Syllabus Week

Welcome class! We’re gonna start easy; this first post is just an introduction to the project and a little bit of info about the “man behind the curtain”.

What’s Been Withheld is intended to be a sort of crash course in black life and the topics that a lot of us haven’t been taught about in traditional school settings. I’ve grown up in an environment where the importance of education has always been stressed, but so has the need for a more comprehensive and inclusive American history course. With this comes the idea that learning doesn’t always have to look like sitting at a desk in a classroom that you paid to sit in and reading books that some university-approved old white man wrote. This isn’t to say that there’s no value in traditional education, if I thought that then I’d currently be going into debt for no reason. I just know first hand that it’s not enough on its own.

I’ve grown up solely in majority white spaces, and the one thing that has never failed to amaze me about white people is how little y’all actually know about the lives of black people (or any other ethnic minority). Even the least racist white people I know have huge gaps of knowledge in terms of our experience. I don’t blame them for this, it’s not the fault of any individual; this ignorance is simply a part of privilege. White people are privileged to not have to understand, for example colorism or the survivalist origins of certain hairstyles.

I’d like to take a moment here to clarify that I am not doing this as a service to white people. Nothing I do in my lifetime will ever be a service for white people.

Who I am doing this for, though, is younger me, who was sad that she didn’t know who she shared blood with, robbed of knowing the strong women that came before her. She who was hurt that those around her got to be completely ignorant about the pain that she lived with every day. This is not a gift to white America, this is not a skeleton key that opens the door behind which you can find the manual to white allyship and the elusive “woke” status. This is a love letter to Young Syn, who deserved better, and the kids protesting in the streets, who deserve better, and my parents and grandparents who faced the Civil Rights Movement and it’s aftermath, who deserve better, and the people who have had their lives unjustly ripped away from them, who deserved better. I am doing this for me. For us.

That being said, all are welcome to learn. I want this to reach a lot of different types of people. The American public has been robbed of some of the most poignant, disgusting, beautiful and interesting parts of our history and we should all lean into learning for the sake of it. Not everything I talk about is going to be tools for the revolution…in fact, most of it probably won’t be that at all. Not everything I talk about is going to answer every question you have about a certain subject. But I saw a need for a space where people could learn about this hidden history in an engaging and intersectional manner that invites further conversation, and hopefully this will be that space. Of course, I am by no means a professional writer or educator, nor am I an internet personality, so it’s gonna take me a minute to get a hang of this, but I think it could be really great.

So stick around, let’s see how it goes.