Nov 19 2024 93 mins
In the introduction of his recently published, Jacob H Carruthers and the Restoration of An African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert, Kamau Rashid [2024] posits that:
“One of the central concerns evident in the scholarship of Jacob H. Carruthers was the intellectual foundations of the modern world. Although he acknowledged the importance of studying systems of oppression, he argued that such structures rested upon the foundation of Western thought, forms of knowledge that facilitated the formation of our most current systems of domination. In addition, these forms of knowledge also serve the primary function to maintain a particular world order as their application is constantly being refined and reinforced through false ideas about reality [Rashid, 2024; Carruthers, 1972/1999].
Carruthers work is occupied by a fundamental question that asks: how can African people who hope to free themselves from these structural and reinforcing mechanisms of domination do so when their conceptions of reality are constantly measured and derived from these very same ways of knowing that support these mechanisms of domination?
Kamau Rashid, thinking with Carruthers, writes further that “knowledge, its production, legitimization, and transmission are shaped by the power relations of a society and through this, society’s institutions, therefore “the elite members of the politically dominant culture strategically impose their knowledge and worldview priorities” in a way that legitimizes their authority through these institutions [Rashid, 2024; Shujaa, 2003, 18].
Accordingly, there is little room for debate when it is argued that “schooling in the United States is a principal instrument of this hegemony.” “It is a process that does not typically privilege critical thought and action, but instead encourages conformity to hegemony, rewards apathy to the status quo, and punishes agency with regard to ideation or advocacy for revolutionary social change. From this perspective, it is with no surprise then, that “the operationalization of schooling is little more than a means for sustaining the legitimacy for a specific form of sociopolitical and economic order [Rashid, 2024].
“One of the central concerns evident in the scholarship of Jacob H. Carruthers was the intellectual foundations of the modern world. Although he acknowledged the importance of studying systems of oppression, he argued that such structures rested upon the foundation of Western thought, forms of knowledge that facilitated the formation of our most current systems of domination. In addition, these forms of knowledge also serve the primary function to maintain a particular world order as their application is constantly being refined and reinforced through false ideas about reality [Rashid, 2024; Carruthers, 1972/1999].
Carruthers work is occupied by a fundamental question that asks: how can African people who hope to free themselves from these structural and reinforcing mechanisms of domination do so when their conceptions of reality are constantly measured and derived from these very same ways of knowing that support these mechanisms of domination?
Kamau Rashid, thinking with Carruthers, writes further that “knowledge, its production, legitimization, and transmission are shaped by the power relations of a society and through this, society’s institutions, therefore “the elite members of the politically dominant culture strategically impose their knowledge and worldview priorities” in a way that legitimizes their authority through these institutions [Rashid, 2024; Shujaa, 2003, 18].
Accordingly, there is little room for debate when it is argued that “schooling in the United States is a principal instrument of this hegemony.” “It is a process that does not typically privilege critical thought and action, but instead encourages conformity to hegemony, rewards apathy to the status quo, and punishes agency with regard to ideation or advocacy for revolutionary social change. From this perspective, it is with no surprise then, that “the operationalization of schooling is little more than a means for sustaining the legitimacy for a specific form of sociopolitical and economic order [Rashid, 2024].