Getting Schooled: A Curriculum of Lying, Choking, and Dying

• In Event: The Miseducation of Curriculum: Schooling and #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

Outside of school it’s okay for police to kill you, your siblings, your cousins, your mom, your dad, your uncle, your aunt, your grandmother, your grandfather because you are not white. Police are regularly relived of responsibility for thinking in the moment by grand juries while you are shot or otherwise murdered for thinking in the moment, from putting your hands up (Michael Brown) to running away unarmed (Walter Scott) to changing lanes (Sandra Bland) to saying you can’t breathe (Eric Garner). You can be shot for toy versions of guns that white folks regularly wear in public to exercise their rights in open carry states like Ohio, whether you’re a twelve year old playing in the street (Tamir Rice) or an adult hanging out in Walmart (John Crawford). White kids who dress like you are cool, Dressing While Black can get you legally murdered (Trayvon Martin). Doing what the police tell you to do can get you shot (Levar Jones), riding in a police car can get you killed (Freddie Grey), and opening your door and Mothering While Black can get you (accidentally) murdered by police (Bettie Jones). Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is a curriculum of dying.
People are educated not only through their own experiences but by watching the experiences of others (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as well as within and across various communities (Wenger, 1999). When viewed as constellations of events, what may at first seem like disparate curricula become the warp and weft of an interwoven set of understandings connected through a combination of experiences, perspectives, ideas, and ideals. In short, they become a curriculum.
In this case, it is a racist curriculum of lying, choking, and dying. That it is directed at people of color does not mean that it is not learned by everyone and, through its constant repetition and reinforcement, it is what we are teaching our children. It is an implicit and explicit understanding that schooling in the US has always been, and may yet ever be, a Jim Crow space (Gershon, in press) designed by eugenicists (Winfield, 2007) that is running not incidentally biased but instead tends to run as planned. That the color of your skin is a strong determinant in your life choices and of an everyday curriculum that is a constant reminder that your future health and general well-being, that of your children, your grandchildren, and ancestors to the founding of our nation are inescapably impacted by violence and aggression, not the least of which are yet another state approved poisoning of predominantly poor to working class people of color (Governor Ron Snyder and administration/Flint, Michigan) and the ongoing, nation-wide, deeply disproportional incarceration of (young) African American men and Latinos fed in no small part by a continuing school-to-prison pipeline (Fasching-Varner, Martin, Mitchell, & Bennett-Haron, 2014).

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University