Education Quote by John Henrik Clarke

Oppression has a tuition bill, and Clarke is pointing at who insists on paying it. The line is engineered as a threat disguised as a diagnosis: the powerful keep schooling scarce not out of neglect, but because knowledge reorganizes desire. Once you understand how institutions work, how histories get edited, how laws and labor systems are designed, you stop petitioning the gatekeepers for a seat at the table. You start building a new table or flipping the old one.

Clarke’s punch is the pivot between “ask” and “take.” “Ask” is the grammar of legitimacy: it assumes the oppressor’s authority to grant or deny. “Take” rejects that premise. The sentence also smuggles in a radical definition of education. He’s not talking about credentialing or polite civics lessons; he means political literacy - the kind that makes exploitation legible and collective action imaginable. Education here is less self-improvement than insurgent infrastructure.

The subtext is aimed at both sides. To elites: your control depends on managed ignorance. To the oppressed: don’t confuse access with liberation, and don’t mistake representation for power. Clarke, a Black nationalist historian writing in the long afterlife of Jim Crow and in the wake of decolonization movements, is speaking from a world where literacy tests, redlined schools, and “neutral” curricula were tools of governance. He’s also arguing against a comforting liberal fantasy: that if you just explain injustice nicely enough, power will yield. Clarke insists power rarely yields; it is seized, and education is the rehearsal.