Last week for my American Literature course, I read and finished Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery, which is the story of how he grew up, was able to go to school, and eventually founded the famous Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). In my eyes, this book is completely unproblematic. It’s his raw story of overcoming adversity and using his experiences to help other black people to better their lives through education. However, in the eyes of the school system, Up from Slavery is problematic because of the language and themes presented, the portrayal of race relations, and the historical context. While I can understand why you maybe wouldn’t want to use this book to teach an elementary school class about racism due to the upper-level grammar and vocab and the more complex themes that are discussed, I believe that Up from Slavery should absolutely be required reading in high school not just because it’s an inspirational story that also sheds light on race relations in the late 1800s, but it also shows how our current perception of race is ridiculous.
The book starts off with a description of Washington’s life as a child. He had no idea who his father was, his mother didn’t have much time to raise him and his brother because she was a slave, and he too had to work as a slave until he was 9, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. After that, his family moved to West Virginia, and he began to teach himself to read and went to school for the first time. He later attended Hampton Institute when he was 16, graduated at 19, went to seminary, and founded Tuskegee Institute when he was 25.
However, one thing that Washington talks about throughout the book is how much his race struggled during the Reconstruction Era to apply their education to real life. After being freed from slavery, many of them, like their former masters, saw work as being something detestable. Thus, after learning how to read and write and accumulating book knowledge, they believed that they could simply become successful off of their wits alone. This was a belief that Booker T. Washington fought against because it didn’t actually help black people to succeed and when he founded Tuskegee Institute, he made sure that he wasn’t just teaching his students book knowledge but was also teaching them the value of hard work. He taught them skills that could be applied in the real world to make them successful.
It’s in this that I think that a lot of schools and politicians need to take notes. Today, while we keep raising taxes to improve education in minority communities and praise minorities for getting into colleges and universities, we keep lowering the bar so that minority kids who aren’t doing well can seemingly keep up with the ones who are. Even a teacher who agrees that racial bias can play a role in how kids are graded agrees that this lenient “equitable” grading system is a terrible idea because it lowers expectations and allows for students to shirk their schoolwork and still get a passing grade. Instead of grading them based on merit, thus encouraging them to work harder so they can succeed, teachers are instead inflating grades to combat supposed racism. This also makes it harder for minority kids who do well in school to be successful in life because employers may think they only graduated because of the grade inflation and pick someone else who they deem less likely to have graduated thanks to grade inflation for the job.
Furthermore, these same teachers tell minority students that they’re oppressed and if they’re not successful in life, that’s simply because they’re victims of an oppressive, racist system and it’s not because they dropped out of high school or refused to learn. They also praise minority students for getting into college even if they did poorly (colleges like Harvard have been accused of discriminating against white and Asian applicants based on race) in the name of “Black Excellence,” and then make fun of the minority kids who put an effort into learning and call them traitors to their race, using slurs like “Carlton” (a character from the 90’s sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) and “Oreo” to describe them. If Booker T. Washington were alive today, he would probably be called these things.
Up from Slavery preaches a different message, however, which is that it’s not necessarily the system which holds minorities back (though because of preconceived beliefs like what I just discussed, they will have to work harder to succeed), but that it’s a lack of self-improvement. If you want to succeed in life, you need to be willing to learn and work hard. If you don’t, you’re going to fail. That’s what schools, the media, and politicians should be saying to everyone, especially to minorities instead of pushing the victimhood mentality, but they’re not because it would take away voters.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 