«The pedagogy of blackness quickly becomes naked political activism, which is often smuggled under the label of "anti-racism."
ln the School District of Philadelphia, for instance, administrators, unions, and teachers have all converged on racial politics as the new Noith Star. Following the George Floyd riots, the district superintendent released an Antiracism Declaration promising to dismantle "systems of racial inequity" and circulated a memo recommending racially segregated training programs for white and black educators. Meanwhile, the local teachers' union produced a video denouncing the United States as a "settler colony built on white supremacy and capitalism" that has created a "system that lifts up white people over everyone else." The solution, according to the union, is to overthrow the "racist structure of capitalism," provide "reparations for Black and Indigenous people," and "uproot white supremacy and plant the seeds for a new world”.
At Philadelphia’s William D, Kelley elementary school, which is 94 per cent black and100 poor, administrator have overhauled the school's programming to focus on political activism. As part of the social studies curriculum, for example, the school's fifth -grade teacher created a unit celebrating Angela Davis, praising the "black communist" for her fight against "injustice and inequality." At the end of the lesson, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-old students into the school auditorium to "simulate" a Black Power rally to "free Angela Davis" from prison, where she had once been held while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder.
The students marched on the stage, holding signs that read "Black Power," "Jail Trump," "Free Angela," and "Black Power Matters." They chanted about Africa, appealed to their tribal ancestors, then shouted "Free Angela! Free Angela!" as they stood at the front of the stage. Even the school's public artwork illustrates this shift: administrators painted over a mural of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama and replaced it with the iconography of Davis and Huey P. Newton. »
(To be continued)