The Art of Sankofa and Re-Establishing Kujichagulia

Abstract

As many social critics are just now discovering the racial treatise W.E.B. DuBois advanced more than 100 years ago, the academy continues to devalue, marginalize, and ignore specific voices while choosing to champion, protect, and canonize others. This exclusion allows, or directs, each generation of new scholars to carefully dance around the real problems in education by judiciously repackaging the discourse of their predecessors. This is not to suggest that the intellectual past of a discipline should not be revisited. This does suggest that some aspects of that past, a past often marred by cultural incompetence and the intellectual marginalization of specific groups a discipline pretends to be educating, needs to be considered and critiqued by those groups the discipline has objectified and transformed into others. Intentionally connecting educators to the history of Black self-determination in education may potentially serve to assist in the creation of pedagogy and programs to address the challenges of Black males in education.