140th birthday of Carter G Woodson

(Born 19 December 1875, New Canton, Va, United States)

Historian, journalist, versatile educator and inaugurator of the “African World History Month”, now a very important fixture in the annual calendar in several regions of the African World, outside Africa, and who, whilst researching the nature of the education of African Americans in the 1930s, concludes on the following consequences on someone being controlled and defined by an agency outside their own centre of being, an observation as salient as ever, 80 years on (Woodson, 2010: 48):

If you can control a [person’s] thinking, you don’t have to worry about [their] action. If you can determine what a [person] thinks you do not have to worry about what [they] will do. If you can make a [person] believe that [they are] inferior, you don’t have to compel [them] to seek an inferior status [for they] will do so without being told and if you can make a [person] believe that [they are] justly an outcast, you don’t have to order [them] to the back door. [They] will go to the back door on [their] own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the [person] will demand that you build one.

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