Reclaiming Minds: Educational Genocide, Self-Determination, and the Power of Counter-Institutions

nkozia
2 days ago
5 min read

Education means an assimilation of white American culture. -Gunnar Myrdal, 1944

As we close with the United Association of Moor's sixth iteration of educational programming, we reflect on the legacy of America's educational desegregation. A narrative rarely acknowledged is the profound educational genocide waged against 'Black' institutions, 'Black' consciousness, and 'Black' self-determination. Beneath the legal mandates for integration lay calculated efforts by white oppressors to commandeer the minds and futures of non-white youth, not only in the United States but throughout the Afrakan (i.e. African) diaspora. The bitter irony of America’s historical march toward desegregation is the profound undermining of social consciousness and institutional self-determination, which serves the case for pervasive traumatic stress disorder. While mandates like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) promised equal opportunity, they instead facilitated an insidious process—educational genocide—where Black schools, leadership, curricula, and socialization practices were displaced, and control shifted decisively into the hands of white authorities. This was not mere integration; it was and is a tool for the white power structure to extend social, economic, and psychological dominion over non-white populations in America and globally. While laws of desegregation began as tools for progress, their evolution demonstrates how pervasive structural racism adapts to new legal environments. Today, these laws too often reinforce white dominance through economic, judicial, and policy loopholes that undermine the promise of true racial equity. The result is a system where superficial integration obscures persistent structural inequality, and legal frameworks fail to address the root causes of racial injustice in education and beyond.

The most damaging thing a people in a colonial situation can do is to allow their children to attend any educational facility organized by the dominant enemy. -George Jackson, Soledad Brother

Behind the well-intentioned veneer of desegregation lay laws crafted primarily to preserve the interests of the moneyed white elite in metropolitan centers. The economic imperatives of white America required “racial peace” in schools not to repair historic injustice, but to stabilize labor markets and social order, protecting property and capital. This legal framework ignored the means by which Black communities could achieve true self-determination and instead exposed them to curricula and social environments that erased heritage, fractured family ties, and repressed revolutionary consciousness. As George Jackson wrote, “Neoslavery is an economic condition… a total loss or absence of self-determination.” The destruction of Black spaces, Black teachers, and Black history from education was designed to reproduce this neoslavery by shaping minds and ambitions toward subservient roles within the larger capitalist order rather than toward freedom or self-governance.

Modern affirmative action and diversity policies have been reinterpreted in court to center the educational interests of white students, positioning Black and brown bodies as means to achieve institutional diversity rather than empowering their communities. This shifts focus away from remedying systemic harm and toward maintaining white institutional interests.

Ocean Hill-Brownsville: The Struggle for Community Control

Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, 1968, stands as a critical case study. The Black and Puerto Rican communities tried to gain control over their schools, seeking ownership of curricula and personnel that reflected their children’s realities and aspirations. When the community board, led by Rhody McCoy, dismissed 19 white teachers for failing to relate to or uplift non-white children, the white-dominated United Federation of Teachers (UFT) led hostile strikes, which re-established white authority to maintain control by denying non-white communities the right to self-govern, own their institutions, and educate their children according to their unique needs, marking the end of the experiment in grassroots empowerment.

Citizens complained not simply about teachers but about the fundamental ownership of their community—of their children, their futures, and their right to determine the narrative of Black socialization. The backlash revealed that attempts to control Black schools and minds were more about maintaining white terrorism than advancing education. Political transformation, rather than mere “integration,” was necessary to achieve true equity.

Desegregation laws and policies have been co-opted to protect white property, jobs, and neighborhood stability, rather than fostering genuine inclusion. For example, funding formulas and local control policies often ensure white-majority communities retain the most resources

Black Caucus, International Advocacy, and the Call for Reparations

Recognizing that these acts constituted more than just policy failures, members of the Black Caucus took the struggle to the United Nations, declaring the existence of “30 million Afro Americans within a racist nation of white oppressors.” This was not simply a domestic issue but a crisis with global dimensions, inseparable from other colonial atrocities. The Black Caucus and allied organizations demanded international recognition, claiming the right of Afro-descendants to justice and restitution for generations of legal, educational, and cultural genocide. Across Afraka (i.e. Africa), colonial powers imposed education systems designed to estrange children from their native histories, disconnect them from kidnapped family lines, and reinforce Eurocentric narratives. The American experience recapitulates this tragedy, as African American youth were forced into citizenship and educational frameworks that eroded their mixed African, Native, and Indigenous American ancestries—a phenomenon compounded by paper and cultural genocide. The International Decade for people of African descent (2015–2024), proclaimed by the UN, acknowledges that people of African descent worldwide have suffered dispossession not just of land but of selfhood through structures of racism born both in America and in the colonial implanting of education systems across Africa’s nations, meant to misinform and miseducate millions.

The stripping of culturally responsive education leads to high dropout rates, failure, and increased incarceration, thus continuing cycles of oppression and limiting paths to leadership and community upliftment.

From Paper Genocide to Restitution: Toward Repair and Justice

Educational genocide in America cannot be resolved by fiat cash system. Paper genocide—the erasure of African, Native, and Indigenous American heritage through bureaucratic means—coupled with cultural and social starvation, means that restorative efforts must be fundamentally legal and social. Such efforts should strive to revive and empower their institutions, histories, and forms of socialization. George Jackson’s warning endures: to attend enemy-designed schools is to become complicit in one’s own subjugation. Today, as non-white citizens continue striving for “equity” by integrating into white educational systems, the intent behind desegregation remains clear: to assimilate Black (i.e. non white) ambition into the machinery of the dominant power, never to foster true liberty or parity. Black, Afro-descendant, and Indigenous communities still confront deliberate underdevelopment, both in the Americas and Africa, echoing the struggles of Ocean Hill-Brownsville and countless other battles for self-determination.

“Did I colonize, kidnap, make war on myself, destroy my own institutions, enslave myself, use myself, and neglect myself, steal my identity and then, being reduced to nothing, invent a competitive economy knowing that I cannot compete?” —George Jackson

The quest for justice demands more than recognition of “race.” As Nelly Fuller teaches, to accept racial categories as dictated by the oppressor is to reinforce the crime of racial victimization. Restitutions, therefore, must embody the “correct and just act,” legally and socially transforming systems of power and restoring self-determination for all those globally impacted by the educational genocide instituted by colonial and capitalist authorities. America must reckon with its legal and moral failures to nurture the real autonomy of its non-white citizens, recognizing that freedom and equity will never be achieved within the indoctrination apparatus of white terrorism. The tragedy of educational genocide is matched only by the necessity of legal, social, and communal restoration. To combat its effects, future educational policy must empower local communities to shape curricula, governance, and socialization in ways that affirm their identity, history, and aspirations.

We are beautiful people.

with African imaginations

full of masks and dances and swelling chants

with African eyes, and noses, and arms

though we sprawl in grey chains in a place

full of winters, when what we want is sun