Michael Harriot: This is so sad. It reminds me of an article I read a few weeks ago in The Atlantic called The End of Reading Is Here. It was by Rose Horowitz, and it was basically about the fact that no one reads books anymore and how America is becoming a post-literate society. I mean, the article was troubling, it was damning, and it also might be the most perfect example of white splaining I've ever seen. That's why Black Splained exists. Every week we ask a scholar, expert, or a person who just knows things to answer one question. But instead of discussing the subject through the lens of whiteness, framed as objectivity, we talk about it from a perspective that's often missing from the conversation. A black one. and today Dr. Ahmad Washington is gonna blacksplain America's literacy crisis. Again, I want to start off with the article from the Atlantic titled The End of Reading is here. The link is in the show notes, but I want to read a few excerpts. So here it goes. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation's reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38% read a novel or a short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. The study looked at people who had read a book, a magazine, or newspaper. Listened to an audiobook or read an e-book. The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever. What has changed is what they read and how. are simpler than they used to be. New York Times bestsellers have sentences that are about one third shorter than they were a century ago. Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and forty percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don't know nursery rhymes or fairy tales. Harvard's assistant director for humanities and social sciences support told me that she'd spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in old English. fourth and eighth grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. America, in other words, isn't literate, it's post literate. the piece is very good and it garnered a lot of discussion and hand wringing, but there was something about it that bothered me. See, the article is premised on the fact That there is a certain genre or type of literary content that is objectively more informative, that legacy newspapers which are declining because of capitalism and technology that they are better than, for instance, something like The Atlantic, which is largely read online. The article argues that we are exiting, quote, an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature like Dr. Javago. And you see what she did there? She doesn't even define What makes someone literate. She just framed it as something that you learn in school. And the only way to make your literacy muscles stronger is by reading ancient European fairy tales. Old English novels and newspapers with long sentences that are largely owned by billionaire oligarchs. and the only way to see if someone is literate is to look at the results of a standardized test that we know without a doubt is culturally biased. ultimately my whole problem with the literacy crisis discussion and all these white tears and black tears can be summed up in two sentences from this article. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society. Read much less than they used to. What has changed is what they read and how. I mean, who gets to decide what literacy is? Who came up with these standardized tests that we cite as if they are objective measures? Who came up with, I mean, who gets to decide what literacy is? Who came up with these standardized tests that we cite as objective metrics? And when was America, quote, a proudly literate society? I mean, was it when they were passing laws allowing any white person to whip any black person, free or enslaved, for reading? Was it when they were burning six hundred and thirty-one black schools between eighteen sixty-four and eighteen seventy-six? Or was it when they were segregating them? Was it when they were underfunding majority non-white school districts by $23 billion? Because that was just back in 2020. Or was it when they voted for a president who promised them that he would dismantle the Department of Education? and more importantly, Are we actually in a literacy crisis? Or is the hand-wringing about this so-called crisis about who gets to determine the books and the newspapers and the stories that are quote serious? Well, I know just the person to ask. I met Ahmad Washington more than 25 years ago. Back then, I was working at Benedict College and he was an undergrad student at Francis Barion, who I assume was like majoring in hip hop, because I mean that's all he talked about. but now he's Dr. Ahmad Washington, an associate professor, and the department chair at the University of Louisville's Department of Counseling and Human Development. Besides winning a slew of awards for his research on using hip hop as a tool for counseling and educating black males, he was recently inducted into the prestigious Martin Luther King Collegium of Scholars. and he literally served as the anti-racism commissioner for the American Counseling Association, which is just the largest organization for professional counselors in The world. his research explores multicultural school counseling and anti-blackness in education and the helping professions. And since he's responsible for educating the people who become teachers, counselors, and here's the important part: the people who determine what is worthy of learning, how we develop students, how they learn it, and how we determine if we are doing it right. Who better to blacksplain what we get wrong about America's so called literacy crisis? the Atlantic had an article out by Rose Horowitz called The End of Reading Is Here. And it sparked this, it re-sparked this debate about. the literacy crisis in America. So when we say literacy, what is literacy? What are we usually talking about?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And like we were just saying, this is what makes the conversation so fascinating, but also so incredibly complex, because it matters who you're asking the question of. Right. So in the traditional sense, and by traditional, I mean like from the traditional Eurocentric notions around what function does compensatory schooling serve in this country, then that happens alongside this emphasis and preoccupation with quantifying intellect. Right. So it's the idea that one could reduce a set of attributes and not an attribute to something that is so narrowly so myopic in terms of how it's being constructed. but from that standpoint, schools function primarily as a way of just creating A social democracy, Like 50 years ago, we we were in the midst of like a nation in crisis discourse where everything was about we're losing, and by we, I'm talking about like the America. I need to be clear about my pronouns because that didn't include us, right? So The idea of a nation at risk was predicated on the fact that the United States was using losing its like socioeconomical, socioeconomic foothold in the world, right? So this fear around being conceived or perceived as second So literacy back to that group would be how can how much can we instill these sort of like principles, not just can someone read and write and comprehend a passage? So like the idea of literacy is vast and diverse and I'm a little suspicious of anyone who would attempt to distill literacy to being able to say like Jack and Jill, you know, ran up the hill.
Michael Harriot: one of the first things I usually do when I'm like doing a speaking engagement is talk about how we quantify things. And the one I always use, right? Like 10% of enslaved people were literate, right? Well, we know that that statistic has been used by historians. When we also know that there was also laws that says, hey, if we find out you will read you can read, we will kill you, right? If
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: you're black. So how like you're throwing out that statistic without context, as it is as if it is an absolute,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Only but not only that, it's the ability to say to determine what markers or criteria get used to establish that 10% that gets circulated. Right. So like if we think about it through that lens, then it is only those people, and I'm gonna be throwing books across, but like only the people who can read a particular passage, but the enslaved person's ability to and this is where again it opens up avenues to talk about. literacy in a more nuanced way. so what is absolutely necessary for black people is to be able to go in somewhere and read the room. You know what I'm saying? Like being able to read the room is a form of literacy that doesn't even come into the imagination of folks who have the power to determine what constitutes what is literate and what is illiterate. Right? So that's where It's like what does it mean to be able to dictate to the masses what it means to be literate?
Michael Harriot: still a step ahead of me, right? Because that's actually where I was going, right? So when you talk about that, it's because it's literacy is one of the ways we use this overall metric of what we call intelligence or IQ, right? Like not
Dr. Ahmad Washington: But so
Michael Harriot: not just intelligence, but IQ. If we point out, for instance, right, that When you shoot a three-pointer, when Steph Curry shoots a three-pointer while he is moving backwards, right? What his brain is calculating is a parabola to the percentage point or to a a decimal point, relaying that to his brain. His brain is figuring out how much force do I need to use in these muscles, specific muscles, to do the thing that I just the mathematical equation that I just figured out, that is not considered a form of intelligence.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: Right, but the ability to read a passage by Shakespeare, right? Right,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Himing way, Kimingway, yeah, yeah.
Michael Harriot: is considered a form of intelligence. And so when we talk about this, we also again have to begin with the notion of who is making the metrics and who is defining the metrics with which we define literacy. Is is it how many black people told a census? worker in 1820, how if they could
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Okay.
Michael Harriot: read or not, a person that they had never seen before, under threat of yeah, under the penalty
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Go ahead, no no no
Michael Harriot: of death, if they could read, or is it the people who could we know could form words while looking at specific markers in the alphabet, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: The funny thing is, is like, like I said earlier, the ability to like without actual instruction, right? So I'm gonna use it, but like without actual instruction, like, the fuck, what you want with this data? What you want with this information?
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right? like my bro, my grandmama, when I would go and spend like the majority of my days with her, we my pops would pick us up, take us out of my grandma's house. And That's the first time I ever had like interaction with insurance man. You know what I'm saying? Bro, the insurance man, I would always wonder, like, why would my grandmama respond to this white guy this way when he would walk down the driveway? And like, she wasn't acting out of character, but she had a diff she had discerned that you are only going to get access to so much. That is the ability to be literate. That is a type of literacy that, again, Does not make its way into any framework of assessment when we think about what constitutes as a marker of intelligence. And you alluded to in terms of the quantification and the standardization, like the emphasis on assessment, right? The objective social empiricist approach to intelligence is what we're really also talking about is education as a form of eugenicism. Right? So I'm by training a counselor educator, backgrounds in psychology. And one of the things that I would encourage your listeners to to go and find if they don't have it already, is in 2021 the APA created an apology, wrote an apology to people of color. Are you familiar with this one? Yeah, yeah,
Michael Harriot: Yes. Go ahead.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: yeah. So, but one of the domains, if you think about it, is like, well, APA is a psychological organization. Why would it have anything to do with, or what would it have to do with like education? But there is a section in the entire document, and there are two documents, one that chronicles APAs and psychology more broadly, the role that psychology and APA play in the domination of or the perpetuation of racism in the world. And then it offers a corrective or attempts to offer a corrective, and it talks about education. And you might ask, well, what is the relationship between psychology and education? But two of the biggest figures in black psychology are. Dr. Clark, Dr. Mr. and Mrs. Dr. Clark, right? And their work was instrumental in desegregation and the doll studies, right? So there's a very, very intimate relationship between the psychology of oppression and the role that colonial education and thus decolonization have always played in our radical traditions and liberation struggles.
Michael Harriot: the the study that you're talking about was used in Brown versus Boy. So Thurgood Marshall used the Doll study, showing that black children who went to white school would to to in schools in America preferred white dolls. and that shows that even like it cannot be a separate education system cannot be equal. It's what is what what he was showing, right? But there are broader implications of that study in when you think about it, how that notion extends beyond the classroom, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: it really does, if you think about education from again, a pan-Africanist perspective, a black studies, a critical black theories perspective, is it wasn't just about the preferences of white dolls, right? That's just a symptom, right? It revealed the extent to which these young black children had already begun to subscribe to dominant notions about what it meant to be a black person.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right? So absolutely devoid of the characters that they had already started to assign to white dolls and whiteness in general. It was never just that. It was a more radical critique that I would argue is connected to other earlier iterations, or maybe not earlier, contempor contemporary interventions in the psychological discourse. And it wasn't an accident that I pulled up phenon there.
Michael Harriot: Yes. And the the interesting thing about that, right, is again when we look at history through an objective lens, their qu ask was not to like we want to go to school with the white kids. That was not the the end
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: goal, right? They were saying we want equal schools, right? And so but when we talk about that and you say, well that was like, you know, fifty years ago, or we were talking about a hundred years ago. And now we're at this debate about literacy. And if you read the article about the end of reading, it's premised upon this notion that, hey, let's ask the professors and the teachers in classrooms how they see literacy. And that's how this article is it's viewed through that objective lens, right? Like I st Our kids are being less literate and the origin of that is the teachers. Now, here's the question, right? If we distill it down to even just the dominant notion of what literacy is, right? You know, and I know that I I'm always astounded as someone who was homeschooled. When
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: people ask or people wonder, like, why didn't they teach us that in school? Or why like if I don't know something. It is the fault of the people who taught me taught us things in school when like I've never understood that connection. When you talk about literacy, most this the school might lay the foundation for a technique, right? But like if I take a date of carpentry carpentry class, it doesn't make me a carpenter. It's how you practice it in the real world, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right. So, like the apprenticeship, apprenticeship model, right? that's what. the degree in sociology of education helped me to understand. It didn't help me to understand black education better than what I understood it from my, you know, illiterate grandparents, my maternal grandfather my gr maternal grandparents and paternal grandparents, all right? I didn't learn anything noteworthy about our educational struggle. I just got a broader understanding of what was it that was so eager about the disenfranchised white masses, where they understood that if we want to disrupt the aristocracy. Then what we need is a more objective way to educate everyone, right? So it always will always go back to these dominant notions of power and whose ideas around what qualifies as an educated civilian determines long term what it is that students are expected to perform in school and outside
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: of school. So that's the point also that I was You were talking about how most of our education happens outside of school. In preparation for the conversation, I went back to your book. And in the introduction, you talk about the, I'm assuming it's your grandparents' home in in Hartsville.
Michael Harriot: Yes, yes.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: That was your classroom. It was like the middle room. Bro,
Michael Harriot: Right. Yes.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: if I were to take you to my parents' home right now, back in South Carolina. The den is where my formative education happened. And I just so happen to be a beneficiary of going to one of the worst underperforming districts where I was taught and loved by primarily black teachers, bright primarily by black women in particular. So absolutely, this idea that we never should entrust our future, which education is really about culture and the themes that the elders deem important, so important that they must be. replicated and reproduced is what school has always meant for us.
Michael Harriot: Right. And when you think about the fact that you somehow navigated from that school district, w which was, you know, quantified as one of the worst, to where
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Absolutely.
Michael Harriot: you to where you are now, they instilled a form of literacy in you, not just like reading books, right? But the importance of navigating learning how to navigate a world where you could get from there to where you are now. And we've distilled it down to how many books you read a month, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: how can you you know
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And again, that's not to say, and I there was a part of me that should have like prefaced all of this because I can hear someone saying, this man up there like bemoaning the importance of like being able to read. And I'm like, no, I'm not, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, in the same way that in miseducation of the negro, Carter G. Woodson was like, we need to be also asking what type of educated Negroes are we producing? Like,
Michael Harriot: Right. Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: go ahead.
Michael Harriot: Like 'cause what that lends itself to is if 'cause if you subscribe to those notions, then you also subscribe to this man who could quote Shakespeare must be more learned than this man who read Sheikh Anti Diap, right? Cause I don't know what who that dude is, but we should all we should all
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: know, like we should all have a reference to. Shakespeare, no the Shakespeare references as an educated person, right? The
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: more education you have after you learn like the fundamental of reading, right? Is just a practice of what does that like what importance does that have in your life? If you have that fundamental basis, but you can't navigate through the lessons that your grandparents taught you, does it matter?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Does it matter? Does it matter? And it's not just the more and more I'm learning about black critical theory, it is so much of our traditions were in terms of education, were about illuminating and excavating those pieces of our history that have been intentionally withheld from us, obviously, right? But what I've started to learn more and more recently, probably since like 2016 was the role that the objection, the objectification of blackness as a construct, not as a group of people, not about black interior social life, but the idea that circulated so prevalently, prevalently in religious discourse, notions of manifest destiny, how those narratives quite literally could not exist without the Deracination of blackness, right? And like that is one way, one way that it happens, or through one avenue, is traditional schooling. Whether you want to call it in in indigenous studies, a colonial education, or whether you're not you call it in like the black radical tradition, just a romantic notion of Eurocentrism, that has always existed. That that contentious relationship. around education being either just purely pragmatic or having a pat particular or various types of social and political functionality is what separates and what's gets what gets us back to the initial question about what is literacy. Those two camps and the you know those those various camps will think about education very, very differently.
Michael Harriot: if we even look at the objective Euro, the supposedly objective Eurocentric metrics, right? G there is no time in American history where more black people have been graduated from high school, have been attending college, have been graduating from college. So is so we have to ask this, right? When we look at these statistics, are we talking about a crisis in white literacy or a crisis in the closing of the gap in how between black and white people and how they measure literacy, right? Because I mean, objectively we like objectively a greater percentage of People in America can read than like when America was founded, when the Civil War happened. Like, we're way more literate than any other time in American history, right? We
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: might not consume as much books. And here's the important part: back to what we said all the time. Because increasingly, that is a smaller way that information is transferred, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: Right. Like If you are a college professor and you only give your students information that they can read in the book, you're kind of derelict in duty, right? Because that's not how they're gonna navigate the world when
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: they you know when they exit your institution, right? It's a mix. And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: what this critique is of the end of literacy is like maybe. People are consuming information as they did throughout human history in the way where most information is contained.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And so at what time has that form of literacy, again, for operating aside from these traditional Eurocentric notions where pop culture and music weren't understanding or ways that literacy was understood? Or what constituted your ability to be literate? Like to be able to compose a song in such a way that The primary themes or narratives that pervade that song go beyond detection. Right? Those very same traditions that have existed since our escape and abandonment from the plantation, like those forms of literacy still matter. And to your point, perhaps there are, like, let's not also let's not lose sight of the fact that as we're talking about more people literate, I think you alluded to it earlier, is that let's not conflate. degree completion with one being literate.
Michael Harriot: Where or the ability like what they were measuring in eighteen twenty three was like, Can you read on a what we would say now? they read on a third grade level, right? Right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: because we know that there were people, black folks with degrees and high school diplomas and professionals who couldn't pass the white folks' literacy test when they went to vote, right? They were deemed
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: by the institution that judges black literacy. As a literate.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: many bubbles are in a bar of soap. Right, right. Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: Right. That that that that's part of a literacy test, right? How how many jelly beans are in this jar, right? And I think it's all always important to point out these notions when we're having this conversation, who's measuring
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well, and I think there's a part of me that's very I will be forever cynical of a paradigm framework political philosophy that will try to convince the masses that it has it is concerned with literacy or literacy as a proxy for intelligence, as you are absolutely desecrating and destroying like the US Department of Education for all of its
Michael Harriot: Goodbye.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: for all of its flaws, right? But an institution that at various times has been Leveraged as a mode or a type of advocacy. And I'm using advocacy because oftentimes those interventions are at best reformist as opposed to revolutionary in their demands. Right. So I want to like point that out. But excuse me if I'm cynical about your investments and concerns around literacy, if you aren't talking about the relationship between kids and families being unhoused and educational outcomes. Right. So if you
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: were to go and Google it right now and ask about the relationship between homelessness and literacy, it would convince you that homelessness is the outcome of being illiterate. And I'm like, no, we need to flip the variables. Right.
Michael Harriot: Yeah. Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Like, no, homelessness shouldn't be the outcome variable. Right. Homelessness and being unhoused is the precipitator. It's the antecedent for those those sorts of things. So excuse me if I don't believe that you're invested, but have nothing to say about kids being unhoused. If you have nothing to say about the relationship between economic stability and how well children perform. So if you don't care about access to healthcare, when kids who are literally having abscess in their teeth can't focus in school, you forgive me. You forgive me if I find your claims about literacy disingenuous. You're not gonna say anything about the fact that the majority of black and brown kids in the school, a vast majority of them, go to schools where there are cops and no counselors. Like all those things matter and have tremendous impacts on the types of academic metrics that someone would want to animate or want to hyper.
Michael Harriot: Yeah, it that's an illustration of what we're talking about when we're talking about literacy. So, you know, there's always a white person, sometimes a black person in my inbox who says, right, like why can't two thirds of the students in Baltimore school district read at grade level and it's a all in this an all black school district. And they think of that as a marker of one of two things, right? We're less intelligent genetically, or that we don't know how, like black people don't know how to educate. And what it is what I always argue is wait, first of all, you can't even have that conversation and skip over the fact that there is a all black neighborhood and the all black school district, right? Like you gotta go to the history of why that exists. How that, right? And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: after Brown versus Board of Education, after desegregation, like you're saying, well, we're just gonna take it for granted this is all black school district. And the fact that what you're using to measure across these, you know, some of these wealthier school districts, some of the Some of the most resourced school districts and some of these poor school districts. You're using the same metric to measure on one little aspect of how educ how education works, right? And you're saying, yeah, the black school perform performs best. Well, we know the test that you're using
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: is was created to produce those outcomes, right? Right? When we talk about standardized testing and intelligent testing. The SAT, they were produced, they were created for those reasons. And now that they are still producing the outcome, the reflecting the outcomes that you they were created to reflect, what are we talking about? Like, what is the crisis that we're talking about?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well, I mean, this is the so it's pre it's predicated and you pointed it out. Like also one of the things that I learned in educational sociology was like as it pertains to the black children in particular, there are two predominant have been, not have been historically. The genetic explanation, right, which is for white people, it's like you need to take that up with your God. Like your God dealt you
Michael Harriot: Mm. Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: a bare hand. Like you the missing link between animals and human type shit. Right. but the other model that is much more sympathetic is I would argue, and many have argued is even more disturbing, which is the cultural pathology.
Michael Harriot: Why?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, which is, no, y'all don't have the right temperament, which is really just another way to talk about like black respectability and wink wink, part of the current discourse at HBCU is around bonnets and do-rags. Let's keep it a book.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. So those two competing frameworks are both disparaging and leverage and use again insights from black critical theory is like slaveness, the ability to exist as an object for the master's imperative. and gets me back to where the like the nation of risk, as that conversation is happening, and you'll know this. As that conversation is happening in the mid-1980s around education, what is also happening in the area of critical studies? Well, not critical studies, legal studies and juvenile studies. What is happening? The explosion of the superpredator myth,
Michael Harriot: Vai.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: right? Which also connects to three strikes and the explosion of mass incarceral system. And at the same time, is it allows black critical theorists. Someone like Bell Hooks in particular to help us understand why representation isn't enough. Because those same black and white people in your inbox will also be pointing to the fact that seems to be work the things for black people seem to be worse in the areas where they have the social and political representation and local and state political control. So it looks as though black people can't even govern themselves. Right? So it's like all those different things. you lose if you have a very rigid and apolitical notion of what education looks like. It doesn't allow you to make those sorts of assessments and therefore limits your ability to articulate a critique in that particular way.
Michael Harriot: But the interesting thing to me is always that the cure for all of these ills and social flaws that black people have is always like, you gotta have more of this institution that we created specifically to cre the the keep you out, right? Like the answer to y'all's lower literacy rates or to y'all's lower college attendance rate Is man, you gotta have, you gotta go to school. More like white people go to school. And y'all are the ones who removed all those black teachers from the from the
Dr. Ahmad Washington: But
Michael Harriot: academy from from the education, the K through 12 education system. But let me ask you this, as a professor at a university, when we're talking about students that you see now.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And and and again, let me be let me be very clear clear. So as associate professor and department chair, I work which will change, which will make my experiences very different than some of my colleagues. I don't teach any undergrads. So I'm only teaching masters and PhD students. So I have very, you know, very few interactions with undergraduates on campus.
Michael Harriot: But but but I'm sure you know you you got to that level by teaching undergrads and so what I'm asking is do for most of human history, the p the words that we've read from people were produced by the most literate people or what we deem the most literate people. And now we see as many words from people who would never, we would never read their words in most for most of human history.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah, I mean, yes and no, because I'm thinking about like again, literacy for what purpose, right? I can't speak to in terms of how she may have performed on a standardized assessment, right? And again, a standardized assessment that in this Friere would call this like a a banking concept. Really, it is you get an A, the extent to which you record and regurgitate on command, right? I don't know how well Fannie Lou Hamer would have performed on a standardized, I don't know. I don't but what I what I know is her social and political analysis I would put up against any supposed expert in social and political theory. Right?
Michael Harriot: Right. more succinctly, like could Harriet Tubman have passed a geography test right now? Like you we know she knew how to navigate the entire Eastern Seaboard. Could she have passed a geography test? So was she literate in geography or was it right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I was like that and that's the thing, is like is literate can we isolate it to what can be like the abstraction of it all, right? Or does what constitute as literate is the application in the world? So what good is an education that is disconnected from the world? Right? What utility
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: does it have?
Michael Harriot: Yeah, and I like that you keep challenging that notion because I see that I'm trying to get to like the fundamental basics of reading and you're saying, hey, but like Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying, right? Like what are we gonna like
Dr. Ahmad Washington: There is no there is no.
Michael Harriot: when we keep s having this discussion, right? We're talking about like what are we talking, what are we
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And I know how and I know how frustrating that is, right?
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: But it opens up avenues. It opens up avenues, right? Because it says that this notion of literacy could not exist without like one of my favorite, one of the things that I did like not long after getting to Louisville was to start this after school program and it was called lyrics. It was Louisville. Louisville Youth Resisting Injustice and Changing Systems. It was a hip hip hop-based college and career readiness program. And we used a black study, a college black studies text in order to have these after-school sessions. So Whenever I come to talk about like education, it will always be about power. And who has the again to quote Amos Wilson, power is the ability to define reality and make other people respond to that reality as if it's their own. So in education, what this often looks like are mentoring program for young black boys when what we're really talking about is ways that we can convince them that they're altering their behavior and doing these things will make a substantial and market change in how the world relates to blackness and it won't.
Michael Harriot: Yeah. And when we talk about literacy in those flattened terms, right, it redu like it it reinforces the like the horse race that right, right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah, meritocracy, bruh.
Michael Harriot: I remember man when I was in college, one of my my my line brother, he was a engineering major. And every year the engineering department has this contest where they build a solar car. It's a race, but the race is not who went who could go the fastest, which car could go the longest. And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm.
Michael Harriot: there was this and we had this mentoring program where this kid we and our our mentee was like this kid from right down the street in the project. So he would be at our apartment every day. And while my LB was working on this thing, he said, Hey, what why why not use bicycle chains? Well it turns out His father taught him how to weld, so he would take apart bicycles and make these huge tall bicycles, but he would have to figure out the pedaling mechanism to white the wind the chains where you could be on a bicycle that tall and still pedal it. They used what this dude from the projects told them in their engineering
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: class and won the race that year, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: It I think it was the first all-black team to win that race.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: And what I'm asking, like, he was an engineer. Right? If
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: by all intents and purposes, that job that they would have had in an engineering job, a 13-year-old black kid in the projects could have done it. But he probably couldn't have passed the engineering test they were being trained for. That's what that school was training you for, to pass the engineering test and to get a job. He could have done the job but not passed the test. So when we talk about literacy and the ability to read, is there a skill or a a metric that all of these people like we should revere all equally, like the ability to read at a third grade level, or is it ability to how many books you read a month or what what is that metric to determine from your perspective.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: So I don't know if there's a general consensus. And I know this will sound to like somebody like this is, you know, avoiding. I there, I don't know if there's a general consensus in terms of is there a standalone assessment? Because the the thing that I'm also saying is is like, and you alluded to it earlier, is there are all of these multiple categories and and characteristics that we could associate with intelligence. That elude us if we focus narrowly on one way of assessing it, right? So
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: one of the, I'm not gonna say like most recent, but a a huge inventory, a huge intervention, not inventory, a huge intervention in just the educational discourse is the idea of multiple intelligences, right? So expanding beyond this very narrow and rigid notion of like, are we willing to subscribe to a model that would. be unable to account for the ways that its measuring of intelligence doesn't count for Nina Simone's brilliance and intelligence.
Michael Harriot: I always hesitate to use those kinds of examples because it is not just like these benevolent examples of we're, you know, excluding an artist, right? But these are like what made Nina Simone successful in life is a form of intelligence that was just as
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Absolutely.
Michael Harriot: that that was just as valuable as what made Albert Einstein successful in life.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: No good.
Michael Harriot: Right? Like it's not just a art arbitrary thing. If we wouldn't have any beautiful music or art. What we're talking about is a metric that defines i whether someone can be successful.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: So it would then be domain, almost domain specific, which again explodes the idea that it could be distilled because it would depend on. Again, I am a counselor. I would argue that you can go to school and I know how this is gonna sound in the current conversation. I'm probably sure you know where I'm going with this, but like to be a practitioner or a therapist or any other source. You can go somewhere and accumulate the degrees necessary. But I would argue that your ability to be a counselor is predicated on your ability to not just think critically about what informs people's behavior, but also to attend to in a very nuanced way the things that get communicated that are unspoken. Right. but what if we replace the client with a student? So now you're talking to a student and not a client. Your ability to move that young person to what they and their community would consider self actualization is predicated on your ability to understand what it is that that child and their communities have to negotiate. So if you attempt to foreclose the consciousness that that student would bring to his or her their s scenario, you are actually impeding their self-actualization and functioning as an unethical practitioner. Right.
Michael Harriot: Or or an illiterate one. Right. right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Absolutely. Abs
Michael Harriot: Like I I remember I had a a friend who worked for a psychologist. And the psychologist told a white psychologist and the psychologist told me, told him that like man, I don't know why why my black c my black patients won't take their medicine. Like, you know, black people ain't gonna take the medicine. Right? They'll
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro.
Michael Harriot: talk about it something about like it's it's against their nature or it mess with their nature. And it was like it's like you know, some kind of religious stuff. And he was like, wait, you think when they say it mess with my nature, they're talking about something religious, right? It makes that's a f like they're talking about erectile d dysfunction. And so,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bruh.
Michael Harriot: right, he he was illiterate
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: to his patients.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right, right. Bruh, I remember
Michael Harriot: Right. And his in this
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I remember working in Columbia and I was early in my career and I remember having this very same conversation and I was illiterate. This is also part of what makes decolonization so critical for black people is I had been groomed, I had been educated in those very same systems. So no one was saying to me, hey, Ahmad. If you're working with young black men once your career concludes, then you might want to attend to the very real ways that the medication, the way that it converges with some of your clients' notion around manhood and masculinity, will create problems mentally because they quite literally can't perform. and this is how the literature would describe those clients as non-compliant.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: As noncompliant. No, to your point, you have just been miseducated about the things that you should be looking for. And why should we be surprised? Because whiteness quite literally has a stronghold on all the theoretical orientations that help you to understand yourself, your client, and the client's relationship to this to the social environment in which they find themselves immersed. So yeah.
Michael Harriot: So so so what does what does this have to do with literacy, right? So we're talking about this literacy crisis in the framework of one. I think because we're seeing again, if you go back and read letters from colonial people or letters from men who were fighting in the Civil War back to their to their wives, even the presidents. There were so many misspellings and grammatical errors that if we saw them on Twitter, we would say, Man, I look I read through James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington's letters, and man, we got a founder's literacy crisis, right? Because
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: we're using a different metric But I think it is important to realize that this whole notion of this literacy crisis is dependent on where what you value as education. And I don't think that anyone is arguing, you or I, that like I don't think read the ability to read matters. Right? Right. But
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right. In an office with like books everywhere. Like come on now. Like that's not the argument that's being made.
Michael Harriot: Right, but remember again, back in eighty seven through the nineties, we were saying, Well, man, nobody does math anymore. it wasn't that there was a lack of people who understood how to do algebraic equations, right? It was that we were entering into a new form of technology where I mean If you don't know your 11 times tables, you could just do them on the thing, right? Like man, nobody learns cursive anymore in a area in a world where everybody types, right? And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: I'm asking you, forget about the term of literacy. Do you think we're less able to read words? now than in the past.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I I can't say definitively we are less able to read words. No, I don't have any data to support that argument. Equally, I don't have any data to suggest that we are more illiterate. Like I don't have any data. Perhaps you can enlighten me about some things that you've come across, but
Michael Harriot: No, I I think I think okay, let's take all the AI slap and all of that. Like, I mean, objectively, I think we have to acknowledge that probably this generation of human beings reads more words on in an average day than most people in all of human history. Like when you can s can
Dr. Ahmad Washington: mean by just sheer just sheer access to it on our phones?
Michael Harriot: Yeah, and like just looking at words and deciphering them, like probably more than at any other time in human history, right? Would wouldn't you think so?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I mean, if we're talking about just proliferation and but I don't know how many of us are on our phones reading you know, 20,000 word essays.
Michael Harriot: No, but on but but is a t like they're talking about this fundamental ability to like read, they're saying, Well, we we don't read as much, and I'm saying we read more. Like you read a tw in objectively a tweet, whether the information is correct or anything, is the
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: same thing as a paragraph in a in the first paragraph of an essay, right? So we're
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: reading more, right? We're not we might not be reading more from scholars, from people we consider be educated, right? or s like we might be
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And again, this this g this goes back to like if I know and I know how this is gonna frustrate, but it's like again, that operates from the idea that only a particular type of text warrant assessment.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: You know what I'm saying? So like if you can say that reading, the only thing that you are reading are texts, and as though you can't read all forms of media. I think that is again reproduces a particular narrative, a dominant framework about who is and who isn't literate. And it completely not completely constrains, but it interferes with a richer and robust idea around what operate as text, right? Because if you would you were talking about Twitter, there would there would have been no
Michael Harriot: Right. But we're not Africa. Instagram, right? That's what I'm saying and and that is my point, right? In that
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Harriot: in that in a world where information is not disseminated in the same way, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: The focus and the consternation over the ability to read a three hundred word book is to me an effort to reinforce the narratives that we're trying to disassociate with educ education in the beginning, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: But what I'm also saying is that these same people who will proclaim to be concerned about literacy, right, which is the ability to understand, because you use the word comprehension and destroy safeguards that would limit the ability for bots to reproduce and circulate misinformation. So
Michael Harriot: Right. Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: it's like again, and you know. The most critical thing to take away from 619, the 619 project, again, is about narrative, right? We in this climate, black critical theorists or black feminist thought is considered somehow an in endangerment, which it quite literally is, is a frontal assault on dominant notions around like patriotism, right? So that approach to education, what does constitute like Having the audacity to tell a different story, to have a different relationship with the institution that is education is seen, is seen as it's criminal and it's criminalized, which we shouldn't be, which we shouldn't be surprised of. But if you have the ability to define what is the text. Then you can then also decide, is it merely the accumulation of words or is it the ability to accumulate those words and then speak more honestly and more frankly to the circumstances that surround you? And, you know.
Michael Harriot: Yeah, and and and in as it relates to this subject, right? So if we're concerned that people like you are asking the next generation of scholars to not to read like as many three hundred page books or aren't requiring them to read as many whole three hundred page books, but read the works of their sco their their colleagues, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: in a journal. or in the which is online, right? Or
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: to assess the data that we gathered in video evidence, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right.
Michael Harriot: Or or or audio interviews. are we talking about a crisis in literacy or a crisis with the status quo of what how we define literacy?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Think the crisis is again, this is for me continuity. It is a crisis of fear by the dominant order to determine what constitutes thought, right? like in my classroom, what happens when you are no longer compelled by an A at the end of the semester. Like, what happens? Are you more inclined to think critically about, and again, someone who teaches counseling is I want you to have a very different relationship, first and foremost, with yourself and an honest confrontation with what historically this discipline and the helping professions have done to the most disenfranchised and vulnerable people. Like And in my discipline, that is considered that is that I am contributing to many of my field an illiterate set of practitioners.
Michael Harriot: And w what is their critique based on?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Because for them, so that framework quite literally is an a critical studies approach to psychology, where I am asking, what has what did in its origin psychoanalysis and Freudian thought do for humanity or its notions around humanity? What did behaviorism and Albert's Skinner and Pavlov in terms of being able to figure out to control punishments and rewards and how that could be used to manipulate behavior. Right? That's the traditionalist approach. What black psychology did and came in, what black psychology in part came in to do was to say to the dominant notions around what it means to be literate in psychology that the field never addressed race. That instead of Ahmad thinking about yourself in the skinarian or be or behaviorist model. You aren't the practitioner, you aren't the scientist. Black people and other disenfranchised people are the rats. what happens to these disciplines when we attempt to make a different set of literate practitioners who just happen to be black. What does it mean to take that black critical theory? as a form of literacy and shining on these dominant narratives and these dominant frameworks that have forever proclaimed to be neutral and in everyone's collective best interest.
Michael Harriot: Right. Like I think we have this classical classist notion of education as is as though when it is altered in many ways to reflect the outcomes that we desire, right? Or to achieve the outcomes that we desire, we're destroying some like if you don't read Greek mythology, you ain't educated. How how can you call yourself a writer, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, that's crazy. Have you seen this meme circulating on on social media? It's like, isn't it ironic that in this moment where folks are telling us about how irrelevant the humanities are, the most popular movie is the Odyssey?
Michael Harriot: Yeah. And the
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: I I've seen that and and even more like how those notions, right, become so entrenched in our society that sometimes we accept them. Right? Like
Dr. Ahmad Washington: yeah. yeah.
Michael Harriot: like this whole notion of if you ain't if you are for instance reading Books versus listening to audiobooks,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: man.
Michael Harriot: right? I imagine that when the like when the printing press was introduced, you know, there were monks who were saying, Man, when I was coming up, we had to figure out our monks' handwriting to decipher what was
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: and then the After the printing press, people who read books that were printed by computer be like, man, man, we just had to read books middle riddled with mistakes. Y'all don't even have to do that anymore, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: I mean literally that's where the phrase, by the way, mind your P's and Q's came from, because sometimes they would be backwards.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm. Mm.
Michael Harriot: But
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I know that. and this for me is I'm always thinking about what this means with regards to like preparing psychologists, is not just psychologists, counselor educators, people working and helping professionals, So I would be thinking about these learning theories and Dr. Patton got a book coming out like strung up where she talks about
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: like black bro. That is so
Michael Harriot: I read it. I got it. I got it in my email. Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I'm hating. I'm low-key hating that you because it
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: ain't out yet.
Michael Harriot: Nah it's not. It's not. I got the yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Again, I can again again, you know, you know, w different things. but bro, that's gonna be incredibly useful to someone who like me who teaches human growth and development to graduate school courses, the graduate school students.
Michael Harriot: he's talking about Dr. Stacey Patton, who is professor at Howard University, and she is also she also has a book about she's a scholar on black children. She has a book called Strunk Up and it is about the violence that America has inflicted traditional historically on black children. But one of the things she points out, which I never considered, is that Like we really never had black children in America, right? Because there was no childhood during enslavement times, right? And then in sharecropping times, right? There were no black there was not a black childhood in this
Dr. Ahmad Washington: That like
Michael Harriot: country.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: because all those are social constructs.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Those are constructs, right? And this is again what it means to be literate, bruh. And I know for like if whenever you feel the inclination, internally or extrinsically, in your community, in your professional settings, where there is an exerted attempt to narrow the conversation to something singular, black people should resist because it's like, no. You want me to think in a very objective and tangible way. And what this world has always invited, required black people is to think beyond the very narrow notions of like human and child. Like those categories are not biological categories.
Michael Harriot: Now there are some people who are gonna be watching this and say, well, you're literally pulling books off the shelf and say, It don't matter if you can that's what people are gonna say now. I can tell you it don't matter if you can read while you're putting pulling book books off the shelf that you read, right? Or like you got a PhD. what do you say to people who say, like, kind of this is an elitist critique,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: my arguments are quite literally calling into question the notions of round objectivity and meritocracy that your argument requires. That somehow, if we can just gain provide access to more education, folks' lives will be markedly better. When we have data, for instance, where two Exact same, like two resumes, two CVs that are exactly the same, and one has a Eurocentric name and one has an ethnic name. That this ethnic name gets fewer callbacks. That's an object objective fact. So the idea is still predicated on a notion of meritocracy that we know is a fallacy. Like there's actual there's actual data where, and I found it's a there's a study, and I want to say it's the The journal of childhood personality of childhood psychology, but the article that references it is in the Atlantic and it's talking about the consequences on the psyche of Black children when they internalize this notion of meritocracy. The likelihood that children will engage in the letterist and and self-destructive behavior goes up the extent to which they believe in a meritocracy.
Michael Harriot: Well, you you were the source of one of my articles on that years ago, right? the meritocracy book.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: hey, hey, hey, let me get my citational credit, bro. I ain't this is my first time hearing that, so I I'm curious to know
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: what what you're talking about.
Michael Harriot: It was called the the the meritocracy myth about how it was specifically geared towards even before this whole college admissions Supreme Court case, the idea that there is a objective metric that measures your b we know like for instance the SAT does it measure your ability to perform in college. Right. It's just a a arbitrary arbitrary metric meant to keep people out, right? That's why it
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well,
Michael Harriot: exists.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: well, also graduate school, the equivalent is the GRE. You know this.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, if it was based on a GRE, I wouldn't be here. I'm
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: terrible at standing. I think I may have gotten my my best at well, ACT. ACT I was like a 17, 18, somewhere in there. GRE was like a 710, 720. I'm talking about terrible at standardized test, terrible. But what is something that you can't ignore is the relationship between the access to the resources, the educational resources,
Michael Harriot: My
Dr. Ahmad Washington: but really about like, how well can you take the test? Right. And a perfect example of this is you remember the episode of Good Times where Mike was giving
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: bro, he the insight was so poignant and poignant, but also. Obvious to most black people, right? The same black people who were being told, yeah, in order to vote, you gotta be able to pass this test that says, like, how many bubbles in a bar. So Michael was basically saying the same dynamic exists. The same people who were able to determine whether or not I was qualified to vote for vote then, their children and descendants are telling me whether or not I'm qualified to graduate high school.
Michael Harriot: Right. And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: It's the same it's the same dynamic, bro.
Michael Harriot: And to the people who make that critique of people like me and you say who like you know got through the classic American education system and now are saying, like, you know that shit is don't don't really measure nothing. That critique as an elitist critique is I often have to make people understand that like some of the people you're talking to, like us, we got here despite that, right? Like Not because of that, like not that we
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: navigate, like we did the same thing as the white people did and got here. And that our criticism is that we know that we ain't the only smart ones, right? Like we consider scholars, but we ain't the scholars for real, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, I to this day, as much as I like, so my move from being faculty to department chair, as much as I appreciate the ability to like make some changes structurally, the one thing that I enjoy most about the faculty life is the ability to use everything that I've been taught to hurl these critiques. Right. As a way of destabilizing it all, because I know I'm not exceptional.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I'm not exceptional. Like, I don't think, bro, and this is where my like formation in the the academy has always like really hovered around like hip-hop is bro. I hear sociology, I hear sociological critiques. Like one of my favorite MCs died a couple years ago. His name is Brownsville Ca. He has a his project from 2018, 2019 called Descendants of Cain. And bro, it is a critique of some of the most integral and foundational narratives and anecdotes from the Judy Judo Judeo Christianity that I've ever heard. Most eloquent things that I've ever heard. He talks about one of his one of my favorite bars was that covenant was rotten. Was begotten and forgotten. Some days everything was grave, so we was plotting. Like in that short time, this man is talking about a covenant that exists. Again, the social contract and how that contract's existence is predicated on the marking of blackness outside of humanity. Like, so I didn't need sociology because KRS and other folks were giving me a different orientation, a different ontology, a different framework through which to examine the world. Like that's all that was. And again, to get back to your point, if I had the power to design the assessment tool, white folks in that structure would be deemed illiterate.
Michael Harriot: and we see it in almost every form of of every area in American society, right? Like as a journalist, right, we I always so a friend of mine, Wes Lowry, won the Pulitzer for the Washington Post
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm.
Michael Harriot: fatal force thing that counts police killings.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm.
Michael Harriot: And he says like all the black folks I know knew police killed black folks more often like it was a known thing, right? I gotta pull it support for it because white people were illiterate in that area of America, right? Like they had they had not done any studies and the studies that they did proved the thing that we inherently knew was true. Right? Martin
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro.
Michael Harriot: Luther King talked about it. Malcolm X talked about it. Everybody talked about it. And it was like in the two thousands that white people began seeing it.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, Baldwin said what to be black and slightly conscious is to be in a constant state of rage. Cause you
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: you are always getting cross-examined by people who or a framework or a structure that is ill-equipped and not designed to see your arguments as legible. Like you have nothing to say because you've never had anything to say, type shit. Right? So good.
Michael Harriot: Right. And and you can see they would say, like, if you put type shit on the in your
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Ha ha.
Michael Harriot: sentence, why you talk like that's a literate talk.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Which again, you and I both know we can go back to the nineteen eighties, nation at risk. I referenced it for a reason. What was happening simultaneously is our literal court cases around the legitimacy of African American vernacular English. Like liter
Michael Harriot: Right. It was we it was hurting us. It was it was
Dr. Ahmad Washington: it was the impediment. Again,
Michael Harriot: Why?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: how is that any different than the dominant narrative or some of the dominant narratives pervading current HBCU politics and bonnets and do-rags. It is the same cultural depravity narrative. It's a it's the exact same playbook. Exact same playbook.
Michael Harriot: they're saying like we're facing a crisis where kids a don't read as many books, don't have the ability to like, I don't know, write as grammatically correct in the same way that we did earlier. But like how far up the top or toward the bottom would you say what they're talking about? This decreasing tendency to read full text of books and the inability, what they call a reading comprehension, by their metrics.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I don't think, and specifically as it pertains, you're never going to convince me that black people have not, and there will never be a time when black people's desire for literacy in a more practical sense does not exist. Like you can you will never be able to convince me that within black people there exists a desire for a type of liberation, a type of self-determination that is disconnected from. literacy as we define it. You'll never be able to convince me. when students and young people are learning to access social media in ways that allow them to communicate how to defend themselves against tear gas in real time, that those kids are illiterate. They've quite literally mastered, well, what are the primary platforms and mechanisms by by way important information can be relayed. That can be useful in some sort of like ongoing social and political framework for social change. Like again, it gets back to what are we define, what are we defining as literate and who has access and power to the spaces where those definitions get standardized. so I don't for the folks who are trying to dictate the conversation, I think their notions around literacy. Are no different than the dominant notions, conservative notions in the 1980s that we're thinking about how then does literacy and whether that literacy is like in this moment, like AI literacy. There isn't really much conversation, the dominant conversation around AI literacy when we aren't thinking about the very real ecological consequences that are the result of the expansion of AI. Right? Like you can't You can't then say that students who are thinking about or folks who are wanting to think about those sorts of things aren't also literate. Like pushing that we think about what are the what is the ecological toll of this emphasis on AI in the same way that there was an emphasis in the 1980s on the races to the moon and science technology, science technology, engineering, and math.
Michael Harriot: Right. So Ultimately, do you as far as this critique is concerned, do you think there is the lack of consuming because I mean I think that is whether it is an am a metric for literacy or just a phenomenon, right? The fact
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: that people don't read as many books, I don't
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well and also like to your to your point earlier, and I I I I'm glad that you mentioned that because we completely rolled past the idea, first of all, and this is the sort of like elitist and classist idea, is so what counts as reading is someone who isn't in front of a tablet or a book isn't reading because the book is being read to them?
Michael Harriot: Bye.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. So not only is that elitist, in the last couple of like very recently, I've thought about like, that's also ableist. For folks who find it difficult to be in front of a textbook or to do things the very traditionalist way we would think about text, how that doesn't count. The folks who are quite literally consuming so much content that are podcasts, right? There was once a time, for instance, the APA journal, right? The APA manual, like citational citational practices, you couldn't cite a podcast.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: You couldn't cite a podcast, and now you can, quite literally. So our notions around literacy have had to change to your point because it will reflect the myriad ways that people consume text, right? And this interview or interviews like it constitute a form of text that wouldn't have been recognized by the dominant structures ten years ago.
Michael Harriot: one of the notions as as someone who is y in the public historian space is what always interests me is like The idea of, for instance, storytelling and oral histories versus written histories, right? Like
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: we a historian can say this happened because I can quote George Washington's letter to Thomas Jefferson telling him what happened, so we know it happened. But if we quote oral history, hey, that's unverifiable, right? Right? Those are
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Or the other the other forms of
Michael Harriot: Go ahead.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: oral the other forms, forms of oral history that we don't recognize as oral history. Like one of the first things that happened after the Civil War, and you'll know this as a historian, that the South had to revive the image of itself. Right? Who was instrumental in reviving that image? The daughters of the Confederacy.
Michael Harriot: The daughter Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And what did they use? They used monuments, right? So Not just the ability to be able to say, no, this constitutes a legitimate form of literature, right? That classical canonization, but you quite literally get to say these are the artifacts, these are the edifices that qualify as the symbolic, right? The tangible and symbolic representation of a particular narrative, where a mural that we dedicate To the dead and the dying, or the practices that we use to venerate, right? Pouring out a little liquor, that don't constitute a legitimate ritual.
Michael Harriot: Wha what's wild about that though, what what's wild about that daughters of Confederacy thing is I always point out that we say that how they talk about how they changed the narrative and how the lost cause is basically part of our education system now. Never pointing out that they that white Southern women, right, who kind of came of age during the Civil War were probably the least educated demographic in America, right? Like like they didn't go to school. They didn't go to they couldn't go to college. Like most of ended school after like the eighth grade. And that's who formed that's
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Because why do we need you educated? We just need you to be ready for these I believe graduates that we're gonna produce. So domesticity,
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: which is what irritates me most about like some of times the most vocal and vitriolic participants in this discourse, not surprisingly, given the history we just talked about with women's the doors of the Confederacy, some of the most vitriolic are like white women, right?
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Or the counterpart, the other end of the spectrum, but it's still no less nefarious, are the liberal examples. Like Megan Pfeiffer and what's the movie? Dangerous Lives or something, whatever it is. But
Michael Harriot: Doug, I don't know what you're talking about. yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: that's the same thing, right? We can't think about, we have this tendency to only focus on the most gratuitous examples. So therefore we think about like, the daughters of Confederacy and how. The Karen in contemporary discourse is just an extension of that. But like to what extent did the liberal framework that showed up as Megan Pfeiffer also showed up in the blind side?
Michael Harriot: Right. I'll tell you, man, like as a journalist, one of probably the most vitriolic responses that I ever got to anything I wrote was when I wrote about how white liberal parents were trying to a few years ago the New York s school system decided to stop mandating entry tests for some of its what they call magnet schools, right? And white
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: liberal parents were
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Live it.
Michael Harriot: What? And these were the people who were allies, right? They would call them allies, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Living. How dare you? Right, right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: But that's who the most livid constituency were. And I'm telling you how that forms our how we regard education, what we even consider education, especially like I would argue that when you are a person like if you consider reading a thing of value, right? I always want to ask, well, when do you think like black people stopped caring about it? Like was it after we were lit sending our school children to school to let you spit on them so they could have access to an equal education? D was it when we were risking our lives to teach each other to read? Was it when we built the American education system as we know it in 1868, right? Was was it when we were fighting to desegregate it, right? When when was it, right? Like eighty three, eighty four? And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And I'm not going, and I don't mean to do the whole like we was Kangs thing, but like part of the black radical tradition, in particular like in the early 80s around Afrocentrism, was to say this was a pre-colonial endeavor.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Like looking at the stars was an intellectual endeavor, right? The calendar, like all of these different things, but it was not some abstraction. It was observation, engagement with the world, not to manipulate the world. But to understand, to create a sense of harmony, a consent a sense of balance. And this is part of, you know, that comedic tradition around like what it meant to be a person and all the the humanities that started with like a particular curiosity that for them would have been called literate. That if you don't understand your relationship to the world, you are an illiterate person. You are an illiterate person.
Michael Harriot: Right. We never point out that. Like we were building we were paying our tax money to build those schools and then building our own. Like we were doubly
Dr. Ahmad Washington: That's what the argument was about was, hey bruh, I'm not trying to come over there. I just don't want to pay for your school while also paying for what we have as a school.
Michael Harriot: If you had to speak to a parent or a educator or a scholar in this subject or somebody like me was a journalist, right? Should I be worried that my nineteen year old ain't reading as many novels or te books?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: if there is a reduction or a number that we want to quantify? Let's just say three or four books, when are we asking that 19-year-old about the relevance of the books that they are being expected to read? Because there is a relationship between how pertinent, how relevant the narrative is to whether or not students feel engaged. And I'm thinking specifically about like literature and some of the Oral traditions that we talked about earlier. But even in something like STEM, is if we're talking about the extent to which someone is able to perform these particular tasks as it pertains to a math outcome, I'm convinced, and also other folks in the field are convinced that the more that you can re make those examples applicable and germane to things that black children have to confront, the more likely they are. To want to succeed.
Michael Harriot: so what you're saying is like for instance reading the Iliad isn't relevant unless as the educator you find a way to make it relevant to the current existence of the person who's reading it.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well, even before the Iliad, I'd be like, why not things fall apart?
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. And I know for some folks it would be like, well, that's not what multicultural multicultural education is more than simply replacing the, you know, things fall apart with the Odyssey. And I get it. But that is a place to start. Right. Because what we're talking about, the Odyssey isn't about the historical figures as much as it about as much as it is about the attempt to cultivate a particular type of relevance for the for the protagonist.
Michael Harriot: And for West what they call Western civilization overall, right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because it is about the it Horatio Alger, the pulling up of the bootstraps.
Michael Harriot: Yes.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: It's not about the person as much as much as it is about the intrepid spirit. Right? It's like the stuff that you come on, bruh. And that's
Michael Harriot: Right. The narrative. Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: why I like so many folks in Black Studies. And I'm thinking, I'm looking over at my bookshelf. Jacob Carruthers talks about this is just intellectual warfare. What we're talking about is a form of intellectual warfare. That it's not about the Odyssey. There are so many different viable options, so many different viable alternatives to the Odyssey. The problem is that those other alternatives are rendered to or they're the ongoing attempts to render those other perspectives as gibberish. That's the problem.
Michael Harriot: Right. Right. Or again when you said h why not things fall apart, which actually to the credit I think I I I had a college professor and I don't know if they were black or white who like that's when I read Chimwa Chibi's the things fall apart.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, think about in grade school. I remember sitting in my class and thinking to myself, why the hell do I have to read animal form? Why do I have to read 1984? The person that sits here now, it's obvious
Michael Harriot: Why?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: the applicability of the animal form and 1984 to the contemporary moment. But the instructors then were not saying, hey, let's think about what or welling. what the Orwellian themes here mean to surveillance and the black body. Right? No one if I had, I would have been literally sitting on the edge of my seat.
Michael Harriot: when you look at Lord of the Flies under the context of today, right, it's a whole different thing
Dr. Ahmad Washington: no.
Michael Harriot: about masculinity and about how we how power transfers through violence, right? It is a whole different book than some white boys wal in the forest when
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Come on, bruh.
Michael Harriot: I read it originally, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: right, like like the the people who are sensitive, good leadership, if they remove violence from the equation, they ain't gonna be chosen. That's how violence is transferred and power is is transferred. That's That overall point. That's the people would say that's the importance of reading these books. And what you're saying is, yeah, but the things that we're talking about is the information that was gleaned from sitting down and reading 300 pages without somebody saying the reason you gotta read this is so you could get an A at the end of the semester, versus, hey man, let's learn this thing. And the easy way to learn it is through this story.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, Jarvis Givens Fugitive Pedagogy starts with a couple of anecdotes about Black women teachers in Louisiana, if I'm not mistaken, So he talks about black woman sitting on her desk and knowing that someone from the district, a white person from the district, was coming to supervise. And as she's reading, she has the state-approved history book in her lap. But inside of it, she has Carter G. Woodson's work. And she's literally like, I recognize that I'm a fugitive. This is still the plantation. And I'm gonna convince you that what we're doing is exactly what you prescribe, but I'm doing everything but that. Right? So that's the exact point you were making is like I got 1984 just like you. I got animal farm just like you, and I was disengaged because all I saw was some animals who happened to talk on a farm, but not the reproduction of power, and how that was a Marxist critique and the limitations of that Marxist. Marxist critique in being able to think critically about the unique nature that black people suffer. So it could have done all those different things had the instructor, and this is not to disparage because I can't even remember who that person was, it's not just illuminating the shortcomings of that instructor. It is also a structural critique of how that person had been canonized. I want to be clear that I am not a sociolinguist. I don't teach the mechanics of reading and reading comprehension, but what I am is someone who is always wondering about how language, the ability, how language and power, whiteness is property, all those different things construct our notions around what is literate, what is illiterate. so how The dominant narrative is reproduced through discourse, but also for black people, and it's very real, in a very real way, that that violence has not just been epistemic, it's been gratuitous. So when you talked earlier about being spat on and bombings and all those different things for folks who have the audacity to demand educational equality and educational equity, So what I would say is, and this is exactly where I started, is whenever someone invites you or tries to in or invites you to a conversation and they attempt to dictate the parameters around which literacy should occur, something awkward, like something immediately should happen because you know, and this is what I would I know when I was at HBCU's. When I taught at South Carolina State before I got to Louisville, I wasn't telling my students anything they didn't intuitively know. Right? Because they brought that critical lens to the classroom. Because in order to succeed as a black person in these educational spaces, the grades that we are incentivized with, in order to perform exceptionally well there, it requires you to ingest a particular notion about yourself that is problematic. Right. It is toxic, which gets us back to the the dolls, the doll studies. So whenever someone wants to talk about literacy, like I said in the beginning, it depends on their lived experience and how they thought and think about education. If they think about it as neutral, if they think about it as objectively good, if they think about it in universal terms, they probably have some very real blind spots that are a direct, that are directly detrimental to and a historical and incongruent with how black people have historically thought about education and its relationship to liberation. And again, I'm pointing I'm pointing to a history and tradition where a lot of what I read is not about the quantification. It is about the theorizing about the thing, right? Which will which will lead to the accumulation of very different types of data. So not quantifiable data, but like you said, rich descriptions, right? That's that qualitative tradition, that's that tradition that reflects our oral sensibilities. So it again it It depends on what constitutes this data. Is it these large data sheets or is it the narrative that someone happened to write about how toxic it is for black families in Tennessee or Seattle, Washington, like my my beloved friend Dr. Michael Dumas, like those narratives are still data, right?
Michael Harriot: Yeah. Like. So thank you, man. And so
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, appreciate you.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And like we were just saying, this is what makes the conversation so fascinating, but also so incredibly complex, because it matters who you're asking the question of. Right. So in the traditional sense, and by traditional, I mean like from the traditional Eurocentric notions around what function does compensatory schooling serve in this country, then that happens alongside this emphasis and preoccupation with quantifying intellect. Right. So it's the idea that one could reduce a set of attributes and not an attribute to something that is so narrowly so myopic in terms of how it's being constructed. but from that standpoint, schools function primarily as a way of just creating A social democracy, Like 50 years ago, we we were in the midst of like a nation in crisis discourse where everything was about we're losing, and by we, I'm talking about like the America. I need to be clear about my pronouns because that didn't include us, right? So The idea of a nation at risk was predicated on the fact that the United States was using losing its like socioeconomical, socioeconomic foothold in the world, right? So this fear around being conceived or perceived as second So literacy back to that group would be how can how much can we instill these sort of like principles, not just can someone read and write and comprehend a passage? So like the idea of literacy is vast and diverse and I'm a little suspicious of anyone who would attempt to distill literacy to being able to say like Jack and Jill, you know, ran up the hill.
Michael Harriot: one of the first things I usually do when I'm like doing a speaking engagement is talk about how we quantify things. And the one I always use, right? Like 10% of enslaved people were literate, right? Well, we know that that statistic has been used by historians. When we also know that there was also laws that says, hey, if we find out you will read you can read, we will kill you, right? If
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: you're black. So how like you're throwing out that statistic without context, as it is as if it is an absolute,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Only but not only that, it's the ability to say to determine what markers or criteria get used to establish that 10% that gets circulated. Right. So like if we think about it through that lens, then it is only those people, and I'm gonna be throwing books across, but like only the people who can read a particular passage, but the enslaved person's ability to and this is where again it opens up avenues to talk about. literacy in a more nuanced way. so what is absolutely necessary for black people is to be able to go in somewhere and read the room. You know what I'm saying? Like being able to read the room is a form of literacy that doesn't even come into the imagination of folks who have the power to determine what constitutes what is literate and what is illiterate. Right? So that's where It's like what does it mean to be able to dictate to the masses what it means to be literate?
Michael Harriot: still a step ahead of me, right? Because that's actually where I was going, right? So when you talk about that, it's because it's literacy is one of the ways we use this overall metric of what we call intelligence or IQ, right? Like not
Dr. Ahmad Washington: But so
Michael Harriot: not just intelligence, but IQ. If we point out, for instance, right, that When you shoot a three-pointer, when Steph Curry shoots a three-pointer while he is moving backwards, right? What his brain is calculating is a parabola to the percentage point or to a a decimal point, relaying that to his brain. His brain is figuring out how much force do I need to use in these muscles, specific muscles, to do the thing that I just the mathematical equation that I just figured out, that is not considered a form of intelligence.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: Right, but the ability to read a passage by Shakespeare, right? Right,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Himing way, Kimingway, yeah, yeah.
Michael Harriot: is considered a form of intelligence. And so when we talk about this, we also again have to begin with the notion of who is making the metrics and who is defining the metrics with which we define literacy. Is is it how many black people told a census? worker in 1820, how if they could
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Okay.
Michael Harriot: read or not, a person that they had never seen before, under threat of yeah, under the penalty
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Go ahead, no no no
Michael Harriot: of death, if they could read, or is it the people who could we know could form words while looking at specific markers in the alphabet, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: The funny thing is, is like, like I said earlier, the ability to like without actual instruction, right? So I'm gonna use it, but like without actual instruction, like, the fuck, what you want with this data? What you want with this information?
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right? like my bro, my grandmama, when I would go and spend like the majority of my days with her, we my pops would pick us up, take us out of my grandma's house. And That's the first time I ever had like interaction with insurance man. You know what I'm saying? Bro, the insurance man, I would always wonder, like, why would my grandmama respond to this white guy this way when he would walk down the driveway? And like, she wasn't acting out of character, but she had a diff she had discerned that you are only going to get access to so much. That is the ability to be literate. That is a type of literacy that, again, Does not make its way into any framework of assessment when we think about what constitutes as a marker of intelligence. And you alluded to in terms of the quantification and the standardization, like the emphasis on assessment, right? The objective social empiricist approach to intelligence is what we're really also talking about is education as a form of eugenicism. Right? So I'm by training a counselor educator, backgrounds in psychology. And one of the things that I would encourage your listeners to to go and find if they don't have it already, is in 2021 the APA created an apology, wrote an apology to people of color. Are you familiar with this one? Yeah, yeah,
Michael Harriot: Yes. Go ahead.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: yeah. So, but one of the domains, if you think about it, is like, well, APA is a psychological organization. Why would it have anything to do with, or what would it have to do with like education? But there is a section in the entire document, and there are two documents, one that chronicles APAs and psychology more broadly, the role that psychology and APA play in the domination of or the perpetuation of racism in the world. And then it offers a corrective or attempts to offer a corrective, and it talks about education. And you might ask, well, what is the relationship between psychology and education? But two of the biggest figures in black psychology are. Dr. Clark, Dr. Mr. and Mrs. Dr. Clark, right? And their work was instrumental in desegregation and the doll studies, right? So there's a very, very intimate relationship between the psychology of oppression and the role that colonial education and thus decolonization have always played in our radical traditions and liberation struggles.
Michael Harriot: the the study that you're talking about was used in Brown versus Boy. So Thurgood Marshall used the Doll study, showing that black children who went to white school would to to in schools in America preferred white dolls. and that shows that even like it cannot be a separate education system cannot be equal. It's what is what what he was showing, right? But there are broader implications of that study in when you think about it, how that notion extends beyond the classroom, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: it really does, if you think about education from again, a pan-Africanist perspective, a black studies, a critical black theories perspective, is it wasn't just about the preferences of white dolls, right? That's just a symptom, right? It revealed the extent to which these young black children had already begun to subscribe to dominant notions about what it meant to be a black person.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right? So absolutely devoid of the characters that they had already started to assign to white dolls and whiteness in general. It was never just that. It was a more radical critique that I would argue is connected to other earlier iterations, or maybe not earlier, contempor contemporary interventions in the psychological discourse. And it wasn't an accident that I pulled up phenon there.
Michael Harriot: Yes. And the the interesting thing about that, right, is again when we look at history through an objective lens, their qu ask was not to like we want to go to school with the white kids. That was not the the end
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: goal, right? They were saying we want equal schools, right? And so but when we talk about that and you say, well that was like, you know, fifty years ago, or we were talking about a hundred years ago. And now we're at this debate about literacy. And if you read the article about the end of reading, it's premised upon this notion that, hey, let's ask the professors and the teachers in classrooms how they see literacy. And that's how this article is it's viewed through that objective lens, right? Like I st Our kids are being less literate and the origin of that is the teachers. Now, here's the question, right? If we distill it down to even just the dominant notion of what literacy is, right? You know, and I know that I I'm always astounded as someone who was homeschooled. When
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: people ask or people wonder, like, why didn't they teach us that in school? Or why like if I don't know something. It is the fault of the people who taught me taught us things in school when like I've never understood that connection. When you talk about literacy, most this the school might lay the foundation for a technique, right? But like if I take a date of carpentry carpentry class, it doesn't make me a carpenter. It's how you practice it in the real world, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right. So, like the apprenticeship, apprenticeship model, right? that's what. the degree in sociology of education helped me to understand. It didn't help me to understand black education better than what I understood it from my, you know, illiterate grandparents, my maternal grandfather my gr maternal grandparents and paternal grandparents, all right? I didn't learn anything noteworthy about our educational struggle. I just got a broader understanding of what was it that was so eager about the disenfranchised white masses, where they understood that if we want to disrupt the aristocracy. Then what we need is a more objective way to educate everyone, right? So it always will always go back to these dominant notions of power and whose ideas around what qualifies as an educated civilian determines long term what it is that students are expected to perform in school and outside
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: of school. So that's the point also that I was You were talking about how most of our education happens outside of school. In preparation for the conversation, I went back to your book. And in the introduction, you talk about the, I'm assuming it's your grandparents' home in in Hartsville.
Michael Harriot: Yes, yes.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: That was your classroom. It was like the middle room. Bro,
Michael Harriot: Right. Yes.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: if I were to take you to my parents' home right now, back in South Carolina. The den is where my formative education happened. And I just so happen to be a beneficiary of going to one of the worst underperforming districts where I was taught and loved by primarily black teachers, bright primarily by black women in particular. So absolutely, this idea that we never should entrust our future, which education is really about culture and the themes that the elders deem important, so important that they must be. replicated and reproduced is what school has always meant for us.
Michael Harriot: Right. And when you think about the fact that you somehow navigated from that school district, w which was, you know, quantified as one of the worst, to where
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Absolutely.
Michael Harriot: you to where you are now, they instilled a form of literacy in you, not just like reading books, right? But the importance of navigating learning how to navigate a world where you could get from there to where you are now. And we've distilled it down to how many books you read a month, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: how can you you know
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And again, that's not to say, and I there was a part of me that should have like prefaced all of this because I can hear someone saying, this man up there like bemoaning the importance of like being able to read. And I'm like, no, I'm not, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, in the same way that in miseducation of the negro, Carter G. Woodson was like, we need to be also asking what type of educated Negroes are we producing? Like,
Michael Harriot: Right. Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: go ahead.
Michael Harriot: Like 'cause what that lends itself to is if 'cause if you subscribe to those notions, then you also subscribe to this man who could quote Shakespeare must be more learned than this man who read Sheikh Anti Diap, right? Cause I don't know what who that dude is, but we should all we should all
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: know, like we should all have a reference to. Shakespeare, no the Shakespeare references as an educated person, right? The
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: more education you have after you learn like the fundamental of reading, right? Is just a practice of what does that like what importance does that have in your life? If you have that fundamental basis, but you can't navigate through the lessons that your grandparents taught you, does it matter?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Does it matter? Does it matter? And it's not just the more and more I'm learning about black critical theory, it is so much of our traditions were in terms of education, were about illuminating and excavating those pieces of our history that have been intentionally withheld from us, obviously, right? But what I've started to learn more and more recently, probably since like 2016 was the role that the objection, the objectification of blackness as a construct, not as a group of people, not about black interior social life, but the idea that circulated so prevalently, prevalently in religious discourse, notions of manifest destiny, how those narratives quite literally could not exist without the Deracination of blackness, right? And like that is one way, one way that it happens, or through one avenue, is traditional schooling. Whether you want to call it in in indigenous studies, a colonial education, or whether you're not you call it in like the black radical tradition, just a romantic notion of Eurocentrism, that has always existed. That that contentious relationship. around education being either just purely pragmatic or having a pat particular or various types of social and political functionality is what separates and what's gets what gets us back to the initial question about what is literacy. Those two camps and the you know those those various camps will think about education very, very differently.
Michael Harriot: if we even look at the objective Euro, the supposedly objective Eurocentric metrics, right? G there is no time in American history where more black people have been graduated from high school, have been attending college, have been graduating from college. So is so we have to ask this, right? When we look at these statistics, are we talking about a crisis in white literacy or a crisis in the closing of the gap in how between black and white people and how they measure literacy, right? Because I mean, objectively we like objectively a greater percentage of People in America can read than like when America was founded, when the Civil War happened. Like, we're way more literate than any other time in American history, right? We
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: might not consume as much books. And here's the important part: back to what we said all the time. Because increasingly, that is a smaller way that information is transferred, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: Right. Like If you are a college professor and you only give your students information that they can read in the book, you're kind of derelict in duty, right? Because that's not how they're gonna navigate the world when
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: they you know when they exit your institution, right? It's a mix. And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: what this critique is of the end of literacy is like maybe. People are consuming information as they did throughout human history in the way where most information is contained.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And so at what time has that form of literacy, again, for operating aside from these traditional Eurocentric notions where pop culture and music weren't understanding or ways that literacy was understood? Or what constituted your ability to be literate? Like to be able to compose a song in such a way that The primary themes or narratives that pervade that song go beyond detection. Right? Those very same traditions that have existed since our escape and abandonment from the plantation, like those forms of literacy still matter. And to your point, perhaps there are, like, let's not also let's not lose sight of the fact that as we're talking about more people literate, I think you alluded to it earlier, is that let's not conflate. degree completion with one being literate.
Michael Harriot: Where or the ability like what they were measuring in eighteen twenty three was like, Can you read on a what we would say now? they read on a third grade level, right? Right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: because we know that there were people, black folks with degrees and high school diplomas and professionals who couldn't pass the white folks' literacy test when they went to vote, right? They were deemed
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: by the institution that judges black literacy. As a literate.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: many bubbles are in a bar of soap. Right, right. Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: Right. That that that that's part of a literacy test, right? How how many jelly beans are in this jar, right? And I think it's all always important to point out these notions when we're having this conversation, who's measuring
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well, and I think there's a part of me that's very I will be forever cynical of a paradigm framework political philosophy that will try to convince the masses that it has it is concerned with literacy or literacy as a proxy for intelligence, as you are absolutely desecrating and destroying like the US Department of Education for all of its
Michael Harriot: Goodbye.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: for all of its flaws, right? But an institution that at various times has been Leveraged as a mode or a type of advocacy. And I'm using advocacy because oftentimes those interventions are at best reformist as opposed to revolutionary in their demands. Right. So I want to like point that out. But excuse me if I'm cynical about your investments and concerns around literacy, if you aren't talking about the relationship between kids and families being unhoused and educational outcomes. Right. So if you
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: were to go and Google it right now and ask about the relationship between homelessness and literacy, it would convince you that homelessness is the outcome of being illiterate. And I'm like, no, we need to flip the variables. Right.
Michael Harriot: Yeah. Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Like, no, homelessness shouldn't be the outcome variable. Right. Homelessness and being unhoused is the precipitator. It's the antecedent for those those sorts of things. So excuse me if I don't believe that you're invested, but have nothing to say about kids being unhoused. If you have nothing to say about the relationship between economic stability and how well children perform. So if you don't care about access to healthcare, when kids who are literally having abscess in their teeth can't focus in school, you forgive me. You forgive me if I find your claims about literacy disingenuous. You're not gonna say anything about the fact that the majority of black and brown kids in the school, a vast majority of them, go to schools where there are cops and no counselors. Like all those things matter and have tremendous impacts on the types of academic metrics that someone would want to animate or want to hyper.
Michael Harriot: Yeah, it that's an illustration of what we're talking about when we're talking about literacy. So, you know, there's always a white person, sometimes a black person in my inbox who says, right, like why can't two thirds of the students in Baltimore school district read at grade level and it's a all in this an all black school district. And they think of that as a marker of one of two things, right? We're less intelligent genetically, or that we don't know how, like black people don't know how to educate. And what it is what I always argue is wait, first of all, you can't even have that conversation and skip over the fact that there is a all black neighborhood and the all black school district, right? Like you gotta go to the history of why that exists. How that, right? And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: after Brown versus Board of Education, after desegregation, like you're saying, well, we're just gonna take it for granted this is all black school district. And the fact that what you're using to measure across these, you know, some of these wealthier school districts, some of the Some of the most resourced school districts and some of these poor school districts. You're using the same metric to measure on one little aspect of how educ how education works, right? And you're saying, yeah, the black school perform performs best. Well, we know the test that you're using
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: is was created to produce those outcomes, right? Right? When we talk about standardized testing and intelligent testing. The SAT, they were produced, they were created for those reasons. And now that they are still producing the outcome, the reflecting the outcomes that you they were created to reflect, what are we talking about? Like, what is the crisis that we're talking about?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well, I mean, this is the so it's pre it's predicated and you pointed it out. Like also one of the things that I learned in educational sociology was like as it pertains to the black children in particular, there are two predominant have been, not have been historically. The genetic explanation, right, which is for white people, it's like you need to take that up with your God. Like your God dealt you
Michael Harriot: Mm. Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: a bare hand. Like you the missing link between animals and human type shit. Right. but the other model that is much more sympathetic is I would argue, and many have argued is even more disturbing, which is the cultural pathology.
Michael Harriot: Why?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, which is, no, y'all don't have the right temperament, which is really just another way to talk about like black respectability and wink wink, part of the current discourse at HBCU is around bonnets and do-rags. Let's keep it a book.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. So those two competing frameworks are both disparaging and leverage and use again insights from black critical theory is like slaveness, the ability to exist as an object for the master's imperative. and gets me back to where the like the nation of risk, as that conversation is happening, and you'll know this. As that conversation is happening in the mid-1980s around education, what is also happening in the area of critical studies? Well, not critical studies, legal studies and juvenile studies. What is happening? The explosion of the superpredator myth,
Michael Harriot: Vai.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: right? Which also connects to three strikes and the explosion of mass incarceral system. And at the same time, is it allows black critical theorists. Someone like Bell Hooks in particular to help us understand why representation isn't enough. Because those same black and white people in your inbox will also be pointing to the fact that seems to be work the things for black people seem to be worse in the areas where they have the social and political representation and local and state political control. So it looks as though black people can't even govern themselves. Right? So it's like all those different things. you lose if you have a very rigid and apolitical notion of what education looks like. It doesn't allow you to make those sorts of assessments and therefore limits your ability to articulate a critique in that particular way.
Michael Harriot: But the interesting thing to me is always that the cure for all of these ills and social flaws that black people have is always like, you gotta have more of this institution that we created specifically to cre the the keep you out, right? Like the answer to y'all's lower literacy rates or to y'all's lower college attendance rate Is man, you gotta have, you gotta go to school. More like white people go to school. And y'all are the ones who removed all those black teachers from the from the
Dr. Ahmad Washington: But
Michael Harriot: academy from from the education, the K through 12 education system. But let me ask you this, as a professor at a university, when we're talking about students that you see now.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And and and again, let me be let me be very clear clear. So as associate professor and department chair, I work which will change, which will make my experiences very different than some of my colleagues. I don't teach any undergrads. So I'm only teaching masters and PhD students. So I have very, you know, very few interactions with undergraduates on campus.
Michael Harriot: But but but I'm sure you know you you got to that level by teaching undergrads and so what I'm asking is do for most of human history, the p the words that we've read from people were produced by the most literate people or what we deem the most literate people. And now we see as many words from people who would never, we would never read their words in most for most of human history.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah, I mean, yes and no, because I'm thinking about like again, literacy for what purpose, right? I can't speak to in terms of how she may have performed on a standardized assessment, right? And again, a standardized assessment that in this Friere would call this like a a banking concept. Really, it is you get an A, the extent to which you record and regurgitate on command, right? I don't know how well Fannie Lou Hamer would have performed on a standardized, I don't know. I don't but what I what I know is her social and political analysis I would put up against any supposed expert in social and political theory. Right?
Michael Harriot: Right. more succinctly, like could Harriet Tubman have passed a geography test right now? Like you we know she knew how to navigate the entire Eastern Seaboard. Could she have passed a geography test? So was she literate in geography or was it right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I was like that and that's the thing, is like is literate can we isolate it to what can be like the abstraction of it all, right? Or does what constitute as literate is the application in the world? So what good is an education that is disconnected from the world? Right? What utility
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: does it have?
Michael Harriot: Yeah, and I like that you keep challenging that notion because I see that I'm trying to get to like the fundamental basics of reading and you're saying, hey, but like Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying, right? Like what are we gonna like
Dr. Ahmad Washington: There is no there is no.
Michael Harriot: when we keep s having this discussion, right? We're talking about like what are we talking, what are we
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And I know how and I know how frustrating that is, right?
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: But it opens up avenues. It opens up avenues, right? Because it says that this notion of literacy could not exist without like one of my favorite, one of the things that I did like not long after getting to Louisville was to start this after school program and it was called lyrics. It was Louisville. Louisville Youth Resisting Injustice and Changing Systems. It was a hip hip hop-based college and career readiness program. And we used a black study, a college black studies text in order to have these after-school sessions. So Whenever I come to talk about like education, it will always be about power. And who has the again to quote Amos Wilson, power is the ability to define reality and make other people respond to that reality as if it's their own. So in education, what this often looks like are mentoring program for young black boys when what we're really talking about is ways that we can convince them that they're altering their behavior and doing these things will make a substantial and market change in how the world relates to blackness and it won't.
Michael Harriot: Yeah. And when we talk about literacy in those flattened terms, right, it redu like it it reinforces the like the horse race that right, right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah, meritocracy, bruh.
Michael Harriot: I remember man when I was in college, one of my my my line brother, he was a engineering major. And every year the engineering department has this contest where they build a solar car. It's a race, but the race is not who went who could go the fastest, which car could go the longest. And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm.
Michael Harriot: there was this and we had this mentoring program where this kid we and our our mentee was like this kid from right down the street in the project. So he would be at our apartment every day. And while my LB was working on this thing, he said, Hey, what why why not use bicycle chains? Well it turns out His father taught him how to weld, so he would take apart bicycles and make these huge tall bicycles, but he would have to figure out the pedaling mechanism to white the wind the chains where you could be on a bicycle that tall and still pedal it. They used what this dude from the projects told them in their engineering
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: class and won the race that year, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: It I think it was the first all-black team to win that race.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: And what I'm asking, like, he was an engineer. Right? If
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: by all intents and purposes, that job that they would have had in an engineering job, a 13-year-old black kid in the projects could have done it. But he probably couldn't have passed the engineering test they were being trained for. That's what that school was training you for, to pass the engineering test and to get a job. He could have done the job but not passed the test. So when we talk about literacy and the ability to read, is there a skill or a a metric that all of these people like we should revere all equally, like the ability to read at a third grade level, or is it ability to how many books you read a month or what what is that metric to determine from your perspective.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: So I don't know if there's a general consensus. And I know this will sound to like somebody like this is, you know, avoiding. I there, I don't know if there's a general consensus in terms of is there a standalone assessment? Because the the thing that I'm also saying is is like, and you alluded to it earlier, is there are all of these multiple categories and and characteristics that we could associate with intelligence. That elude us if we focus narrowly on one way of assessing it, right? So
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: one of the, I'm not gonna say like most recent, but a a huge inventory, a huge intervention, not inventory, a huge intervention in just the educational discourse is the idea of multiple intelligences, right? So expanding beyond this very narrow and rigid notion of like, are we willing to subscribe to a model that would. be unable to account for the ways that its measuring of intelligence doesn't count for Nina Simone's brilliance and intelligence.
Michael Harriot: I always hesitate to use those kinds of examples because it is not just like these benevolent examples of we're, you know, excluding an artist, right? But these are like what made Nina Simone successful in life is a form of intelligence that was just as
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Absolutely.
Michael Harriot: that that was just as valuable as what made Albert Einstein successful in life.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: No good.
Michael Harriot: Right? Like it's not just a art arbitrary thing. If we wouldn't have any beautiful music or art. What we're talking about is a metric that defines i whether someone can be successful.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: So it would then be domain, almost domain specific, which again explodes the idea that it could be distilled because it would depend on. Again, I am a counselor. I would argue that you can go to school and I know how this is gonna sound in the current conversation. I'm probably sure you know where I'm going with this, but like to be a practitioner or a therapist or any other source. You can go somewhere and accumulate the degrees necessary. But I would argue that your ability to be a counselor is predicated on your ability to not just think critically about what informs people's behavior, but also to attend to in a very nuanced way the things that get communicated that are unspoken. Right. but what if we replace the client with a student? So now you're talking to a student and not a client. Your ability to move that young person to what they and their community would consider self actualization is predicated on your ability to understand what it is that that child and their communities have to negotiate. So if you attempt to foreclose the consciousness that that student would bring to his or her their s scenario, you are actually impeding their self-actualization and functioning as an unethical practitioner. Right.
Michael Harriot: Or or an illiterate one. Right. right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Absolutely. Abs
Michael Harriot: Like I I remember I had a a friend who worked for a psychologist. And the psychologist told a white psychologist and the psychologist told me, told him that like man, I don't know why why my black c my black patients won't take their medicine. Like, you know, black people ain't gonna take the medicine. Right? They'll
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro.
Michael Harriot: talk about it something about like it's it's against their nature or it mess with their nature. And it was like it's like you know, some kind of religious stuff. And he was like, wait, you think when they say it mess with my nature, they're talking about something religious, right? It makes that's a f like they're talking about erectile d dysfunction. And so,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bruh.
Michael Harriot: right, he he was illiterate
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: to his patients.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right, right. Bruh, I remember
Michael Harriot: Right. And his in this
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I remember working in Columbia and I was early in my career and I remember having this very same conversation and I was illiterate. This is also part of what makes decolonization so critical for black people is I had been groomed, I had been educated in those very same systems. So no one was saying to me, hey, Ahmad. If you're working with young black men once your career concludes, then you might want to attend to the very real ways that the medication, the way that it converges with some of your clients' notion around manhood and masculinity, will create problems mentally because they quite literally can't perform. and this is how the literature would describe those clients as non-compliant.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: As noncompliant. No, to your point, you have just been miseducated about the things that you should be looking for. And why should we be surprised? Because whiteness quite literally has a stronghold on all the theoretical orientations that help you to understand yourself, your client, and the client's relationship to this to the social environment in which they find themselves immersed. So yeah.
Michael Harriot: So so so what does what does this have to do with literacy, right? So we're talking about this literacy crisis in the framework of one. I think because we're seeing again, if you go back and read letters from colonial people or letters from men who were fighting in the Civil War back to their to their wives, even the presidents. There were so many misspellings and grammatical errors that if we saw them on Twitter, we would say, Man, I look I read through James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington's letters, and man, we got a founder's literacy crisis, right? Because
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: we're using a different metric But I think it is important to realize that this whole notion of this literacy crisis is dependent on where what you value as education. And I don't think that anyone is arguing, you or I, that like I don't think read the ability to read matters. Right? Right. But
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right. In an office with like books everywhere. Like come on now. Like that's not the argument that's being made.
Michael Harriot: Right, but remember again, back in eighty seven through the nineties, we were saying, Well, man, nobody does math anymore. it wasn't that there was a lack of people who understood how to do algebraic equations, right? It was that we were entering into a new form of technology where I mean If you don't know your 11 times tables, you could just do them on the thing, right? Like man, nobody learns cursive anymore in a area in a world where everybody types, right? And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: I'm asking you, forget about the term of literacy. Do you think we're less able to read words? now than in the past.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I I can't say definitively we are less able to read words. No, I don't have any data to support that argument. Equally, I don't have any data to suggest that we are more illiterate. Like I don't have any data. Perhaps you can enlighten me about some things that you've come across, but
Michael Harriot: No, I I think I think okay, let's take all the AI slap and all of that. Like, I mean, objectively, I think we have to acknowledge that probably this generation of human beings reads more words on in an average day than most people in all of human history. Like when you can s can
Dr. Ahmad Washington: mean by just sheer just sheer access to it on our phones?
Michael Harriot: Yeah, and like just looking at words and deciphering them, like probably more than at any other time in human history, right? Would wouldn't you think so?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I mean, if we're talking about just proliferation and but I don't know how many of us are on our phones reading you know, 20,000 word essays.
Michael Harriot: No, but on but but is a t like they're talking about this fundamental ability to like read, they're saying, Well, we we don't read as much, and I'm saying we read more. Like you read a tw in objectively a tweet, whether the information is correct or anything, is the
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: same thing as a paragraph in a in the first paragraph of an essay, right? So we're
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: reading more, right? We're not we might not be reading more from scholars, from people we consider be educated, right? or s like we might be
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And again, this this g this goes back to like if I know and I know how this is gonna frustrate, but it's like again, that operates from the idea that only a particular type of text warrant assessment.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: You know what I'm saying? So like if you can say that reading, the only thing that you are reading are texts, and as though you can't read all forms of media. I think that is again reproduces a particular narrative, a dominant framework about who is and who isn't literate. And it completely not completely constrains, but it interferes with a richer and robust idea around what operate as text, right? Because if you would you were talking about Twitter, there would there would have been no
Michael Harriot: Right. But we're not Africa. Instagram, right? That's what I'm saying and and that is my point, right? In that
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Harriot: in that in a world where information is not disseminated in the same way, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: The focus and the consternation over the ability to read a three hundred word book is to me an effort to reinforce the narratives that we're trying to disassociate with educ education in the beginning, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: But what I'm also saying is that these same people who will proclaim to be concerned about literacy, right, which is the ability to understand, because you use the word comprehension and destroy safeguards that would limit the ability for bots to reproduce and circulate misinformation. So
Michael Harriot: Right. Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: it's like again, and you know. The most critical thing to take away from 619, the 619 project, again, is about narrative, right? We in this climate, black critical theorists or black feminist thought is considered somehow an in endangerment, which it quite literally is, is a frontal assault on dominant notions around like patriotism, right? So that approach to education, what does constitute like Having the audacity to tell a different story, to have a different relationship with the institution that is education is seen, is seen as it's criminal and it's criminalized, which we shouldn't be, which we shouldn't be surprised of. But if you have the ability to define what is the text. Then you can then also decide, is it merely the accumulation of words or is it the ability to accumulate those words and then speak more honestly and more frankly to the circumstances that surround you? And, you know.
Michael Harriot: Yeah, and and and in as it relates to this subject, right? So if we're concerned that people like you are asking the next generation of scholars to not to read like as many three hundred page books or aren't requiring them to read as many whole three hundred page books, but read the works of their sco their their colleagues, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: in a journal. or in the which is online, right? Or
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm.
Michael Harriot: to assess the data that we gathered in video evidence, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right.
Michael Harriot: Or or or audio interviews. are we talking about a crisis in literacy or a crisis with the status quo of what how we define literacy?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Think the crisis is again, this is for me continuity. It is a crisis of fear by the dominant order to determine what constitutes thought, right? like in my classroom, what happens when you are no longer compelled by an A at the end of the semester. Like, what happens? Are you more inclined to think critically about, and again, someone who teaches counseling is I want you to have a very different relationship, first and foremost, with yourself and an honest confrontation with what historically this discipline and the helping professions have done to the most disenfranchised and vulnerable people. Like And in my discipline, that is considered that is that I am contributing to many of my field an illiterate set of practitioners.
Michael Harriot: And w what is their critique based on?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Because for them, so that framework quite literally is an a critical studies approach to psychology, where I am asking, what has what did in its origin psychoanalysis and Freudian thought do for humanity or its notions around humanity? What did behaviorism and Albert's Skinner and Pavlov in terms of being able to figure out to control punishments and rewards and how that could be used to manipulate behavior. Right? That's the traditionalist approach. What black psychology did and came in, what black psychology in part came in to do was to say to the dominant notions around what it means to be literate in psychology that the field never addressed race. That instead of Ahmad thinking about yourself in the skinarian or be or behaviorist model. You aren't the practitioner, you aren't the scientist. Black people and other disenfranchised people are the rats. what happens to these disciplines when we attempt to make a different set of literate practitioners who just happen to be black. What does it mean to take that black critical theory? as a form of literacy and shining on these dominant narratives and these dominant frameworks that have forever proclaimed to be neutral and in everyone's collective best interest.
Michael Harriot: Right. Like I think we have this classical classist notion of education as is as though when it is altered in many ways to reflect the outcomes that we desire, right? Or to achieve the outcomes that we desire, we're destroying some like if you don't read Greek mythology, you ain't educated. How how can you call yourself a writer, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, that's crazy. Have you seen this meme circulating on on social media? It's like, isn't it ironic that in this moment where folks are telling us about how irrelevant the humanities are, the most popular movie is the Odyssey?
Michael Harriot: Yeah. And the
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: I I've seen that and and even more like how those notions, right, become so entrenched in our society that sometimes we accept them. Right? Like
Dr. Ahmad Washington: yeah. yeah.
Michael Harriot: like this whole notion of if you ain't if you are for instance reading Books versus listening to audiobooks,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: man.
Michael Harriot: right? I imagine that when the like when the printing press was introduced, you know, there were monks who were saying, Man, when I was coming up, we had to figure out our monks' handwriting to decipher what was
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: and then the After the printing press, people who read books that were printed by computer be like, man, man, we just had to read books middle riddled with mistakes. Y'all don't even have to do that anymore, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Yeah.
Michael Harriot: I mean literally that's where the phrase, by the way, mind your P's and Q's came from, because sometimes they would be backwards.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm-hmm. Mm.
Michael Harriot: But
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I know that. and this for me is I'm always thinking about what this means with regards to like preparing psychologists, is not just psychologists, counselor educators, people working and helping professionals, So I would be thinking about these learning theories and Dr. Patton got a book coming out like strung up where she talks about
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: like black bro. That is so
Michael Harriot: I read it. I got it. I got it in my email. Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I'm hating. I'm low-key hating that you because it
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: ain't out yet.
Michael Harriot: Nah it's not. It's not. I got the yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Again, I can again again, you know, you know, w different things. but bro, that's gonna be incredibly useful to someone who like me who teaches human growth and development to graduate school courses, the graduate school students.
Michael Harriot: he's talking about Dr. Stacey Patton, who is professor at Howard University, and she is also she also has a book about she's a scholar on black children. She has a book called Strunk Up and it is about the violence that America has inflicted traditional historically on black children. But one of the things she points out, which I never considered, is that Like we really never had black children in America, right? Because there was no childhood during enslavement times, right? And then in sharecropping times, right? There were no black there was not a black childhood in this
Dr. Ahmad Washington: That like
Michael Harriot: country.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: because all those are social constructs.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Those are constructs, right? And this is again what it means to be literate, bruh. And I know for like if whenever you feel the inclination, internally or extrinsically, in your community, in your professional settings, where there is an exerted attempt to narrow the conversation to something singular, black people should resist because it's like, no. You want me to think in a very objective and tangible way. And what this world has always invited, required black people is to think beyond the very narrow notions of like human and child. Like those categories are not biological categories.
Michael Harriot: Now there are some people who are gonna be watching this and say, well, you're literally pulling books off the shelf and say, It don't matter if you can that's what people are gonna say now. I can tell you it don't matter if you can read while you're putting pulling book books off the shelf that you read, right? Or like you got a PhD. what do you say to people who say, like, kind of this is an elitist critique,
Dr. Ahmad Washington: my arguments are quite literally calling into question the notions of round objectivity and meritocracy that your argument requires. That somehow, if we can just gain provide access to more education, folks' lives will be markedly better. When we have data, for instance, where two Exact same, like two resumes, two CVs that are exactly the same, and one has a Eurocentric name and one has an ethnic name. That this ethnic name gets fewer callbacks. That's an object objective fact. So the idea is still predicated on a notion of meritocracy that we know is a fallacy. Like there's actual there's actual data where, and I found it's a there's a study, and I want to say it's the The journal of childhood personality of childhood psychology, but the article that references it is in the Atlantic and it's talking about the consequences on the psyche of Black children when they internalize this notion of meritocracy. The likelihood that children will engage in the letterist and and self-destructive behavior goes up the extent to which they believe in a meritocracy.
Michael Harriot: Well, you you were the source of one of my articles on that years ago, right? the meritocracy book.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: hey, hey, hey, let me get my citational credit, bro. I ain't this is my first time hearing that, so I I'm curious to know
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: what what you're talking about.
Michael Harriot: It was called the the the meritocracy myth about how it was specifically geared towards even before this whole college admissions Supreme Court case, the idea that there is a objective metric that measures your b we know like for instance the SAT does it measure your ability to perform in college. Right. It's just a a arbitrary arbitrary metric meant to keep people out, right? That's why it
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well,
Michael Harriot: exists.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: well, also graduate school, the equivalent is the GRE. You know this.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, if it was based on a GRE, I wouldn't be here. I'm
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: terrible at standing. I think I may have gotten my my best at well, ACT. ACT I was like a 17, 18, somewhere in there. GRE was like a 710, 720. I'm talking about terrible at standardized test, terrible. But what is something that you can't ignore is the relationship between the access to the resources, the educational resources,
Michael Harriot: My
Dr. Ahmad Washington: but really about like, how well can you take the test? Right. And a perfect example of this is you remember the episode of Good Times where Mike was giving
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: bro, he the insight was so poignant and poignant, but also. Obvious to most black people, right? The same black people who were being told, yeah, in order to vote, you gotta be able to pass this test that says, like, how many bubbles in a bar. So Michael was basically saying the same dynamic exists. The same people who were able to determine whether or not I was qualified to vote for vote then, their children and descendants are telling me whether or not I'm qualified to graduate high school.
Michael Harriot: Right. And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: It's the same it's the same dynamic, bro.
Michael Harriot: And to the people who make that critique of people like me and you say who like you know got through the classic American education system and now are saying, like, you know that shit is don't don't really measure nothing. That critique as an elitist critique is I often have to make people understand that like some of the people you're talking to, like us, we got here despite that, right? Like Not because of that, like not that we
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: navigate, like we did the same thing as the white people did and got here. And that our criticism is that we know that we ain't the only smart ones, right? Like we consider scholars, but we ain't the scholars for real, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, I to this day, as much as I like, so my move from being faculty to department chair, as much as I appreciate the ability to like make some changes structurally, the one thing that I enjoy most about the faculty life is the ability to use everything that I've been taught to hurl these critiques. Right. As a way of destabilizing it all, because I know I'm not exceptional.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I'm not exceptional. Like, I don't think, bro, and this is where my like formation in the the academy has always like really hovered around like hip-hop is bro. I hear sociology, I hear sociological critiques. Like one of my favorite MCs died a couple years ago. His name is Brownsville Ca. He has a his project from 2018, 2019 called Descendants of Cain. And bro, it is a critique of some of the most integral and foundational narratives and anecdotes from the Judy Judo Judeo Christianity that I've ever heard. Most eloquent things that I've ever heard. He talks about one of his one of my favorite bars was that covenant was rotten. Was begotten and forgotten. Some days everything was grave, so we was plotting. Like in that short time, this man is talking about a covenant that exists. Again, the social contract and how that contract's existence is predicated on the marking of blackness outside of humanity. Like, so I didn't need sociology because KRS and other folks were giving me a different orientation, a different ontology, a different framework through which to examine the world. Like that's all that was. And again, to get back to your point, if I had the power to design the assessment tool, white folks in that structure would be deemed illiterate.
Michael Harriot: and we see it in almost every form of of every area in American society, right? Like as a journalist, right, we I always so a friend of mine, Wes Lowry, won the Pulitzer for the Washington Post
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm.
Michael Harriot: fatal force thing that counts police killings.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Mm.
Michael Harriot: And he says like all the black folks I know knew police killed black folks more often like it was a known thing, right? I gotta pull it support for it because white people were illiterate in that area of America, right? Like they had they had not done any studies and the studies that they did proved the thing that we inherently knew was true. Right? Martin
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro.
Michael Harriot: Luther King talked about it. Malcolm X talked about it. Everybody talked about it. And it was like in the two thousands that white people began seeing it.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, Baldwin said what to be black and slightly conscious is to be in a constant state of rage. Cause you
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: you are always getting cross-examined by people who or a framework or a structure that is ill-equipped and not designed to see your arguments as legible. Like you have nothing to say because you've never had anything to say, type shit. Right? So good.
Michael Harriot: Right. And and you can see they would say, like, if you put type shit on the in your
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Ha ha.
Michael Harriot: sentence, why you talk like that's a literate talk.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Which again, you and I both know we can go back to the nineteen eighties, nation at risk. I referenced it for a reason. What was happening simultaneously is our literal court cases around the legitimacy of African American vernacular English. Like liter
Michael Harriot: Right. It was we it was hurting us. It was it was
Dr. Ahmad Washington: it was the impediment. Again,
Michael Harriot: Why?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: how is that any different than the dominant narrative or some of the dominant narratives pervading current HBCU politics and bonnets and do-rags. It is the same cultural depravity narrative. It's a it's the exact same playbook. Exact same playbook.
Michael Harriot: they're saying like we're facing a crisis where kids a don't read as many books, don't have the ability to like, I don't know, write as grammatically correct in the same way that we did earlier. But like how far up the top or toward the bottom would you say what they're talking about? This decreasing tendency to read full text of books and the inability, what they call a reading comprehension, by their metrics.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: I don't think, and specifically as it pertains, you're never going to convince me that black people have not, and there will never be a time when black people's desire for literacy in a more practical sense does not exist. Like you can you will never be able to convince me that within black people there exists a desire for a type of liberation, a type of self-determination that is disconnected from. literacy as we define it. You'll never be able to convince me. when students and young people are learning to access social media in ways that allow them to communicate how to defend themselves against tear gas in real time, that those kids are illiterate. They've quite literally mastered, well, what are the primary platforms and mechanisms by by way important information can be relayed. That can be useful in some sort of like ongoing social and political framework for social change. Like again, it gets back to what are we define, what are we defining as literate and who has access and power to the spaces where those definitions get standardized. so I don't for the folks who are trying to dictate the conversation, I think their notions around literacy. Are no different than the dominant notions, conservative notions in the 1980s that we're thinking about how then does literacy and whether that literacy is like in this moment, like AI literacy. There isn't really much conversation, the dominant conversation around AI literacy when we aren't thinking about the very real ecological consequences that are the result of the expansion of AI. Right? Like you can't You can't then say that students who are thinking about or folks who are wanting to think about those sorts of things aren't also literate. Like pushing that we think about what are the what is the ecological toll of this emphasis on AI in the same way that there was an emphasis in the 1980s on the races to the moon and science technology, science technology, engineering, and math.
Michael Harriot: Right. So Ultimately, do you as far as this critique is concerned, do you think there is the lack of consuming because I mean I think that is whether it is an am a metric for literacy or just a phenomenon, right? The fact
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: that people don't read as many books, I don't
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well and also like to your to your point earlier, and I I I I'm glad that you mentioned that because we completely rolled past the idea, first of all, and this is the sort of like elitist and classist idea, is so what counts as reading is someone who isn't in front of a tablet or a book isn't reading because the book is being read to them?
Michael Harriot: Bye.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. So not only is that elitist, in the last couple of like very recently, I've thought about like, that's also ableist. For folks who find it difficult to be in front of a textbook or to do things the very traditionalist way we would think about text, how that doesn't count. The folks who are quite literally consuming so much content that are podcasts, right? There was once a time, for instance, the APA journal, right? The APA manual, like citational citational practices, you couldn't cite a podcast.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: You couldn't cite a podcast, and now you can, quite literally. So our notions around literacy have had to change to your point because it will reflect the myriad ways that people consume text, right? And this interview or interviews like it constitute a form of text that wouldn't have been recognized by the dominant structures ten years ago.
Michael Harriot: one of the notions as as someone who is y in the public historian space is what always interests me is like The idea of, for instance, storytelling and oral histories versus written histories, right? Like
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: we a historian can say this happened because I can quote George Washington's letter to Thomas Jefferson telling him what happened, so we know it happened. But if we quote oral history, hey, that's unverifiable, right? Right? Those are
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Or the other the other forms of
Michael Harriot: Go ahead.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: oral the other forms, forms of oral history that we don't recognize as oral history. Like one of the first things that happened after the Civil War, and you'll know this as a historian, that the South had to revive the image of itself. Right? Who was instrumental in reviving that image? The daughters of the Confederacy.
Michael Harriot: The daughter Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And what did they use? They used monuments, right? So Not just the ability to be able to say, no, this constitutes a legitimate form of literature, right? That classical canonization, but you quite literally get to say these are the artifacts, these are the edifices that qualify as the symbolic, right? The tangible and symbolic representation of a particular narrative, where a mural that we dedicate To the dead and the dying, or the practices that we use to venerate, right? Pouring out a little liquor, that don't constitute a legitimate ritual.
Michael Harriot: Wha what's wild about that though, what what's wild about that daughters of Confederacy thing is I always point out that we say that how they talk about how they changed the narrative and how the lost cause is basically part of our education system now. Never pointing out that they that white Southern women, right, who kind of came of age during the Civil War were probably the least educated demographic in America, right? Like like they didn't go to school. They didn't go to they couldn't go to college. Like most of ended school after like the eighth grade. And that's who formed that's
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Because why do we need you educated? We just need you to be ready for these I believe graduates that we're gonna produce. So domesticity,
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: which is what irritates me most about like some of times the most vocal and vitriolic participants in this discourse, not surprisingly, given the history we just talked about with women's the doors of the Confederacy, some of the most vitriolic are like white women, right?
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Or the counterpart, the other end of the spectrum, but it's still no less nefarious, are the liberal examples. Like Megan Pfeiffer and what's the movie? Dangerous Lives or something, whatever it is. But
Michael Harriot: Doug, I don't know what you're talking about. yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: that's the same thing, right? We can't think about, we have this tendency to only focus on the most gratuitous examples. So therefore we think about like, the daughters of Confederacy and how. The Karen in contemporary discourse is just an extension of that. But like to what extent did the liberal framework that showed up as Megan Pfeiffer also showed up in the blind side?
Michael Harriot: Right. I'll tell you, man, like as a journalist, one of probably the most vitriolic responses that I ever got to anything I wrote was when I wrote about how white liberal parents were trying to a few years ago the New York s school system decided to stop mandating entry tests for some of its what they call magnet schools, right? And white
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. Right.
Michael Harriot: liberal parents were
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Live it.
Michael Harriot: What? And these were the people who were allies, right? They would call them allies, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Living. How dare you? Right, right, right, right.
Michael Harriot: But that's who the most livid constituency were. And I'm telling you how that forms our how we regard education, what we even consider education, especially like I would argue that when you are a person like if you consider reading a thing of value, right? I always want to ask, well, when do you think like black people stopped caring about it? Like was it after we were lit sending our school children to school to let you spit on them so they could have access to an equal education? D was it when we were risking our lives to teach each other to read? Was it when we built the American education system as we know it in 1868, right? Was was it when we were fighting to desegregate it, right? When when was it, right? Like eighty three, eighty four? And
Dr. Ahmad Washington: And I'm not going, and I don't mean to do the whole like we was Kangs thing, but like part of the black radical tradition, in particular like in the early 80s around Afrocentrism, was to say this was a pre-colonial endeavor.
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Like looking at the stars was an intellectual endeavor, right? The calendar, like all of these different things, but it was not some abstraction. It was observation, engagement with the world, not to manipulate the world. But to understand, to create a sense of harmony, a consent a sense of balance. And this is part of, you know, that comedic tradition around like what it meant to be a person and all the the humanities that started with like a particular curiosity that for them would have been called literate. That if you don't understand your relationship to the world, you are an illiterate person. You are an illiterate person.
Michael Harriot: Right. We never point out that. Like we were building we were paying our tax money to build those schools and then building our own. Like we were doubly
Dr. Ahmad Washington: That's what the argument was about was, hey bruh, I'm not trying to come over there. I just don't want to pay for your school while also paying for what we have as a school.
Michael Harriot: If you had to speak to a parent or a educator or a scholar in this subject or somebody like me was a journalist, right? Should I be worried that my nineteen year old ain't reading as many novels or te books?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: if there is a reduction or a number that we want to quantify? Let's just say three or four books, when are we asking that 19-year-old about the relevance of the books that they are being expected to read? Because there is a relationship between how pertinent, how relevant the narrative is to whether or not students feel engaged. And I'm thinking specifically about like literature and some of the Oral traditions that we talked about earlier. But even in something like STEM, is if we're talking about the extent to which someone is able to perform these particular tasks as it pertains to a math outcome, I'm convinced, and also other folks in the field are convinced that the more that you can re make those examples applicable and germane to things that black children have to confront, the more likely they are. To want to succeed.
Michael Harriot: so what you're saying is like for instance reading the Iliad isn't relevant unless as the educator you find a way to make it relevant to the current existence of the person who's reading it.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Well, even before the Iliad, I'd be like, why not things fall apart?
Michael Harriot: Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right. And I know for some folks it would be like, well, that's not what multicultural multicultural education is more than simply replacing the, you know, things fall apart with the Odyssey. And I get it. But that is a place to start. Right. Because what we're talking about, the Odyssey isn't about the historical figures as much as it about as much as it is about the attempt to cultivate a particular type of relevance for the for the protagonist.
Michael Harriot: And for West what they call Western civilization overall, right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because it is about the it Horatio Alger, the pulling up of the bootstraps.
Michael Harriot: Yes.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: It's not about the person as much as much as it is about the intrepid spirit. Right? It's like the stuff that you come on, bruh. And that's
Michael Harriot: Right. The narrative. Right.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: why I like so many folks in Black Studies. And I'm thinking, I'm looking over at my bookshelf. Jacob Carruthers talks about this is just intellectual warfare. What we're talking about is a form of intellectual warfare. That it's not about the Odyssey. There are so many different viable options, so many different viable alternatives to the Odyssey. The problem is that those other alternatives are rendered to or they're the ongoing attempts to render those other perspectives as gibberish. That's the problem.
Michael Harriot: Right. Right. Or again when you said h why not things fall apart, which actually to the credit I think I I I had a college professor and I don't know if they were black or white who like that's when I read Chimwa Chibi's the things fall apart.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, think about in grade school. I remember sitting in my class and thinking to myself, why the hell do I have to read animal form? Why do I have to read 1984? The person that sits here now, it's obvious
Michael Harriot: Why?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: the applicability of the animal form and 1984 to the contemporary moment. But the instructors then were not saying, hey, let's think about what or welling. what the Orwellian themes here mean to surveillance and the black body. Right? No one if I had, I would have been literally sitting on the edge of my seat.
Michael Harriot: when you look at Lord of the Flies under the context of today, right, it's a whole different thing
Dr. Ahmad Washington: no.
Michael Harriot: about masculinity and about how we how power transfers through violence, right? It is a whole different book than some white boys wal in the forest when
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Come on, bruh.
Michael Harriot: I read it originally, right?
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Right.
Michael Harriot: right, like like the the people who are sensitive, good leadership, if they remove violence from the equation, they ain't gonna be chosen. That's how violence is transferred and power is is transferred. That's That overall point. That's the people would say that's the importance of reading these books. And what you're saying is, yeah, but the things that we're talking about is the information that was gleaned from sitting down and reading 300 pages without somebody saying the reason you gotta read this is so you could get an A at the end of the semester, versus, hey man, let's learn this thing. And the easy way to learn it is through this story.
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, Jarvis Givens Fugitive Pedagogy starts with a couple of anecdotes about Black women teachers in Louisiana, if I'm not mistaken, So he talks about black woman sitting on her desk and knowing that someone from the district, a white person from the district, was coming to supervise. And as she's reading, she has the state-approved history book in her lap. But inside of it, she has Carter G. Woodson's work. And she's literally like, I recognize that I'm a fugitive. This is still the plantation. And I'm gonna convince you that what we're doing is exactly what you prescribe, but I'm doing everything but that. Right? So that's the exact point you were making is like I got 1984 just like you. I got animal farm just like you, and I was disengaged because all I saw was some animals who happened to talk on a farm, but not the reproduction of power, and how that was a Marxist critique and the limitations of that Marxist. Marxist critique in being able to think critically about the unique nature that black people suffer. So it could have done all those different things had the instructor, and this is not to disparage because I can't even remember who that person was, it's not just illuminating the shortcomings of that instructor. It is also a structural critique of how that person had been canonized. I want to be clear that I am not a sociolinguist. I don't teach the mechanics of reading and reading comprehension, but what I am is someone who is always wondering about how language, the ability, how language and power, whiteness is property, all those different things construct our notions around what is literate, what is illiterate. so how The dominant narrative is reproduced through discourse, but also for black people, and it's very real, in a very real way, that that violence has not just been epistemic, it's been gratuitous. So when you talked earlier about being spat on and bombings and all those different things for folks who have the audacity to demand educational equality and educational equity, So what I would say is, and this is exactly where I started, is whenever someone invites you or tries to in or invites you to a conversation and they attempt to dictate the parameters around which literacy should occur, something awkward, like something immediately should happen because you know, and this is what I would I know when I was at HBCU's. When I taught at South Carolina State before I got to Louisville, I wasn't telling my students anything they didn't intuitively know. Right? Because they brought that critical lens to the classroom. Because in order to succeed as a black person in these educational spaces, the grades that we are incentivized with, in order to perform exceptionally well there, it requires you to ingest a particular notion about yourself that is problematic. Right. It is toxic, which gets us back to the the dolls, the doll studies. So whenever someone wants to talk about literacy, like I said in the beginning, it depends on their lived experience and how they thought and think about education. If they think about it as neutral, if they think about it as objectively good, if they think about it in universal terms, they probably have some very real blind spots that are a direct, that are directly detrimental to and a historical and incongruent with how black people have historically thought about education and its relationship to liberation. And again, I'm pointing I'm pointing to a history and tradition where a lot of what I read is not about the quantification. It is about the theorizing about the thing, right? Which will which will lead to the accumulation of very different types of data. So not quantifiable data, but like you said, rich descriptions, right? That's that qualitative tradition, that's that tradition that reflects our oral sensibilities. So it again it It depends on what constitutes this data. Is it these large data sheets or is it the narrative that someone happened to write about how toxic it is for black families in Tennessee or Seattle, Washington, like my my beloved friend Dr. Michael Dumas, like those narratives are still data, right?
Michael Harriot: Yeah. Like. So thank you, man. And so
Dr. Ahmad Washington: Bro, appreciate you.
