The Mis-Educated Negro

I recently finished an amazingly mind opening book. The book is called The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Woodson (Amazon, Wiki).

"When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”

Without giving away the details of the book, because I believe that this book is a MUST read, Mr. Woodson explains the mis-education of the negro as he sees it and I believe that many his theories are still relevant today even though this book was published in the early 1900s. He breaks down and explains his opinion on many things including: the difference between training and education; how blacks don’t support black owned/operated businesses; how we don’t associate being smart with being black; not supporting HBCUs by attending them, not reinvesting in them with time or money, etc; not teaching African history to our kids along with American, European, Greek history, etc. in our schools especially since a lot of these societies are tied to Africans…and I could go on. Many of my own ideas and opinions have changed or been expanding on do to reading this book. I pride myself on having an open mind and being open to receiving new ideas from any source and I am extremely glad that I picked this book up to read. Mr. Woodson examined many things that I had thoughts about before but hadn’t yet examined further myself.

As I said before, this book is a must read by anyone black, white, latino, etc. If you want to borrow mine, I’ll mail it to you. Let me know…

Fred

This post is a day early and I missed my post from last week due to me being out of town and having no internet access. Therefore, there will be another post this week and I already have a juicy idea…