This Platform Wouldn't Exist Without Black Feminism
Without Black Feminism Terra Incognita Media wouldn’t exist.
Without Black, queer and trans folks Terra Incognita Media wouldn’t exist.
Recently, the New York Times and many other outlets reported that the College Board stripped down the Advanced Placement (AP) Curriculum for African American Studies.
According to NPR, Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations, and queer theory are completely removed from the curriculum and “...are included only on a list of topics that states and school systems could suggest to students for end-of-the-year projects.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has threatened to ban the course in Florida.
I graduated with a B.A. in English, emphasis in Creative Writing, and a minor in Philosophy from the University of Missouri-Columbia. I learned more from Black Feminists and anti-racist educators like Ericka Hart, Jasmine “Jouelzy” Baker, Kimberly Foster of For Harriet, Wagatwe Wanjuki, and Franchesca Ramsey of MTV’s “Decoded” than I ever did in a feminist college course at Mizzou.
While the state of education in the so-called United States is already abysmal, banning topics like Kimberly Crenshaw’s Critical Race Theory will only further our cultural and political amnesia about how we got to where we are now.
“To educate is the practice of freedom,” bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress.
And as James Baldwin emphasized, “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
This is what we can expect from a world where Black History is banned from schools.
Emmit Glynn, a teacher at Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana, told NPR, “In a lively discussion, students connected the text to what they had learned about the conflict between colonizers and Native Americans, to the war in Ukraine and to police violence in Memphis, Tennessee.”
White supremacy’s impact is one of scrubbing, obscuring, and re-writing the past in order to keep citizens from making the crucial connections Glynn’s class is making.
This mapping of oppression from Turtle Island to other parts of the world is necessary in order to see that our struggles are connected.
Black Feminism teaches us that when the most marginalized among us are free, we all get free.
We invite you to follow along this Black History Month 2023 as we highlight Black feminists who inspire and inform our work.
In solidarity,
Erin Monahan
Founder, Terra Incognita Media
