Darlène Dubuisson is the newest faculty member in UC Berkeley’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. In this first-person narrative, she shares how her unconventional educational path ultimately led her to her current field of study at Berkeley.
My academic story is a strange one.
Before college, I had not been taught by a teacher in a classroom since the first grade. My mother was an immigrant from Haiti, and we were a single-parent, working-class household of four living in Boston. But my mother was determined to give her kids a good education, which for her meant sending us to private school. The only one she could afford was, as it would turn out, an independent fundamentalist Baptist church school.
At this school, you sat in a cubicle by yourself, with your back to everyone else, and taught yourself from booklets and checked your own work. What you did not learn from these booklets, you learned from the daily sermons and interactions with the teachers who supervised your self-study.
We students were taught Black racial inferiority. We were prohibited from listening to music with beats to it — anything that was considered “Black music.” The choir director explained that these rules were because my African ancestors had used drums to worship the devil. It was even insinuated that the chattel slavery of African peoples was part of God’s plans — the curse of Ham.