Today’s youth are bombarded by technology. They consider YouTube a primary news source. And, they are exposed to violence (up close and/or via the media) at unprecedented levels. Black History month provides an opportunity to share knowledge with today’s youth which, hopefully, will provoke them to reflect, remember, and reconsider. They are, after all, our future, our tomorrow, our leaders and our visionaries. I dedicate this column to Nokomis Montessori Magnet School of St. Paul who invited me to share my thoughts during Black History Month.Dear Nokomis Montessori Magnet School students,
You are too young, and perhaps you have not read enough history, to know that at one point in time, during slavery, it was illegal for anyone Black (slave or freedman) to be able to read and write. Thus, learning to read and write became a revolutionary act. Literacy was something that these slaves and freedmen were willing to be beaten for, and for which they were even willing to die. Because of this history, for those of us who have it, education is a gift. And I want you to think of it as the gift that keeps on giving.
What I mean is that with education doors are opened that can make impossible dreams come true. For example, I grew up in the housing projects of Chicago’s Westside. From the age of eight, I have been writing poetry; it was education that made me realize that becoming a writer was something more than a dream. Learning to read exposed me to different possibilities. For me, reading was magic. I could go places in books that I could not go in real life because I didn’t have the money or the access. Reading opened up new worlds for me. Through books, I traveled.
Education is a gift that keeps on giving.
As a child, when I read, I was able to incorporate the new things I learned into my writing. And so, when I was eight-years-old, I wrote a play about a young girl who visits the world beneath the ocean, with a sea horse as her tour guide. Back then we didn’t talk about the environment, nor did we recognize that beneath seas and oceans were worlds beyond our imagination.
Now mind you, up to that moment, I had never visited an ocean, and I certainly had not seen a sea horse-and the segregated urban schools I attended in Chicago as a child did not have many field trips to the aquarium. It is through education, through reading, that I was able to imagine this world and write about it well enough to write and produce a play so that others could learn.
Education is the gift that keeps on giving.
I attended a vocational high school. And while I learned very practical skills of learning to type and do shorthand, I also dreamed of going to college. I am a first generation college graduate. No one in my family had ever gone before me. My father dropped out of school in the second grade to help take care of his brothers and sisters, and make sure they completed school. My mother completed high school by attending night school. I was the first in my family to receive a college degree, the first to receive a terminal degree in creative writing (MFA), and the first to receive a second terminal degree in anthropology. I still dreamed this impossible dream. For me, education was a key.
I have worked as a professor of literature, teaching African American, American, and African literature, teaching about the writings of women and Black women in particular. I have worked as an anthropologist, teaching people about other cultures around the world. I have lived in Belize, Central America , in the Netherlands, and in Surinam, South America.
For me, education has proven to be the gift that has opened up doors to other gifts—it has given me connections to people in India, China, South Africa, Kenya, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Belize, Panama, and many of the islands in the Caribbean: St. Croix, Jamaica, Antigua, Cuba, and a few others. I have forged friendships all over the world; met people, seen places, and encountered languages that I might not have known otherwise. Education is the road I traveled to reach them.
Education is truly the gift that keeps on giving.
I would like to ask each of you who reads this to ask yourself, how has education been a gift to me; what will it allow me to do different in my life; and how will it enable my dreams to come true?
Irma McClaurin is an anthropologist and also Associate Vice President for System Academic Administration, as well as Executive Director of the Urban Research and Outreach Center at the University of Minneapolis. Her latest essay, “Walking in Zora’s Shoes or ‘Seek[ing] Out de Inside Meanin’ of Words’: The Intersections of Anthropology, Ethnography, Identity, and Writing,” was just published in Anthropology Off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing (Wiley 2009). The views expressed are entirely her own. © 2010 McClaurin Solutions
