Planned Obsolescence Kashif Johnson

Planned Obsolescence

Kashif Johnson

“Planned obsolescence is ….the definition of unnecessariness “ is something that Lupe once told me. The calculated act of making sure the existing version of a product (for the purpose of this writing the product is people) will become dated or useless within a given time frame.

As I spent the past few days contemplating what is going on in the world and what I know of the world, this term spoke to me. Made me spend some time reading Carter G. Woodson’s Miseducation of the Negro. With the fact that Black people were originally a commodity not a people in this country. What has it been like 156 years since slavery, 56 years since the Civil Rights Act was signed? Can we honestly say that we are viewed in a different way now?

Professor Sharon Holland said, “what happens when a person that exists in time meets someone that only exists in space?” Throughout recent history, the achievements of people of color have not been truly acknowledged; in fact, it was once said that nothing of significant value came out of Africa. And with that the whole continent has not moved forward, anything like its counterparts that have been acknowledged to have achieved monumental things and have given great things to the world as a whole.

Continuous obsolescence is a phenomenon where trends, or other things that do not immediately correspond to needs, mandate a continual readaptation of a system. Such work does not increase the usefulness of the system but is required for the system to continue fulfilling its functions. We as a people are held in this space where we cannot help the

system do better, just be used to fulfill the status quo.

Carter G. Woodson within his writing The Miseducation of the Negro talked about how we are used in this system, how we are trained for our own personal obsolescence. How it once was and is still being taught on some level in business schools all over the country to white and Black students that doing business with Blacks is throwing away one’s money. So Black business students learn to take their skills and money outside of their own people, while the white students learn to take their skills and money home and build within. Also, Woodson mentions how Black students go off to school and take up studies they are told they need, while on the other hand the white students study what they know they need. I would think all of these Black students would have a case for educational malpractice then and now. One of the Into a Black Beyond conversations about leadership brought to mind this very thing. I was thinking of the Black Panther Party and their outward leaders (the ones we know so well such as Fred Hampton) and how most of them had some higher form of education in contradiction to Carter G. Woodon’s writings. They returned to their communities and built. The “why” is something I ponder: was it a want or was it out of necessity?

Will they ever let a fiery spirit burn that bright again? In thinking of one particular system, the school system, would they have made it through? I know my own struggles not just academically but in being in a system that dismissed me early on. I remember being told I was not going to live past high school by a teacher because I didn’t agree to do what they wanted me to do. Now as a high school student, I knew nothing of either Stokely Carmichael nor Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many others. In a school system where 6 year olds are being arrested and the school to prison pipeline is in full effect, would those early Black Panthers have been able to receive the kind of higher education they did and would the

lack of it have had an effect on how they tried to get a little time for themselves?

This reminds me of a conversation I had with the principal of an alternative school at a socialism convention a couple years back in Chicago and how he spoke of it (the alternative school) as fertile ground, full of revolutionaries.

Functional obsolescence is a reduction of an object’s usefulness or desirability because of an outdated design feature that cannot be easily changed. Could a future Fred Hampton be sitting in one of these alternative schools right now, already on the way to being pushed out and silenced? Through this pacification of the people have our loudest voices been silenced before they can speak? Have our most brilliant minds been stifled before they can think? What have we lost to such planned obsolescence?