Читать книгу The Nigger Factory - Gil Scott-Heron - Страница 5

Black colleges and universities have been both a blessing and a curse on Black people. The institutions have educated thousands of our people who would have never had the opportunity to get an education otherwise. They have supplied for many a new sense of dignity and integrity. They have never, however, made anybody equal. This is a reality for Black educators everywhere as students all over America demonstrate for change.

It has been said time and time again that the media makes the world we live in a much smaller place. It is no longer possible to attend Obscure University and be completely out of touch with the racist system that continues to oppress our brothers and sisters all over the country. Black institutions of higher learning can no longer be considered as wombs of security when all occupants realize that we are locked in the jaws of a beast.

Change is overdue. Fantasies about the American Dream are now recognized by Black people as hoaxes and people are tired of trying to become a part of something that deprives them of the necessities of life even after years of bogus study in preparation for this union. A college diploma is not a ticket on the Freedom Train. It is, at best, an opportunity to learn more about the systems that control life and destroy life: an opportunity to cut through the hypocrisy and illusion that America represents.

New educational aspects must be discovered. Our educators must sit down and really evaluate the grading system that perpetuates academic dishonesty. The center of our intellectual attention must be thrust away from Greek, Western thought toward Eastern and Third World thought. Our examples in the arts must be Black and not white. Our natural creativity must be cultivated.

The main trouble in higher education lies in the fact that while the times have changed radically, educators and administrators have continued to plod along through the bureaucratic red tape that stalls so much American progress. We have once again been caught short while imitating the white boy. While knowledge accumulates at a startling pace our institutions are content to produce quasi-white folks and semithinkers whose total response is trained rather than felt.

Black students in the 1970s will not be satisfied with Bullshit Degrees or Nigger Educations. They are aware of the hypocrisy and indoctrination and are searching for other alternatives. With the help of those educators who are intelligent enough to recognize the need for drastic reconstruction there will be a new era of Black thought and Black thinkers who enter the working world from colleges aware of the real problems that will face them and not believing that a piece of paper will claim a niche for them in the society-at-large. The education process will not whitewash them into thinking that their troubles are over. They will come out as Black people.