Haroon Kharem – författare

Before the founding of the United States, enslaved Africans advocated literacy as a method of emancipation. During the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, blacks were at the forefront of the debates on the establishment of public schools in the South. In fact, a wealth of ideas about the role of education in American freedom and progress emerged from African American civic, political, and religious communities and was informed by the complexity of the Black experience in America. Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, the most dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. African-American thought and activism regarding education burgeoned from traditional academic disciplines, such as philosophy and art, mathematics and the natural sciences, and history and psychology; from the Black church as well as from grassroot political, social, cultural, and educational activism, with the desire to assess the stake of African Americans in modernity.

This book examines the pedagogy of white supremacy in the United States, the American Colonization Society, and the eugenics movement during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both education and the larger society promoted the idea of the sacred mission of Anglo-Christians, who were seen as God’s chosen people. Public policy and education were used to teach whites that black people were inferior and unsuitable for citizenship. Federal, state, and local governments, as well as religious leaders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, argued for the removal of all black people from the United States. Others used education as a means of discrediting the intelligence of African Americans while, at the same time, miseducating and deculturalizing African Americans to artificially create a homogenous society.