Editing education maintains racism, sexism, classism and unearned elitism: Opinion

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, Kentucky native, bell hooks is one of the authors removed from AP African American Studies. The College Board apparently sees no harm in removing hooks from the Advanced Placement course. Inasmuch, the College Board has also seen fit to remove other Black intellectuals and provocateurs like Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Such removals are capitulations to a long-standing curriculum that is not anti-racist but very much anti-intellectual. It fortifies an already politically captured curriculum while it incapacitates thinking.

More:Iconic Kentucky author scrubbed from pared-down AP African American Studies course

The political capitalistic heterosexual white-male playbook that exalts white males has not changed in four hundred years. In concert with Dr. Ricky Jones, I doubt it ever will. Curriculum is doing exactly what it was designed to do. We should never forget that bold intellect wielded by Black skin was a threat to the colonizers of this country. We should never forget that literacy was reserved for white people. Labor was assigned to Black people. When the laborer was 'caught' being literate he/she was punished or killed. Why mangle, mute and/or murder mental sharpness?  Because educational emancipation is the ultimate undoing of white supremacy. hooks, Coates and Crenshaw's pens promote a divergent way of viewing maleness and/or whiteness and/or Americanness. Their words stir up the truthful soot that a deliberately weakened and watered down curriculum tries to cover.

Coates says, "The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. "It is likely that  Florida's Governor knows little to nothing about the man or this quote; however, he and a host of others do not disagree with it. By incarcerating minds in the schoolhouse, intellectual jail is an outcome; especially for racialized groups. Public school libraries throughout the country are getting edicts as to what can be on the shelves. There is a capitalistic sadistic reason for editing education. It is done to maintain racism, sexism, classism and unearned elitism. Fear mongering and sheep-clothed wolves that come in all different hues and linens benefit from egregiously editing education.

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Curriculum omissions are strategic

Although it may appear that decisions to ban books and remove writers and thinkers that promote reparations, feminism, lifestyle choice, revised history and pedagogical accountability as innocently doltish, it is in fact a strategy that the conductors of the strategy knows would serve as dynamite to the tower of tyranny known as curriculum. If they know just an itsy-bitsy amount to remove it,  they know enough to see why it would rattle the station to which supremacy sits.  We need to stop press conferencing, (just) tweeting, meeting, hiring sheep-clothed equity officers and leaders, megaphoning and town-halling our way to (educational) emancipation. College boards, curriculum gatekeepers, boardrooms, politicians and power brokers are fine with the by and by picketing and panhandling for a piece and peace. It is a ha'penny to a 500 trillion dollar moral and monetary debt.

If a mass of people had access to quotes like, "I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance," while being placed in front of a teacher that welcomed divergent discourse, a principal that is principled in free thought and a system that did not fortify the discriminatory isms, we could accept this quote and the teaching of the late bell hooks as a way to love up, lift up and level set. Yet, in that same class, the teacher can quote, teach, and celebrate the omni-present cry attributed to Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death."  A melanated messenger like Coates or hooks or Malcolm X,  cannot say what Patrick said and make it to the pages of a public school course? Ridiculous!

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Fugitive Pedagogy

Instead, we have a system where brave and daring teachers are forced to subscribe to what Harvard Scholar, Jarvis Givens coined as Fugitive Pedagogy, a covert and culturally responsive means to teach the truth about self, history, reality and systems. This is the reason for pulling hooks and others from between the covers of lesson books. We should not forget that teachers in several states are now working under the threat of being financially and publicly hanged for accurately teaching certain present events, historical figures and people.

Wait! That sounds like the porno boogie man and the critical race sasquatch. Removal of divergent American context and content demonizes those removed and vilifies those that teach it. It distills American classrooms to ram reality and 'reform' to the rim of no return. It makes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech of a dream that is taught every February, overshadow and fade the nightmare of the reality of the justice he actually fought against and died for.

Hugh Auld, slaver of Fredreick Douglass, knew that should Douglass/Blacks learn to read think of himself as anything other than a slave, the institution of America/slavery would topple. The mentality of free thought and truth from the ancestors of Auld and confused or cowardly Black people serving as mascots for the 'Aulds' of the world still shackles the way we teach and treat each other.

Long live the brave. Long live bell hooks! Long live the Fugitive Pedagogues. Anti-intellectualism is big business used to maintain the current structure and those that sit at the top.  The current curriculum of America is not to uplift. It is to upkeep.

John Marshall is the Chief Equity Officer for Jefferson County Public Schools.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Editing education to remove authors like bell hooks upholds inequities