Race, Character, and Education

November 2020

by Mari Jørstad
Research Associate, Kenan Institute for Ethics

What kind of character traits should education seek to form in children and young adults? More specifically, what kind of virtues do students need in order to get the most out of their education? These are two of the questions considered by Willie Jennings, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale University, in his book After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, and Candace Owens (an author and political activist), in her book Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation. Jennings is writing specifically about theological education, but his book is also a general critique of Western education. Owens is focused on K-12 public school education in the US, though she also touches on affirmative action in university admission programs.

Jennings and Owens come to the question of virtue in education with widely different commitments and they do not agree on much, but they agree that something is wrong with our current educational system. They also agree that the wrong-ness of the system is especially harmful to Black students and teachers.

For Owens, the main problem with education is that less is expected of Black children than of white ones. “I believe that the reason Blacks continue to lag behind whites in terms of educational achievement is due to a culturally widespread belief that we [Blacks] should not be made to put in the same effort because of our earlier oppressive circumstances” (84). Rather than emphasizing to students their abilities, creativity, and intelligence, “today’s curriculum overemphasizes the role that others play in our success,” and so “systematically [disempower]” students (87). For Owens, the solution is hard work, individual effort, and school choice. Parents should be free to choose academically demanding schools for their children, and children themselves need to cultivate the virtue of industriousness.

For Jennings, the problem with education is not that less is expected of Black students, but that Black minds and bodies are seen as largely irrelevant to the academy. European colonialism bequeathed to Western education the idea that Europe “spoke the truth of peoples more accurately than peoples’ own accounts of themselves” (19), and that this was “key to forming institutionalizing processes that were crucial to global well-being” (137). This too leads to low expectations for Black students. If Europe has the answers, then the best answers are white. This, Jennings argues, turns educational material “toward a Black lack” (109). Repeated exposure to Black lack leaves students feeling like they are not “smart enough, mature enough, prepared enough” – they come to experience what Jennings calls “academic despair” (56).

When it comes to solutions, the common ground between Owens and Jennings disappears. As a system of personal formation, Jennings argues, Western education aims to create the self-sufficient man, “his self-sufficiency defined by possession, control, and mastery” (6). Owens’ solution, self-sufficiency achieved through hard work, is Jennings’ problem. Instead of more effort on the part of students, Jennings wants education to “cultivate belonging” (10). His hope is for a form of institutional life that makes it possible “for everyone [to] feel at home in the work of building, sustaining, or supporting an institution without suffering in a tormented gender performance bound up in racial and cultural assimilation” (18). For Owens, the character traits students need are primarily individual: individual work ethic and making good choices. For Jennings, the most important virtues are communal. His question is not “how do you solve this problem for yourself,” but “how do we build a different community.”

I don’t know how to square the circle of Owens’ individualism and Jennings’ focus on community. They are, in many ways, incompatible. I am also hampered by my own biases; my sympathies are all with Jennings’ argument. Still, when I step back, what I see is that both authors speak to the pain of being part of a system which does not take you seriously, which expects you to contribute nothing of importance. They speak of the love of learning and of ways in which that love turns to disappointment and shame for students. They speak of forms of education that leave students with despair instead of courage and creativity.

Maybe we can build something from that. What if we start the conversation around education not with the things we can’t agree on, but with students? What if we ask students, Black students in particular, about conditions that make virtue formation possible? What makes you feel valued, what makes you feel trusted, what makes you feel challenged? What makes you feel disempowered, what makes you feel underrated, what makes you feel overlooked? When is hard work satisfying and when does it feel useless, a road to nothing at all? What motivates you to work hard and who motives you to work hard? What aspects of education are important to you, what makes you feel passion, drive, and purpose? When do you feel like you belong?

Owens and Jennings agree that if our educational system consistently produces better results for white students than for Black students, that means something is wrong. Perhaps we can build something from that agreement, from that small overlap between two thinkers who otherwise see eye-to-eye on next to nothing. And it isn’t next to nothing, to agree that education should serve Black and white student (and all the students who fit into neither category) equally well. That is quite a lot, and something to take hope from. We are not all suddenly going to agree, and yet we need each other in order to create thriving communities. How do we become the kind of people who can build such communities out of our disagreements, rather than let our disagreements become reasons to despair of change?

Jennings, Willie. After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2020.

Owens, Candace. Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation. New York: Threshold Editions, 2020.

Resources