Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Kwame Nkrumah. This is a half-page document with a reading of two sentences and three comprehension questions. It’s a concise biography of this anti-colonialist statesman–but little more.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“And even in the certitude of science or mathematics it has been unfortunate that the approach to the Negro has been borrowed from a ‘foreign’ method. For example, the teaching of arithmetic in the fifth grade in a backward county in Mississippi should mean one thing in the Negro school and a decidedly different thing in the White school. The Negro children, as a rule, come from the homes of tenants and peons who have to migrate annually from plantation to plantation, looking for light which they have never seen. The children from the homes of white planters and merchants live permanently in the midst of calculations, family budgets, and the like, which enable them sometimes to learn more by contact than the Negro can acquire in school. Instead of teaching such Negro children less arithmetic, they should be taught much more of it than the white children, for the latter attended a graded school consolidated by free transportation when the Negroes go to one-room rented hovels to be taught without equipment and by incompetent teachers educated scarcely beyond the eighth grade.
In schools of theology, Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro sometimes almost to the point of starvation. Deriving their sense of right from this teaching, graduates of such schools can have no message to grip the people whom they have been ill trained to serve. Most of such mis-educated ministers, therefore, preach to benches while illiterate Negro preachers do the best they can in supplying the spiritual needs of the masses.
In the schools of business administration Negroes are trained exclusively in the psychology and economics of Wall Street and are, therefore, made to despise the opportunities to run ice wagons, push banana carts, and sell peanuts among their own people. Foreigners, who have not studied economics but have studied Negroes, take up this business and grow rich.
In school of journalism Negroes are being taught how to edit such metropolitan dailies as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, which would hardly hire a Negro as a janitor; and when these graduates come to the Negro weeklies for employment they are not prepared to function in such establishments, which, to be successful, must be built upon accurate knowledge of the psychology and philosophy of the Negro.
When a Negro has finished his education in our schools, then he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain. He goes forth to play his part in life, but he must be both social and biosocial at the same time. While he is a part of the body politic, he is in addition to this a member of a particular race to which he must restrict himself in all matters social. While serving his country he must serve within a special group. While being a good American, he must above all things be a ‘good Negro’; and to perform this definite function he must learn to stay in a ‘Negro’s place.’”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2018.
For the first Friday of Black History Month 2024, and following last week’s relatively turgid Text, this week’s Text is the second lesson of five on the British young adult novelist Alex Wheatle. The do-now for this unit is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the British Empire. I think a word of caution on this document is called for: this is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four long compound sentences and seven comprehension questions. In other words, it can and probably should be pared down. But I do think it’s important, when teaching about racism around the world, and particularly England, to deal with the problem of imperialism, manifest destiny, or whatever other nonsensical ideologies are in play to justify imperial land and resource grabs.
This biography of Alex Wheatle is adapted from The Guardian; if you want the full version of the article, it’s under that hyperlink–and is 1,898 words long, a fact which strikes me as salient here. Finally, here is the comprehension and analysis worksheet that accompanies the reading.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
Frederick Douglass, Speech, Canandaigua, N.Y. 4 Aug. 1857
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, professional development, united states history
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on reggae. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two relatively simple declarative sentences and two comprehension questions: a short, symmetrical reading on this popular music genre.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Wolof: Muslim people of Senegal and Gambia speaking the language of the Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo family. In the 14th-16th centuries the Wolof maintained a powerful empire. Traditional Wolof society was highly stratified, consisting of royalty, an aristocracy, a warrior class, commoners, slaves, and members of despised artisan castes. Today most Wolof (numbering 4.5 million) are farmers, but many live and work in Dakar and Banjul. Wolof women are renowned for their elaborate hair styles, abundant gold ornaments, and voluminous dresses.”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, professional development, readings/research
When I prepared this document a couple of years ago, I found myself wondering if the Watts Riots are on anyone’s mind anymore. I’m old enough to remember them distinctly and I certainly remember the film Wattstax, which I badly wanted to see. At age 14, alas, I couldn’t surmount its R rating–so given, I assume, because of Richard Pryor’s hilarious “license-plate-pressing motherf*****r” routine.
Anyway, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Watts Riots. This is a half-page document with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. The reading does mention the Rodney King beating, which is, I submit, an association worth making in an exercise like this.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“The Emotional Disturbance Bias: Many of the problem children, I would contend, are suffering a temporary emotional disturbance due to severe culture and family shock, resulting from their sudden removal from the West Indies to a half-forgotten family, and an unknown and generally hostile environment. They often react by being withdrawn and uncommunicative, or, alternatively, by acting out aggressively, both of which are well-known human reactions to upset, bewilderment, and dislocation. This behaviour is often misunderstood by these supposedly trained people, as being a permanent disturbance. Despite their training, in my experience, many teachers feel threatened by disturbed children and tend to be biased against them. This accounts for the extremely large number of West Indian children who are submitted for assessment by the teachers not on grounds of intellectual capacity, but because they are ‘a bloody nuisance’. And dozens of teachers have admitted this to me.
This temporary disturbance of children due to the emotional shocks they have suffered may well take on a permanent form, however, when the nature of their problem and their consequent needs are misunderstood, and instead they face an educational environment which is humiliating and rejecting. While suffering emotional turmoil they are placed in unfamiliar testing situations, to do unfamiliar and culturally biased tests, with white examiners whose speech is different, whom they have been brought up to identify as the ‘master calss’, and before whom they expect to fail. They then experience the test, only to have their fears confirmed, when they are removed from normal schools—in their mind, ‘rejected’—and placed in the neighbourhood ‘nut’ school. And it must be remembered…that 20 percent (that is, one-fifth) of all the immigrant pupils in six of their secondary ESN schools had been admitted to the Special School without being given a trial in ordinary school first.”
Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.
Black History Month 2024 begins a week early this year at Mark’s Text Terminal. I have a five-lesson unit on British young adult novelist Alex Wheatle to offer for this year’s Black History Month. Since Weekly Texts publish on Fridays, and there are only four Fridays in February, well, here we are.
Have you (and I understand I have previously asked this question on this blog) watched Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s quintet of films about Britons of West Indian descent in London in the 1970s and 1980s? The Fourth film in the series, Alex Wheatle, is about its namesake. It’s a fine film and I can’t resist calling attention to the talents of its leading man, the sublime Sheyi Cole.
When I watched Alex Wheatle for the second time, I’d been casting my net for material relevant to the lives of my predominantly Afro-Caribbean students in South Central Brooklyn. Once I’d sussed out the real Alex Wheatle, his bona fides and his accomplishments, I knew I had the ingredients for an English Language Arts unit on literary history, and especially post-colonial literary history.
Because you may want to develop this unit further (and as always, I would be interested to hear where and how you think it might be expanded), let’s start with the planning materials. First, here is the unit plan with the usual explanations and justifications–backed, of course, with the Common Core Standards addressed therein. The aggregated text for the entire unit, that is the worksheets in each lesson, are in a 14-page document under that hyperlink. Should you decide to take this unit further (and I think there is plenty of room in it for expansion, or to link it to other films in the Small Axe suite), here are the lesson plan template and the worksheet template. Finally, where this unit’s infrastructure is concerned, here are some notes toward greater clarity in some of the issues this unit deals with.
OK, this first lesson is centered around “The Guns of Brixton,” a song by The Clash, that paints a grim picture of the South London neighborhood named in the song’s title. I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on colonialism. Here are the lyrics to “The Guns of Brixton.” which serve as the reading for this lesson. Finally, here is the comprehension and analysis worksheet that attends the reading.
At the risk of prolixity, I feel a need to justify the use of a song by The Clash, especially a song as bleak as “The Guns of Brixton,” as the opening lesson in this unit. The answer remains in formulation, but I can tell you that Paul Simonon, the bass player in the The Clash, grew up in Brixton and therefore around reggae music. The Clash loved reggae and wrote and recorded their own punked-up versions of it, and more faithfully to the genre, recorded the great songs “Armagideon Time,” written and originally recorded by Willie Williams, and which I occasionally hear to great delight playing in cars around Brooklyn, and “Bankrobber,” of which Clash confederate Mikey Dread recorded a dub version. Another reason to start with The Clash derives from the three-part documentary series from Steve McQueen, Uprising (which, incidentally, would be a place to start in expanding this unit, should you see fit: both Alex Wheatle and Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose poem “New Crass Massakah” is dealt with in lesson three of this unit, appear in these films, which backstops Small Axe nicely. In one of those films, one of the members of the British reggae band Steel Pulse (it might have been David Hinds–I watched these movies three years ago, and while I mean to return to them, I haven’t yet, so it also might have been one of the members of UB40) recounts that at street demonstrations against police brutality, racism, and the general political horror of the National Front that preceded the 1981 Brixton Riot (which its participants probably more rightly call an uprising), he was surprised to see white punk-rockers among the demonstrators. The Clash certainly made no secret of their own generally leftist and specifically anti-racist politics. And let’s not forget Rock Against Racism, an organization made up of musical stars across genres in Britain, which was in its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, it occurs to me as I write this, it wouldn’t be hard to come up with a lesson on building political and social coalitions using Rock Against Racism as a model.
OK, enough said.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
For the fourth and final Friday of National Native American Heritage Month 2023, here is a reading on Tupac Amaru II with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If you recognize this name, it is because, as you have probably already inferred, this eighteenth-century rebel against the Spanish colonial presence moved Afeni Shakur to name her son Tupac Amaru Shakur, who is of course the late, lamented, Hip-Hop star.
You’ll also find Tupac Amaru II in a namesake organization, the Tupamaros, a rebel group in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. They were famous for urban guerilla actions in Montevideo like hijacking grocery delivery trucks, driving them into poor districts in that city, opening them, then walking away–which, editorially speaking, appears to meet or exceed the accepted standards for efficiency and effectiveness in such actions. The Tupamaros also, in one particularly famous incident, got their hands on Dan Mitrione, who was in Uruguay on behalf of the United States Central Intelligence Agency to teach torture techniques to various of the Uruguayan security services.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Tupamaros, the justly famous film by Costa-Gavras, State of Siege, tells the story of the kidnapping and murder of Dan Mitrione, often with actual documentary footage. Also, Netflix offers a documentary series on Jose Mujica, who fought with the Tupamaros, and later became president of Uruguay, called El Pepe: A Supreme Life. President Mujica is known affectionately as “El Pepe,” apparently a Spanish nickname for Jose.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged black history, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, diction/grammar/style/usage, film/television/photography, first nation/indigenous peoples' history, professional development, readings/research, united states history
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