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- Title
"The Silent Response of the Little Monitor Within": Freedom's Journal, Education, and Race in Everyday Life.
- Authors
TERRY, DOUGLAS
- Abstract
This essay situates Freedom?s Journal within the context of antebellum education. It explores the newspaper as emerging from a shared cultural site marked by the conflicting convergence of educational ideologies--of African Americans striving for education against a white supremacist culture that sought to exclude them from it. African Americans were culturally situated on the threshold of education, requiring inclusion while observing injustice in traditional educational practice. In taking this approach, the essay challenges scholars who fail to examine how the status of Freedom?s Journal as a weekly periodical shaped its pedagogical message, as well as those who characterize it as articulating a racially conservative educational message. It argues that, despite appearing conservative, Freedom?s Journal shared radical educational agenda with other African American writers of the period. Illustrative of the threshold, the Journal?s readership consisted of both African American and white reformers who had competing ideas about race and education. Therefore, it advanced its critique subversively through literary performances that depend upon a radical subtext that undercut their more racially conservative literal message. Where whites read assent to the dominant culture in the Journal's educational texts, African Americans read dissent. In this way, Freedom's Journal instilled a radical literacy based upon as a strategy for teaching its African American readership how to navigate race within the sphere of everyday life.
- Subjects
FREEDOM'S Journal (Periodical); UNITED States education system; RACE discrimination
- Publication
49th Parallel, 2016, Issue 38, p1
- ISSN
1753-5794
- Publication type
Essay