The Future They Fear Looks Like Our Children

A message from the Desk of Derick Harris, | Executive Director.

 Dear BESR Community,

         President Trump’s recent executive order to shutter the Department of Education (DOE) is more than what his rhetoric has suggested. The goal for its closure is not to return agency or power back to the states. Do not be deceived. The goal is retraction and erasure. This bold and callously calculated backlash intends to retract the social and economic progress Black America and other historically undercut communities and peoples have achieved since the department’s founding.

        Born in 1979 under the Carter administration (due to increasing pressure and recognition for the need to enforce anti-discrimination in education), the DOE has been instrumental in funding of historically disadvantaged learning communities and elevating education as a national priority. Now, not even more than 50 years later, that same department has been given orders to begin shuttering its mission though having not secured its stated objectives.

        Let’s be clear: this moment we are in transcends party politics. It is deeper than that, more sinister than that. It has to be, because this ruling touches the minds and flesh of our children—our most vulnerable, our most brilliant, and our most promising futures. And when our vulnerable are cast aside to be disinherited, dispossessed, and used as photogenic props in their own abandonment, there are no winners. Everybody loses. Every. Last. One. Of. Us.

        When our Black scholars are made to bear the weight of bigoted motivations dressed up in the sanctimonious garb of “states’ rights” and “small government,” or when terror is cloaked in the guise of “fiscal stewardship” rhetoric aimed at downplaying the DOE’s importance to Black scholars, we are no longer dealing with issues of governance. We are navigating a gaslit terrain of socio-psychological and economic violence against our Black futures.

       Students of history are aware that we are experiencing a familiar story. This moment is a national rerun, a repeat of a familiar episode, a narrative where the powerful feast on the powerless and call it progress. We are in a familiar moment where, once again, to be a child in this nation means learning to survive the actions and inactions, the decisions and indecision, of dishonorable adults. But we come from a people who have traversed terrors of self-interest and have survived the shears that have sharpened to cut down our dreams and sever our hope.

      Through our shared heritage of brilliance and resilience, we know well the path of resistance. We know the measures by which we must resist. And we refuse to let this nation’s mechanisms for the maintenance of bigotry use or dilute our coco-buttered brilliance, our blue magic magnificence, or our pink lotion resilience to grease the lies we’ve been asked to believe. We refuse to be the ceremonial offering laid upon the altar of white fright, or be consumed by the fire of white supremacy. We refuse to let the minds and bodies of our richly melanated children be laid at the feet of this underwhelming administration that seeks to under educate, under develop, underfund, and under resource our students, turning them into underpaid, low-wage laborers to build the dreams of the powerful.

      And as students of history, we know the actions of this administration are yet another saga our children must endure. But as inheritors and makers of it, they will not face this burden alone. Our ancestors taught us that history is our teacher and our guide. And though this administration has made every attempt to hide our historical contributions, rewrite them, and kill them dead—our stories like our ancestors, live on. Their stories run deep and wide within our bodies and culture in such ways that not even keyword whiteouts or algorithmic clearinghouses can erase or undo. For the truths of our heritage are etched in the blood-soaked soil of this land and pump warmly through our veins.

       At this critical juncture in our nation and state, we must do everything in our power to hold accountable our elected officials to ensure that our Black scholars are not made to bear the burden or biases of negligent adults who prioritize their proximation to the power and privilege, over the dreams and possibilities of our children. And in the pursuit of educational justice, we must remember that we do not embark on this journey as those who have no hope or agency to fight.

       From our shared memory, we bring to recollection the defiant spirits of Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman; the visionary minds of Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois. We invoke the unwavering resolve of Mary McLeod Bethune, Marcus Garvey, Carter G. Woodson, Septima Poinsette Clark, Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin; the urgent voices of Bernice Johnson Reagon, Gloria Ladson Billings, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Bettina Love, Terrell Strayhorn and Jarvis Givens—We carry their brilliance and their blueprint. For “we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”

      While we have yet to see how this directive toward closing the Department of Education will play out in Congress, we at BESR remain resolute in our efforts to ensure the systemic success of Black students across our state. One such step is hosting Anchored in Truth: African American Studies for Today’s Classroom, a professional learning community focused on African American Studies. As corporations, agencies, and firms across the country retreat from their commitments to equity, we remain steadfast in our mission. We will not stand by. We choose to stand up. We will fight back. And we will plan forward.

Register today: Anchored in Truth: African American Studies for Today’s Classroom

In solidarity,

Derick D. Harris, Executive Director 

Black Education Strategy Roundtable