Emancipatory Research Symposium

As a student researcher in the Young People’s Black Pedagogical Activism Lab, I had the opportunity to present my Black and African studies course at the Emancipatory Research Symposium in New Orleans, Louisianna. The course I presented was actually a project that I had worked on in high school as a member of the Guardians of Heritage. I wanted to create a history curriculum that humanized African American history by providing a more complete historical perspective in which African people and their descendants are not reduced to victims of European oppression.

One of my units covered the Rwandan Civil War to show that there have been events where African people were both the oppressors and the oppressed. This deconstructs the European idea of an African monolith and the assertion that Africans are merely the victims of Europe’s history. At the research symposium, an audience member pointed out that my description of the conflict in Rwanda was flawed as it dismissed the history of European colonialism and control that facilitated it. Calling the conflict a civil war isolates the event from its historical context and reinforces the flawed historical perspective that African nations struggle to organize and maintain central governments.

While it is important for students to learn about the Rwandan genocides and other events where African people play complex roles, it is also important that they learn to consider the interconnectedness of history in a global context. The Emancipatory Research Symposium encouraged me to think about both the subjects of history and the ways in which their stories are told.