From “Dropout to Doctorate: Breaking the Chains of Educational Injustice” By Terrence Lester, PhD
The new pressures of the wrong associations, created and exacerbated by the unstable, impoverished environment, conspired to drain my attention away from school. My experience, however, also reflects Jawanza Kunjufu’s discourse on the systemic biases against Black boys. Kunjufu’s Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, written in 1985, reveals a disturbing trend that was happening when I was growing up. He wrote in a time period when society was predicting the building of prisons that would be populated with Black men based on the test scores of Black boys as early as third grade, a narrative further validated in The New Jim Crow.
In a public lecture on countering the conspiracy, Kunjufu explained the harsh reality of what causes a Black male student to go from being deeply engaged to not being engaged at all because of the shift in the interest of education of young Black boys as they move through elementary school. Part of that disinterest is grounded in the way Black boys are not engaged in their imaginations as children, and it starts to fade away when it is not nurtured and influenced by cultural trends and systemic issues. The disengagement could be triggered by multiple environmental hardships and trying to cope with lack, social pressures, being labeled and stereotyped, lack of representation in the curriculum or at home, as well as an inability to see beyond their immediate environment. He also told an audience in 1987 that we must consider, “When did the conspiracy start? Who is against Black boys? Why is there a conspiracy against them? What exactly is the conspiracy?” He made the powerful statement that “if you can destroy Black boys, they will never become Black men.” And while Kunjufu was a scholar talking about these things in the 1980s, his conclusions came through the unique lens of a sociologist, a scholar, and a father who helped raise Black children himself and witnessed the targeting of Black communities and Black men through public policy.
While Kunjufu’s work primarily focused on Black males, it also critically examined three pivotal areas relevant to the Black experience of the eighties and what I faced as a child dealing with these intersectional experiences. Reflecting on his work – particularly his research on the targeting of young Black males during this time period – I recognize that, as a young Black man myself, I was the very subject of his studies. I find it difficult to process the complex dynamics that made it challenging for me and others to navigate these same roads, especially considering the decades leading up to the twenty-first century. As an adult, it is heavy seeing how generational trauma, systemic barriers, and the misuse of power all worked together to hinder my potential and that of others just like me in the form of educational injustice. Knowing the immense barriers they are up against, how can children be expected to focus on schoolwork when their home life or living environment has a traumatic weight that disconnects them from their own life?