Sedjem

On August 31, Dr. Carr spoke to our class about "Learning, Wisdom and the African World Experience." Dr. Carr was able to show us different facts about the history of black people and about our ancestors' importance in the systems that all people use today. He was able to show us the necessity of understanding and harnessing African Deep Thought and of understanding the fact that our history began before slavery and we contributed to such advances as writing and that even the first university was in Africa. This relates to when Dr. Carr spoke about Frazier’s “Failure of the Negro Intellectual.” There are educated Black people, but they seem to always be following the same pattern and fighting for the same goal each time. We need to move in a direction that helps for us to pioneer into new ways of thinking and posing ideas that have not been thought of by any person of any race. Continuing in the same patterns does not cause progress, and it would already take much work to build progress on what the Black race has already accomplished. Dr. Carr told us when discussing that we should not start Black history at slavery that “If we start teaching with slavery, then everything then on seems like progress.” Dr. Carr was able to open my eyes to a way to make progress on what this race had accomplished thousands of years ago, instead of what has happened in the past couple of hundred years. Dr. Carr’s lecture was an experience that I would have been more than happy to repeat, since I had never been taught by anyone with such a passion for what they were saying themselves. Telling us the actual history of Black people, even if he was not able to cover all of the minute details of the entire history, was something that most people our age are not able to experience and has never been taught in such an engaging manner. Dr. Carr’s lecture was able to teach me more about myself and the race that I am a part of.