If we are serious about changing the educational experiences of Black students, we must address those obstacles that impede their intellectual stimulation including fundamental problems of perspective bias and conceptual flaws that corrupt education research. 

CORIBE's approach call attentions to ways the ideological corruption of research, buttressed by the mainstream research orthodoxy, blocks the development of beneficial knowledge, education practice, and policy.

The findings and recommendations presented in this volume also illuminate the far-reaching social costs of alienating, soul-damaging education—costs that top-down, corporate-driven, for-profit reform efforts fail to address. Ameliorative reforms may facilitate individual economic goals for a few but not our collective advancement and empowerment of Black people and our communities.  

Moreover, the evolving “diversity” discourse in the U.S. too often encourages a false hope in “multicultural chic”—hybridity, inclusiveness, anything but African. While Europeans are attempting to forge a new pluralism and respect for their multiple heritages and languages, African people are being cut off from our collective identity and care for each other, strengths that have been so integral to our survival, which is clearly in jeopardy.

Indeed, the news coming out of our communities in the U.S., the Diaspora and out of Africa is cause for alarm:  28 percent of Black men in the U.S. will be sent to jail or prison in their lifetime; women and girls of African descent globally are bearing the brunt of the violence and poverty ravaging our communities and villages; of 38 million cases of AIDS in the world, 34 million are in Africa; a genocidal war against the Black population of western Sudan portends the latest of “the world’s greatest humanitarian crises” on the continent while the “new scramble for Africa” takes place in the guise of  “tribal conflict” (New Internationalist, 2004). 

In the midst of this global crisis and the abject state of Black education that is painstakingly illuminated in this volume, there are hopeful signs, however. This 50th year after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown decision another watershed event, the 40th anniversary of the Freedom Schools has also been celebrated.

During the Civil Rights movement SNCC activists joined with fearless local people in Mississippi under conditions of sheer terror to create these extraordinary liberated spaces for education. In this new century, young artists and activists are bringing educational messages of high moral and socially redeeming value in spite of the massive onslaught of ghetto-fabulous cultural capital promoted by the $5 billion “Hip-hop economy” (Chuck D, 1997; KRS-ONE, 2003).

Reparations, no longer a fringe conversation, has entered even the venerated  “halls of ivy” as institutions such as Brown University are using the tools of scholarly inquiry and ethical introspection to reveal more instances of mainstream dependency on “benefits” derived from our “Holocaust of Holocausts” (Moore, Sanders & Moore, 1995).   

Some may wonder about or even object to the attention given to Africa in this initiative. Why focus on learning African language or on what is going on over there, or in Brazil, when “we have so many problems of our own to deal with right here?” Or, “Our children need to pass these tests so they can get a job.”

Such short-sightedness will not serve us well.  This is because our dispossession in the U.S. is part of a system of global hegemony that transcends both individual opportunities as well as our domestic predicament. Furthermore, as the title of this volume suggests, the well-being of the human family is also imperiled by these patterns of exclusion and domination.

A recent Chautauqua Institute lecture titled, “Why Africa Matters” is also worth mentioning.  In this lecture H. J. de Blij (O’Grady, 2004), distinguished professor of geography at Michigan State University, emphasizes the African foundation of our human interconnectedness.

“We are all Africans,” he observes:  “It is where we learned to speak, where we learned to live in communities, where we did our first art, it is where we made our first music. . Man [sic] would understand himself better if he knew Africa better.”  Of five reasons why Africa matters (or should matter) to all Americans, the second one that Professor de Bilj cites is that eleven percent of the U.S. population is African American. “For that reason alone,” he concludes, “we should re-connect.”

Re-connect? How? What do “we” need to know to “re-connect?” On whose terms?  Sadly, like most of our fellow citizens, as several of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, neither African Americans nor Diaspora Africans are being educated to feel connected to Africa, nor are we sufficiently informed about Africa’s best interests to act accordingly.

Celebrated Hip-Hop artist and author Chuck D (1997) sums up the gravity of our mis-education succinctly: “Brothers and sisters in Africa have been lied to about us, just as we have been lied to and misinformed about them” (p. 162). Furthermore, our particular disaffection from our African heritage and identity is a burden that non-Africans do not have to bear. This is the crime against our humanity.

What have we learned from the CORIBE initiative that can address the conditions of Black education?  The transformative agenda that CORIBE has distilled shifts the research framework beyond a narrow focus on so-called academic “dis-identification” (the “acting white” hypothesis) or the “stereotype threat,” the “achievement gap,” the “skills gap” or quick-fix school reforms.

Instead this volume presents research on proven solutions—best practices—that prepare Black students and other students to achieve at high levels of academic excellence and to be agents of their own socio-economic and cultural transformation.

The vision of Black education that CORIBE is advancing is grounded in two important premises: 1) Education is a basic human right and 2) Humane and equitable education for and about Black people is a condition of humane and equitable education, justice and human freedom for all.

The globally inclusive approach to Black Education as a field of study, as well as the research and practice presented in this volume, take into consideration the experiences African descent people share with other historically subordinated groups in the U.S. and in the global South.  Racialized disparity and alienation are inexorable outcomes of the “power-knowledge-economics regime” in which white supremacy reigns and corrodes education at every level—for students, teachers and teacher educators as well as other scholars in academia. More so than studying these matters to produce a conventional report, CORIBE was designed as a broad-based participatory process to re-frame our thinking about the issues that created the need for this initiative.

Pointing toward new directions for research, education and social action, the powerful documentation assembled in this volume demonstrates the expertise of educators who know how to provide culturally nurturing, enriching and liberating education across the disciplines in schools and community settings.

CORIBE’s Transformative Research and Action Agenda (Appendix A) underscores the importance of linking research and social action to be undertaken by the global community of African-descent scholars/activists and our allies, within and also independently of AERA.

Fortunately, this work has already begun. In the Postscript that follows “Bill” Watkins affirms the dedication, passion and hope among those who have stepped fearlessly into the fray.

In conclusion, this book and the exemplary work of the Commission on Research in Black Education testify that we are prepared to battle the forces of barbarism—whether ideological, institutional and cultural practices or policies—that dare to exclude Black children here and there in the world from their rightful futures.  Civilization and human freedom in the new century hang in the balance. . . .

Dr. Joyce E. King is the Benjamin E. Mays Chair of Urban Teaching, Learning, and Leadership in the College of Education at Georgia State University. 

The former Provost and Professor of Education at Spelman College, King is recognized here and abroad for her contributions to the field of education. In addition to Black Education, a publication which she edited, Dr. King has published three other books –Preparing Teachers for Diversity, Teaching Diverse Populations and Black Mothers to Sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with Social Practice.

She has published many articles as well that address the role of cultural knowledge in effective teaching and teacher preparation, black teachers’ emancipatory pedagogy, research methods, black studies epistemology and curriculum change. King is a graduate of Stanford University where she received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in social foundations and a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology. She also holds a certificate from the Harvard Institute in educational management.