FunkEntelechy Inc.

I am applying on behalf of FunkEntelechy Inc., an organization I co-founded last year, because this time of racial reckoning calls for everyone who understands the Black experience in this country to step up and take action to make substantive change.

Our mission is to change the way that Black history is taught in the U.S. We believe that for Black lives to truly matter, Black history must matter. Black history is American history. Four centuries of Black contribution and sacrifice that is foundational to this country can no longer be ignored, whitewashed, erased or relegated to Black History Month.

I would use the financial portion of the Elevate Prize to help build out organizational infrastructure and fund a campaign to generate national awareness behind our Tell The Truth, Teach The Truth educational justice movement.  

I would leverage the resources that come with the Elevate Prize to support our activation of a broad coalition of national and grassroots stakeholders in the Black community and allies to demand change at the federal, state and local levels.  

As the George Floyd summer protests sparked similar protests around the world, Elevate Prize resources could also help us activate International allies as well.

Our vision is to strengthen the self-identity and self-confidence of Black children through exposure to Black history and Black role models that ground them in who they are and show them what they can become.  

Our organization is an extension of 20 years of passion driven work in building a unique collection of Black culture artifacts. We created and curate the Museum Of UnCut Funk, a virtual museum that features our collection, celebrates 1970’s Black culture, and preserves Black history and Black stories.  

During the 8 years prior to COVID-19, our highly successful Black history exhibitions featuring artifacts from our collection toured to museums across the country. Our exhibitions were seen by 322,459 people, the majority being school-aged children. Students found our exhibitions to be very engaging and enjoyed learning about new aspects of Black history. We received significant press coverage and were featured in The New York Times twice.  

As the pandemic closed museums worldwide, we shifted our focus to our mission, and creating Black history curriculum and educational games based on our collection and exhibition experience in how to engage children.  

We formed the non-profit to expand the footprint of our work in educating and uplifting Black children.

Research proves Black history education is instrumental to Black students' psychological, cultural, and academic well-being, and the lack of Black history is one reason why Black students fall behind academically. (Adams, 2005; Merelman, 1993; Salter & Adams, 2016)  

Our experience supports these findings.  

However, there are no national Black history education standards. By design, the version of Black history taught in schools is distorted and whitewashed, told through a master narrative that perpetuates white supremacy.  

The toxic politics around teaching Black history, made exponentially worse by the previous administration, has resulted in laws to teach “patriotic” history, ban The 1619 Project, critical race theory, and any source of information that tells the truth about this country’s racist past. The widespread ignorance that fuels racism and hatred, resulting from inadequate and inaccurate Black history education, is a cancer that adversely affects the entire nation.

We are addressing this problem through our Tell The Truth, Teach The Truth movement that demands educational redress through federal mandate and funding to teach the truth about Black history in all Pre-K-12 schools, year round.

We believe this is an urgent issue that warrants a federal mandate, particularly for majority Black, majority minority public schools.

The negative impact of public school education on Black students is well researched and documented. Several organizations are working to solve aspects of the problem. We are the only organization working to build a coalition of stakeholders to attack the problem systemically and make permanent change at the federal and grassroots levels.  

Tell The Truth, Teach The Truth seeks educational justice and educational empowerment for the Black community, which looks like:

• Funding levels that achieve resource equity, meet students’ total needs
• Culturally relevant, liberatory, anti-racist educational standards, curriculum, teaching materials, including Black history, created by Black education experts that intentionally center Black students’ educational, social and emotional needs

• Classroom instruction that builds knowledge across a range of subjects, helping to improve literacy
• Using Black history as a knowledge building gateway, providing positive role models, building positive self-identity and self-confidence
• Replacing standardized tests with culturally relevant assessments
• Ending discriminatory disciplinary practices, school policing
• Hiring Black Superintendents, Principals, Teachers, Counselors, Tutors to run and support community based schools and adequately compensating them so Black students get the champions and guardians they deserve

Universal Black history education will take time. Achieving educational justice in public schools with majority Black student enrollment can’t wait.

Black history education fosters psychological liberation, which happens once a conceptual shift occurs when oppressive Black history narratives begin to "acknowledge Black people's strength, accomplishments, and creativity throughout their history." (Chapman-Hilliard & Adams-Bass, 2016)

When people believe that you have made no contribution to history, it is easy for them to deny your humanity. Thus universal Black history education is essential to protecting Black people’s humanity.  

Further, for Black descendants of the enslaved, knowledge has always been our path to justice, power and freedom. Educational justice is a critical and essential intersectional component along with racial, social and economic justice to achieving equality for Black people.  

The inaccurate and incomplete teaching of Black history is not only a persistent barrier to achieving educational justice, but an impediment to achieving racial, social and economic justice as well.  

This country has never dealt with its’ hard history of enslavement, white supremacy and white supremacist violence, and until we do we will never heal or move forward to eradicate systemic racism.

The only way to fix this problem is for everyone to be working with the same set of facts. Thus we must teach everyone a complete and accurate Black history in school.