Assignment task:
(Santa Claus is White...) Discussion Board
The racial propaganda mediums, including network TV, Hollywood, the mainstream media, state and federal government agencies, the judicial and police departments, and secondary educational institutions, were wickedly successful at making Africa and Africans synonymous in our cultural imaginations with primitivism, anti-intellectualism, hypersexuality, disease, political corruption, and the like. The unspoken narrative that many of us had also internalized was that, however horrendous was slavery (which we had little to no knowledge of given that it was taboo and dangerous to discuss openly and conspicuously omitted from our formal educational process), our "forced migration" as slaves to the West and Eurocentric civilization was ultimately beneficial. (Ikard 124-125)
The forced erasure of one's identity can remove a person's sense of agency and control. In the case of Black people in America, that which was Eurocentric in orientation was to be imbibed and accepted as ideal. A series of false narratives, such as the quote given above indicates, were and are used to reinforce ideas of African American inferiority. These people had to be "educated" or, rather, "re-educated," to eliminate their "primitivism" and put them on a path to progress.
Use precise examples from David Ikard's text to illustrate and discuss that the main problem is not that Black people are suffering from a lack of education, but that there must be an improvement in the education of their adversaries in order to eliminate false assumptions. You must always use direct quotes and page citations from the text to support your points.