Why Don’t The Black Kids Like Math and Science?: Easy Answers

Why Don’t The Black Kids Like Math and Science?: Easy Answers

By: Adisa Banjoko and Arash Daneshzadeh

Some ask why we act the way we act, without lookin’ how long they kept us back- Public Enemy, Rightstarter

I took a job working as a security guard for about five years while doing guerrilla research for my non-profit (Hip-Hop Hop Chess Federation) to help at-risk kids at John O’Connell High School in San Francisco. At the time, “OC” had a solid reputation as a tough school. In my five years there I learned a lot about youth violence, teen eating disorders, teen pregnancy and alcohol and drug abuse. What I saw and learned changed me as a parent and a teacher forever. One of the main things I learned was about why kids don’t learn.

For the record, that school has many loving and competent teachers in the space of math and science. However, “Why don’t the Black kids like math and science?” was a common question. The answer for me, as a Black male who was transformed by books like Golden Age of the Moor by Dr. Ivan VanSertima, African Presence in Early Asia by Dr. Runoko Rashidi and The Black Man of The Nile and His Family by  Dr. Yosef Ben Jochannan was very easy.

HHCF Founder, Adisa Banjoko teaching Hip-Hop history.

“You must tell them their cultural and historic connections to the subject. The kids are feeling like they have no connection to the formulas and concepts they are being shown. If you teach this as part of their cultural legacy, it will be more exciting to digest.”

My own son was actually home schooled from the  6th grade to the 11th because my wife and I saw many unfair biases in the way the teachers treated him. When my wife first began teaching him algebra he was very unexcited. Then I told my son about Moorish achievements in mathematics, cartography and architecture. David Shenk’s chess book The Immortal Game illustrates how one Moorish scholar of the era used the chessboard, as an abacus! His eye opened a little wider.

I showed him a section of John G. Jackson’s Man, God and Civilization that reads: Students flocked from France, and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia (what Spain was called at the time) were in the van of science: women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study, and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and and botany, history, philosophy and jurisprudence were to be mastered in Spain and Spain alone. “

“Look at what all your ancestors invented and how they used all relevant knowledge in the field of mathematics” I said with wonder. “If they could create it, you can at least do them the honor of learning what they made.” He took those words to heart. Making math part of his cultural and racial legacy gave him a reason to rise to whatever occasion was on the whiteboard. He is currently trying to decide between several top tier universities for his college path. For my daughters I do the same thing.

I explained to one of the math teachers, a White female, how crucial this was. “If your students are mostly Latino then you need to tell them about how the Mayans invented the concept of the zero several hundred years before the people of India and they had no contact.” I talked about how Aztec and Mayan architecture is something that should be used to as a cultural bridge for them to understand their legacy in math and science.

Her vacant eyes she blinked in hollow despair “But I don’t know all that stuff.” Her unwillingness to pursue new racial and cultural paths to math told me she was not interested. She still struggles to keep her students engaged to this day.

Her struggle is real, and not uncommon across  America. Many teachers across the country hold the same recalcitrant psychological posture with students of African and Latino descent. This ties the child to a culturally infertile arena where the monotony of formulaic recitation does not feed the brain or the heart. For this reason the minds of many Black boys and girls (like many of their Brown brothers and sisters) are often remain unopened like a treasure chest at the bottom of the sea.  The issue is not about ability, it’s about authentic m consistent engagement.

Helping teens discover their own wisdom is the highest form of teaching.

Unless and until all American children can name African pioneers of math like Imhotep (architect of the first step pyramid) or list the achievements of Benjamin Banneker or George Carruthers , Black children will never believe they have a place where STEM and STEAM are taught.

My emancipation don't fit your equation

-Lauryn Hill, Lost Ones

        Math is a universal language that has been ubiquitously applied in creating virtually all civilizations. Paradoxically there is a racist notion that Black youth are detached from mathematics curriculum, due to an inherent version and cultural disposition towards education. However, this dangerous and quixotic belief is underscored by correlation to the under-subscription of Black students in what is quickly viewed as the most academic fields—STEM education.  This unfounded belief submerges education policy in every American milieu and has even managed to unearth the rancor of the Supreme Court during last year’s debate regarding the polarizing case of Affirmative Action. Recently deceased court Justice Antonin Scalia, is on record, as saying a Black student in a selective college “does not do well” and thus is more auspiciously fit in “a less-advanced school—where they aren’t being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them”. This anecdotal narrative has shaped the contours of educational opportunity since well before the Jim Crow era, and yet, it continues to place a student’s race, at the center of conversations around educational disparities, rather than the ecology in which racism socially engineers the construct and pathological associations tied to race.

        It is a common idiom of thought that race creates a susceptibility of understanding. Nevertheless, there is no verifiable research to suggest that Black children are innately less able to solve the geometric challenges presented in Tetris, the algorithms germane to computer coding, or the inductive reasoning requisite of Chess. Black children are not reclamation projects. They are not devoid of creativity as a result of oppression, but like other students, require frameworks of academic achievement that recognize the multiple ways that creativity manifests itself. The rubrics commonly associated with academic excellence are not representative of students, and create what H. Rap Brown (2002) describes as academia’s “monopoly on truth”—that allows schools to create competitive individualism that controls youth, by forsaking the political polarization triggered by race. Stuart Hall (1997) explains that negotiations between students and their educational settings involve students conceding any community-based concerns with racism by focusing on material gains by the individual.  What we do find, is a host of literature that demonstrates the ways in which race impacts academic expectations and perceptions of Black youth, and thus, the harsh conditions that subject them to more exclusionary discipline for subjective infractions in schools, even experienced by students in elementary schools as young as five-years old.

HHCF Director of Education Arash Daneshzadeh.

        Racism legitimizes race as the most salient hurdle towards effective teaching, without examining the toxic and self-effacing environment propagated by racist teaching practices. At the crux of teaching Black youth, is a rigid policy towards control and conformity. This draconian ideology places students in a position at the hegemonic fringe of society, punishing them for an existence more readily associated with criminality as existential threats. Classrooms are subsystems that work on behalf of a racist academic machine that squelches opportunities for inquiry and innovation, and pathologizes Black youth for classroom “errors” that could ultimately give rise to synthesis and greater understanding. Race and ethnicity are not synonymous but inextricably linked. Understanding ethnicity as a portal to community literacy, demarcates access to cultural vehicles that make learning a more familiar experience for students, thereby narrowing the social distance between communities and academic institutions.

The fulcrum of popular culture bends images of urban America. As prelude to Freddie Gibbs’ song, F**kin Up The Count, there is an image of Black youth solving a math problem by finding analogues within the drug trade infesting their neighborhoods. When one youth asks his peer why he’s more likely to solve math problems grounded in criminogenic frameworks commonly associated with drug deals, he responds by citing the live-or-die stakes associated with many Black urban communities. In Strange Fruition, by Hip-Hop emcee Lupe Fiasco, he explains that youth must make “double-edged choices” regarding their identities within White Supremacist frames of school that create a mismatch of power and consequently disillusion Black youth to education systems associated with oppression. Terrell and Terrell (1981) describe this psychological phenomenon among Black youth, as cultural mistrust. In this description, what is perceived, as a student’s impertinent disinterest in math education is a means of self-defense in lieu of the more public narrative of Black destitution. So how do schools begin to move beyond blaming Black youth for wittingly removing themselves from academic spaces, as an executioner would his victim? We must begin with the history of Math education within the realm of public education. From the Algebra Project created by Bob Moses, to Dr. Chris Emdin’s pedagogy that bridges the dialectical space between STEAM and HipHop expression, we find culture as the spool which unites the fabric of math education.

Arash and HHCF students after a day of chess and life strategies class in Oakland, CA.

        When examining the architecture of antiquity, one finds plush and radiant mosques from civilizations throughout Africa and contiguous acres that comprised Mesopotamia. But despite the reality of Black cultural representation since the dawn of civilization, images that forge a vast and pervasive influence from Black scholars do not parallel the intellectual ancestry that is generated in school curricula. Given the bounteous presence of conical shapes, pillars with concentric orbs, that stood atop Moorish arches, it stands to reason that today’s STEAM studies could create a more critical literacy of math education by representing the Pan-African contributions to the canon. Education practitioners and policy wonks use false assumptions about math to justify expectations that have more to do with anti-Blackness, ethnicity, national origin and gender, than reasoning and cognitive function. In Schooling for the New Slavery (1978), Donald Spivey asserts that the validity of anti-Black perceptions is fortified by the emergence of White settler education systems. Asa Hilliard furthers this position by recounting cases in which schools have “kept African people away from the data needed to interpret their own cultural and history reality” (1995, p. 189). Black youth are given the imperative to center a revisionist history as the benchmark of success. We treat the curricular mismatch between schools and students as a student deficiency or cultural problem squarely placed upon the shoulders of students with faddish bromides, such as academic grit or personal responsibility. These semantic dodges skirt the implication of schools—as a tool for perpetuating racist ideology—and avoid meaningful discussion about the ecology of anti-Black schooling.

        Finally, while Europe struggled to emerge from the Middle Ages, troves of literature demonstrate the unrivaled contributions that African scholars, during that era, made to the field of mathematics and other sciences. Yet, these iconic fixtures are all but removed from Western curriculum. Imagine if students were offered a portal into their intellectual ancestry in math, the same way Spanish immersion allows non-Native English speakers from Spanish-speaking countries to make lateral connections in the classroom. There are thousands of noteworthy contributions that Black scholars have made to mathematics, well before public schools were formally ratified in the Western Hemisphere. Timbuktu gave rise to many differential equations formulas used today by astronomers. These formulas were cultivated during the inception of the Ghanaian Empire (modern Mali) during the 11th and 12th century. Yet, the Treatise of Algebra, scribed 400 years later by John Wallis in 1685, is still revered as the seminal work from which astrophysicists operate. Omar Khayyam, a Persian scholar, is often recalled, as no more than an indulgent Sufi poet from the 11th century, yet he is responsible for finding the intersections between cubic and conic equations, which has influenced the architecture traditionally associated with colonial Spain. In regards to Arab contributions to math B Carra de Vaux wrote “They made algebra an exact science and developed it considerably and laid the foundation of analytical geometry; they were indisputably the founders of plane and spherical trigonometry which, properly speaking, did not exist among the Greeks. “

        To create a more equitable school system in which individual identities are not stigmatized, we must have painstaking and honest conversations around the process of academic identification. In order to fully affirm the academic pedigree of mathematics, we must recognize the geopolitical contributions that all cultures have made to its canon. Until then, Black youth will continue to be ensnared by the false binary of “underachievement” and fatalistic trappings of Eurocentric distancing. By stigmatizing and historically abstracting Black ancestry from the academic canon, we manufacture a pathology of Black youth, rather than achievement itself, as in need of restoration.

Adisa Banjoko is the Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation (HHCF). They are the first 501c3 non-profit to fuse music, chess and martial arts to teach STEM, STEAM and Life Strategies. He is the author of the upcoming book Bobby, Bruce & Bam: The Secrets of Hip-Hop Chess. Follow on IG @realhiphopchess  

Arash Daneshzadeh is the Director of Education for Hip-Hop Chess Federation and a Professor of Education, in the Organizational Leadership Program at the University of San Francisco. Twitter: https://twitter.com/A_Daneshzadeh

Against All Odds: Education, Race and Chess

RZA playing International Master the late EmoryTate, Jr. Photo: Eric Arnold

Against All Odds: Education, Race, and Chess 
by Adisa Banjoko and Arash Daneshzadeh | 

Teaching students, “The World Is Yours”

A few years ago, I was asked to speak at a high school for Black History Month in San Francisco, CA. Their original speaker had bailed on them, at the last minute. Rather than open my talk with a lamentation of US slavery, I focused on Dogon discoveries in Astronomy, and Moorish science contributions that served as the foundation of the European Renaissance. After citing the role of the African Islamic influence of Europe's’ rise out of the Dark Ages, I asked the students how many enjoyed what they heard.  Almost all the hands went up. I said, now ask yourselves this question: How is that you have been in school for at least 9 years and this is the first time you are hearing it? It is against all political, social, and economic odds that Black children are expected to excel.

As we approach Black History Month in 2016, I’m already torn between my genuine love in celebrating Black achievement, and the sad circus many schools turn the opportunity into. American schools have a long way to go in sharing the more dynamic aspects of African contributions to global civilization. For me, I tend to do my best teaching on a chessboard. It is almost impossible to talk about chess in America and not have race come up. I’m doubtful that this happens in China, for example. As Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation (HHCF) and an educator for more than a decade now (mostly in inner cities) I’ve watched kids argue about who gets to be white, who gets to be black and why. African American kids, often as young as 9 years old, out of what appears to be a loyalty to their team (race) often chose to be Black irrespective of the known reality-- that it is harder to play as black in chess. It takes time to learn how to be black and expect to win.

In the medieval times, apparently white did not always start first. Historically speaking. The first chess books were written by Muslims. As Moorish sovereignty in Europe grew, Christians and Jews began to play and write about the game. One of the European authors said white went first (without explanation of why) and the idea seems to have stuck. The high polarization of racial issues in America seems to inherently make our kids consider that black starts from a place of weakness. This is not the game itself that does this. It is their experience as African American children, not chess players, that puts this feeling upon them.

It is what they observe in their lives, in the news, and in their history classes. It is the greatness of Black history that is deliberately left out- that ends up making them feel this way.  I can’t prove it, but I believe that this inherent feeling that Black is at a disadvantage in chess is connected to racial disadvantages in life.

Dr. Frances Cress-Welsing touched on this topic of race and chess in her groundbreaking 1989 book, The Isis Papers. “White always makes the opening (aggressive) move in chess” she writes, “The black king and queen must move in tactical and strategic harmony with one another if they are to counter the white assaut successfully and defend their side of the chessboard effectively.”

The HHCF has always worked to use chess as a tool for racial and cultural transcendence.

Nevertheless, even some of the best things about chess seem to slip through our hands. On October 17, 2015, one of the greatest minds, a Black man, in modern chess passed away. His name was Emory Tate and he died doing what he loved best, playing chess in the San Francisco Bay Area. Black American mainstream press didn’t report it. Nevermind that as an International Master he battered Grandmasters with seamless regularity. Despite the fact that  the brilliance he displayed in countless games gave a slight sketch of the elite expressions of his cognitive function- his passing was ignored by Black media outlets. I personally watched Tate beat RZA of Wu-Tang Clan in 2009 in San Francisco at John O’Connell High School. Emory Tate and RZA spoke together to kids at length about the intellectual and moral benefits of chess for them. Emory Tate’s name struck fear in the hearts of his opponents around the world. Unfortunately, Emory Tate died in a time where what qualifies as modern Black “news” is often relegated to mostly Worldstar fight clips and Love and Hip Hop style gossip. These “news” outlets have largely erased genuine young adoration for Black intellectual and entrepreneurial achievement beyond the arena of entertainment. 

Today, most Americans think of chess as an upper echelon “White” game. In fact, the game only made it to America after the Moors (African Muslim scholars) conquered Spain from 700 AD until 1400 AD and brought their books and chessboards with them. After teaching the game of chess to the Christians and Jews, it spread across Europe. The English loved chess and when some rebelled and settled in America, so too did the game. Colonial Americans such as George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson became obsessed with the game.

Thomas Jefferson's Chess piece at World Chess Hall of Fame. Photo: Mike Relm

Theophilus Thompson of Frederick, Maryland is one of the first African American chess players known by name. Despite being raised in the violence of the Civil War era he authored a book of chess positions that were respected by all the players of his day. You can even see one of his brilliant games played in 1874 at The Chess Drum, the world’s best site for Black chess news around the globe. Even the most remedial chess player can see Thompson's style unleashed a horrific series of psychological landmines and traps, forcing his opponent to resign. Sadly, he was rumored to have died at the hands of the KKK who held big numbers in Frederick at the time. America has never been a safe place for intelligent Black men daring enough to display critical insight publicly. It is in the spirit of Thompson’s bravery that this piece is written.

One of the amazing things about chess is that it is a proven tool in raising scores in IQ testing and academic exams. Additionally, in 1979, Chinese University in Hong Kong shared a study by Dr. Yee Wang Fung. It reported that chess players showed a 15% improvement in math and science scores. Five years before that a study in Zaire by Dr. Albert Frank of 19 students aged 16-18 stated that chess players showed significant advancement in spatial, numerical and administrative-directional abilities. These improvements held true regardless of the skill level attained. Simply stated, your child doesn't need to be a Grandmaster in chess to benefit greatly from the impact it can have on your mind. In a country professing to be so STEM and STEAM obsessed the recalcitrance of the American school system in making chess a daily class (just like English or Math) borders criminality- not mere hypocrisy.

Democracy and illiteracy are not synonymous. To ensure that the future of our democracy is sustained and elevated, literacy has to be its indestructible root. If chess was good enough to enlighten George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Jay Z and Tupac it is good enough for the American student- irrespective of their grade level. 

Fear of a Black Planet

“If you want to understand any problem, focus on who profits from that problem, not who suffers from that problem.”--Dr. Amos Wilson 

There is a relationship between the literary stories that represent “triumph” and historical accounts of oppression. Who tells the story, how they tell it, what details are selectively removed, which others are emphasized or outright falsified, determines how one interprets history.  In the enduring words of Hip Hop artist, Inspectah Deck, “life as a shorty shouldn’t be so rough”. American schools have played a prominent role in manufacturing an image of Black youth as “other” than human—destitute, needy, unruly, savages. There’s something troublingly ironic about an education system that perpetuates the myth of a normative achievement gap, while minimizing the role that COINTELPRO had on normalizing Black pain. The criminality of Black youth in the United States education system is proportional to the perceived danger of Black resistance, self-definition, and independence. These three variables are forged in the mantle of critical storytelling.

In the wake of Black History month, we revisit a discussion as timeless as Dr. Amos Wilson’s hallowed words above. That this, power and privilege determine the relationship between teaching and learning. Who gets to tell the story is just as important as who plays the role of hero in an epic saga. Students internalize perceptions of their learning ability with their existential power. Storytelling, with the hopes of transmitting parables to youth, has been a common vehicle for teaching historical literacy since time immemorial. Historical literacy, of course, is paramount to unpacking the truth about where we come from. Particularly, in any society that blurs the atrocities of transatlantic slavery and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. You may recall a recent case in Texas, in which a textbook manufacturer referred to enslaved Africans as “workers”.

It is important to remind administrators, teachers, and students that teaching historical accounts and positional power in the classroom are not mutually exclusive, but symbiotically paired like the effect of location upon real estate prices. If you are teaching Black youth from a space of intersecting privilege (example: White, heterosexual, upper-middle class, male), it becomes important to center students in the texts so that your unearned privilege does not derail a potentially uplifting moment of historical literacy. Too often, individual icons such as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are superimposed onto Black students as passive and inanimate props for White integration stories.

But what about the communities that inspired King and Parks? Their political nuances, critical development, and vast ocean of community influences are filtered through a netting that removes all texture--replaced with carefully curated aesthetic. An aesthetic which appreciates Martin Luther King for his eloquent rhetoric, and Rosa Parks for her searing opposition to a bus driver—rather than the radical story of how the community mobilized, despite painful opposition from the United States government in the form of COINTELPRO, prior to the bus boycotts and union walkouts.  

While teachers often misappropriate Dr. Martin Luther King as an inter-racial sympathizer, the facts surrounding his death are often manufactured by an ideology, which seeks to destroy any implication that American imperialism was responsible for his demise and for the overall declaration of war upon the Black community. The irony behind this academic tampering: In 1999, the King family won a civil trial against the United States government for conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King. Why is this history lesson not as readily accessible to youth, particularly Black children, whose historical points of reference are still grounded in respectability and obedience?

Any remote association with Black resistance is engulfed, chewed up, and spit out as a breach of decorum and personal responsibility. Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Tupac Shakur and even rap artist KRS-One are prime examples of luminaries whose images were quickly vanquished from critical teachings in school. In January 2015, the Huffington Post reported on a teacher who was publicly attacked in Tucson, Arizona for incorporating what was deemed as “inflammatory” and “threatening” lyrics by KRS-One into their curriculum for an African American history course. The teacher attempted to unpack generations of systemic oppression through “artistic response”. This example of historical cherry picking presents a sterilized image of classrooms as neutral factories of compliance. Any inquiry, particularly from students well versed in historical literacy or anti-racist artistic expression, poses a threat to the fabric of reproducing society in its current image. 

The truth is, our classrooms are political spaces where battles for representation (beyond the symbolic) are waged. Nonetheless, stories of organized Black revolutionaries are swept up like doll houses during a tornado, splintered, and dissipated like dust across a child’s consciousness. Education policy makers must examine whose power is squarely positioned at the center of our historical textbooks, and privileged as the aspirational goal for students. When discussing student learning, power reprises its role as inseparably married to the privileges wrought by being a teacher.

"No matter what the name, we're all the same pieces in one big chess game"--Public Enemy

The chessboard serves as a microcosm for community. It also represents the fallacy in quotidian education that your success is inspired bybecoming King. An allegory lauding the merits of social isolation is a direct contradiction from the revolutionary bedrock of liberatory education, which invokes the collective power of community pieces, against a common enemy. This self-aggrandizing portrait of success is buttressed by the capitalistic notion encouraging students to surmount their cultural literacies, because achievement cannot be shared among peers. In the interest of this article, literacies is defined as the historical definitions of self, rooted in understanding race, gender, class, and other normative identities as constructed within a cultural ecology of synchronized domination and oppression.

In this society, we are trained to believe that academic “success” can be only hoarded, as our education system intentionally triages for patent winners and losers. One consequence of this reductionist view of collective solidarity is the normalization of divestment. Divesting from community.  Sloughing entire layers of historical understanding is actually seen as a strategy towards success. We center Whiteness and settler capitalism by telling students that they were admitted into a college, “despite growing up in the ghetto”, which is pathologized as a proxy for Blackness.  Similarly, in chess, students are told to count the most valuable pieces in accordance with a rubric of settler colonialism; rendering pawns as merely disposable players who make the occasional cameo during protracted matches.  A Western framework that problematizes pawns, and makes Queens a transactional gambit to sustain the longevity of the King, barters with identity.

To perceive pieces as inextricably linked with achieving victory, one must frame chess pieces as more than individuals but an ecologically sustained community. When students, particularly children of color, in my classroom discuss chess, their initial impulse veers towards “becoming” King. As a result, they forsake the importance of other pieces, whose quantifiable values mirror the “desirability” as competing members of a chess community. This value system parallels a market-based society, whose racialized underpinnings, commodify Blackness as space to be charitably leveraged by or platform White sensibilities. In chess, White moves first and pawns are worth “less” points than Queens.

Conversely, students must forgo an appreciation of community in order to position themselves at the mantle of dominance. As well, domination is advertised as a political dividend that requires a divestment of cultural literacy, because our communities are problematized as anchors to our long-term prospects. And our success is propagandized as a marker of innate worth. In chess terms: If you became King, you achieved it despite the distractions and convoluted machinations of other (read: less important) pieces on your side of the board. This raises the question of education as a tool for inculcating societal value systems that may actively oppose indigenous and Black diasporic foundations.

Taking a more critical lens, we must peel from the layers of historical rust that stifles a student’s social mobility. Miring students in the minutia of political and social competition, moves the illusion that they are individuals first, and communities are merely instruments for self-marketing. Black history is hijacked, reconstructed, and expelled as a finite canon of individual transcendence. Black excellence is merely a reflection of individuals who demonstrated personal “grit” or perseverance, despite overwhelming odds. As a result of the grit narrative, individual successes throughout Black history fails to consider the manner in which oppressive ideology overly determines policy that shapes community outcomes. 

Teaching Black history as more than a positivist and towering beacon of more-to-less stakeholders, flies in direct opposition to the perception that power and privilege are independent of one another in the classroom. “Ubuntu” is a Zulu word that means “I am because we are”, and captures a liberatory strand of teaching. This model posits that our position as individuals is gained by our appreciation of the stories and critical understandings of our ancestors. Without exercising liberating and critical literacies, students tacitly amputate a political connection to their cultures. A connection, that renders them as powerful partners within an intergenerational war for the redistribution of provisional wealth. In his groundbreaking work, Developmental Psychology of the Black Child, Dr. Amos Wilson distinguishes between schools that subsidize a highly educated servant (to Capitalism) and those that seek to promote Black mobilization. He writes that the Black child is taught to have a sense of dependency on her historical storytellers (i.e., schools) and thus, can only exercise enough power to perpetuate the desires of those who center an image of Black domination and youth control. 

A note about Pan-African teaching. Look at how many miles separate Greece and England. English universities have no problem teaching students that Plato and Socrates are their intellectual ancestors, yet Anglo-Saxons didn't directly descend from Greece. Thus, it shouldn't be absurd for Black children to learn about Pan-African philosophy, history, and contemporary intellectual inspiration. The Book of the Dead, Kingdoms of the Nile, Kush, Nubia, the Mandingo Empire, Senegambia, Duse Mohamed Ali, and Henry Sylvester Williams. I could go on, but the battle for Pan-African narratives, is to cobble a direct conduit to intellectual ancestry for Black youth.

In Whistling Vivaldi (2010), eminent social psychologist, Dr. Claude Steele explains that the threats to Black student identity are external albeit internalized. He adds, that if people on the street heard someone whistling classical musician, Vivaldi, that the violence prone, “unrefined” Black youth image would not reflexively come to mind. What’s more, even other Black youth are less inclined to assume a Black peer is the whistler. Our values and images of “high white society” will always emerge in the classroom.  Black children are 18 times more likely than White children to be incarcerated as adults and comprise 58% of all children sentenced to prison as adults in the United States (Poe-Yamagata & Jones, 2007). Black students are "personally responsible" for their actions at an age when white students still benefit from assumptions of their innocence. A school environment that conditions Black youth for perpetual "fight or flight" mode, cannot offer time for reflection.  As a result, we must not think of Vivaldi as the metric for what distinguishes an academically “successful” Black child from her peers. Instead, it is incumbent upon educators and radical scholars to wean from the phantom value systems that commercially, and socially, distinguish between Vivaldi and J. Cole. Until then, pawns will never live to be Queens.

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Adisa Banjoko is the Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation (HHCF) and author of Bobby, Bruce & Bam: The Secrets of Hip-Hop Chess releasing Feb 2016 on Young Lions Press. Arash Daneshzadeh is an HHCF Chess Instructor and Doctoral Candidate at UC Davis. Learn more about HHCF.