A Grammar for Black Education Beyond Borders: Exploring Technologies of Schooling in the African Diaspora

Abstract

Education has been a technology used to sustain black abjection across the African Diaspora. Employing Mills’ Racial Contract and Althusser’s theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) through a racial lens, this article will discuss how white supremacist education has been used to promote the misrecognition of black subjects as sub-human. German colonizers’ recruitment of Booker T. Washington to develop cotton schools in Togo, West Africa will be explored to highlight this phenomenon. Beyond this, the article demonstrates how members of the Diaspora have resisted white supremacist education, through what I have termed as Educational Diasporic Practice. This concept will be explored through the work of Chinua Achebe and Carter G. Woodson. Ultimately, this article recommends a global language of blackness as context for educators and researchers concerned with schooling experiences of black students.