Summary: The Miseducation Of The Negro

n the beginning of the semester my professor was challenged with the task to help students develop analytical and compositional skills and create the awareness of socio-historical events affecting African Americans. In this paper I'm going to prove how our required texts and enrichment activities guides one back to the roots of African American history and creates a sense of self-actualization through life's experiences.
In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself by Olaudah Equiano details a first-hand autobiographical account of his sea voyages around the West Indies, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere. Equiano is kidnapped into slavery at a young age and fights for many years for his freedom, …show more content…
Woodson presents his ideology that African Americans in his day were being culturally brainwashed, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning or shaping rather , in his opinion causes African Americans to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to do for themselves regardless of what they were taught. Woodson provides a guideline for the African American society chapter by chapter to instruct them on how to better themselves. My professor intentionally introduced this text because it deals with the students on a personal level " Most of the Negro colleges and universities is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence." (Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro, Chapter 1). This quote directly affects me as a student at a Historically Black College University Woodson emphasizes that in the past and even currently African Americans earn a living by coming back to the Black community to teach what they have been taught. Since they have already been taught to despise everything African, their role becomes suspect. He describes it as the worst kind of lynching teaching students that their roots are a curse and implementing European history and instruction as the main focus. Woodson argues that going back to your roots and developing your own mind is apart of achieving self actualization. Contrasting views could argue he isn't preaching self-actualization but almost negatively down talking the African American community and offering his opinion as the one and only way to achieve

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The Miseducation The Negro Summary