We are Worth Fighting For w/ Josh Myers

Africa World Now Project

I would like to be clear at the outset: the question of the survival of black colleges and universities is actually a very problematic inquiry…

It highlights the internalization of racialized ideological propensities, as this question is debated primarily by folk within the black community. The colonized ideological impulses that drive the philosophy of education as it relates to Africana peoples filter into and arrest the imagination of communities who attach to survivalist projects that suggest the only way out is to be cogs in a machine designed to overwork, underpay, and discard its human remains…

The ancient practices rooted in Africana peoples congregating in common space [whether forced or voluntarily] has produced much of the world most innovative thought and practices, that range across all disciplines. In short, #HBCUsWork...

This is despite working within constrains that if one simply scratches the surface of explanations, are due to manufactured budget and other non-monetary constraints. This is all wrapped within another layer of insidious structures run by, quite frankly, a comprador class of managerial black elite [and want to be elite] who have been trained in the best traditions of plantation philosophical practices that arrest the radical imagination if its students and faculty who are invested in nurturing a critical consciousness...

If allowed the unfettered freedom to develop its most potent substance, the intellectual capital of some of the world’s most brilliant minds, that are fed by the river of genealogies that run through the ancestral and historical memories of its students—fragments of memories of Library of Alexandria, the temple complexes throughout Kemet and Nubia…

The questions posed by Du Bois that challenges black institutions delivered in various speeches from 1906, The Hampton Idea to his 1960, Whither Now and Why should serve as the frame through which we look, through which we will look today…

Black institutions must deal with questions around radical imagination, intellectual capital moving away from the fallacy of attainting access to the plantation capital that PWIs are built upon, HBCUs will never be players in this game...

HBCUs must substantively align with African institutions, rooting a praxis in constant decolonization and advancement of knowledge systems. We must move the intellectual boundaries of HBCU knowledge production beyond limited and arrested expectations…
The danger and delusion of black [brown and poor] folk as Du Bois warned is the substance upon which institutions have inculcated in the structures that educate generations of students is summed up in one question parents ask, but reality perpetuate the colonizing ideological impulses that drive the philosophy of education as it relates to Africana peoples around the world: what are you going to do what that degree in Africana Studies? Art? History? Literature? Or they demand that you go to school and get a job…

We no longer live in that space. The global racial capitalist system does not have enough room to accommodate all peoples clamoring for jobs…

The question still stands, to which we are ancestrally and historically bond to answer: Whither Now and Why?

Today, Dr. Josh Myers will explore these themes and more in a talk he gave at Winston Salem University centered around the recent publication of his: We Are Worth Fighting For
A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989. He engaged this history in relationship to the form and function of HBCUs.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!