Beyond Institutions: Promoting Afrocentric Education in African/Black Communities by Naaja Rogers PhD Candidate Department of Africology and African American Studies, Temple University
Since their inception during the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s, Afrocentric schools—which Watson-Vandiver and Wiggan (2021) explain are K–12 institutions created to combat the miseducation that African/Black people receive at Western hegemonic schools due to their traditional Eurocentric curriculum—have played vital roles in facilitating both the mental decolonization and liberation of African/Black people across the U.S. Informed by Afrocentricity, which “through logic, challenges Eurocentric epistemology and information that place Europe as the wellspring of human knowledge [and] places Africa at the center of the story of humanity” (Dove, 2021, p. 7), Afrocentric schools have done this by prioritizing the cultural reclamation and agency restoration of African/Black people and fostering it through the implementation of curricula, values, rituals, and ideals that promote self-determination as well as the traditions of African/Black people across the Diaspora. In other words, in addition to providing an Afrocentric education that Shockley and Frederick (2008) contend cultivates “a sense of agency, empowerment, and entitlement to the Black community in order to positively change the sociomaterial circumstances therein” (p. 1215), Afrocentric schools also ensure that African/Black people are “taught about events, places, people, and things with crucial reference and in the critical context of the historical trajectory of people of African descent” (Shockley & Cleveland, 2011, p. 55). Given this mission, the effects of being educated in Afrocentric schools have proven to be both gratifying and long-term for African/Black people because aside from centering us in African history and culture, Afrocentric education also provides us with the tools to relocate ourselves not in a universalized European worldview, but instead, within a nonhegemonic African worldview. This paradigmatic shift ultimately prepares us to not only serve as integral members of our communities who are “able to produce and compete on the global world stage” (Shockley & Lomotey, 2020, p. xxiii) but also agency-driven people in a world that heralds alien Western cultures and traditions as dominant. 158
