Thread by @michaelharriot

I have received a lot of emails pushing back on this quote from my mother.

“A black child’s humanity can never be fully realized in the presence of whiteness”

Some of them were genuinely interested in understanding why this is not racist.

A thread:

In a perfect world, an integrated community would recognize and acknowledge differences. But America isn't there yet.

Imagine if your grandfather played guitar & taught everyone in your family how to play. But, because he was left-handed, everyone in your family played that way

One day, your 2-year-old, whose actually left handed, picks up a guitar and sounds like Jimi Hendrix. In fact, he's the most purely gifted player you've ever heard.

So you decide to enroll the kid in a guitar class to develop their skill. You drop them off for the class and...

Your child is the only left-handed child there.

The teacher is right-handed and has only taught right-handed students.
The person who wrote the book was right-handed.
All the practice material was written for right-handed guitar players
EVERYONE is right-handed except your kid

One of three things will happen:

1. Your child will learn how to play right-handed, in which case, they will not only have a learning curve, but they won’t be able to use their natural ability. Even if they excel, they will NEVER reach their full potential.

OR:

2. Your child will keep playing left-handed, in which case, your kid will have to expend MORE ENERGY just to reach the same level of proficiency as the rest of the class. They will have to do the regular work AND translate every lesson to their perspective, OR:

3. Forget their family guitar heritage.

They will encounter more differences just because they were raised in a left-handed guitar-playing family. They might start believing that they’re not as good as the other kids BECAUSE THEY ARE LEFT HANDED.

Weird, right?

If ALL the guitar classes in the American guitar education system used the same right-handed approach, over time, guitar teachers and music schools, in general, would either start integrating a left-handed perspective into the guitar curriculum OR...

Guitar teachers, guitar schools, companies who hire guitar players and even people who know nothing about playing guitar would begin to assume left-handed guitar players aren’t as good BECAUSE THEY ARE LEFTHANDED

They'd insist they weren't prejudiced against left-handers.

It's not like they HATE left-handers. Their assumptions are just based on the OUTCOME of a system geared toward the majority of guitar students.

And, because only 10% of people are left-handed, no one sees a system that works for 90% of the guitar-playing population as flawed.

Do you blame the teachers?

Given that each class is only 2 hours, they have limited time and resources and, of course, they ALL LEARNED HOW TO TEACH in the right-handed system.

What you would WANT is a guitar curriculum developed with left-handed kids in mind.

You’d hope that beginner's courses address the differences in stringing the guitar. You’d hope every class would have chord translations chords for left-handed players. You’d hope that the school and the people who devised the lesson plans realized that they should be inclusive.

If guitar schools did this, guess what would happen?

EVERY person who wrote guitar music would be accustomed to seeing the left-hand version of guitar music from when their early education. So they would make sure they included the left-handed version when they published music.

Bands who were looking for a guitar player would make sure they looked for left-handed musicians. Left-handed guitar players wouldn’t be thought of as “lesser.”

If guitar schools made lessons more inclusive, only a crazy person would accuse them of push a "leftist agenda."

For whatever reason, systemic differences in the way people of different races are treated DO EXIST.

Black students are punished, suspended and kicked out of schools at higher rates for the SAME infractions as white kids theroot.com/government-stu…

Especially Black girls.

Black girls are seven times more likely to be suspended from school and four times more likely to be arrested at school, compared to white girls.

theroot.com/black-girls-mo…

Imagine if the way YOUR HAIR GROWS OUT OF YOUR HEAD could get you in trouble

Imagine if doing THE SAME THING as your white classmates got you suspended instead of reprimanded

Imagine if you were REQUIRED to subject your child to a PROVENLY racist system

theroot.com/new-study-show…

Now, imagine having been through the right-handed educational system and experienced on your own.

If YOU WERE LEFT-HANDED, you knew how to play guitar, and you believed your child could be the greatest guitar player who ever existed.

Here is the question:

Do you send your left-handed child into a right-handed system or do you teach your child on your own?

Now here's a story that illustrates the point.

I may get in a lot of trouble for this, but check out this guitar:

It was built by a 20-year-old Black woman

She didn't take guitar-building lessons. She never studied woodworking. She just liked guitars. Her dad had been raised around a bunch of carpenters and had every tool.

One day, he walked into the garage and saw her grabbing tools.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked.

Apparently, she wanted to play bass but she couldn't find any that were her size that she liked. So she was gonna build her own.

But woodworking tools aren't necessarily built for small girls. And schools that have woodworking classes usually restrict them to boys.

Luckily, this girl, who was 15 at the time, just happened to have a dad who had the resources.

Her mom bought her a whole different set of tools, all kinds of exotic woods. She convinced her dad to remodel the attic so she could have her own woodshop.

Now, here is the crazy thing:

This girl attended a school with ALL OF THE resources she needed to do this. Of course, no one assumes a Black girl is interested in woodworking.

They didn't hate little Black girls, it's just that she wasn't like 99% of the woodworkers.

So this 15-year-old Black girl went on YouTube and TAUGHT HERSELF how to build guitars from SCRATCH.

The only prefabricated materials were the strings, knobs, and hardware.

Here are some of her early creations, ALL BY HAND.

So this girl graduates high school and applies for a college scholarship at an art school. For the portfolio, she builds this guitar

She got the scholarship!.

BUT, because of the world we live in, YOU KNOW a lot of people think she got it because she was a "minority"

And the thing is, they're right.

She had to learn a whole craft BECAUSE she was Black and female.

Not being a part of a structure with preconceived notions of her capabilities actually made her possibilities unlimited

If she had learned this craft in the presence of a bunch of traditional woodworking students, she would have probably been told "you can't do it like this."

Again, she made this with her own hands from just a block of wood.

THIS BLACK CHILD'S HUMANITY COULD NOT BE FULLY REALIZED IN THE PRESENCE OF WHITENESS.

And trust me, her dad didn't even help build any of these.

I am 100 percent sure of that.

First of all, I was never this good at woodworking
Secondly, my daughter doesn't allow me in her room.