The Development and Contextualisation of Black Consciousness

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The Development and Contextualisation of Black
Consciousness

• finding safe places to enable the genius to grow

chowson_at_dmu.ac.uk Experience of Black Students in
Education
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Introduction

• They taught us to hate ourselves and love their
  wealth (Kanye West 2004)

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Learning Outcomes

• Raise awareness of why Black perspectives
• Increase understanding of oppression and its
  impact on Black young people
• Developing strategies for WWBLKYP

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Activity

• Think of issues that adversely impact on BME
  students
• What are they/issues
• What obstacles
• How might these be overcome

chowson_at_dmu.ac.uk Experience of Black Students in
Education
5
Some Questions

• What is the context in which the BME Students
  experience emerge?
• How is this experience recognised, validated and
  articulate?

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Exercise 1

• Who are you
• I am
• What do you bring to the situation how does this
  inform or impact on you work
• Identify how confident you are in working with
  race and diversity (rating 1-10)
• Explain why you gave yourself that mark
• What is your aspiration

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Exercise 1 continued

• What is the relationship between you and those
  that you seek to manage
• What are you seeking to do and what is your
  criterion for success
• Whose criteria is this
• What are your values, the relevance of the
  knowledge and skill that you bring

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Functional Society

• Accepts that society is stratified
• considers this to be functional
• those at the top deserve to be there
• those at the bottom also deserve to be there
• Supports the idea of meritocracy

SOCIETY NORMATIVE CONSENSUS DOMINANT IDEOLOGY
Fringe groups
Sanction and rewards
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Structural Society

• Inequality is accepted as functional
• More accurate to describe society as coexistence
  of consensus and conflict

NORMATIVE CONSENSUS/CONFLICT DOMINANT IDEOLOGY
Fringe groups
Sanction and rewards
10
Aspiration graph
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Working with Black young people

• Have you ever had a young person that was having
  unexplained difficulty in school that you thought
  related to the student's status as a member of a
  minority group?  

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False consciousness

• Karl Marx talked about the working class as the
  first group that wanted to destroy itself.
• Carmichael Black leadership first group that
  wanted to destroy its own people
• In what ways do we practice in a manner that
  leave those with whom we work to seek refuge away
  from themselves?

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Black young people education

• If we go back to history, immigrant children and
  young people are about as old as education
  itself in the UK context.
• This group of young people, like the other group
  ( non-immigrants) may have various learning and
  other educational difficulties and needs but they
  also have the potential to bring positive
  elements to enrich the education system.

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Oppression - impact on Black young people

• Oppression is how the system is rigged against
  certain classifications of people- women,
  homosexuals, working class people, Black people,
  people with disabilities, youth, the elderly,
  people with mental illness, etc...
• Within the classroom there are styles of
  discourse, systems of power-knowledge,
  institutional structures and practices- all which
  combine to marginalize and harm certain groups of
  people.

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Themes

• State policy and rhetoric
• Education and legacy
• Cultural impediments
• The Equation (BMELS)
• HE inertia and resources
• Cultural competence
• Institutionalism Oppression,
  Discrimination, Racism
• Enabling the Genius to Grow

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Who controls the image?

• The image of Black people out of control is
  amplified through use of media, education and all
  major institutions controlled by the state
• It is made complete when Black people seek to
  escape from themselves

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Who controls the image? (cont)

• When Black people aspire to be like white people
  and deny themselves their own heritage in
  exchange for an illusion a reality based on
  capitalism and greed a place where people are
  commodified
• They taught us to hate ourselves and love their
  wealth (Kanye West 2004)

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Collectively change

• It is only as we collectively change the way we
  look at ourselves and the world that we can
  change how we are seen. In this process, we seek
  to create a world where everyone can look at
  blackness, and black people with new eyes (Hooks
  1992).
• HOOKS, B (1992) Black Looks, race and
  representation, Turnaround

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Inequality damage every citizen

• The inequalities in British society are neither
  inevitable nor accidental. They are now severe
  enough to damage every citizen. They are most
  plainly damaging of our children and young people
  preparing them for exclusion from the
  mainstream of what should be their society
  (Donnison 1998 30).
• Donnison, D. (1998) Policies for a Just Society,
  Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan

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The silent ones

• I am prepared to initiate some change in the
  university and its approach towards students,
  because I am in touch with the "silent-ones", who
  speak to me about how they truly feel but do not
  have enough confidence in the initiatives that
  are being created. I feel if we all work
  together, things will improve for all the
  students.

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Making space for voices that are not heard

• Part of our task as informal educators is to ask
  why certain voices are not heard
• Jeffs, T. Smith, M. (1999), Informal
  Education- Conversation, Democracy Learning.
  Derbyshire Education Now Publishing Cooperative.
  

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How can I rise?

• Anger over race.
• Race over anger.
• Questions I ask,
• But no one to answer.
• Your judgments of me,
• Limit my outcomes.
• Your assumptions of me,
• Broaden my experience.

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• If I told you my race
• Am I validated into your racist institution?
• Or am I a disgrace,
• On this attempt to better our situation?
• When you preach equality,
• I still feel the presence of this oppression.
• I know I anger you,
• But I will continue to ask this question.

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• You claim you want to understand
• My problem
• But you have a problem when I open the gates
• To my experience.
• My friend I cannot offer you an understanding,
• But I can offer you knowledge of my experience to
  effectively challenge.
• My experiences can arm you with the awareness of
  the abandoning of my very existence.

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• Because if you have not experienced like I...
• ...if you have not struggled as I,
• You saying you understand is a true full on lie.

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• I share with you now how I feel,
• This is not for pity but to illustrate how the
  struggle is still very real.
• Like you I be born and then crawl,
• But when I try to rise in this political world I
  fall.
• These laws are put forth heavily brushed in this
  word equality.
• This is an insult to my existence because this
  allows these fools to ignore our pain and our
  humility.

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• This humility that they forced upon us,
• This humility that is still very much amongst us.
• Because we fight a battle on pre-established
  false grounds.
• We fight a war with invalid arms.
• I say invalid not in vain.
• I say it because we are unaware of this
  institutionally racist game.
• When we are in school being educated?
• Now can you say you understand?
• How we are alienated?

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• Anger over race.
• Race over anger.
• Questions I ask.
• But no one will answer.
• Written by B Kumar 19.11.2007

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Exercise 3

• Undertake research into historical examples of
  management of race and diversity.
• Identify key features, processes involved
• Policies, principles, values, structure and
  context.
• You will be asked to make a short presentation in
  relation to your findings

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Gandhi

• 'I don't want my home to be walled in on all
  sides and its windows to be stuffed. I want
  cultures of all lands to be blown about my house
  as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown
  off my feet by any'.
• (Gandhi)