MICHEL DEGRAFF: You know, so why this hashtag for the course?
The hashtags, Stay Woke?
Well I love it, because in a way,
it's one of these phrases that take a very complex concept,
and that makes that accessible to the larger public.
Because Stay Woke is a way to talk
about critical consciousness.
And what we've seen in the past elections
is this increase of quote-unquote "fake news."
And one thing which I've been trying
to share with the students is that this concept of fake news
isn't at all a new phenomenon.
So in fact, if you look at the way
history is taught in the US--
if you look at, say, Howard Zinn's book about history--
it tells us how our history books
are filled with fake news.
So the point is that, it's not just fake news that's fake.
And what the students get to see through, for example,
the Haitian revolution is that, in the textbooks,
most of them-- actually, almost all of them, maybe,
except for one or two--
they got to learn lots of details
about the French Revolution.
And then the American Revolution.
So they know all the things about that.
But almost none of them knew about Haiti.
But if you think of what revolution means,
this revolution has had much more impact
when it comes to human rights, civil liberties,
than both the US revolution and the French one.
And the question that I ask them is, why is it
that they went through the elementary school,
the high school, some of them most of the college years,
without ever hearing about the Haitian revolution?
Right?
Which, in fact, it has been much more potent
than both the French one and the US one.
And to me, that was a great way to introduce to them the idea
that, you have to stay woke.
You have to understand why history
is being taught in such a biased way, that excludes the one
revolution that actually allowed this concept of equality
among all human beings to become true.
Because both in France, and in the US,
when they were claiming liberty, equality, fraternity, there
were still people who were in chains.
You know, in fact, blacks were still in slavery.
Women couldn't vote.
It's only in Haiti that revolution took its
really meaning in really changing the world order.
And in creating this possibility for all human beings
to be equal.
But yet, it's not taught in the classroom in the US.
And to me, that's one of the most blatant cases of fake news
that's become so much a part of the way children
are educated in the US.
So Stay Woke means to be alert to this kind of propaganda that
passes for history.
That's Stay Woke.
And of course, we look at other examples
where they, themselves, participate
in these hierarchies of knowledge that actually
subserve hierarchies of power.
That's Stay Woke.