33 pages • 1 hour read
Carter WoodsonThe Mis-Education of the Negro
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1933A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Professional Education Discouraged”
Chapter 8 focuses on how professional education, or lack thereof, has impacted the Black community. Though there are, Woodson describes, a number of Black professionals, there are also significant tensions both regarding access to training for those professions as well as the treatment of Black people in those professions. For example, in some professions, like in law, Black lawyers are actively discouraged or barred from interacting in ways that will further their career. Woodson describes how while “in one department of a university a Negro may be studying for a profession, in another department of the same university he is being shown how the Negro professional man cannot succeed” (50).
In many arenas, Black people experience a lack of development or support in obtaining professional careers, like in theater and art. There are some Black people who have “taken the time to train themselves” (51) to become professional artists, but many more, Woodson argues, are stopped early on by the racist beliefs and actions of White people. Finally, Woodson also articulates the issue of the Black author, who “writes, but the white man is supposed to know more about everything than the Negro” (52), so no one actually wants the book.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Political Education Neglected”
In Chapter 9, Woodson describes how Black people lost power in the US political system after Emancipation, relating this to the larger issues of education. After the Civil War, schools began to teach programs of history that would force Black people “to feel that [they] had always been a failure and that the subjection of [their] will to some other race is necessary” (53). In this way, education became a tool to “control a man’s thinking” (53), making it less important to control Black people in other ways. To do this, curricula for history classes were rewritten so that what was taught included such ideas as “slavery was a benevolent institution; the masters loved their slaves and treated them humanely […] [and] it was a mistake to make the Negro a citizen” (54).
This was an important aspect of what happened after Emancipation because it effectively removed Black people from participating politically, making a “one sided system” (55) where “[a]n influential Negro in the South […] is one who has nothing to do or say about politics and advises others to follow the same course” (55). Woodson argues that the decline of Black involvement in politics was directly correlated to the intentional racist shifts in education.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Loss of Vision”
As the result of receiving a racist, biased education, Black people in the United States have learned “to follow the line of least resistance” (58) and stop dreaming of ending the oppression they experience. Woodson describes several examples to support this point, suggesting that as a result of education, “the large majority of ‘educated’ Negroes in the United States have accepted segregation and have become its fearless champions” (59).
In addition, Woodson articulates how the subsequent economic downturn experienced by Black communities leads to a divide between the uneducated and the “educated,” so that poorer Black people are exploited by those who have pursued higher education. Woodson contends that this is the result of a “lack of confidence […] in himself and in his possibilities is what has kept him down” (63); this lack of confidence has been created by the educational system.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Need for Service Rather Than Leadership”
In Chapter 11, Woodson condemns “the ambitious miseducated Negro” (64) who grasps at small advances, even when these cause the exploitation of their own people, which “renders impossible cooperation, the most essential thing in the development of a people” (65). Woodson advocates for the need for a kind of leadership that is in service of others: “under leadership we have been made to despise our own possibilities and to develop into parasites; by service we may prove sufficient unto the task of self-development and contribute our part to modern culture” (67).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Hirelings in the Places of Public Servants”
Woodson argues in Chapter 12 that one of the most insidious impacts of the education system is that it has made it so that Black people do not want to respect or work for other Black people in professional settings. It is critical to understand, Woodson describes, that “the fault here is not inherently in the Negro but in what he has been taught” (69). Woodson believes that the education system has completely failed in preparing Black people to “assume the responsibility of [their] own uplift” (70).
It is also important to Woodson to make the distinction that school should not only be a place of rote learning but a place for people to learn and benefit for their own growth. Woodson advocates for people with “more humility” (72) to serve their community by providing genuine opportunities for education.
Chapters 8-12 Analysis
Placing The Mis-Education of the Negro within the social context of the early-20th century is critical to understanding some of Woodson’s central points. In some places, it might appear that Woodson is overly critical of the Black community, yet his point is significantly more nuanced than that. The first aspect of historical context that is vital to understanding Woodson’s arguments regarding training, professionalism, and economic success is the fact that he is discussing events post-Emancipation. In Chapters 9 and 10, Woodson references a short period of time during which Black people briefly gained larger amounts of political and social power after the Civil War. This was short-lived; White people reacted with violence and firmly racist policies at the national and state levels. The resulting segregation and interpersonal racist actions led to significant losses for the Black community. The second aspect of historical context is that Woodson is describing an educational system that was operating within that segregated society; Black people received separate schools, universities, and social experiences. Through this segregation, White people could justify their superiority and power while continuing to deny Black people equitable opportunity and safety.
Within this historical context, it becomes easier to understand Woodson’s arguments regarding many of the limitations placed upon Black citizens in the early 1900s as well as his descriptions of how Black communities responded. When Woodson critiques the Black community in not having “responsibility” (70) for its own uplift, it is really a larger critique of the racist circumstances that Black people were surviving. This section of the book is well-placed because it comes after Woodson’s broader arguments regarding the failure of education while providing a more detailed explanation of the consequences of this failure. By Chapters 11 and 12, Woodson begins moving towards some suggestions of solutions to these problems, describing the need for people who are willing to be humble servants. This is an important connection to Woodson’s derision of the hypocrisy of White churches (and, by extension, culture), where people who have acted as enslavers and murderers claim to have good morals and values.
Woodson intentionally uses charged language to engender a response in the reader. The most obvious of these examples is Woodson’s choice to repeatedly place the word “educated” in quotation marks to illustrate his disdain for the US schools. There are other key examples, though, of how Woodson supplements his points with specific language like “citizen,” “leadership,” “culture,” and “professional.” It seems clear that Woodson understood that in a racist system, Black people would not inherently be allowed to claim citizenship, leadership, acculturation, or professional status; these were aspects of White culture that Black people had to work hard to obtain. Through his use of these types of terms, among others, Woodson begins to push readers to either acknowledge their own internalized racism or to support Black people to see their own potential to access a different kind of existence within a White supremacist society.
