Letter from a Region in My Mind - James Baldwin

[Kind of Blue]

15. For sure.

I was pretty lucky in high-school, an all-girls Catholic school of all places. I know for a fact that my English/History teachers were the first in our area to introduce Baldwin, Wright, Angelou, Hurston, just a milieu of African-American authors and one from my country, Chinua Achebe, as well as heated discussions of enslavement of Africans and 1st Nations People. As far as Theology, which is what this Baldwin article concerns, my priests/teachers were very open to prodding though I know I exasperated them.

It was shocking to me that this sort of education, except for Theology, was not a regular part of the curriculum. Unless you went onto higher education and sought it out otherwise many of us just read and shared information whether we were in school or not.

So yes, we've had to teach our own kids/nieces/nephews because they were getting distorted information from school. I'm so proud of them because they're not afraid/ashamed of their African roots on both sides of the Atlantic and ready to lay out facts to their friends faster than I could ever imagine.