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Preface
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Mis-Education of the Negro, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Education
Mis-Education as Social Control
Failures of Black Leadership
Business and Economic Development
Summary
Analysis
Woodson argues that “the ‘educated Negroes’” look down on other Black people because their education teaches them to value white people’s accomplishments above Black people’s. Even in Black schools and universities, students almost never learn about Black people’s history or thought. When they do, their textbooks and teachers often explicitly teach that white people are superior to Black people. This partially explains why, in Woodson’s time, most successful Black people have little or no formal education, while educated Black people do nothing to help the race as a whole.
“The seat of the trouble” is the racist curriculum taught in U.S. schools and universities. In order to succeed in the school system, Black students have to internalize white supremacist values. This creates a devil’s bargain: in order to build the skills that they need to succeed in life and in business, Black students must learn to stop believing in their own potential. Therefore, on a societal level, the U.S. prevents the majority of Black people from building skills through education, while also ensuring that those who do receive an education learn to support the racist status quo rather than fighting it.
Themes
Because the education system teaches Black people to denigrate themselves and abandon their hopes for a better life, Woodson considers fighting it even more important than fighting lynching. Universities in the North and West are largely responsible for mis-training Black scholars, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But even in math and science, the system is inadequate. For instance, in the South, the poor Black children of tenant farmers ought to have more resources to learn math than the wealthy white students who learn to make budgets and financial plans at home.
Woodson is careful to fight two of his readers’ common assumptions: that racism is only a problem in the South, and that math and science curricula can’t be racially biased because they are objective disciplines. In reality, Northern universities hold the primary responsibility for mis-educating Black scholars. Moreover, effectively teaching math and science requires providing rural Black students with a different curriculum than wealthy white students. In this way, he shows that racism is more widely entrenched in policy and society than many of his readers may expect. In turn, if education policy doesn’t explicitly take class and race differences into account, it ends up reinforcing those differences.
Themes
Meanwhile, theology, business, and journalism schools teach the white establishment’s ideology and tools. This makes Black ministers, businesspeople, and journalists ill-equipped to work in their own communities, where segregation forces them to stay. Rather than developing their own creativity, “educated Negroes” end up imitating white people. Eventually, they often grow cynical and turn against other Black people. Their error is thinking that they can achieve equality through imitation, rather than by developing Black people’s own talents and creativity. They worry that other Black people justify discrimination against them when they think in race-conscious terms. But they fail to see that race-consciousness is necessary for Black people to overcome oppression, and they wrongly assume that racial differences inherently make one group better than another.
Mis-education and segregation work together to stifle Black professionals’ success: tragically, they receive an education that they can never use, and they can never get the education they actually need. Because they can’t get a race-conscious education oriented to Black communities’ specific needs, they can’t fulfill their duties to these communities. Thus, mis-education is also a detriment to the Black community as a whole, because it turns the people’s primary pathway for development into a road to nowhere. Worse still, the “educated Negroes” learn to internalize white supremacist ideas about race, like the idea that race-consciousness is the same as racism or that racial differences automatically justify a racial hierarchy.
Themes
