My Personal Journey through Education and Responsibility

November 6, 2024
6:13 AM – Noted via phone at my kitchen island.

This feeling has made a home in me before, yet I can’t give it a name. I couldn’t the first time it visited in 2016.

I know it’s beneath disappointment – more profound than the origins of pain. Disgust, maybe, but closer to a deep anguish that tugs and pulls further from the darkness but can’t seem to escape the chains that bound it to its cave.

A memory connected to a place of defeat that can only be classified as an abyss of hope glittered with possibility, perhaps even lined with a truth I knew was too good to be true.

But you believe, right?
Because reality itself seems too bad to be true.
Because what else do you have?

Some call it optimism, a gamble, and often even innocence.

I inherited my political values and fundamental understanding of right vs. wrong in many ways, as most young black boys do; the things I said and did weren’t discerned.

They were recited.

Memories – and confirmation of a connection I shared with the elders.

The gatekeepers.

I never dared question the principles I believe to be true (you don’t have space to do that in a Jamaican household.) Until I met Mr. McKinney (as I called him then and still struggle to let go of) and worked alongside him during the Bracka Obama Reelection campaign in 2012.

I phone banked, canvased, updated Excel sheets, passed out water, and attended rallies, but most importantly, I listened to the people.

I began to understand you can’t separate politics and people, especially people who have been historically marginalized and systematically oppressed.

I learned through listening that knowledge of policy and procedure that directly affected the voices that sat in the margin and asked for more was different from common knowledge.

The want was apparent – but how to obtain the want through political demands wasn’t, which resulted in self-inflicted humor, degrading personal and communal circumstances, or simply not voting at all.

I would debrief with Mr. McKinney over the sounds of Lupe and Krit as we discussed the inner workings of America. Wondering where I fit into the scheme of freedom.

Wondering what my role was in freedom.
Wondering if freedom was even real.

Obama won Florida that year. I felt the drastic opposite of what I feel right now. Less because Obama won – and more because of what the win represented.

Could I, too, be American?
Patriotic, even?
And for once, not go to the kitchen when company came?

This win was Communal, but selfishly, it aided in my understanding of politics and its connection to the people.

I carried that visceral feeling of hope into college, paired with the skills to organize. I read books; I volunteered, led movements, forced change, and got scholarships and programs that serviced the minority reinstated alongside my then comrades.

I believed in the power of the people so much that when Trump surfaced for the first time in 2016, nothing in me thought that amount of hate and disregard for people would ever grace the head of the table.

I mimicked the teaching I learned alongside Mr. McKinney in 2012. I canvased, registered people to vote, rallied, phone banked, listened again and immersed myself in local politics.

I wanted to believe America understood the ramifications of allowing a man so out of touch with people – who degraded the souls of the oppressed to represent this country.

He mocked circumstances forced by the hands of those who sat near him, with him, and in the same line of fragile privilege he inherited. A man who pandered and turned the institution of American democracy into a reality TV show … a man who never believed in the fundamental principle of justice and liberty.

To watch what I presumed to be friends and allies pull the hood of the red hat over their heads in the unity of message that stood on the opposing side of an humanity inclusive for all – a side that didn’t consider me or anything that looked like me.

Those hats flooded campus that night. The red that filled the deep dark of a Syracuse night will forever be etched in my memory.

There it was, hoods on the heads of the hands I shook in favor of “progress.”

It distracted me, enchanted me in a dysphoric spell focused on blaming a “silent racism.” Blocking, unfollowing, unfriending, and not doing the work.

Not this time.

But confirmed then, like now more than ever, education has precisely one function – creating avenues of freedom from the bedrock of where we develop understanding – the Classroom, by simply teaching a child how to learn. If done right, inherently on their journey to freedom, the student will develop the ability to think critically.

To discern.
To be self-reliant
self-determined…
And, most importantly, inquisitive of the world around them.

Explicitly — Classrooms that hold the intersectional lines that have all been crossed- soiled with rhetoric that isolates the owner’s identity/formation of identity from someone else’s idea of humanity.

The Classroom, or any nonconventional place of education now MORE THAN EVER, must be (re) created to serve as a beacon to educate.

The Classroom, or any nonconventional place of education now MORE THAN EVER, must be (re)imagined to serve as a beacon to warn of the shadow dwellers.

The creatures that crawl in the shadow and grow strong on fear – cowards that create streams of terror to prevent the “collapse of white privilege,” as Toni Morrison called it in “Making America White Again.

The Classroom, or any nonconventional place of education now MORE THAN EVER, must be (re)aligned to serve as a beacon of political awareness.

Responsibility for me is a bit heavier this morning…