Education Equity Series Episode 4

How do we move from resisting systemic harm to actively building a just future for our children? In this powerful season finale of "The Politics of Possibility," co-hosts Dr. Ezekiel Dixon-Román and Dr. Sonya Douglass host a masterclass on transformative organizing, structural policy change, and grassroots solidarity. They are joined by a world-class panel of visionary leaders, researchers, and movement builders: Angela Glover Blackwell (Founder in Residence at PolicyLink), Dr. Maisha T. Winn (Excellence in Learning Professor at Stanford University), and Dr. David Stovall (Professor of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago).

Together, this powerhouse panel explores how to design broad, multiracial coalitions capable of protecting and transforming public education against sustained, coordinated rollbacks. Angela Glover Blackwell unpacks the "Curb-Cut Effect"—the foundational equity framework proving that when we design laws to support the most vulnerable, we inadvertently elevate the entire society. Dr. Maisha T. Winn bridges justice with classroom practice, demonstrating how restorative justice and transformative justice paradigms reshape how schools handle conflict and build genuine community. Dr. David Stovall grounds the discussion in a fierce, uncompromising analysis of racial capitalism, school-sanctioned violence, and the critical historical work needed to build coalitions alongside community members, youth, and labor organizers. This final episode provides the ultimate strategic roadmap for anyone looking to turn educational advocacy into lasting structural liberation.

Coalition Building and Educational Advocacy for the Social Good

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The Debrief - Episode 4

Episode Transcript

Ezekiel Dixon-Roman: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Politics of Possibility, Coalition Building and Educational Advocacy for the Social Good. I'm Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, Director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, and this is my co-host, Dr. Sonya Douglass, Director of the Black Education Research Center here at Teachers College.

Sonya Douglass: And we are so glad to introduce our three amazing guests today we have with us.

Sonya Douglass: Dr. Maisha T. Winn, Excellence in Learning Professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Education, where she also serves as the Faculty Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning Equity's Equity and Learning Initiative. We have with us also Angela Glover-Blackwell, Founder in Residence of PolicyLink.

And Dr. David Stovall, Professor in the Departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Welcome so much for joining us for the final episode of our very first season of Politics of Possibility.

Sonya Douglass: We've talked throughout this series about disruption as an opening to imagine new possibilities, and so we wanted to know, what is your boldest vision for a more equitable and humane society, and what gives you hope that it is possible?

And we can maybe ask Dr. Maisha Winn to… to kick us off?

Maisha Winn: Good morning and good afternoon, depending on where you are. Thank you so much for hosting us, and I'm really excited to be in this conversation with Angela Glover Blackwell and Dave Stovall, who I admire greatly. Again, my name is Maisha T. Winn, and I often describe myself as an ethnographer by training and historian by necessity. And I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between histories and futures. When I think of possibilities and, potentially bold vision. 

One of the, strategies that my center and lab has been working on is getting futures and foresight thinking and methods into the hands of families so that they can plan… imagine and plan for their futures using tools that have been used in other contexts, but are often unavailable to everyday families, particularly families in non-dominant communities. I believe that if we have an opportunity to prepare families to both forecast and plan for their futures, and make sure that they have the skills and the strategies to do so, that this is really important work.

And I also really believe that this is work that we need to do in community, and I believe in getting these skills and opportunities directly to families. So, my lab, the Futuring for Equity Lab, has been working with a project called Families as Futurists, and we do this work beyond school. We do this work in other community contexts because we want to get the services and the opportunities and the experiences in the hands of the people as soon as possible without obstacles.

Sonya Douglass: Thank you, Maisha. And thank you for kind of talking about how you're broadening this out beyond schools and beyond education. Angela, could you tell us about your bold vision of possibility.

Angela Glover Blackwell: Hello, it's a pleasure to be here, and thanks for that question. Because this really is a time for vision, and it needs to be bold. It's touching everything. I've had the extraordinary opportunity to have been an activist really pushing for social change for over 50 years. And in that 50-year period, I've been everything from an observer, to a participant, to being actively engaged to leadership around some of it.

And I must say that for all of that period, I've personally been driven by the same thing, to build a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. And… I've seen how that's been different over time. And it's come to something that I think is a fundamental opportunity. 

You use hope in your question, and I very much have been influenced by the thinking of Miriam Kaba, of the prison abolitionist, who talks about the fact that hope is a discipline. I mean, that just really spoke to me, that it's not… Getting up and having the discipline to wish for a different future. But the discipline of understanding why we're in the situation we're in, getting the facts. Finding things that are working and finding out who's doing it. Figuring out how to replicate those things that are really effective, and making sure that you're assigning yourself so that you are engaged in a way that you become part of the solution.

Over time, I think that this notion of equity has really been a driver for me. PolicyLink's been around for over 25 years now, and we did a lot to put equity on the map in terms of health and infrastructure, but it was education that got there first. 

Education got there first because that context has so much to do with democracy. And a democracy that really can work for human flourishing. Democracy is not just voting, is not just participating, it's bringing your full self and all of ourselves from all of our communities to a process that allows us to have a government that governs for human flourishing.

And so, as I think about what really drives me now, it really is this idea that we are finally, because of the upheaval, because of the threats, able to think that we have to create, we have to start anew. We have to invent. And the idea of being able to bring all that we've learned in the quest for justice to reinventing, birthing a new nation, finally building a society worthy of the ideals of democracy. Those things give me a lot of…Sense of the possibilities that we can produce.

Sonya Douglass: Well, I'm feeling hopeful already, based on that vision. Dave, what is your boldest vision for a more equitable and humane society, and what gives you hope that it is possible?

David Stovall: And thank you all again for having somebody like myself, to be in the presence of folks who are doing the work. I really appreciate it. Greetings from Chicago, y'all, and I think one of the things that really becomes important to me in terms of that bold vision is recognizing that many of these spaces already exist.

 So what does a world look like without testing? What does a world look like without grades?

And we already have those spaces. We have schools that are competency-based. We have spaces, and we actually learned during the pandemic that no young person died because they didn't do well on that test, right? And I think it's really important to put that in our broader conversation, because now, when you think about that future, and Ruha Benjamin always reminds us in the African presence, there is only the presence and ancestorship. You build a future by being in the present.

So now, as you build that future, you are now thinking about the things that already exist, right? And now those things that do exist now allow us to understand that the possibility can be a reality, right? So now when you don't have testing, or when you don't have spaces that are reliant on these kind of substandard or, like, Western European standards of quote-unquote achievement. You can actually do things that are actually centered in a way of rethinking what we've already known. That most of this stuff that we've put in front of our young people's face does not work.

And now, moving to the things that do see those bold divisions, and one of the examples that gives me quite a bit of hope here in Chicago was the resistance to ICE, right? So everybody was very clear that it was not just about Latine families. It was a reminder to Black people that at any given moment, we were next. And in fact, they showed it. They came in a building, in a Black neighborhood, landed helicopters, propelled through people's houses, and zip-tied folks in the front. So now, It was a marker to say that they are not just talking about other folks. We are those other folks. And now, where we understand us being those quote-unquote other folks, it puts a fight in us to say that the imperative is to build something else, right? And I think that's a really important space to be in at this moment of upheaval, but the upheaval is a reminder that we've been here before, and now what do we pull from those lessons from before to what Dr. Winn put forward in terms of building that new future.

Ezekiel Dixon-Roman: I love, I love the line of, both, not just, questioning and engagement here, but even beginning with recognizing what already is. So, beginning with this question of the what if, what could be, and basing it on what… and recognizing what already is that we… that exists that we can draw from to even go after those… those conditional… those future conditional questions of what's possible, if you will. 

Maisha, your work invites us to think beyond reform and toward what you call futuring. What does it mean to intentionally imagine and design futures rooted in justice, dignity, and collective possibility? And why is that practice especially urgent in this moment?

Maisha Winn: Yeah, thank you so much for the question. I have been arguing that we often think about the future of education and innovation as something that we have yet to discover, something that's in the far-off distance. And I vehemently disagree. I believe we have to look back as much as we look forward, and because of social movements, because of passionate parents and educators, we have what I call historical signals. So in forecasting work, you think about signals of change, but we also have historical signals that point to innovations of the past that try to solve very challenging conundrums in education.

 I specifically look at the time period that's known as the Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement. I'm keenly interested in the independent Black institutions, or IBIs, that were established during this time. You had parents, you had educators, you had artists who leveraged their artistry and leveraged their, celebrity, if you will, to build institutions, start schools…schools. These schools often had food co-ops and healthy eateries. They had opportunities for parents to return, to get GEDs, to get other kinds of education opportunities. These IBIs were the foundation of what we call wraparound services. All of the things that we say we want and desire, people were doing these things with far fewer resources than we have now.

And so futuring for me is when we're thinking about building the future, it has to be a verb, right? And there was something that the language around forecasting was lacking for me. I feel like forecasting can be transactional, but futuring is relational. It values getting to the future as a collective, as opposed to, I got here first, I created this, I made this, I did this. It is about the collective moving together. 

I have been thinking a lot about Chicago, Dave, especially, Chicago had its own Black arts movement that was in full effect. A lot of people point to New York City and other places, but Chicago had so many institution builders and so many people working from the ground up. And, my book, Futuring Black Lives, thinks about the work of the Institute of Positive Education that was established by Haki Madhubuti, who had started the Third World Press in 1967. He and his wife, Carol Lee, who's in our field, former president of AERA, and recently former president of the National Academy of Education and Professor Emerita from Northwestern. They were in Chicago building, dreaming, creating, not only an African-centered school, but they had farmland in Michigan that they would take young people to. 

They also launched a journal called Black Books Bulletin Literary Journal that Jabari Mahiri, who's a professor at Berkeley, was the managing editor for most of the journal's tenure. They did so many things with this journal. One thing that they did that I was so enthralled with is they had a section called Books for the Young, where they reviewed children's literature, and they made recommendations to families, to guardians, to educators about the kinds of children's literature that they wanted to put in the hands of young people. And they didn't want diverse literature for the sake of having diverse literature. They wanted literature that told the story of collective movements. They didn't want the biographies of the usual suspects, right? They wanted to show stories of people getting to this new place in the future together. And so, when you think about the role of Black print culture during the Black Arts Movement, the newspapers, the journals, all of these amazing artifacts that we still have access to. 

I argue that these are actually maps. These are maps to the future of education, and we need to go, and we need to access our archival intelligence. Elizabeth Yackel talks about archival intelligence as user knowledge in the archives, but I would extend it further and say that archival intelligence also involves a sort of relationship with the archives to make the archives, living, breathing history that we can use sort of in the spirit of Alice Walker's Everyday Use essay, right? We're not just…putting things away and curating them so they can be preserved. We want to use these things. We need to re-read. We need to revisit these items. I keep thinking about my father, he said, you know, we may not have another revolution because people are not reading.

And we need to read. And during the Black Power and Black Arts movement, everybody was reading. One of the favorite pastimes was generating a reading list. Everybody had a reading list, right? And so I've been thinking a lot about how we do this futures work, part of it is going back and reading. We have to be a part of that sort of intellectual loop, where we're reading, we're writing, we're thinking, we're contributing.

Sonya Douglass: Thank you, Maisha. Yeah, this really thinking about the work of the collective and what it does take to be able to, create the types of futures that we want to see. And Angela, I'm thinking about, you know, the impact that you've made in the many years that you've been doing community work, and especially in terms of advancing equity. You've described the curb-cut effect as a powerful example of how policies designed to support those most marginalized ultimately benefit everyone, what… could you tell us more about this effect, and what this idea does teach us about equity, democracy, and the kinds of public investments we should be making today?

Angela Glover Blackwell (she/her): Absolutely, I was just thinking about it as Myisha was talking, because the Black Arts Movement, the Black Liberation Movement, the Black Panther Party. The reason that we're still talking about those things all these years after they had their entry into our imaginations is because what they came up with was transformative for all of society.

Because those people who had been most demonized, most kept behind, and my friend, the scholar Manuel Pastor, is the one who taught me to say, kept behind, because I often said people who were left behind. And he said, you know, left behind sounds like it was inadvertent, and I'm coming back for you. Kept behind is the reality of what happened. That as people who have operated from those broken points in society, solve those issues, the benefits cascade out to all. 

And I have been trying to develop that idea with this statement that equity is the superior growth model for the nation, because If we could…get equity right, we get everything else right. But as I talked about that in public speaking, I noticed that people didn't respond the way that I hoped that they would to the phrase.

So one day, I was in the green room, getting ready to give a speech, and I thought, I gotta find a better way to say this. And it came to me that the curb cut in the sidewalk there, because of the advocacy of people with disabilities in wheelchairs, is something that benefits all of society. And I started using it to make that point, and there was a great response. People would come up to me afterwards saying, I'm going to use that. I said, absolutely, you should use it. So in 2017, I wrote an article about it. And here we are almost 10 years later, and people are still gravitating to that language.

Because I think there's something about it that communicates really well what we need for the kind of change that we're trying to build. The curb-cut effect says that if we solve problems with nuance and specificity. Based on the needs of those who have been most marginalized by society, the benefits cascade out for all of society. And once you know what to look for, you see it every place. 

Think about the benefits of not smoking in public places. That started because of the advocacy of flight attendants. Who was more exposed to the dangers of concentrated smoke than flight attendants, whether they smoked or not? They tried on their own to solve that problem, but it wasn't until they hooked up with Ralph Nader, that wonderful consumer advocate, that they were able to get smoking banned on airplanes, which led to banning smoking in public places, think of the millions of lives that have been saved because of that. I'll give you an education example.

The Head Start program started because children who were Black and rural and poor in the South, the SNCC and others, Marion Wright Edelman, understood that they needed a special focus on their development and early education so that they could achieve. Now, no parent thinks of not getting a child in an early childhood development program.

Curb cut effect.

So I think it is so important that as we try to build a thriving multiracial democracy, which I think of as a radically inclusive, mutually accountable democracy in service of human flourishing, so that society can thrive and all can have a good life. We need to be applying the curb-cut effect to governing, to leadership, to the kind of changes that we need, because unless we start with those who have been rendered most vulnerable [...] In society, we will always keep coming back to the same old problems.

Ezekiel Dixon-Roman: Amen. Oh my gosh, thank you. So, like, there's multiple things I actually want to just engage and riff off here. So, I mean, one in which is sort of drawing a thread between something that Maisha mentioned to what you just said, Angela, and that is, one, to think about the information networks and practices that Maisha's speaking to. And particularly in relation to the Black Arts Movement, thinking about that today, in relation to banned books and what it means to really try to address almost, compensate or even supplant, subvert the very movements that are working against, the very reactionary movements that are working against our very interests, right? And the importance of education and equity, especially for social transformation, for the nation as a whole. 

And this, you know, this really connects nicely to what, Angela, what you're offering here, what you've offered us as a nation. The very notion of the curb-cut effect, and the importance of centering equity, and the importance of how equity will benefit the nation, having a cascading effect for the whole nation…want to get there. 

How do we get there? And Dave, I want to turn to you to really engage this question of, really, how do we get the nation there? How do we get the people? How do we get communities there to fully understanding, appreciating, and going after the curb-cut effect, the importance and significance of equity. And so, Dave, coalition building is often celebrated as essential to social transformation. Yet, it can also be difficult and fragile work. Even frustrating work, even waning work, literally, where you have to… you need to get your own respite, if you will. You need your own… you have to have your own space for recovery, if you will. From your perspective, what have moments for educational justice gotten right about coalition building? And where have we fallen short?

David Stovall: I think, and again, thanks so much for that question. I think one of the things that coalitions have gotten right is that for a coalition to work, you must have an analysis of the opposition. You must know how white supremacy functions, how capitalism functions, and what it will do. Pit you against other folks that are in that coalition.

So when you actually see folks who have that particular analysis, and one of the things here in Chicago, there is an organization that was… it was a coalition that was built called the Grassroots Education Movement, which actually formed into… what actually created a space that became part of the Chicago Teachers Union's contract around what they refer to as sustainable community schools, right? And that's those sustainable community schools are ones that focused on those who are on the margins, and partnered them with community organizations who are also dealing with people who are on the margins, and now had to have that school community space as one that works internal to the school and external to the school to now bring those issues together. 

I think the other part where we do not get things right, we see these large-based movements that do not have an analysis of white supremacy and capitalism. And now, those spaces become either deeply corporatized, or one that is now now become…positional to community-driven efforts, and I really appreciate Dr. Winn bringing this forward in terms of thinking about the Black Arts Movement here in Chicago, because this is a sign, and Russell Rickford does a really great job in this book, We Are All an African People, to really kind of get into what was that fall, and I really appreciate what he did, because he interviewed folks and said, well, what did they see as this particular space? 

And Mama Safisha, who we know as Carol Lee, at that time at the Institute of Positive Education, which became the Betty Shabazz Community Academy, they talked about how they were pitted and looped into a corporate charter model. And it really became detrimental, because when IPE transitions to Betty Shabazz and Betty Shabazz, Was having financial difficulty. The city of Chicago actually made an offer to them to put them in this group of charter schools. Now, what they brokered was to say, we will keep our identity, keep what we do, but now you have a different funding mechanism.

And that funding mechanism is all subject. And I think this is… and it came from this larger coalition of community-based schools who went the charter route. 

So you had Latine schools that went the charter route, you had Black schools that went the charter route, and remember, these were community-based schools, and that was the original vision of Charters, right? It was to be this community-based school where you could experiment in instruction and share the instruction across institutions. 

The thing that happened was late-stage capitalism figured out how to monetize charter school education. And when those charter… when those large educational management organizations came up, they became banks. And they became banks that distributed money to actually engage, and they were selling models. I mean, they were literally franchising models across the country, in particular locales that now further marginalize Black youth. And I really appreciate Mama Safisha talking about that tension, because that's not what they intended or wanted to do, but they got swooped in to that particular iteration by way of late-stage capitalism. 

So I think the coalitions work, they are very grounded in community space, and they remain that… they remain grounded because they have an analysis of the enemy. When it does not work, white supremacy and capitalism play[s] on our desperation and actually splinters those particular movements, and I think those examples become critically important when we talk about holding coalitions, because coalitions are fraught, very fragile, but they have to be maintained with an analysis of how the enemy moves.

Sonya Douglass: Thank you, so much to think about. Maisha, I had a question for you, focused on public education, as the immediate past president of the American Educational Research Association, also as a National Academy of Education Fellow, if public education is meant to prepare people not just for work, but for democracy and collective life.

What kinds of leaders should schools and universities be cultivating today? And this might be a question for all of the panelists, but what types of leaders should we be developing and cultivating?

Maisha Winn: Thank you for the opportunity to think about that. I've been thinking a lot about the values of these Black institution builders and, thinking about… it's very hard to distill these values, because they did so much in these institutions, but, when I attempt to distill them, there are a few values that I think are really critical. 

One is being intentional, being intentional about everything, from how you show up, to how you speak, to the modeling that you're doing, modeling the leadership that you want the young people to step into. And thinking about shared and distributed leadership. I think there were some really powerful models around. I might be in charge at this meeting, I may be the one who's facilitating, but we rotate the facilitation. We hear from different voices. I'm not always going to be the one at the head of the table.

I also think there was a lot of attention paid to reimagining as opposed to reacting. Carol Lee, or Mama Safisha, talks about this a great deal, that, you know, rather than complaining and reacting to everything, which will, you know, as we know, can take you into a different direction, when you're reacting to everything, you're not dreaming, you're not generating ideas. Being reactionary is not a space where any leader, especially of a school with children can thrive. You have to be ahead of things. And the only way to be ahead of things is to generate ideas. 

I talked about this in my [AERA] presidential address, how when I, you know, thought I was sort of finished, if you will, with this historical ethnography of the Institute of Positive Education and the Black Books Bulletin Literary Journal, I had a conversation with Black Arts Movement poet Hakimarabouti.

And he said, you know, Maisha, we were not, we were not in the books business. And I said, oh, okay. And it kind of was a little bit of a surprise, but then he said, we weren't even in the education business. And then I thought, oh my goodness, I'm in trouble, I think my whole project needs to be scrapped. He said, we were in the ideas business. We were in the ideas business, and I think that leadership right now in public education, or independent education, or wherever we have these young children for hours and hours and hours of their time away from families, away from communities, we have to be in the ideas business.

And then I keep thinking about one other thing that I think is definitely up for debate, and I think in this, you know, sort of culture and time where we talk a lot about self-care. This is not a very popular thing to put out. But the notion of struggle was a badge of honor during this period. And you had so many writers and theorists of this time period talking about how the… the opportunity to struggle, and struggle for the greater good of our society and for our children and the next generations, that is actually an honor. And so struggle is good. And that reframing, I know, has really, really helped me during this time, and I've been…reorienting myself to the notion of struggle, and not trying to take on some of its newer dynamics and definitions, but what does it mean to return to thinking about struggle as a badge of honor?

Sonya Douglass: Love that.

Ezekiel Dixon-Roman: I really appreciate this point that, that you shared, Maisha, that Haki shared with you, of being in the ideas business. I mean, I… this is… it's profound in so many ways. It's… it's such a deep understanding of how important and significant the production of knowledge, controlling knowledge, even having control over, the cultivation, and who gets to know what, and why that's so important, especially for those of us coming from histories of subjugation, of marginalization, of oppression, where knowledge has always long been used as a way of oppressing and subjugating populations. So I really appreciate that, and it's… it's…It actually says so much about the kind of movement work that was being done in relation to what was… what we often recognize as, I don't want to say businesses, but, you know, organization development and practices, that there were… that these were really connected to a larger agenda and movement, and so…

Okay, last thing I'm gonna say, and then I'll move on to this next question: You know, I, you know, go to AERA, and a number of different other, you know, been to AESA, but the conference where I've been to  that I… I've got the sense where the transactions on the future of education are happening, and I don't mean this in a celebratory way, but in a quite a suspicious and concerning way. That's ASU GSV. It's the major ed tech sort of conference. It's almost like a show… what do you call it, like a showcase, if you will, of all the major ed… ed tech platforms and all. And I can't help but think:

(1) what is the relationship of the push of those platforms in relation to those ideas? The generation of those ideas, or even the suppression of certain ideas and understandings? And then (2) What does it mean for public education? And this really is a nice, you know, way of thinking, or segue to this next question.

As we work to build a better future, what role should public education play? I mean, charter schools were mentioned. We also know there's the voucher system as well. We know there's this ongoing assault in relation to public education. Right now, is education driving transformation? Or is it struggling to catch up with it?

And I have to mention, again, platforms, but especially Gen AI, how is it playing into the very…challenge for public education to transform, to drive the transformation. Okay, I'mma shut up. And this is for all three of you.

David Stovall: Well, here in Chicago, opening this September, we will have an Agentic AI school starting in 3 months, right? And what does this mean, Ezekiel, to your point?

Young people will be put in a room with 4 people who are not teachers, they refer to them as facilitators. They will be on the… they will be on their tablets and headphones for 2 hours in the beginning of the day. And now those facilitators are there if there are any technical difficulties. The rest of the day is…what they refer to as project-based learning, but they have not been explanatory in terms of what that actually is. The school costs $55,000 for an academic year.

Now, let's put this into context. When that $55,000 now gets to be $10,000. Well, that $10,000 now gets to be reduced to $2,000. We are in the moment that Bill Watkins warned us of at the end of public education. Right? So now we have to think about that, and to everyone's point, never to be fearful of that moment, right? So it's this thing around what comes from the ashes, right?

So if this thing is done, then what is it that we are willing to create, and where will we be creating it, right? So now we're asking not just an existential question, but a question around where will we be building and creating?

And I think this is… this becomes important because the hope of that agentic AI school that opens in 3 months in Chicago is that they figure out how to scale it. And when they figure out how to scale it, that's gonna be sold to us, right? So now, we have to be clear about what the rejection of that thing is, and now what will we do? 

And I'll be 54 this summer, and one of the things that I would always get into my bag, and Doc Winn, I've talked to you about this before. When older folks in struggle would always be like, look, y'all better watch out for these machines. And I would always be like, yeah, they just riffing.

We are here, right? There's no question, we are in that moment, and now, opposed to being fearful of it or panic-stricken, now we have to lean on history and now say, what are we willing to create in…place of this thing that is really built to anesthetize us, right? Like, much of schooling has always been built to anesthetize us, so now what is the interruption of that practice and process?

Angela Glover Blackwell: I'd like to jump in here. I so appreciate what you said, and I heard what you said as being the same thing that I said, that we are really both pointing out Dead.

What people are energized around now, based on fear, whether it's AI and what'll happen to public education, or whether it's destruction of our democratic principles and what's going to happen to the nation, absolutely creates a space for those who have seen a better way to jump in and make sure that we use these moments of destruction to be able to build something entirely different, the struggle that Maisha was talking about. And I wanted to comment on that before I get back into the education one, because she talked about how we have to see ourselves as being in struggle again.

I have a podcast called Radical Imagination, and one of the people that I interviewed was Adrienne Marie Brown, who talks about joy. And in that conversation, she was talking about how we needed to pay attention to joy in everything that we do, and her challenge to me is that if in all this work for social change and transformation, if you don't have a vision of joy as part of it, your vision is incomplete. Because we're not just working for people to be able to participate, to be able to have agency. We want people to be able to find their joy, express their joy.

And so, I want to take that into the purpose of public education. Because when you talk about democracy in service of human flourishing, what that means is that all of our systems have to be engaged in what is their contribution to human flourishing.

And education has one of the most important contributions to human flourishing, because where we open up the possibilities, we open up the pores of the human imagination and mind to be able to transform and learn and build and grow.

And we haven't been able to actually do that, because the systems that we have been working for have not been in service of human flourishing. They have had small ambition. Small ambition, if not negative ambition, for those who we have cared about.

And so, we really need to use this moment to do what David is challenging, to demand that we use everything we have access to, to be able to actually have a system that supports human flourishing through education, but also through health and through everything else.

But there's another aspect here, and that's in the question:

Education for leadership.

That we need a different kind of leadership, and we've been touching on all the aspects of it. That we need leadership that has radical imagination, that can absolutely envision something that is more just, more fair, more inclusive, more durable, more sustainable. Education has a role in bringing people up to adulthood, who come with all of that. 

You know they have it when they're in third, fourth, fifth grade, and then we beat it out of them, so that by the time they're finished, they've lost that. We have to be able to imagine. The second thing is we have to not be afraid of the past, the ugly parts of it, and the good parts of it. We can't just tell one-sided stories.

When I talk about democracy. I don't talk about it to praise it. I talk about it to challenge it. But I challenge it because it's based on some assumptions that are bigger and better than anything I have ever seen done with it in the United States of America, which doesn't mean that this country didn't create a space for that challenge.

 And so we've got to be able to tell the whole story, and we have to train people to live with contradictions, to understand that not quite figuring out is okay. That's where you can help to figure it out. And then we have to have people who can knit all the stories together, because what we need is transformative solidarity. We, as Black people, are not the only ones with a story to tell.

We're not the only ones with a story to tell about our interactions with systems that have oppressed us. We're not the only ones with stories to tell of glory days and aspirations. We have to figure out how to be in transformative solidarity with all of the stories of people who need, for the nation, in fact, for the world to work in a different way. Transformative solidarity is not transactionalist, not you supporting me, and I'll support you. 

That's not… your fight is important to me, too. Let me give you a check. Transformative solidarity is your struggle is my struggle. I am not free until you are free. And when you are free, it lays a path for my freedom. That is transformative solidarity. And so, our leaders need to have radical imagination, they need to be grounded in history, and they need to understand that we will not achieve the glory that we seek if we can't honestly and authentically join with others who need it to.

Ezekiel Dixon-Roman: Preach.

Sonya Douglass: Angela, I might not need to come… need you to do a guest lecture in one of my leadership classes. As we… we actually have some questions from the audience that we want to turn to. We have two participants who wanted to hear more about archival intelligence, and they asked:

What archives, movements, or community practices do you believe contemporary educators should revisit to interrupt carceral schooling? And can you provide additional examples of communities or institutions doing this well?

Maisha Winn: Thank you so much. So, the term was, to my knowledge, coined by Elizabeth Yackel, who was a librarian at the University of Michigan, and she and Deborah Torres have an article on archival intelligence that I think is 2003.

So, they've been thinking about this for quite some time. Now, their thinking around archival intelligence is very specifically about user knowledge in the archives. It's a fairly straightforward and even a bit conservative viewpoint of what archival intelligence is.

One of my grad students, Beth Bass, who's a historian here at Stanford, and I have been thinking about archival intelligence as being relational, and how we think about archives as a part of our everyday practices. We're actually working on a VR experience with some community archives that we have access to. 

My parents started a Black community school called Shuleja Mimose in the early 70s, and I'm very fortunate that my father and my mother collected all of these materials, and so we have been digitizing them, and we want to make the archives available to people, so we want to, you know, create these VR experiences where we could take them to young people wherever they are. Everybody's not coming to a university campus, everyone's not coming into an institution or going into special collections.

I think also we thought about how vulnerable we were. I had some research to do in DC last fall and wanted to visit some of our Smithsonian institutions, and they were closed because of a government shutdown, and so I think we also need to be thinking about archival intelligence in terms of how we keep and curate some of our own materials. I think about the artist Solange, and her St. Heron Library, that's a digital library online. Such a powerful, powerful example of…what I call citizen archivist, someone who's making these materials available.

Ashley Smith-Purviance has the Rolling Archives that documents and thinks about the role of roller skating in Black girlhood. The Bay Area, there's a Bay Area Lesbian, archive that Farima just recently put me on. I was blown away by the work that they're doing. 

So, there's so many different examples of people saying, you know what, we're gonna document our stories, we're going to keep our materials, and we're going to make them accessible, and we want to make sure that people can access them, not… people who are not necessarily stepping on a university campus, or people who are maybe not going into these other government institutions that are at the women mercy of, you know, whether people are agreeing or not, right? 

And so, I think that this is really important, and I'll put one other plug in. Bill Jennings, Billy X. Jennings, David is nodding his head, dear, dear family friend, and he has kept an archival record of the Black Panther Party, and if you're doing a documentary about the Black Panthers, if you're writing a book, you have to go see Bill Jennings, and he has kept all these materials. There's a reason why he hasn't sold these or put them in somebody else's archives.

And so I think that sort of spirit is something that all of us need to be thinking about, is how we look at the materials in our lives and reorient ourselves to… to preservation and everyday use.

David Stovall: And just a quick shout-out, Caleb Germanaro. Started a Black Community Archive in Seattle, Washington.

He actually, to Maisha's point, moved the archive out of the university into the community, and actually houses… he actually was gifted all of the copies of the Black Scholar, right, so all of the copies of the Journal of the Black Scholar actually is in this community library, in…Seattle. And then here in Chicago, there's the Black Metropolis Research Consortium that's co… that's actually comes out of these radical librarians who actually joined all… joined all of the libraries, university and community libraries, to actually have this operating archive that people can access that do not have to be affiliated with universities. 

So those, are spaces that folks can plug into that are accessible, that people actually intended to make them accessible.

Ezekiel Dixon-Roman: I so appreciate what, both, Maisha, what you're offering, and also, David, your additional, suggestions and examples here. I look at just a way in which I have myself think… I find myself thinking about Stefano Harney and Fedmoten's The Undercommons, and how a number of these examples are examples of undercommons. And at the same time, I also find myself thinking about the intentional, important ethical decision of not placing something on the digital, online, because we know how anything that goes online becomes of extraction and of rapture, if you will, of Gen AI. And so, there are certain things we may want to maintain for our own interests, right, in order to maintain those undercommons.

That said, okay, I have just another question from the audience here is, what would a modern collective framework for educational liberation look like today? Could a coordinated approach across states help us rebuild power and reclaim education while still leaving room for innovation and community-specific visions?

David Stovall: You actually have some examples of this, and one example is an old… or older formation called the Republic of New Africa. And the Republic of New Africa was actually spread across the Southeast, so from Tennessee to Florida, from Louisiana to Georgia. 

So those states that comprise what we consider to be the Southeast region actually had an education plan, right? So across states, they would share particular curriculum, they would… they had planned to engage a space that was actually a land-based school, right? So now, teaching people how to take care and tender, land, but to also to build, right?

 So it's a very tangible, practical space. I think another example that becomes important, and we miss this in the work of Vanessa Siddle Walker. She… writes a book called The Lost Education of Horace Tate. And it's a really important book.  Because it's teachers who are sharing curriculum across state lines, and they are also communicating to NAACP Legal Defense Fund that the Brown approach was the incorrect approach.

It was not about integrating schools as much as it was about taxation and representation. And Oliwei Rooks does a really good job of putting that understanding forward out of one of the plaintiffs out of North Carolina. And they were… their money was being used to build white schools in North Carolina when these Black districts were being taxed right next to them.

So now, when you're Brown… and remember, Brown is a class action case, right? So now it's actually 18 plaintiffs in that case. So… and they were across state lines. So now, when they actually started to have that conversation, and Doc Douglass, you do this better than most in terms of laying this out. But I think it's important to look at how they shared that curriculum, what they did, and remember, y'all, this is in the days of letter writing, right? They were… they were writing letters to each other, sharing what they were doing in their respective classrooms. And I think this… these examples now allow us to think about stuff different, and I'll end with this.

I would encourage people to check out this NPR story called The Magic Bookshelf. The Magic Bookshelf is about a group of teachers who had their books banned in Texas. And what they did across, and this was a state example, but it was across districts. They created what they referred to as these magic bookshelves, that they would name a location, they would buy class copies of books and put them in certain spaces so teachers could go get those class copies and now exchange them with each other as the books have… as the books have been banned. And this is… literally, this is 5 years ago, right? 

So this thing around really thinking about the undercommons, or dare we say, a fugitive relationship that allows us to now think about what's possible.

Angela Glover Blackwell: I see a couple of questions in the chat about transformative solidarity, and I see our time is almost up, so I wanted to offer a couple of things.

One is that transformative solidarity comes out of practice. Maisha talked about the Black Arts Movement, and that period of time when we all couldn't get enough to read, and we started reading so much. The people became revolutionaries in their thinking, and that drove them to read, because they wanted to know more. It is so important to know that practice and action drives us to get more information, and it's practice and activity that drives us to want to have transformative solidarity.

And we need transformative solidarity, not only across race and ethnicity, we need it across generations. Because we've been citing the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, the Black Arts Movement. All of that was 50 years plus. And there's so many young people today, take Justin Jones in Tennessee. The generosity of leadership, Justin Jones, a representative in Tennessee, they put him out for taking a stand for an issue that wasn't necessarily his issue, but it was an important issue, and the people put him back there. We need to figure out how to build across generations. We also need to understand that we cannot sit back and let our brothers and sisters who are Indigenous, who are Latin, who are Asian, who are poor, who are gay, who are transgender, be demonized if we're in the room.

I always try to say to people, I may fail at this every day, but if I am in the room, I'm trying to have everybody's back, and I will do the best that I can. Something came up just the other day, no more than two days ago, I was in a social setting with women I had not met before who were all Black, and I was adoring being in that setting with them, meeting new Black women. And one of them started to go off about Latinos coming into the neighborhood. I sat there, I got that churning in my stomach, you all know it. People have just been having a good time. Am I gonna be the skunk that came to the garden party? And I told myself, yes, that's where you always have to be prepared to be the skunk that came to the garden party. You gotta call it out. 

And so, if we don't take that responsibility to reach across generations, and to reach across our own, discomfort to make sure that we are building moment by moment. The foundation for transformative solidarity. I thank you so much for letting me be a part of this conversation.

Sonya Douglass: Well, thank you for your willingness to be a part of it, and thank you to all of our panelists, Maisha T. Winn, David Stovall, Angela Glover Blackwell, we have learned so much, and just appreciate not only your contributions to the conversation, but the work that you do on a regular basis.

And we are so grateful for all of you in our audience, across the nation for coming together to join us in this series of discussions exploring the politics of possibility.

Ezekiel Dixon-Roman: Please be sure to follow our work and sign up for the mailing list to remain connected to all of us in the Coalition.

Sonya Douglass: We're building new educational futures, and the foundation is equity.