-Good evening, everyone.
My name is Paisley,
and I'm a house manager here at Town Hall Seattle.
On behalf of Town Hall staff, Seattle Public Library
and our friends at Elliott Bay Book Company,
it is my pleasure to welcome you to our presentation
with Jesse Hagopian, Ayva Thomas, and Wayne Au
discussing Hagopian's new book, "Teach Truth."
As we get underway,
I'd like to acknowledge that our institution stands
on the unceded traditional territory
of the Coast Salish people, particularly the Duwamish.
We thank them for our continued use
of the natural resources of their ancestral homeland.
The presentation will run about 45 --
sorry, 75 minutes, including Q&A.
When we get to the Q&A portion of the event,
you may ask your question through the mic just right here.
Or you can use your smartphone to scan the QR code
on the screen and submit your question digitally.
For our virtual friends,
we'll drop the link in the chat as well,
and you can submit a question anytime.
We'll try to get to as many questions as possible,
and you can help us by keeping your own question concise
and in the form of a question.
We have some great events coming up,
including the first of our Queering Talk series, curated
by Dr. Jen Self, founder of the UDub Q Center, on January 29th.
And on February 4th,
MSNBC's Chris Hayes will be discussing his new book,
"The Siren's Call,"
encouraging us to release our grips on our phones,
or as Hayes calls it, the little attention box.
Town Hall is adding new events to our calendar every day,
and you can always find tickets
and more information on our website at townhallseattle.org.
Town Hall's work is made possible through your support
and the support of our sponsors.
Town Hall is also a member-driven organization,
and we'd like to offer a big thank you
to all the members here with us tonight.
If you're not a member yet,
please consider joining or donating.
Your support helps keep Town Hall a place for everyone.
Lastly, if you don't already have the author's book,
you can purchase a copy from Elliott Bay Book Company
over at the Auto Bar.
Jesse Hagopian has taught in public schools
for over 20 years.
Hagopian serves on the Black Lives Matter
at Schools Steering Committee,
organizes for the Zinn Education Project,
and has founded the Ethnic Studies course at Seattle's
Garfield High School.
He's been an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine
and books such as
"Black Lives Matter at School, Teaching for Black Lives,"
and "More Than a Score."
Dr. Ayva Thomas is a P-12 education and systems leader,
and beyond her local community. She's been a speaker, panelist,
and thought partner for events
like Zinn Education Project's Teaching for Black Lives
campaign, the City of Bothell's DEI work,
and the City of Kenmore's Juneteenth celebration.
Wayne Au is a dean and professor at the University of Washington
Bothell School of Educational Studies,
and he is an editor
for the Social Justice Teaching Magazine and Rethinking Schools.
Au's most recent book is an "Asian American Racialization
and the Politics of US Education."
Please join me in welcoming Wayne Au, Dr. Ayva Thomas,
and Jesse Hagopian.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Hello and good evening. It's super bright up here.
And I can't see all of your faces,
but it's okay, so bear with me.
My name is Ayva Thomas.
I work in preschool through 12th grade education setting.
I am a younger Black woman in a senior leadership position.
And I feel like the reason that I am where I am is
because I didn't let outside voices bring me
down or suppress me.
But I've tried to listen to
and channel the voices of my ancestors,
and of my community,
and who I knew that I was from my own self-definitions.
And I think that that body of work
and that ideology is underscored in Jesse's book "Through Truth."
And so I just want to situate a little bit the state
that we're in in these current times,
and how I think Jesse's book is a testament
to engaging in resistance,
and engaging in radical imagination
and Black freedom dreaming from a Black man himself,
who positions himself as a community member and leader,
but also as an author and activist.
So in these times,
we know that there are some national things happening,
but that DEI is not our way to liberation,
and it never has been.
We have to continue to engage in justice
and actively engage anti-racist thought, ideology,
and action in practice. As Fred Hampton reminds us,
a theory without practice isn't S-H-I-T.
Jesse underscores that in his book.
We also depend on the people to see and lead us,
not on any institution, organization,
or government entity.
People have always channeled our uprisings and strength
through each other and through the organization and communities
that we've built from plantations
to the carceral state
to education systems and classrooms.
We also have the right to stay on offense.
Nipsey Hussle talks about in some of his lyrics
the fact that we don't have to play defense all the time.
We get to stay on offense,
and we get to claim who we are through affirming who we are,
and affirming and loving one another radically.
We also have a moral obligation to teach the truth.
That comes from our own internal moral compasses,
but the compasses that our ancestors channeled so long ago
but that led to the ciphers of today.
We must draw on the strength and knowledge of our ancestors
because our ciphers are here.
Our ancestors carried messages forward from the way
that they braided their hair on plantations
and mapped out escape routes,
to the ways that we've authored books and stories
within our classrooms today. We will also not shrink to fear
but stand tall in our own self-affirming definitions
of who we are because we have the right to do so.
Sorry my voice, I'm getting over a cold.
But I think Jesse does a really brilliant job
describing his ancestors and giving an ode to his ancestors
at the very beginning of his book.,
and he titles it, A Promise to My Ancestors.
And he talks about the labor that they put in,
and that he discovered over time
and is still unpacking those histories still today.
But also the visions that they left
and carved out the path for him to be where he is,
to be able to have the knowledge,
and skill set, and expertise to be able to author
and narrate such exquisite stories of our time.
The state of our schools is one
that looks different depending on what state or school
district you're in.
I'm glad that we're situated within the Pacific Northwest
and that we don't get a lot of our funding
from federal dollars,
but that a lot of it comes from state and local dollars.
But that looks different because we know
that there's class struggle and there's racism
that intersects with class struggle among lots
of other forms of oppression.
And so the state of our schools
can look different depending on what our students look like.
So there's this notion of mirrors and windows
and our students deserve representation.
And just like our white students need to see people and authors,
and people who look different than them.
Our students of color need to see individuals
who reflect their own identities, from educators,
to leaders, to their peers, and to what they see in books.
But we know that there's an attack on books
right now through book banning,
and that our students are continuing
to organize and fight back.
And so we've seen this, kind of, shift in youth
over time from them trying to take a back seat
and sit down and put their head down in their classrooms
and try to seek that education elsewhere,
to standing tall and who they are,
knowing that they get to not just ask for change
but demand change,
and to pull up seats or to even create tables
that have not yet been created.
They're doing that actively in our schools
and I just want to celebrate that truth.
We get to set ourselves free by beginning
with the truth and Jesse talks about what truth means
and what that looks like in an educational context.
But we know that banned books has a history
that stems from enslavement and pre-enslavement,
and led into the carceral system.
And has informed policy and practices
that directly impact our students sitting
in our classrooms,
and that students have always been fighting back.
We see the impact of systemic
and institutional racism play out in our classrooms,
but also in the ways that students interact with
one another and also in the ways
that educators can interact with students.
It's all connected.
We set ourselves free through education,
and one that is critical not uncritical,
and that's situated in love and care.
So drawing on bell hooks and the idea of the beloved community.
One that is representative and affirming,
but also knowing that it's one
that doesn't just stop at representation,
but that it also is unapologetic in nature and is justice driven.
And lastly we set ourselves free in action
by standing on the business of our truth,
by building community and organizing and mobilizing.
So I just want to say thank you to Jesse for his body of work
that he has mapped out.
And I think that it comes at a very timely moment
within our nation and in our community,
so big round of applause to Jesse.
[ Applause ]
I'm also pulling a high school student move
and getting my phone out to read the next bio.
I'm learning from our students every day.
So I'm going to introduce our next speaker
who is Janelle Gary and Janelle is from Seattle
and a Garfield High School alum.
Adding in that she was Jesse's former student.
Janelle graduated from Central Washington University
with a degree in psychology and Africana and Black studies.
She currently works at the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle
as a youth engagement coordinator,
working with youth on house arrest.
Her personal passions are coaching softball
and empowering the youth.
Her primary focus is to become a mental health professional
and serve the people in her community
that need representation of themselves
in the mental health field.
Please give Janelle a round of applause.
Thank you for having me today.
[ Applause ]
-All right. Hello everyone. It is bright.
Wow. Okay. Yes. My name is Janelle Gary.
Mr. Hagopian was my teacher at Garfield.
It feels like way back but not really, 2019.
I think COVID messed things up for me a little bit time wise.
But I also just want to talk about
a little bit of my testimony.
I think a lot of times
when we talk about anti-racist lens,
we really don't see the people that it affects
and I was one of those people.
If it wasn't for Mr. Hagopian
and being part of his ethnic studies class,
I wouldn't be the person that you see right in front of you.
So if you guys don't mind,
I'm just going to share just a little bit about my story
and how it relates to his book.
So again, I was fortunate enough to be part
of Mr. Hagopian's class in ethnic studies.
It was the first year
it was implemented at Garfield High School.
So I was able to learn at an early age
what it means to be influenced by someone that looks like you.
Sadly, many of my peers
who weren't able to have that privilege
be a part of that class weren't able to understand themselves
and they weren't able to discover things
until later on with vital life lessons.
The struggle for anti-racist education is essential
because it involves sharing truths and untold stories
while addressing systematic racism
within educational institutions.
Personally, receiving an education through this lens
has profoundly impacted my life
and shaped my aspirations for my future career.
I believe I am an example of positive impact
of anti-racist teachings.
Not using anti-racist approach
has a severe impact on students of color.
When they feel excluded from the curriculum,
it often reflects on them negatively.
I know through my experience being an AP in honors classes,
I would always dread having to go in there.
And the only time I actually felt
like myself is when I was in Mr. Hagopian's class.
Because of this lack of representation,
it can lead to disconnection and disengagement in school.
Oftentimes, we see our youth and we wonder
why the kids of color aren't doing well in those classes.
But it's really because they don't see themselves
and can't identify with their teachers.
And because of that, it also impacts on their self-esteem.
I know for myself growing up dealing with self-esteem
as a young, Black woman,
it's really hard trying to navigate who you are.
And being able to have those safe spaces of Mr. Hagopian,
myself and other students were able to use our voices
and create a group called New Generation.
And basically, we were able to hold an assembly within 24 hours
after Charleena Lyles was killed by Seattle police.
So teaching without an anti-racist approach limits
also critical thinking.
And I think because if we didn't have that class,
my friends and I weren't going to be able to get together
to actually critically think about
how the shooting of a black woman actually impacts us,
not only in Seattle Public Schools,
but also globally.
Oftentimes, living in Washington,
we do have the privilege,
but also we kind of have the dis-privilege of,
you know, sweeping things under the rug.
And I think oftentimes, living in such a liberal city,
we just think those things still can't happen to us,
when in reality, that they can.
So moving on to my next thing
that I would like to say about Mr. Hagopian.
In 2019,
we were able to learn about Colin Kaepernick
and how he was able to take a knee.
And because of that, I was on the softball team.
And we decided to follow footsteps
of the Garfield football team and the volleyball team.
And we did organize and take a knee.
So that is something that has been proven.
Yes, that is something that has been proven
and shows where it's like to understand your history
and what's also going on in the world.
Lastly, I just wanted to add that teaching
with an anti-racist framework
not only helps students gain a better understanding of race,
but it also fosters a deeper understanding of themselves,
regardless of their race or ethnicity,
by centering around experiences like the ones
that I talked about.
And these experiences not only will amplify their voices,
but also empowers those students to express
how they feel with past, present,
and issues that will happen in the future.
The importance of anti-racist education
is its ability to create more of an inclusive
and equitable society within and outside the classroom.
These principles are things that I learned
and that I continue to teach the youth that I work with that
are on house arrest.
So I would just like to thank Mr. Hagopian, again,
for being a light in my life
and also helping me be a confident,
Black woman that I am today.
I'm about to pull the high school move too.
Okay, I will be introducing Geo Quibuyen,
aka Prometheus Brown, formerly known as Geologic.
A Hawaii-raised, Seattle-based cultural worker,
best known as the vocalist for Blue Scholars,
and more recently as a co-founder
of Hood Famous Bakeshop with his wife, Shira.
If you guys haven't been, please go check out Hood Famous.
He is currently a fill-in DJ at the KEXP,
a solo artist with a Beatbox Music Collective,
and writing for his new settler, Brownouts,
and for an upcoming book featuring his photography.
So give a hand for Geo.
[ Applause ]
-I'm wearing tinted glasses and it is still bright.
Thank you for the intro. I'm here selfishly.
I need to be around people. These are some confusing times.
And like Ayva said, playing defense,
feels like we've been playing defense our whole lives.
And we know that defense wins championships.
At the same time, how much longer do we got to do this?
I stepped away for a little bit from the path
that I was on as a writer, as a storyteller.
Actually, that's inaccurate.
I stepped away from the familiar role that I had as a vocalist,
as a musician,
but I continued to tell the same stories through food
and through community spaces.
And I had a reckoning during the pandemic,
as a lot of people with creative energy do,
where you felt -- it felt like the time is now.
So this is something I wrote during the pandemic
with a little bit of my thoughts over the last few months.
So allow me to not introduce myself.
My name is Very Colorful.
Ride with the tribe who protect the most vulnerable.
Really live the lives we've been living in these lines,
plus the lives that we tried to get,
what the labor provided to the establishment.
Underwhelmed and highly intelligent,
but overstimulated by the present state of things.
Regardless of who president, them bombs continue to rain.
You heard the old saying,
puppets, strings, [bleep] us for game.
But we the ones who imagine something better
because we have to.
There's no alternative.
When you the subaltern who altering the passages
and patted on the head for being so articulate.
And told that this language isn't your own,
but still killing it.
Bringing it back to life with the slang, the pigeon,
they displace the indigenous, but they can't replace rhythm.
And we the ones walk around with the drums in our head,
trying to drown out the ism.
They found out what we found out when we was infants.
Sundance in Mauna Kea, Haka in Dakota.
The last people leave first, first people show up,
and I show them that I hear them and I pass the story on.
And I hope y'all do the same when I'm gone.
Because I'm an elder in training,
staying allergic to the hype here.
I am my ancestors worst [bleep] nightmare.
But trying to do right and raise up their wildest dreams.
So I'm back.
And if you need me, but can't reach me through the screen,
I came to pass the torch.
Now we take a walk with the youth,
the students and everybody after him
who's destined to surpass us.
Because it take more than one generation
for some multi-generation [bleep] to happen.
Simple math, right?
So I'm trying to listen to the youth and listen to my elders.
Listen to myself, my ancestors and descendants.
Listen to the ocean and the sky try to tell us all,
slow down even if it feels antithetical.
When everything is urgent and urgency
requires us to choose fight or flight
at every moment of our lives,
because there's real soldiers who defend their right to live.
And these other so-called soldiers taking land
and calling that [bleep] self-defense.
And the rest of us, we just want this all to end.
The vibe and feeling off
because the vibe was never meant
for us to feel disconnected from each other in this war.
Affecting us all profoundly, even if ignored.
And anger, a powerful thing, don't let that wane.
But know it can consume you like a fire uncontained.
I've been on that path, tired and praying for the rain.
And when it finally came, only a fraction of us remain.
I see the best minds of my generation
afflicted by wounds from friendly fire, self-inflicted.
Purity of ideology we measured up.
They used to infiltrate us.
Now they watch us self-destruct.
Just sharing what I witnessed, hoping maybe it'll mend.
I should be pessimistic, but I still believe we'll win.
And when I say we,
I mean the ones who care enough to remember the past
for the future yet to come.
We remember the past for the future yet to come.
And those who teach the truth
will be the ones who get it done.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Before I go, I just want to say the path
that I came up through -- I didn't put it in my bio,
but I also came up through -- I'm a UDub ethnic studies major.
And that is the path
that brought me to community art spaces, to open mics.
That sent me on the path
that eventually went through the whole music thing,
and then got me on this stage. And along that journey,
I marched alongside Jesse before he wasn't even a teacher.
I get to -- I'm one of the few people that get to say that.
So I just want to say thank you and it's an honor to be here.
-Yeah.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Incredible way to launch this event.
The hours I spent writing this book just paid off.
Appreciate you. Good evening, everybody.
-Good evening. -Let me first just say, wow,
seeing all of you here tonight gathered for the first time
to launch this book,
"Teach Truth" is an absolute joy.
It's a real honor, and I want to thank town hall.
I want to thank the Seattle Public Library
that helped sponsor this and Haymarket Books
that published the book.
And I want to say that this book isn't just mine.
I think it belongs to the movement.
It belongs to educators,
and students, and parents, and caregivers,
and organizers, and activists, and artists,
and truth tellers
who inspire me every day with their defense
of honest education and their struggles for liberation.
And tonight I'm especially grateful for the folks
who started this program.
Thank you so much, Ayva and Janelle and Geo.
And we'll be inviting Wayne up in a --
after I do some readings to have further conversation.
And I couldn't do any of this work
without their brilliance and courage.
And I've learned so much from all of them.
And I also just want to thank my family, my parents,
and my son, Miles, who's here and my wife, Sarah,
who I write in the acknowledgments.
You are the harvest moon who is the source of light and darkness
with the power to move oceans.
I'm profoundly grateful for your loving partnership
and our intellectual engagement,
without which this book would not have been possible.
So thank you.
I began writing this book in 2021
when the attack on anti-racist education
was beginning to boil over.
And as I began writing the book, within a couple of weeks,
my dad, Gerald Lenoir,
made a stunning discovery that changed my life forever,
and our families.
He found out which plantation our family had been enslaved on
in Morgantown, Mississippi, and in Lawrence County, Mississippi.
And it gave context to me to the lives of my great,
great grandfather, Thomas Lenoir, and his wife,
Laura Lenoir, who was born in 1844
and died the year my dad was born in 1948.
Laura Lenoir birthed 15 children,
including my great grandfather, York Alonzo Lenoir,
who became a teacher and a principal.
And if I can get it to -- there you go, that's --
Laura Lenoir was enslaved there in Morgantown, Mississippi.
And after discovering the location of the plantation,
I knew I had to get down there and feel that land
that my family had been bound to.
And so we immediately bought plane tickets to go down.
And then the Delta variant of COVID surged
and we had to cancel our flight.
And then we bought another ticket,
but my dad had a stroke and we had to cancel it again.
Then we were about to go again and I got COVID,
which turned into a particularly debilitating long COVID.
And my brother also wanted to go,
but he has a really bad fear of flying
and wasn't sure if he was going to make it.
But eventually, in June of 2023,
we finally just couldn't wait any longer.
And despite all of us
in different states of not being very healthy, we just had to go.
And we found the land.
We got to go on the private land.
There's no sign.
Like, you might've -- if you've been to Germany,
I hear there's signs that mark
where all the concentration camps
where people were murdered
and horrific crimes were perpetrated.
There's no sign marking.
You just have to spend your life finding out where it is.
And we were able to get there.
And the man who owned the land allowed us on his land
and showed us where the gravesite was,
where our ancestors buried each other.
And I count these moments among the most precious of my life.
We held a ceremony for my ancestors there at the gravesite
where one headstone was still there.
And -- -- I read a letter to my ancestors
that is the preface to my book.
And I want to read that letter to you all now.
I said, beloved ancestors,
many obstacles have been placed in the way of us
returning to the land where you were enslaved,
abused, and forced to work
to enrich the white Lenoir enslavers.
The pandemic, a stroke,
a fear of flying, long COVID delayed our journey here.
Before that,
the education system withheld any knowledge of
where you came from,
the cruelty you endured or the creativity
and beautiful resistance you contributed to the world.
The system of white supremacy used many tactics to deceive us
and prevent our family from making this pilgrimage to
where you were held captive and denied manumission.
Despite many obstacles and the plots to hide this place from us
and deny us knowledge of this land and your existence here,
we have found it.
Your family has returned to claim you.
We have returned to the forced enslaved labor camp
that was politely referred to as the Lenoir plantation.
We have returned to the place
where you no doubt spent endless hours picking cotton and tobacco
with the promise of the lash if you slowed down or refused.
We have returned to the site of unspeakable horrors.
But we have also returned to the place
where you all dared to live.
A place where you all had the incredible courage to love,
despite knowing that falling in love
could inflict a terrible pain when your beloved was sold away
or worked to death. We are here.
We are at the very place where you found ways
to guard your humanity from those
who thought it was possible to steal.
We are here where you sang together,
granted forgiveness to a friend who hurt your feelings,
dressed the wounds of those who were injured
and held those in need of comfort.
We are here to experience a truth deeper than any
that can be understood intellectually.
We are here to make a promise to you,
to this land and to each other.
You will not be forgotten. It doesn't matter
if they pass laws to make it illegal to speak of you,
to teach about you,
or to learn about you, because those laws don't govern us.
Only truth and love govern us.
And so we will pass on the knowledge of this land
and your existence here to our posterity
and to all who we encounter.
We send to you our deepest gratitude
for gifting us the will to survive
and the spirit of resistance
that you passed to us through your blood
and through your stories.
With eternal love, Jesse, Jemana and Gerald.
After reading that letter to my ancestors,
we knelt on the ground to be closer to our ancestors
who lay beneath,
and I really felt their love just washing over us.
And this book is really my promise.
It is my confirmation of the promise
that I made to my ancestors
that their story would not be forgotten.
And I see teaching the truth about my ancestors
as both an act of remembrance
and an act of rebellion against a system
that would rather we all forget what happened.
So part one of my book is titled disremembering,
where I discuss the concepts of the violence
of organized forgetting.
That concept that Henry Giroux developed,
and the related concept of Boaventura de Sousa Santos
called epistemicide, the annihilation of ways of knowing.
And also a related concept
I developed in the book called educational arson,
where I trace the history of book burning, school burning,
and which has led to the burning of people as well.
Part 2 of the book is titled remembering,
and it looks at the great struggle that is rising up
called the teach truth movement.
And I delve into a concept
I developed in the book called the radical healing
of organized remembering,
which I'll try to get to before the end of the evening.
So I want to read a couple selections from both parts
of the book tonight.
And you know, it's incredible what's happening
in the country today.
I call the efforts to ban books
and ban honest history truth crime laws,
because they criminalize educators
who teach honestly about history.
And astoundingly,
almost half of all public school students
today in the United States go to a school
where their teacher is mandated to lie to them about US history,
about race, about gender, about sexuality.
It's illegal to teach the truth to almost half
of all students in the US.
Whether that's a statewide ban, or a citywide ban,
or a district ban.
And the fear of retribution for teaching the truth
has created a chilling effect that's so cold
that a recent study revealed
that two out of every three teachers
in the United States self-censor, right?
They report self-censoring discussions on race,
gender, identity, and sexuality in their classrooms.
And the laws have become so over the top,
so draconian, so absurd that really only
"The Onion" can properly capture the moment we're in.
Teacher Fired For Breaking State's Critical Race
Theory Law After Telling Students She's Black.
"The Needling" also nailed it.
Florida Bans the letters LGBTQ from the Alphabet.
Yes, as absurd as this is, the reality is more absurd.
In Florida, they banned the dictionary because after all,
the word sex is in there.
Racism is in there.
There is literally a school district
that banned the dictionary.
The reality is far more absurd.
I want to read to you from my passage
where I describe what I call truth crime.
We are bearing witness to an era
in which teachers who allow students to learn
about racial disparities stemming from the legacy
of slavery and segregation
can be charged with what I call a truth crime.
A truth crime is any act of honest pedagogy
in a jurisdiction where truthful teaching has been outlawed.
A truth crime is enforced disremembering.
A truth crime law then is one
that makes lying to children obligatory
and effectively renders honest educators as truth criminals.
The goal for the enforcers of truth crime in the end,
is to make committing a truth crime literally impossible.
Because there will be no one left
who learned the honest history,
and therefore no one left to teach it.
This requires rewriting the past
so that it appears to justify the dramatic inequality
that exists today.
So that it impedes the ability of those
who have learned the revisionist history
to imagine a future without oppression.
That's their goal.
And I want to give you a sense of what these
truth crime laws are about.
So I'll read from another section here.
Truth crime laws have been used to ban thousands of books
in districts around the country.
A great deal of them written by Black, brown,
or LGBTQ authors.
One school in Florida mindful of truth crime laws and book
banning efforts in the state went so far
as to send home a permission slip with students
to ask for their parents' consent to participate
and listen to a book written by an African American.
Yes, you read that right.
Students had to get permission
to read a book by a Black author,
and this didn't happen in 1824, in 1924, but in 2024.
Laws have been written to threaten librarians
with extensive jail time for distributing books
that provide accurate information
about gender and sexuality.
And police have been interrogating school librarians
about their book collections as I explain in Chapter 2.
The hysteria has gotten so bad in the last couple years
that school board members have even threatened to burn books.
And there's been at least one large public book burning
that's occurred in the country
since these truth crime laws were passed,
to give you a sense of just how off the hinge
the attack has gotten.
And the same billionaires and politicians
attacking black education and trans students
are also attacking any educator
who allows their students to consider the genocide
that's occurring in Gaza,
and to look at the situation
from the perspective of Palestinians.
So I want to read to you again something
that came out of Florida.
In the context of Governor Ron DeSantis's Stop Woke Act,
a school in Indian River County,
Florida banned the book
"Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation,"
a 2019 retelling of the diary of Anne Frank wrote --
the diary Anne Frank wrote while hiding out for two years
with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
In addition,
DeSantis directed
his independent Department of Education
to ban two textbooks about the Holocaust.
At the same time,
DeSantis's policies have bolstered anti-Semitism.
The governor is one of the most zealous defenders
of Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
For example,
he has called for banning Palestinian refugees
from entering the United States,
and boasted that he personally sent weapons and ammunition
to Israel from the state of Florida
to aid the destruction of Gaza.
Additionally, despite his outrage over cancel culture,
DeSantis banned the Students for Justice
in Palestine on Florida's campuses.
And this aligns with the larger trend
where the right suppresses educational initiatives
that aim to honestly confront anti-Semitism
while unequivocally endorsing Israel's attack on Palestinians.
This support for Israel
isn't rooted in genuine concern for the Jewish community,
but rather it serves to bolster the Israeli state
as a strategic ally to the United States
in the oil-rich Middle East.
Now -- -- I've talked a lot about Florida,
but let's be clear,
truth crime policies are not just in Florida.
They're not just in the South.
They're not just in red states.
They're all across this country.
In California, a state that's never -- well,
I mean, we've seen such wild things, it's hard to say never.
But I don't think they're going to pass a statewide ban
on Black history in California.
And yet 110,000 students in California go to schools
where the same laws that were passed in Florida
were passed in their school district, right?
In Washington state,
we have three school districts that have passed the same laws
that Florida has, that ban an honest telling of US history.
We have -- in this book,
I detail one educator from this area.
I don't know if Crystal Vispress is with us tonight.
Is Crystal here?
-I'm here.
-Hey, Crystal. Let's connect afterwards.
Your story's in here. And, you know,
Crystal was teaching in a school in Sammamish, Washington.
And I wrote about what happened to her
after she taught the truth about the January 6th attacks
and that they were connected to white supremacy.
And so this is in our backyard.
Let's hear what happened.
The following October,
Crystal learned from her school administrators
that a student had made a secret recording of that lesson
without her consent. The video,
along with complaints about her Black Lives Matter flag
in the classroom,
was sent to a particularly bellicose local
right-wing radio host.
At this point, Crystal went
from lamenting the difficulty of teaching the truth
about race to her students to fearing for her physical safety,
emotional well-being, and career.
"It hit me then that I'm going to be doxed on social media.
What do I need to tell my parents?
I was scared for my life."
Even though the vast majority of her students loved
and supported her,
Crystal decided she had to take a leave of absence,
and make preparations for when the radio host turned his mob
of uncritical race theorists on her.
This is what's happening in school districts
all across the country, even in blue states.
And I call them uncritical race theorists.
These are the people
that are trying to pass the truth crime laws.
And I believe the concept of uncritical race theory
is vital to understanding race, the history of race,
and also the current political era we're in.
I want to explain to you what I mean by uncritical.
We've heard a lot about critical race theory.
I want to explain what I mean by uncritical race theory.
In the cacophony of today's political discourse,
debates about CRT are ubiquitous.
But what is not discussed
and what I believe must be studied
is uncritical race theory.
Uncritical race theory is the term
I'm developing here to define systems of belief
that unquestionably subscribe to prevailing views on race
that reinforce existing racial power relations.
Uncritical race theory denies that racism exists at all.
Or it maintains
that racism primarily victimizes white people.
Or rejects any systemic
or institutional analysis in favor
of an interpersonal explanation
that understands racism as only sporadic,
or merely the product of individual bias.
Uncritical race theorists position themselves as neutral,
as objective, as unencumbered by ideology or a theory of race.
When in fact they have a highly developed theory of race,
even if they are unaware of its origins
or the full dimensions of their theory.
To be clear,
uncritical race theorists would never refer to themselves
as such because it would divulge that their opposition to CRT
and every other anti-racist framework is not anchored
by research or historical inquiry,
but rather is the result of unsubstantiated
and unmoored theories
that sink under the most cursory examinations.
When educators analyze race in their classroom,
uncritical race theorists accuse them
of politicizing the classroom.
A claim that only approaches reason if you believe
that teaching children
that the uncritical acceptance
of the current racist structures and institutions
is not political.
Describing people who accept status quo beliefs about race
as uncritical race theorists I believe is important
because it helps us underscore
that the people opposing anti-racist education
aren't actually rejecting theory about race altogether.
They are merely trading one theory for another
and trying to hide their theory of race behind a smoke screen.
They have a highly developed theory of race,
but they would prefer the underpinnings and origins
of that theory go unexamined.
Uncritical race theorists demand an anodyne telling of history
where the United States was delivered by the stork.
And they would rather not look any farther into
how the country was made,
lest it offend delicate sensibilities.
They tell themselves that America doesn't fornicate,
doesn't cuss, or brawl, or drink, or abuse,
or exploit, or lie, or cheat, or steal.
But as James Baldwin reminded us,
"People who shut their eyes to reality
simply invite their own destruction.
And anyone who insists on remaining in a state
of innocence long after that innocence is dead,
turns himself into a monster."
It is important to understand
that uncritical race theory is used
by liberals and conservatives
who both often advance narratives
of colorblindness or post-racialism
in their meager attempt to explain
how race functions in society. In this way,
the term is useful for pointing out the overlap between liberal
and conservative ideas.
That's the disremembering,
but I want us to spend a little bit of time
understanding that there is an incredible movement
that is surging across this country.
And it can be hard to see
because the mainstream media does not benefit
from interviewing teachers who are fighting back.
Interviewing students who are organizing rallies.
Interviewing educators
who are clandestinely teaching the truth
despite the law around the country.
And so in the second half of the book,
I tell the stories of many that I interviewed
across this country. And I believe that if all of you
had had the opportunity to spend the hours
I did interviewing these freedom fighters all across the country,
you would have much higher spirits right now.
Because these are definitely tough times,
and we don't see the resistance very often
because they don't want us to see it.
And yet, there are thousands of students, parents,
and educators who are combating truth crime
and fighting back to make spaces for the coming rebellion
that is definitely going to happen.
So -- --
yeah, I want to give a shout out to the Seattle Public Library
that joined this struggle.
They have the Books Unbanned campaign.
Their Books Unbanned campaign allows teens
and young adults aged 13 to 26 living anywhere in the US
to access the entire catalog of books and audiobooks,
and e-books.
An important contribution to the struggle
that was first started by the Brooklyn Public Library.
And this year we're organizing the fifth
annual Teach Truth National Day of Action,
and everybody is encouraged to join us.
We had an --
we've been having an incredible movement across this country.
Those are some of the many cities
that participated last year.
And I want you to hear from some
of these inspiring victories and struggles.
So let's take a look at one of my favorite stories.
There's a teacher named Amy Donofrio
in Florida who was fired.
She was the first teacher probably in the country
fired with one of these truth crime laws.
She taught at Robert E. Lee High School.
Okay?
Here we have a school named after a homicidal maniac,
a white supremacist who killed hundreds of thousands of people
in order to impose slavery on this country, right?
And you have a school that's majority Black
who have to go and endure that humiliation and shame
of going to a school named after somebody
who wanted to murder you.
And this teacher had the audacity to put a flag
up in a room that said Black Lives Matter,
to make sure her students knew
that they mattered in her classroom,
even if the school didn't care about them.
And for that, she was fired. Publicly.
They went -- the governor and the superintendent
went on the airwaves,
and she learned about her firing through the media,
and she had to go to teacher jail for a year.
They call it teacher jail.
It's a little warehouse with no windows,
and you go and sit there every day while you're on probation.
She endured that humiliation just because she believed
that Black students' lives had value.
But one of the most inspiring wins for
the teach truth moment happened in Florida in June of 2024.
As detailed in Chapter 3,
Governor DeSantis intended to use Amy Donofrio as an example
to show, as he put it,
that "Florida is where woke goes to die."
By targeting her for the Black Lives
Matter flag in her classroom.
While the state attempted to revoke her teaching license,
grassroots organizing,
and Donofrio's fighting spirit
successfully helped convince a judge
to allow her to continue teaching in Florida.
Donofrio hopes
that her experience inspires other teachers.
"Affirming Black students should never put a teacher's license
at risk," she said.
"In Florida, 64% of public school students are of color,
and I hope this can show that teachers not only
will fight for our right
to uphold our professional responsibilities to them,
but we will win."
I want to conclude by talking to you
all about the need for the struggle
for what I call the radical healing
of organized remembering. And to me,
that is the alternative to the curricular violence
that so many of our BIPOC students are subjected to.
I propose we care for those harmed by the violence
of organized forgetting with what I will call
the radical healing of organized remembering, RHOR.
The radical healing of organized remembering
identifies collective efforts in education,
but also in social movements
to uncover purposefully concealed historical lessons
that are vital to recovering from historical trauma,
and building healthy struggles for justice.
Trauma is not only inflicted by physical acts of violence,
but also by the erasure and distortion of historical truths.
When BIPOC youth are denied lessons about their culture
and their history,
it negatively impacts their self-esteem,
their understanding of their own agency in the world,
and their ability to envision
how to help create a more just society.
The RHOR emphasizes the importance of reviving knowledge
that has been incapacitated by epistemicidal attacks
through facilitating collaborative efforts
between schools, social movements,
and communities to learn historical truths
that have been obscured or denied.
And I go on to talk about the fact
that we need honest educators and truth teachers
who can implement this framework of the radical healing
of organized remembering.
And there's a lot to say about what I mean by a truth teacher.
So I will cut this short,
but I want to just give you a short understanding of it.
Honest educators are time travelers.
They possess the ability to bend the space-time continuum
and transport their students to the past.
Janelle remembers my time machine
in the classroom probably, right?
To transport their students to the past,
to examine an era before race was invented,
investigate the origins of where structural racism and oppression
came from, and to visit people
who helped build social movements
to combat these inequalities.
But they don't get stuck in the past.
They are also able to travel to the future
to help students imagine a world
where the government doesn't spend more to bomb people,
than to house them.
And a society that doesn't lock human beings away in cages.
Truth teaching isn't only an intellectual endeavor,
but it's also an emotional one.
Honest educators are guided by love.
"Commitment to truth-telling lays the groundwork
for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love,"
writes Bell Hooks.
Truth teacher, Cornel West has observed,
"Justice is what love looks like in public."
I would add that truth teaching is what love looks like
in the public schools.
Martin Luther King Jr. centered love in the building
of social movements when he imparted,
"Our goal is to create a beloved community," right?
And that's still our goal today.
So I'll end with these words from the conclusion of my book,
and then we'll bring Wayne up and do some Q&A.
There have been many names given to the destination
of those seeking relief from racism and oppression.
The poet Phillis Wheatley,
who had been enslaved and kidnapped from West Africa
before gaining her freedom
and becoming the first African-American author
to publish a book of poetry,
she called the destination deliverance.
"In every human breast,
God has implanted a principle which we call love of freedom.
It is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance."
The great gospel soul band, the Staple Singers,
simply called the destination a place in their hit single,
"I'll Take You There."
And they told us that this place -- in this place,
no one would be smiling at us while they lied to our face.
Martin Luther King called the destination
the beloved community.
The Black Panther Party called the destination socialism.
As member Assata Shakur put it,
"Capitalism meant that the rich businessmen owned the wealth,
while socialism meant that the people who made
the wealth owned it.
Stevie Wonder called the definition higher ground.
And he invited us, in his sonically soaring refrain,
to keep on going until we reach it.
This higher ground is not an isthmus
with only room for a few.
There is room for everyone, and you're all invited there.
Thank you.
You want to grab my water, Wayne?
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
So appreciate you all being here.
Really excited to continue dialoguing with Wayne.
We're going to grab some seats here,
and I'm going to catch my breath.
All right.
Should I be here? -Yeah, yeah.
-We good? All right. Yay.
-All right. Thank you, Jesse. Good evening, everyone.
For the record, I'm not pulling a high school student.
This is the official town hall mini pad.
I mean, iPad mini, so -- Jesse,
it was wonderful to get to watch you to read,
think about the stuff.
I found myself reflecting a lot on our own history, right?
I was like, man, we've been friends almost 15 years.
We've been friends, and we've organized together,
and written together, and watched our kids grow up,
and like, all this stuff.
And it was just beautiful.
Like this book, I feel like, is in a way like,
the culmination of a lot of who you are.
Like, in a particular kind of way around the organizing,
and the racial politics, and everything.
And so I just want to thank you for the gift that this book is,
and just the beauty -- like just how beautiful it is,
I think, both for you, for the world,
and the timeliness, right?
So -- -I wish it wasn't so timely.
-Right?
-Honestly, I wouldn't mind selling a few less books
if we didn't have a maniac getting ready
to push truth crime all over the country, but --
-I know, yeah. We'll get to that.
All right.
But so, just for the audience, what we're going to do is like,
I have a couple few questions I want to ask Jesse,
and then we want to open it up to the audience.
And then that's what the iPad here is for too,
as well, to take some questions from online, right?
So again, Jesse, I was just thinking about the activism,
and you know, who you are as a teacher and educator.
And you were talking a lot about -- you talked some about like,
you know, like, you know, even here in, you know,
in the Puget Sound region, right?
Folks getting attacked and censored.
I know you've been attacked, and shoot,
I mean, you know I went to give a talk in California,
and the school district canceled me the night
before I was going to talk, right?
So like, in all these spaces, it kind of -- you know,
it's not just down South, it's like,
you know, it's -- these spaces are here too.
And so, my question for you is,
you know, you have a lot of like,
really exceptional stories of resistance in the book, right?
These amazing educators who have really fought back under really,
really difficult conditions.
But I wonder what you would say to like --
you know, we know a lot of teachers who are anti-racist,
and they really want to do this work.
But they are scared right now,
because it's tough.
And so, like, what would you say to those folks
to help them find the bravery,
to help them see that the risk is worth it,
and to help them -- like, help them into the kind of teaching
that you call for in your book?
-Yeah, no, that's such a good question, Wayne, and thank --
man, I just appreciate you reflecting on the culmination
of so much work we've done together that's in this book.
So thank you for everything
you've taught me for so many years.
And it's just so great to be a comrade
with you in the struggle.
Yeah, the risk is real.
So I don't want to like, just glorify truth teaching.
And like, you know, these sort of honest education
can get you in real trouble, right?
The story is filled with teachers
who have been fired for doing this work,
and teachers are in different situations
financially with their families,
and have to weigh different risks they can take or not take.
But I think that the best way
to follow through on your convictions
and continue to teach the truth,
regardless of what laws are being passed
or what harassment is happening, is to really study the history.
Connecting with the history has helped me so much.
People haven't really learned about Septima Clark.
And if most educators had,
I think they would have a whole different view on the work
that they do, right?
And Septima Clark was a Black woman in South Carolina
who dedicated --
was a lifelong educator, and was called by Martin Luther King,
the mother of the civil rights movement.
And she was fired from her job in South Carolina
because she refused to quit the NAACP
and refused to give up her civil rights activism.
She didn't only lose her job, she lost her entire pension.
So after 30 years of teaching, she now had nothing, right?
She gave up everything for the struggle.
And then she went on,
she got hired at the Highlander Center
and went on to create the citizenship schools
and consult with SNCC on the freedom schools.
And, you know, if you have that perspective,
that like, you are part of this unbroken chain
of the Black freedom struggle,
and social justice education from that time till today,
and part of this struggle,
then these sacrifices are part of building to something bigger.
And if you don't have that perspective,
it's really hard to be part of that.
And that's why they're banning this history, right?
That's why so many teachers haven't learned this history,
because it would empower them to continue the fight to know that,
yes, Septima Clark was fired,
and she helped to lead a revolution in the South
that overturned Jim Crow segregation.
-Right on, thank you.
And so I take from that just like,
the idea that for teachers to really see themselves
not as alone and not isolated, right?
But really as part of these movements
and have these actually strong connections
across history and time
that they represent these other things
and they can take strength, right, in being part of that.
-It's like -- yeah, the struggle has to be collective,
but I want us to think about also linking arms with people
in the past, right?
And like that, yes, they're not there,
but I mean, they, yeah, give me a lot of inspiration.
And we have to link arms with people right here.
And that's where the radical healing of organized remembering
-- to me, that word organized is about the collective part.
It's not just closing your door
and teaching the truth in isolation,
but it's about how you build networks in your school,
in your school district, in your community.
That's when you can stand up to these laws,
because if you're by yourself, you're an easy target, right?
But the African proverb, sticks in a bundle are hard to break.
-Yeah, right on, right?
You find you're not alone in real time is critical,
right, in community. Related to that,
the other question I wanted to pose to you was,
you know, you
and I have talked a lot about the need
for teaching solidarity.
Like, we're not going to get this work -- like,
the work we got to get done, right?
The massive social change that we need
is not going to get done
if we do it in isolation from each other, right?
We have to be teaching around solidarity.
And I think a lot about
how the uncritical race theorists talk about this
is all divisive, right?
If you teach this, is going to be divisive.
And so I would love to -- like, could you talk about like,
the role that you see around teaching for solidarity?
Sort of, in the context of what you talk about
around teaching the truth in your book?
-Yeah, yeah, thank you for that question.
Absolutely.
Solidarity is the only way to win, right?
We're up against an oligarchy in this country.
We saw the three richest people in the world
sitting behind Donald Trump on the inauguration day.
And they have more money than any of us can imagine,
and we'll never outspend them.
And that's not our advantage.
Our advantage is that those are three people.
Let's go get them, y'all.
They don't stand a chance if the 99% links arms.
We could spit and they would drown, right?
Like, we got this.
But the problem is we're divided by race, gender,
sexuality, nationality.
They use every way they can to divide us, right?
That's what all these forms of oppression are about,
to divide our solidarity so we're not working together
to take back the that we all produce.
And -- --
so education can play a huge role
in cutting through racist ideas that divide us,
sexist ideas that divide us,
transphobic ideas that divide us.
Education can help us cut through those ideas
to build real solidarity.
And, you know, the uncritical race theorists say
that our classrooms are all about shaming white kids, right?
It's doom and gloom every day in our classrooms,
and we're just there shaming white kids day after day.
You know what? That's not their real fear.
That's what they tell you on television.
But their real fear is that we're empowering white kids.
See?
Because the white kids in my class learned about John Brown.
The white kids in my class
learned about the Grimké sisters in the abolitionist movement.
They learned about Anne Braden in the civil rights movement.
They learned about Howard Zinn, right?
And they learned about anti-racist white people
that want to link arms in a great uprising
to transform this country.
And that's what they're really scared about.
That we're going to teach them about the possibility
of building a real, multiracial democracy in this country.
-Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that relative
to Viet Nguyen's concept of expansive solidarity,
where he's arguing around --
where he's making an argument
about Asian Americans needing to understand
that Palestine is part of Asia, right?
And what does that mean?
How do we think about that? So I appreciate that.
-Right on.
-So my last question for you is,
the book is really about K-12 education, right?
And these days, I'm working in higher education
as a professor and administrator,
and doing that work with future teachers.
But so like, how do you see -- like, how do you translate this?
How do you think about higher education relative to the work
that you're asking for in your book?
-Yeah, I mean,
the truth crime laws started rolling out in 2021,
in the last months of Trump's presidency.
And at that point, they were focused on K-12 education.
And again, there was sort of, oh, okay,
well, that's happening there.
I guess if it's not on us, then it's fine, you know?
And there was not enough solidarity
between K-12 and higher ed.
But of course, if they come for one,
they're going to come for the rest, right?
And now higher ed has become one of the main targets
of uncritical race theorists all over the country.
And it cracks me up because it really just gives lie
to everything they started this attack with.
They said that we were indoctrinating kids
who were defenseless against our political indoctrination, right?
But then what happens when you get to adults
who are in college,
who get to choose which classes they want to take?
Is it still indoctrination
when they decide they want to learn about Black history
and they sign up for that class? Which is it?
I mean, the hypocrisy of these people is incredible, right?
You know, they bemoan cancel culture over and over again.
And without even blushing,
they're the first ones to cancel any book
that they disagree with,
any teacher that teaches something
that makes them uncomfortable. But yes,
they are rolling out the attack first on DEI offices
in every college campus.
And as Ayva pointed out,
DEI is not going to liberate us all, right?
It can begin conversations. And there are places
where there are radical DEI leaders
who use the position to do something much deeper
than just investigating inequality
and endlessly talking about it.
But actually trying to build real multi-racial struggle.
But if we just let them take those DEI programs,
then we know that that's not
where they're going to stop, right?
They're going to keep going.
And so the movement is defending those,
even as we know it's going to take a lot more than that.
And there's incredible examples like in Florida,
of the new college
where they brought in Christopher Rufo
to help oversee this incredible college in Florida,
which was a big problem.
And you know, everybody,
when they think of truth crime laws,
you think Florida or red states, right?
But Christopher Rufo ran for Seattle City Council, right?
And he lives in Gig Harbor.
Is he here tonight? Christopher, did you make it?
-I'm right here. -Yeah, good.
He didn't make it?
Oh, I would have loved to just invite him up here
and have a little chat. But too bad.
But Christopher Rufo was the one that launched the truth --
he launched the attack on critical race theory, right?
He was the one who got on Fox News
and challenged Trump in 2021
to eradicate critical race theory from the country.
And then he was invited to the White House the next day,
and this is where we're at.
And now he's sitting on the board of New College
and they fired all
the innovative education teachers there.
And their aim is what they did at New College
to now spread throughout the country.
And that's what they'll do unless we rise up.
Unless we fight back.
Unless you all join me on June 7th
for Teach Truth National Day of Action.
We are headed to that kind of dystopia
that you shuddered at in 1984.
But there's another possibility.
And that depends on what decisions we all make
and if we're ready to link arms and fight back.
-Yeah, right on.
All right. With that, I want to give some space for --
if there's folks in the audience who want to ask a question,
there is one here on my magical town hall iPad.
But I want to create space here for folks in the room.
There's a mic up here.
And as the house manager said,
you know, make sure to try and focus on asking a question,
not doing a whole thing.
So yeah, yeah, come on. Come on up.
-Hey, how are you doing? -How you doing?
-I'm good, thanks. -Right on.
-Props to all that you do. -Thank you.
-A reporter or interviewer
once asked Malcolm X what his alma mater was.
He said books.
-Yeah.
-I was wondering, like, do you think, A, we,
especially as Americans,
put too much of a premium on education and equality,
whether we have a bachelor's, or master's, or PhD.
from Harvard or Yale or whatever?
And then the other part of my question is,
if you weren't in a formal school setting,
would you still consider yourself an educator?
-Great questions.
First off, since I don't have a PhD.,
definitely doesn't mean nothing. No.
-What are you saying about me, Jesse?
-Right. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah,
I think that yeah, Malcolm X didn't have a PhD.
and he knew a thing or two. So there can --
we can use these letters to substitute for real knowledge.
And we can also find radical professors like Wayne
and study with them and learn and learn a lot.
Right?
So we have to figure out how to use those spaces
when and where we can, but not pray to them.
Not bow down to that higher education system either.
You know, I've taught for 20 years in --
I started in elementary school in Washington, DC,
and then I came back here and taught middle school
before I was laid off with the Great Recession.
The banks got bailed out
and I lost my job the year my son was born.
And that was scary.
And then I got rehired at Garfield High School
and I taught for a decade there.
But since getting long COVID,
I haven't been able to be back in the classroom yet.
So I'm not in the classroom,
but I'm working
with the Zen Education Project to do training.
My job is, I get to meet with teachers all over the country,
mostly virtually, who are in study groups
around the book "Teaching for Black Lives" that Wayne,
and Diane, and I co-edited.
And so, I mean, it's incredible to meet with teachers in Florida
where it's illegal to teach the truth.
Where it's a felony,
a five-year jail sentence
if you get caught with the wrong book in your classroom.
Right?
And yet they're meeting every week,
reading "Teaching for Black Lives"
and practicing what Jarvis Givens calls fugitive pedagogy.
-Thank you. -Right on.
-Children, nine, 10, 11 years old,
want explanations of what certain phrases mean.
If you had a 10-year-old child
and they wanted a short explanation
of critical race theory, what is it exactly?
How do you put that into words?
-Yeah. Yeah. So I have a section in the book
that explains critical race theory,
because what's hilarious to me
about the discussion around critical race theory
is that those attacking teachers for teaching
critical race theory, don't know what it is.
And the teachers
who are being attacked for teaching critical race theory
never heard of it
before the Republican Party started using it as a club.
Right? Very few, I should say.
There were a couple of educators I've worked with,
probably two or three,
maybe, in like a K-12 setting
who had actually studied critical race theory.
And I learned something from them.
The thing is, social justice educators often --
even though they weren't trained in critical race theory,
which is, you know,
a graduate level study of how race is embedded in the law.
Right?
Even when the law sometimes appears to be race neutral,
it's often still racist.
So you have the example of the disparity of crack and cocaine.
Right?
It didn't say we are going to give Black people --
the law does not state, Black people get more jail time.
Right? They don't have to use racial language.
They can just have a higher sentencing for powder cocaine
than they do for crack
and achieve the same goal of a racist law.
Right?
That's one explanation of how critical race theory plays out.
And social justice educators may not have been trained
in critical race theory,
but often there's so much overlap in ideology of people
who want to get free.
So you know,
critical race theory states that race is a social construction.
That it's not a biological reality.
That's what scientists have told us for a long time now.
That's a core tenet of critical race theory.
So those -- there's several core tenets of critical race theory
that any advancements against structural racism
lead to a backlash.
We're seeing that with the 2020 uprising leading
to this backlash.
And I invite you to read more about it
and bring it to your community.
-Well, bringing legality
and the law mixed in with all of this,
is what really scares people,
because they don't even know what the laws are.
So if you match up those people with people
who are aware of what's going on,
there can be a real struggle.
But if we educate kids,
that sort of won't be nearly as bad as it might be.
-Agreed. -No doubt. Thank you.
-Thank you so much.
Yeah, that's -- There's another one up there.
I got I got a couple here on my screen, too.
So we'll go ahead and we'll --
-Hi, I'm going to break the rule --
-Hey!
-I'm not...
-It's Chris. -...ask a question.
I'm going to say my name's Chris Posaricky.
I've taught many years and now retired.
And I just want to thank the day that I met Jesse and his family.
And I can't talk about how much I've learned,
but -- and I don't think I try to do what I learned
from not just you,
but that whole community.
I just want to say thank you.
-Aw, Chris. It's so good to see you.
-And I'm so glad you're here.
And I'm so glad you wrote this book.
-I can't wait to hear what you think of it.
-I love you. -Love you, too, Chris.
Thank you so much.
Chris taught at the greatest preschool in the world,
Central Branch Preschool.
My kids beloved educator.
Give it up for Chris and all the awesome preschool educators.
-We should take a couple from the screen maybe here.
Do you want to answer a question about the election?
-Let's do it. Let's do it.
-Okay. Okay, so -- -Let's go there.
-Okay, we're going to go there.
So someone posted, sort of, a two-parter.
But it's how do you feel about white liberals blaming
and shaming uncommitted voters
for Kamala Harris losing the election?
And their follow up is, how do you -- like, I don't --
I mean, it depends on how much trouble you want to get.
And then who do you hold accountable
for the election loss?
So yeah.
-Yeah. You want to do elections?
It's there for you. Let's go there.
Yeah. I mean, here you --
when you run a campaign on --
you know, you say you stand for justice
and then you're sending billions of dollars
to go bomb schools and hospitals.
And then you want to go blame uncommitted voters
who were like, I'm against bombing schools and hospitals.
No, that's whack. That's just -- I mean,
you can do that when you get funding from billionaires.
You can do that kind of thing.
But it's laughable.
It's not a -- it's a political strategy to lose.
Right?
In fact,
a study just came out that the largest percentage of people
who changed their vote
and said they weren't going to vote for Kamala were folks
who were concerned about Gaza. Right?
And it would have been easy to get those votes.
You just had to stop bombing schools
and you would have won the election.
Right?
But they weren't willing to do that
because US imperialism is what they pray to,
what they bow down to.
And we have to change that.
We have to build a different political movement
in this country that refuses to choose
between one genocidal maniac and the other.
-Nice. All right. You go ahead.
-Thank you, Professor Hagopian in your --
-I'll take it. -Yeah. Yeah.
-Save me the trouble of going to school for the PhD.
I appreciate that.
-You're an inspiration to many people I've met here.
But I grew up in Brooklyn
and I see a lot of the philosophies
that you espoused to in the teachers
I grew up learning from.
So I wanted to ask as an ally,
someone who doesn't have any children
or doesn't work in education,
how can we stand with the movement
to fight against untruth?
There's a movement towards changing historical markers
that celebrate the genocide of indigenous people on this land.
And also,
the Confederate soldiers memorializing their celebrating
them for the impact they had on this country.
How can we also lay our life on the line,
just like teachers do,
by being an ally against the fight towards untruth?
And how can as a community,
the philosophies you espoused in your book be tools for anyone,
no matter what line of work,
or what place they find themselves in society?
-Yeah. Thank you for that.
So as you came in at the front table,
there was a postcard that said, was it organized vote and teach?
Yeah, there's one.
On that -- so if you get that postcard,
you can scan the QR code and there's --
it'll take you to the Zen Education Project's
Teach Truth page.
And there's so many different ways
to get involved in this struggle.
You don't have to be an educator, or a student,
or a parent, or a caregiver.
We need everybody because everyone has a stake
in what our students learn, right?
When students have the history of the civil rights movement
erased, it's a lot easier to get rid of the Voting Rights Act
today, when nobody knows how it was fought for
or what it's about, right?
All of the freedoms that people have fought for
are so much easier to take away
if we don't understand our history.
And so we all have a stake in fighting
for youth understanding history.
And you can help testify at school board meetings.
You can support school board candidates that are running
and fighting for ethnic studies programs.
We have the Black Lives Matter at School, Week of Action
that's coming up the first week of February.
That started right here in Seattle in 2016
when a white supremacist made a bomb threat
at John Muir Elementary School,
Wayne Au's son's Elementary School.
While his son was there,
they made a bomb threat of that school.
And instead of just giving up to despair,
the educators fought back and 3,000 educators in the city
went to school in solidarity with John Muir wearing a shirt
that said Black Lives Matter.
We stand together.
And ever since then, every year, the first week of February,
we have Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.
So this year,
we're going to have
the Young Gifted and Black Student Talent Showcase
that I invite you all to go to.
You should check it out.
It's going to be at Franklin High School on that Thursday.
I forget what the date is,
but that Thursday, the first week of February
at Franklin High School at 7:00 pm.
And you're going to see some incredible young people
who understand the change
that needs to be made in this society,
and who are organizing, using their voice, singing, dancing,
showing films to help us all get free.
There's so many ways to get involved.
Join us on June 7th
for the National Teach Truth Day of Action
and help us build this movement.
-Yeah, that's the thing I always tell folks is like,
the first thing is to show up.
Show up, give your labor, give your support,
and help people do the work they want to get done, right?
So that's the first step always.
-Yeah. -Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right.
Come on.
-Hey, how's it going?
-Hello?
-Good to see you. -Hey, good to see you.
-I met -- my name's Kylia Baldwin.
I met Jesse through some socialist organizing.
And what really stood out to me about how you move
and how you do your movement work and your organizing,
is your clear like, care about the people around you.
You can see that by all these people who clearly like,
care about you and who you have held friendship,
community relationship with.
Can you talk about how -- giving examples of
how you continue to do that as we approach rebellion,
and how you want to see others embodying that beloved community
as we get towards a revolution?
-Wow. Thank you. So good to see you.
Great. Always good to organize with you.
Great. Thanks for being here.
And that's such an important question.
And it's one that I didn't start thinking about
till way too late. It's never too late.
Like, now that's a core principle
that I consciously think about.
But in so many different political organizations
and socialist groups
that I work with throughout the years,
like the idea of how we care for each other,
wasn't really the main thing that we discussed.
And yet without learning how to build a community
and build strong relationships, those organizations fall apart.
Right?
And they can only last for so long.
And so the work does have to integrate all --
yes, we're fighting against the 1%
and we're fighting against white supremacy,
and systemic racism, and transphobia,
and all these forms of oppression.
And we have to figure out as we're fighting these systems,
how we lift each other up and support each other.
And I don't know --
I mean, there's beginning to be more books
and important works written about how to do that well.
We all need to start -- you know, we should read those,
and work on it,
and continue theorizing about
how we build strong relationships
that -- where we are caring for each other.
And where we can have disagreements
without canceling each other, you know?
Where we can have real political debates
that can be fierce about the way forward
because there's so much on the line.
Yeah, we're going to get passionate about it.
But saving our vitriol, saving like all that,
let's save that for Elon Musk. You know what I mean?
Like, let's save that for people who are hailing Hitler
and destroying the climate.
And you know, and use care and love
for each other to build this movement to fight against them.
-Hi? I was wondering, as an educator,
how would you recommend when students want
or need to have these tough discussions in the classroom?
Especially when students tend to not all have the same opinions.
How would you make that space safe for everyone?
-Yeah, we were just talking about this.
But when you are able to build a safe space in the classroom --
if anybody has been in a classroom where you felt seen,
where you felt empowered,
and you felt safe to speak your truth,
it's the most magical situation I've ever been in.
It is just electricity
where people from all different kinds of backgrounds
know that maybe they don't have it all figured out.
And they could make a mistake and share something
and they'll be okay.
And to build that, it takes time.
You have to earn it.
There are some teachers that just want like,
students show up in the classroom
and they'll be like, I'm in charge.
And so you should listen to me
and here's what I'm teaching, and listen, and take notes.
And they'll never experience that magic.
Because it takes time to really build trust,
and to earn that trust over time by being there for them.
By making sure that every student in your class,
their background is affirmed.
That they get to learn something about their culture
and they see themselves as part of the community.
And if you get there, magical transformations are possible.
I remember a white student
that was in my first ethnic studies class
at Garfield High School, and he was an AP student.
And so he was never used to being in a class
with Black students.
And this was one of the first integrated classes
that I ever had, because usually my AP classes are all white,
and my general ed classes are the kids of color
and they never mixed.
And in this class, it was integrated.
And this -- one of the first assignments
we did was -- were poems about our intersectional identities.
And they created these incredible poems
after learning about intersectionality
that spoke to who they were as people and shared them.
And this white student said he checked off all the boxes
so he could pass the assignment.
But he was like his poem was like, I'm white,
but that doesn't matter.
I'm a man, but that doesn't matter.
Right?
And so he showed that he understood the concept
of intersectionality while rejecting it.
Right?
And then after a couple months of study
where I went, we took my famous time machine back to the 1600s,
and learned where race was created, and how it was created.
And how it was used to divide laboring people
from Africa and from Europe.
And to give European laborers a little bit of privilege,
so that they saw Black enslaved labor as their enemy,
rather than those that own the plantation.
Right?
And a light bulb went off in his head
and he realized that he wasn't part of the 1%.
And that, in fact,
his life would probably be better
if he joined struggles against racism
and that his classmates lives would be better, too.
And it was amazing to hear his next poem
where he started off apologizing to the class.
Right?
That he hadn't taken the time
to learn before he rejected what people said.
Right? And the reason
why he was able to have that growth was
because I didn't come down on him and say, you're canceled.
Right? You don't get it. You'll never get it.
You're white.
It was like,
yeah, you have a lot to learn and let's go and learn it.
And there is incredible things that can happen
when we create spaces for people to learn.
-I want to be mindful of time.
I'll check with the house.
What are we -- how are we doing time wise?
Okay. Yeah, I'm getting told we need to wrap it up.
So apologies to the two folks standing there for questions.
I think we need to make sure we're respecting folks labor,
and space, and expectations here.
But again, please give another round of applause for Jesse.
Thank you so much. Appreciate you so much.
-So good to see so many friends here.
Thank you all so much for coming.
I couldn't imagine a better way
to launch this book into the world.
Y'all touched my heart tonight.
Have a great evening.
[ Cheers and applause ]