By Bakari Chavanu

The first day of my African American Cultural Studies course, my students ate a birthday cake decorated with red, black, green, and gold icing representing the patriotic colors of the African Diaspora. Selected in the 1920s by the Universal Negro Improvement Association leader, Marcus Garvey, these colors symbolize cultural pride, the call for self-determination, and a respect for African heritage. The red represents the blood of the people; black, the race; green, the motherland, and gold, the continent's rich resources. Many of the students - 26 9th-12th graders, all of them African American except two - did not know precisely what the colors represented.

But identifying colors of a flag is much easier than getting students to understand the lasting impact of slavery upon African-descended people. I knew I needed an engaging resource that would help introduce the course's theme and purpose: to develop greater cultural awareness and knowledge and to examine how African-descended identity has been shaped throughout the Diaspora.

I found Mychal Wynn's modern short tale, The Eagles who Thought They were Chickens, a powerful tool for exploring a range of issues, from African history to institualized racism. In particular, the book is useful for discussing cultural empowerment and internalized oppression - by which I mean the dominated racial group taking on, acting out, or enforcing the dominant racist beliefs about themselves or members of their racial group.

This tale, told in the tradition of West African proverbs, parables and storytelling, is a metaphor for the history of African-descended people in the Americas. As the introduction explains, the tale tells "the tragedy of the unrealized potential of the eagles who didn't believe that they could fly."

The story is of baby eagles brought over to America in a slave ship and taken to a plantation chicken yard. Kept ignorant of their heritage, they lose their sense of identity, and are scorned and ridiculed by the chickens and the rooster overseer for being different. Made to feel ugly and inferior, they lack any confidence in themselves as eagles and are unable to fly.