This year, as with every year, I’ve hung a little poster of both Malcolm Little to Malcolm X / el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz with the tagline “People Change: Don’t Give Up On Our Youth.”

When I’m seated at my desk in the morning, it’s positioned so it’s slightly above my head. Curious students ask who the boy and the man are and why I decided to buy that poster. A student might chime in “That’s Malcolm X” while other students might not chime in at all.

The grumpy old man in me, trained in black liberation thought back in college and exposed to so many of the greats of the Civil Rights era, might have belted out a “YOU DON’T KNOW WHO THAT IS?” The teacher in me said, “Well, he was someone special” and build my case accordingly. 

Suppressing the urge to not do as some of my elders did has gotten exponentially easier over time, a function of empathy and actual social justice. Another part of it is knowing that students need the time to let these ideas and people foment before actualizing knowledge of the struggles to win the rights they may not fully comprehend. For adults, it also means that we understand that the work for justice did not find its genesis in us. We’re stewards for the movement forward and we hold the past for lessons and guidance. 

Learning and earning in education has so many implications for our students and their schools, but we’re reluctant to use over-abused words like status quo. 

The current era of what we consider justice work has proven even more perilous with the economic shift towards neoliberalism and individualism. Neoliberalism has been defined a billion different ways, but a handy set of characteristics include austerity, privatization, market-based solutions, and the focus on the uplift of one or a handful as stewards for these ideas. The term itself has lost popularity these days thanks in large part to global and domestic uprisings, but the elements within our capitalist society remains. Also, as we’ve seen with movements in the past, our society can more readily handle the rise and fall of one individual who fervently or reluctantly takes on leadership of a movement than a collective mass who’ve offered a new model for governance. 

In education, this has been even more unsettling. While we can argue whether education policy and practice have changed dramatically in the last few decades, we still haven’t discussed the simplest yet most complex question facing our schools today: what is an education? We have – pardon the pun – so many schools of thoughts, we might never get to a single solution. Yet, it seems to me that moving folks along a continuum that suggests all of our students deserve an equitable education and it will take some personal and institutional sacrifices to do so is our most arduous task. As I’ve stipulated in the past, we can provide equitable resources to every school, assure highly qualified (and highly paid) educators get staffed in the neediest schools, and re-envision our school spaces. As long as one school is viewed as predominantly white while another is viewed as predominantly Black / Latinx / Asian / Native-American-First-Nation, inequity will always reign.

This is even exemplified in who’s taken up the mantle of “leadership” in education today. Of course, there’s a difference between authority as an official position in a recognized institution or organization [management, for argument’s sake] and leadership as a set of affirmations and permissions granted to someone on a micro and macro scale. In this era of social justice work, influenced in large part by movements like Black Lives Matter / Occupy Wall Street / Fight for 15 / DREAMers, equity came to the fore for educators in the Obama era.

From within education, plenty of educators, parent groups, and scholars had a hand in keeping the justice boat afloat before the wave came in, many of whom I consider mentors and colleagues. Even when they held no formal leadership positions, their thought formations and galvanizing created a foundation for the current set of education justice groups like EduColor, Black Teacher Project, and Black Lives Matter at School to influence otherwise resistant folks. Most of this work was done through grassroots efforts and often against the will of administrators who oversaw the decimation of our teaching workforce diversity.

But now, not only has it gotten more popular, it’s gotten more profitable. One of our current presidential administrator’s greatest accomplishments might be that he pulled white supremacists out from hiding. The other side effect might also be that those who don’t consider themselves supremacists have gone scurrying to putting on the veneer of anti-racism. Thus, people who had rarely uttered the word “equity” were now forcing themselves into incorporating the words into the vocabulary.

The white folks with massive followings have been the most interesting case to watch. The same folks who thought they inoculated themselves from issues that people of color face suddenly found their following asking them questions about what to do. Some clumsily cobbled together words about black kids they once knew while others pulled in the people of color closest to them for cover while others never needed said cover because they sought to do the work before it became relevant.

Ostensibly, our education economy only allows for a handful of leaders at a time, and too many of us still see leadership as the person placed in front of us by the economy. Where this leadership model fails miserably is ensuring that the voices of students, parents, and educators in our most marginalized communities get equitable power through democratic and liberating solutions. Folks feel the need to signal virtues of justice in their blogs, podcast, books, and other wares where they did not care to before.  For folks who’ve done said work without remuneration, this shift breeds real contempt because we saw how quickly those gates went from a simple key to combination locks and deadbolts. We’ve seen so many of our colleagues’ lives and livelihood sacrificed for the greater fight and how that was rarely if ever acknowledged.

We see how neoliberalism allows for the wealthy to buy up space in a movement and sit themselves in that space. And the droves of followers who uncritically co-sign the malarkey.

Marian Dingle’s recent essay lays out how averse our white brethren are to that transfer of power. Too many of us want to be perceived as allies to the work without changing the structure and placement of the seats we’ve been bestowed. Even people of color with orientations centered on funders, pundits, and scholars who like the power “the way it is” can get caught up in the machinations.

It’s not too much to ask white people to shout out the folks who taught them how to speak in anti-racism. It’s not too much for all of us to shout your friends and fam in your books and presentations like the back of the liner notes in a rap / R&B CD. It’s not too much to pass on a speaking engagement or an article writing gig to a person currently in schools, especially our most marginalized schools. It’s not too much to check in on folks who, even in the fight for justice, have made time to organize with or without pay. It’s not too much to check our enthusiasm and assumptions before jumping in at the chance to flex our presumed wokeness in favor of asking good questions and prompting discussions with one another. 

It’s OK for the powerful to redistribute their power so we can all model the sort of world our students see, especially those of us who see students daily. It’s OK for us to see ourselves as the leaders we’ve been waiting for and adjust our worldview accordingly. In this work, it’s the only way our world progresses.