Da’Vinchi’s Insult About Black Americans Echoes White Colonial Lies

On Cam Newton’s “Funky Friday” podcast, actor Da’Vinchi explained why producers cast Black actors from overseas in Black American roles: Americans, the “BMF” actor said, stay “incompetent for a really long time.” Da’Vinchi, a Brooklyn native with Haitian parents, used that claim to rank Afro-Caribbean people above Black Americans.

Ironically, white writers once said the same thing about Afro-Caribbean people. In 1774, Edward Long, an English plantation owner in Jamaica, wrote that Black people were “void of genius.” In 1918, while U.S. troops occupied Haiti, Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote that Black people “lack genius for government,” and Lansing named Haiti, which defeated Napoleon’s army in 1804, as proof. The troops stayed until 1934. They said we lacked genius, could not govern ourselves and needed nineteen years of supervision.

Eugenicists turned that claim of incompetence into U.S. law. North Carolina’s 1929 law let officials sterilize people they labeled “feeble-minded,” the era’s term for incompetent, and the state sterilized more than 7,600 people by 1974. After 1964, about two of every three women the state sterilized were Black, even though fewer than one in four North Carolinians were Black.

Da’Vinchi most likely learned the incomplete history most of us learned. I went to school in Jamaica and taught in Washington, D.C., and no teacher in either place showed me how Long’s Jamaica, Lansing’s Haiti and Black America connect. The Caribbean Examinations Council’s history syllabus never mentions eugenics, and AP African American Studies covers eugenics only inside U.S. borders. Because of those gaps, some of us use against other Black people the claims white officials used to occupy Haiti and sterilize Black women. Even though those writers saw us all as one people, our schools have only taught us about each other in part.

Jewish educators understood that a community taught only part of its history, and never where an attack came from, will one day repeat that attack against itself, so they answered with curriculum. The Lookstein Center for Jewish Education in Israel created a high school lesson asking students to trace antisemitic stereotypes to their sources, find those stereotypes on social media, and practice a response. Armenian educators treated memory as a public duty and comparison as a lesson plan: in 2023, Armenia approved a course teaching the Armenian Genocide beside other peoples’ histories, so students learn their history alongside others. Black students in Baltimore, Port-au-Prince, Kingston and Accra deserve both lessons: where the attacks on us came from, and how our histories connect.

Parents can start this month:

• Search “Edward Long History of Jamaica,” read a summary with your child beside Da’Vinchi’s quote, and ask your child who said it first.

• Check your district’s website for board meeting dates and the public comment sign-up, then ask for one unit comparing the claims made against Haitians, Jamaicans and Black Americans.

The men who wrote these ideas studied us as one people. Our children will answer them as one people, once we teach them their whole history.

Dr. Shauna Knox is the founder and chief executive of The Emancipation Group, an innovation studio dedicated to the future of learning for Black students. She taught in a Washington, D.C., classroom, managed education technology policy at the U.S. Department of Education for six years, is Senior Advisor on artificial intelligence and education to Project Evident, and wrote two Routledge books on curriculum theory.