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African and African-American Studies Curriculum Framework Essay Addendum
http://www.citycom.com/web/heruseye/Textfiles/AAACurriculumEssay.html

by Dr. Gregg Kimathi Carr

Introduction:

o Relevance to multicultural cross-cutting competency

The success of students of African descent depends in large measure on a basic understanding of the nature and function of African identity. Instructional approaches, content standards and assessment instruments which do not consider and include the self-concept of the diverse student populations being taught open the door for many misunderstandings. Many students of African descent, their parents and their communities have come to view public institutions with suspicion because of the historical nature of racism in American society. Intelligent and successful strategies aimed at teaching the student of African descent must initially and continuously address the fundamental concept of identity and its relationship to the realizing of human potential.
In adopting the Multicultural Cross-Cutting Competency, the School District of Philadelphia has stated that generating cross-cultural understanding "is indispensable if we are to succeed in creating the culturally inclusive educational environment necessary for all our students to thrive in today's world and into the 21st century. " This goal cannot be achieved without first understanding the ways in which students of African descent have come to their current position, the ways in which they view the world, and the aspirations, intentions and agendas they bring to the educational system with them from their various communities. This introductory essay is designed to present a general cultural perspectives which will assist the educator in making the most effective use of the cultural content infused in the Curriculum Frameworks. An additional goal is to provide a general sense of current "first voice" and other source material on topics which communicate the particular and unique needs, struggles and challenges which have faced and continue to face Africana communities. The myriad of historical examples, sources and events which converge to create the tapestry of the Africana experience in the United States are provided in great detail throughout the Curriculum Frameworks and will be discussed in this essay only as occasional chronological markers for the overarching narrative.



oo EDUCATIONAL IMPACT

Education is the process through which human institutions (families, social groups, states, nations, polities) reproduce their cultural and civil components from generation to generation. During the past 500 years, the shift in geopolitical relations of power which attended the birth of the modern nations of the Western Hemisphere in general and the United States in particular has been premised in large measure upon the creation and maintenance of a common set of characteristics which transcend nations and have come to be grouped under definitions of "whiteness." European ethnic groups of various cultural and geographical origin, through the process of "discovering," exploring, appropriating and maintaining governmental control over lands previously unknown to them, have managed to maintain discrete cultural identities while simultaneously generating common cultural and political markers of social relations.
These common characteristics found their philosophical blueprints in the writings and traditions of Europe, in particular the traditions of the "Enlightenment," which also served to generate a narrative of European history which stretched from a reconstructed image of ancient Greece through the "Revolutionary Age" of the 18th century. Equally important to the creation of Europe-centered civil societies, particularly those West of the Atlantic ocean, however, was the impact of the encounters of Europeans with various indigenous peoples across the globe. These encounters contributed two distinct but interrelated elements to the construction of "whiteness" as a cultural perspective and paradigm for social and civic governance. The first element was the incorporation of non-European cultural contributions by various European ethnic groups who engaged in cultural and social state building in the Western Hemisphere.
The second element was the strengthening of definitions of "whiteness" by posing "non-whiteness" as an opposing racial, social and cultural category of "other." While all "non-whites," regardless of biological, social or cultural distinctiveness, were relegated to varying degrees of inferiority through this essentially racial cultural perspective, the position furthest removed from "whiteness" was and continues to be "blackness." In an increasingly sophisticated manner beginning with basic differentiations based on skin color, hair texture and physical features and intensifying to include racial categorization of social and cultural traits and perceptions of human potential based on those categorizations, "blackness" became an indispensable component of white racial, cultural and national identity. The need for a cheap, experienced and pragmatically-inexhaustible labor force to maximize profit for agriculture-based European ventures in the "New World" intensified and forever intermingled the histories and futures of Europeans with what became and continues to be the most distinct and easily-identified single population-based marker of "blackness": peoples of African descent.
Because of the "browning" of societies in the Western Hemisphere in general and the United States in particular, the preservation of civil societies premised in part on social structures dominated by "white" people has increasingly occupied the attention of the multi-racial, multicultural populations of these societies. While non-white citizens of the United States have joined civic discourse in increasingly representative numbers, perhaps the most stubborn vestige of the constructed and maintained emphasis on "whiteness" is the educational system (public and private). Accordingly-and precisely because the cultural perspective of "whiteness" is intergenerationally transferable without regard to biological difference-the social status of "black" Americans based on racial inferiority has been maintained.

oo LEGAL PRECEDENTS

Because the very cultural differences which mark populations of African descent have been associated with "blackness" and, therefore, inferiority, African-American students face the twin negative impacts of centuries of racial discrimination based on both social status and cultural identity. In addressing the pervasive nature of this discrimination as a prerequisite to redressing racial discrimination in public education in the early 1950s, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund presented the testimony of African-American Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark on the subject of the self-image of African-American schoolchildren. The Clarks's research, simplified and abbreviated in public discourse over the years as the "doll test" research, was offered to demonstrate that African-American schoolchildren had internalized inferiority complexes based on skin color.
In a series of decisions in 1954 and 1955 aimed at redressing institutional racism in public education, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that desegregation of public education was a necessary prerequisite to insuring the success of African-American students. The issue of the impact of the cultural perspective of "whiteness," imparted through the educational process independent of the racial population being educated, was not addressed. In the two generations since the legendary "Brown" decisions, opinion on the impact of "desegregation" on the erasure of opinions on African-American inferiority and the barriers to social equality and career and life success to which they contribute has been decidedly mixed.
Legal historian Girardeau A. Spann, in distinguishing the rhetorical impact of the Brown decisions from the actual impact, notes that, as an actual matter, the decisions did not accomplish the erasure of race-based classifications in pubic education. Spann writes that, as of 1993, "a third of the black students attending public schools in the United States still attend all-black schools, and 63 percent attend schools that are at least half black." Further, private schools, gerrymandered district lines, unequal funding, white flight, residential housing patterns, and resegregation are among the many factors that converged to assure that Brown v. Board of Education is more of a public relations success than an actual weapon in the assurance of quality education for African-Americans .
The dismantling of legal apartheid in the United States triggered by the Civil Rights and global anti-colonial movements of the 1950s-1960s promoted institutional access to previously excluded racial and cultural groups as well as women. However, the positive elements of non-white social institutions, particularly with regard to creating an identity-based sense of investment in civic structures, were severely curtailed. African-American students in Philadelphia currently matriculate in a desegregated public education system in which they are the numerical majority, a de facto African-American school district supervised largely by non-African-Americans. Their investment in that system, reflected in levels of academic achievement and enthusiastic whole-system participation, is informed as much by their attitude towards the educational system as it is by the educational system's attitude toward them. An educational system which reproduces cultural and civic structures premised on the "othering" of markers of Africana identity will continue to fail students of African descent.
No amount of whole-school reform initiatives will cause African-American students to invest their best efforts in a process in which they feel under-valued as social, historical and cultural beings. Accordingly, the successful implementation of the District's performance standards and Cross-Cutting Competencies relies in significant measure on instructional practices which understand, develop and celebrate the sources of African-American historical, social and cultural being. These types of instructional practices, modeled throughout the Curriculum Frameworks, will help to insure African-American student success and, subsequently, the creation of enthusiastic, valuable and contributing members of American civil society.



II. Origins and Historical Contributions

Africa and Africans in the Western Imagination:

The contemporary history of Africa and African people, including African-Americans, has been written as an appendage to what has come to be known as "modern history." Modern history is essentially the record of the encounter between Europeans and European civilizations and cultures with the civilizations and cultures of other people. The concept of "modern history" presumes concepts of "ancient" and "medieval" history. These "stages" of history, moving from "prehistory" to the present and the future, rely on the concept of historical progress from a more primitive age to the present era, which reflects the upward movement of mankind.
It is important at this juncture to understand that there are many ways of conceptualizing and recording information about the past. The science and method of recording history is known as "historiography." Like any other systematic approach to collecting, arranging and interpreting information, historiography abides by a set of rules for its practice. Unlike other intellectual endeavors, however, the practice of recording history is the practice of explaining the way in which present-day human beings are understood and relate to one another.
When an individual asks "who am I?" they pose this question against family, group, national and global narratives of the past, or histories. African-Americans search for group identity has too often led them to access narratives written by others for reasons often different and sometimes even opposed to the reasons African-Americans seek to reconstruct the past.
Western historiography has been used to help construct the narrative of "whiteness" referred to above. While any number of famous European historical thinkers, from Herodotus and Thucydides to Vico, Marx and Gibbon could be cited as key figures in shaping contemporary perspectives on "modern history,: one figure looms large above all others on the subject. The German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1731-1830) set the general framework in which European historical identity has been created and through which non-European cultures, particularly African cultures and civilizations, have been moved to the margins of human history.
In his famous series of lectures on "The Philosophy of History," Hegel made the pronouncement that "the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom," a consciousness grounded in the development of "reason." For Hegel, persons or groups who are depicted as lacking rational thought have no history. World history is the record of the rise of reason from age to age, as human beings develop increasingly sophisticated understanding of the rational laws of the universe. The most "modern" statement of human civilization's understanding of reason is America, "the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself "
By Hegel's standards, people without the indicators of reason (i.e. material and spiritual progress based on rational thought) have no place in historical development. This sets the stage for his assessment of the "history" of African people. Hegel uses his view of reason to separate Africa as a conceptual entity, and the subsequent physical segmentation of Africa has endured to this day as one of the fundamental acts of European geographical determinism toward non-European lands and people.
Hegel summarizes the history of Europe and the rest of the world by explaining the central thesis behind his geographical determinism: that the environment (climate) of the world which is the most temperate is the only place where reason could have flourished. When combined with the fact that the so-called "temperate" areas of the world are where white people resided, it becomes clear that Europeans (in Hegel's Germanocentric view, specifically Germans) were destined to give the world modern history. Others from places where it was either too cold (Eskimoes) or too hot (Africans) could not develop reason given both their environmental circumstances and the physical characteristics they developed in order to adapt to such circumstances.
For Hegel, Europe marks the culmination of all human history which had transpired before it. He writes that:

"In accordance with these dates we may now consider the three portions of the globe with which History is concerned, and here the three characteristic principles manifest themselves in a more or less striking manner: Africa has for its leading classical feature the Upland, Asia the contrast of river regions with the Upland, Europe the mingling of these several elements. "

From this point, Hegel turns his attention to Africa, and, in so doing, lays the specific foundation for the current history of Africa. He divides the continent into three parts: so-called "sub-Saharan" Africa, which he calls "Africa proper"; so-called "European Africa," the coastland above the Sahara; and the so-called "river region of the Nile," which, according to Hegel, "is in connection with Asia."
This separation of Africa allows Hegel to extract from African history those elements which he will not concede to African culture and civilization: namely, the Mediterranean-area cultures of North Africa and, more importantly, the complex and awesome achievements of Nile Valley civilizations which run from East-Central Africa to the Mediterranean sea. The contemporary division of Africa into discrete cultural/geographical parts and the removal of Egypt from Africa finds its conceptual roots in Hegel.
Having separated much of African culture from "Africa proper," Hegel goes on to argue that "Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained-for all purposes of connection within itself-the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of night. " He then launches a litany of what have become familiar stereotypes about African life and culture. He identifies cannibalism, savagery, immortality, stupidity and superstition as common traits of African culture, arguing that the lack of basic human reason has turned Africa into a cultural backwater which lies on the historical margins of world history. What is worse still is Hegel's assertion that, as Africans were, Africans still are.
Hegel distills his list of Africans' sub-human characteristics into one major characteristic. He writes that, "from these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes." Continuing, Hegel seals Africa's historical fate by writing that "this condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been. The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes and Europeans is that of slavery. " The only exceptions to this relationship with the African continent, according to Hegel, were to be found in "European Africa" and the Nile Valley, neither of which was allegedly "Africa proper." Though Hegel's ruminations on historical philosophy are nearly two hundred years old, the general attitude towards Africa, African people and the relationship of Africana cultural, social and intellectual contributions to world history remain the same.

Origins of Humankind and African "Prehistory":

Prior to its severe regional depopulation through the enslavement and wholesale relocation of millions of Africans to sites across the Western hemisphere, the continent of Africa served as the birthplace and primary sociocultural incubator of modern humanity. The contemporary emphasis on the past 500 years of human history caused by the disproportionate influence of European-descended peoples in the "modern era" often obscures the paleolithic, neolithic, classical and medieval cycles of human history which preceded the rise of "Europe" and in which non-European populations such as Africans and Asians figured prominently. While the geographical origin of Homo Sapiens Sapiens is a topic of interest primarily to biologists, anthropologists and geneticists, the recontextualization of narratives of human origins also serves as a marker of trans-cultural and trans-geographical identity for all human beings.
Most importantly for contemporary African Americans, however, is the realization of the cultural commonalties and complexities of Africa, including the rise, development and diffusion of intra-continental social and cultural complexes. It is important to note at this juncture that history must not be restricted to the period after the development of known writing systems, but should include all periods before the development of such systems. African societies often interacted with, influenced and were in turn influenced by non-African societies and served as the incubator and developer of many of the cultural practices and social conventions and structures which eventually found their way to the western hemisphere with Africans.
It is generally agreed upon among scholars that the ancestors of modern human beings originated in Africa. From the 1974 discovery of Australopithecus atarensis in the Rift Valley region of East Central Africa through the genetic identification of "Mitochondrial Eve" as the "mother" of all human beings, students of human biology agree that the African continent is the home of the widest range of biological types found on the planet, a simple indicator of its primacy as the "cradle of humankind." The earliest hominid activity found in the world is in East Africa.
As human beings posed solutions to the challenges of group survival, Africa served as the site of the earliest stirrings of social relations, cultural construction and historical consciousness. The controlled use of fire in Africa dates back at least 60,000 years. The increasingly precise and efficient size and shape of microlithic tools (spearpoints, picks, cleavers) reveal and demonstrate the development of early systems for passing information from generation to generation. The domestication of animals and cultivation of plants led to increases in geographically sedentary and socially-stable societies in which the division of labor and construction of other social roles occurred.
Of the many "ice ages" experienced by the earth over the course of its development, the most significant for human beings to date has been the "Würm II" ice age of approximately 70,000 to 10,000 B.C.E. The glaciers which descended from the northern polar cap covered most of Europe and created climatic changes in Africa. In addition to the racial differentiation of African migrants to Europe from those who had remained on the African continent, the Würm II age led to the creation of a cooler and wetter Eastern Africa and a cooler and drier Western Africa. This made the forest regions of Africa more habitable by large groups of humans and created a balance between the savannah and forest regions.
During this period, human societies developed most rapidly in Africa, unimpeded by the encroaching polar ice. Approximately 10,000 years ago, as the savannah regions of the current Sahara area of northeast Africa began desertification, large populations migrated into the Nile Valley region of East Africa and the Sahel and forest regions of central and West Africa. This migration process led to the rise of the most significant and widespread classical African cultures discovered to date.
These early Africans are knowable largely through what Historian Elizabeth Isichei calls "the solid quantifiable data about economic life and technological change" which their remains reveal. The earliest historical records, it can be advanced, are the "artifacts" of culture (e.g. tools, artwork, articles of clothing, etc.). Most continental African sites of early human society have not been excavated, so many early African societies and the material remains they left are no doubt waiting to be (re)discovered, thus adding to the rich tapestry of African historical narrative.
The fact that the societies labeled Mousterian (Egypt, Nubia), Arterian (Maghrib, Sahara) and Sangoan/Lupemban (Central and West Africa) manifest what Isichei calls "astonishingly widespread" similarities indicates a general unity of African approaches to building society and culture. The development of African languages and more complex cultures is usually dated to 10,000 B.C.E .