Sublime

They lose attention because many of their teachers have lost attention, shed it in the heat of a formation that narrowed intellectual excellence down to one kind of performance, one kind of white body-mind.

creator of the Smithsonian Museum’s “Programs in Black Culture,” and one of the leading authorities on Black American music culture,

Il faut cultiver notre jardin – we must cultivate our garden – he said at the end of his satire Candide (1759). Notre jardin is that plot of soil on the earth, within the self, or amid the social collective, where “the cultural, ethical, and civic virtues that save reality from its own worst impulses are cultivated. Those virtues are always ours.”

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.