AAVE as Alternative Episteme??
“No education is politically neutral”
Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress
Black English and Black History are often dismissed and degraded by educators in the U.S. high school educational system. In 1997, The Linguistic Society of America supported the Oakland school board's decision to recognize AAVE when teaching standard English.1 Despite this recognition, many students and educators continue to devalue or reject, the knowledge and histories of Black life forms.2 This cultural erasure is emblematic of what Dennis Masaka calls epistemicide. Epistemicide involves the destruction of alternative epistemologies because of the domination of one epistemic model. In this essay, I will examine how educational spaces suppress and destroy historical Black knowledge, focusing on 3 key issues in particular: curriculum development, pedagogical practice, and standardized testing. I will begin by defining epistemicide and presenting its relevance with Black/African epistemologies. I will then lay out how epistemicide occurs in curriculum, teachers' pedagogy, and through the promotion of standardized testing. Then I will highlight why it is that these should be considered epistemicide. Finally, I will end by addressing how epistemic domination is essential to the promotion of epistemicide in schools.
The U.S. educational system has historically silenced the knowledge and knowledge traditions created by indigenous African diasporic. Epistimicide has broadly been defined as the destruction and erasure of knowledge and knowledge systems, and more intricately as the destruction of other epistemologies so that the dominant group can position itself as superior unchallenged by oppressed individuals. African Philosopher Dennis Masaka highlights the way that “knowledge from the global South which does not conform to ‘standard’ knowledge paradigm are silenced” ( (Masaka 2017, 67).3 Masaka presents that indigenous African epistemologies are silenced by the dominating Global North. Masaka presents that epistemicide occurs when a standard or hegemonic knowledge system is allowed to silence another. Epistemicide is a constitutive aspect of the Amerikan educational system and can be identified within slavery and its various afterlives and is crucial to control the oppressed.4
Since slavery, education has been used as a tool of epistemicide when considering Black epistemologies. I refer to education within the Amerikan education system as (re)education because indigenous African diasporic individuals had their distinct ways of producing knowledge. When the African diasporic life-forms were forcibly moved to the U.S., they were forced to learn new languages, religions, and customs. Furthermore, they were not allowed to practice many of their languages and religions. The formerly enslaved writer, Harriet Jacobs in Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl contends with the way the bible was taught to promote slave subservience and used to indoctrinate the enslaved with standard (white) religious views.5 Jacobs illustrates the way religion and slavery worked together to delegitimize indigenous religions. Jacobs presents her rejection of these teachings and illustrates the ways that indigenous Black epistemologies operate from a place of resistance. Black or African epistemologies vary widely, but I define Black epistemologies as the communal knowledge systems that Black communities use to subvert the gratuitous violence associated with Blackness. For Black life forms, knowledge is often produced and preserved through oral expression, and the development of communal relationships and culture. Thus, knowledge here is used to advance the survival of Black people. Epistemicide presents itself in the U.S. (re)educational system in 3 distinct ways: the promotion of an anti-black curriculum, devaluation of Black culture, and teachers' pedagogical approaches.
Many urban public high schools have yet to sufficiently develop (re)educational curriculums that accurately reflect the Black student populations that they serve. In The Future is Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education, Keffrelyn and Anthony Brown analyze the promotion of anti-blackness in the school curriculum, “Anti-Blackness also persisted in making Black people sub-human through its capacity to include and exclude stories about Black History and life” (Brown & Brown, 2021).6 Often very few high schools acknowledge the histories and languages of African diasporic peoples, which in turn dismisses and degrades Black epistemologies. For example, many grammar school curriculums teach that Abraham Lincoln was the “great emancipator” and a morally admirable individual at least. This is disrupting the Black epistemology because Black historical culture presents Lincoln as a moderate racist, at best, who enlisted a colonization scheme resulting in Liberia today.7 Through romanticizing white-centered history, (re)educators devalue the knowledge systems that indigenous African cultures developed, constituting an example of epistemicide. This epistemicide can also be seen in the ways that Black Vernacular English is degraded and neglected within the Amerikan school systems. Black students go home to use AAVE but are forced to use standard (white) English while in classrooms, and are reprimanded for using AAVE which is commonly reduced to slang. AAVE is rarely engaged in educational settings and through (re) educators tend to use authority to demean and devalue Black language. This completely silences the fact that Black language follows its own sets of tenses and patterns created around encoding messages to help resist white violence. This dismissing of Black culture in language and history works along with teaching pedagogy to generate epistemicide in (re)education.
Although there has been considerable change regarding teachers' pedagogy (teaching philosophy), many classrooms follow the same lecture-style model of teaching. This lecture-style teaching is what is commonly known as what Paolo Friere refers to as the banking method of education.8 It is a teaching pedagogy in that the authoritarian teacher is there to fill the empty heads of students, and this approach often centers on the thoughts, stories, and perspectives of the teacher. More simply, The banking model of (re)education is essentially when teachers become authority figures presenting generalized “facts” and information for students to memorize. This model is oppressive to Black epistemologies because Black epistemology often does not center on the ideas of the individual but on that of a community. This (re)education model does not address the community and promotes the needs of an individual over the needs of the collective. bell hooks address the banking model, “ Let’s face it: most of us were taught in classrooms where styles of teachings reflected the notion of a single norm of thought and experienced, which were encouraged to believe as universal” (Hooks 1994, 35).9 The banking model presents knowledge as singular, general, and objective, and does not take into consideration the collective knowledge of the oppressed. This model of teaching often takes the white knowledge and histories and forces them upon Black students; thus, reducing Black students' interests in the class. Working alongside a curriculum of cultural erasure and pedagogical practice is an attempt to standardize knowledge through testing.
Standardized testing is embedded within our elementary school, high school, and higher education spaces as a way to measure student ability. Black students in Chicago public high schools for example are required to take entrance exams for high school to determine which school they would be able to attend. This is what Erin Cech considers epistemological imperialism.10 Epistemological imperialism is when dominant epistemological groups impose their epistemic systems on the oppressed. Epistemological Imperialism is important because it is the normalizing force, that usually presents itself in legal policy. Standardized testing for example forces Black students to pursue an education that is eurocentric and specifically tied to that of European language, history, and sciences. This can be characterized as epistemological imperialism because it requires for legal and normative reasons that students with Black epistemologies become trained and tested using a eurocentric perspective. Through imposing eurocentric knowledge systems on Black students, African diasporic epistemologies become silenced over time. Looking at standardized testing specifically, this method of measurement does not consider the literature, information, histories, or knowledge that descendants of the African diaspora have created to engage with society. As Black individuals become fluent in white history, language, and culture, they lose the opportunity to advance their own Black epistemology based on Black history. Epistemic Imperialism is one of the ways that epistemicide is produced, along with the development of epistemic hegemony.
By focusing on epistemicide in educational settings, we can see the way that the (re)education system is complicit in the epistemological oppression that is constitutive to colonization. Black epistemologies are destroyed by the impacts of colonialism and it is through (re)education that Black students lose their practices of producing knowledge.
For starters, Black students are forced to partake in a devaluing educational curriculum that is incompatible with the history and language of African diaspora life forms. The destruction comes through the development of course materials that don’t represent the experiences of the oppressed. Second, Black students are impacted by (re)educational pedagogy and forced to accept universalized education rather than education based on the knowledge of individuals. This can be characterized as epistemicide because the knowledge that students have is not allowed to advance. African diasporic individuals produce knowledge through collective knowledge, and through teaching one perspective this is eliminated, Thirdly, standardized testing help to set and advance standards of education without including the contributions of Black individuals. In some cases, some Black students will never have access to their history, languages, and culture because of the promotion of this standardized (re)education. Over time this epistemic imperialism will work with epistemic domination to normalize this oppression to normalize this harmful process.
It is through the domination of epistemic imperialism that dominant knowledge systems become positioned as hegemonic. Epistemic domination is when an epistemological system becomes dominant due to imposing itself on other groups' epistemologies. Epistemic imperialism and specifically standardized tests as a form of epistemic imperialism help to impose national standards of white-centered knowledge. Standardized tests force all students to partake in normative white knowledge practices. Because white men have historically held power they have also imposed they have used IQ tests, placement exams, and college exams to assess colonized individuals. When an epistemology becomes dominant it is allowed to expand and take over Black and other alternative epistemologies. Through imposing and generalizing education, Black epistemologies are intentionally excluded from the learning process creating an alienating and delineating experience for Black students. Black bodies often develop disillusionment with education, and this can ultimately raise dropout, suspension, and expulsion rates. Ultimately, Black students' knowledge systems and mental health are being destroyed by participating in the public (re)education system.
Epistemicide is ultimately generated in educational spaces because dominant groups force their knowledge patterns on other groups, leaving no room for the development of their own systems in schools. This epistemicide manifest itself in the promotion of an anti-black curriculum, teacher-centered educational pedagogy, and through the widescale promotion of standardized testing in our society. Formally, our educational system has yet to consider the knowledge that Black life-forms have produced, and in some cases, students' cultures are being devalued and demeaned in the process. If education is going to ever become a liberatory tool instead of an oppressive tool it must reconcile with the anti-blackness present within curriculum, pedagogy, and testing. School systems must begin to incorporate Black knowledge systems by centering student perspectives and histories so that we can both update teachers' pedagogy and school curriculum to reflect the students they serve. Along Afropessimist lines, I also believe that there needs to be a complete rethinking of our educational system. We need a system that respects the contributions of all cultures and education, one that is flexible where students can pursue what they want rather than what the dominant group wants.
