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

Today's Math: Cultural Exclusion Within the STEM Trend

Today’s Math: Cultural Exclusion Within the STEM Trend

By: Adisa Banjoko

Can we talk about the top 1% and the bottom 99?/ Or the wise 5% and the deaf, dumb and blind 85?/ Or how the circle 7 and the 120 saved our lives?

                                                                                     - Come to the Hills Amir Sulaiman

A few weeks ago I walked into the Ocala Youth Center in San Jose after passing out fliers for our free Hip-Hop Chess program. I was sweating like a runaway slave under the summer sun, but I was happy. You might think walking between Crip, Norteno and Sureno gang turfs trying to teach kids about chess would not work, or be fun. But its a ”beautiful struggle.”

Our non-profit was awarded the Safe Summer Initiative Grant provided by the City of San Jose through the Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force.  Through that, we have been able to teach the game of kings to underserved kids in East side San Jose. Because of the shimmer of silicon chips is so often in the news, it's easy to forget the gang wars and turf battles. The BG’s (young "baby gangsters") respect my efforts and let us do our work without any hassles. They know my intentions. I appreciate that. When we first opened up at Ocala Middle School, five kids walked in. Two weeks later we were getting just under fifty.

HHCF teaching fundamentals at Ocala Youth Center in San Jose, CA

One of my favorite kids is a teenage girl who learns freestyle wrestling from her dad, loves rap and heavy metal, and has a passion for singing in her spare time. “Where did chess come from?” she asked me one day between moves. I smiled and spoke to her like an uncle talking to his favorite niece.  

“Chess came to America essentially because the Moors brought the game with them when they conquered Spain on 700 AD. If they don’t bring the game to Spain, Europe never gets it. If Europe never gets it, Benjamin Franklin never learns it. If he does not learn it, and come to America- we never get it. Today Maurice Ashley stands as the first Black Grand Master. Cuba had a World Champion, Jose Raul Capablanca, a true icon for Latino’s around the world. The beauty of the sport and art of chess is something all cultures have connected through. If you think chess is a game only by and for old rich White people, then you have lost your place in the history of chess. Im here today to help you find it and do something with it.” I also remind my students about Black female chess champion Rochelle Ballantyne (seen in the documentary Brooklyn Castles) who is now at Stanford University and rising female champion Diamond Shakoor.

She immersed in the conversation. I told her that opening with pawns, knights and bishops to control the center of the board, was no different than keeping your head up, elbows tight and low center of gravity heading to the middle of the mat to meet your opponent in wrestling. I knew then that the history of chess, when framed through an authentic cultural lense, gets students immediately engaged.. I had an instant flashback to one of my discussions on this topic with a former colleague who served as a mathematics  teacher.

Moorish men playing a game of chess in Spain

Working as a security guard at John O’Connell High School in San Francisco, I learned a lot about American public schools. Compared to the average American parent I’ve had an uncommon level of access to teachers and students unfettered for several years. These experiences helped me configure my non-profit, the Hip-Hop Chess Federation to help teachers and students find new ways to achieve academic greatness.

One of the first things I learned was the gross lack of cultural connectivity to math and science. It all started while talking with a White female teacher at the school who was concerned about not reaching a certain group of Black and Latino males. They were regularly in trouble in her class. These kids were very disruptive and she called me to her room many times to wrangle mayhem out the classroom.

After hearing her legitimate grievances with these youngsters I asked her “Have you ever thought about teaching math from a cultural perspective?”

“What do you mean” she asked?

“For instance, the book Blacks in Science by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima talks about how the Mayans invented the concept of the zero before the people of India did. I find this fascinating because there is no historical account of them having any contact with one another. Now, I believe things that that would really excite kids from  Mexico and El Salvador (we have a large Latino population).. Maybe if you talked to your Black students about Imhotep , architect of the first step pyramid in Kemet (commonly called Egypt) you would be able to make math not just another subject, but an extension of their culture. That makes it more than just homework, it makes it part of a tradition to uphold.”

She looked at me with the most serious eyes on Earth and said “But I don’t know any of that stuff. I can’t teach that.” The horror in her response was that she said it as if she was incapable of reading the same book I just referenced. I realized a millisecond later her response was ploy to evade taking the time to do homework on her own to get connectivity to her pupils. As if by virtue of her college degree, she no longer needed to read these kinds of things to qualify her as a teacher. She continues to struggle with Black and Latino students.

Looking at the dismal state of Black and Latino achievements in mathematics, can make any half sane parent cringe. Bloomberg recently reported “The achievement gap between black and white students has remained steady at about 30 points in math from 2005 to 2013.” One could google for hours the low numbers in Black and Latino math and science deficiencies. Diverseeducation.com quoted  Dr. Sylvia Hurtado, Professor and Director of the Higher Education Research at UCLA in 2011 stating “It is very disturbing to see more pronounced gaps at basic science proficiency in 12th grade, and that so few Black and Hispanic students are proficient at the most basic level.”

Mayan scholars like the one pictured above invented the concept of the zero long before the people of India.

Almost everytime I turn around I see people trying to promote STEM (Science, Technology Engineering, and Mathematics). It serves as the latest buzzword in academia. As exciting as it appears, I find this an offense to Black, Latino and other non-White peoples. This is simply because the bulk of STEM approaches are culturally sterile, sleepy hollow methodologies that frankly don’t inspire inner city minds. But it does not have to be this way.

My belief is that the future is not in STEM but STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art [underline emphasis mine] and Mathematics. The element of art instantly alters the effectiveness of teaching the others. It's  also closer to the ancient traditions of many in the global diaspora.

The unmatchable classic Who Is God  Rakim paints images of the Black man and womans past “Life was life, and love was love/ We went according by the laws of the world above/ They showed us physically, we could reach infinity/ But mentally through the centuries we lost our identity.” This is the the most succinct explanation of our academic failure in American education I have ever heard from a rapper (or anyone really).

Look around. Most ancient Black and Brown civilizations never separated their art from mathematics, science and engineering. They are the inventors and curators of STEAM. These ancestors painted pyramids, decorated lunar and solar calendars. Kemetic craftsmen engraved towering pillars in their houses of worship adorned with hieroglyphics. The architects of the Ottoman empire emblazoned geometric calligraphy in their masjids. Nevertheless, Most non-White children believe their people have no historical bond with science, math and engineering. Yet we know better, and so do most American teachers. Clearly a type of cultural and ethnic cleansing inside education has been taking place.

Geometry, algebra, architecture, art and spirituality were never separated in traditional cultures

I think many astronomy students would love to know that the Kaaba in Mecca, built by Prophet Abraham is perfectly aligned with the star Canopus. “The four corners of the Kaaba roughly point toward the four cardinal directions of the compass.[1] Its major (long) axis is aligned with the rising of the star Canopus toward which its southern wall is directed, while its minor axis (its east-west facades) roughly align with the sunrise of summer solstice and the sunset of winter solstice.”

Any class of Algebra that does not start with the Persian mathematician  Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (a scholar at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad), dishonors all the work in the classroom that follow it. The words algebra and algorithm, are born from his name. He was from Baghdad. In People of the Book, Zachary Karabell quotes the intellectual achievements of that city by one person who walked its street stating “Baghdad thrived as few cities ever have, or ever will.” One of the greatest mathematicians of Baghdad,  Ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī al-Samawʾa was the son of a Moroccan Rabbi who wrote several books on algebra and also respected scholar of medicine.

In the book Golden Age of the Moor, Edited by Dr. Van Sertima, it highlights how Africans and Arabs “made algebra an exact science and developed in considerably and laid the foundation of analytical geometry; they were indisputably the plane and spherical trigonometry which, properly speaking did not exist among the Greeks.” In The Immortal Game, David Shenk highlights how the Moors used the chessboard as an abacus for mathematical calculations. Andalusian architecture in Spain today is a living testament to centuries of African and Arab science, technology, engineering, art and math.

What the Moors built, was on the shoulders of the Kemetic (Egyptian) ancestors. On the topic of African contributions to physics, John Pappademos wrote “The few papyri which have survived, show that they (the Egyptians) could compute the areas and volumes of abstract geometric figures….To the Egyptians we owe the idea of letting a symbol represent an unknown quantity in algebra.”

Like the Moors, when Hip-Hop was In its “golden age” (1988-1993) it heavily promoted the importance of mathematics. This was mainly done by the 5% Nation of Gods and Earths, a branch of the Nation of Islam. Artists like Poor Righteous Teachers, Rakim, Wu-Tang Clan, Brand Nubian, Jay Z  and many others have been affiliated with the organization. For them, understanding of mathematics has many practical and spiritual importance. Their symbol is the number 7 inside a circle and star. They teach their own “supreme alphabet”, “supreme mathematics” and “120 degrees” of knowledge. Hip-Hop spread these ideas across the world.

On the left, Jay Z, wearing a 5% medallion. On the right, its Founder Clarence 13  X

One of the fastest growing movements in teaching science is Science Genius. It is spearheaded by Dr. Chris Emdin who works closely with Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA (heavily influenced by the 5%) to host youth rap battles about science. Its impressive to see.

As a young adult in the early 1990’s I cannot allow the effort and accurate scholarship of Dr. Van Sertima, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Dr. Runoko Rashidi and others to be buried under online searches. Our contemporary educators need to be informed and trained on this wisdom and encouraged to teach it to all American youth. To fail to do this, is not just a crime against the Black, Latino, Arab and Persian contributions to STEAM are the foundation of everything we say want our children to study. It is a crime against all American youth as a whole. Because the current culture of mathematics reinforces European superiority in STEM- it robs them of the truth! Today’s Black academics have a duty to demand more books with these truths be made part of public school curriculum. Virtually all cultures have had a hand in the evolution of how we learn and apply math. Eurocentric based math classes dishonor STEM’s founders and innovators as well their newest students. I am not in favor of Black or White supremacist teaching methods. I’m an advocate of the truth for the benefit of all.  At the same time I understand that the enemies of my ancestors had no vested interest in ensuring their children knew the truth about my people. In many ways the American school system is functioning as it should in its failure to properly educate kids.

I submit to all administrators and teachers in American public, charter and private schools that teaching science, technology, engineering and math minus an artistic element  undercuts the potential of student engagement from day one. The global diaspora has never separated their art from their cultural relationship to mathematics and science. Our culturally barren methods now used to teach math and science only alienate and marginalize American minds. This renders them incapable of moving full STEAM ahead in the future. We must do better.

Adisa Banjoko is Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation. They are hosting the grand opening of their new facility August 16th 2014 in the Bay Area. For more information visit www.facebook.com/hiphopchess

Hip-Hop Chess got shouted out on Forbes! We have many leather-bound books. Kind of a big deal

And it deals with PHYSICS!

From Atoms To Bits, Physics Shows Entropy As The Root Of Intelligence

We have been taught to think of entropy as a bad thing. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” wrote William Butler Yeats in the aftermath of World War I, in words that still ring true today. Yet Yeats was both a Romantic poet and a Modern one, and he followed up this couplet with a more counterintuitive one, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst /Are full of passionate intensity.”

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This is what you look like to me.