Week 2: "You'll always have you to depend on, but will you?"

Most of us get caught in the glam of the connotations - negative and positive, that come along with saying “I go to Howard University” and all of the glee that we see on peoples faces as they interrogate us about homecomings, legendaries and if we’ve seen Wale or P. Diddy yet - and as we answer with nothing less than pride we subsequently forget the founding principals of our university. We forget that it was because white schools would once not take us that we were founded to increase the advancement of African decent, that it is because of our past and history that this university was even founded; we forget all that Howard University has intellectually and done in conjunction with the human community. In Dr. Carr’s last lecture he spoke on Howard University and its connection with the world, creating a connection between learning and teaching wisdom and what we need to do to foster a pathway to approaching our history and lives in order to work on a better future. 

The issue that Dr. Carr lectured on that caught my attention the most was taking appropriate responsibility and control of issues in our life. Dr. Carr said that we have three sources: our text, our teachers and our selves. This is applicable to more than just school and why we have no reason to fail in academics if we have even one of the aforementioned three, but this is also why we should not fail in general and ties into the miseducation of many Black Americans. In the black community we have grown deathly crippled by a broken history that falsely is stated to have begun at slavery and how we need others (whites etc) but this is far from the truth. We built whole empires, such as Egypt, and were once kings and queens with prospering kingdoms. So with knowledge like this how could we justify depending on others and blame our failures on anyone but ourselves?Thus, I believe that if we, as a community, come to terms with the fact that we are in control of our destinies and that whatever we want to happen or allow to happen is in our hands - we could advance more and take full responsibility of our psyches instead of falling victim to the lies we are constantly being force fed.

Daisa Gainey

Sociology Major 

Class of 2014