The Literate Black Man as a Sociopolitical Threat or Reading is Fundamental

Working-Class African American Boys and the Literacy Problem

Reading is fundamental. The ability to decode and understand written language is a basic and important skill. Literacy research has demonstrated if children do not know how to read proficiently before 4th grade, they will probably suffer academically for the rest of their K-12 schooling experience. And most likely beyond.

This problem is what Reading expert Keith Stanovich labeled "The Matthew Effect". Proficient readers often become more academically proficient. Struggling readers often become less academically proficient. This progression seems to support Stanovich's suggestion that reading can make you smarter.

In the United States, The Matthew Effect disproportionately impacts working-class African American boys. They often score in the lowest percentiles on reading comprehension tests.

Numerous popular articles and scholarly works regularly describe the problem of African American boys not knowing how to read complex, literary texts aloud with adequate fluency of pronunciation (prosody).

Apparently, many of these boys cannot even recognize the smallest units of sounds (phonemes) in first and second grades. If, as Stanovich suggests, reading makes one smart, then many working-class African American boys may be perceived as less than intelligent.

Frederick Douglass

Now for the hard question: who benefits from this perception? In the antebellum South, the answer was relatively simple: slave-owners and an economy based on slave labor.

A literate slave was a dangerous slave, as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and many others demonstrated.

Literate slaves often questioned the status quo. They debated the nature of oppression and quoted authority to support their pro-freedom claims. They sometimes forged documents (freedom papers) that facilitated slave escapes. Apparently, literate African American men were the most dangerous of slaves. Like Nat Turner, they can reason and lead bloody insurrections.

Anti-Literacy Laws

Illustrations about Nat Turner's Rebellion

To keep these insurrections in check and thus maintain the status quo, Virginia and several other southern states passed anti-literacy laws. These laws were part of the sociopolitical infrastructures designed to keep African Americans, especially African American men in a sub-human category. The inability as Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo argued, "to read the world and the word" kept many of these slaves tethered to a dominant, exploitative culture.

Literacy, African American Boys, and the legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws

Anti-literacy laws seem to be the relics of a shameful era. Working-class African American boys have more access to literacy than ever. If reading makes one smart, then the current generation of working-class African American boys should be among the most intelligent and literate populations in the world. But studies seem to contradict this statement. A number of socioeconomic reasons have been explored. A lack of literate and educated role models have been proposed, most recently by presidential candidate Pete Buttiege.

But what if the literacy problems with working-class African American boys indicate something more pervasive and insidious than poverty, apparently substandard school districts, and the lack of appropriate role models? What if the idea that a literate African American man as a threat still exists in some form in the cultural psyche of the United States? Although Barack Obama was the first African American president, his intelligence was constantly questioned by millions of Americans. His mixed-race heritage and his being raised by White grandparents may have also complicated the literate African American man as a threat image for him.

Black Panther Party founders Bobby Seale (left) and Huey Newton

But millions of working-class African American boys are not Barack Obama. They are not ambitious centrist politicians who want to become adored world leaders. On the contrary, some of these boys could be the next Nat Turner or Frederick Douglass. Or the next Huey Newton or Bobby Seale (founders of The Black Panther Party). They could disrupt the status quo and become the thinkers and leaders of social, political, and economic revolutions.

Reading is fundamental. Reading and changing the world for the better is even more fundamental.