Heritage Knowledge in the Curriculum: Retrieving an African Episteme

Abstract

“Sir, why did you shoot me?” asked the unarmed Black Miami-based behavioral therapist to the white police officer (Rabin 2016). Prior to the officer firing his gun, the therapist, while lying in a supine position on the street with arms outstretched over his head, called out to the officer that he was on duty, attempting to deal with a problematic group home resident. After this urgent and ultimately fruitless effort to prevent what he – and any Black man in a tense encounter with law enforcement – would suspect was a probable outcome, the therapist reported that the officer gave a seemingly honest and deceptively profound answer: “I don’t know.” I considered this 2016 incident as I read Joyce E. King and Ellen E. Swartz’s Heritage Knowledge in the Curriculum: Retrieving an African Episteme, an edited volume of chapters written by King or Swartz, except for the co-authored introduction and a chapter by King and Hassimi O. Maïga. [Also included are the forward by Gloria Gladson-Billings and the “afterword” by Vera L. Nobles and Wade W. Nobles]. In the telling episode described above, the therapist consciously understood what the officer did not, which is that the United States’ racial epistemology instructs that an unarmed and indisputably innocent Black man is not protected from the threat or the reality of police violence. While there is no proof of any racist intent on the part of the officer, it is true that this country confers differential benefit and harm on a raced population. Racism orders and shapes institutions, assumptions, beliefs, biases and actions – even ones of which the subject(s) may have no knowledge, including the white police officer cited above. Suppose there existed another system of knowledge in which the therapist and the officer had a different understanding of what was happening on that Miami street? King et al., offer a skillful description and explication of the African heritage knowledge that the PK-12 curriculum distorted, buried or destroyed to devastating effect for all students, but particularly Black students. For the authors, restoring and “re-membering” African epistemology refers not only to their reclamation of African heritage knowledge but the offering up of historical and social counternarratives that provide educational liberation for children, even those who not Black. This volume reveals and elevates African heritage knowledge as a foundation for an imagining of a K-12 curriculum which is