As schools face political pressure over curriculum and Black history, and the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, Karida Brown, Ph.D., says the battle for the Black mind is not new.
An Emory University Professor of Sociology, Brown spent eight years researching her new book, “The Battle for the Black Mind,” a historical account of a century of systematic efforts to control what Black children are taught and how they are educated.
The book reminds readers that Black educators and families built private schools and institutions to resist those efforts, and Brown says they left behind a blueprint for today’s times.
Of the book, Brown says: “I want you all to understand and engage with [it] as a playbook.” She describes it as a strategic plan of how Black Americans survived, and even thrived, educationally, despite the oppressive segregation of the Jim Crow era.”
During a conversation on Let’s Start Healing podcast, Brown said that today, people are making intentional moves that can lead to big change. For example, increasing numbers of Black families are homeschooling their children, and even forming small homeschooling communities.
Brown also highlighted the diversity of thought within the Black community, and emphasized that Black people are not a monolith. In her book, she explores this through the historic rift between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois — two influential leaders with different perspectives on how Black people could achieve social and economic success.
Brown jokingly calls their ideological clash “the original diss tape,” long before the kind of lyrical beefs we see today in music between Kendrick and Drake or in the 1990s between Biggie and Tupac.
As a cultural sociologist, Brown’s work has earned recognition from such institutions as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Last year, she received an NAACP Image Award for “The New Brownies Book: A Love Letter to Black Families,” an anthology that she co-authored with her husband, artist Charly Palmer. She also served on the board of the Obama Presidency Oral History Project.
But Brown is not only a scholar; she is deeply spiritual. She wrote “The Battle for the Black Mind” in Martha’s Vineyard, a place where she says she feels a strong connection to her ancestors. She believes it was no coincidence that the book was released this spring. Her ancestors, she is certain, played a role in the timing.
“Never did I think the book would come out at such a time as this — when the Department of Education is being actively dismantled. When books are being banned… Black books, especially, are being banned… The Black Smithsonian is being attacked…,” she said.
In this moment when many feel a societal polarization and cultural division, Brown says the battle for the Black mind is also a battle for our shared humanity — and empathy.
There is a scarcity mindset in society today that serves as a trap — “a Jedi Mind Trick,” she told Let’s Start Healing Podcast.
Political narratives, she believes, have people in fear that if your neighbor has the benefit of something, then that means “that something is being taken from you.”
That scarcity mindset is “dehumanizing us,” Brown said.
She continued: “So when I say, “what it means to be human,” It is to return us to reality that we live in abundance; that we can be well, that we can have joy — and in fact deserve it. And that we have empathy for others.”
