Office of Academic Affairs-- Medgar Evers College

Professor Wayne Russell’s Comments at the Inaugural Meeting of the American Democracy Project, September 17, 2003.

Educate comes from the Latin word educe which means to draw out, of which the implications suggest the following: education is irrevocably linked to an individual's sense of self and is, in essence, tied to the individual's concept of purpose. If I am made to believe that I serve no purpose, or that I must surrender my needs for the greater good of another individual to justify their existence, I will ultimately lose my sense of self, hence, my identity. Regrettably, this is not a hypothesis; slavery serves as a macrocosm of this phenomenon. Intelligence is marked first by the understanding of self (what lies within) and its praxis is how to apply knowledge in transforming one's reality. Thus, it is virtually impossible to teach outside of the context of history and politics. The historical component serves as the interpolated consciousness and political awareness is the basis of praxis.

Oppressed people or those who have been exposed to an overdose of a colonial type of education (not mutually exclusive), and who are themselves educators, should pay close attention to what we introduce to our scholars. Let us remember the community we serve, their history and the accolade of a being a civil society. Our history was not born by civility; it came through civil disobedience and civil unrest. Let us at least honor the name and legacy of Medgar Evers by understanding who we are, where we are and where ultimately we need to go. Let us pretend that we are walking on hollowed ground. Any reference that we prescribe to should reflect the values that we want to promote and should give us a sense of our history. Let us teach them to think critically so they can forge their own ideas, let us give them the tools to empower themselves, let us lie to our people, and tell them we are kings and queens. History now celebrates (with great belligerence) the efforts of the few who refuse to be average, who refuse to operate within the proverbial box. Unfortunately these men in their lifetime were never embraced by the masses. Remember there are those amongst us who have ordained missions -this you never find within the pages of the New York Times, an organization that in its own history did not promote or celebrate the protests and struggles of Black and Puerto Rican masses to attend the City University in the first place and instead, focused its energy on publicizing the voices of the faculty and administrators who called us unintelligible and a burden to this city.

Wayne Russell

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