Just this week, it was announced that California’s San Diego State University would be offering a course dedicated to analyzing how black men are undervalued in classroom settings. The course, “Black Minds Matter: A Focus on Black Boys and Men in Education,” was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and had planned on connecting “themes from the Black Lives Matter movement to issues facing blacks in educational settings.”
Despite the fact that the course’s main mission is to “help black male students succeed in school,” San Diego State University has now come under severe criticism from conservatives. One protestor, Craig Deluz, complained, “Now we want to give them taxpayer dollars to train educators on how to indoctrinate our children? That’s insane.”
The course’s creator, J. Luke Wood, countered that the goal of the course is not “indoctrination,” but rather “to educate future teachers about how to make black male students more successful in school.”
Wood added, “Our goal is to change the paradigm as to how educators view their role.”
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, doctoral students will learn about how black male students face race-based challenges in educational settings, along with strategies that can help these students succeed and overcome their struggles.
Regardless, protesters like Deluz-who is black-still argue that the Black Lives Matter movement is more propagandism and less reality. In his press release, Deluz claimed, “Black Lives Matter is a political movement, and even worse, it’s movement whose members have promoted segregation and violence against law enforcement.”
But that’s not how everyone sees it, as Professor Wood explains.
“Its guiding principles are directly against segregation of any form. If he has ever been to a Black Lives Matter rally, which I have, he would see there are people of all ethnic backgrounds, or different races and genders, who are there because they are disaffected.”
Most opposers to the course base their argument on the idea that the Black Lives Matter movement is a negative product of “fake news” and rowdy politics. This of course, isn’t the case. The Black Lives Matter movement was born out of a long history of police brutality and racial profiling directed at the black community. Institutionalized racism exists on a wide surface in varying degrees, including the education system. Not only does blatant racism contribute to learning difficulties of young black students, but studies show that American schools treat students of color in a vastly different way than white students.
According to the Huffington Post, “Black students are suspended or expelled at triple the rate of their white peers, according to the U.S. Education Department’s 2011-2012 Civil Rights Data Collection, a survey conducted every two years. Five percent of white students were suspended annually, compared with 16 percent of black students, according to the report. Black girls were suspended at a rate of 12 percent — far greater than girls of other ethnicities and most categories of boys.”
The idea of implementing a course for the purpose of solving institutionalized racism within the education system is perhaps Professor Wood’s idea of contributing to a less racially divisive America. To recite the old adage, education is one’s best counter to ruthless ignorance; education is power. By informing those studying to be teachers or professors on what black students truly endure throughout their educational careers, the hope is that these future educators will be more considerate and work to stop seeds of racism and discrimination in their jobs.
Featured Image: Billie Ward Via Flickr
