alter the cultural landscape.

However, I am always concerned with what messages are being transmitted when leadership and cultures have no upfront stated ideological project.

Akbar (1984) describes the Afrocentric model as acknowledging individuality, but also ensuring and envisioning those identities as a part of the more substantial collective. Because of this critique of mainstream education, it is essential that leadership in this model pay care to the notion of “Belonging and Care.” Again, Mazama (2015) sees the idea of community building as teaching and leadership praxis; as a process of healthy educational scholarship assisting vulnerable members of the society into healthy black identities. For her, The Afrocentric model is a robust, and upfront ideological approach for members of the African diaspora to attain a sense of agency in the process of socially constructed notion of what intelligence is, a form of nation-building stating,

One scholarship cannot claim to be “neutral,” or objective ``: much to the

contrary, it must be consciously oriented in such a manner that it will be of

service to the African community, out of obligation to one’s community.

Given that Afrocentricity was identified as the indispensable remedy to

end our disenfranchisement and inferiorization, African scholars must

exercise their own agency, that is, embrace the Afrocentric paradigm.

(Mazama, 2015, par. 28)

Afrocentricity in Schools; and Liberation

For Leone, Culotta, Jackson, DiTomasso, and Goff (2014) children of color are entering into histories of dehumanization that are a necessary component of state- sanctioned violence. In their study, they found that middle-class white males are not held fully responsible for their actions during their adolescent years and agree with sociologist

Michael Kimmel (2009) that their time of arrested development can extend well into their

late 20s. However, Leone et al. (2014) argue that black children are viewed by society as adults as soon as 13 stating,

“with average age overestimations of Black children exceeding four and a

half years in some cases. In other words, their findings suggest that,

although most children are allowed to be innocent until adulthood, Black

children are not (Leone, Culotta, Jackson, DiTomasso, & Goff, 2014, p.

541).”

Kailin (2002), who found from her ethnographic research, that black students in middle school had a slightly better chance of dropping out or being pushed out instead of graduating; and black students were four times more like to be judged “cognitively disabled” when there was not a presence of a black school psychologist. Jalil Bishop

Mustaffa (2016) terms this “Educational Violence,” which he views as a practice of participants and leaders using systematic power to marginalize people both in and outside of formal systems of schooling. This troubling data can be expanded on in many categories. The point is that black and brown students face troubling cultures in schools, which serve to harm the overall educational experience for students of color.

For Piert and Asante the very notion of an educational process built around

Afrocentricity could serve as an ameliorating tool of reaffirmation of blackness in a world that seeks to devalue it. They view schools, similar to that of Tyson (2002), (1) teach academic skills and (2) serve as an agent of cultural orientation; in Tyson’s view, the traditional public school served as an agent of nation-building for europeans and their allies. Kailin (2002), views what she calls antiracist and multicultural education as a system that offers a critical analysis of dominant approaches to systems of control in

society. That the model focuses on community needs and a capitalist critique through practices that seeks to repair black social and cultural bonds. On this point Asante agrees with Kailin stating, it is essential to construct a system that challenged white supremacy on the terms set by black people.

Piert found in her study of independent Afrocentric schools; that students were practicing a “higher order of thinking” that they were connecting the process of education to the larger project of nation-building. The students she interviewed saw themselves many years later, as servant and builders of a larger nation. That they were not single individual free from responsibility, but brothers and sisters in struggle helping to uplift their nation. Peirt discovered that this model institutionalizes the notion of leader creation, creation that sought to challenge the prevailing assumptions of blackness. Piert also found there was a focus on “Principles of Self-Advocacy,” particularly Activism and

Student Agency that were core principles of the schools she studied. This aspect of self- advocacy is the point of Afrocentricity. It appears that the students Piert interviewed were being socialized as agents of anti-white supremacy, which I describe as beliefs, actions, movements, and policies adopted or developed to oppose racism and white supremacy.

That the children were displaying the same phenomenon of unlearning of harmful ideologies of socialization, highlighted by Wilson when discussing the 1970s and 1980s replications of, “Kenneth and Mamie Clark Doll Test.”

It is important to recognize the richness of true multiculturalism and how it can serve as a marketplace of inclusion and difference, but it is also essential for leaders to recognize the troubling nature of Eurocentric culture domination of American schools.

Manning Marable (1995) in discussing Multiculturalism rejected the idea and model of

cultural assimilation and social conformity. For him and other Afrocentric scholars, multiculturalism was a kind of escaping the “mythical melting pot” the historical idea of racialized member’s culture being combined into a non-racist, thoroughly homogenized blend of culture that never existed.

These scholars take into account the barriers that were put in place for African

Americans and seek to incorporate histories of racial and economics into the pedagogical approach. Similar to how the democratic school model seeks to incorporate emancipatory practices in its pedagogical approach or single-gendered schools seek to make right past gendered wrongs. Afrocentric systems seek to encourage a real search for care and belonging for African American parents and students in schools systems that go beyond the economic critique of Willis, Bowles and Gintis. Scholars committed to the

Afrocentric system critique understand that true educational multiculturalism is first, a recognition of the socially constructed reality of schools and society.

The universality of Eurocentrism for African centered thinkers must be challenged; for true multiculturalism to arise, minority cultures must assert themselves into the space reversed as the universal commons. Multi-cultural means “many,” yet for many students of color in schools, this reality fails to materialize and leads to what some scholars theorize as “harm and danger” of passively participating in a system that does not value their cultural contribution to the fabric of America.

Role Theory and Racialized Social Scripting

Role theory refers to the cultural norms concerning the psychological and interactional aspects of members of society, such as mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and grandparents. The originators of role theory are Ralph Linton in sociology and

George Herbert Mead in social psychology. When they refer to “Role” it applies to the social expectations and the “social scripts” of relationship roles, chiefly how cultural practices and social ideologies have shaped social schemas of individuals. One aspect of role theory studies investigates how particular aspects of roles are acquired during the process of socialization. In other words, these scholars were interested in determining how societies formulate certain “social scripts” or expectations with specific social groups.

Structural role theory as developed by Linton and Parsons refers to the structural and systematic aspects of status and role in the larger society. When Linton and Parsons considered the structured nature of Role Theory, they came to the recognition that distinct social systems and its content, expectations and history of social roles determine how individuals experience social life. For example, what are the social scripts associated with what roles of mother and father in society? Social scripts of gender roles in our society might be that of the mother is in the home; she should raise the children, cook, etc., whereas in other societies, mothers should work, share with the husbands the daily work of the home and care of children, etc. A fundamental understanding of Role Theory is that of consequences. What are the consequences for the rest of the social system of the specific role? How does the role contribute to the maintenance of the system? Moreover, most importantly, for this review, how does a particular role help in the achievement of the collective and social goals of the broader social system?

Mead (1934) theorized that the organized community or social group gives an individual his unity of self or “the generalized other (a person’s common expectations about actions and thoughts within a particular society).” With Mead stating,

The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole

community. Thus, for example, in the case of such a social group as a ball

team, the team is the generalized other in so far as it enters, as an

organized process or social activity—into the experience of any one of the

individual members of it. (p. 154)

Mead speaking from 80 years prior to our modern social and organizational scholars see communities assuming different systematic forms. Mead and our modern scholars believe these multifaceted organizations systemically give rise to a generalized other and a self that corresponds to it. Generalized others can also be found in social classes or subgroups, such as political parties, clubs, corporations, which are all actually functional social units, in terms of which their individual members are directly related to one another (Aboulafia, 2008; 2016).

When thinking about the broader “social culture” script students find themselves associating with, it raises questions about how our system metabolizes social views and self-imagines into lived reality for racialized members of our society (a kind of, what can be perceived and achieved for certain people). For Mead and scholars like him, realize that social pressure or even social expectations labor as a kind of social foreclosure mechanism, in a sense that social relations and social expectations are serving as a kind gatekeeping to certain realities. Indeed they believe and understand that attention needs to be paid to how the students are pedagogical, consuming culture, and history if we are genuinely looking to root out specific harmful scripts that usually fall to minority members of society.

For example, I think of Herman and Chomsky (2002) and their “Propaganda

Model Theory” that focused on how our society formulates and implements propaganda and systemic biases through corporate mass media. However, for the purpose of this section, I want to look at a small theory Chomsky put forward in the book. Chomsky described and critiqued a significant societal practice in the book, that of social filtering.

Suggesting that that society is ordered in a particular direction, to where social filtering of people begin in kindergarten or earlier, as to by the time a person reaches the heights of our society, they would have already been captured, vetted and approved. For him, things like discipline gaps and school to prison pipelines… are all machinery capital uses to socially filter people out.

Dual Role Theory

I see African-centered Schools creating a kind of Dual Role Theory or social script. Part of the problem for many black children is the lack of direct conversations about social positioning, however when this does occur in a formal organization where students are explicitly told racialized rules, regulations and expectations, students’ achievement improves. For Asante and Piert racialized conversations and experiences serve as a kind of process of demystification of whiteness. Ray’s (2019) examination of the “The Racialized Organization” found whiteness served as an organizational credential or access point for dominant (In group) organizational members. Whiteness within “The

Racialized Organization” serves as an organizational schema that disallows racialized persons full access to organizational resources.

“Whiteness as access” is invisible and not perceived fully, however if a person is specifically told of an organizational barrier that person will, in some cases for the first

time, have access to their objective reality, allowing them to actually operate with full knowledge of their “social script” and social position. For example, looking at chart 1, I am imagining socialization happening on a line that follows, Erikson’s (1988) notion of social development. I see over time, different groups or people diverging from that nice neat line of development Erikson theorized about. However if the society of Erikson’s focus is social and cultural, positioning students on path of healthy human development, we can also view, Erikson’s companion framework of negative human development outcomes of socialization as maybe a kind of off ramp into another ideological path. I view African-centered Schools as an off ramp for black children experiencing negative racialization in schools. The arrows on the chart signify students diverging onto other

Paths of Social Development. This divergence could happen at any stage, they are just randomly placed on chart 1. One of these paths of divergence could be an African- centered intervention with its own ethno culturally relevant Stages of Psychosocial

Development.

Figure 3: Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development

Racialized Identity Formation

The significance of cultural and racial identity as a contributing factor to the psychosocial wellness of African American students has been well-documented and studied in Social Science and Education literature. Cross’s (1971) conceptualization of black identity formation termed Nigrescence is theorized as a five-stage model for

African Americans moving from self-hatred to self-love: (1) preencounter, (2) encounter,

(3) immersion-emersion, (4) internalization, and (5) internalization-commitment

(Constantine, Richardson, Benjamin, & Wilson, 1998). Cross contributed to the field of social science a framework for researchers to understand that a unique and dynamic process of socialization was occurring and social factors influenced it. Additionally,

Cross was able to introduce into mainstream social science the notion that African

Americans’ organizational participation influenced their identity formation. Those factors and specific organizational actors initiated particular stages in the Cross Model. For example, Cross theorized that individuals in the pre-encounter stage believe race and racial group membership are not important. However, when a person has a traumatic encounter with racial prejudice, that event “shakes a person from their original view so that they are more receptive to new interpretations of their racial identity” (French,

Edward, Allen, & Aber, 2006, par. 9). This process of growth only occurs when a person has a direct encounter with white supremacy.

Cross’s model, unlike Erikson’s framework, places race and social interaction at the forefront of human development. Cross believed it essential for a black person to have a traumatic encounter with racial prejudice for them to be receptive to new interpretations of their racial identity. Similarly, when looking at additional models of racial identity formation, there is a consistent theme of “racialized occurrences” triggering processes of racialization and new conceptions of racial identity formation. For example, Poston (1990) and his examination of biracial identity development, examines the problematic nature of cultural forces pulling on the individual, in this case, the cultural construct of race is pulling the individual in an attempt to define the racial identity of the biracial person. This type of human development is ambiguous and does not quite follow the neat and tidy nature of Erikson’s framework.

Beverly Tatum (1992), expanding on Cross’s model, viewed race as a kind of social taboo that servers to create barriers in American educational systems. She theorized that race served to clash with the meritocratic discourse that is prominent in American society. Additionally, she perceives white students’ failure to recognize race as having a

meaningful impact on the lives of minorities and themselves. There appears to be incompatibility between Erikson’s Psychosocial Stage Six: Intimacy vs. Isolation and minority student development. Tatum and Cross view racial identity construction as one of the most formative processes of human development for minority persons. Moreover,

Tatum and Cross observe this process of development as occurring at any age or any point on the Erikson’s Psychosocial Framework.

Dual Role Theory, Cross’s Model and Racialized Socialization Paths

There is a very real tradition of racial social orientation amongst black families, called “The Conversation” which consists of black families having a conversation with their black children about the social realities of the United States. Nevertheless, I think what differentiate traditional black social conversations with African-centered School’s process of healthy black socialization is the sustained process of interaction and indoctrination. Cross see this in his stages: (2) encounter, (3) immersion-emersion and (4) internalization.

Fundamental pillars of the African-centered model is healthy socialization and interaction with fellow black people, fellowship, and a forceful repudiation of the anti- blackness nature of our broader society. There is something unique about the sustained racialized education and interactions students received in African-centered Schools.

Jackson, Jackson, Liles, and Exner, (2013) found in their study of black male undergraduates that the underrepresentation of black men in the university setting reduced positive mentoring opportunities, also known as organization-based relationships, and may have perpetuated deeply ingrained beliefs of inferiority. Cabrera

(2014) asserted that whiteness is continually recreated as socially dominant within the

context of higher education because it is framed as normal. Moreover, the disproportionately high representation of whites in higher education serves as a method of normalization that embeds notions of white supremacy in educational systems. Ray

(2019) and his analysis of the racialized organization sees racial inequality of modern systems as not merely “in” organizations but “of” organizations. Racial processes are foundational to the organizational formation and life, that if leaders want to root out racialism greater care has to be paid to how the very make up organizations serve to reproduce whiteness and system of white domination (Ray, 2019).

Communitarianism as an Idea and Theory

The Tanzanian Philosopher-Statesman Julius K. Nyerere (1964), affectionately known as Mwalimu, wrote in his book of essays Ujamma – The Basis of African

Socialism, the following about how he saw the state of African cultural relationships with what he described as an alien cultural project of European capitalists, Nyerere’s line of thinking in Ujamma, would become one of the bases of what is known as African

Socialism, writing:

In traditional African society everybody was a worker. There was no other

way of earning a living for the community. Even the Elder, who appeared

to be enjoying himself without doing any work and for whom everybody

else appeared to be working, had, in fact, worked hard all his younger

days. The wealth he now appeared to possess was not his, personally; it

was only ‘his’ as the Elder of the group which had produced it. He was its

guardian. The wealth itself gave him neither power nor prestige. The

respect paid to him by the young was his because he was older than they,

and had served his community longer; and the ‘poor’ Elder enjoyed as

much respect in our society as the ‘rich’ Elder

Those of us who talk about the African way of life and, quite rightly, take

a pride in maintaining the tradition of hospitality which is so great a part

of it, might do well to remember the Swahili saying: ‘Mgeni siku mbili;

siku ya tatu mpe jembe’ –or in English, ‘Treat your guest as a guest for

two days; on the third day give him a hoe!’ In actual fact, the guest was

likely to ask for the hoe even before his host had to give him one–for he

knew what was expected of him, and would have been ashamed to remain

idle any longer. Thus, working was part and parcel, was indeed the very

basis and justification of this socialist achievement of which we are so

justly proud. (Nyerere, 1964, pp. 6-7)

Nyerere recognized socialism not as an alien idea to the African continent, but as social order that reflected traditional African lifestyles and points of view. In his view, a

“socialist attitude of mind” was already present in traditional African society. However, what I find so prescient about Nyerere thinking in today’s climate is his critique of

Westernize Imperial thinking about African peoples stating, “We, in Africa, have no more need of being “converted” to socialism than we have of being “taught” democracy.

Both are rooted in our past – in the traditional society which produced us” (Otunnu, 2015, p. 170 ).

Nyerere, saw eurprean socialists as displaying a kind of paternalistic attitude toward African socialists and the continent’s tradition of communitarianism, a kind of,

‘we have to teach these people about Marx and Engels. Before we can acknowledge them

as practicing marxism. Bill Fletcher Jr. (2008) described using a defination of this behavior by Hubert Harrisonas “Radish Socialist,” Red on the outside, white on the inside. However, what made Nyerere and his book of essays so persuasive in the 1960s and now, is his theoretical critique of Western arrogance, attempting to teach African people, the concept of cooperative economics, something he saw as a fundamental organizing principle in African society for nearly 3000 plus years.

Nyerere’s message to the west was (1) a cry and recognition of the many peoples around the globe with histories and cultural practices that employed what some would describe as collectivist approaches to society, built independently of Marx and Engel’s theories; and (2) a message of Sankofa to the broader African diaspora. Nyerere challenged Africans to think bigger, and rediscover their cultural selves before the Maafa.

Indeed, for example, just look at the continent and see how many collectivist ways of being were in Africa alone. There were principals of Harambee, Ubuntu, Sankofa, and of course, Nyerere’s notion of Ujamaa. These same principals of cultural communitarianism can also be found in the de-colonialization efforts in North America, South America,

Asia, and India… all over. It was an idea of self-determination through the historical reclaiming of traditional African idealogies.

Communitarianism as a Praxis of Care

Lomotey (1993) and his exploration of African American principals coined the term “ethno-humanist,” which he used to describe the role of identity amongst black educational leaders. The Ethno-Humanist role encompasses “commitment to the education of all students, compassion for, and understanding of all students and the communities in which they live” (Lomotey, 1993, p. 36). Lomotey’s framework in black

majority black educational spaces. The framework components are a significant component in the discussion on African Communitarianism has been the debate over the position of “the individual and the community.” With many African-centered thinkers projecting the understanding that traditional African cultures prioritized ways of being, in order, to resist the excesses of the individual (Eze, 2007; Ramose, 1999). Its proponents see communitarianism in the broader sense as a social philosophy that emphasizes the centrality or supremacy of the society. For these scholars, communitarian centrality is expressed best in the idea of responsibility to the social (families, groups, formal systems) serving as a mode for “a people” to codify social behaviors that benefit the whole, leading to open participation, dialogue, and shared values (Rawls, 2009; Taylor,

1998). Communitarians understanding of a person’s subjectivity is partly constituted by people with whom they share a social world; with that social world being dependent on how integral social interaction are experienced. With Mbiti (1969) writing;

In traditional life, the individual does not and cannot exist alone except

corporately. He owes this existence to other people, including those of

past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole.

The community must therefore make, create, or produce the individual; for

the individual depends on the corporate group… (pp. 108-109).

Additionally, these scholars contrast their holistic view of the community to what they have come to see as modern forms of extreme individualism or extreme liberalism that they perceived as emphasizing the centrality of the individual as the moral foundation to the society (Etzioni, 2015).

Eze (2007), does not necessarily see these scholars as projecting opposition to the notion of individualism, in fact, Eze through an African-centered lens and Taylor though a classical european philosophical lens observes a more nuanced view of “the role of communities in facilitating the good of the individual…is not prior to the individual and the latter does not pre-exist the community” (Eze, 2007, p. 386). Eze in this nuanced view articulates how notions of community and responsibly to African social groups are woven into the everyday fabric of African communities. Indeed, according to Ramose

(1999) and his exploration of the African concept “Ubuntu”—a Nguni Bantu term meaning “humanity” or translated in other moments as “I am because we are” or

“humanity towards others,” this concept is a way African communities undergirded communal “ways of being,” codify norms, and determine African social comportments.

Moreover, concepts like Ubuntu or Sankofa serve as a philosophy and a culture and as mechanisms for the past to speak to the future. These concepts serve as a tool for communities to conserve cultural touchstones and histories that can be passed down to later generations. Ubuntu, however, for Ramose serves as a broad framework for understanding the social and cultural similarity between African peoples that creates an

African Communitarian interrelatedness of cultural affinity and kinship that grounds culture and philosophy stating,

Our point of departure is that Ubuntu may be seen as the basis of African

philosophy…[And]….a persuasive philosophical argument can be made

that there is a ‘family atmosphere’, that is, a kind of philosophical affinity

and kinship among and between the indigenous people of Africa. (Eze,

2007, p. 387)

Key in understanding contemporaneous discussions of African

Communitarianism is looking at how these understandings effects “the politics of common good,” which many African-centered writers have equated to social consensus.

The “Consensus” does not give an adequate account of the praxis of common good in

African Communitarianism, Eza perceives it as absorbing multiple viewpoints through what he calls a “totalitarian uniformity.” Which he also interestingly proposes to view from another alternative, specifically, “realist perspectives,” which sees a Communitarian culture as not depending on hostile practices of social conformity but methods that attempt for the conversion of beliefs a communal ethos. The following chapter is my

Mythology section, I will demonstrate how, where, and in what form did I undertake this study. There will sections on the research questions, description of the research sites, and an examination of how the unique approach of African centered schooling influenced how I undertook the study. Following chapter 3, my data chapters begin with a exploration of elders, intergenerational learning and student socialization.

Chapter Three: Research Methodology

“African organizational leadership,” and culture is an underdeveloped area of research. Although experts have perceived the continent of Africa as a location lacking a homogeneous population and culture; they have, however, begun to recognize Africa and its people as a location researchable for unique communal and leadership practices that have benefited humanity’s drive to modernity. Mazrui and Levine (1986) describe these practices as a trinity of cultures (ways of being) and values (closeness to nature; familial ties; and religion), that binds populations and ethnic groups throughout greater Africa.

Additionally, Mazrui as an Africana scholar, perceives this “bind,” as extending beyond the physical landmass of Africa into the broader African Diaspora. For him, this bind assists in the creation of an imagined cultural connection, similar to Benedict Anderson’s

(1983) construct of an Imagined Community.

This notion of Mazrui and Anderson’s “Imagined African-centered Community,” is cornerstone to the theoretical framework I used to understand and approach the phenomena of how African-centered leaders shape and define their unique organizational culture. The notion of African-centered organizational culture as an “Imagined Cultural

Creation” and an “Intentional Constructed Organizational Identity (Anderson, 2016;

Chowdhury, 1997),” is at the forefront of how I approached the cultural production in

African-centered systems of socialization. African-centered scholars, policymakers, and practitioners have demonstrated links to specific aspects of African-centered thinking and cultural production that encourage students’ to engage in a process of communitarian social relationships and high level of academic achievement. In figure 4, is how I have

come to understand how the organizational ideology is being construed in African- centered organizations.

Figure 4: Ideological Logic Map

Schools as Ideological Instruments

For these scholars and practitioners, intentional organizational practices serve as cultural binders to students’ sense of cultural and organizational belonging. African- centered schools’ emphasis on communitarian social relationships, black social cohesion, and healthy social bonds connect their organizational citizens (students and adults) to a broader philosophical project of diasporic nation-building designed to reclaim and repair communities in preparation for future political struggles of self-determination (Akbar,

1984; Piert, 2015; Rodriguez, 1996). Moreover, I explored how African-centered culture formulations and school leaders’ “academic and non-academic” systematic practices created a cohesive school organizational culture, tasked with facilitating their students’ sense of organizational belonging and unique process of healthy black socialization into the broader society (Akbar, 1984; Anderson, 2016; Piert, 2015).

Research Design

This inquiry was undertaken by employing a qualitative research design. The qualitative research approach is established upon the premise that organizational cultures, practices, and their realities are socially constructed, complicated, and in constant motion.

This study was guided towards the understanding and significance of social phenomena through an interpretative and descriptive view of the meaning people use to perceive their world and their reality; particularly how participants’ personal racialized experiences, through knowledge and understanding of history or personal perceptions, are used as an organizational “meaning-making” device for social analysis (Cresswell, 2013; Croker,

2009; Elliot & Timulak, 2005; Glesne, 2006 & Merriam, 2009). Additionally, because of the nature of this study, being that of, a descriptive and interpretive ethnographic and case study approach, organizational and social analysis was conceived as a methodologically emergent and participatory process to understand the culture of multiple sites and their participants’ perceptions of their organizational lives (Creswell & Poth, 2017; Markham,

2016).

Additionally, the descriptive and interpretive ethnographic and case study design was employed with an Afrocentric methodological approach. An interpretive design was selected because “knowledge is a social and historical product” (Miles & Huberman,

1994, p. 4), and meaning can be discovered in what people do and experience in their everyday life. The goal of the study was to peer inside a formal organization that centers

race at its ideological core. I wanted to glimpse into how social and organizational actors were making meaning of and defining organizational cultures around their personal and communal racialized experiences.

Janesick (2000) sees qualitative researchers as studying a social setting and making meaning out of what they have seen. This approach was best suited for this study since the intent was to provide the organizational leaders and citizens an opportunity to share their lived experiences as “cultural artisans,” and speak to how their unique form of organizational leadership and participation have come to define their leadership and design of a formal social system. The qualitative research method utilized for this study was a data-gathering method that sought to understand the insights of organizational citizens who attend an African-centered School and how that educational experience has influenced their understanding of our racialized and classed society. Additionally, the qualitative approach stressed methods, such as intensive in-depth interviews, narratives, observations, artifacts, and document analysis that captures the organizational process of meaning-making. Moreover, it captured how I, the researcher, and the participants were engaging and processes of social-cultural production that co-constructed culture and its understandings (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Merriam, 2009).

This design was also necessary because there were several units of analysis in the study. One unit of analysis was viewing the “African-centered educational model” as a formal organization that socialized students into a particular way of being. The study examined the cognitive and non-cognitive organizational practices of the African- centered model and how cultural artisan (leader) influenced organizational experiences of their citizens, in hopes of shifting their social development. I wanted to know how

African children’s organizational membership socialized them into a healthy way of being.

Another unit of analysis was the organizational citizens themselves. Each participant’s life told a different story about how they had experienced and interacted with, what I term in this dissertation the “mainstream educational model (The American traditional public and private education system),” and the descriptive and interpretive approach allowed these unique experiences to be captured and examined individually and collectively. Smart (1998) sees interpretive ethnography as aiming to chart a network of shared meanings that constitute reality within a community. I wanted to center the “black social lived and organizational experiences” as data to inform how organizations can create practices that led to healthy black youth socialization.

One of the surprises that came out during the data collection was the position of

African Communitarianism as an organizing principle in Pan Africanism and African- centered understandings of the world. African Communitarianism for the institutions in the study was seen as an inheritance going back millennia to the African continent. It is also the process of how leaders understand Africa and its descendants’ essential ways of being. For example, the school sites selected for the study, Steve Biko Public Charter

School and Bethune Charter School, ideas of African Communitarianism and

Collectivism is not just about being your brother’s keeper, it is about healing and rebuilding the black community from the wounds of history and the arrows of social and political domination. Learning through an African-centered curriculum is the principal focus for African-centered institutions; it is the reason they are operating and why the

leaders and the schools’ participants are comprehensively paying attention to the holistic reality of black socialization and learning.

Research Questions

1. How do African-centered educational leaders define their guiding ideology?

How do leaders see this ideology defining and shaping their system of

education.

a. How do leaders of African-centered schools define African-

centeredness and African-centered education?

b. How do leaders interpret Afrocentric philosophies?

2. How do African-centered school leaders view the cultural socialization of

black students in systems of white supremacy and how do they perceive

African-centered schools’ role in those systems?

a. What are their aspirations for students (learning and futures)?

b. Relations with the wider non-Afrocentric community and how they see

students interacting with non Afrocentric communities (non-

Afrocentric African American, broader African diaspora, white or non-

African populations).

c. How do Afrocentric school leaders view themselves in relation to

systems of capital (economic accumulation and negative aspects of

capitalist labor, flexible work schedule, unemployment, low-wage

employment, and state enforcement of capital, police and mass

incarceration, lack of males in communities)?

Site Descriptions

The settings for the research were two K-12 African-centered charter schools situated within urban communities in the Midwest and East Coast regions of the United

States. I have used pseudonyms for both schools, students and staff. Both Steve Biko

Charter School and Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School opened as Independent Black

Institutions and operated under the auspices of the Council for Independent Black

Institutions until the mid-2000s, when both schools transitioned from the independent school model as defined by Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) to an independent charter school model. Both schools continued to offer students an African- centered school experience but were also required to implement organizational measurements approved by their state and local charter authorities.

Participants

Data collection consisted of two schools, 18 formal in-depth interviews with school staff (teachers and school staff), three elders who worked in the school but did not have a leadership role beyond being a senior member of the community, and 19 students in five focus groups (four students from MMB and 16 from Biko). Additionally, 53 quick informal conversations with various people in the school buildings were conducted; these conversations included parents, students, family of staff members, maintenance staff, lunchroom staff, building visitors, outside agency staff, and substitute teachers. All participants, except the two elders, were full-time school organizational members. Table

1.1 is a description of the project participants’ pseudonyms and school positions. The students’ names were excluded because students are referred to in the dissertation by

their focus group information. Interviews with school staff took place from April 2019 to

February 2020

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School Participants

. One student focus group with four student participants

. Eight formal school leader interviews: school principal, school

elder, fifth grade teacher, P.E. coach, school assistant (led the

morning circle) and director of student and cultural development

. 28 informal or quick interviews were conducted

Steve Biko Charter School Participants

. Four student focus groups with 15 student participants

. 10 formal school leader interviews: principal/elder; vice principal;

teacher (second-third grade); teacher (first-second grade); school

librarian; current teacher (fourth-fifth grade); special education

teacher; former fourth-fifth grade teacher; kindergarten teacher

. 25 informal or quick interviews were conducted

Table 1: Participant Demographic Data Participants Position School Baba Williams Elder (Board Member) Mary McLeod Bethune Charter Mama Pat Principal Mary McLeod Bethune Charter Mama Gene Teacher (5th grade) Mary McLeod Bethune Charter

Baba Terrell Dir. of Student & Cultural Mary McLeod Bethune Development Charter

Baba Anthony Teacher (P.E.) Mary McLeod Bethune Charter Baba Ken Support Staff Mary McLeod Bethune Charter Mama Tammy Dance Instructor Mary McLeod Bethune Charter Baba Malik Drum Instructor Mary McLeod Bethune Charter Mama Sydney Principal/Elder Steve Biko Charter Mama Nia Vice Principal Steve Biko Charter Mama Jazmin Teacher (Pre K- Kin.) Steve Biko Charter Baba Nicolas Teacher (2nd- 3rd grade) Steve Biko Charter Baba Jake Teacher (1nd- 2rd grade) Steve Biko Charter Baba Menelik School Librarian Steve Biko Charter Mama Janice Teacher (4th- 5th grade) Steve Biko Charter Mama Aliyah Special Education Teacher Steve Biko Charter

Mama Rose Elder (works with 1-2 grades) Steve Biko Charter Baba Reginald Elder (reading) Steve Biko Charter

African-centered Schooling Definition

Independent Afrocentric School. An independent Afrocentric school is a self- identified school that utilizes practices of Afrocentrism or Afrocentricity. These practices can be in the form of an African curriculum and ideological approaches. Additionally, using a traditional definition of an “independent school,” it is a nonpublic, pre-collegiate, self-governing institution that is not financially dependent upon a broader public or sectarian organization. Foster (1992) expands the definition of independent within the

context of the African American community to disclosed schools supported and governed by individuals connected to a church or church congregation.

The Council for Independent Black Institutions, affiliated schools, have additional philosophical requirements to be considered an IBI affiliated school. According to

Lomotey (1992), there are three additional IBI philosophical components a school must adopt and practice to be considered IBI. First, “family-hood”—placing an emphasis on creating a family atmosphere; second, usage of “NGUZO SABA” (Kiswahili for “The

Seven Principles of Blackness), value system; and third, Revolutionary Pan-African

Nationalism. There is a requirement to work toward a political system that will replace the current system of white supremacy, a system that has done so much harm to black people (Karenga, 1980; Lomotey, 1992).

Afrocentric Charter School. Afrocentric Charter Schools are publicly funded independent schools that adopt an African-centered or Afrocentric approach to the educational practice of schooling and socialization. This is done through teaching and social techniques that focus on the praxis of education and intentionally incorporating cultural concepts found on the African continent—concepts such as African language, customs, dance, rituals, and traditions. These concepts are embedded in the everyday classroom and serve as organizational ideology and an idea for how the school produces culture (Shockley & Frederick, 2010; Teasley & Okilwa, 2016).

Traditional Public School with an African-Centered Approach. Public schools with an African-centered approach to education are much like the Afrocentric charter school model. Both schools’ models are publicly funded organizations. However,

the public school model is publicly operated, with an African-centered or Afrocentric approach to the educational practice.

Participant Interviews

All interviews were analyzed using an inductive process of constant comparison across and within cases; further, this iterative process led to the development and refinement of groups of themes that were identified across cases (Erickson, 1986;

Huberman & Miles, 1994). Additionally, a reflective and interrogative process was employed to formulate and develop the direction of the study’s interview questions and topics as the project proceeded. Although the project had a beginning set of protocol questions and themes, the underlying and nonconforming nature of Afrocentrism as a topic required space for flexibility. I also observed this flexibility as a method to formulate questions and topics as an essential check for participants to inform the research, as their “voices and concerns” were the driving force and data for the research. I believed it was essential to build into the data collection process a manner that was flexible in a way that authentically captured participants’ concerns and judgments of their organizational lived experiences (Agree, 2009). This process for Agree (2009) is called a

“qualitative reflective process,” which requires the researcher to be in constant conversation with past interviews as an ongoing process of analysis. In a sense, past data is informing future data collection and understanding.

Recalling Holstein and Gubrium (2000), and their notion of creative interviewing, enables the interviewer to generate a climate of mutual disclosure that creates a social interaction between interviewee and interviewer. Moreover, Holstein and Gubrium, pointed out that the interviewing process is a social encounter based around two

knowledge bases coming together, which they see as a process of knowledge construction. These researchers also interpret the interviewing process as free from methods of banking knowledge from the interviewees, a kind of thinking that the interviewer will come in and withdraw stored (banked) information. They see this process as a dynamic intercultural interaction of knowledge creation as a result of the social interactions between the researcher and the participant. Interviewing allowed the procurement of data that could not be obtained through observations, and since this research is concerned with how individuals experience organizational culture, there were few opportunities to observe long term cultural productions. So interviews served as a process to engage how organizational citizens perceived themselves and their actions within the more extensive social system.

Participant observation

Although this study is not a full-fledged ethnographic project, it was vital to have a sense of the variety of ways that organizational experience and control is practiced and employed throughout the organizational life and school days of my participants. As

Glaser and Strauss (2008) argue, “the reason why observation is so important is that it is not unusual for persons to say they are doing one thing, but in reality, they are doing something else” (p. 29). This is often not because people intend to be misleading, but rather because social actions and interactions are complex and the people may not be able to accurately describe the subtleties of these interactions. I did approximately 60 hours of observation at both schools.

In an effort to fully understand how African-centered institutions create a process of healthy student socialization through a unique organizational culture, I observed

cultural productions in many settings. In addition to classes, I observed both formal and informal staff meetings, staff development meetings, passing time between classes, the main office, free student times (P.E. and classroom free time), lunches and school field trips. After the student interviews, I also chose to concentrate my observations on the classrooms of my student participants to understand better how their teachers were utilizing techniques of mental health in the classroom. Mental health was not a huge aspect of my study, but the idea of introducing techniques that addressed the mental and emotional tax modern and historical American life has taken on black people was an intriguing practice I wanted to witness.

Before this decision, I floated between various settings of school life.

Data Collection

Data collection for this study consisted of three parts. First, I carried out approximately 60.25 hours of participant observation for both sites, which at times required my participation in the organizational process of cultural production. I spent 30 hours of observation at Steve Biko Charter School and 30.25 hours at Mary McLeod

Bethune Charter.

I also spent 15 additional hours at Steve Biko, chaperoning two field trips and an additional 12 hours at Mary McLeod Bethune attending staff meetings, training, and school events. Subsequently, I conducted five cohorts of student focus groups (19 students in total), 18 teachers, school leaders, and other staff members’ were interviewed and 53 quick informal conservations with various people in the school building; these people included parents, student and staff family members, students who were not formal participants, school visitors and substitute teachers.

Finally, for each school, I collected their charter school application and renewal information, their charter school commission report cards, and what general state and local information I could find. I also collected newspaper information for both schools using Nexus Lexus. As supplementary material, I formally interviewed five African- centered school experts and visited two leaders in their schools.

Throughout the process, I kept field notes of what I was seeing. When possible, I tried to conduct short, informal interviews with organizational members about how they were experiencing a particular school event or practice, such as graduation, field trips, morning circle, and just the general school environment and philosophy. I used my notes to guide the development of my structured interview protocol, as well, to generate questions related to the experience of particular students and teachers. Following each observation period and interview, I generated a short set of analytic notes, which frequently consisted of questions to myself or observed events that I hoped to investigate further. In total there were 148 pages of field notes; pictures, and video. Sounds of the schools also were collected.

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School Data Collection

. 30 hours of observation

. One student focus group with 4 student participants

. Eight formal school leader interviews: school principal, school

elder, fifth grade teacher, P.E. coach, school assistant (led the

morning circle) and director of student and cultural development

. Collected 200 pages in documents from Illinois State Charter

School Commission (SCSC), Chicago Public Schools;, Illinois

State Board of Education, The Chicago Sun-Times, and the Mary

McLeod Bethune’ website (handbook, mission, history and school

policy)

Steve Biko Charter School

. 30.25 hours of observation

. Four student focus groups with 15 student participants

. 10 formal school leader interviews: principal/elder; vice principal;

teacher (second-third grade); teacher (first-second grade); school

librarian; current teacher (fourth-fifth grade); special education

teacher; former fourth-fifth grade teacher; kindergarten teacher

. Collected 100 pages in documents, from District of Columbia

Public Charter School Board, District of Columbia Public Schools

(information about how to start a charter), Maryland Department of

Education, and the Biko school’s website (mission, history and

school policy)

Data Analysis

There was anticipation that data analysis would take place throughout the study.

All of the taped interviews, memoranda, school sound and field notes were entered and stored on my personal computer; these sources were also preserved and archived utilizing

Google Drive (file storage and synchronization service developed by Google Inc). For

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coding and analysis, NVIVO or QDA Minor (qualitative research software programs) were used to code and track phenomena. The coding software was also used to organize and determine topics and themes during the research and data collection phases.

All observation and interview data was analyzed and interpreted through an inductive process of constant comparison across and within cases (Huberman & Miles,

1994). Additionally, a reflective and interrogative process was used to formulate and develop the direction of the study’s inquiries and topics as the project advanced.

Trustworthiness and Validity Check.

Along with the methods cited above, I used and was informed by Lincoln and

Guba’s (1985) techniques and theories of “credibility” and “trustworthiness” in qualitative research, particularly their concepts of prolonged engagement, triangulation, peer debriefing, and member checks. Below is a list of the techniques and descriptions of how their techniques were incorporated in the research process.

● Prolonged engagement: I used an ethnographic case study approach. This

approach required me to perform in-depth, prolonged site observations. I spent

about 30 hours in each school collecting data.

● Persistent observation: Throughout the research process, I observed the

production of organizational cultural phenomenon from many different

perspectives. Using Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) notion of observing in the various

places that are relevant, I deliberately sought locations that offer a unique

organizational perspective of African-centered culture creation. These places

included the front office, arts programming, organizational rituals, staff meetings,

morning intake and release, staff and student trainings, and school field trips.

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● Triangulation and ongoing auditing: Because of the research design of the

study, triangulation was embedded within the fabric of the research practice. Each

interview and observation served as a check to confirm or disconfirm

phenomenon being witnessed.

● Peer debriefing: There were several Ph.D. students, professors, and African-

centered experts who served as my research debriefs for the project. I also served

as my project peer auditors. They provided me a set of fresh eyes during the

different stages of research.

● Reflexive journal: I used field notes as a reflexive journal. It helped me

document in real time positive and negative experiences faced during the research

process. Additionally, I kept contemporaneous memorandum and notes

throughout the research phase; this was done through formal written notes,

emails, and text messages to peer reviewers, jottings, and electronic

memorandum.

● Member checks: A core philosophical theme of this research is the examination

of black meaning-making and hope that informs black cultural production. As part

of this, the participants were allowed to review the findings; which included

checking for how their cultural productions were being represented and having a

voice and opinion about how their culture is being dictated and presented to the

broader society.

● Recorded interviews: I recorded all interviews with an electronic recorder and

field notes. I also at times recorded parts of lessons, opening circle ceremony, and

sound from fieldtrips. The recorder interviews were transcribed and coded with

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the help of my peer debrief partner. Interviews were also provided to some

interviewees for comments.

● Collection of school documents: The schools provided me the opportunity to

review their school documents, like handbooks, parent forms, and newsletters sent

home. This information is also included in the site section of Chapter Three. I also

collected the schools’ charter school authorizing body reports and assessments in

hopes of getting an idea of how the schools are academically measuring up to

governmental and mainstream school standards.

Steve Biko Public Charter School

Steve Biko Charter School was founded as a non-profit corporation in March

1999 by Sydney Dawson. Steve Biko commenced its first year of operation in September

1999, with an enrollment of 60 students. Biko initially began operation with grades one through eight. In 2004 a preschool that serves ages 3-5 was added to the school network.

However, at the start of the 2014- 2015 school year, Biko closed their middle school grades to focus on elementary education.

Steve Biko Public Charter School Goals and Mission

The goal of Biko Steve Biko Public Charter School (taken from its website) is

“to groom productive, well-rounded leaders for tomorrow. The mission of Biko

PCS is to offer a culturally relevant and academically stimulating curriculum. We

believe that by giving students an appreciation of their land, history, and culture,

we inspire and motivate them to maintain high academic standards and social

ideals. All subjects align with the Common Core State Standards. The program

utilizes an open-space facility design for grades PK3–5. We have had two Ben

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Carson Scholars. Our students continue their education at some of the top-ranked middle schools in the city.”

Mission

 Encourage success, leading to self-reliance and economic, social/political

contributions to society;

 Promote and secure the connection of Mother Africa within our children;

 Prepare students to break the chains of psychological conditioning that

attempt to keep them powerless in all phases of society;

 Provide students with a strong African-centered learning environment;

 Guide students toward academic excellence, exemplary character and

social responsibility;

 Encourage success leading to self-reliance and economic, social/political

contributions to society.

 Biko PCS believes in the principles of the NGUZO SABA- the African

Value System of

. Umoja (unity) . Kujichagulia (self-determination) . Ujima (collective work and responsibility) . Ujamma (cooperative economics) . Nia (purpose) . Kuumba (creativity) . Imani (faith)

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 The teachers and staff of Biko believe that children of African heritage

have unlimited potential, that if nourished properly can flourish and bring

about a brighter world. We believe in teaching from an African-centered

perspective, which includes hands-on and holistic activities.

 Our school is designed to facilitate organized activity using open spaces

which are strategically divided. Students are grouped in a multi-grade

fashion so they can grow and develop naturally as siblings do in a family;

the younger children learn skills faster and the older children acquire a

sense of responsibility and maturity along with advanced academic skills.

In this simulated family, homeroom teachers remain with the groups as the

group advances in grade: Pre-primary (3-5 years old), first through fifth

grades, or fifth through eighth grades.

 Our motto is “Youth are the Steve Biko of change and exposure is the key

to the intelligence.” Biko, therefore, provides its students with a

stimulating academic curriculum of language arts, math, social studies,

science, music, art and physical education. The goal is to enable students

to become successful lifelong learners and valuable, contributing agents of

change in our global community.

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School

When it opened in 1998, Mary McLeod Bethune Charter became the first

African-centered public charter network in its city. Within a decade, it had grown to include two K-8 elementary schools and one high school. From its inception, MMBC

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School has consistently produced exemplary, high-achieving students who have self- confidence, a strong sense of cultural identity, and a commitment to make positive contributions to their community and the world. Below is their mission and vision taken from their handbook.

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter Goals and Mission.

Our mission is to provide an academic and culturally relevant

program that integrates and balances cultural knowledge and improves

competencies in reading, oral and written language, mathematics, science,

technology, social studies, the arts, and the humanities.

MMBC Vision

Our vision is for our children to be encouraged and filled with self-

love and respect. We envision that our students will develop high moral

values of truth, justice, balance, order, harmony, reciprocity, and propriety

and become exceptional leaders of a global society.

MMBC Founding Philosophy

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter is the children’s educational

division of the Institute of Positive Education. MMBC is an educational

institution dedicated to the academic and cultural development of African-

American children. We define Black by four criteria:

 Color: of African Ancestry.

 Culture: Practicing a lifestyle that recognizes the importance of our

African and African-American heritage and traditions and is geared to the

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values that will facilitate the present and future development of our

people.

 Consciousness: Aware of our strength, beauty, and potential as African

people.

 Able to interpret all institutions from the standpoint of the greatest good

for the greatest number of Africans in the world.

 Commitment: willingness to work tirelessly in the interest of African and

African American people.

We define independent as not being dependent on resources outside our community for the maintenance of our programs. We define institution as a body of people committed to the struggle for a common cause. The dedication to the common cause goes beyond the resources of one generation. It means that we are not simply a school, but an institution seeking to develop a way of life. MMBC was established to participate in the world

Black struggle for recreating an African mind as the basis for our movement toward self- determination. We seek to prepare a generation that has the will, skills, and resources to make the concept of effective nationalism for African people in the Western hemisphere

(and a United Africa) a reality. In order to do this our children must:

. Think critically and question everything;

. Understand history;

. Internalize principles that are in the interest of our people;

. Understand the concepts of friend, the enemy within, and the enemy

without;

. Set good examples and accept just criticism;

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. Develop practical skills in the sciences and communications;

. Practice a lifestyle that recognizes the importance of our African and

African American heritage and traditions, and is geared to the values that

will facilitate the present and the future development of our people;

What is African-Centered Education?

Our school incorporates African cultural elements and influences

found on each continent into every aspect of our school environment and

curriculum. Cultural elements like language, the arts, tradition, ceremony,

and values are used to instill in our students a sense of history,

responsibility, accountability, community, extended family, propriety, and

of course, pride. The culture- and value-based protocols and instructional

routines we use daily have been developed and proven successful over the

past 40 years by the institute of positive education. This model has shown

that by integrating African culture, history, and values into our rigorous

academic curriculum and throughout our school environment, and by

hiring loving and committed teachers, the children we educate will

develop the cultural pride and self-confidence they need to accelerate their

pace of learning and excel academically.

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School Students

With a strong focus on leadership skills, sustainable living, and the

arts, our educational program produces self-assured, yet humble, student

leaders with an unwavering commitment to higher education and making

an impact on the world. In addition, every morning each Mary McLeod

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Bethune charter school campus begins with a school-wide “unity circle” in

which students pledge self-determination, self-respect, community service

and to lead principled lives. These pledges guide our students in living

positive and productive lives.

Mary McLeod Bethune Demographic information and Message from Principal

 Established: Fall 2005

 Enrollment: 305

 Grades: K-8

 Class Size: 25

Message from Mama Pat (Principal) to the Community:

Dear Mama and Baba of the MMBCS Village:

And how are the children? ALL the children are well!

Welcome to Mary McLeod Bethune Academy, or as we also

affectionately call it—MMBCS! In the spirit of Maat (guardian of truth,

order, justice, harmony, and righteousness), it is a pleasure for me to

welcome your family to Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School Network.

At MMBCS, we have a strong tradition of academic excellence; a

devotion to embracing our culture, and a commitment to instilling values

that are critical to the uplift of our people. We are honored that you have

entrusted us to share in the awesome responsibility of educating and

“awakening the genius” in your student/Watoto (child/children). Our

school follows a rigorous, Common Core curriculum which prepares our

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children for the challenges of a global society. We have a robust character- rich PBIS/House Party program rooted in the Virtues of Ma’at. We have a committed staff—devoted to making sure that ALL the children are well.

I am an educator with over 20 years of experience as a teacher, school leader, and education. I have worked in nearly every setting of education: rural, urban, suburban, and policy; as well as elementary, middle, and high school levels. I am a Nationally Board Certified Teacher and was part of the Toyota Teacher Exchange Program, allowing me to study educational systems in various cities in Japan… Most recently, I received a Certificate in Urban School Leadership from the Harvard

University Graduate School of Education. I am a former college athlete, extensive world traveler, a mother of a soon-to-be college graduate, an avid reader, a history buff, and a believer in “achieving impossible tasks.”

We invite you to join us as we continue in the footsteps of the likes of our illustrious ancestors: Baba Asa Hilliard III, Mama Barbara Bethune,

Baba Meshach Silas, and Mama Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School.

May their protection and guidance inspire another magnificent year [at the] Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School Network. As the principal of

MMBCS , and with the help of the enduring spirit of our people, we look forward to making sure that your child and every child in the village is well—academically, spiritually, physically and emotionally. Welcome to our Village!

In the Spirit of Ujima,

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Mama Pat, Principal

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Ethnographic Tour of Mary McLeod Bethune and Steve Biko Charter Schools

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School: A Tour

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School is one of two schools that

are part of an African-centered school network in a large Midwestern city.

The school sits on a residential street covered with many large green

American elms, buckthorn, and green ash trees. During the spring months,

the buckthorn tree flowers with a beautiful mix of white and pinkish

sweetly scented, bell-shaped flowers that cast sweet, edible nectar scent

into the community. People say it also serves as a cue that summer

weather is on its way.

MMB Charter is housed in a former Catholic school building. You

can still see the vestige of the building’s former life, a symbol of the once-

powerful Catholic parochial school network. In the masonry of the

building, there is Catholic iconography telling the story of Christ, and at

the very top of the building is a Christin cross that looks down upon the

children entering the building. As for the building itself, the school

building is in a Modernist (New Classical) architectural style, with gray

concrete molding accented and adorned with floral wreaths and shields

under the windows.

In keeping with its New Classical architectural perspective, the

building has three front doors, two single outer doors, and one middle

double door, evenly spaced on top of a set of stairs. The doors are painted

green and are aligned and positioned on top of the stair in a manner to

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invoke the characteristic pattern of classical Greek architecture. The building design is also in agreement with the 20th century philosophy of the New Classical Architects’ conception of locations of schooling and learning; as the “new temples” of the modern age (Geertz, 2004). As you enter the school, there is another set of stairs up to the first floor and another that leads to the basement where the lunchroom, art classes, and dance room are housed. The layout of the school building is in a traditional big-city Catholic school style, with multiple floors and long corridors with five or six doors that lead to individual classrooms. The first-floor hallway also leads to the school’s gym, where sounds from within could be heard echoing down the hall.

The first and second-floor corridors are lined with deep, dark brown wood chair rails and are painted a vibrant forest green below the chair rail and sky blue above the rail. Additionally, in yellow, red, blue, and orange, Adinkra symbols were composed onto the vibrant green sections of the wall giving the onlooker a sensation of these figures leaping out. Moreover, above each classroom door is a small (3⅞ inches

₇ high by 8½ inches wide by 2 /₁₆ inches deep), green and red street sign displaying the classroom’s name. Names consisted of inspirational concepts like Justice Road, Prosperity Lane, and MA’AT Path. There are also green and red banners matching the street signs hanging from the ceiling that read balance, harmony, and other essential concepts the school leadership wants to impress upon the students. Furthermore, in the school,

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the title Baba and Mama is an honorific term used to convey honor to a community elder or adult; “Mama” and “Baba” means mother and father in Swahili.

The front office is the door to right as you walk up the front steps, and inside the office is a warm, brown-golden light that appears to be a mixture of the natural lighting coming from the large windows on a far wall facing the office entrance and wooden office paneling common in

Catholic school buildings. On the immediate left is a billboard of Mary

McLeod Bethune, the school’s namesake, and a group of giant 4-foot-tall wooden African statues. During a visit, a student once told me that “These statues [are] cool and unlike anything” he had seen in his last school.

Inside the front office is a long wooden counter that was being used for sign-in and information storage. Behind the counter are four desks—one for the school office assistant, one for the school counselor, and two empty desks teachers use when they visit the office. The front office also houses the principal’s office (where student interviews were conducted) and an office used by staff visiting from the other network school. The office also is decorated in African iconography; there were kente cloth table coverings, Andinkra symbols, posters and pictures that depict to visitors the importance of Africa to the school.

The school gym, where the morning circle takes place every day, is at the end of the first-floor corridor. It is defined by the large, light-brown hardwood basketball court and bleachers that line the walls. There is also

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African iconography on the walls. Like many elementary and middle

school gymnasiums, this school’s gym is framed by a large stage. As you

enter the gym from the first-floor corridor, you enter onto the stage, which

requires you to take another set of stairs on either stage (right or left) to

enter onto the gym floor proper. The gymnasium is also a location for

members of the school to socialize before and after school. In the morning,

before the opening ceremony, students are playing, talking, and

socializing, which creates a sound in the gym that echoes loudly through

the halls. When the ceremony began, a school “crier” bangs four staccato

beats to signify the start of the day. These staccato notes cut through the

sound of the students, and automatically the entire school (students and

staff) begins to prepare for the morning ceremony and the start of the

school day.

A Day at Steve Biko Charter School

Leaders at Steve Biko Charter School begin their day thinking

about the whole child. They strategize how they can holistically give

African children an educational experience that is filled with an

atmosphere and climate steeped in authentic African-centeredness. They

start this process with ceremonies and rituals. For the community of Biko,

ancestral reverence defines their approach to schooling and student

socialization; ancestors surround the students on the walls; they are spoken

about with reverence, and they are honored in the morning ceremony.

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Each morning, the entire village (school) participates in the Circle of Love ceremony. The ceremony takes place on the school’s “outside” basketball court and play area. During good weather, the school ceremony is framed by a warm, gold, morning Chesapeake Bay sunlight that, for me, gave a sense of connectedness to nature. On days when the weather is not so good, the ceremony is held in the school’s gym, where village members are surrounded by pictures and African iconography reminding them of their place and mission in the world. The open ceremony is intended to awaken and stimulate Biko’s African cultural memory and understandings of African-centeredness through an intentional selection of songs and chants. Village members during the ceremony play drums, hold hands, sing songs, chant, and recite words and battle cries that intend to reaffirm their commitment to blackness and the larger project of black liberation.

These selections are intended to orient the organizational members into a mindset that seeks to facilitate learning through an African lens and fortify their relationship with the broader African diasporic community. The morning ceremony also serves as a reminder of everyone’s place in the village.

During the ceremony, the two students selected by the village stand in the middle of the village circle (holding hands) and lead the village through the ceremony. While the school village stands in the morning circle, the lead students walk around to encourage and welcome people into the circle. During the ceremony, every adult and visitor is

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acknowledged and welcomed into the community. Furthermore, the morning ceremony also serves as an organizational practice for students to reconnect and practice fellowship with their teachers, parents, and peers.

The morning ceremony is the most important village action taken throughout the day.

Within the Circle of Love ceremony, organizational citizens greet and reconnect with old village members and welcome new ones. With songs and pledges, citizens affirm new memberships and invite them into the African-centered community as brothers and sisters. It was at this moment that the school began to orientate new members into the cultural practices of the school and the community. Also, during this time, the guests and new members begin to discover the concept of African- centeredness and how that concept informs and defines the broader school community and culture. During the “circle of love” ceremony, participants sing the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James

Weldon Johnson, and recite a “call and response greeting song.” “The

African Pledge” is also recited with words derived from the African continent. But most importantly, it is during this ceremony that the youth of Biko are giving an opportunity to demonstrate their leadership.

After the morning ceremony, the students divide into classes and meet their teachers to begin their academic day. During the time after the morning circle, some teachers take the opportunity to prolong their opening of the school day. There is about a 20- to 40-minute flex time

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built into the school’s schedule that some teachers use to enhance the social relations between the village members. It is at this point, in both

Biko and Mary McLeod Bethune, when teachers tackle issues like mental health, bullying, community violence, healthy black social relationships, and the beauty of being black in America. At Biko, this time is critical to the promotion of healthy black social relationships and is a significant component to how the institution understands its role as an agent of black socialization

The instructional model of Biko is interdisciplinary with multilevel classrooms. Teachers use a mixture of informal and formal learning circles that revolve around group work. The central goal for an African- centered classroom is to encourage collaboration. However, for Biko they seek to encourage students to examine knowledge in a communal model that emphasizes cooperation, critical thinking skills, and social learning activities. Along with their philosophy of co-construction of knowledge,

Biko views cooperative learning as a foundational practice for the socialization and education of its students into their roles as future community leaders.

A unique element of Biko is its “open school model” or “open classroom model.” Biko sees the model as an intentional organizational model, which improves accessibility to all village members. Overall the idea behind the open school model is to provide flexible areas without the use of fixed rows of desks and walls. Scholars believe this freedom in

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physical space will provide students with opportunities for individualized instruction and help them learn at their own pace, according to their abilities and needs. Biko believes its model provides the students with the best opportunity to spark creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration with their teachers.

Cooperative learning for Biko is also an educational approach that organizes their classrooms into spaces that help students grow into their academic and social best. For them, there is much more to social learning

(collaboration) than just group work. Biko sees the classroom as a space for collaborative action that socializes the students into a mindset of self- determination and into the ideological view, “that it will be Black people who are going to lead other black people into liberation.”

Although much of Biko’s learning occurs in a traditional sense, they also view learning as holistically giving children an African-centered education filled with an atmosphere and climate of African-centeredness.

Ceremonies and rituals are an important part in African-centered education at Biko. For example, Biko celebrates Kwanzaa and has monthly ceremonies and celebrations around the birthdays of ancestors and living s/heroes. They have an annual autumn African-centered children’s masquerade disco instead of Halloween and a Black Love

Skating Party instead of Valentine’s Day. These practices by the school leaders serve to reinforce the central goal of socializing children into healthy Black adulthood.

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Chapter Four: Elders, Intergenerational Learning and Student Socialization

Vignette: A First Visit to Steve Biko Public Charter School

I arrived at the upper school and was greeted by an African

American woman with short hair and a broad, welcoming smile. I would

later learn this was “Mama” Sydney Dawson, the Steve Biko Public

Charter School founder and leader. Mama Sydney greeted me with a

Kemetic greeting of “Em hotep Baba,” named after the ancient Egyptian

vizier and scholar Ptah-hotep (Zulu, 2009). At the time, I was incredibly

frustrated as I entered the inconspicuous white brick buildings because I

had walked 20 minutes in 90-degree weather to the wrong building, which

made me late for our 10:00 a.m. meeting. As I entered the air conditioned

front office, I immediately began to apologize to the first person I met

from the school, who happened to be Mama Sydney, standing at the front

desk talking to a parent. She comforted me and said, “I heard you went to

the other school?” She smiled warmly and we both laughed at my mistake.

However, as I entered the school on my first visit, one thing that

surprised me was the level of sound coming from the classrooms. From

my experience working in mainstream schools, I had become accustomed

to not hearing children in hallways and classrooms. This surprising

encounter also caused me to wonder about the organizational control

schools enact on students and to question why mainstream schools are so

concerned about the corporeal control of students, particularly schools

with majority black populations. Why are not urban schools LOUD,

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boisterous, and active; why are children controlled and constrained; why are these schools foreclosing black students’ universal need to be in community? Indeed, when I taught in mainstream schools, teachers with loud classrooms were talked about disparagingly by other teaching professionals: “They cannot control their room” or “The students run his or her room.” I had also become used to seeing children not fully express their emotional selves or having their emotional selves restrained.

Nevertheless, anyone who visits Steve Biko Public Charter School or

Mary McLeod Bethune Academy can tell, right away, that there are children in their buildings; moreover, that the students are working, communicating, and producing organizational sounds that serve the

African-centered notion of community.

Mama Sydney would tell me later that she sensed my nervousness as I entered, which was one of the reasons she greeted me with a hug and words of peace. Mama Sydney wore a sweatshirt and long black pants. On the sweatshirt were Adinkra symbols and phrases embroidered with gold thread. Some of these symbols I recognized—such as “DENKYEM, adaptability; DWENNIMMEN, humility and strength; and SANKOFA, go back to the past and bring forward that which is useful—and many I did not. She offered me something to drink and a place to rest while she finished working with the parent who was asking about an upcoming end- of-the year field trip.

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The front office of Steve Biko is a small room at the front of the school building that houses the school’s Principal Mama Sydney, Vice

Principal Mama Nia and the director of program compliance. The front office is also decorated with African iconography and images of African diasporic leaders, heroes and “Sheroes” (for which Mama Sydney corrected me for my lack of acknowledgment of women during our interview: “We must be forceful in our acknowledgment of the sisters in the movement.”) There were also African statues and pictures of students, both current and former, doing things that the school’s community considered representative and worthy of emulation. Later, during our walkthrough, Mama Sydney would show me a picture of a senior citizen in a blue flowered dress surrounded by students in their maroon collared uniform shirts, having a 100 years birthday celebration. “She really taught our students a lot, they really loved her when she visited,” Mama Sydney said. This was the first moment I got an indication that intergenerational relationships were important.

“Elders are everywhere in our school,” Mama Sydney told me during my second visit. “They are an essential part of our school’s model and serve as a mediator between living memory and ancestral recollections. Ancestral memory influences our school’s identity and our children’s sense of belonging in the world.” Elders at Steve Biko and

Mary McLeod Bethune Academy serve as teachers, mothers, grandparents, dance and drum instructors, office staff, and school leaders.

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For Mama Sydney, Steve Biko Public Charter is a labor of love, stemming from her earlier years of involvement in the Black Power movement and her experience on the front lines of racial desegregation in Washington,

D.C. “Elders serve as a mediator between living memory and ancestral recollections,” Mama Sydney repeated. “We at Biko see them as an influence on how we approach and relate to the world. It is sankofa, knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress.”

Intergenerational learning at Steve Biko and Mary McLeod

Bethune is modeled on the practice of relationship building and healing from histories and practices of white supremacy. They recognized the bonds of community as a form of value that enhances their pedagogical approach to education and student socialization. However, in a society that is youth obsessed and places age at the center of its national identity, we find African-centered institutions creating process of “collaboration as dialogue and learning.” Students and seniors are speaking in a form of value tension, “conflict between …goals” (Hartoonian, Scotter, & White,

2013, p. 8), which is meant by the schools to explore and codify values and ways of being. This process is understood as an opportunity for the village to grow and fortify itself through dialog and understandings of history. Students learn about the past, seniors learn about the present, and both are constructing and imagining a future that incorporates their co- constructed liberatory values.

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In this this chapter, I will in two sections attempt to explore what it means for children to be socialized in a community that prioritizes healthy familial relationships through practices of intergenerational learning. Further, how does the framework of

Bengtson and Roberts’s “Six Elements of Intergenerational Solidarity Indicators” function in a formal system of intergenerational fictive kinship networks? I investigated how organizational cultures change when elders are welcomed, appreciated, and listened to. How can African-centered reverence for elders and their history change how leaders lead and students learn? And finally for section two, I will examine how organizational members care for elders in their systems, how concerns like elder social isolation and loneliness are handled and metabolized by leaders who are culturally focused on the health of the broader black community.

Section One: Kin, Intergenerational, and Familial Relations

Intergenerational interactions have been the bedrock of African American culture from times of slavery through the tumultuous days of mandated racial segregation. One of the most devastating aspects of the slavery experience was its ability to create modern conceptions of systems that reverberate through time distorting black familial bonds. This kind of dispossession of “social” self-determination has encouraged the development of the social practice of “fictive kinship,” which researchers describe as individuals who are unrelated by either blood or marriage but consider one another in kinship terms

(Sussman, 1976; Taylor et al., 2013). Ethnographic research identifies different types of fictive kin in the black community, including adolescent peer group members, godparents, play mothers and fathers, and church members (Chatters, Taylor, &

Jayakody, 1994). For instance, black church members frequently describe fellow

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congregates in kinship terms, “Brother” or “Sister,” and church members are regarded as one’s “church family” (Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990).

Understanding the tradition of fictive kinship in the black community is critical to understanding why intergenerational fictive networks are so important to African peoples. There is a cultural practice going all the way back to tribal traditions on the

African continent, that promote and make secret relationships of young and old; it is the making real of the African proverb, “It takes a village…” However, looking at an expansive view of fictive kinship networks from the intergenerational family model, there is a sense that relationships and bonds between members are as essential and fundamental to the organizing features of the family and community. The bonds and personal relationships between family members define the health of the community.

However, the intergenerational solidarity model, which I think more aligns with how I am conceiving fictive kinship for this chapter, refers to the degree of closeness and support between different generations. It is the idea that solidarity helps a person understand how people of different generations relate to, help, and depend on one another in their daily lives (Virpi, Catherine, & Gemma, 2013). Below is Bengtson and Roberts

(1991), six dimensions of parent-child relations. The authors have defined the essential components of intergenerational solidarity. They observe five dimensions reflecting

“behavioral, effectual, and/or cognitive orientations of intergenerational dyad members toward one another” (p. 857).

These dimensions the authors define include:

(1) association (or contact);

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(2) affection (or emotional attachment);

(3) consensus (or agreement);

(4) function (or patterns of instrumental support or resource sharing); and

(5) familism (norms or expectations of individual obligations to the family).

(6) “The sixth element of solidarity, structure, refers to the “opportunity structure” for family interaction…” (p. 857)

Table 2: Bengtson & Roberts’ Six Elements of Intergenerational Solidarity Framework

Construct Nominal Definition Empirical Indicators

Associational Frequency and patterns of interaction in 1. Frequency of solidarity various types of activities in which family intergenerational interaction members engage (i.e., face to-face, telephone, mail)

2. Types of common activities shared (i.e., recreation, special occasions, etc.)

Affectual Type and degree of positive sentiments 1. Ratings of affection,

solidarity held about family members, and the warmth, closeness,

degree of reciprocity of these sentiments understanding, trust, respect,

etc. for family members

2. Ratings of perceived

reciprocity in positive

sentiments among family

members

Consensual Degree of agreement on values, 1. Interfamilial concordance

solidarity among individual measures of attitudes, and beliefs among family specific values, attitudes, and members beliefs

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2. Ratings of perceived

similarity with other family

members in values, attitudes,

and beliefs

Functional Degree of helping and exchanges of 1. Frequency of

solidarity resources intergenerational exchanges of

assistance (e.g., financial,

physical, emotional)

2. Ratings of reciprocity in the

intergenerational

exchange of resources

Normative Strength of commitment to performance 1. Ratings of importance of

solidarity of familial roles and to family and intergenerational

roles meeting familial obligations (familialsm)

2. Ratings of strength of filial

obligations

Structural Opportunity structure for intergenerational 1. Residential propinquity of

solidarity relationships reflected in number, type, family members

and geographic proximity of family 2. Number of family members member 3. Health of family members

Bengtson and Roberts. 1991. Intergenerational Solidarity in Aging Families: An Example of Formal Theory Construction. Journal of marriage and the Family The Bengston & Roberts family solidarity model further states that understanding the functioning of a family in a particular domain requires an appreciation for other factors that characterize family members’ attitudes, behaviors and the qualitative aspects of family relationships. For example, look at the horrifying U.S. immigration spectacle of mass detention, family separation, and the forced transfer of non-white children into

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white homes. This practice, new to some, has been a part of the fabric of U.S. history, from colonialism, expansionism, and beyond. However, African Americans can draw a straight line of horrifying projects of capitalist exploitation, from slavery to convict leasing to Jim Crow, ending with the foster care system and mass incarceration—all practices that sought to force transfer of non-white children into white homes. The familial bonds of the black community have been defined by this horrifying history. Our cognitive and non-cognitive orientations and history are greatly influenced by this distort of familial relationships. This is why African-centered leaders view the project of white supremacy as a force designed to break up black families, black homes, and black communities.

This idea of trust and repairing black social bonds for African-centered leaders is a fundamental theme I encountered during my data collection. This practice of repair, which I will speak of in greater detail in Chapter Five, functions as a lens to make actionable “actual historical memory or practices that encourage communitarianism.

(Mama Nia, 8/29/2019).” Moreover, it required the organizational actors to account for histories and traditions of white supremacy and begin to build practices within the organization that sought to reconstruct a future free from confusing practices of racial and capitalist mystifications. Baba Williams, an elder and board member of Mary McLeod

Bethune Charter, when discussing the collectivist ideological essence of Bethune, spoke about how it was essential that they encourage young people to trust each other. His goal and that of the school were to repair and tackle histories of material dispossession, but also the actual “social and emotional” dispossession of black social bonds:

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Baba Williams: For a young person to learn about how important it is for

them to be an individual but knowing that their individuality is valuable in

and of itself, so they have no need to accentuate that but to then focus on

how they can hone those skills and acquire even more information and

more guidance by way of utilizing the experiences of their elders whether

they’re biological or from the extended family is key. You have many

people now [who] do not trust anyone. That then has a detrimental

impact when we then try to engage in economic endeavors.

Banwo: Do you see that school shifting the mentality of students or even

families or even the larger community from one individualistic, what you

get in mainstream schools or traditional schools to these collective?

Baba Williams: It’s not trying. That’s actually one of the goals of this

school. (Baba Williams, Elder, Bethune, interview 6/26/2019).

Along with Baba Williams’ words, you can find this type of organizational cultivation of

“social repair” in MMB and Biko Schools’ documents, which are featured in Chapter

Three. We can see in both of their vision and mission statements the schools planning and wrestling with understanding that there is a mental and ideological barrier infused into the black community by practices of white supremacy both state,

“Our vision is for our children to be encouraged and filled with self-love

and respect. We envision that our students will develop high moral values

of truth, justice, balance, order, harmony, reciprocity, and propriety and

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become exceptional leaders of a global society” (Mary McLeod Bethune

Charter, vision statement).

“Prepare students to break the chains of psychological conditioning that

attempt to keep them powerless in all phases of society” (Steve Biko,

mission statement).

There is a social conversation happening with the students and teachers, which is intentionally being crafted by the leaders and being received by the students. Baba

Williams’s statement demonstrates why targeting social relationships was and is a key component of their plan to rear and socialize healthy black people. It is the notion that, when you have a society where “You have many people…[who] do not trust anyone,” there is a detrimental impact when you’re trying to engage in partnerships. This for me is why African-centered schools’ encouragement of fictive kinships is so essential. These practices serve as an orientation for students and adults to begin to see each other not as strangers with ulterior motives participating in an organization for a personal material gain, but as brothers and sisters in fictive kinship.

Black Social Bonds in Black Spaces

On many levels, the promise of educational advancement post-Brown v Board of

Ed has been a dream many felt would bring African Americans into the social and economic mainstream. For many members of the black underclass, education did improve their social situation, despite somewhat improved access to resources and materials. However, if we look at the landscape of American cities, we see locations that seek to continue the division of the black family. Government, education, and housing in urban areas are all alienating forces designed to wall up and silo social relationships and

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social bonds. Indeed, if we look at many of the rapidly gentrifying landscapes in the

United States, we see forces that are challenging the creation of healthy black social bonds.

Moreover, I see the denial of intergenerational interactions as being planned and intentionally policed by elites. While interviewing the students about their experiences in the school, there was a lot of conversation around social issues they face in their community and how the school gives them a safe location to interact with their friends.

Similarly, the leaders spoke about the schools being a location to “love up on the seniors

(citizens) (Mama Nia, Interview 8/29/2019).,” to appreciate them and love them from a cultural and community perspective.

Take, for instance, a small policy, the growth of senior housing in urban areas, according to a study by Taylor et al. (2018), in which loneliness rates are high in senior public housing even though they may have access to resources, support, programs and activities that could mitigate loneliness. The authors found that 70% of seniors living in senior public housing felt some measures of loneliness and social isolation. The conclusion of the study’s authors is for staff to create more opportunities for residents to engage with others by building stronger connections and relationships. I mention senior housing not as a critique of public housing designed for the needs of senior members of our society, but as an example of public policy that breaks intergenerational familial bonds.

From my experience in Baltimore, North and West Philadelphia, and Camden,

N.J., senior housing was promoted as an escape of sorts from the dangers of a deteriorating neighborhood and the crime and social disorder that comes with it.

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However, what about the social bonds that are limited, what about not having the ability to have your actual family or your fictive kin move in and help you, or moreover, the senior help them? Public policy is effectively limiting “functional solidarity” of intergenerational relationships. It is continuing that line of public policy designed to deprive “social relationships” from the most vulnerable populations.

On many levels, African-centered schools serve as black locations of fellowship, designed as a healthy agent of cultural socialization in communities that are rapidly becoming alienating spaces. During my first visit to Steve Biko, I spoke to Mama Sydney

(an elder), about the power of black imagery in her school, particularly the gendered and racialized messages being transmitted to students. I was interested in understanding what the students thought about being in an institution founded and operated by two black women. Were students receiving these powerful nonverbal messages? She told me that yes, of course, the students recognize her and Mama Nia’s (vice principal) leadership, but she felt the school being a black institution administered by black people served as a more powerful message of groupness to the students. She saw the message of black people professionally operating a social institution like a school would help the students understand that they can be in business and social relationships with other people like themselves, which in the long run is beneficial to the broader black community.

Therefore, intergenerational work for African-centered leaders is a process of healing and infusing relational care back into the community. Mama Sydney described

Biko’s mission as “students learning as brothers and sisters.” The school is socializing the children with a healthy sense of fictive kinship; the school is a village and we are all responsible for the maintaining of its health. However, when leaders and students at both

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schools talk about elders and intergenerational relationships, there was a sense of the sacred, moreover in how elders are seen as keepers of the past and connections to the beloved ancestor.

I would like to point out that Mama Sydney, during our interactions, never downplayed her role as a black woman in a political social space that at times has been dominated by male voices. During our first meeting, she forcefully corrected me when I did not include women in our conversations about black leadership and black social development. So, it was actually surprising to me, when we moved the conversation from black gender politics to group politics that really gave me insight into how their leadership zeroed in on our communal relations. For her, in my opinion, the black community did not have time to do gender battles of blame. Indeed, it is that we must have a larger conversation about why our community is awash in violence, pain, and hatred.

Ancestors, Elders and Imagining History

Intergenerational learning at Steve Biko and Bethune Academy is a process of co- constructing knowledge and ways of being. The African-centered embrace of elders in these institutions serves as an integral part of the learning model. Elders, in many cases, serve as keepers of diasporic experiences and cultural practices that undergird the ideological project of African-centered schools. In many African communities, ancestral benevolence is assured through appeasement and sacrifice. For some diasporic members, neglect of this is believed to bring about retribution. Ancestors and “ancestral worship” looms large in African-centered schools and connects directly to sociological research of sub-Saharan Africa. Fortes (1965) described African ancestral worship as having a

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remarkably uniform structural framework, which Kopytoff (1971) described as having a general pattern that he summarized as:

Ancestors are vested with mystical powers and authority. They

retain a functional role in the world of the living, specifically in the

life of their living kinsmen; indeed, African kin-groups are often

described as communities of both the living and the dead. The

relation of the ancestors to their living kinsmen has been described

as ambivalent, as both punitive and benevolent and sometimes

even as capricious. In general, ancestral benevolence is assured

through propitiation and sacrifice; neglect is believed to bring

about punishment. Ancestors are intimately involved with the

welfare of their kin-group but they are not linked in the same way

to every member of that group. The linkage is structured through

the elders of the kin-group, and the elders’ authority is related to

their close link to the ancestors. In some sense the elders are the

representatives of the ancestors and the mediators between them

and the kin-group. (p. 129)

Uchendu (1976), in a critique of Kopytoff, observed that analyses which reduced the character of relations with ancestors to a structural role were particularly inadequate to deal with ritual practices among West African peoples, particularly the Igbo people, where ancestors were “both objects of honor and tools or agents which can be manipulated to achieve competitive goals” (p. 285). Uchendu was advocating for a more dynamic view of ancestors and elder worship. He viewed groups as having a more

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practice-based approach to understanding how ancestors are perceived in the communities.

“Elders serve as a mediator between living memory and ancestral recollections,”

Mama Sydney said during our first conversation. In later conversations she expanded upon how she viewed elders’ roles in the larger organizations. For her, elders serve as a link or structure through which members of the African-centered village (organization) can perceive where they had come and where they could possibly go. It is elders to whom the community looks to gain knowledge and understanding of the world, particularly how it has or hasn’t changed. For instance, during the research interviews I continually raised issues of racial separation. Elders displayed a type of reflectiveness when the subject of racial segregation came up.

Each elder, of course, expressed sadness of the legal and forced separation of peoples, but there was also a centering or reflectiveness on what they described as “black culture and communal displacement,” which Baba Williams of Bethune described as a kind of social application of community destruction that served to uproot healthy black cultural practices and in some degree stymie the healthy economic and social growth of black communities, saying “We had a healthy culture, not 100%, but we had something that prepared black people for the world they were facing… that was found in the black community.” Baba Williams goes on to say that we must recognize that there was institutional machinery in place that was constructing culturally relevant experiences and pedagogies for black people in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, before the systematic dismantling of black institutions. Finishing with an observation, he offered, “The funny thing is, we

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are now hearing all this talking about culturally relevant pedagogy and practices, funny we had all that in the ‘60s.”

For African-centered psychological theorists there is a mottled quality to Black life existing within a society based on a conceptual system that is at odds with the way in which African people see the world. Fanon (1977) articulated this as a kind of cultural and social confusion caused to Africans by european culture. A kind of, multifaceted cultural force of supremacy determinant of blackness. Fanon saw this control over black identity formation as a form of double consciousness. Du Bois (1903), the originator of the term of double consciousness, saw the African American experience as a psychological challenge of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes (p.8)” of a racist white society. Similarly, this research contends that when looking at practices and cultures of mainstream educational institutions, organizational behaviors, like double consciousness, serves to create the type of systems of violence theorized by Jalil Bishop

Mustaffa. Mustaffa (2017) used the term “educational violence” to describe formal systems of schooling that limited and ended the lives of black people due to white supremacy.

Additionally, scholars like Mustaffa also put forward the understanding that with the development of models that accurately describe the reality of black life, society should be allowed to prescribe culturally relevant solutions that actually define black- lived conditions (Carroll & Jamison, 2011). The students describe their interactions with elders “as one that helps them understand themselves”; additionally, Mama Pat,

Bethune’s principal, also discusses the notion of intergenerational relationships and how they support students in understanding themselves culturally. In the case of Bethune, she

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sees the importance of positive interpretations of black cultural productions that serve to socialize black children into healthy understands of their racial identities, in essence that they are fine, their culture is fine, and they should not be ashamed of being black or being involved in “Black things.”

Banwo: What do you think that does for a kid that there’s clarity in the

school? That they can witness and learn from black people

unapologetically existing in the world. How does the school’s work with

elders benefit that clarity?

Mama Pat: I think you get a couple of different benefits from that.

Number one, you get a lack of judgment on a kid about who they are. We

have to be very careful about what we’re shaming children on. Because

when we’re shaming them about the way they speak, we’re also telling

them that the way their people speak is not appropriate. That the way their

mother and their aunts and their uncles and their grandmother, that there’s

something wrong with them. We don’t want to send that message. There is

nothing wrong with being from Englewood. There is nothing wrong with

the way that your family speaks to you and talks to you. (Mama Pat,

Bethune, 5/23/2019)

Operationalizing Ancestor and Elder Histories

In the larger sense, intergenerational relationships for minority children serve as powerful socializing tools for them in societies that racialize them into increased risk of social (physical and psychological) dangers. Additionally, early and robust involvement with intergenerational relationships benefits members of society in the production of

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social obligation to the community; actors see themselves as obligated to the community rather than just supportive. Parental care and the human life cycle, for example, primarily consist of parents protecting the child and, above all, assuring him or her of a secure base.

This duty flips in later years, where Corso and Lanz (2012) believe early intergenerational relationships were a defining aspect of how social actors perceive their felt obligation to the community. These early intergenerational relationships and interactions for the students are apparatuses the leaders use to introduce the students into a shared ideological project. Again Baba Williams discusses this community and organizational process of dispositional orientation in his interview. Elders for him and his community are social examples (good and bad) and knowledge givers to the organization and larger society. “For a young person … focus on how they can hone those skills and acquire even more information and more guidance by way of utilizing the experiences of their elders whether they’re biological or from the extended family is key.”

The students, like the psychologist, are moving toward an understanding of liberation as a social psychological orientation predicated upon the establishment of new epistemology praxis. The students understand this by their access to history through their intergenerational relationships and notions of “Intergenerational Affectual Solidarity”

(described in the early section). When speaking to teachers at Steve Biko, this notion of intergenerational affectual solidarity was raised in a conversation about how elders are incorporated in the formal organization.

Banwo: My last question is about the elders in the schools. How do you

see elders being incorporated? What’s your opinion about the elders being

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incorporated in the school? Why is that good? What’s your thoughts about

that?

Mama Janice (teacher): We were just talking about that the other day

like when an elder dies, I think maybe Karenga said this too, that’s like a

history book just gone by the wayside. They have so much information

and they’ve experienced so many things throughout their lives that if

they’re not sharing it we’ll never know that information.

We have so many elders here. Mama Sydney founded this school, both

schools, so she imparts a lot. Then we have the grandparents who are here

and we have other guest speakers who come and just share information. I

just think it’s very beneficial to gain or glean some insight on what they

went through and if it weren’t for them, then we’d have to go through

those same things, so they made our lives a lot easier.

Mama Aliyah (teacher): I think it’s really all about intergenerational

learning. It’s not just a one-way exchange, because as you get older, too, a

lot of things have changed over time. For example, I don’t know how to

work my Facebook and I need you to help, help from a young person... I

think we can tell the kids something happened, but it’s not as impactful as

actually seeing it or meeting someone who has seen it. (8/30/2019)

The understandings are based on recovered history and memory from elders, which is then infused into the organization by elders and practices of intentional intergenerational relational formations. Martín-Baró (1996) sees intergenerational

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understandings as “the recovery of a historical memory supposes the reconstruction of models of identification that, instead of chaining and caging the people, open up the horizon for them, toward their liberation and fulfillment” (p. 30). In other words, being in conversation with history alters the students’ identification; they are not chained to the

“social scripts” (series of behaviors, actions, and consequences that are expected in a particular situation or environment) that have been written for them by societies steeped in notions of white supremacy.

Black scholars like Du Bois and Woodson realized in the early 20th century that to liberate Black America from shame of our origins, we would need to educate ourselves about who we are. McCall (1995), looking at the Ohafia clan of the Igbo tribal group, observes notions of ethnicity, community, paternal and maternal descent groups are components in which the individual formulates their sense of themselves in relation to a multiplicity of social identities. However, these seemingly “individual notions of self” are products of knowledge grounded in the past and lived experience of daily life in Ohafia villages. The clan’s historical memory is foundational to the concept of personhood and group participation. African-centered schools similarly are using history to guide their students into an African-centered understanding of the world. History is a tool for social orientation and healthy construction of self and space.

Baba Williams, like other elders and leaders interviewed, asked a similar question that revolved around the notion of why white parents are not sending their children to black schools. Why are schools in the Southside of Chicago and northeast Washington,

D.C., some of the most racially isolated places in their respective cities? Baba Williams has a historical understanding that while Black professional classes have expanded

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greatly since the Brown v Board of Ed ruling, social and economic conditions for the disproportionately large Black underclasses have steadily deteriorated over the past 66 years. Baba Williams’s lived experience is grounded in a live history, which makes his historical relationship and understanding of late 20th century black life incredibly valuable to an organization that aspires to socialize black children into an honest understanding of the black condition.

Perhaps the cruelest irony of Baba Williams and this section of the chapter is that the organization Baba Williams has chosen to dedicate part of his life is continuously accused of rejecting integration in favor of segregated schooling. Leaders of African- centered schools are perhaps some of the most racially sensitive administrators I know, but critics continue to charge that African-centered schools are segregated. However, these critics fail to reckon with the fact that a significant number of urban schools are already segregated; it is virtually impossible for African-centered schools to segregate their students any more than they already are (Merry & New, 2008). Although racial separation was only a small part of the data I collected, it served as an entrance point for me to understand how elderhood and intergenerational relationships play an important role in the daily life of many African people connected to institutions grounded in history and social conditions.

Section Two: Ancestor and Elder Co-Construction of Knowledge

Elders in the two African-centered institutions of the study are honored and seen as an authority that links the community to a sense of shared common ancestry. In other words, the elders of Steve Biko and Mary McLeod Bethune are the representatives or bridges to their “fictive kinship” past. Like our brethren on the African continent and the

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broader diaspora, senior members of the school community act as a living memory of the past. They function as mediators between living memories and ancestral recollections that, for many institutions, ground the organization in a sense of black radical imagining.

Mama Pat, for example, during her interview, spoke about the importance of an elder’s voice. Moreover, she viewed their input into the organization as a kind of social, lived memory that helps organizational members understand how the society students are entering is shaped by historical practices.

Mama Pat: That, too, is the world that our ancestors and elders used to

have. It’s that whole premise that they used to tell us back in the day,

“You have to be twice as good.” Truthfully, we could use some of those

lessons now. That why elders are so important to listen to....

Banwo: Do you invite elders from the community into the school?

Mama Pat: We have one in the village right now, Mama Mary. She

reminds us constantly of those lessons. Their voices are very much needed

because they are a remembrance of who we used to be. Sometimes we

forget that. (Mama Pat, Bethune, 5/23/2019)

In many African communities, oral tradition is still widely used as a method of preserving knowledge, cultural identity and constructions of new knowledge. African- centered schools are using the lived history of senior members as an intergenerational method of co-constructing of knowledge. Memories shape the village identities and sense of belonging in the world. Like the Ohafia clan, historical memory influences a wide

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range of concepts of personhood, from ideas of blackness to notions of social comportment. In all these aspects you can see the dynamic historical memory at play.

Co-constructing the Self

Knowledge and cultural co-construction is an approach that incorporates ancestral memories into how African-centered children perceive and experience historical consciousness in their present world. The schools have demonstrated a particular interest in how students process ancestral memory. In a sense, the students are co-constructing their world view within an intergenerational conversation. There appears to be a process of using elders’ memories and practices of ancestral reverence or worship to co-construct parts or whole components of an operational world view. This is akin to “historical memory,” collective memory or social memory, and it refers to the way by which groups of people create and then identify with specific narratives about historical periods or events (Biases and Examples, 2017). Below are two segments of dialog from the student interviews that note how students understand their relationship with elders in school. I want to highlight how ancestor worship and elder reverence influences how the students are developing their “sense of self” and their ideas of blackness.

Key Quotes: Mary McLeod Bethune

Banwo: What does it feel like to go to an African-centered school?

Jesse: “It feels good going to an African-centered school because we can

learn about our culture, our race, our religion and we can learn about our

ancestors.”

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Anna: “We probably be talking about some of the ancestors, like some of our ancestors that we don’t know yet. But I really think one of my ancestors is powerful, I don’t know, I have a feeling inside about it.”

Jesse: “Because they probably, some people don’t do this, but you can look them up and they can tell you good things and stuff.”

Dan: “Because they changed the world for us.”

Anna: “Slavery.”

Jesse: “Yes. It’s important to know about your ancestors because they make you who you are today and they help you learn about your history.

And your ancestors help you learn who you are.”

Banwo: To be connected to the past? Why is it important?

Anna: “I think that because if we know about stuff like that, we can change the world. We could achieve better things.”

Key Quotes: Steve Biko Public Charter

Banwo: Why is it important to go to an African-centered school?

Mike: Even though sometimes they (the teachers) get on our nerves, they actually helped us through this journey, they let us express our feelings.

And when we do that (express feelings), they give us information about our heritage and where we come from. So it’s like a win-win situation.

Earl: One example is because it (the school), teaches us about our history even when we weren’t alive, when slavery was happening and there were

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black heroes. That there are still black heroes all around us, helping us like

during slavery.

Banwo: African-centered school helps you learn about black heroes?

Earl: Yes, and black history and all about our nation and our ancestors. It

tell us who we are and where we came from.

I found the students using history and collective knowledge to imagine their future in a positive and healthy way. Their connection to their past was one of being in conversation about black processes of historical “struggle and community.” The students are using elements of Sankofa to understand their present lives, the ancestors are present, they are speaking to the students, and they are helping in some sense the students overcome the harsh social reality of being young, gifted and black.

Ancestors as Fictive Kin

Considering the students’ view of “the ancestors” from another frame, we can see how fictive kin networking is influencing the historical closeness the students have to the past figures; Heroes and Sheroes of the past are “shared” spirits of emulation. In the schools, the students did talk about their (blood) relatives and families, however, I did not encounter a sense of blood lineage hero worship, but a sense of fictive kinship—if you are black, you are adopted into the ancestral pantheon. Anna, for example, in discussing her connection to her “fictive” ancestors, utilized the concept of extended family and communal association to reach back into history and personalize her belief in social and motivational nourishment. Her idea of ancestors, people she never met, people she might not be related to, are assisting her, giving her encouragement, aiding her into the future

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via a historical path and relationship. Like the Igbo mentioned earlier, Anna perceives her ancestors as both objects of honor and tools or agents that are available to be manipulated to achieve her goals. They are active and conscious agents in her life!

This kind of cognitive and non-cognitive conceptualization for the students is extraordinarily personal and informs almost everything they do in the school, from learning to motivation. Indeed, while visiting classrooms at Bethune, I witnessed students talking in language that depicted ancestors as a kind of shared lineage, a kind of thinking that Black historical people, famous or not, were seen as part of a shared legacy that extended beyond the speakers. For instance, a kind of thinking that Martin Luther King

Jr. was a relative of sorts. This historical figure was closer to us than they actually were.

Take another example of Earl speaking about how learning about history, expressly slavery, has demonstrated to him that every day and everywhere, there are heroes in his community, “… that there are still black heroes all around us, helping us like during slavery.” Because of his knowledge of history, Earl has been able to formulate a collectivist or shared understanding of his ethnic past, a kind of thinking that everyday black people can help him in a significant way. This idea ties directly back to the notion of African communitarianism that will be discussed in Chapter Five and to the notion of reparation of black familial bonds.

Earl, like the other students, I believe, are co-constructing their belief system through historical conversations with the lives and examples of elders and historical figures, also I see these students viewing and understanding their future selves without notions of market value. The students are using history and their knowledge of African studies to construct a social and political identity. I am not sure if the schools are aware

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of how deep an impact ancestral reverence plays into the students’ psyche, but the schools are intentionally incorporating elders and ancestral knowledge into how the students consume the education and socialization process.

Centering elders and ancestors in the educational process was further demonstrated in interviews with school leaders; when asked about elders’ involvement in the schools, the majority of leaders spoke about the importance of teaching the students about “What black people have done. What we have contributed to the nation and beyond” (Mama Sydney, 4/17/2019). Additionally, the leaders emphasized the importance of elders as bridges to our past. Steve Biko, for example, on their website and in their monthly newsletter, prominently place a section called “Commemorating Our

Heroes and Sheroes”; moreover, Biko intentionally highlights and centers elders and ancestors from the local Washington, D.C., area. For instance, the December 2019

Heroes and Sheroes section included Cicely Tyson, Florence Griffith–Joyner, and a local educator and former Steve Biko principal and teacher named Albert “King Kamau”

Leroy Robinson. For me, the highlighting of local elders and ancestors goes back to what

Bethune student Earl said about seeing heroes all around him. These heroes are accessible, can be touched, seen, and found throughout the Steve Biko and Bethune communities. Mama Nia during her interview described how Steve Biko positions elders in the organization stating,

Well, elders have a certain wisdom about themselves; they’ve been around

for a while. So it’s two-fold. They have wisdom that we want to get from

them. And then, we also want our children to be exposed to elders, right?

Maybe sometimes their grandmothers aren’t as old as what my

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grandmother was, or they may have younger grandparents... and you know

elders don’t always get to be seen in our society, once they get older.

(8/30/2019)

Goldfarb (1999) determined that students who participated in a service-learning intergenerational project found their most important lesson learned was having access to lived histories: Students shared the importance of the past and the need to talk, relive, and share past history. Furthermore, the seniors informed how the participating youth approached their present life by their encouragement of the students to seek out their history, to explore their past. Additionally, for the seniors, Goldfarb found there were benefits ranging from practical help to emotional support. The participating elderly had increased access to information about existing services and assistance in translating materials and filling out forms. An interesting aspect of the Goldfarb study was that student ties between generations within ethnic communities were strengthened as elders and students shared their perspectives on the past, present, and future.

The process of knowledge and cultural co-construction is an approach that incorporates ancestral memories into how the students perceive and experience historical consciousness in their present world. It is vital for African-centered schools, as Black educational institutions, to prepare students for a world that perceives them as inferior.

For these institutions, this means connecting students to elders and their immense resources of knowledge and skills. Co-constructing enables students to gain valued understanding through daily communication and interactions with senior members of the community.

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Steve Biko for example, intentionally places elders within the student body, which facilitates an organizational practice that allows for a vibrant process of community memory and narratives making. Jones and Ackerman (2018) observed that these familiar interactions provide an opportunity for senior members of our society to communicate face-to-face with the youth in order to preserve content and pass it along to their families and communities. African-centered schools build upon these narratives and enable Black people to create a sense of collective identity across multiple generations.

This collectivity in memory and interaction is how this organization stays nimble, relevant, and fresh for generation after generation of students and organizational actors.

In the following chapter (Chapter Five), I will discuss how African-centered schools are seen as social locations of collective care. Moreover the chapter will explore how an organizational ideology of communitarianism is socializing African children into healthy practices of social relationships. With Chapter Five, I want to understand how a formal organizational culture, grounded in methods that value collectivism, particularly traditions of cooperation found on the African continent, serves to socialize black children into a healthy sense of self and self-efficacy. Chapter Five will consider Black

Cultures of Care in three parts: First is an exploration of African communitarianism, as an institutional ideology. I am looking to examine how a praxis of communitarianism can particularly shift how institutional participants experience, perceive, and maintain a black organization that centers a black historical experience and healing of black social bonds through a caring organizational environment. Moreover, I will examine how challenging practices of competition in the educational and socialization process can serve to advance two fundamental pillars of the African-centered model. The first of which is the idea of

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learning in environments that promote and center fictive kinships. In the two schools of the study, the students are encouraged and socialized into the perception that their peers are their brothers and sisters.

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Chapter Five: Black Organizational Cultures of Care and Communitarianism

Vignette: Black Cultures of Care & Group work

“No, you are not done, because your partners are not done!” Baba

Nicholes tells a young African American male student I would later learn

was named Rashad. The student was attempting to turn in his assignment

before his group was finished, which Baba Nicholes had reminded the

class against at the beginning of the assignment. “This goes to the

principle of Umoja (Unity) in the NGUZO SABA and is something we

think is good for our people.” Baba Nicholes would also tell me during our

interviews that Rashad is an incredible student. “He is quick and is

displaying qualities of being a strong leader that could help our people, but

we have to learn to work together... I want them (the students) to

understand that we are all we have, we have to be our support, our

foundation.”

Rashad began to pout, turned away, and sat with the other two

members of his group. The second- and third-grade class sat on a large

blue carpet that spanned the room. Since the second- and third-grade

classrooms are a part of a larger open-space school model, other students

from the lower and higher grades could be heard next door. About 12 to

15 students were working in groups of three on a science project about the

three states of matter. The students wore a mixture of school uniforms, red

soft-collared shirts with the school logo embroidered on the pockets in

gold with black or khaki-colored pants.

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Baba Nicholes is a middle-aged African American man with long

Rastafarian dreads. From time to time, during the lesson, he would call out to the class different African historical facts or exciting details that connected to the ongoing lesson. He also, from time to time, highlighted students’ special moments, “Wow class! Kim is going to be a scientist.

She is really getting this science lesson in such an incredible way. Hotep

Sista!” (He gives her a pound.) Although Baba Nicholes was assisting other students, he kept a watchful eye on the group of boys. “This is a lesson for them. They need to see themselves as a group. As black people willing to put up and sacrifice time and energy to help pull one of our people up.”

After a few minutes, Baba Nicholes spoke to the upset student,

“You are going to be in charge of many employees one day. There is no doubt in my mind, and I would hate for them to see you in this state. We are here to help each other, to love each other, and to be in service to each other.” Baba Nicholes went on to modify his lesson into a broader class conversation about the significance of Umoja for the black community, which he and Steve Biko Public Charter School regard as an essential component for Black liberation. One of the boys began helping his groupmates, while Rashad, the “upset” student in the group, sat on the side, observing his groupmates act out the lesson of Baba Nicholes. After watching his classmates work for awhile, Rashad joined in and began helping his group finish their lesson. (Baba Nicholes, Teacher, 5/29/2019)

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Mainstream Schools and Social Harm

Shaull (1970) in the forward of Paulo Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, stated:

There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either

functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the

younger generation into the logic of the present system and brings about

conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom…’ (p. 34).

African-centered education, at its most basic form, is a philosophical approach of infusing “care” into the formal learning environments for black students. Louis et al.

(2016) describe caring as a process of helping another person grow in his or her “own right.” However, most importantly, caring is not bound up in the interests and well-being of the caregiver but in the one being cared for. For many Black children participating in mainstream public education systems, there appears to be a lack of a “neutral education process,” moreover, many black students find themselves in ideological systems that are devised in a Eurocentric world view. Further, many scholars perceive black participation in Eurocentric organizations as black people entering into arrangements of genuine harm or lack of care within societies’ formal system, which, in many cases, dooms black children to the margins of our society.

For me and other African-centered thinkers, generations of conversations about gaps in racialized educational experiences demonstrate how the field of school leadership has failed to address the lived experiences of black children in formal organizations.

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Lomotey (1993) and his exploration of African American principals coined the term

“ethno-humanist,” which he used to describe the role of identity amongst black educational leaders. The ethno-humanist role encompasses “commitment to the education of all students, compassion for, and understanding of all students and the communities in which they live” (Lomotey, 1993, p. 36).

Returning to Louis et al. (2016) and their notion of care being a kind of distinct personal, organizational experience that is forwarding or enhancing the “individual,” say, organizational citizenship experience or system participation. Moreover, for this chapter,

I am interested in how Louis et al. theorize leaders’ implementation or introduction of practices or feelings of “care” into the organization, being that, in my opinion, of an individual change agent, a kind of walking, talking beacon that transfers care into an organization. Louis et al. (2016) do acknowledge that “Caring communities in schools are also promoted through the social relationships students have with adults and peers in school” (p. 22). So organizations can facilitate or develop a systematic culture of care through organizational policing of ways of comportment.

However, what does it say when you have a school culture structured around

Lomotey’s notion of “ethno-humanist?” I believe you find cultures of communitarianism, collectivism, and an idea of “collectivist” or “group care.” It is the organizational expression of Louis et al. (2016) concluding idea of care occupying a central position in the organizational ideology. I encountered Lomotey’s notion during my data collection, particularly when elders and school staff discussed issues around their perceptions of care within mainstream schools. Many participants spoke about their experience teaching in non-African-centered schools and how they struggled in an organization that actively

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restricted them from discussing issues of race and racism. Here is where I find Louis et al.’s (2016) notion of care and individualism being not quite actionable. The participants spoke about attempting to act in a caring manner around issues of race. Conversely, the actors also express surprise when they were organizationally policed out of those actions.

In many cases, the teachers described students of all races wanting to talk about social and systemic issues around race that the students and teachers believed was taking an emotional toll on the student body. However, for many of the teachers of the study, they found their willingness to help students explore their racial identities, curtailed by school leadership. Here is how a fifth grade teacher at Steve Biko described the need to employ her own curriculum to teach racial identities when she taught at a mainstream school:

The curriculum was from downtown. Generally speaking for the

classrooms but I always used my own. Same with the other school… I just

taught them what I felt that they needed to know, but like she said, here I

don’t have to sneak and do it. It’s in the open and it’s unapologetic, the

information that we’re giving them (students) (Mama Amina, Teacher,

MMB, interview 8/29/2019)

Another example of this is when I was speaking to the librarian, Baba

Menelik, at Steve Biko about how he saw race playing out. Baba Menelik talked about how it was challenging to address issues of race and history in his former school, where the school culture and leadership did not fully appreciate the interconnectedness of history and identity. He felt some students were uneasy when discussions of race came up, which served to organizationally police what

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he felt was much needed racial conversations among black children. This organizational policing also gave Baba Menelik the opinion that organizational harm was okay for black children to experience, just as long as powerful members of the school were not inconvenienced by practices and actions that raised their privileged position.

It is basically white culture, definitely, like for instance I will have black

kids and Latino kids in my school. A lot of times the Latino and white kids

would feel isolated when you get to talk about Africa and black people as

the father of civilization. Some of them would accept it but some of them

would feel kind of isolated because they don’t really know their history. It

just feels like, oh you’re talking about all these black stuff, black stuff,

that’s the fine line you had to walk.

A lot of times you just had to pick and choose your battles... Pick

and choose your battles because some of the kids and I had a few young

black men that were receptive to the information. When other kids were

around it’s like I can’t really speak to freely because I don’t want to offend

nobody. For the other cultures they’re just like, “That’s just African. that’s

just for y’all, it’s not really for humanity, it’s just for y’all.” That was one

of the excuses that you face when you get to the other side of the equation.

(Baba Menelik, Steve Biko, interview, (4/16/2019)

For Lomotey and myself, there appears to be something uniquely occurring in schools with organizational actors steeped in cultural responsiveness and sensitivity to the complexity of systematic histories of people who have searched and failed to find

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loving and caring places to develop and enter the world. Indeed this lack of sensitivity to black cultural responsiveness for Mustaffa (2016) is again termed “educational violence,” which he views as a practice of participants and leaders using systematic power to marginalized people both in and outside of formal systems of schooling. The experiences of Baba Menelik can be expanded on in many categories. The point is that racialized students face disturbing cultures in schools, which serve to harm the overall educational and socialization experience of racialized youth.

The institutions and leaders featured in this dissertation personify organizational cultures that purposely and meaningfully tackled social and communal matters that affect social bonds and healthy ways of being. It is the systematic practice of “care” that Louis et al. long for at the conclusion of their paper. What I witnessed and what I plan to present in this chapter is how formal organizational cultures, grounded in methods that value collectivism, particularly traditions of cooperation found on the African continent, serve to socialize black children into a healthy sense of self and self-efficacy.

The following sections will consider Black cultures of care in three parts. First is an exploration of African communitarianism as an institutional ideology. I am looking to examine how a praxis of communitarianism can fundamentally shift how institutional participants experience, perceive, and maintain a black organization that centers a black historical experience and healing of black social bonds through a caring organizational environment.

Furthermore, I will explore how eliminating practices of competition in the educational and socialization process can serve to advance two fundamental social pillars of the African-centered model. The first of which is the idea of learning in environments

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that promote and center fictive kinships (social ties that are based on neither consanguineal—blood ties—nor affinal—by marriage ties). In the two schools of the study, the students are encouraged and socialized into the perception that their peers are their brothers and sisters. In other words, we are all a part of a more extensive diasporic family (fictive family), which requires us to treat and develop healthy familiar bonds.

Lastly, I will examine how the promotion of a unique practice of Ethno-cultural responsiveness school leadership deepens organizational relationships and focuses organizational leadership to accurately and swiftly identify the physical and psychological needs of their students.

Section One: African Communitarianism and Social Cohesion

The Tanzanian philosopher-statesman Julius K. Nyerere (1964) saw collectivism not as an alien idea to the African continent, but as a social order that reflected traditional

African lifestyles and points of view. In his view, a “socialist attitude of mind” was already present in traditional African society. Moreover what I find so prescient about

Nyerere’s thinking in today’s climate is his critique of Westernized imperial thinking about African peoples, stating, “We, in Africa, have no more need of being “converted” to socialism than we have of being “taught” democracy. Both are rooted in our past – in the traditional society which produced us” (Otunnu, 2015, p. 170

Nyerere’s message to the West was one, a cry and recognition of the many peoples around the globe with histories and cultural practices that employed what some would

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describe as a collectivist approach of community built independently of Western Marxist theories, and two, a message of Sankofa to the broader African diaspora.

He saw, as many African-centered leaders do today, that many traditional African social orders derived from principals of communitarianism that “served and serve” as powerful roadmaps to liberate practices of learning and social comportments from problematic and Eurocentric foundational assumptions. Further, Nyerere skillfully saw his message of Sankofa in the de-colonialization efforts in North America, South

America, Asia, and India… all over. It was an idea of self-determination through the historical reclaiming of traditional African and pre-european contact ideologies.

History as a Weapon

When I began my data collection, one of the first practices I observed was how the formal organizational (African-centered schools) utilized historical recollection and knowledge to shape their school’s mission and goals. Everything originates from this practice. Some scholars describe it as decolonization, while other African-centered scholars call it decentering of europe. All these terms, in my opinion, are correct; however, I prefer to see this as the practice of what Asante (1988) terms Afrocentricity.

Asante’s theory or paradigm sees the reclaiming of healthy black social relations and self-determined liberatory practices as a form of relocation that stresses the criticalness of

Africans becoming the center of their cultural traditions, through a process of reclamation of their historical reality. In other words, African freedom is predicated upon the

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conscious activation of one’s Africanness, that is, ultimately, with the exercise by African people of their agency. Baba Terrell, director of student and cultural development of the

Mary McLeod Bethune Network, which includes Bethune, also spoke how the conscious activation of history can transform how students consume information. The radical nature of centering blackness has a shifting effect on how a student understands modernity.

Banwo: How do you think positioning blackness and African-ness at the

center of the school’s culture is preparing students to enter a world?

Baba Terrell: By giving them a more accurate account of how things

came to be. Essentially, when a black student is in a typical school, being

a successful student is basically based on how well you can think and act

like white folks. If you understand that the things that these white folks

hold up as their standards for excellence are, let’s say, borrowed from

African culture and tradition, these practices and this knowledge and these

understandings and these teachings and these philosophies all came from

people who look like you, then why focus on the copy, when you are the

original? If that makes sense. (Baba Terrell, MMB, interview, 3/20/2019)

History for these institutions served as a grounding force that defined their view of the current reality and position of Africans in the United States. Centering blackness in a world that devalues it is a critical practice that helps the children understand how racism informs their daily lives and the lives of their elders and ancestors. Take another instance, while observing a class in Bethune, the teacher I was watching began to connect her math lesson on integers to mid-century black female mathematicians. When asked about this, the teacher told me that,

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“A black understanding of history helps the students appreciate why it is

important to do well because so many of our heroes were stopped or not

given an opportunity. Look what happened to Malcolm when he learned

better, look at what he became when he got a chance.”

In this instance, the teacher used Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson (Black mathematicians who worked at NASA) as an example of persons to emulate. According to the teacher, racism and sexism prevented both mathematicians from fully excelling in their chosen careers and fields. This barrier, according to the teacher, “should serve as a reason” for the students to understand how bigotry and sexism can prevent people, through no fault of their own, from being happy and prosperous in a society that (1) claims to value meritocracy, and (2) preaches the ideological concept of the “pursuit of happiness.” The teacher spoke about how obstacles did not restrain Mary Jackson and

Katherine Johnson from succeeding; they challenged power structures with support from their black families and community.

This simple math lesson turned “math integers” into a transformative experience on history and social relations, which tied the students to the political nature of the past.

The teacher with this lesson and others I observed was demonstrating to the students that they were not “just” individual actors in the world, but members of a collective of people who have in the past been historically dispossessed. Further, the lesson tells the students that their current racialized experiences are not unique and should not exempt or prevent anyone from not aiming to be successful or helpful to the broader black community.

Moreover, this grounding of the present in historical terms also, in my judgment, buttresses the communitarian nature of the school. The students are being continuously

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socialized into thinking that their experiences are a part of a more comprehensive black narrative—believing that what is occurring now has occurred before in a different machination. This advises the students that we, the group, can learn from our history.

This logic of historical placement enables the students to see adults as illustrations of

“what to do” or “not to do” when it comes to their relationship with the broader society.

The schools are encouraging students to study and shape themselves from the historical narrative.

In a broader sense, a long line of black revolutionary struggle and thinking is being socialized into the students. History for the schools is seen and used as a weapon or a tool to demystify racialized jargon and histories. Students at Bethune and Steve Biko should have no illusions of the black historical experience and how that experience connects to the current position of Black America. There are no myths of America being taught here, only the hard truth of what blackness has meant in the United States, moreover, what blackness was before blackness was even a racialized and capitalist concept.

Communitarianism as a Praxis of Care

A significant component in the discussion on African communitarianism has been the debate over the position of “the individual and the community” with many African- centered thinkers promoting the understanding that traditional African cultures prioritized ways of being, in order to resist the excesses of the individual (Eze, 2007; Ramose,

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1999). Its proponents see communitarianism in the broader sense as a social philosophy that emphasizes the centrality or supremacy of the society. For these scholars, communitarian centrality is expressed best in the idea of responsibility to the social

(families, groups, formal systems) serving as a model for “a people” to codify social behaviors that benefit the whole, leading to open participation, dialogue, and shared values (Rawls, 2009; Taylor, 1998). Communitarians’ understanding of a person’s subjectivity is partly constituted by people with whom they share a social world, with that social world being dependent on how integral social interactions are experienced. Mbiti

(1969) wrote:

In traditional life, the individual does not and cannot exist alone except

corporately. He owes this existence to other people, including those of

past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole.

The community must therefore make, create, or produce the individual; for

the individual depends on the corporate group… (pp. 108-109)

Mwalimu, like Mbiti, like Baba Nicholes and Mama Sydney, all see African

Communitarianism as a praxis of black care and social cohesion. Nyerere and Mbiti viewed African Communitarianism as a form of inheritance going back millennia on the

African continent, which is also how the institutions of the study observed communitarianism and collectivism. For Steve Biko and Bethune, communitarianism is not just about being your brother’s keeper, which is an essential component to their school culture, it is also about healing and rebuilding our community from the wounds of history. Indeed learning through an African-centered curriculum is the principle focus for

African-centered institutions; it is the reason they are operating; however, these schools

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are also comprehensively paying attention to the holistic reality of black socialization and learning. For example, I had the following exchange with Baba Williams, elder and board member of Mary McLeod Bethune Academy:

In this day and age, there’s a lot of divisiveness. There’s a lot of focus on

individuality with some of our students and families, and from what I

understand and what I’ve come to learn, the first part of any child’s

education and the last lesson that an elder had to learn was one in the

same, it was to ‘know thyself and to thy self be true.’ …NGUZO SABA

talks of the actions that we must engage in as a collective which

mainstream culture counteracts, with its focus on the individualistic

approach to life…Because of this you have many people now that do not

trust anyone. That then has a detrimental impact when we then try to

engage in economic endeavors. (6/26/2019)

The elder is discussing the dynamic nature of their school’s culture. He regards the institutions as having the capacity to shift, shape, and be culturally responsive to their organizational participants. Baba Williams recognizes the power of a black institution as a mechanism to repair and reconstitute healthy black social bonds, which he describes as individualism. Additionally, Baba Terrell, during his interview, also spoke about how he sees the process of Bethune reconnecting students to historical “ways of being” through a healthy process of socialization. What I also find so interesting about the two Babas is how expansive and culturally inclusive they are when it comes to thinking about social and emotional development, particularly how that influences their organizational ideas of culturally relevant pedagogy.

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Banwo: What are things that are requirements for a school, for leadership, for culture, that you guys do that center race, centers blackness, that other places aren’t doing that you think if you could change school for black kids in America?

Baba Terrell: A few years ago, that question might’ve been a little easier to answer, but now, we see that there’s a trend where schools are becoming more focused on the whole child and their social, emotional development, and culturally relevant pedagogy. Nowadays, there are more schools who are doing these things, but these are all traditional African approaches to education. Even though we do identify as an African- centered school, everything we do isn’t just about race and being black.

It’s about the ideas and philosophies and the ethos of African people in forming our approach to pedagogy, so honoring and respecting nature, honoring and respecting your ancestors, those who came before you, recognizing the fact that you’re not just a physical being, you’re also a spiritual being. Those types of things that are intangible concepts that inform education, but are not necessarily racially based, because if you look at any ancient cultures, you’ll see the Asians did it. The Native

Americans did it. Some european even did it. It’s just not all about race.

It’s more about philosophical and cultural beliefs and norms that we’re trying to instill within our young people that have been lost over the generations since we’ve been brought to this continent…(3/20/2019)

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There is a political landscape the schools are operating in. Baba Williams and

Baba Terrell are both troubled with the predicament of the black community and the broader culture that is challenging our natural collectivist approach to life. In Baba

Williams’s statement, you can observe the communitarianism and collectivist emphasis coming out. He begins with a critique of the broader culture; we are encountering a lot of

“divisiveness,” tied to notions of individuality, where he concludes by stating these types of social practices are harming our community because of the lack of trust between

African peoples. What we are hearing through these two Baba’s voices is the ideological reason why it is critical for African-centered schools to implement communitarianism as a praxis through the intentional embedding of organizational values that encourage students into collectivist thinking and ways of being.

Bethune and Biko’s organizational purpose is much more dynamic than just a pure institutional task to educate children; they are much more in line with the “Ohafia villages” described in Chapter Four—social institutions with productions of knowledge grounded in the past and lived experience of daily life. At the core, African-centered schools are tasked by African-centered leaders and thinkers with serving in a traditional formal organizational role of influencing future black social participants’ levels of cognitive and non-cognitive thinking.

Take another instance. Below is how Mary McLeod Bethune Academy describes in its mission statement its model of African-centered education. Look at how prominently “responsibility, accountability, community, extended family, propriety, and of course, pride” is placed in its mission statement. Yes, the school is in the business of

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schooling, but it also recognizes itself as an agent of socialization. Further, the school is formulating its organizational culture to develop and encourage black social cohesion.

Our school incorporates African cultural elements and influences found

on each continent into every aspect of our school environment and

curriculum. Cultural elements like language, the arts, tradition,

ceremony, and values are used to instill in our students a sense of history,

responsibility, accountability, community, extended family, propriety,

and of course, pride. The culture and value-based protocols, and

instructional routines we use daily have been developed and proven

successful over the last 40 years by the Institute Of Positive Education.

This model has shown that by integrating African culture, history, and

values into our rigorous academic curriculum and throughout our school

environment, and by hiring loving and committed teachers, the children

we educate will develop the cultural pride and self-confidence they need

to accelerate their pace of learning and excel academically.” (Mary

McLeod Bethune Charter School etc., 2020)

The practice of cultural responsiveness is felt when you are in the schools. Sounds of children collaborating, drums playing, and familiar african rhythmic cultural sounds permeate the halls. The students address adults as “Mama and Baba”; every day the schools perform rites and rituals that help to develop the organizational identity, and there is an intentional practice that incorporates and centers Africana thinking, which serves to influence how the organizational members perceive black social cohesion. “In essence, we’re not only trying to introduce the student to an African way of thinking, but we’re

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also trying to plant seeds that they give to their families, their parents, and their extended family… (Baba Williams, Elder, Bethune, Interview 6/26/2019).”

Maxwell’s (1996) definition for social cohesion is that it involves building shared values and communities of interpretation, reducing disparities in wealth and income, and generally enabling people to have a sense that they are engaged in a joint enterprise, facing shared challenges, and that they are members of the same community. Among many African-centered thinkers is the belief that the black experience in the United States has been a process of sustained and intentional destruction of black social and familial bonds. Government, education, and housing in urban areas are all alienating forces designed to wall up and silo social relationships and social bonds. If, for example, we look at many of the rapidly gentrifying landscapes in the United States, you see powers queued to destroy communities. Through challenging the creation and maintenance of black social and communal bonds through the co-optation of social institutions (schools, local government, and local industry).

Black store owners in Washington, D.C., can no longer play “go-go music” in their stores where they had previously played music for 40 years. Black drummers in

Brooklyn are being discouraged from playing drums in Prospect Park where they had previously played for half a century. These are barriers to black fellowship that are inflicting a form of restriction on black neighborhoods and black communal spaces. The lived experiences that the leaders of my dissertation face are on policing, controlling, gentrifying, and ultimately the dispossession of healthy black social bonds. They see themselves as creating an organization that centers black experiences steeped in actual reality. Living in the actual reality of “White-dominated cultural spaces” requires the

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leaders to consider the cultural and physical safety Africans in an organization designed to socialize black children into adulthood. It is not either-or (social, or academics) but both. In a sense, it is the difference between schooling and education or what Baba

Nicholes continuously tells his students: “They (the students) need to see themselves as a group. As black people willing to put up and sacrifice time and energy to help pull one of our people up. (5/30/2019)” Not only are these institutions places of safety and care for black children to learn to love themselves, their history, and their ethnic group, but also a location that is safe and grounded in 3,000-plus years of a cultural tradition of Africans being actors in history, and not acted upon in history.

African-Centered Schools and Identity

I began searching for an organizational theory that would help me understand the social orientation and cultural production that is occurring in African-centered schools. I believe these institutions are practicing social identity theory formation, which Tajfel

(1978) defines as “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (p. 63). Teachers and leadership staff at Bethune and Steve Biko cultivate the social identity of students through their organizational experience from the very beginning to the very end of the school day. The institutions, through intentional organizational practices and leadership, are molding and crafting the students’ world view into that of a communitarian and collectivist viewpoint.

The social identity that the leaders believe most closely resembles an African state of mind and is most helpful in the development of healthy black social bonds. Keep in mind

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throughout this dissertation that African-centered schools are just as concerned with the

“social” as they are with the “academic.”

Returning to Baba Nicholes’ classroom, you can see from his insistence that the students work together that he was orienting the students into a collectivist approach to their social identity. Further, during his impromptu lesson, he states to the class: “No one asked if you wanted to be black, you were born into a group, so we must take care of each other (5/30/2019).” Here again, Baba Nicholes is using the language of “group or whole care,” combined with history, as a way to orient the students into a social understanding that their peers are their fictive kin family.

Furthermore, his pedagogical approach to the classroom and school culture formulation centered on strengthening and privileging social-relational development. In my opinion, classroom time is the most valuable thing a teacher possesses, and, interestingly, Baba Nicholes suspends his academic lesson to emphasize the significance of healthy black social relationships. Again for me, this is a demonstration of how

African-centered approaches take care to develop within students a vibrant affinity for camaraderie and partnership between Black students and their community. Care and social bonds are a critical component of how African-centered schools view themselves in the broader black community.

Indeed, concerns about healthy black social bonds were also expressed by Baba

Anwisye, (an African-centered educator and leader in St. Louis). The Baba felt it was the responsibility of African-centered leaders to cultivate in young people an African- centered state of mind. By expressing the importance of Black unity and a clear understanding of how black social bonds have been tested and damaged historically

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through the process of negative socialization. Both the Babas also acknowledge the traditional role of schools as a place of ideology and politics, which can be used to orient students into trustful and valuable healthy social relations. Baba Anwisye terms this socialization process in schools as having an “African personality” (Anwisye, 2017), which he describes in the brick-and-mortar parable below:

The strength of a brick wall, and then the strength of the structure of

which the wall is a part, is ultimately determined by the strength of the

small, individual bonds between the bricks themselves. If the brick mortar

(or other brick bonding technique) is weak, cracking, or not present in the

first place, the individual bricks fail to adhere to each other. The unbonded

or weakly bonded bricks shift or pop out, and as a result, the wall begins

to bulge, crack, crumble, and eventually collapse. The “mortar,” which

holds human relationships together, consists of commitment, politeness,

courtesy, respect, empathy” (Kwk, p. 18).

Self-Discovery and Co-Construction

Baba Nicholes’ classroom was, first, in a state of kinesthetic and tactile pedagogical methods. Students were encouraged to move around, work, and communicate with their peers freely, and utilize collective knowledge and classroom tools to facilitate learning. Take another instance from Baba Nichole’s classroom, during one of my observations of a lesson about the three states of matter. The students were given time and space to employ tactile pedagogical approaches. Students worked on the large blue carpet with yellow writing on it in groups of three. The students were encouraged to move around, use items in the classroom to help them solve the

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assignment, and, most importantly, be active in the learning process. I saw students acting out the assignment, mimicking different types of elements, and participating in a process that was socializing them to be social learners. See the following ethnographic vignette:

When I entered the room, I quickly sat at a small desk next to a group of girls and began watching them finish their science assignment. I heard from across the room Baba

Nicholes’s voice call out, “Show Baba (me) your answers when you are done.” In a flash,

I had four groups of students showing me their assignment papers, and what I found extremely funny, some students performing the different states of matter. After checking everyone’s work, I observed a group of students, in the middle of the carpet, struggling to answer the question of, “What are the three states of matter?” The students approached

Baba Nicholes for help, to which he recommended that these students ask one of their classmates (again reinforcing the notion of black self-reliance—”we can help ourselves”) if they could help them figure out the answers. The group of three students then approached a finished group, on the edge of the carpet, working on another assignment, for help. Typically, when I have been in the classroom, students would guard answers and not share them with people who are not close friends. However, in this situation, the second group of students used this moment to encourage the first group to figure out the correct answer, even though they only wanted the final answers. I am not saying this is a different pedagogical method from mainstream schools, but this process of collaboration as pedagogy appears to be at the center of how learning occurs at Steve Biko. Here is a transcription of the students’ interactions:

Group 1 (Anna): Do you know the states of matter?

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Group 2 (Kyle and Tiffany): What is something that can be matter?

Yeah what are the states of matter?

Group 1 (Nicole): We don’t know, can you just tell us?

Group 2 (Kyle): I will show you, look! (They point to an earlier question

on the handout) What about water? What states can water be in? (At this

clue, the first group of students began to call out the different states of

water.)

Group 1 (Anna, Nicole and Zahra): Ice when it gets cold, because the

molecules slow down. Water is normal, and what’s the third? (The group

struggles to name water vapor)

Group 2 (Kyle and Tiffany): What about when you boiling water and

that stuff comes up, like when it is, like, really hot outside. (One of the

students begins to mimic water vapor, by moving hands and fingers up

and down in the air.)

Group 1 (Nicole): Oh like steam, like the stuff that comes out of the iron.

(Half the students look puzzled at the iron reference.)

There is a critical centering of Black children’s self-discovery and co-construction of knowledge within the classroom space that celebrates their ethnicity, freedom, and learning. Giddings (2001) describes this practice as having a comprehensive Afrocentric curriculum, which he observes as being represented by five goals:

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1. Assist students in developing the necessary intellectual, moral, and

emotional skills for accomplishing a productive, affirming life in this

society.

2. Provide such educational instruction as to deconstruct established

hegemonic pillars and to safeguard against the construction of new ones.

3. Provide students of African descent with educational instruction that

uses techniques that are in accord with their learning styles.

4. Assist students of African descent in maintaining a positive self-

concept, with the goal of achieving a sense of collective accountability.

5. Serve as a model for Banks (1988) “transformation” and “social action”

approaches to multicultural education. (p. 463)

Baba Nicholes’s classroom serves as an environment that values collective discovery; the children aren’t competing for who gets the right answer. Group 2 is not jealously guarding the answers when they are asked for help. On the contrary, Group 2 encourages Group 1 to figure out the answer by using the example “water.” Even though

Group 1 was resistant and just wanted the answers, Group 2 encouraged their peers to come to the answer intellectually. Imagine the collaboration as pedagogy approach to learning in a mainstream school, fueled by artificial practices of competition. Could this approach work?

When asked about the freedom allowed to the students, Baba Nicholes described that he would not have it any other way. “Learning is about discovery, and for me black children’s learning is about teaching black children to learn together in traditional ways,

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like our ancestors.” In another interview later in the year Baba Nicholes elaborated on this notion:

Baba (referring to myself), you cannot go to an African village where

children are learning from elders and see them at desks, row after row…

Yeah, you see that in Western educational imports, like schools (referring

to the formal institution)…but when in the community you see people

interacting, you see movement, you hear noise and you see real people

displaying love and care. It’s a community and they learn and teach as a

community. (5/29/2019)

Mama Sydney used the practitioners’ terminology of “kinesthetic and tactile” when describing the pedagogical approach of Steve Biko. However, she also explained how she and her leadership team envisioned and designed many components of the school to encourage student cooperation through kinesthetic and tactile approaches, which I believe goes to the essence of their organizational purpose of repairing black social bonds and relationships. The encouragement of social learning skills helps socialize the students into the understanding that black people working together can solve problems.

Another unique element of Steve Biko is their “open school model” or “open classroom model.” During my first visit, I asked Mama Sydney about the structure of the classrooms, mainly why there were not permanent walls. Moreover, was this because the purpose of the building was not initially for a school? She explained that the model was her vision; it was an intentional organizational model, which improved accessibility to all

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village members. Students could look across the wall and see their family members, their friends, their sibling’s teacher, or friends.

Additionally, she understands this model as encouraging students to see the upper grades, which allows them exposure to higher levels of knowledge. The students during their interviews also spoke about the proximity of their classrooms and how it permitted them access to higher levels of knowledge (higher grade level): “Last year I was in Baba

Nicholes class and we got to do fifth grade work, which made us ready when we got to the fifth grade. I knew what to expect.” (Anna, Steve Biko) Again, this organizational model was intentionally selected to encourage students’ relationship-building through collaboration, spontaneous conversation, and learning. Mama Sydney discussed the model:

Mama Sydney: Well, that’s a design; it’s called open space learning, and

research shows that when you have an open space learning environment

the people are more open-minded. Just like if you go outside and you go to

the country and it’s a wide-open space your mind is freer to think. You’re

like, “Oh my goodness this is a wide-open space.” You see the sky and as

far as you could see. You see grass and whatever. It’s something

psychological about having an open space than it is having a closed-in

environment.

Banwo: Don’t some people say that the kids are distracted from the other

classrooms?

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Mama Sydney: Well, you do have to sort of monitor yourselves in your

voice level and this type of thing but in life the kids are distracted. There’s

so many distractions for young people, even more nowadays than they

were when I was here with the drugs, the guns, and the gangs. There’s so

many distractions. In life you learn how to focus in on what you’re about,

in an open space learning environment where you’re really forced to focus

on what you’re doing and what you want to hear and not be distracted by

everything else that’s going on in the world or in the area. (4/17/2019)

Although Bethune is not an open-school model, their pedagogical practices such as self-discovery, co-construction of knowledge, kinesthetic and tactile was also encouraged within the classroom space. Bethune, through a more traditional classroom setting, used classroom time and teaching practices to encourage students’ collaboration and relationship building. Desks are arranged in groups; teachers use a lot of cooperative learning groups for assignments; and the relationships with elders in the school were respectful, but also very familiar.

Indeed, when students expressed how they “find help” in the school building, students at both institutions described their relationships with adults as “like home.” The students’ perception of adults is that of trust. Relational trust is incredibly high at both schools, which is an essential component to an African-centered curriculum. The students described organizational cultures that provide them the freedom to communicate with teachers and staff, whomever they need to deal with their problems, with one student from Bethune stating: “Even though sometimes they get on our nerves, they actually helped us through this journey, they let us express our feelings.”

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I found this type of relational care in African-centered schools tied to their practice of communitarianism and their focus on healthy black community cohesion or healthy black social bonds. Inside the organizational culture was a sensitivity among adults that recognized their students were the future of the black community, which oriented their organizational position as that of teacher, mentor, or persons responsible for the healthy rearing of future leaders who will be responsive to a black constituency.

Again there is also a kind of social identity introduction happening with the adults; they are taking their self-concept and group membership and attaching that to how the organizational culture is orienting new members. The leaders described how students face challenges outside the building, which requires their organizations to be sensitive and caring about the real-world psychological and physical anxieties students face. These anxieties require the leadership to initiate organizational practices that outwardly demonstrate love and care to the students. Mama Pat from Bethune described how her organization tackles the social anxieties of her students:

Banwo: Do you see this school build social cohesion?

Mama Pat: Yes, I think that somebody needs to. It’s very difficult to go

to a school where there is nothing about you, except what you see in

textbooks, you’re taught by people who don’t look like you. How is that

supposed to give you a sense that who you are and who your people are is

important? It doesn’t.

Banwo: How do you, guys, help parents who are struggling with things

like work hours, family issues? How do you reach out to the larger

extended family?

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Mama Pat: I think that most of that help is embedded. It varies from

family to family and child to child because the help that you give is based

on what children and families need. Some families need more financial

support, and then some families need social support. There is a great deal

of trauma in our communities and we have to be aware of that. Some of

the support that we give families is simply helping their children through

that trauma, because in other places, people may not be as open to

working with family and community issues as we are. We have to help

families and our communities heal from the trauma we face. (5/23/2019)

When the students are participating in the daily “Circle of Love” morning ceremony, it is not just a reaffirmation for them to the community, but also a reaffirmation of the community to them by caring and loving elders. Baba Terrell of

Bethune told me during our interview that, “It was not enough for the students to find a trusted adult on their own; the students had to be aware explicitly that they have a caring village of adults, that are responsive to their needs. (4/16/2019)” Remember, number four in Giddings’s goals is to “Assist students of African descent in maintaining a positive self-concept, with the goal of achieving a sense of collective accountability.”

It is significant when discussing African communitarianism the position of “the individual and the community. (4/16/2019)” Indeed looking at the research, I found many

African-centered thinkers hold the understanding that traditional African cultures prioritized, collective ways of being, in order, to resist the extremes of individualism

(Eze, 2007; Ramose, 1999). Its proponents see communitarianism in the broader sense as a social philosophy that emphasizes the centrality or supremacy of the society. For these

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scholars, communitarian centrality is expressed best in the idea of responsibility to the social (families, groups, formal systems) serving as a mode for “a people” to codify social behaviors that benefit the whole, leading to open participation, dialogue, and shared values (Rawls, 2009; Taylor, 1998). Communitarians’ understanding of a person’s subjectivity is partly constituted by people with whom they share a social world with that social world being dependent on how integral social interactions are experienced. Mbiti

(1969) wrote:

In traditional life, the individual does not and cannot exist alone except

corporately. He owes this existence to other people, including those of

past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole.

The community must therefore make, create, or produce the individual; for

the individual depends on the corporate group… (pp. 108-109)

I found this notion of the “centrality or supremacy of the society” in my data. The schools’ ideological emphasis on the group or community is socializing the students into an expanded view of group identity and self-realization. This sense of groupness again goes to the development of the students’ social identity. They are learning because they have to help better their people. However, leaders are intentionally crafting cultures that socialized students into a group identity, which returns to the theory of social reproduction.

In the next two sections, I will explore how rooting out competition in the

African-centered space helps students become better social actors—a fundamental pillar of institutional political ideology. Moreover, I will end this chapter with a section on how the schools are responsive to the students’ social and community needs, how their

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sensitivity to black life allows their institutions the organizational means to quickly shift practices and policies that instill care into their system’s culture. The goals for African- centered schools are to socialize black children into healthy adults who are concerned for and active in the betterment of their community. The first words expressed during the

Steve Biko “Circle of Love” morning ceremony, is “We are African peoples,” and this mantra is the definition of what I found in the schools: care and love for the past, present, and the future of African peoples.

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Section Two: Competition as a Practice of Social Harm

In the book Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School, Demerath (2009) observes that while attending one of

America’s elite public high schools may bestow certain advantages academically, the school’s competition can be intensely stressful and downright debilitating for the students. Demerath regards the school’s culture as an intense culture of personal advancement, with high-socioeconomic status students possessing a pronounced advantage over students from a low-socioeconomic status family. The competition of the school, and the organizational faith in meritocracy, take a heavy psychological toll on many students; it is deeply inequitable, which leads him to conclude that the role of the culture of personal advancement exacerbates social inequality (Demerath, 2009).

My reading of Demerath’s work is from a Marxist and communitarian lens. When

I look at the school in Demerath’s research, I see class conflict, social distinctions, and community alienation based on an organizational construct and an ideology of competition, which appears to be producing—sure!—”intelligent and successful individuals,” but for me, the larger question is what type of non-cognitive skills are these formal agents (schools) of socialization inculcating into our children? I think Demerath makes this point plain in his work, but for African-centered schools, this question is still relatively under-researched.

Competition is considered by many scholars a healthy construct, a fact of life, and a required component in which grades are assigned and students ranked. However, education scholars on the left do not agree on whether competitive desires should be encouraged or constrained in education systems. One theoretical judgment claims that,

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since competition is a part of every culture and since education should be a transmission of culture, it is necessary to incorporate competition into education to help children get used to it in later life (Ericksen, 2011). Other theories and frameworks observe competition as opposed to collaboration and, therefore, as a negative element in a culture and should be curtailed.

Competition in Steve Biko and Bethune

Steve Biko and Bethune offer a mix of traditional pedagogical approaches to learning infused with an ideological core that promotes practices of African communitarianism (Umoja) and social cohesion (Ujima and Kujichagulia). In Chapter

Four I described these practices as “the political core” of African-centered schools. The schools are not free from practices of competition; the students still take standardized tests, assessments, and play games and activities that could be seen as competitive.

However, what I saw during observations were leaders who intentionally sought to develop organizational cultures that prized and honored the customs of group solidarity.

When I asked about what a successful student would look like, the majority of the leaders spoke about “adults or former students coming back to help the community” (Mama

Sydney, Biko, Interview 4/17/2019)

The leaders wanted to develop in the students an understanding of cultural and group responsibility, which reinforces their social identity as stakeholders to the success of the group. The leaders are aware that they have to be cognizant of how the students are experiencing culture; particularly, how intentional crafting of the organizational culture influences the experience of the students. Nevertheless, at the center of the ideology of

African-centered schools is the concept of self-determination, which demands that

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Africans trust and rely on their ethnic brothers and sisters. This trust has to be built and socialized into the students in a world that has sought to destroy intimate black bonds since Africans first arrived in the Americas.

The idea of competition in African-centered schools goes against the core values of the schools’ ideology. The Council for Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) affiliated schools, for example, have philosophical requirements to be considered a CIBI affiliated school. According to Lomotey (1992), there are three philosophical components a school must adopt and practice:

 First, “family-hood,” placing an emphasis on creating a family

atmosphere;

 Second, usage of the NGUZO SABA value system, Kiswahili for “The

Seven Principles of Blackness:” Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia (Self-

Determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa

(Cooperative economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), Imani

(Faith);

 Third, revolutionary Pan-African nationalism. There is a requirement

to work toward a political system that will replace the current system

of White Supremacy (Karenga, 1980; Lomotey, 1992).

NGUZO SABA (Value Systems) and Competition

At the center of each institution of the study is the NGUZO SABA value system, which I introduced in Chapter Two. The leaders refer back to these principals and socialized students into its understanding as a doctrine of black social care and black social comportment. Indeed, during every interview in both schools, the NGUZO SABA

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was seen as a kind of organizational core value system that radiated, what I term in

Chapter Four, the political core (organizational ideology) of African-centered institutions.

Take for example Baba Williams, who sees the NGUZO SABA as the action steps for black people; it is a sort of road map that the black community can use to rear strong and healthy people.

The advice that’s given is how one should conduct themselves in a number

of different affairs that deal with them first and foremost having the ability

to display that they are a person of integrity. By doing that, you have to

then understand what that foundation or what predicates that ability to

display that type of character to actually act and to behave in such a

manner. That then brings us back to the virtues of my heart. It then ties in

to the principles of the NGUZO SABA because the NGUZO SABA talks

of the actions that we must engage in as a collective which culture

counteracts the individualistic approach to life at this time. (Baba

Williams, Bethune, Interview 6/26/2019)

I also suppose that the centering of organizational values on a system that encompasses issues and concerns outside “the academic” shifts the organizational model onto, what I consider, a higher plane of sorts, which appears to reinforce the black “social care” aspect of the model. The NGUZO SABA is a social doctrine, used to connect schools (a social institution) to the larger society. Karenga (2008) intended these principals as a social doctrine, stating:

… reinforce seven basic values of African culture which contribute to

building and reinforcing family, community and culture among African

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American people as well as Africans throughout the world African

community… these values which are not only the building blocks for

community but also serve to reinforce and enhance them (p. 2).

Competition and Social Bonds

Thinking about social doctrines like the NGUZO SABA, one of the most innovative aspects of cultural exploration in education research is the understanding of the adverse nature competition has on the community. Researchers similar to Demerath have found practices and encouragement of harmful forms of competition lead to environments of anxiety and rivalry. While Johnson and Johnson (2009) observe that when the element of competition is present in the classroom or the “competitive element” is introduced into situational learning, it creates a sense of external urgency and drama for students. Competition brings a variable into the equation that shifts the participants’

(students) attention from the task (learning) itself to the cost of their performance in the task (Johnson & Johnson, 2009). Consider how the competitive element transforms a classroom’s thinking when a sense of urgency (for whomever cares about winning) is promoted. It introduces an unhelpful social drama into the learning environment. The goal of the learning activity moves from the learning objective to efficiency, speed, and the outcome relative to others. As a result, the activity becomes less something in which to engage for its knowledge virtues to more a means to an end (Reeve & Deci, 1996).

For the school leaders, this shift from learning to reward also alters the students’ social relationships with their peers. Competition breaks down social bonds, and rivalries disrupt relationship development. In an organization that worries very intensely about

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socializing black children to see other black people essentially as brothers and sisters in struggle, pitting them against each other significantly undermines this goal.

Social cohesion for the leaders is not just words or notions that help students when they are older or outside the school’s social network; it is built into the design of the school itself.

We are communal. And we hold that dear because that is how our

ancestors related to each other, through community, right? So you go and

look at some of the way that the houses were built, they were in a circle,

you know what I mean? They shared everything. It was no ‘mine versus

yours,’ it was for the village… (Mama Nia, Steve Biko, Interview

8/29/2019).

The schools encourage collaborative work as their preferred method of instruction. Students’ desks are grouped in a way that promotes the free exchange of ideas and conversations; teachers use small, cooperative groups as their preferred approach to teaching.

However, this approach motivates how organizational actors comprehend and perceive themselves in a more complex society. Another instance of this was how Baba

Anwisye of St. Louis described his institution’s emphasis on cooperation over competition during student recess. He talked about how they do not promote games that put the students into competition, because it goes against the ideological mission of the school. He used the analogy of musical chairs and the TV show Survivor. Furthermore, he asked the question: What African society intentionally designs situations where there

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are not enough chairs for everyone or enough food, clothing, or places to live? These social practices in schools for Baba Anwisye served as a process of division of the community (Anwisye, 2017). Moreover, the Baba views the socially constructed process of competition as a genesis of factionalism, which he believes is the antithesis of what

African collectivism and schooling are trying to instill in the students.

It is somewhat true that the world is competitive, particularly if you look at it from a global, capitalist economic lens. It is challenging to avoid competition in life entirely; however, for the most part, competition is a self-imposed or at least self-selected condition. We can just as comfortably live an existence defined more by collaborative and self-referential goals than by competition with others. To assume that we are developing students for the real world by socializing them into intentionally constructed competitive situations is to impose on them an explicitly biased world-view (Johnson &

Johnson, 2006). African-centered schools see themselves as repairing social bonds of the black community. These schools are not just locations of learning; they are also locations of black politics that seek to instill into African children an idea that they can lead, and the notion of “trust” of other black people. It is, in a sense, African-centered institutions seeking to repair black social bonds as a means to forward their political projects of black liberation in the form of an emancipatory nation-building project. African-centered institutions are the railroad workers, laying the track for the youth into a blight day of black freedom.

Section Three: Organizational Responsiveness, Students’ Needs and Realities

Because last year, we had this thing, where we talked about how we felt

because some of us got bullied. We were in the library and we used to talk

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about it last year. I wish some people was here then because it really

helped a lot of people to deal with struggles because a lot of people when

we did it, they were crying and stuff. One student wasn’t crying. Her name

is Sydney. She kept saying, “Why is everybody crying? Why is everybody

crying?” We were all like, because it’s emotional to have to talk about

bullying and stuff. Because some people have to go through a lot of things

in their life, at home and at school. And we are with our family, so we can

cry. (Justin, Student, Steve Biko, Student Focus Group 11/18/2019)

African-centered thinkers view education and the practice of schooling as a part of a more extensive black emancipatory nation-building project. A location must be culturally responsive to the students and spiritually healing to the community they are tasked to serve. In other words, African-centered leaders view the practice of education similar to that of Karolyn Tyson (2002): (1) teach academic skills and (2) serve as an agent of cultural orientation (nation-building), in which they similarly see traditional public schools serving as an agent of nation-building and cultural orientation for europeans and their allies—one of the reasons why the African-centered leaders perceive themselves as tasked with forcefully tackling notions of anti-blackness and dehumanization faced by African people in the broader society.

Combating Dehumanization as a Social Condition

Bethune and Steve Biko are responsive to these acts of dehumanization. For the leaders of these institutions, healing and care of students are at the forefront of how students are prepared and oriented into the world. Below is dialogue from the three

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leaders at Steve Biko and Bethune. During their interviews, all described how the schools were tasked with being responsive to how the children are experiencing the world. In this case, they are discussing racism and white supremacy.

Mama Pat (Bethune)

“Yes we celebrate blackness and black people, but we also understand the

world. Our students are navigating when they leave our building and we

have to help them understand what is going on.” (5/23/2019)

Mama Sydney (Steve Biko)

Banwo: Some mainstream schools, they don’t have any conversations

about race, but African center schools are centering race in the practice.

Why is this important?

Mama Sydney: …Yes. We have videos and films and songs and

discussions about current events that are happening to us as black

people… That’s very important for us to be aware of what our children are

going to enter when they leave us. (4/17/2019)

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Baba Kwan (Bethune)

Banwo: …how do you think your youth would have been different if you

were in a school that was like this, instead of the multi-ethnic school you

were in?

Baba Kwan, Bethune: I think that a lot of our young people enter into

that world thinking and seeing themselves from a deficit model, and

there’s something that they have to prove or something that they have to

be or do in order to gain some type of social currency or legitimacy.

Whereas, our students enter those environments knowing that they’re

inherently great. I think there’s less of a stigma that they’re faced with,

because they have already been prepared and equipped with the

knowledge to stand on their own and to validate who they are and where

they’re from. You know what I mean? (4/23/2019)

The above exchange demonstrates the effort and care the schools place into authentically socializing students into a racialized society. Baba Kwan, for example, when asked about his upbringing in a multiracial school, spoke about how sometimes black children enter these racialized spaces with deficit thinking. Although I am sure he does not want to portray all black children with this thinking, nevertheless, for him and the staff at Bethune, they accept their responsibility as a location of care for black children and prepare them accordingly. Staff at Bethune and Steve Biko believe that they need to prepare children for a world that sees them in a deficit light; moreover, they believe that they must formulate an organizational culture that equips students with the

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cognitive and non-cognitive means to leave Bethune without having a belief of inferiority.

African-centered Schools tackle issues of race and to some measure, racial capitalism. Turning to my discussions with students at Bethune, there were two moments of critical reflection by the students that described how the school’s environment created opportunities for them to express their emotional selves through practices of organizational care. The first was a conversation about a classmate’s uncle being shot and how that student was dealing with the trauma, and the second moment was about the confusion of white racism. These student musings began a lively discussion among the students about race, mental health, and black people’s position in the larger society.

Below is a small section of their conversation:

Key Moment: Kadeem’s Mental Health Rap (10.28.2019)

Ken: That’s how it was. It’s this boy named Earl, I think it was Earl and

Deion. They was rapping. After that, Kadeem rapped, and that’s when

everybody got on stage.

Banwo: But I’m saying when he was rapping about being shot, or rapping

about being violent?

Ann: His uncle got shot.

Banwo: I am sorry to hear that.

Ann: Yeah, it was support. Support for his uncle. He was looking back on

the past and telling people what happened.

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Ken: It wasn’t supportive for me because both of my uncles got almost

killed the same way.

Ann: I think it was good that he let it out. Because most people around

here, they get hurt, lots of times, they’ll express it by doing other bad

things, like drugs and alcohol. But he let it out in the rap at school.

Key Moment: Racialized Police (10.28.2019)

Ann: It feels good to go to an African school because you relate to other

situations and what other people go through, like how you get treated

different. Because if it’s a different color police officer that’s not your

color, they’ll treat you wrong, because they think just because you’re

darker than them that you don’t belong. And they’ll treat you like you’re

not human. And we can’t express how we feel, and we can express that in

African school.

Ken: Another good example at this school is learning about different

people. Like different ancestors from Africa and on and on. They teach us

more about the people they know about. Like Dr. Martin Luther King, but

they also teach us how our ancestors dealt with stuff, like race stuff.

What is so powerful in my opinion is the line between school mission, leader intentional design, and students’ perception of the organization. For example, in the

Table 2: Intentional Leadership Quotes below, you can view how the student statement reflects how the leaders are crafting and view the organizational culture of the school:

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Table 3: Intentional Leadership Quotes Students Quotes Leader Quotes

The school village means to …We also understand the me that we can talk about world our students are anything and everything, going navigating when they leave from how we feel, to stepping our building (Leader Mama out of the school and like Pat) taking a walk around the playground so that we can get our emotions out. (Steve Biko student interviews)

They’ll treat you wrong, That’s very important for us to because they think just because be aware of what our children you’re darker than them that are going to enter when they you don’t belong. And they’ll leave us. (Leader Mama treat you like you’re not Sydney) human. And we can’t express how we feel, and we can express that in African school. (Bethune student interviews)

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In each of these critical moments, the administrators are expressing a racialized concern that they need to be conscious of because of their student racial struggle.

Moreover, these moments are influencing the organizational culture they are trying to cultivate and lead. The leaders understand that they cannot have a safe, healthy school environment when children are entering grappling with racism, violence, and social confusion. It is making real the idea of Asante (1988) and Afrocentricity (the idea of

African people reasserting their sense of agency in order to achieve sanity). Their students have to be prepared to encounter hazards that are singularly connected to their ethnic background. The students hear the concern of the organizational leaders; although each cohort of students interviewed was either in the Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth grades, young by some standards, each has a genuine sense that racism in America is real; it is connected to people’s aversion of their skin color, and that it is not their fault.

Teaching Histories of Dehumanization

Asante and other African-centered scholars understand African children in the

West are entering into histories of dehumanization, which some see as a necessary component for state violence and capitalism. The students during these interviews were expressing how this history is confusing and destructive (both mentally and physically) to themselves and their peers.

Nevertheless, what I found remarkably compelling about the schools’ response to the needs of the students is the sense of the organizational care and culture responsiveness of the school community. The schools’ organizational cultures serve as a kind of clarifying mechanism that reiterates to the students that racism is real and that they are not alone in their fears. I believe the use of history is a crucial component of how

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the students understand that racism is not their fault, that they should not internalize anti- blackness. This idea for me comes out of how the school is employing the notion of black care and black community.

Another important detail for me was the idea that the organization is demonstrating to the student that there are healthy and safe ways to deal with the strain of racism and the world. For example, look how Amy responded to the question about support: “I think it was good that he let it out. Because most people around here, they get hurt, lots of times, they’ll express it by doing other bad things, like drugs alcohol.

But he let it out in the rap at school.” Said another way, “Good/ He let it out/ people around here/ get hurt/ they’ll express it/ doing bad things.” she goes on to name those bad things. How much higher level of thinking could you ask for from a fifth grader?

The idea of emotional care and school responsiveness was a major theme that emerged from the students. It was as if the students were speaking back to the adults. I would interview an adult in the school and then talk to students and hear similar themes.

For example, Mama Sydney talked to me about an aromatherapy and meditation alternative to harsh discipline. While interviewing students, a couple of students talked about meditation and aromas as being something significant to them when they are trying to focus or deal with problems they are facing in life. This intentional practice by the leader was so important to the students that they highlighted it as significant.

I also have the heart release body oil. You drop a bit of oil, it smells so

very good. It’s a heart expansion, heart release body oil. You drop a drop

of it in the palm of your hand and rub it together and then put it up to your

nose. Put your hands up to your face and breathe in and then breathe out,

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breath in and then breathe out. These are things that calm not just children,

they calm all of us now whenever we have that kind of anxiety, stress.

(Mama Sydney, Biko, interview 4/17/2019)

So my teacher, Mama Dana, she lets us do morning decorations and we do

a positive mindset which is saying positive things instead of saying the

negative things about us. We say positive things and most people like to

use the NGUZO SABA, up there on the wall. I don’t use that. I use my

words out of my mouth… last year we first started meditation. Because it

was just something I knew to do. (Anna, student groups, MMB,

9/16/2019)

Operationalizing Communitarianism and Social Bonds

Each school strategized how they can holistically give African children an educational experience that is filled with a cultural atmosphere and climate steeped in authentic African-centeredness and love that emphasize both care and academic achievement. Bethune’s mission statement demonstrates how the schools balance these twin concerns:

“Our mission is to provide an academic and culturally relevant program that integrates and balances cultural knowledge and improves competencies in reading, oral and written language, mathematics, science, technology, social studies, the arts, and the humanities” (Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School, 2020).

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Students are made to feel love, the building walls are covered with pictures that reflect back to the student, success, care, love, family, group and legacy. The cultural language (Baba, Mama, Watoto, NGUZO SABA) are all used by the village as a reminder that they are part of an African family.

Both Bethune and Steve Biko start each day with ceremonies and rituals that serve to center and bring calm to the school space. There is a belief that ancestors define the institutions. They surround the village on the walls; they are spoken about with reverence throughout the day, and they are honored in the morning ceremony. The entire village shares in what Steve Biko called “circle of love ceremony,” and Bethune calls their “unity circle.” The villages regard these ceremonies as a process to awaken and stimulate cultural memory and understanding through an intentional selection of songs and chants. Mama Pat described the Unity Circle:

When we have circle, we talk about the triumph of our struggle, where

you have to understand that the mere fact that you are here is in itself a

celebration of your own spirit, that you were able to sustain the middle

passage and endure that type of oppression instead of looking at it as a

source of shame, centering it as a source of persistence and perseverance

(7.19.2019).

Village members play drums, sing songs, chant and recite words and battle cries selected to orient the village actors into their day and back into the African-centered school community. The morning ceremony for Steve Biko serves as a reminder of everyone’s place in the village, but also as a place to reconnect and fellowship with teachers, parents, and peers. While Bethune sees their unity circle as a practice of

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reaffirmation of village goals and a reflection ceremony that honors the past and looks to the future, below is Bethune’s description of their Unity Circle:

“Students pledge self-determination, self-respect, community service and

to lead principled lives. These pledges guide our students in living positive

and productive lives (Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School” 2020).

I start this section with the morning ceremonies because (1) It is the most important village action taken throughout the day, because it is the only time the entire village is in one place and the same time doing the same thing, and (2) It demonstrates how practices of communitarianism and collectivism are intentionally embedded into the formal organizational practice. I return to a major theme of this chapter: We find again that the care and concern for healthy black social bonds are exceptional. In addition to their concerns about bonds amongst their village members, the schools also extend themselves to the students’ extended family. Below is Baba Williams discussing why

African centered schools’ morning circle is so crucial to their student social-cultural work, and why Bethune perceives the process of social healing and reflection as an essential aspect of healthy black familiar life:

Banwo: How do you invite the family in to experience these African-

centeredness?

Baba Williams: Well, through the orientation is the primary way in which

we invite them in. They are always invited in to the community of the

morning circle that you participated in.

Banwo: Okay. That’s open to the families?

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Baba Williams: It is open to the entire family. If the mother and father are

not together, we tell them that it’s not an issue as to whether or not the

child comes from a blended family. It is a cultural norm for everybody to

be included because everybody plays a part and everyone is important. No

one is useless. In many family situations when there is discord between

mother and father or different members of the family, one feels more

valued than the other. By us just inviting both sides, it’s an attempt to

bring about a different understanding and also bring about some healing

and understanding that when they come together, they are reminded that

the primary goal is never based on self-interest. The primary goal is to

uplift the children. If they can lift two or three other children that they

didn’t give birth to as well, that’s a job well done. (Baba Williams,

Bethune, Interview 6/26/2019)

Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL)

In my view, the African communitarianism being practiced in the schools is a form of vibrant school leadership. Looking at Khalifa, Gooden, and Davis (2016), a framework of Culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL), there is significant positive “responsiveness” occurring in all four areas of framework (“Leaders” critically self-reflects on leadership; behaviors developculturally responsive teachers; promotes culturally responsive/inclusive school environment; engages students, parents, and indigenous contexts). There is something transformational happening in the schools

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through leadership’s centering of and on students who are traditionally marginalized in mainstream society and schools. The leaders observe that the promotion of culturally responsive and inclusive environment (racialized and politicized conversations and organizational practices) of the schools is bringing the children into a sense of Radical consciousness which is seen as a form of healthy black socialization.

Think of the anger and consciousness that Frantz Fanon (2008) spoke of, that anger of consciousness of racial alienation:

“It is the anger of all whose cultures, knowledge systems and ways of

being that are ridiculed, demonized, declared inferior and irrational, and,

in some cases, eliminated. This is not just any anger. It is the universal

fury against oppression in general, and the perpetual domination of the

Western civilization in particular” (Fanon, 2008, p. 8).

Take, for example, how Mama Sydney describes her school’s socialization process. It is not in the sense of racial animus, but as an opportunity to create a school environment that helps children clearly understand the world they are in and preparing for. This is also what Amos Wilson, in 1984, spoke about when he called Black education in America a crisis, which he perceived as outright hostility, a system designed to socialize black children into reactionary relationships with systems of control and domination, a system into which black children are forced to lash out in anger.

Banwo: Do you see African-centered leaders… leading the students into a

racial consciousness?

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Mama Sydney: Yes. A racial consciousness, a racial awareness, a racial

understanding and love for self, but not a racial consciousness like

teaching hate or anything like that…

Banwo: Sure. That’s not what I meant, but yes, thank you for that

clarification.

Mama Sydney: Yes. Some people might get the impression that when

you say racial consciousness then they think about skinheads…. It’s not

the same thing. We want our children to understand our history and

understand that they can build a world for us. That they can make their

ancestors proud through their actions, but they must have the racial

consciousness to know how to navigate this world. (5/23/2019)

Finally for my last data chapter, I will examine the cultural responsive leadership of the African-centered schools and mainly focus on the concept of

Ethno-cultural responsiveness Practice, which I regard as an idea that an organization can be singularly responsive to a community, that they imagine themselves apart, and be hyper-focused on how organizational and cultural practices socialize younger members into the imagined cultural milieu.

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Chapter Six: African-Centered Schools and their Centering of Blackness

Vignette: Black Cultures of Care - Enacted Through Intentional Black Cultural

Practices

The students had been practicing for their end of the year program

for some time now. Each year at Mary McLeod Bethune Academy, the

eighth-grade students plan and produce a graduation program that is

intended to honor their matriculation through the school and the village

members that guided them through the process. “OK ok, men, you try the

dance,” called out Bethune’s dance instructor, dressed in a black dance

leotard. The students were practicing in a basement classroom, painted

green like a forest, with a golden morning light shining through the white

hopper windows. The students, a mix of eight boys and seven girls, began

to play a mix of crisp, complex, punchy yet warm, rhythmic sounds on

African drums. The young men entered and began to dance.

During the ceremony several months later, the young men wore

black dress pants and a white dress shirt with a brown and orange kente

cloth printed vest, while the young women wore a black fitted top and

short pleated skirts in the same brown and orange kente cloth print worn

by the boys. The rites of passage ceremony took place in the school’s

gym; there were parents, other students, and the community. The gym was

bathed in warm spring light (which someone explained to me, was a sign

to Chicagoans that the hot summer months were near) that was accented

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with a cool spring breeze that carried a scent of early spring blooms. There was excitement in the air, “This is my second child to graduate from here,” one parent told me, “I like how they teach the students about being a proud black person, and the school is close to our house, he doesn’t need to go across town.” As the students began to form a line for their procession into the gym, a single Djembe drum marked three staccato beats, which signified the start of the ceremony. The audience roared with approval, and the students entered the gym, performing a dance, to the delight of all who watched.

“The rites of passages ceremony is about sending our young people out into the world and showing them that the community loves them and celebrate what they have accomplished at Bethune Academy,”

Baba Williams later told me during his interview. “We want the students to give something and receive something… It is an acknowledgment of the time dedicated and celebrating their next step as community members.” Baba Williams was one of the founders of Bethune Academy and was asked by the school to give words and preform the libations ritual that began the program, “The ritual of pouring libation is an essential ceremonial tradition and a way of giving homage to the ancestors.

Ancestors are not only respected but also invited to participate in all public functions (as are also the gods and God). A prayer is offered in the form of libations, calling the ancestors to attend.”

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I asked Baba Williams during our interview about the emotional

displays of affection by the students and staff, which I found surprising. I

mentioned to him my earlier experience with the eighth-grade students in

their dance class, particularly the boys and how they acted to cool to dance

in front of the girls. The Baba replied, “Well, it is an emotional time; I see

the emotion… happiness and sorrow as an expression of thank you to their

teachers and their community. Some of these students fought to graduate,

and it was the hard work of the community that helped them achieve this

goal. It is a kind of collective display of expression. You saw during the

ceremony; the students are acknowledged and welcomed into the alumni

of the school; they are now seen as stakeholders.” Baba went on to explain

that the community wants the students to understand that they are and will

always be a part of the community. “Yes, they are moving into non-

African-centered Schools, but the work we have done with them has

prepared them to see and act with the mindset of what is best for the

African community.”

The following chapter will explore the ideological and operational structures of

African-centered Schools in two sections. First, I look at how the ideological or political core of African-centered Schooling informs their organizational structures. For me, I wanted to understand how the practice of purposely centering the Benedict Anderson’s concept of an imagined cultural past, well in this case, “an imagined African cultural past,” generates a unique process of black socialization which I believe is disrupting the

“Social Scripts” of African Americans in the United States. Additionally, this section will

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examine how black organizational leadership’s embrace of the concept of an imagined cultural past informs how black students ideologically perceive themselves in the broader cultural milieu.

Next, I will briefly explore how leaders of closed cultural, organizational networks shape social identities with the use of the culturally responsive leadership concept “Ethno-Cultural Responsiveness.” I am also interested in exploring how school leaders are operationalizing racialized ideas of history in the learning process and how the students are ingesting highly political notions that are tied to their lived experiences in the broader society. I want to begin to understand how African-centered leadership’s unmasking of American myths socialize black children not only into healthy adults but healthy community members (a healthy sense of selves) who feel a responsibility for the betterment and maintenance of their fictive communities.

Finally, the last section will examine how ethno-cultural responsiveness can be used as an educational motivator. For example, how is African-centered Schools’ politicization of learning (discussing race, racialize social positioning, racialized trauma, and healthy youth socialization) fuel students’ sense of group or community achievement? It is a more in-depth exploration of how the operationalized and structured ideological instrument of African Communitarianism is serving as a fuel for student motivation.

Section I: Ethno Cultural Responsiveness

Leaders in many organizations can serve as a kind of cultural artisan, cultivating and constructing culture and ways of being inside organizations. These cultural artisans influence and define how relationships and realities can be experienced and seen by

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organizational participants (Freiberg, 2001; Sergiovanni, 2001; Snowden, 2002). In mainstream schools, ultimately, the relationships and leadership that shape the culture and climate are school principals and their leadership teams. However, when approaching

African-centered School cultures from the lens of an “Imagined Cultural Creation” or an

“Intentional Constructed Identity” (Anderson, 2016; Chowdhury, 1997), it forefronts the notion of how black school leaders examine racialized social systems and how they construct school cultures that prepare students for an anti-black world.

The leaders highlighted in my dissertation serve as Cultural Artisans and people who have taken cultural practices found on the African continent and woven it into a coherent, rich African-centered tapestry in the form of a unique school organizational production. For illustration, let us take a deeper dive into the morning ceremonies, discussed in the earlier section. For both Steve Biko and Bethune, each of their morning ceremonies serves to open the organizational day and help to connect students to their teachers, elders, and to a broader notion of what Benedict Anderson describes as an imagined community. The schools are reenacting the concept of “Communal Fellowship” found in many West African and African American traditions. In this case, an imagined

African diaspora community. The morning fellowship elevates the community’s sense of consciousness and responsibility, past simplistic notions of state nationalism onto a cultural plane that connects African people from the “here and now” to a sense of shared cultural past and shared cultural future. In each school village, members are holding hands, reciting the same village creeds and confessions. The village through song is also calling out to their fictive families and asking them to be with them, to guide them and ultimately support them in being a better member of their organization. It also serves to

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connect Africans in fellowship to the larger nation of African peoples. Mama Sydney in her interview described it:,

We talk about the diaspora and that’s important because no matter where

we are in the world, we are African people. No matter where we are in the

world, we’re treated as one people. It’s our village. Our diaspora is

inclusive of all African people, whether they’re in United States or if

they’re in Canada or South America or France. Wherever they are. African

people are part of the village, are part of the diaspora. (Mama Sydney,

Biko, interview 5/23/2019)

Along with Mama Sydney’s emphasis on the fictive notion of family across borders, she also reflected on how her formal system utilizes organizational practices like the morning

“Unity Circle” as not only a method to gauge concerns of the organizations but as a way to impart information to organizational participants. She saw students upholding their position as junior members of the village; moreover, the morning circle served as an affirmation from the students that they are open and ready to learn from the elders of the village. The circle is the first exercise the schools conduct, and it is also a point where leaders can locate problems and issues brought into the organization from the outside.

This implicit understanding of participant roles, organizational ideology, and system functions of the institutions are a significant aspect of how African-centered

School approach the socialization of young people. I see it as a kind of “Ethno-Culturally

Responsive practice,” the idea that an organization can be hyperfocused and responsive to a community’s needs and concerns, that they imagine themselves apart, and be

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hyperfocused on cultural practices and the processes that socialize younger members into the imagined community. Again I am thinking of Marx & Engels’s (1846) notion of

“Base and superstructure.” There is a social script being written for the children, which in turn is being pumped from the base into the superstructure, which is then, in turn, influencing the base.

Further, when I say Ethno Cultural Responsiveness, I am thinking of homogeneous locations or closed homogeneous or closed networks. Think (Mennonite,

Mormon, Amish, Rural Small Towns, Native American reservations) places where culture is uniformed and organizational leaders can quickly shift systematic cultural practices, rules, and organizational power dynamics without much social pushback. What

I think propels an organization into Ethno-Cultural Responsiveness is a kind of interjection of myth, politics or an Imagined Cultural past; however, I do wonder what roles oppression, genocide, and social rejection play in the creation of an organization practicing Ethno-Cultural Responsiveness. For example, what role did abuse and social violence, particularly Missouri Executive Order 44 (Extermination Order), in the early days of Mormonism play in the fusing of many of their communities into a form of

Ethno-Cultural Responsiveness? And more to the point of the dissertation, how does that legacy echo down into the organizational practices of not only the Latter Day members, but the smaller closed off sects and groups. I struggle with stating this because the term

“imagined” is often used as a pejorative to denote (make-believe or fake), however in this situation I used the word “imagined” in a Benedict Anderson’s (1982) sense, as an analysis of nationalism and social construction (community as imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group).

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Returning to Khalifa, Gooden, and Davis’s (2016) Framework of Culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL), seen earlier in Chapter Five, and the idea of

“responsiveness” occurring in four areas of the Framework (“Leaders” Critically Self-

Reflects on Leadership; Behaviors Develops Culturally Responsive Teachers; Promotes

Culturally Responsive/Inclusive School Environment; Engages Students, Parents, and

Indigenous Contexts), we can see the schools are performing at a high level of responsiveness according to the broader definitions defined by the scholars. However, the critical philosophical shift of African-centered leaders is their insertion of the political in the form of their utilization of, the formal system of schooling, as a tool for black socialization into a subcultural ideology.

Take, for example, the following dialog; Baba Jason is talking about how the philosophical and social reframing of Steve Biko has created a dynamic network of information dissemination into the black community that could help in the broader project of liberation.

Banwo: One of the aspects of African-centered education I’ve noticed

visiting schools is the idea of responsibility to the community or you

talked about the village. Why do you think that’s so important in the

African-centered model that it is our community it’s not individualistic

type learning?

Baba Jason: Our students go home and teach their parents because

oftentimes the parents they went here, this is a unique school a lot of the

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parents went here. They have a lot of background on black history but

sometimes the kids whose parents didn’t go here they went to public

school they don’t have the information that we’re imparting on the

students so they go home and teach their parents and then their parents

talk to their friends et cetera. The information disseminates that way and it

improves the community because now we’re understanding, “Okay, our

people were great and they’ve done all these wonderful things to help and

reach back.” That shifts the mindset in a more positive direction in some

cases. That’s the hope I think that’s occurred. I always hear good stories

from graduates. (Baba Jason, Librarian, Steve Biko, interview 8/30/2019)

If you look at Figure 5, you can see a closed cultural network, represented by a solid lined box surrounding the activities of the organization. At the core of the chart is a porous box representing the “Imagined Cultural Ideal” for organizational participants in the closed system.

Figure 5: Responsive School Leadership defined by Imagined Cultural Ideal

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This imagined ideal is the prototypical (or normative) “way of being” for the organizational participants; it is the standard the organization has set for citizens to strive for. I contend that Khalifa et al. are correct in their analysis of formal multiracial systems.

These multiracial systems are being controlled by a dominating ideology, which is indeed serving as a policing agent and gatekeeper to organizational resources. However, what do you call closed, homogenous systems, where leaders are hyper-vigilant and aware of cultural concerns and issues? I theorize these leaders are practicing a form of Ethno-

Culturally Responsive School Leadership that is being used to adjust the organization in directions that serve to erase not only interpersonal concerns among the network participants but also broader social concerns entering into the organization from a dominant outside force. Ethno Cultural Responsiveness School Leadership is why

African-centered Schools’ cultures can react to community concerns quickly and authentically interject themselves into community conversations because the political groundwork has already been laid.

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I don’t want to sound like a black essentialist with this line of thinking; however, there is something unique happening with black educators that appears to be benefiting students and larger systems of socialization. Again Lomotey (1993) explores this concept with his theory of ethno-humanist. According to Lomotey, there is something dynamic happening with black educational leaders and their ability to utilize their unique cultural positionality to display a type of culturally responsive school sensitivity. I would contend

Lomotey agrees with Khalifa et al.’s idea of robust, healthy, cultural responsiveness.

Take Mama Nia’s hope for her students once they leave her school,

“…when they leave out of here, even if they don’t have the same space to

talk about it, they’re gonna notice it. And I always tell them to always find

somebody that you can talk to. So there’s always one black person in the

building. You know what I mean. There’s always somebody that’s gonna

be looking out for you” (Mama Nia, Biko, interview 8/30/2019).

Her want for students’ leaving her system, is for them to practice self-efficacy and locate a helping adult in the building.

Mainstream schools are also awash in politics, however, their political ideology is obscured as normal or just the ways WE do business here. I believe that since each participant in mainstream schools, tacitly accepts the ideological rules, leaders can claim whiteness as normal and thus blunt true cultural responsiveness. For example, many West

African traditions emphasize “community and cooperation” over competition. However, you find mainstream American institutions in communities with traditions of cooperation unable to incorporate customs of collaboration, even when customs of cooperation are found locally in African American communities that emphasize black communal

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cohesion over capitalist notions of individualism (Anwisye, 2017; Karenga, 1995).

During my interviews, many of the participants spoke to this notion, particularly while comparing African-centered Schools to mainstream schools.

Anna (Student, Steve Biko)

Because if they go to this African school. Baba Nicholes (her teacher)

would be like, “Hey you all need to care about your history.” If they still

didn’t care, he would and then they would be kicked out of the school.

Then they would be crying because they couldn’t go to an African school

anymore. Then if someone asked them, “What did you learn about your

history in school today dear?” Then they would have to say, “Mommy I

got kicked out of school because I didn’t know anything about African

history. And I didn’t care because some people are cuckoo birds and they

don’t care about their own history. Yes, and I want to be one of those

people.” Then my mom is like, “No, honey you better go back to that

school and you better be like, ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to, I’ll learn

more history. (Anna, Biko, student interviews 5/23/2019)

Mama Sydney (Steve Biko)

Yes, a lot of the mainstream public education now is when mostly these

people from other disciplines…They’re not our people nor do they

understand our children. It’s just not the connection, it is something

deeper… You could get fired as a teacher if the children’s standardized

test scores don’t measure up. The standardized tests don’t actually reflect

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what a black child knows or what a teacher taught. It’s a whole child

approach here…A weeder is a test where they want to weed out certain

people. They’re weeding out our people with these standardized tests

instead of looking for the positive and looking for, what do our children

know and what do they do well? They try to look for what the children

don’t do well and a lot if is not practical to the children in the first place.

(Mama Sydney, Biko, interview 5/23/2019)

Look at the two conversations above; both participants were from Steve Biko and each participant talked about the importance of having a connection to the imagined community and its history. Steve Biko, for one, is a very compelling example because it is a multi-national and multi-religious institution. They’re African-Americans, Africans,

South American, and Caribbean students learning together as brothers and sisters in this school. Additionally, there are religious differences, particularly Christian and Muslim

Students. However, within this mass of humanity and cultural differences all organizational participants are able to coalesce around a shared imagined cultural identity, within a shared imagined cultural history that doesn’t disempower but celebrates the 54 African countries and the thousands of ethnic groups, tribes, and clans on and off the continent. I believe the opposite is happening in mainstream schools, instead of the cultural empowerment we see at Steve Biko through practices of decolonization and

Ethno-Cultural Responsive school leadership. We see practices of foreclosure and denial; below are dialogues of students and teachers at Steve Biko describing the differences between mainstream and African-centered Schools.

Anna (Student, Steve Biko)

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How would I describe the school? It is like I would basically tell them: here, we learn about our actual heritage. Over there, y’all are probably learning that Christopher Columbus was a good man and things like that, but not over here, we learn the real stuff…, (9/16/2019)

Mama Janice (Steve Biko)

I still taught African-centered materials when I was in Public School and I had my own curriculum, in my classroom though. My one principal was

African-centered. He had a pledge that the whole school would sing every morning, but the curriculum was from downtown. Generally speaking for the classrooms but I always used my own. Same with the other school I taught at

Mama Pat (Steve Biko)

I just taught them what I felt that they needed to know, but like she said here I don’t have to sneak and do it. It’s in the open and it’s unapologetic the information that we’re giving them. (5/23/2019)

Baba Jason (Steve Biko)

Well, it depended on the leadership. So for one principal Dr. Taylor, he was

African-centered, as well as his frat brother and he was the vice-principal.

We had a pledge in his tenure and he had different expectations for the school, but again the curriculum wasn’t African-centered. Here we also

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have a pledge. We have a morning ritual, but there’s a lot of overlap in what

we do in the morning and what happens in the classroom.

We, for the most part, feel like all the students belong to each adult. Just

because there’s a student in Mama Simone’s class if they’re cutting up

then I’d reprimand them as well. It’s a community. We still have our

individual silos, but again like I said they overlap and I go in everyone’s

classroom. I help, I encourage, and I reprimand at the same time. It

doesn’t matter because they’re all our kids. It wasn’t like that in public

school out there. (8/30/2019)

The students and teachers are describing an organization that is alive, idealized, historical and most importantly to me responsive to their cultural and communal needs.

The organization is grounded in history and in a cultural ideal defined by the system leaders. However, what I found so appealing about the responsiveness of African- centered Schools was the organizational foregrounding of the Political or ideological core of the organization. Unlike mainstream schools, African-centered Schools utilize the political nature of Black Nationalism and African-centered ness to make social demands on their organizational participants. To go to an African-centered School, an organizational citizen would have to endorse and coalesce around the “imagined cultural past” and core.

Remember back to “Social Identity Theory,” from Chapter Five, that found a person’s membership in a social group is defined in part by an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups)

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together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership. The social demand of the organization is the membership passkey and also the first barrier to organizational citizenship. This imagined past for African-centered schools just so happened to be centered on an idea of a racialized “way of being.” However, I also wonder what would happen if the concept of an imagined cultural core was interjected into a mainstream school– would students be able to coalesce around a share non racialized idea of themselves. Would Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) unite around a commitment to behavior aimed at improving the welfare of an individual, a group or an organization?

I do wonder if the myth of America, the myth and story of the nation of immigrants, is serving as a kind of imagined cultural past or ideological core for mainstream schools. Is the hidden ideology of mainstream schools a kind of positive notion of how the United States has come to be? Which could be a reason why students of color feel so uncomfortable with the ideological and hidden political nature of these formal institutions? After all, Mama Nia and other organizational leaders I spoke to, hope and want for their students leaving their African-centered organization is for them to find people of care in their new schools.

“When they leave out of here, even if they don’t have the same space to

talk about it, they’re gonna notice it. And I always tell them to always find

somebody that you can talk to. So there’s always one black person in the

building. You know what I mean. There’s always somebody that’s gonna

be looking out for you. (Mama Nia, Biko, interview 8/30/2019)

The Political: The Ideology of African-Centered Education

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When Mary McLeod Bethune described her vision of education and schooling, particularly for black people, she saw it as a process of “Education for the whole person”

(Newsome, 1982) that pushed a person along a spiritual life of full engagement of head, heart, and hand. Karenga (1995) on the other hand, observed this as an inevitable track towards excellence in character, spirit, and intellect (Anwisye, 2017: Karenga, 1995).

Acker’s (2006) exploration of systems control, saw western organizations have within them, what she terms, “Inequality regimes: interrelated practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within particular organizations” (p. 443). She observed these inequality regimes as being associated with the inequality found in the surrounding society, “its politics, history, and culture” (p. 443).

Leaders of African-centered schools, whom I call “Cultural Artisans,” understand the process of schooling in this view, the very ideology of African-centered education is a response to the harmful practice of socialization in the broader society. It is an effort to understand and address the “inequality regimes” that surround black children in mainstream systems. For example, Mama Nia, during her interview, remarked on how she perceives the role inequality regimes play in organizations of the broader society. Her experiences as a black woman within mainstream educational systems inspired her to participate in an educational process that is responsive to the ways inequality regimes perniciously craft organizational practices and understandings:

Banwo: Why do you think centering race benefits black kids in the

education process?

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Mama Nia: Because it benefits white people…I mean like european-

Americans have a certain sense of understanding of their position in this

country because of their race. It’s a man-made construct, we know that,

and they have a certain idea of what our position is, too. So we have to

counter that and let them know that their narrative is this and our narrative

is that. (8/30/2019)

Anti-racist scholars and philosophers view race and racism in contemporary societies as a way of masking the structural machinery of white supremacy that is now centuries old. Sociological studies of complex organizations chronicle a long history of analytic concern with the linkages between broader societal groupings and the structure and activities of organizations (Perrow, 1986; 2002). In recent decades, sociologists have begun thinking about how these complex organizations are influenced and affected by histories of race and racism. However, looking to the past, Stinchcombe (1965) and his research Social Structure and Organizations, observed the formation and founding of organizations as being influenced by external environmental forces that persist long after the founding of an organization. Stinchcombe described what would become known in organizational theory as Imprinting. Imprinting is the idea that the past influences the present, that organizations are defined and affected by its founding. Moreover,

Stinchcombe’s contribution provides leaders with a roadmap to eliminate histories of negative imprinting by interrogating organizational and social behaviors and actions that purposely identify and repair histories of harm (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2017).

Although Stinchcombe primarily focused on industrial levels of organizations, he nevertheless gave contemporary thinkers a lens to see how notions of white supremacy

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can be embedded into formal organizational cultures and passed down through the multiple cycles of organizational participants. To illustrate this point, I asked each of the school leaders and teachers about how they had come to an African-centered ideological position. Each spoke about their Social Imprinting experiences in the broader society.

Each spoke about how their experiences with social phenomena and constructions of whiteness had changed them in some way and motivated them to the conclusion that they needed to be a part of an organization that articulated and examined racial discourses differently. Below are some of their remarks:

Baba Williams

Banwo: Yes. How did you get involved in African-centered education?

What’s your origin story, I guess?

Baba Williams: My daughter was born. I didn’t want her to be a part of

any institution I had known. I needed her to be a part of something that

was different than my experience because I had not gone to a positive

school system and I understood the downfalls. I understood the different

messages that get sent and the messages that are implied. I didn’t like the

benign neglect that occurs in some of these schools and didn’t want her to

start off with a deficit. When we initially tried to get her into a school that

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we thought was good, but not African-centered, we found out very early, that after they tried to test her, they were trying to test her in preschool and tried to identify some deficiencies that she had.

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand how they derive the fact that she had those deficiencies when she was, in our eyes, she was growing and thriving. For me to then think their results and then begin to address them and address her from that vantage point was all the confirmation that I needed. That she needed to move away from that system that was already making it known that they wanted to put her in a box, put her behind the able and make her feel she was less than and had to overcome some type of deficiency. She then led the way for her sister that came after and her younger brother. That was my origin story when it comes to how we became involved with Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School.

(6/26/2019).

Mama Pat

Mama Pat: I was familiar with it (African-centered Schools), but I had not had the chance to experience it myself… I grew up around people who were very pro-black, but I would not say that they had that African consciousness. I also journeyed from there to Louisville, Kentucky, then from there, came here. This has been my first real experience with an

African-centered education. It’s been extremely powerful, both for me as a leader, and as a learner.

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Banwo: Did you go to HBCU?

Mama Pat: I did not, but I think having had the experiences that I had,

make working in an African-centered environment critically important for

me personally and professionally. I think having attended a PWI is

probably one of the reasons why my own child attended an HBCU

(5/23/2019).

The leaders are expressing a kind of “hidden and not so hidden” racial politics that occurs in our formal organizations, which I see as an engine that empowers the inequality regimes of our society. The themes and ideological search for these leaders are in the form of, a kind of, cultural-historical responsiveness. They are looking for a distinct redress of historical wrong with a radical reimagining of schooling coupled with the politics of black nationalism. Furthermore, I view these leaders in conversation with the earlier question posed in the introduction, “Is it up to racialized people to change whites into seeing the humanity of all people.”

The leaders spoke about building and leading a school that forcibly rejects the conception of white supremacy. This injection of “The Political” within the formal structure, I see as, as fundamentally transforming how African-centered schools organizationally function as a social institution and socializing agent. Indeed, when looking at nationalist communities that conceive these institutions, we see places grounded in a type of black radical tradition that acknowledged the political nature of black childhood, black socialization, and political agency. These communities also recognize the significance of independent black institutions as locations to incubate

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political actors imbued with an awareness of decolonization and an authentic interest in the wellbeing and health of black communities.

We can look at Baba Williams’s discussion about his childhood participation in mainstream schools. Notably how his negative experience motivated him and his wife to search for a location of learning that served their children’s cognitive and non-cognitive dispositions, which ultimately led them to Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School

Network. Stating, “I understood the downfalls. I understood the different messages that get sent and the messages that are implied. I didn’t like the benign neglect that in some of these schools.” Baba Williams’s recognition of the social and political conditions of schooling propelled him to go on a search for a safe social culture location for his daughter that would not repeat the same harmful organizational practices he encountered.

When he did discover a non-African-centered “black” school he liked, he found it generating the ideological damage of his early years, and

“did not want her to start off with a deficit. When we initially tried to get

her into a school that we thought was good, but not African-centered, we

found out very early, that after they tried to test her, they were trying to

test her in preschool and tried to identify some deficiencies that she had.”

The lived reality of Baba Williams allowed him to recognize the “social script” that was written for him and social and politically being written for the generation after him. What he did not see until later was that he sought black social relief from an institution that was operating in a white supremacist framework. The school’s staff was socially scripting his daughter, at age 5, into a pathway that was guiding her into outcomes that are very familiar to black people.

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Khalifa’s (2012) research of a formal organization and its leadership found that there was an expectation that community members who needed help would naturally feel comfortable asking for help and entering the school of his study. System leaders had a mistaken belief that a partnership existed within the paradigm of school-driven goals. The idea that what is best for the school would be best for you and your child. This embrace of “The Political” for me, is where the political activism of African-centered schools shine. They are aware and activated by politics in and out of the institution. Baba Terrell, for example, sees the Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School network, as deeply connected to the outside community, the mission of the school is to center the political reality of blackness at the heart of the institution. For instance, they care about healthy black social bonds; they care about proper teachings of history; and they care very intensely about nurturing healthy black community members. This mission also signals to the community an invitation into the school,

“Community is the heart of all that we do. It’s based on cooperative

economics, but not so much from a capitalist perspective, as from a

communalist perspective. Whereas, all do what we can to provide for

ourselves, our family, and our community” (Baba Terrell, MMB,

interview, 3/20/2019).

Khalifa’s example also demonstrates how mainstream schools can easily fall into the practice of institutional isolation from the community and how a lack of understanding of “The Political” nature of social institutions can be experienced on both sides of the organizational paradigm. Both sides in the Khalifa example, are experiencing an organizational culture with rules and histories grounded in racialized politics, except

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both sides are misinterpreting the reality and cultural cues of the organization. For some organizational citizens with power and control of resources, this misinterpreting does not affect their organizational reality; however, for the side without power, this misinterpretation has a material consequence on how they will interact with the broader organization. In my opinion, this kind of cultural misunderstanding rarely happens in schools where the leaders are intently aware of the community histories and concerns.

I am uncertain if mainstream school leaders understand they are participating in practices of social scripting that influence students down pathways of social risk.

Nevertheless, African-centered schools’ practice of community vigilance of the political nature of society, allows them to quickly recognize black social concern and move to mitigate the potential injury or harm to black students. The politics of African centered schools are upfront, talked about, and visible. I also contend one of the most compelling components of African-centered education is the process of decentering europe and western pedagogical approaches, for instance, starting the institutional day with a Unity

Circle is an organizational practice that serves to signal to organizational citizens that they are entering into a different ideology. Indeed, it is where the students understand that outside cultural practices and “ways of being” are to be shed. It is also the key that allows these schools to rethink and reimagine how black students are socialized to be healthy and productive members of the black community.

Section II: Collectivity and Black History as Pedagogy

During one of my last visits to Steve Biko, I entered the school gym where Baba

Nicholes was talking to the second and third-grade students after their morning “circle of love ritual.” I would come to understand, this flexible time in many African-centered

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schools (time between morning rituals and the start of their formal education day), was a time used by teachers and staff to have conversations with students about matters of black social life. Both in Bethune and Steve Biko, this time was used for discussions about bullying, loving and caring for each other, healthy ways to disagree, community violence, healthy social responses to neighborhood and police violence, police shootings, and many more concerns that affect the students. However, today, the students were talking about their upcoming science fair.

Baba Nicholes was asking the students if they had brought in glass jars for the science fair. Most had not. He would tell me during one of our conversations that “I wanted to demonstrate to them (the students) that this science fair was their project and they were responsible for the items that were needed.” He would in the moment, reiterate to the students the importance of how this event was a celebration of their intellectual work, that it was their opportunity to demonstrate Umoja (Unity) ending with, “...We either win together or we fail together, either way, we will be together.”

When achievement is measured along traditional indicators such as grades, graduation rates, success on standardized tests, and dropout numbers, African American students do not seem to fare well when compared to their White counterparts. Gaps in performances have been apparent for decades, and many have attempted to explain its causes. Theories in the 1950s and 1960s focused on motivation and emphasized stable personality traits such as needs and cognitive dispositions as the basis for achievement, motivation and performance. These theories tended to explain the gap in performance in terms of a deficit model, suggesting that Black students had low achievement motivation

(McClelland, 1961; Kaplan & Maehr, 1999). While researchers who worked within these

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theoretical frameworks sought to specify the deficient nature of Black students’ motivation—some portrayed African American culture and families as emphasizing needs other than achievement (McClelland, 1961).

Others theorized that experience and circumstance destined African American students to rely on external attributions such as luck rather than on internal causes such as effort. (Battle, 1963; Friend & Neale, 1972; Murray & Mednick, 1975). African

American students were also thought to have a lower sense of competence and, therefore, lower aspirations (Graham, 1994). In the long run, none of these assumptions received consistent support. However, with modern understandings of achievement gaps, differences do not necessarily rely on acquired dispositions, which are now more focused on situated cognition. Kaplan and Maehr (1999), see a social-cognitive approach that attends to the meanings associated with such activities or contexts as, for example, what students understand school and learning to be, its purpose, and how success is defined and achieved (Kaplan & Maehr, 1999).

Baba Nicholes’s science fair example sparked in me a memory from my childhood about black education, student socialization, and learning motivation, particularly how black ideology can serve as a catalyst for greater educational success.

Surprisingly to some, I was not a particularly good student throughout my academic career. However, I began participating in a youth program, sponsored by my church,

Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Tallahassee, Florida. The program incorporated elements of Black Nationalism, Black Liberation theology through youth programming. For me, this was mostly displayed in the program organizers explicit instruction of history, which soon became a love of mine. I remember during black

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history month watching A&E biography television program and being amazed that I knew more about these famous black people than the experts on television. The organizers of the program recognized my budding interest in history, and I can see now, they cultivated that interest into a narrative of how my love of history could be used as a tool or “weapon” to help our people understand where they had come and where they are going.

This reframing of my world view in the seventh grade transformed how I saw myself in the broader African American experience. In a flash, I could think larger; I was given a reason to care about my fellow man; and most importantly, I was motivated to learn. It gave me what Zulu (2018) says in his “African-centered Paradigm,” the opportunity for me to see and allow myself to be a subject of history and not an object.

Zulu stating, “allows African people to be the subjects of historical data rather than the objects of historical experience; a forum for victorious consciousness development and consistent dialogue with African history and culture (p. 11).”

African-centered Schools and Student Motivation

One of the most significant components of excitement was thinking about student motivation, particularly why the students in African centered schools aspired to learn and why the students considered education at an African-centered school necessary? Because of my past, I expected this question to be a complicated narrative. I wondered, had the students’ experienced the same excitement I had when I recognized my role in the unfolding narrative of Africans in the Americas? Or was this something less grandiose and just a means for the students and their families to achieve a material benefit that will feed their individualistic ambitions?

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From my very first interaction with students, there was a sense of oneness and a sense of Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) being inculcated into the student body. The communitarianism and co-constructing nature of the schools’ model appeared to be building in the students an ideological sense of education as a collective project; yes the school is being perceived as a place to learn academic subject matter, (Math, Reading,

Science…), but also as a location to learn about their non-cognitive selves and motivation in a broader social context.

Which is, in turn is orienting them into an ideological mindset of African- centeredness. Durden (2007) describing Cheryl Grills African centered observation, found a paradigm that required one to “examine or analyze the phenomena with a lens consistent with an African understanding of reality; African values; African logic;

African methods of knowing; and African historical experiences (p. 173).” Asante also perceives this as an assertion of the central role of the African subjects within the context of African history, that in turn removes europe from the center of the African reality

(Asante, 2009). African-centered schools are political spaces, orienting children into a political world, which sees them with a particular lens. Like my earlier years, the students describe their African-centered school as a place of care that will help them achieve their communitarian ideas of blackness. The motivator for success in school is to serve the larger African-centered ideological project, for example, below is an interview with students at Steve Biko about why success in school is important,

Student Conversation

Anna (Student 1): Because in the past a lot of people (black people) did

not get to go to school and this is an opportunity for me, because now a lot

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of people get to go school, because it’s an opportunity for us. I want to be

a good student and go to college, and then get a degree, get a high school

degree and then I get a college degree.

Banwo: Why do you want to go to college? Do you want to go to college

because you want to get a degree?

Darius (Student 2): No, I want to go to college because I want to get

knowledge and help people.

Anna: He took my line

Banwo: The question is what are you going to do with that knowledge?

Do you just want to go because you want to be smart?

Darius: I want to create a business when I grow up to help black people

get jobs, so that’s why I want to go to college

Anna: He took my answer, but I want to help my community.

Darius: (interrupting Anna) Then I can get a degree and then because

without a degree how am I supposed to be able to create my own business

(Student focus group, Biko, 11/18/2019).

Later in the interview, Anna, spoke about wanting to become a social worker, because she had known other students or children her age (was not clear which group she was speaking about), that were taken from their homes and she wanted to “help protect children, from violence (community, state (DC Child and Family Services) and physical violence).”

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Although the students have futures goals, their goals are a part of a larger narrative of collectivism and service to their community. This idea was continuously found in observations and interviews. Below is another conversation about how the students perceived their future. The students spoke about the school being strict, but the notion of strictness is complicated and seen as a form of preparation for service to their community.

Jamie (Student 1): Yes, they were strict.

Dan (Student 2): They care for us. They want us to grow, right? They

don’t want us to be fighting. Because they want us to change the world

and makes the world more peaceful.

Tim (Student 3): Yes, like Baba Nicholes who was talking to me. He was

saying…he was like saying that I’m probably going to be a writer when I

get older because I’m a good writer and that I could change the world for

black people one day (Student focus group, Biko, 11/18/2019).

Again their motivation for learning is racialized and politicized. The teachers and staff are socializing the students in an organizational culture that tackles racialized issues head-on. Tim is not just going to be a writer because he has stories to tell and likes to write. Tim, at age nine, perceives himself as having a role in the liberation of our group.

This idea of collectivist motivation is also taken up in conversations about being a burden on the black community. During the interviews, students expressed concern about being a productive force, not falling into pitfalls and learning from the examples, taught in the school and in their neighborhoods,

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I want to be a good student because then I’m going to look forward to

helping… I can be a good student and do great things with my life, and not

be like the black girls on TV who are in medicine, prison and stuff, or

juvenile corrections centers and stuff. I won’t have to go to juvenile prison

or nothing like my brother did. Instead I want to be a good student to go to

college and help my brother and community. (Rita, Biko, 11/18/2019)

Rita sees herself as part of a community that is dealing with trauma and concerns.

She understands the significance of dangerous social pitfalls and traps and, most importantly, how these social pitfalls can have a detrimental consequence on her future plans. The hope and the dream of Rita is to be “good and help her community,” stating, “I want to be a good student to go to college and help my brother and community.” This raises the question how has this shift in intentional non-cognitive student preparation and socialization for African-centered leaders, transformed the role of school as a socializing agent.

Mama Nia (Vice Principal at Steve Biko), also described how the idea of responsibility to the community is used by the students when speaking about the infusion of community in the culture of the school, she states,

“It’s not really, it’s just a continuance of the African-American

experience. We are communal. And we hold that dear because that’s how

our ancestors related to each other, through community, right? So you go

and look at some of the way that the houses were built, they were in a

circle, you know what I mean? They shared everything. It was no mine

versus yours, it was for the village, it was for the community. She went to

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say that, If you did something against the village, or against the

community, everybody would have something to say. Everybody would

hold you accountable, right? Even if I just did it to you, everyone in the

village is gonna know that, because they’re gonna hold me accountable,

because it’s an offense against the whole village, not just against one

family. So the fact that we still believe that I think is so powerful. After all

these years and years and years and years and years and years and years,

like eight generations later, we’re still holding on that very near and dear.

(Mama Nia, Biko, interview 8/30/2019)”

This notion of responsibility and accountability “Everybody would hold you accountable” for Mama Nia serves as a motivation tool for organizational citizens to be responsive to the community. For her and leaders of the village, this is an intentional organizational edification of the political that is serving to create a healthy driver

(socialization) of students into active community participants and further inculcating their ideological mindset into that of successful black scholars in a fictive ken relationship with black community members. The schools are preparing the students to be the future trustees of the black community equipped to do battle for the healthy direction of black people and black politics.

Schools as Community and Communities as Care

Ladson-Billings (1995) developed three criteria that undergird culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP): “an ability to develop students academically; a willingness to nurture and support cultural competence of students; and the development of a sociopolitical or critical consciousness” (p. 483). The teachers in her research believed “in a Freirean

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notion of ‘teaching as mining” (p. 479), or drawing out already existing knowledge. This belief aligns with research on students’ funds of knowledge that has shown that children bring to school knowledge rooted in their home cultures. The African-centered leaders presented in this dissertation, are practicing this authentic variety of cultural education, that is, time and time, being highlighted in theory as a best practice of culturally relevant pedagogy and leadership, which is inspiring the student’s academic motivation. I want to highlight the students’ ideological mindset during the student group interviews, words, and phrases like “Help, Change, Do Great Things, Help my people,” were continually used when students were asked, “Why they wanted to be a good student?” The schools, through a process of African Communtiarism, have successfully created a dynamic system of socialization that appears to shift the students’ mindset away from the “I” and on “us.” Below are sections from the student interviews.

Table 4: Student Teacher African Communtiarism I can be a good student and do I want to create a business when I

great things with my life (Rita) grow up to help black people get

jobs (Darius)

They want us to grow, right… they I want to go to college because I

want us to change the world and want to get knowledge and help

makes the world more peaceful. people. (Darius)

(Tim)

I’m probably going to be a writer (Talking about being a social

when I get older because I’m good worker) but I want to help my

writer, and that I could change the community. (Ann)

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world for black people one day.

(Dan)

Thinking about Bandura’s (1986), Social Cognitive Theory (spoken about in chapter four) and its observation about the individual’s possession of a “self-system” that enabling them to exercise a measure of control over their thoughts, feelings, motivation, and actions. Bandura regards this self-system as providing a reference device and a set of sub-functions for perceiving, regulating, and evaluating behavior, which results from the interplay between the system and environmental sources of influence. In other words,

Bandura’s Social cognitive theory is telling us that “persons are neither autonomous agents nor simply mechanical conveyors of animating environmental influences. Rather, they make causal contributions to their motivation and action within a system of triadic reciprocal causation” (Bandura, 1986, p. 1175). Social cognitive theory is at heart, trying to explain the entire course of an individual’s development. Its origins of interpersonal exchange, the initial development of social awareness, social skill, and social orientations. However, I am particularly interested in if these schools with an organizational culture of reaffirming the students’ ethnic background — enhance the students’ social cogitation, which is improving their self-systems and thus promoting their academic motivation.

What some observers regard as merely a pedagogical approach to educate children, leaders at Steve Biko, and Bethune recognize the dynamic impact of continual reaffirmation of students’ ethnic backgrounds and experience as a method to motivate black students into healthy paths of success and healthy adult identities. Indeed, in our

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broader social discourses, we talk about loving each other more, caring for each other more, and yet we socialize children in systems that pit them against each other, both racially and socially. Menkiti (1984) contends that in traditional African communities, the group held priority over the individual. He uses John Mbiti’s statement to support his thesis, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”

Quimby, Wolfson, & Seyala, (2007), found when studying the social cogitation of

African American adolescents’ interest in an environmental science career that self- efficacy was the only significant predictor in how students chose to envision their futures.

There appeared to be a link between trust and perceived equity. Education for the children at Steve Biko and Bethune is about a legacy and culture of cooperation.

Students’ conceptualized themselves as a part of an Imagined Cultural Ideal that is being intentionally shaped. The leaders and teachers all cultivate in the student the idea that they are a community, and they are responsible to each other. The students are future stewards and stakeholders of the school, they are keepers of its culture and history and, ultimately, they are responsible for its success and continuation. I want to end this chapter of the organizational theory of African-centered schools with the words of Mama Pat principal of Bethune, speaking about how she views black liberation and how she leads a black organization that socializes black students into that thinking.

Banwo: You mean liberty in the sense of agency…?

Mama Pat: Yes. When you ask people what it means to solve our own

problems, you might get 30 different examples of what that means and

how we need to come together. The issue isn’t whether those 30 answers

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are correct. They may all be correct but sometimes we don’t unify on the

points in which we agree. We divide on the points in which we don’t

agree. I think that those things in terms of being free to respect that your

brother or sister might have a different opinion is a key point in the liberty

and being liberated.

Banwo: How do you see your students, the students that are being

socialized in African-centered philosophy, African-centered ways of life,

how do you see them interacting with the larger Chicago Black

Community, for instance?

Mama Pat: Where I see that come into play is when they leave us. When

they go to high school and they can come back and they say, “I challenged

my history teacher because he said something was wrong.” Or, quite

frankly, they go to other places and they protest and speak out to get some

justices at whatever high schools they go to. Where I see it taking place is

when they, even as children, are speaking out against injustice and to feel

very free do to that. To know that we are somewhat responsible that they

are strong enough to do that. (5/23/2019).

For me though this experience, it is about the political unmasking of the unspoken and disruption of the unhealthy socialization position black children find themselves encountering. African-centered institutions socialized students with a clear vision of the world that seeks to bring into focus the racialized experiences and histories of African

Americans. This is transformative for a black student.

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Chapter Seven: Conclusion: Black Organizations Enacting Black Organizational Care

Education scholars that theorize through an African-centered lens see Western processes of schooling as projects of cultural and economic “Social Hegemony,” rooted in practices and attitudes that privilege european ways of knowing (Asante, 1991;

Monteiro-Ferreira, 2014; Piert, 2015). I see western systems of socialization as processes of cultural negation of African histories and understandings. I also view this “cultural negation” as a signifier of western devaluation or indifference for the healthy social integration of African peoples in our larger society. Formal institutions such as schools are a socialization apparatus used by communities to shape the behaviors and values of the less powerful members of their group (Handel, 2006, p. 2).” Moreover, I regard this process as the foundation for a group to socially construct its cultural identity and preserve what it deems essential, which makes social institutions such as the church, the family, and the schools responsible for the transmission of traditions and values of the broader society.

African-centered organizations enable black people to look at the world with

African ways of being at the center and began to shape and piece back their historic and authentic selves. It is in this place that black children can begin to appreciate the power of

“Ancient and modern Africa,” serving as a centerpiece of their “Imagined African cultural tradition.” African-centered education not only encompasses instructional and curricular approaches to student socialization, but it also results in a shift in the student’s worldview and sense of self. The system naturally engenders a reorientation of social values and actions that facilitate a black social state of being. For example, Baba

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Williams, when discussing student socialization at Bethune, displayed an organizational approach to student social formation that understood schooling as a holistic approach to student development.

Moreover, Baba Williams in Chapter Six saw African-centered schooling as a factual process that prepared students for the “actual” world they were entering. This social “preparation” for him and the formal organization call Bethune served as a unique black cultural practice that sought to fortify its black organizational citizens into a stable and robust association to their black community. Further, it sought to repair the social bonds between members of the broader black community, which they perceived as a weak point that has been historically targeted by practices of white supremacy. This attention to black communal discourses also informs how the organizational culture shapes students’ African mindset and black social consciousness. In our interview, Baba

Williams spoke about the academic importance of the school. However, for him, the non- cognitive “mindset” of the students was what he saw as the most critical work Bethune performed, stating, “Yes, they are moving into non-African-centered Schools, but the work we have done with them has prepared them to see and act with the mindset of what is best for the African community.(6/26/2019)”

As I wrap up this dissertation, I want to highlight and review three core concepts that I believe emerged from the research and have significance to the broader field of education. First being, African centered school on focus on black groupness, care, and politics, through their emphasis on healthy black fictive relationships, which I see as being driven by African centered school’s grounding in black nationalism and Pan

Africanism. This understanding of politics is the idealogical driver for the schools, it is

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the reason why they pedagogically and organizational structure themselves the way they do. Next, through Rincon-Gallardo (2019) process of liberating learning, I will look at his three complementary areas as a liberatory framework for understanding how mainstream school fails to create cultures and systems of liberation for marginalized groups. I want to demonstrate to mainstream school leaders, the blind spots and areas that are points of contention for marginalized groups and how deep understanding of racialized histories and organizational cultures could help to improve learning for all students. Finally, there is a brief section that examines how African centered schools are an applied model for the process that mainstream school should look at when they are exploring ideas and systems that purport to liberate learning.

Group Care and Communitarianism

Leaders of African-centered schools are perhaps some of the most racially sensitive administrators we have in the field of education. Their practice is grounded in the sense of historical authenticity that is dynamically informing the organizational culture of their institutions. For example, African centered school’s idealogical emphasis on communitarian and social-relational ideals requires them to confront the actual historical damage to black social bonds— they have to confront the myths and stories we have told ourselves. These leaders can soberly comprehend the political and organizational work that has to happen if the school is to achieve a healthy process of black socialization. Further, if this communitarian model of centering race in the organizational core were to be transferred to a mainstream institution, it would require all members of the organization be grounded in history and conscious of how capitalist notions have informed our modern conceptions of social relationships.

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I understand these African-centered organizational artisans as informing, cultivating, and constructing their system’s culture and “ways of being,” as being informed by their very real sensitivity to the historical position of African Americans.

However, many critics continue to charge that African-centered schools are segregated and not welcoming places for non-African students. These perspectives fail to reckon with the fact that a significant number of urban schools and urban spaces are already hypersegregated; African-centered schools cannot be more segregated than most urban schools are already (Merry & New, 2008). The larger question that I keep returning to is why, for the sake of modernity, Africans have to participate in formal systems that have not fully metabolized notions of their humanity? Is it up to some of the most powerless groups in society to change the hearts and minds of the dominant culture? Moreover, why when Africans go off and establish social institutions that privilege their cultural identity, they are criticized as proponents of segregation, while aspects of white hypersegregation go unexplored and unexamined on a larger social scale.

The social challenge that ethnic schools raise in our society is that of radical social democracy in the sense that it shines an unwanted light onto western and capitalist understandings of the humanity of people with dark skin. These schools are critiques of western organizations and their inability to forcefully and healthily create inclusive and healthy locations of care for black children. Think back to the Brooklyn example in the introduction. The white parents of the story were doing what they felt was in the best interest of their children in a western and capitalist framework. I am sure each of those speakers at the school meeting would consider themselves fair, honest, hardworking, and a believer in the doctrine of American social democracy, however, there was a broader

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failure with these parents to see the idealogy of anti-blackness at play in their statements.

They failed to understand that their words and actions are a continuation of the fraying of social bonds between constitutionally and “inalienable” equal peoples. Furthermore and more profound was their lack of recognition of how their anxieties and concerns about their children attending school with black children are rooted in political and social scripting that has made black people in the United States a contagion to all things deemed socially, politically and economically undesirable.

In my opinion, the social challenge of our time is to confront our formal organizations’ complicity in institutionalizing social scripts of harm. This would require organizational leaders to be concerned with the political nature of systems and their controls. I see these leaders having to understand how odious practices of tradition, normality, and just simple organizational inertia forward social scripts that continue tendencies and trajectories of racialized social realities. I perceive African-centered leaders in a unique opportune position to understand how these confrontations will alter how racialized members experience the organizational reality of a formal socializing agent. African-centered leaders and their clear understanding of racialized social histories are demonstrating how practices of care built around relational fraternity can socialize people into a healthy understanding of themselves and their society.

African centered schools are a demonstration of the communitarian power of care and the notion of collectivism as a praxis of black care, Fictive Kinship repair, and social cohesion. Nyerere talked about communitarian power as an ancestral inheritance going back millennia on the African continent. Moreover, he also believed the communitarian power of care is also the inheritance of all peoples of the world. We all can trace our

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lineage back to communities of communitarians concerned with the survival and justness of the broader community. Forging practices of collectivism require us to reexamine how our social systems are constituting adverse social ways of comportment for all people.

Moreover, we must move to reimagine our formal socializing agents into places of social transformation; this movement has been happening for some time now in African- centered schools with leaders that shape their organizational cultures into socializing agents for healthy social and political development.

Social Organizations with a Political Core

Lomotey (1992) observed three major idealogical components of schools that are affiliated with the Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) (1) Organization as a family (Family hood); (2) NGUZO SABA value system; (3) Revolutionary Pan-African

Nationalism. To which he used Brookins (1984) who saw as the “philosophical commonalities” between institutions during his 1980s examination of ten CIBI schools identify,

 Several commonalities in the philosophies of these institutions:

 An emphasis on high or superior academic achievement;

 An emphasis on the transmission of culture;

 A sense of commitment to african american people;

 An emphasis on self-determination, including the necessity for the schools

themselves to be independent;

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 Implementation of an educational process based on distinct and explicit

values;

 An emphasis on developing a strong african american identity and

 Self-concept;

 A commitment to the belief that african american people are an african

 People with a common ancestry, a common condition or experience,

 And a common destiny;

 The provision of political education through a critical examination of current

and historical events and how they relate to African American people

(Lomotey, 1992, p. 459).

Again returning to the earlier ethnographic narrative in chapter 4, one of the major takeaways from the interviews and the observations of Steve Biko and Bethune was how the school leaders innovatively employed organizational components to forward their goals of healthy black socialization and repair to social relationships. During Baba

Williams’s interview, he emphasized the ideological goal of Bethune and the broader

Mary McLeod Bethune Charter School network, which is to transform African children into positive forces for the advancement of African peoples and their community.

Similarly, Steve Biko does this, through the structural design of their organization, in the earlier chapters, I highlighted how Steve Biko uses their open space model to encourage organizational citizenship and cooperation. Indeed African-centered school’s practice and implementation of organizational citizenship and healthy relationship formation is also beneficial to students’ broader social understanding of society. It serves to challenge what

African centered thinkers perceive as odious strands of thinking and behaviors they see as

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harmful to the broader black community. According to Baba Williams, Bethune’s ideological core is a process of organizational decolonization stating,

In looking back through the annals of time by way of Drs. (Yosef) Ben-

Jochannan, John Henrik Clarke and Ivan Van Sertima and a host of other

historians. Our history predates our interaction with european. Our history

and the activities that we engaged in were not defined as a result of our

interactions with european either…in knowing this, it is becoming aware

of that, it then dictates that we have to then learn what we did in a number

of different aspects when it comes to our relation with ourselves, our

relationship with our family, family members and our relation with our

community at large and that community can extend out to what we would

consider a nation. (Baba Williams, Elder, Bethune, interview 6/26/2019)

Lee (1992) described the history of black “mainstream or government” educational reform, as being racialized and a process of systematic quick-fixes and single-solution mentalities that regarded solving black children’s organizational experiences as simplistically ideas, designed to skim the surface of concerns like race and social domination, for which she believes real reform would tackle. Lee recognized that

African-centered schools’ unique infusion of “political” doctrines within a social system is missing from the organizational realities of most black children and has a detrimental effect on the healthy ethnicization of racialized students. It is the making real of the

Asantian notion of historical “actors vs. acted upon,” mainly how non-white students are made to see themselves and their group as none historical actors, but as a group that is

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“acted upon” instead of as actors or a part of groups with self-determination (Asante,

1991; Monteiro-Ferreira, 2014; Piert, 2015).

I contend that when Black children participate in organizations that (1) are socially entrusted as an “agent of socialization,” and (2) neglect the acknowledgment of the racialization process; these organizations start to formulate processes of social and organizational injustice. This development also begins a process of mystification of systems and tools of white supremacy in organizations, through unspoken and unchallenged system realities. I also observe these “failures” as a kind of, organizational system control that serves to protect dominant members’ priorities and access to organizational power. For example, Baba Terrell, during his interview, spoke about not going to an all-black school when he was younger, and how his lack of access to healthy black cultural productions was possibly one of the reasons he got involved with African- centered education. He also spoke with sensitivity about how a lot of parents and adults who have children that attend his schools also had not had significant exposure to black schools (organization) when they were younger. He saw this as creating a longing in the parents to participate in something like an African-centered institution. I believe these parents comprehend the value of organizational culture with healthy black socialization at its core. Baba Terrell recalled:

I went to the army, which was is diverse. I’ve always been in mixed

settings and I think that may even have been an impetus for me to seek out

the cultural thing...I think a lot of our parents are similar to how my mom

was. They see the value in the culture, but they may not necessarily

possess the knowledge that they feel is important for their students to

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have. I know for a fact, if our school was around when I was in

elementary, my mother would have broken her neck to try to get us in

there. I think that’s the case for a lot of our parents today. They see the

value in culturally centered or culturally specific or culturally relevant

education and that’s something that they want to expose their children to.

(3/20/2019)

What these parents realize is the significance of the racialized and social “reality” of black life, which also informs a critical component of the socialization process. I believe that if an organization is genuinely concerned with the healthy socialization of black students, it has to have discussions or at least acknowledge how practices of racism attempt to restrict access to locations in our broader society.

The organizational restriction for black students is accomplished in mainstream schools, in my opinion, by socializing black children to restrict their racialized selves and racialize cultural productions. It is the organizational policing of their racial histories and racialized community connections. Think back to Chapter Five’s example of Baba Jason.

Who was prevented from what he saw as a critically needed racialized conversations with students when he worked in a mainstream school. Baba Jason, who identifies as a black male librarian and educator, perceived his fellow black organizational citizens as needing a space to address their racialize realities. However, he also felt this organizational

“need” was policed and discouraged by system leaders and other non-black actors (latino and white organizational citizens), which he believed permitted designs of race and racism in the organization to be undiscussed. For Baba Jason, this practice of organizational policing further mystified “organizational restrictions” for black

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organizational citizens. However, I do believe the organizational policing did send a message to the black students, mainly, that discussing of race should not happen interracially or in public.

Moreover, the organizational policing experienced by Baba Jason of “identity, purpose, or direction” also serves to limit the organizational knowledge of the relationship between schooling and student future racialized social realities (later life)

(Fine, 1991; Lomotey, 1990; Lee, 1992).” This racialized systematic patrolling forced

Baba Jason to search for an organization that he believed honored his ethnic identity and foregrounded notions of healthy black cultural preparedness. Mainstream schools, in my opinion, are failing when they do not consider how vital racialized social experiences are in creating an organization that forecloses on black children’s understanding of their social reality. For example, Cohen et al. (1999), found “African American students were less likely to adjust written essay feedback given by white professors if they were led to believe that white students received less negative feedback” (Casad & Bryant, 2016, p.

5). In other words, race and racism played a role in how the students understood and perceived their position based on their social reality.

For Bethune, their ideological foundation is a holistic conception that schooling is a process of healthy student socialization. Moreover, their anchoring is grounded throughout the organizational approach to knowledge and system formation. Every day the school holds a ceremonial opening of the day (Unity Circle), where the entire school participates in public affirmations that reaffirms the community’s commitment to the single goal of building toward a positive and healthy black community and future. This practice for each of the leaders is the most critical organizational ritual perform every

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day. Cascio, et al. (2016), that daily self-affirmation posits that people are motivated to maintain a positive self-view and that threats to perceived self-competence are met with resistance. Moreover, when threatened, self-affirmations can restore self-competence by allowing individuals to reflect on sources of self-worth, such as core values (Cascio, et al., 2016). This organizational approach to knowledge and system formation through affirmation is serving a much deeper role than I previously considered. The organization’s use of self-affirmation is fortifying its members and orienting them into agents of resistance that perceive itself as building student’s minds up for the African centered political end game.

Additionally, the practice of daily self-affirmation came up during the Bethune student interviews. The students talked about how their teacher implemented a practice of daily classroom self-affirmation after the El Paso shooting. Moreover, the students clearly understood this daily self-affirmation practice as an approach for them to cope with their social comprehension of societal events stating,

Banwo: Like what are some things that, tell me a story about how they

teach you... that they teach Black people to be positive-

Michelle (Student 1): So my teacher, Mama Gene, she lets us do morning

decorations and we do a positive mindset which is saying positive things

instead of saying the negative things about us. We say positive things and

most people like to use the NGUZA SABA up there on the wall. I don’t

use that. I use my words out of my mouth. I don’t just look on the walls

and use everything that they use.

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Banwo: So what’s some of your words?

Michelle (Student 1):So my words are being like, in the morning I always

have a positive mindset. I don’t get up angry, get grumpy, it’s only when I

don’t have enough sleep. I also always use knowledge. Because if you

don’t have knowledge, you ain’t got no money. You can’t teach kids, you

can’t do none of that. You can’t do nothing.

Earl (Student 2): Okay, we first started meditation, well the 6th grade

class now, last year we first started meditation. Because it was just

something I knew, it was... I think it was in English, what was it in?

Michelle (Student 1): El De Paso, something? (Student focus groups,

MMB, interview, 9/20/2019)

When I spoke to Mama Gene about this classroom practice and why she felt this was an essential social practice, particularly why she was taking classroom time to extend the start of the academic day, she first disagreed that this was not a part of the academic life of the organization. Indeed she felt this morning practice was critical to how the students experienced school and her classroom. Relational experiences (Black Love) are such a vital aspect of their school’s culture that it was essential to anticipate or deal with the concerns and fears of students. “You cannot expect students to learn as brothers and sisters when they are worried or scared about something traumatic that happen outside of school” (Mama Gene, Teacher, 5 grade). This focus on social trauma is a vital aspect of the school, its something that has to be dealt with because having students participate in the school culture amid a traumatic episode harms the overall project. African centered

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schools rarely practice exclusionary discipline, and they favor alternatives, such as restorative justice. The aversion to exclusionary discipline requires them to deal with the root cause of problems and issues as a family and as a group. Trauma for the schools are apart of the long history, and mental tax Africans have faced in the West, there are root causes, there are systematic problems, and intergroup dynamics are driving psychological and social issues faced by our people. I also view Mama Gene’s implementation of meditation practices as a way to demonstrate to the students how to deal healthily with mental health problems or stressful situations.

This moment stimulates the participants’ kinship to their ancestors, promotes and binds the culture, and orient the students into distinct processes of childhood socialization, they are intentionally building up their “identity, purpose, and social way of being.” This process also is the bridge that Lee regarded as missing in mainstream schools. The students in African-centered schools are not being socialized into mystifying conceptions of white supremacy or organizational practices that tell them to restrict themselves ethnically. On the contrary, they are being brought into an organization that, at its core, is concerned with their consciousness and the relationship between their schooling and what will occur later in life. They are being supplied the keys to understand what white supremacy is and how understandings of social domination have wreaked havoc on their ethnic communities and histories.

Liberating Learning

According to the Brookings Institute (2018), the United States population is expected to grow more slowly and become older over the next 40 years. As this reality begins to set in, cultural diversity has become an ever-increasing core component of the

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United States. However, for many minority participants in formal organizations, authentic cultural expressions, and healthy multicultural integration remains vastly out of reach. For many observers of formal organizations in the United States, organizational cultural competency has evolved slowly and, have yet to fully realize its potential of working effectively in multicultural environments and situations. Additionally, these observers see organizational cultures as a dynamic and ongoing process that must evolve and grow with changing social customs and populations. Nevertheless, research into organizational micro racial discrimination has found that “everyday discrimination does occur in the workplace and that it negatively affects Black well-being” (Deitch et. al.,

2003, p. 1319)

However, when some leaders are tasked with creating cohesive multicultural and multiracial organizational cultures, they face intense push back from dominant members who are interested in protecting their cultural productions and traditions. In schools, I see this pushback in the reaction to the growing movements and voices of minority organizational citizens attempting to liberate schools from practices of eurocentric domination. One of the most important takeaways of the study is how African centered schools insert their ideology at the forefront of their institutional vision and way of comportment. In early chapters, I called the process of fore fronting ideology as a demystification of the “The Political” and its power to control and dictate organizational resources and relationships. For me, the notion of knowledge decolonization or learning liberation in African-centered schools is most forcefully seen in how the institutions approach the political and social rationale of their schooling model.

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Rincon-Gallardo (2019) views the process of liberating learning as happening in three complementary areas or as a kind of framework, first of which is the idea that learning is a practice of freedom. A kind of notion that the use of the formalized structures of schooling is a place to disrupt cultures and ideas of harm. For me, it is the

African-centered notion of the NGUZO SABA, which in a sense, is how African- centered systems can ideologically ground their organizational productions in a real sense of community and responsiveness. It is why African-centered institutions are so concerned with things like social bonds and community connectedness. The schools are places of care designed to root out generational histories of social trauma, designed and codified by practices of white supremacy. Liberation for these leaders is actual instruction of history as schooling, and this radical reimagining of schooling for these leaders is a practice of building up young people with social and academic tools like social knowledge and ideological understandings of how blackness has been devalued and abused throughout the time Africans have been in the west.

Secondly, Rincon-Gallardo sees contesting the physical, social space of learning organizations in our society as a key to liberating learning. He perceives that if we challenge the keepers of knowledge productions in the public education arena, it would require an organizational change in classrooms, schools, and entire educational infrastructure. I think back to how Baba Williams of Bethune talked about how he searched for a location for his daughter to go to a school that did not repeat or carried the harmful legacy and effects of his schooling experience. Baba Williams was expressing a kind of “hidden and not so hidden” racial politics that occurs in mainstream schools, in

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which the engine that empowers inequality regimes throughout our society are the same ones influencing and defining our social institutions.

Rincon-Gallardo is encouraging racialized people to participate and reimagine the spaces our schooling occupies. Moreover, he believes people who are interested in transformation should make these location transgressive racial space that is respectful and welcoming to the multi-racial, multi-ethnic nature of our society. While yes, this is true, decolonization efforts must challenge white hegemony, but I think the beauty of African- centered schools is they are a location for the racialized to see themselves as members of a healthy formal system, that is not worried about the white gaze and white opinion of black humanity.

Lastly Rincon-Gallardo (2019), believes we must understand how social movements have in the past, been some of our most potent vehicles for widespread cultural change, and understand how these social movements operate is a way for leaders to comprehend how cultural production embedded themselves inside of systems. For me, the most potent example of this is how African-centered schools shaped their ideology around movement designs and a historical conceptualization of radical black politics.

African centered schools, through their historical conceptualization, understand that western social scripts for black people are apparatuses of alienation designed to wall up and silo black social relationships and social bonds. African-centered thinkers and leaders recognize the lack of black community space stymies healthy black social formation, which in turn hurts their ideological project of healthy black community and relationships.

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Rincon-Gallardo’s idea of liberating learning or decolonization of learning in the

African-centered model is at the core of what these leaders saw as Carter G. Woodson

(1933) termed “real education.” For Woodson, it meant understanding the social and political complexities of black life in America and infusing those experiences, rules, and laws into independent formal systems that shape black life for the better. Although for many people, the desire to root out negative aspects of racialization out of our formal social systems is pioneering work, for African-centered leaders, this idea has been a long and winding road towards freedom that has come to define many of their life’s work.

There is much that society can learn from ethnic systems of education, they would only have to ask and, most importantly, listen.

What Mainstream Schools can learn from Ethnic Schooling

Shaull (1970) in the forward of Paulo Freire book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wrote, “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom…” (p. 34). I believe for many mainstream school leaders, an exploration of how culture and social practices, in the form of social ideologies, can inform and improve the social position of many of their “out-group” organizational citizens. I found during my research that racial and social ideologies served as a critical juncture for African-centered schools to perceive and understand how harmful social productions, attitudes, beliefs, and quite frankly histories enter social institutions and define how racialized people experience their organizational citizenship.

Formal organizations produce, through practices of policing and systematization, “ideals

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of comportment,” for black and brown students. Furthermore, these ideals of comportment of harm, also come with histories and social scripts that have been embedded within notions of black personhood and humanity. For me, I also perceive these notions of comportment as “social scripts” or social expectations that inform organizational and educational discourses like academic and discipline gaps.

Take for example, Hathaway’s (2016), research on implicit bias, preschool expulsion, and black children. He found that teachers showed a tendency to more closely observe black students, especially boys when challenging behaviors were expected. The white teachers of his study, through their socialization, brought into the formal organizations their racism, hang-ups and ideals of “comportment” for black children, which served to intentionally construct through their organizational behavior a negative and harmful social reality for black students. Yes, this teacher behavior is undoubtedly damaging to the black student in the class, but it also goes much deeper. The teachers are denying the students an opportunity to be a part of the larger society. There are serving as gatekeepers and foot soldiers to resources in the form of classroom education and the denial of healthy organizational relationships with adults. These teachers’ unpacked racial anxieties are also socially scripting these kids down a path of social harm and isolation.

Interestingly Hathaway also found black teachers hold black students to a higher standard of behavior than do their white counterparts, which he speculated as black educators may be demonstrating a belief that black children require harsh assessment and discipline to prepare them for a harsh world. This idea of preparation was undoubtedly a theme with the leaders at the two schools of my study. The leaders felt a sense of

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responsibility to prepare the children of their institutions to face a western society that saw black people with a particular ideological lens, which required them to organizationally center race and address it openly and forcefully.

I asked in earlier sections, “What would happen in a mainstream school that followed an African-centered model?” For me, that questions is easy to visualize, it would be liberating, both physically and mentally. The cultural ideology of the two schools of this dissertation saw African-centeredness as an organizational praxis of amelioration of harm placed onto black students and their communities. Although districts are multi-racial and multi-ethnic organizations there, lack of exploration of race and its “political” and social ideologies create environments of danger and risk for racialized organizational citizens. However, if we look at the events featured in this dissertation, we can see how “out front” and “public” centering of race and differences can serve as an opportunity for organizational growth. I want this dissertation to contribute to the broader movement and project of reimagining and quite frankly, transformation of schooling.

The closing section of the conclusion is my recommendation for mainstream school leaders. I wanted to leave you “the reader” with an idea of how I perceive African- centered applications and approaches entering and influencing mainstream systems. As our society continues to diversify, school district leaders are going to have to tackle difficult questions surrounding how to integrate students into organizations with histories and practices of white supremacy. I appreciate these present challenges by district leaders as a fork in the road in how we, as a society, will embrace a multiracial social democracy.

Leaders can ignore the underlying cultural and ethnic differences, which I see as taking a

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colorblind approach to organizational leadership. However, this course of action runs the risk of allowing odious elements of racism and harmful practices of racialized behaviors to go unexplored and unchallenged inside their social institution. Remember,

Stinchcombe (1965) research about how harmful elements at the founding of organizations persisted long after the founding agents left the system. This, for me, is a flashing red light that says a lack of close examination of histories and practice of race in districts leaves them vulnerable to the formation and flourishing of harmful social scripts from the larger society.

These leaders could also take the path of confrontation and challenge that honors and respects the vibrant cultural differences of a multicultural society. This is done in

African-centered schools by the centering of the organization in an ideological milieu,

African-centered organizations decentering european histories and practices is, yes, a way to connect to the idea of African ness, but also as an opportunity to create “a new culture”! A new organizational culture not defined by racialized histories and capitalist notions of humanity. It is a process, in my opinion, that traverse blackness without looking at it through the eyes of whiteness. They are reaching back to a historical “way of being” that is right for them and their ethnic group. This deep exploration of organizational culture also is available to mainstream school leaders. Anti-racist leaders have an opportunity with organizations to be Organizational Cultural Artisans, defining and shaping their cultures for the better. However, this takes courage and fortitude, something that many leaders fail to express.

Serving the Vulnerable

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From Khalifa et al.’s (2016) work with Culturally Responsive Leadership, we can see how robust the education process can be if schools embraced the mantle of critical organizational reflections and Leadership. Schools are organizations that serve an essential role as socializers of young people into adult members of our society. However, leaders must be aware of how social vulnerabilities such as negative views and ideas of blackness can seep into their organizations and inform the realities of its citizens. From my research, I found four significant takeaways that could help mainstream schools learn from African-centered education.

1. Decenter Europe in the education process- decentralization of histories and

practices in the organizational environment, requires teachers and school staff

to rethink how knowledge and logic is being transferred to students. It pushes

the institutions to ask, why are we doing schooling this way, and it requires

educators to search and create a mechanism that is not rooted in the historical

milieu of anti-blackness.

2. Transparently tackling societal views of African Americans- African-

centered School as formal organizations recognize the social and societal

implications of racialized understandings and histories. They are sensitive to

how social views and broader social scripts can formulate futures designed to

guide black children into harmful life outcomes, which is why they play such

care to the practices of organizational cultures and how it informs their

institutional process of youth socialization. They also understand themselves

as responsive learning organizations to their community’s needs and wants. If

the children of the school are having issues with bullying or community

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violence, then the leaders understand those issues have to be addressed for the

greater health of the organizations. Mainstream leaders must design systems

that also have the ability to move and shift immediately with the concerns and

problems of their organizational citizens.

3. Healthy African Identity Formation (An African state of being)- The

leaders of the study spoke about the importance of black people reclaiming

their historical diasporic narratives and using it as a tool to define their

position in the broader historical account of the world. Two of the leaders

raised Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks concept of Western perceptions

and the socialization of black kids to see “blackness” with “wrongness.” The

Leaders considered black education as a dynamic process of healthy identity

formation that encourage black students to, of course, learn academics, but

also to see themselves as people connected to a broader history of modernity.

These leaders felt, if schools wanted to construct an organizational of care for

black children, they would have to take seriously the Asantian notion of that

Africans were historical actors and not just historical beings acted upon.

4. Become a Learning Organization- Each leader spoke about how their past

racialized organizational citizenship experiences and how those early

interactions informed how they led their organizations. Each leader of the

study came to African-centered schooling in a unique racialized way that

made it clear that race needed to be organizationally addressed differently

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during the socialization process of black children. Moreover, the leader was

able to use their racialized experiences as a tool for organizational leadership

that sought to devise practices of care in hopes of mitigating what they saw as

normalize social practices of hostility faced by black organizations. These

experiences allowed the leaders to spotlight and learn how practices of

marginalization worked as social and organizational tools in european

centered organizations, which they saw as a tool for the preservation and

continuation of African peoples.

It is important to recognize the richness of true multiculturalism and how it can serve as a marketplace of inclusion and difference, but it is also essential for leaders to acknowledge the troubling nature of eurocentric culture domination of American schools.

Manning Marable (1995) in discussing Multiculturalism rejected the idea and model of cultural assimilation and social conformity. For him and other African-centered scholars, multiculturalism was a kind of escaping the “mythical melting pot” the historical idea of racialized member’s culture being combined into a non-racist, thoroughly homogenized blend of culture that never existed.

These scholars take into account the barriers that were put in place for African

Americans and seek to incorporate histories of racial and economics into the pedagogical approach. Similar to how the democratic school model aims to incorporate emancipatory practices in its pedagogical approach or single-gendered schools seek to make right past gendered wrongs. African-centered systems seek to encourage a real search for care and belonging for African American parents and students in school systems that go beyond the Marxist economic critique of Willis (1981), Bowles and Gintis (1977).

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For true multiculturalism to arise, African-centered thinkers believe the universality of eurocentrism must be challenged. Indeed, they perceive minority (non- dominate) cultures must assert themselves into the space reversed as the universal or as a social commons. Multiculturalism means “many,” yet for many students of color in schools, this truth fails to materialize and directs them to what some scholars theorize as

“harm and danger” of passively participating in a system that does not value their cultural contribution to the fabric of America. Ethnic educational scholarship is an unmasking of the hiddenness of race in our racialized culture and is a way for minority members to take their place in society on an even ground, which in the end, is what Culturally Responsive

Leadership is asking for understanding and space for the complexities of culture in the

United States.

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Appendix A

Protocols

Student Protocol Questions (Biko and Bethune)

1. Tell me a story about a positive moment at Steve Biko Public Charter School?

2. Can you give me an example of what it is like going to an African centered school?

3. Why is learning important to you?

4. What does being black mean to you?

5. How does Biko Public Charter School help you feel good about being a black person?

6. What does it mean when your teachers used the word village?

7. Can you tell me a story about your village (class) how do yaw support each other?

8. What makes you want to be a good student and how has Biko Public Charter School help you come to this?

Leader Interview Biko and Bethune School 1. What is African centered education? And Why is it important for Black children to experiences if principles and practices? 2. How would you describe successful? a. What is student success? If you ran into a student 10 years from now, what type of person you would want them to be? Agents of socialization READ TO PARTICAPANT-- The purpose of schooling is the transmission of culture, the process by which the culture of a society is passed on to its children. Individuals learn their culture; acquire knowledge, beliefs, values, and norms. Agents of socialization are people, groups and/or institutions that influence self-concepts, emotions, attitudes and behavior. b. What does healthy student socialization mean to you? c. How is African centered school serving as a agent of socialization? 3. Let’s translation to the early days, what was happening in the community around the time of founding that propped you to start the school? a. In what way is this school

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different from you elementary school and does that influence your leadership? b. Is this still the case now? 4. One of the wraps African centered schools get is that they have negative gender attitudes, that girls are treated unfairly in these schools, what is your opinion on that thinking? Cultures of care 5. What does the village mean? Why is that concept important to the organizing of the school? Mayeroff (1971) views caring as a process of helping another person grow in his or her “own right,” 6. What is a caring school culture? 7. How does you school help student “grow into their own right” 8. What types of things you look for when you want to assess and evaluate if the school has a healthy, caring culture? 9. How is white supremacists ideology talked about in the school? How do you center conversations of race in the school? a. Do you see the leaders and yourself as leading the students to racial conscience? 10. What does the circle in the morning mean? Why is that important practices Elders 11. How long have you used elders in the school? 12. Why is it important for young people to have intergenteral relationships?

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Code Book

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