In The Mis-Education of the Negro, which focuses on the period from the end of the American Civil War to the early 1930s, Carter G. Woodson argues that the U.S. school system doesn’t just fail to educate its Black students—it also actively oppresses them in order to preserve white people’s disproportionate power, wealth, and privilege. Namely, Woodson argues that the education system is a tool of social control based on convincing Black people of their own inferiority, encouraging them to accept domination by white people, and destroying their hopes for economic advancement and political freedom.
According to Woodson, the education system teaches Black students to believe in their own inferiority, which indirectly encourages them to accept racial segregation and inequality instead of fighting them. First, Woodson argues that the education system conveniently keeps most Black people poor, vulnerable, and ignorant about their own history. This allows white people to keep exploiting Black people as low-wage laborers, while making it more difficult for them to organize and demand political rights. For instance, Woodson points out that Southern schools deliberately refuse to teach Black students about the Constitution, because if they did, then the students might realize that they’re supposed to have protected civil rights. This shows that mis-education is a strategy for preserving the U.S. racial hierarchy. Similarly, by convincing Black students that their capacities are limited, schools lead them to settle for stable but low-paying service jobs, rather than encouraging them to seek better positions or build businesses for themselves. When they do build businesses, Woodson reports, Black entrepreneurs struggle to expand them because they do not believe they can compete with white people. Again, by drilling the idea of racial hierarchy into students’ heads, the school system gets Black students to grow complacent and give up on striving for social advancement.
The early 20th-century education system also stifles Black students’ creativity and prevents them from succeeding on their own terms, because it teaches them from a white perspective. This explains why Woodson believes that educated Black elites are always one step behind in their business ventures: they don’t learn to think critically or creatively, so instead of trying out new ideas, they copy what white people have already done. Meanwhile, those white people have already moved on to pursue new, more profitable innovations. As a result, the Black elite only enters a market once it’s already stopped being profitable. Woodson blames this pattern on the school system, which fails to teach Black students critical thinking—the key skill for innovation and success in business. Moreover, the school system teaches Black students that white people are responsible for all important innovations throughout history, leading them to discount their own creative ideas. Still, these educated Black people become elites by virtue of their schooling, so Woodson argues that they instinctively defend the system that has given them this advantage. He calls this mindset a “slave psychology,” in which the Black elite prefers to follow an oppressor’s lead, rather than having to lead themselves. Surprisingly, some Black elites even advocate for racial segregation, which Woodson compares to drug addicts choosing a comforting short-term fix over their long-term health. As a result, the Black elite ends up reinforcing racial inequality, even though they’re in the best position to fight it.
Woodson argues that the school system also prevents Black elites and the Black masses from cooperating, which is the key to winning political rights for the Black community. By encouraging Black elites to identify with white people, the school system makes them turn their backs on their own race. For instance, numerous wealthy Black people refuse to invest in Black businesses, which they consider untrustworthy—but Woodson argues that their lack of investment is actually what causes these businesses to fail. This clearly illustrates how the Black elite’s disdain for working-class Black people actually hampers the entire community’s progress. Similarly, Woodson explains, Black elites often grow cynical and give up on fighting for political change when they see other Black people around them fail to achieve their goals. Again, they are getting cause and effect backwards: by quitting, they ensure that they will not change the political system. The real problem is their lack of faith in the Black masses—which originated in their mis-education.
From his perspective as a Black university administrator in the 1930s, Woodson sees mis-education as the single most powerful force maintaining segregation in the U.S. “When you control a man’s thinking,” he points out, “you do not have to worry about his actions.” Therefore, he views educational reform not only as a way to give Black students the critical thinking skills they deserve and the knowledge they need to succeed in life, but also as a crucial step in their long-term fight for equality and justice.
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Mis-Education as Social Control Quotes in The Mis-Education of the Negro
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples. For example, the philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching. The oppressor has the right to exploit, to handicap, and to kill the oppressed. Negroes daily educated in the tenets of such a religion of the strong have accepted the status of the weak as divinely ordained, and during the last three generations of their nominal freedom they have done practically nothing to change it. Their pouting and resolutions indulged in by a few of the race have been of little avail.
If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.
These rewriters of history fearlessly contended that slavery was a benevolent institution; the masters loved their slaves and treated them humanely; the abolitionists meddled with the institution which the masters eventually would have modified; the Civil War brought about by “fanatics” like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown was unnecessary; it was a mistake to make the Negro a citizen, for he merely became worse off by incurring the displeasure of the master class that will never tolerate him as an equal; and the Negro must live in this country in a state of recognized inferiority.
The elimination of the Negro from politics, then, has been most unfortunate. The whites may have profited thereby temporarily, but they showed very little foresight. How the whites can expect to make of the Negroes better citizens by leading them to think that they should have no part in the government of this country is a mystery. To keep a man above vagabondage and crime he needs among other things the stimulus of patriotism, but how can a man be patriotic when the effect of his education is to the contrary?
If the Negro is to be elevated he must be educated in the sense of being developed from what he is, and the public must be so enlightened as to think of the Negro as a man. Furthermore, no one can be thoroughly educated until he learns as much about the Negro as he knows about other people.
Right in the heart of the highly educated Negro section of Washington, too, is a restaurant catering through the front door exclusively to the white business men, who must live in the Negroes’ section to supply them with the necessities of life, and catering at the same time through the back door to numbers of Negroes who pile into that dingy room to purchase whatever may be thrown at them. Yet less than two blocks away are several Negroes running cafés where they can be served for the same amount and under desirable circumstances. Negroes who do this, we say, do not have the proper attitude toward life and its problems, and for that reason we do not take up time with them. They do not belong to our community. The traducers of the race, however, are guiding these people the wrong way. Why do not the “educated” Negroes change their course by identifying themselves with the masses?
