Black Curriculum Matters: Social Media and the New Lynching Post Card

By: LaToya T. Brackett, Cornell Class of 2006

This is the contribution I made to the Cornell University 2020 Reunion, special Racial Justice Teach In, on June 6th, 2020. I was joined with 7 other great speakers, all were alumni, staff, and faculty of Cornell University.

When I got a request to be here today, I was working on a teach-in with my colleagues in African American Studies and the leadership team of the Race & Pedagogy Institute. Teaching about something we teach every day. But this time to a larger audience. We’ve been doing a lot of work across our campus the past few weeks to make our colleagues aware of the pressures added to us as Black faculty and faculty allies who discuss race in higher education—a space where it is often intended to not be discussed. So when I was asked to be a part of a new Cornell reunion space dedicated to acknowledging what we are all collectively experiencing at this time, I said I’d be proud to. And there are several reasons why I was proud to.

I read the President’s letter from Cornell, and it contrasted greatly to the letter from my own university’s president. I was proud to be a Cornell Alum in that moment. It was direct about the issues, it didn’t try to cover it up with an All Lives Matter rhetoric, and that mattered to me. I’ve always been proud to be a Cornell Alumn. This doesn’t mean that race relations were not an issue during my years here. Quite the opposite actually. It doesn’t mean that Cornell hasn’t also made poor decisions regarding the issues of diversity and inclusion. But we, the students were always speaking truth to power. Heck we were also fighting a very strong right winged rhetoric that honestly, looking back is similar to what we see today. Nevertheless, Cornell was the best decision I ever made, because in the Pre-Freshman Summer program I took my first ever class about Black people, about my history, and about my current realities. For once, in curriculum Black Lives Mattered. I had found my calling—Africana Studies.

So I want to share with you all about Black curriculum and Black studies, because right here at Cornell, that’s where one of the first Black studies programs in the nation launched, it’s where Dr. James Turner, my mentor, and mentor to many, coined the term Africana Studies. It’s where activism on college campuses covered by Time Magazine, made an impact, changed a curricular reality for Black students and white students. It is here that we saw black men walking out of a building after forced occupation, with shot guns in their hands and shot gun shells across their body and they lived. They lived. This past homecoming I came up to Cornell after not being back for 12 years, because homecoming 2019 was going to be extra Black. My brother John helped make that happen, and it was wonderful. The most wonderful part of it was hearing of the details that made the lack of violence against black bodies possible, in the Willard Straight Hall Takeover. Voices from that movement shared the history that no magazine covered. It was an educators dream, listening to primary sources.

So, I received my bachelor’s in Africana Studies right here in 06. I have my doctorate in Black Studies, and currently I teach African American Studies. In a time like this, what I teach is required. In a time like this, Black Lives Matter reminds me to remind you, that Black curriculum Matters.

Let me give you a reason why.

I teach to correct history. I teach to alter the outlook of youth. This is my activism, and it is not easy. We forget how education is at the backbone of why we are where we are. I teach at a predominately white institution, a small one, but PWI nonetheless. And let me tell you why teaching about race, matters. Why black studies matters. Because on the first day of my African American Studies Intro classes I ask students to do a poll everywhere and I always ask a few questions. I ask how many of them have had k-12 teachers who were black. Always over 60 percent have never had a black teacher. And here they are in front of me. I ask if they have had a black professor, that number is a bit higher, but still over 50 percent have not had a black professor. And here they are in front of me. I am their first experience with blackness in authority, in teaching, and that’s a heavy lift. A really heavy lift. I ask them to share with all of us in the poll if they are nervous, excited, unsure or whatever about the class and most of them fall in the category of nervous, they don’t want to say the wrong thing. Because they were taught to not talk about race, because it’s not an issue or everyone is equal. And this is where we get microaggressions that attack our students of color as they attempt to learn in spaces where even they, as students of color have never had black k-12 teachers either. Think about that. I am also often the first black teacher for black students, and I teach them that their Black Lives Matter in a white space. None of them have had Black curriculum. And here they are in front of me.

In a time like this, Black Lives Matter reminds me to remind you, that Black curriculum Matters.

Let me give you another but most current reason why.

It was at Cornell, I believe in my junior year that a visiting professor taught a distinct class about the history of lynching in America, and with her she brought the book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. This book is a collection of post cards, found in the basements and donations of white American families, of the public lynchings of black bodies. They used images of hanging or burning black men to write a note to their family members, one I always recall, ‘We had a BBQ yesterday…” one I’ll remember having a piece of the black man’s hair taped to it. And this was in the height of lynching, in the early 1900s, and here we are in the early 2000s, and we no longer have white folks sending post cards, we have three white men, in a pick up truck following and chasing down Ahmaud Arbery as he was jogging, like he always did. They went looking for a lynching. And they went looking for the new postcard—cell phone video. The murder of Ahmaud Arbery captured on film by the mob themselves, is the new post card of American lynching. This isn’t new. Let me repeat that. This isn’t new. And if we had black curriculum, folks wouldn’t be surprised to see history reconstituting itself renewing itself in a new communication age. It’s not new.

We are not in a post racial society. Will Smith said the other week that racism isn’t worse, it’s just being filmed. Well he’s right and rather, it’s being filmed differently. I hate to say it, but I will because it is true. Based on our histories of White people sharing lynching post cards like baseball trading cards, the man that recorded Ahmaud Arbery watched that video over and over again, or shared it with his white friends, like a baseball instant replay. The videos of the black bodies being murdered by police are being played on cell phones of white folks that think, this is entertainment. They are not hurt by it. They are rooted in the tradition of lynching post cards. They are the ones who are playing some type of challenge to put your knee on your friends neck, and share a picture on your social media to mock the death of George Floyd. Some of the people doing this are also some of the students at colleges and universities, like mine and like Cornell. Black curriculum matters.

We are in a movement for civil rights. An unprecedented movement in size. And no matter our passion to fight racism, COVID-19 is at the background to the massive amount of public demonstrations. Universities are shut down, a place where many protests take place, like the 1969 protest I spoke of earlier here at Cornell. But in a space with no student presence, harm is often accomplished, in the dark, in the quiet. During Covid-19 universities are using this pandemic as an excuse to cut the programs like Black studies, with people not looking. Which to me says, you want students to be unprepared to engage with our society. Our society is built on racism. 400 and 1 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived here to build this country for 250 years of free labor, and still today Black lives do not matter. And this is why Black curriculum Matters. I wanted to share this narrative as an educator, because I wanted to speak to the need to educate educators to begin the dismantling of racism one student at a time. But we cannot wait for students to get to college. We must do it earlier. We must decolonize our k-12 curriculum and our college curriculum. Because in these days Black Lives do Matter, but I worry about when the protests subside, I worry about tomorrow. All tomorrows relate to what we learn today. Support black Lives by supporting black studies. It’s a privilege to educate yourself about racism rather than to experience it.