One Book

Lance Eaton had been trying to read Foucault for fifteen years.

Every couple of months, he said, he would open the book and try a few pages. It didn’t work.

Eventually an audiobook came out. That was how he got through it.

After fifteen years.

In the seminar, people around him seemed ready for Foucault. Some were fans. He remembers shrinking down, looking for an opening where he could offer what he calls faux participation: yeah, what that person said.

Maha Bali recognized something immediately in what he was describing.

She had read Foucault while completing her doctorate remotely. Alone, she said. She thought she was the only person who didn’t get it. Much later, she learned that everyone finds Foucault difficult.

“That would have helped me a lot.”

“I just wanted other people that I could talk to.”

Lance’s answer was different.

What he would have wanted first was a way to test his understanding before stepping into a place with others. Something private enough to work through what he understood before the room could see where the gaps were.

One wanted other people.

The other wanted somewhere safe to think before other people entered the picture.

Only later did I realize I had been hearing two different questions.

Between not understanding something and letting another person know you don’t, something happens.

What Difficulty Costs

The conversation did not stay with Foucault.

Lance named a pattern that had appeared before: students who arrived at university already knowing how to say their ideas in a language the institution would recognize as intelligent, the translation complete before they walked in. Students who arrived without it were not less capable. They were doing something the others were not being asked to do.

Maha had written in academic language for years. She put it in the Padlet during the session: academic language is so disconnected from our souls, writing in it is torture. She has not written that way since finishing her doctorate and wishes the requirement had not existed.

Ali described what that had cost. During those graduate school years, Ali had carried the shame gap, the legitimacy gap, the judgment gap. If AI had been available, Ali suggested it might have made it easier to express those ideas in ways that were academically and socially recognized.

She was not describing a wish for easier thinking but for a different relationship between what she knew and what the institution recognized as knowledge.

One participant named what stood between confusion and asking for help: revealing uncertainty to another person carried a social cost. Another described carrying that confusion alone because asking felt too costly. In the Padlet, Maha named what stood behind the calculation: going to the writing center felt too embarrassing, the hours were inconvenient, and therapy meant a long waitlist, money, and stigma at home.

Different obstacles. The same calculation each time: is it worth letting another person see this?

When the Rooms Compared

The same conditions had surfaced before, in two different rooms.

Earlier this year, a faculty group at the American University in Cairo named the same conditions. Not because they had read the previous session’s notes. Because they inhabited the same institutional architecture. Before that, faculty and administrators across several American liberal arts colleges had asked the same question about AI: not what it does, but what it walked into. Three rooms. No coordination between them. The same cluster of difficulties in each.

Some of that recurrence has a straightforward explanation. The same facilitation team carried the same questions from one room to the next. Some language traveled with the design. The word abandonment was part of the facilitation design in Cairo and again here. It described how students have been left to navigate AI without institutional guidance. When a word lands and spreads through a conversation, that is not automatically evidence that it names something real. It may be evidence that a room is responsive to a frame.

That explanation covers some of the recurrence. Some things appeared only in specific rooms. Others appeared on their own.

If the social cost of asking were a personality type, it would not appear across rooms selected for different roles, cultures, and institutional contexts. If the shame attached to academic uncertainty were a product of a particular national culture, it would not surface independently in three rooms across three continents. When a pattern survives that much variation, something structural is producing it. Not personality. Not culture. Not institutional type.

Two findings surfaced in multiple rooms without the facilitation introducing them.

In Cairo, Maha described students using AI for therapy. Not as an experiment. As a substitute for support they cannot access, because therapy costs money, because stigma makes mental health difficult to name at home, because finding a therapist can be so hard. In the July session, someone had written almost the same sequence of obstacles before the conversation even began: therapy, expensive, long waitlist, stigma. Different countries, different institutions, different people – the same gap.

The governance question exposed something more specific about institutional structure. In Cairo, a question about who makes decisions regarding AI -- which tools are permitted, whose interests are centered -- was raised repeatedly and received no answer. Faculty engaged it and then moved around it. No one refused. The question simply found no traction. In the July session, the same question received no response across three separate channels: no spoken reply, nothing in the chat, nothing in the written reflection space that had been open throughout. Two rooms. Three methods of invitation. The same absence.

The pattern is not a coincidence of timing. A question that vanishes consistently, across different contexts and different methods of asking, is not failing because of how it is phrased. It is disappearing because of the structural position of the people being asked. The people in both rooms could describe the consequences of governance decisions with precision. They were not the people positioned to make them. The question landed in rooms full of practitioners and found no surface to hold it.

One finding appeared only in the July session. It appeared because of who was in the room.

Participants described using AI in languages other than English and finding something unexpected. One person said the outputs still reflected a Western, English-centered way of thinking, even when the prompt had been written in Turkish. Maha described receiving what she called colonialist information in her own language. The tool was not moving between languages neutrally. It was carrying assumptions about what knowledge looks like and where it originates, and those assumptions did not dissolve when the language of the question changed. That had not appeared in either previous session. This room reached further across languages and national contexts than either of the others, and the difference was audible.

Only comparing the rooms made the recurrence visible. The differences between rooms mattered as much as the similarities.

The Question That Disappeared

Near the end of the session, I asked a question.

Whose experiences are typically present when important decisions about teaching, learning, and AI are made? Whose are absent?

It received no spoken reply, nothing in the chat, nothing in the written reflection space that had been open throughout the session.

The same question had been asked in Cairo – where are decisions about AI being made, and who is in the room when they are made -- and it too disappeared. What that disappearance revealed was not that faculty were afraid to engage it. The question addressed a part of institutional life that was not, for most people in that room, theirs to address.

The people closest to students understand the consequences of institutional conditions most precisely. They see what grading does to learning, what stigma does to help-seeking, what language does to voice. What they are rarely positioned to do is redesign the conditions they can describe so clearly.

That is not a failure of insight or will. Institutions divide their labor -- and in doing so, make it harder for people to recognize that the conditions they are navigating are shared.

The people who set policy about which AI tools are permitted, which data those systems collect, and how that data will be used are generally not the same people who hold office hours, read student writing, or notice when someone has gone quiet. Those decisions are made in committees, in administrative offices, in conversations that most faculty and most students never enter. The governance question disappeared not because no one had thoughts about it but because engaging it would have required stepping outside the role the institution had assigned to the people in the room.

By the end of the session, the pattern had become difficult to ignore: that asymmetry is itself data.

What makes the silence significant is not that it appeared. It is that it appeared everywhere. Three rooms, three audiences, three methods of invitation. In every one, the question of who decides went unanswered by the people who understand most precisely what those decisions are producing.

Rooms can make certain things speakable that cannot be said inside institutions. But that limit sits exactly at the boundary between describing conditions and claiming authority over them.

That boundary is about to become harder to locate.

Lance named something that most institutional conversations about AI have not yet had to reckon with: what began as tools students could question is becoming, in some implementations, systems that act on their behalf: navigating processes, completing tasks, moving through institutional requirements for them. A service piloted earlier this year offered to complete a student’s online course for $40 a month. It was shut down, but it was a proof of concept. If institutions cannot see what students experience when they navigate conditions alone, they will have no instrument at all when a system navigates for them. The institutional record will show completion. What produced it – the navigation, the conditions that shaped it -- will be invisible.

What Rooms Can Do

The session ended without resolution. No policy was written. No committee was formed. No one left with a redesign.

What the room produced was something harder to measure than a policy: people saw the conditions together that they usually only navigate alone -- and for some, discovering the conditions were shared was itself the correction they had needed.

One person named something difficult. Then someone else said they recognized it. Then someone named something harder. The room did not become safe all at once -- it became less costly, one disclosure at a time.

The structured reflection space had been open before, during, and after the session. The day after, Ashley returned to it. She wrote about registration processes, regulations, and how each additional step becomes a new hurdle for students who did not arrive knowing how the system works. It was careful and specific.

One person. One contribution. The day after.

That is the only evidence across three sessions that the conversation continued once the room closed. The people who had named these conditions returned to their institutions. What they had described continued to reproduce.

That is not a criticism of the session but a description of what rooms can do.

What a room cannot do is change the conditions it has made visible.

Across three sessions, the same question was raised and left open: what would it take for what becomes visible in rooms like this to survive after the room ends? Not as a conversation. As something that reshapes the conditions themselves.

The question remains open. What has changed, across three rooms, is how precisely it can be asked.

What Remains Unbuilt

The conditions that produced what these rooms made visible did not arrive fully formed.

Some were designed into policies, curricula, and assessment architectures by people who had reasons for building them that way. Some were inherited, arriving before anyone currently in the room made a single decision. Some have been reproduced so consistently, through so many ordinary institutional acts, that they no longer feel like choices. Some have settled so deeply into the structure of institutional life that their origins are difficult to see.

None of that is fate.

Conditions that were designed can be redesigned; that requires authority. Conditions that were inherited can be named, and naming is the beginning of deciding differently; that requires honesty. Conditions that are reproduced begin to change when someone notices what they are passing forward. Conditions that have become invisible require harder work: tracing the origin that has settled into the present weight of things.

The conditions these rooms made visible are being reproduced through the ordinary operation of institutional life. The students who will inherit them are already on their way.

What these rooms could not answer is not something any single room is positioned to resolve. Who decides? How do those decisions get made differently? That is a question for institutions, for the people with authority over the conditions that practitioners can describe and students navigate. Those people were not in these rooms. They are rarely in rooms like these.

What becomes possible when they are present is still, largely, unbuilt.

Lance wanted somewhere safe to think before other people entered the picture. Maha wanted other people. Both were describing something that most of the institutions in these rooms have not yet built.

That is a design problem. It has design solutions.

WeBe,

Dr. G

See the recording of the July 1, 2026 session, Equity Unbound / MYFest here:

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“The little mountain things are the most extraordinary.” – my grandmother

For Auntie Cynthia, who kept carrying it forward.

The little mountain things are the most extraordinary.

She said it the way people say things they have always known –
not as wisdom, but as weather.
As though the mountain had been telling her this
long before she found the words.

St. Kitts. St. Christopher. The island whose names
hold a saint and a history and a landscape
that produced a woman who passed this forward:

Look at the small things. The close things.
They are the ones that carry you.

I carried it to St. Thomas.
I carried it to Maine.

The student does not go to the tutor.

The faculty member makes himself smaller in the seminar.

Someone opens a chatbot at midnight because the machine
feels safer than the door.

We call these choices.
We call them personality.
We call them motivation.
We call them human nature.

We speak of human nature as though it arrived complete –
as though you entered the world already knowing
which questions cost too much to ask,
already knowing whose voice carries
and whose needs translation first,
already knowing how much of yourself to reveal
in a room that wasn’t built to hold all of you.

You didn’t know any of that.

The conditions taught you.

In Maine, I listened to Bob Marley every day.

Not as music. As mentorship.

I still do.

The nervous system that navigated eight years of barriers –
frozen transcripts, personal loans, a medical condition
that closed the Air Force door,
working while attending, attending while working,
and then the long solitary passage of doctoral work –
that nervous system was not navigating alone.

There was a voice that understood
what it costs to move through systems not built for you,
and sang about it anyway.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
None but ourselves can free our minds.

The institution recorded my path as non-linear.
It could not see what was carrying me.

Before I was Dr. G, a friend called me Ras G –
conscious, conscientious, already becoming
what no transcript had yet confirmed.

He saw something before the institution did.

That is what friends are for.
That is also what grandmothers are for.

Conditions are patient teachers.

They don’t announce themselves.
They don’t stand at the front of the room and say:

this is what you are worth here.

They teach through architecture.
Through who gets called on.
Through which answers earn silence
and which earn a second question.
Through the cost of being wrong in a room full of people
whose opinion of you
you cannot afford to lose.

Every interaction is a lesson.
Every lesson updates the calculation.

If I speak, this is what it costs.
If I ask, this is what it reveals.
If I reach for help, this is what it confirms
about what they already think of me.

That is not fear. That is learning.

That is the human animal doing precisely
what the conditions were designed –
or inherited, or reproduced –
to produce.

And yet:

Not all conditions teach subtraction.

Some teach the little mountain things.
Some hand you a name before you’ve earned the credential.
Some sing to you across the water when you are far from home
and the island has become memory your body still holds.

Some rooms were built long before anyone present arrived.

Their builders are gone.
The arrangements remain.
Passed forward so many times
they no longer feel inherited.
Only natural.

The language of instruction was chosen before you were born.
The hierarchy of knowledge was settled before your discipline existed.
The door that costs something was hung
before anyone thought to ask who could afford it.

They were taught it was fixed.

Not a lie, exactly.
A belief that functions like one.

Designed once –
by someone, for something,
with reasons that made sense then
and calcified later into the floor beneath your feet.

Inherited afterward –
not chosen, just received,
the way you receive the language
you think in before you know there are others.

Reproduced daily –
not through conspiracy
but through the ordinary operation of systems
that do not examine what they are passing forward.

Sedimented, finally –
until what was built
becomes what simply was.

This is how a room gets built without a builder.

But it is also –
and this is what the room cannot see –
how a grandmother’s voice gets carried
across generations,
past the weight of everything
that tried to bury it.

Institutions mentor too.

Not always intentionally.
Sometimes through what the curriculum includes
and what it quietly omits.
Sometimes through which knowledge enters the room
already certified
and which has to prove itself at the door.
Sometimes through what happens to the first person who speaks
before the room decides it is safe to speak.

Sometimes through the fact that the person who could help you
sits behind a door that costs something
you are not sure you have.

The chatbot has no door.
It has no memory of your last question.
It doesn’t carry your uncertainty out of the conversation
and into the hallway where someone who knows you might see it.

This is not a technology story.

This is a story about what the conditions have been teaching
long before the technology arrived.

The question the institution never asks:

What did this person carry in
that made it possible to navigate at all?

A basketball coach who saw a path when guidance counselors didn’t.
An auntie who became parent and best friend
when parents were absent –
not as policy, but as love.
A friend who gave you your name
before any degree confirmed you were worthy of one.
A grandmother who taught you how to see.

Nothing I’ve done is possible
without the relationships that carried me through.

The institution recorded the trajectory.
It missed entirely what made the trajectory possible.

Here is what the institution cannot see:

The student who did not go to the tutor
was not avoiding learning.
She was reading the room accurately.

The faculty member who made himself smaller
in the graduate seminar
was not lacking confidence.
He was calculating what revelation would cost
in a room not built for his uncertainty.

The person who turned to a machine at midnight
was not avoiding connection.
They were navigating toward the only door
that didn’t carry a toll.

The young man in Maine,
navigating cold and distance and a path the institution
kept calling non-linear,
listening to Bob Marley every single day –
he was not being sentimental.
He was maintaining the thread
back to who he was
before the conditions started redefining him.

The institution records the navigation.
It cannot see what produced it.

It interprets the trajectory.
Calls it risk. Calls it outcome.
Calls it success or failure,
persistence or attrition,
engagement or disengagement.

It cannot distinguish
collapse from calculation.
Withdrawal from wisdom.
Silence from strategy.
Grit from grace.

And then the interpretation becomes policy.
And policy reshapes the system.
And the system produces new conditions.
And the cycle begins again.

But someone named it.

And then someone else said:

yes, I have been carrying that too.

And then the room breathed differently.

Not because the conditions changed.
Because people became, for a moment,
readers of the conditions
rather than only products of them.

They had been reading the room all along.
Now they were reading the room itself.

We have been watching back the whole time.

This is not fate.

Designed conditions can be redesigned.

Inherited conditions can be named –
and naming is the beginning of choosing differently.

Reproduced conditions begin to change
when someone notices what they are passing forward.

Sedimented conditions require the harder work:
finding the historical origin
that has become invisible inside the present weight of it.
Reading the strata.
Asking who built this layer
and what they thought they were building
and what it has become.

And the other kind –
the grandmother kind,
the auntie kind,
the friend-who-names-you-before-you’ve-earned-it kind –
those require something different:

Remembering what was given.
Passing it forward.
Trusting that a voice can travel
across water, across years, across loss,
and still condition someone
toward wonder rather than vigilance.

Belonging is not a feeling you were supposed to bring with you.

It emerges where conditions make relationship possible –
through what is designed, and what is inherited,
and what gets reproduced so many times
it stops feeling like a choice.

You did not fail to belong.
The conditions failed to produce it.

That is a different problem.
It has different solutions.

And some of those solutions are very old.

The little mountain things are the most extraordinary.

She is still here in that.
Still conditioning.
Still passing it forward
through everyone who received it
and chose to carry it.

They dubbed me Dr. G.

But Ras G came first –
given by a friend who saw what I was
before any institution confirmed it.

That is how it works, when it works.

Someone sees you.
Someone names you.
Someone passes something forward
that the conditions alone
would never have produced.

The little mountain things are the most extraordinary.

Remember the small things.
The close things.
The ones that carry you
when the rooms were not built to hold you
and the maps were not drawn
and you had to find your way anyway –

not alone,
never quite alone,
even when it felt that way –

because somewhere,
a grandmother was still speaking,
a friend had already named you,
a voice was crossing the water,
and the little mountain things
were waiting
to be seen.

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The Room Full of Voices

Jeremy Hobson opened the hour the way you’d expect a public radio host to open it the week of America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday: warmly, a little wryly, with a list. Big changes, he called them. The end of slavery, by constitutional amendment. FDR and Social Security. LBJ and Medicare. Reagan and the turn toward less government. Smoking banned in restaurants. AI arriving whether anyone voted on it or not – technology changes that hadn’t involved votes or the Constitution at all. He asked what one thing listeners would change about America as it celebrated its big birthday. Before long, the lines were all full.

It’s a good list. It’s also, without anyone intending it, a kind of confession. Notice what the list does: it names the change and skips the residue. Slavery ended – and what, exactly, persisted underneath the ending? FDR built Social Security – for whom, and who got left outside its first design? The list moves in one direction only: forward, upward, an arc bending the way these stories like to bend. It is the story America tells about itself on its birthday.

A ten-year-old named Sarah called in from Dallas, wanting tougher laws for drunk drivers. “Whenever someone gets in a crash with them, it’s most likely fatal,” she said, “and it’s very sad.” That was the whole pitch. No ideology, no hedge. A harm, named plainly, with a fix attached. The room was charmed – one guest gave her a shout-out for being so civic-minded – and understandably so. There’s a kind of clarity that only shows up before a person has learned what they’re supposed to be careful about saying.

Source: “America 250: What Would You Change About America?”

The Middle with Jeremy Hobson (2025).

All quotations from callers and studio participants are drawn from this public broadcast. 

Then Rebecca called from Columbia, South Carolina.

She’s a Type 1 diabetic – “I can’t live without insulin,” she said – and what she described was not abstract. People who need insulin to survive, she said, often fall into a gap that feels less like a policy choice than a fact of life: too much income to qualify for assistance, not enough to simply absorb the cost on their own. “In the middle, people don’t qualify,” she said, and you could hear, underneath the calm radio voice, the specific exhaustion of someone who has done this math more times than she should have had to.

People ration their insulin when they land in that gap. They water it down. They take less than their body needs because less is what they can afford. “It just hurts,” she said. “It hurts the system when people don’t have or can’t afford the healthcare that they need. So desperately.”

Nobody followed the question very far backward. Rebecca didn’t ask. The hosts didn’t ask. The studio guests – a congressman, a journalist, both sharp, both genuinely trying – moved on to whether Medicare expansion might be more politically possible now that AI has everyone anxious about losing their jobs, and with them, their employer-sponsored coverage.

Real and useful. Also, itself, evidence of the thing this essay wants to name: the gap Rebecca described has a history. Somebody built the threshold she keeps falling into. Nobody on the call – not because they were careless, but because the call wasn’t built to ask this – went looking for who.

Caller after caller named a harm and proposed a fix; not one used the word “designed,” and not one traced a present condition back to a founding decision. A caller named Claire wanted to eliminate “that darned Electoral College” and add term limits on the Supreme Court. A commenter named Patty wanted a civics test administered before anyone could vote. Jeff, in Overland Park, Kansas, wanted a multi-party system and dark money out of politics.

The word “designed” did surface once. Mike Pesca, the journalist in the studio, noted that the Constitution is hard to amend because the framers made it hard on purpose – “that was by design,” he said – before excusing them: they were reinventing democracy for the first time since Athens. Design, invoked once in the discussion, deployed to explain why change is difficult. Never to explain what built the conditions everyone wanted changed.

Nobody said: this condition I’m describing was built on purpose, a long time ago, by people solving a different problem, and it has been quietly handed down ever since. Ro Khanna, the congressman, came closest, tracing contemporary economic anxiety back to de-industrialization and capital concentration – people, he said, who got “shafted,” who watched their towns hollow out while wealth piled up in fewer hands. That’s real, and more historically aware than almost anything else said on the call.

But even that account starts in the 1970s. It doesn’t ask why some Americans had savings to absorb the hollowing-out and others didn’t – why some families had a cushion built up over generations and others were starting from nothing, and whether that gap has a history too.

It does. All of it does. This is not a failure of the callers, who were thoughtful and specific and trying, on live radio, with thirty seconds each, to name something true about their lives. It is something else: a country that has become remarkably adept at building new floors over old foundations without ever quite looking at what’s underneath. We experience inherited conditions as though they have no history. We feel them as new, or as personal, or as simply the way things are – and rarely, strangely rarely, as the residue of arrangements that were designed, inherited, reproduced, and eventually forgotten.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

Here’s a question worth sitting with: why do these particular complaints – a healthcare system that punishes you for earning slightly too much, an Electoral College nobody quite trusts, a two-party system everybody wants to escape and nobody can – feel both urgent, like they just happened, and strangely familiar, like we’ve had this argument before and forgotten it?

One answer is that a country is, among other things, a designed system. Not a metaphor, not yet – just a fact. Somebody had to decide how votes would be counted, who would be a citizen, who would own what, who would owe what to whom, and whose knowledge would count as knowledge in the first place. Those decisions got written down, in 1787 and the years around it, by a small number of specific people solving a specific set of problems in front of them at the time.

And then those decisions didn’t go away when the problems changed. They became the system everyone since has had to work inside of, whether or not anyone now remembers exactly why it was built that way.

Call it America, Inc. A country that launched with a founding document, a board of directors with very particular interests, and a product – citizenship, opportunity, a vote that counts – that worked far better for some people than for others, by design, from the outset. Two hundred and fifty years later, the company is still running substantially the same code. It’s been patched. There have been twenty-seven amendments, a Civil War, a New Deal, a civil rights movement, each one a kind of release update. But an update is not a rewrite. It changes what you see on the screen. It doesn’t always touch what’s underneath.

This is where the essay’s strongest critic deserves a real hearing.

Pesca – the same journalist who’d noted the framers made change hard on purpose – spent much of the call making a different case: that by nearly every measure that can actually be counted, Americans are living better than their parents did, dramatically better in some cases, and that the gloom so many people carry around is closer to a mood than a fact. “We’re kind of living in the era of miracles,” he said, and he’s not wrong about the data. Cancers that were once near-certain death sentences now carrying ninety-something percent cure rates. Drunk-driving fatalities down by a third since the 1980s.

The national pessimism, he said – borrowing a coinage from the economics press – is a “vibe session”: a gap between how good things measurably are and how bad people insist on feeling. The numbers are real, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

But an aggregate number is an average, and an average can tell the truth about the country while telling almost nothing about Rebecca. Two things can be true at once – the line on the national chart going up, and a specific gap that a specific person keeps falling into, year after year, while the chart keeps climbing. Whether those two things are a contradiction, or whether one is hiding inside the other, is what this essay will come back to with evidence once there’s been time to look at where Rebecca’s particular gap actually came from.

For now, here’s the more immediate question, the one Pesca’s data doesn’t quite answer: if the country keeps getting better on average, why does it also keep having the same argument? Why does “who counts as a full citizen” keep needing to be settled – at the founding, after the Civil War, during Jim Crow, during the civil rights movement, and again, this year, in a radio commenter’s proposal that voters pass a test before they’re allowed to vote? Progress and recurrence are not opposites. Sometimes they’re the same motion, viewed at two different distances.

That’s the puzzle the rest of this essay is going to follow into the room where it was actually built.

Who Was the Room Built to See?

Patty, by every visible sign, wants an informed electorate. She posted a comment to The Middle’s online thread that read: “I’d like to see a civics test administered before allowing a single person to vote.” Nothing in how she wrote it suggests malice. It reads like concern – the kind of concern a person has about a system they care about.

So here’s the actual question: why does a civics test feel like common sense to so many Americans, before anyone’s had a chance to ask where the idea has been before?

America has tried this solution before. Not once, but repeatedly, across more than two centuries, whenever the question of democratic legitimacy has come up: who is actually fit to participate? The Naturalization Act of 1790 answered it one way, restricting citizenship to “free white persons” – an answer so direct it required no test at all, because the test had already been built into the definition of who counted.

A century later, the answer got more elaborate: literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses that let a man vote if his grandfather had voted – which solved nothing for the grandsons of people who, in his grandfather’s time, had been somebody else’s property. The tests were administered selectively, which is itself the tell: a white voter who couldn’t read was waved through; a Black voter with a law degree could be failed on a question about state constitutional minutiae, asked by a registrar with the discretion to fail anyone he chose.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed this, eventually, after decades of organizing and bloodshed got it onto the books. The mechanism didn’t disappear afterward so much as it went looking for a new shape – voter ID laws, proof-of-citizenship requirements, purges of the rolls justified as maintenance. Historians still argue about how directly to draw that line forward into the present, and that argument is worth taking seriously; but the recurring instinct – some people should have to prove they’re ready before they’re allowed to participate – keeps reappearing under different names, in different decades, each time presenting itself as a fresh idea rather than a returning one.

The mechanism has carried completely different cargo in different periods while wearing roughly the same clothes. Sometimes the test was explicit and brutal – pure exclusion, dressed up as literacy. Sometimes, like with Patty, it seems to arrive almost innocently, severed from its own genealogy, as a commonsense fix for a problem – an uninformed electorate – that is itself real. The test doesn’t remember what it’s been used for. Only the historical record does.

Some systems fail because they stop working. The civics-test idea isn’t one of those. It still works exactly as designed – it sorts people, the way it was built to. What’s failed is something quieter: the system has stopped telling anyone what it was built to do, or for whom, or why.

Claire’s complaint runs on the same engine from a different angle. She wanted to eliminate “that darned Electoral College” – and the standard case against it is real: the math genuinely produces outcomes where the candidate with fewer votes nationally wins the office. But here’s the harder thing to sit with: the Electoral College isn’t malfunctioning. It is doing something close to what it was built to do.

It emerged out of the same convention that produced the Three-Fifths Compromise, in the same room, as part of the same set of bargains. Historians generally agree that these arrangements substantially increased the political influence of enslaving states in choosing a president, while those states never had to extend the vote to the people being counted for that influence. The bug was not always a bug. Sometimes it was the business model.

That’s not an argument for keeping it. It’s an argument for being honest about what “fixing” it would actually mean – not repairing something that’s stopped doing its job, but finally undoing a design choice that has never stopped doing exactly the job it was given.

If a country gets to decide who is legible enough to be seen as a full participant, a second question follows: once you’ve been seen, what do you actually inherit? Legibility gets you into the room. It doesn’t tell you who furnished it, or who’s been paying the rent.

Who Inherited the Proceeds?

Go back to Rebecca for a moment. Not to her words this time – to the shape of the gap itself. “In the middle, people don’t qualify.” Too much income for assistance. Not enough to absorb the cost alone. Where did that threshold come from? Not healthcare costs in general – the specific architecture of a system that ties insurance to a paycheck, assistance to poverty, and leaves a gap in between for anyone whose life doesn’t sit neatly on either side of the line.

It didn’t come from the Constitution. Nobody at the founding wrote a clause about insulin, or insurance, or who qualifies for what. This part of the story is something built much later, by people solving an entirely different problem, who had no idea they were also deciding, eight decades ahead of time, what would happen to a woman in Columbia, South Carolina, trying to keep her blood sugar stable on a budget that doesn’t quite stretch.

During the Second World War, the federal government froze wages to control inflation, so employers competed for workers with benefits instead – health coverage chief among them. In 1943, a tax ruling made those benefits exempt from income tax, which meant a dollar of health insurance was worth more to a worker than a dollar of wages. That ruling, not a constitutional provision, not a piece of landmark legislation anyone remembers by name, is the reason most Americans still get their health insurance through a job.

A wartime improvisation that calcified into the national default, because nobody ever had a strong enough reason to undo it.

Here is the part that matters for Rebecca’s gap specifically: the labor protections being negotiated in that era – unions, seniority systems, benefits packages – were disproportionately available to industries that, at the time, employed white workers far more than Black workers. Domestic work and agricultural labor, occupations disproportionately held by Black Americans in the 1940s, were excluded from the major federal labor protections of the period entirely, by explicit statutory carve-out, not oversight. The system that decided whose job came with health insurance was, from its first years, already sorting by a line that wasn’t healthcare at all – it was occupational segregation by race, baked into which jobs counted as the kind that came with benefits.

That’s the inheritance. Not a single villain, not a single law you could point to. A tax ruling. A wage freeze. A set of labor categories that excluded the workers least likely to be white – layered together over eight decades, run through generation after generation of “this is just how health insurance works,” producing the coverage gap Rebecca is standing in today.

This is also where Mike Pesca’s numbers and Rebecca’s testimony stop looking like a contradiction and start looking like the same chart, viewed from two different elevations. Pesca is right that, in aggregate, Americans live longer and healthier than their grandparents did. None of that is false, and none of it needs to be argued away to make room for Rebecca.

What the aggregate curve doesn’t show, because averages by definition don’t show distribution, is who is riding comfortably above the curve and who is wedged into a gap the curve was never built to measure. The same forty years that produced Americas “era of miracles,” to use Pesca’s phrase, also produced – through the same employer-based system, with the same racial sorting built into who got covered first – the specific shape of the gap Rebecca is living inside right now. Progress and inheritance aren’t opposites. The progress is real. So is the gap underneath it.

The housing version of this story is, if anything, more direct. Redlining – marking entire neighborhoods, mostly Black ones, as too risky for federally backed mortgages – wasn’t a private prejudice the government happened to tolerate. It was drawn onto government maps, by a federal agency, as official policy, in the 1930s. The result, compounded over three generations of home equity – the single largest source of middle-class American wealth – is a measurable, well-documented gap in family wealth that tracks almost exactly onto those original maps, drawn by men long dead, in a federal program that no longer exists.

None of this required a single person, today, to do anything wrong. That’s the part that’s hardest to sit with and most important to say plainly: an inheritance doesn’t need a living villain to keep doing its work. It just needs nobody to have rebuilt it. None of it constitutional. All of it inherited just as thoroughly as if it had been.

What that leaves is a harder, more honest question than the one this essay started with – not whether Rebecca’s gap is real, which it plainly is, but what it would take to close it. Eligibility thresholds can be redrawn; that’s a real fix, available now, worth doing. But the deeper architecture – insurance tied to employment, employment historically sorted by race, wealth compounding for some families and starting from zero for others – isn’t a threshold problem. You don’t redraw your way out of it. You’d have to build something that doesn’t depend on the same foundation at all, which is a much larger kind of work, and a much slower one.

Admission Is Not the Room

Here is a distinction the whole conversation kept almost making and never quite landed on: being let in is not the same thing as belonging once you’re inside. A person can be admitted and not belong. A person can belong, deeply and for generations, without ever being formally admitted. A person can hold every legal protection on paper and still discover, when it matters most, that the paper didn’t hold. American history is, in large part, the record of how far apart these can drift.

Start at the beginning. The Naturalization Act of 1790 – one of the new republic’s first acts of self-definition – limited citizenship to “free white persons.” Not an oversight to be corrected later. The founding answer to the question of who counts. Everyone outside that category wasn’t merely excluded from a benefit; they were excluded from the precondition the entire system runs on. You cannot belong to a polity that has not yet decided you’re a person it recognizes, no matter how long you’ve lived inside its borders, built its roads, raised its children, or buried your dead in its ground.

The decades that followed read like a long argument over how narrowly to draw that same line. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first federal law to bar immigration by name of a specific nationality. The Immigration Act of 1924 went further, setting quotas by national origin engineered to favor Northern Europeans and all but seal the door to Southern and Eastern Europeans, and almost entirely to Asians. None of this required new constitutional language. The Constitution had never promised belonging to begin with; it left the question of who gets to arrive almost entirely to statute – which means it has always been one of the parts of the room most easily rebuilt, re-locked, and re-opened, generation after generation, by whoever held the keys at the time.

And then there is the case that should unsettle anyone tempted to think legal status alone settles the question. In 1942, roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forced from their homes on the West Coast and held in internment camps – and the majority were United States citizens.

Citizens, by birth, with every formal protection the document is supposed to confer, removed from their homes anyway, by executive order, because a wartime government decided their ancestry made them a risk the Constitution’s promises could be set aside to manage. Legal membership turned out to be necessary, but not sufficient. The protection was there, on paper, the whole time. It simply didn’t hold when a different kind of power decided it shouldn’t.

That’s the sharpest version of the lesson, but the softer version runs through nearly every immigrant community in American history, including the ones living in this country right now without legal status. People build real lives inside relationships that are entirely genuine – marriages, churches, decades in the same neighborhood, children who know no other home – while remaining, in the eyes of the institutions around them, provisional. Belonging, in the full relational sense, is often already there.

What’s missing is the institutional layer that would make that belonging durable instead of revocable. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act dismantled the national-origin quota system, a genuine redesign – but it didn’t, and couldn’t by itself, rebuild the deeper architecture in which legal personhood functions as a precondition for protection rather than a description of who already, relationally, belongs.

This is, in some ways, the whole essay compressed into one recurring American argument. We experience inherited conditions as though they have no history – and nowhere more than here, in the conversations about who belongs and who doesn’t, conducted year after year as though the question were being asked for the first time.

It is not the first time. It was answered in 1790. It was re-answered in 1882, in 1924, in 1942, in 1965, and it is being re-answered again right now, by people who mostly don’t know they’re standing in a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old argument, repeating its oldest moves in newer language.

Admission is not the room. It’s the door. Whether the room itself is warm, or even safe, once you’re standing inside it – whether your knowledge counts, whether your labor is credited, whether your children’s children inherit anything more durable than provisional welcome – is a separate question, and it’s the one this country has spent two hundred and fifty years answering unevenly, for different people, often at the very same moment it was celebrating having answered it for everyone.

What would belonging actually require, then – not admission, not tolerance, but the durable kind, the kind that doesn’t get revoked when the politics shift? That’s the question the rest of this essay has to try to answer, on the one day of the year built for asking it.

What a Birthday Is For

Go back, one more time, to the callers. Nobody sounded resigned. A ten-year-old wanted tougher drunk-driving laws. A woman in South Carolina wanted a healthcare system that didn’t punish her for earning slightly too much. A caller in Wisconsin wanted the Electoral College gone. A congressman wanted money out of politics. A commenter wanted a more informed electorate. Every single one of them was reaching for the same tool: redesign. An impulse to rebuild something, running through almost every voice on the call – an impulse at least as old as the twenty-seven amendments, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.

So the closing question isn’t whether Americans still believe in redesign. The callers answer that on their own. The harder question is which kinds of redesign actually hold, and which ones get quietly absorbed back into the system they were meant to change.

Here’s what the historical record shows, across every genealogy this essay has traced: the redesigns that lasted weren’t simply the ones with the clearest moral case, though moral clarity certainly helped. They were the ones that built something durable enough that the old arrangement could no longer function around it. The Voting Rights Act didn’t just declare literacy tests illegal – it built federal oversight with real enforcement, real consequences for states that tried the old tricks in new packaging. It held, strongly, for decades.

Then Shelby County v. Holder, in 2013, removed that enforcement mechanism, and within hours, several states announced new voting restrictions they had been waiting to introduce. Same impulse the tests had always served. New paperwork.

The lesson isn’t that the Voting Rights Act failed. The part that held wasn’t the moral argument – that had already won, decisively, in public opinion and in law. The part that held was the machinery built to make the old workaround structurally impossible. When the machinery went, the workaround came back.

That’s the test worth applying to whatever redesign comes next. Does it build something durable enough that the old arrangement genuinely can’t reassert itself in new clothing – new credentialing, new enforcement, coalitions strong enough to outlast a single election cycle? Or does it simply restate the moral case more emphatically and hope that’s enough? Restating the moral case matters; it’s necessary. But the historical record is fairly blunt about whether moral clarity alone tends to hold against a system built to absorb it. Often, it doesn’t – not because the people arguing for it were wrong, but because they were fighting an architecture, and architecture doesn’t move for being told it’s wrong. It moves when something is actually built that it can no longer stand on top of.

America has patched its interface repeatedly, sincerely, at real cost and real sacrifice, for two hundred and fifty years – Reconstruction’s amendments, the dismantling of the national-origin quota system, a Medicare program built from nothing, a Voting Rights Act with real enforcement teeth. The engine underneath has been rebuilt less often, and mostly only when someone built new capital strong enough to make the old engine structurally unworkable, not merely embarrassing.

Which brings the day itself back into view. July 4th gets observed, every year, as a celebration of a beginning – fireworks for a founding, gratitude for a document. That’s not wrong, exactly, but it skips the residue, the same way Jeremy Hobson’s opening list skipped it. A founding is not a finished thing. It’s an opening move, made by specific people, solving specific problems, that the rest of us have been living inside and revising ever since – sometimes patching, occasionally rebuilding, far too often forgetting that the patch and the rebuild are not the same kind of work, even when they look identical from the outside.

A birthday worth having, for a country or for a person, isn’t one that pretends the foundation was perfect, or one that spends the whole party listing what’s wrong with it. It’s one honest enough to ask what’s actually load-bearing down there, after two hundred and fifty years, and curious enough to find out – not because the asking is comfortable, but because not asking is how Rebecca’s gap stays open, how Patty’s idea keeps resurfacing without its history attached, how the room keeps getting new paint while the wiring underneath stays exactly as it was, waiting for nobody in particular to notice and everybody in particular to inherit.

We experience inherited conditions as though they have no history. That’s where this started. Here’s where it has to end: we inherited this country. We did not inherit it equally. Most of us did not build any of it – not the Naturalization Act, not the Electoral College, not the wage freeze that made health insurance a job benefit, not the maps that decided whose neighborhood was worth a mortgage. None of that was ours to choose.

But we are participating in its reproduction now, today, in the choosing or the not-choosing – in what we preserve without examining, what we redesign with enough patience to make it hold, what we let keep running because nobody asked who built it, and what we finally, deliberately, decide can’t be carried forward another two hundred and fifty years.

That’s not guilt. Guilt is about origins, and almost none of us chose the origins. It’s closer to citizenship: the ongoing, ordinary work of deciding, with whatever time and attention we actually have, what gets handed to whoever comes next.

WeBe,

Dr. G

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It follows What It Costs to Ask for Help and What Comes After the Ticket, which explored the distance between formal opportunity and actual participation – between available support and usable support, between admission and belonging, between enrollment and completion.

This essay draws on a faculty session held at the American University in Cairo on June 16, 2026, facilitated by Dr. Rhoan Garnett and Dr. Lance Easton, and hosted by Dr. Maha Bali and AUC’s Center for Learning and Teaching. A related conversation continues July 1 through Equity Unbound and MYFest, where these questions will travel across institutions, languages, and contexts. Registration is sliding scale, with free access available upon request here.

The Calculation

Across this series, I have returned more than once to a student who refused a tutor.

She was a student at Bowdoin College, a top student from a nearly all-Black high school on the South Side of Chicago, failing pre-calculus for the first time in her life. The tutor was available. The support was there. She would not go.

When she finally explained why, her answer stayed with me.

There’s absolutely no way I’m gonna go to confirm to these people what they already think about me.

The question I was asking then was simple: why wouldn’t she use the tutor? What I understand more clearly now is that the tutor was never the whole question.

The point of that story was never that a student declined help. It was that she was reading her environment accurately. By the time the tutor was offered, the calculation had already been made. Asking for help carried a social cost the tutor could not reduce. The room had taught her that uncertainty was dangerous long before anyone formally offered support.

Her calculation was rational.

Earlier in this series, in What It Costs to Ask for Help, I argued that students are often not failing to engage with institutions. They are responding to conditions institutions struggle to see. What looks, from the outside, like disengagement may instead be a careful reading of the room.

This essay begins with a different question.

What happens when the people on the other side of the desk are invited to examine the rooms they themselves inhabit?

Because faculty calculate too.

They calculate whether naming a particular idea will cost them standing with colleagues. They calculate whether experimenting with grades is worth the institutional risk. They calculate whether the thing they have just realized about their students – or about themselves – is something they can safely say aloud.

The calculations are not identical. The positions are not equivalent. But the underlying structure is familiar: a person reading an institutional environment, assessing what honesty might cost, and deciding what can be said.

In June 2026, a group of faculty at the American University in Cairo entered a room that had been designed, deliberately, to make that calculation come out differently.

This is what happened there.

The Room Opens

The session was called Structuring AI in Our Learning: What Are We Missing in the Conversation? The title suggested a conversation about tools. What was actually designed was something different.

It opened not with AI but with memory. Participants were asked to think about a moment when someone was navigating a room differently than everyone else. Maybe it was a student. Maybe it was themselves. Maybe it was something they only understood years later. Before anyone discussed technology, the room was asked to remember what it felt like to need a map and not have one.

The room began with memory before it moved to analysis. Those conditions were introduced as a compass, not a lecture. Before any of them were named, the room was asked to hold something it already knew.

The session was hosted by Maha, who is an educational developer at AUC. I co-facilitated it with Lance, who has spent years studying how AI is reshaping teaching and learning in higher education. The Padlet had gone out days before, with five prompts and one open question: What are we missing in the conversation? The responses that came back were careful, specific, and sparse: four voices across six columns, with three columns receiving nothing at all.

That sparseness was itself information. Some conditions are harder to name in writing, with your name attached, before the room has opened. What the Padlet could not hold, the live session would have to make possible.

It began slowly. The throughline question was planted and left to sit: If AI sometimes feels lower-risk than office hours, what does that reveal about the environments we’ve built? Not a question about AI. A question about what the environment has been built to make safe, and what it hasn’t.

Nothing dramatic happened at first. People listened. The chat moved slowly. The Padlet remained sparse. The room was being asked to do something unusual: to begin not with solutions but with memory, not with technology but with experience. Rooms accustomed to expertise do not always know what to do with that kind of invitation immediately.

The room was designed to work that way: question before answer, recognition before prescription, the condition named before the tool is discussed. What that design made possible over the next seventy-five minutes is what this essay is about.

What Faculty Named

The room did not become safe all at once. It became less costly, one disclosure at a time.

Lance was the first to name something that had not yet been named. He had been talking about patterns across institutions, tracking what he sees when he looks at how students are navigating AI without much institutional guidance, and he used a word that changed what became possible to say.

Abandonment.

Not frustration. Not confusion. Abandonment.

September 2026, he said, would mark the fifth academic year of AI being broadly available to students. Five years. And in most places, there had been no clear, thoughtful curriculum engagement around these tools. Students had been left to find their own way – through Reddit threads and roommates and trial and error – while institutions deliberated.

He had said something else first, something quieter. He described what it had been like to sit in graduate seminars as a first-generation student, working through material that felt genuinely beyond him. He did not stay quiet because he didn’t understand. He made himself, as he put it, “think down in the seat.” He found windows in the conversation, moments where he could say “yeah, that thought too,” so that he could appear to belong to a room that had not been built with him in mind. It took him fifteen years, he said, to find a different way into the material he had been trying to reach. Not through seminars. Through audio.

The institution never offered that path. He built it himself.

That is not a student story. That is a faculty member, someone who now spends much of his professional life helping institutions think about teaching, learning, and AI, describing what belonging had cost him and what it had taken to navigate its absence.

Another faculty member, a historian, was next.

She described a student who had submitted a review of a novel. The novel had been generated by AI. It did not exist. The student had presented it, she said, without understanding it, because there was nothing to understand.

What she took from that moment was not, primarily, frustration with the student. She described it as producing a sudden recognition of where her discipline sat in the institutional hierarchy. In that moment, she realized, history no longer occupied the place she had assumed it did.

She said this – and then apologized for talking too long.

She said it again, differently, a few minutes later, and apologized again.

The apology is worth sitting with. It is what the calculation looks like in real time: a faculty member, in the middle of naming something precise and structurally important, stopping to make herself smaller. Not because anyone interrupted her. Because the room – even a room designed to welcome this kind of speaking – still carried the weight of every room that had not.

Then Maha named something the Padlet had not been able to hold.

Students at AUC, she said, are using AI for therapy.

Not as an experiment. Not occasionally. As a substitute for mental health support they cannot access, because therapy costs money in Egypt, because cultural stigma around mental illness makes it difficult to name at home, because finding a therapist, as Maha put it, can be so hard.

And then she said this: “once someone admits it, everyone else starts to admit that they use AI for that.”

The first disclosure made the next one possible. Not because the room had suddenly become safe in some abstract sense. Because the cost of saying it had been demonstrated, in real time, to be lower than anyone had calculated.

That is the mechanism the room was built to produce.

One faculty member wrote in the session chat, rather than speaking aloud. She had given every student in one class an A the previous semester. It had worked well. She framed it quietly -- as something she did not ordinarily do, and something she was not certain her institution would welcome.

Three observations. She named something effective, something hidden, and something risky – in the same breath, with no dramatic pause.

The calculation, visible.

What these four people named, across seventy-five minutes, in a room they had not built together before, is not exceptional. It is what happens when the cost of saying it goes down far enough. Lance went first. Then a historian named what she saw from inside her discipline. Maha said the thing that was hardest to say. Another faculty member spoke quietly through the chat, where names are attached but voices are not required.

Each disclosure made the next one slightly less costly.

That is not a feature of the individuals. It is a feature of the design.

The Room They Inherited

By this point in the conversation, something had shifted.

Faculty were no longer talking only about students. They were talking about themselves, about making themselves smaller, about disciplinary hierarchies, about experiments conducted quietly, about ideas that felt unsafe to voice. What had begun as a conversation about AI had become a conversation about institutional life.

And certain patterns kept returning.

No one defended grades. No one argued that the existing architecture of assessment was working particularly well. Faculty described students organizing their learning around GPA rather than curiosity. They described themselves experimenting at the edges of grading systems they did not design and did not entirely trust. That experiment had already suggested another possibility. The lingering question was whether there was room for that possibility inside an assessment architecture she had not designed and could not change alone.

The tension is worth noticing.

The people closest to students often experience institutional limits most directly. They see what grades do to learning, what stigma does to help-seeking, what language does to voice. Maha observed that the fluency dynamics at AUC – where English accent functions as a class marker, where the institution’s American liberal arts design sits inside an Arabic-speaking city – is, as she put it, “a big thing we rarely talk about.”

Students learn the English. They don’t always get the same accent. And that accent, in this context, is not merely a linguistic variation. It is a signal: about where you grew up, what schools you attended, which families you come from. It is, simultaneously, an instructional language, a class marker, and a legitimacy signal. Students whose English sounds like theirs, and not like the institution’s, carry that gap into every classroom interaction.

What AI offers, in Maha’s observation, is relief from one dimension of that exposure. It speaks what those students experience as better English than theirs. It does not mark them. It does not remember how they sounded when they asked. It does not carry the social weight of a room where some ways of speaking feel credible and others feel like they need to be apologized for first.

Students are not seeking intelligence from AI. They are, sometimes, seeking relief from visibility.

The American University in Cairo was founded in 1919. Long before anyone in that room became a faculty member, decisions had already been made about language, legitimacy, curriculum, and whose ways of knowing would feel familiar inside its classrooms. Those decisions did not disappear. They became environment. They were inherited by faculty who had not made them. They have been reproduced, through hiring patterns, through curriculum design, through the ordinary operation of an institution that does not always examine what it is passing forward.

Faculty could describe these consequences in remarkable detail. They could describe their own quiet experiments at the edges of systems they had inherited. What they could not do – what the conversation did not produce – was identify who, exactly, had designed most of them. The conditions were described. The decision-makers were not named. The room itself was not traced to its builders.

Nobody in that room built it. Everyone in that room reproduces it – from different positions, with different degrees of authority, and with very different costs attached to naming what they see.

Not through conspiracy. Not through malice. Through the ordinary operation of institutional life, through grading policies, through course design, through assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge that arrived long before anyone in that room arrived.

If students are calculating whether it is safe to ask for help, and faculty are calculating whether it is safe to name what they see, then we are not looking at separate problems. We are looking at different positions within the same room.

The room was not built by anyone in it alone.

But for seventy-five minutes, the people inside it were able to see it together.

What the Room Could Not See

There was one question the room could not hold.

It was asked three times. It was placed in the chat. It was named in the facilitation. It was the kind of question that, once planted, should have produced something.

Where in your institution are decisions about AI being made – and who is in the room when they are made?

Nobody answered it.

Not because no one had heard it. Each time the question surfaced, the conversation moved in a different direction.

Not because the question was wrong. Not because faculty were afraid to engage it. But because the question addressed a part of institutional life that was not, for most people in that room, theirs to address. AI governance decisions at AUC – which tools are permitted, which data is protected, which policies govern how students and faculty may use these systems – are made somewhere else. In committees, in administrative offices, by people with different institutional roles than the ones represented in that session.

The faculty in that room are classroom practitioners. They design courses. They grade papers. They hold office hours. They conduct experiments quietly and worry, sometimes, about getting in trouble for them. They are not, in the ordinary flow of institutional life, the people who set policy.

Ironically, the people most able to describe the consequences of institutional conditions are often the people least authorized to redesign them.

That is not a failure of the session. It is a description of how institutions divide their labor.

And it matters for what AI is doing in higher education right now.

Because the most consequential decisions about AI – what tools students can access, which systems become institutional infrastructure, what data those systems collect, and how that data is used – are being made in rooms that most faculty and most students never enter. Those decisions shape the conditions inside which everything else happens: the course design, the assignment, the office hour, the student who turns to a chatbot when no human resource feels available..

The governance question disappeared not because no one had thoughts about it. It disappeared because engaging it would have required stepping outside the role the institution had assigned to the people in that room.

That gap – between the people who experience conditions and the people who design them – is not incidental. It is structural. It is, in fact, one of the conditions the session was built to examine.

What the room could see was substantial: the cost of asking for help, the weight of disciplinary hierarchy, the quiet experiments conducted at the edges of systems nobody designed and nobody owns. What the room could not see – what no single room of classroom practitioners is positioned to see – is where the decisions that produce those conditions are being made.

That is not the room’s limitation. It is the institution’s design problem.

What Becomes Possible

The session ended the way many important conversations end: without resolution.

No policy was written. No committee was formed. No one left with a blueprint for redesigning higher education.

Instead, Maha thanked the group for opening topics that are usually not spoken about, and that, she said, really need to be spoken about.

The distinction matters.

The things named during those seventy-five minutes had not been unavailable before. Faculty had already seen what grades were doing to learning. They had already noticed the quiet legitimacy work students perform. They had already observed the costs attached to language, uncertainty, experimentation, and asking for help. Many had been carrying these observations for years.

What changed was not the information.

What changed were the conditions.

One participant wrote afterward that she left holding several feelings at once – something like unease, alongside curiosity, and something close to hope. Not certain. No reassured. Three things at once, none of them canceling the others out.

That may be the most honest description of what rooms like this can produce. They do not eliminate contradiction. They make contradiction discussable. They do not produce agreement. They make collective recognition possible.

Near the middle of the session, another participant posed a question that stayed in the room long after the conversation moved on.

She wondered whether AI might become the space where faculty and students could meet as co-learners – neither holding authority, both finding their way. She was not presenting herself as an expert. She named her own uncertainty plainly: she was navigating the same unfamiliar terrain as her students, and neither of them had a map.

Neither side pretending expertise. Neither side required to conceal uncertainty. For a moment, faculty and students appeared not as authorities and novices, but as fellow travelers in terrain neither had fully mapped.

It is a small thing to say in a seventy-five-minute session. It is not a small thing to say in an institution.

Across this series, I have returned to a student who refused a tutor. By the time help was offered, she had already calculated what asking for it would cost. The institution recorded her navigation. It could not see the relational experience that had produced it.

That was never simply a student problem.

What the room at AUC suggested, briefly, provisionally, under conditions that dissolved when the session ended, is that faculty and students may be navigating different positions within the same belonging architecture. The same conditions that make asking for help costly for students can make naming structural failure costly for faculty. Both groups learn to read rooms. Both learn what uncertainty costs. Both adapt themselves to conditions they did not design and often cannot fully see.

The room on June 16 did not solve that problem.

But for seventy-five minutes, it made a different calculation possible.

The first person said something difficult. The next person said something slightly more difficult. And then someone named the thing that had previously been unsayable.

You cannot redesign conditions you cannot collectively see.

For seventy-five minutes, the people who inhabit and reproduce those conditions were able to see them together.

What remains uncertain is whether institutions know how to preserve that kind of seeing.

Rooms end. People return to departments, committees, workloads, and inherited routines. Conditions continue reproducing themselves. What became visible can become invisible again.

What would it take for collective recognition to survive after the room ends – to move from conversation into institutional memory, from recognition into redesign, from a scheduled event into ordinary practice?

That question remains open.

It is also, increasingly, the work.

WeBe,

Dr. G

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On June 25, 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Supreme Court majority in Shelby County v. Holder: voting discrimination still exists. No one doubts that. Then the court removed the mechanism that made those words matter. Within hours, states once held in check announced the laws they had been holding. Eight years later, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act passed the House -- twice. In the Senate, it did not come to a floor vote. The Senate had the votes to change the rule that blocked it. The Senate chose the rule.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963 that the Negro’s greatest obstacle was not the Klansman but the white moderate -- who prefers the absence of tension to the presence of justice, who believes the problem has already been fixed, who agrees with the goal but not this method, not this season. That preference did not end in 1963. This poem begins before 1865 and shows where it has brought us.

WeBe,

Dr. G

Some people watch from windows 
where streets don’t reach them.

Where Castles are built and kept 
by the hands they still shackle -
where they still measure human worth 
in paper, ink, and metal.

Ask yourself 
why the loudest cries for law and order 
come from the safest rooms, 
from people who have never pressed themselves 
against a wall and counted seconds.

The Black community pleads for police protection. 
What it gets is indifference - 
streets patrolled by men in uniform 
looking for an excuse to get violent, 
vigilantes carrying the same excuse, 
since before they called it law, 
since before they wrote it down.

Since before 1865 -
since a colonial legislature decided 
the most efficient way to prevent 
the poor white man and the enslaved Black man 
from fighting together 
was to give one a badge, 
call the other a threat, 
and tell them both the danger 
lived next door.

They had been fighting together. 
That was the problem.

Some of them clean the houses 
they will never live in. 
Some of them guard the gates 
they will never pass through. 
They know the codes. 
They know what happens 
when someone arrives 
who doesn’t know how to act 
like they belong. 
They go home tired. 
They go to the polls.

The abolition of slavery 
led to bitter constitutional battles 
over who would be included in the American polity -
not who deserved safety, but who deserved to feel afraid.

Look further into 1965.

The People pressured elected officials 
into opening the American dream franchise -
passing the most comprehensive Voting Rights Act in history, 
expanding access to the American franchise.

Politicians soon began 
an ambitious covert disenfranchisement. 
Through the War on Crime 
against Black bodies, Black wealth, Black properties.

Covert means this:

The Chief Justice stood before the country 
and said: voting discrimination still exists. 
No one doubts that.

Then he removed the mechanism 
that made those words mean something.

He called it outdated. 
He called it our country has changed.

Within hours, 
the states that had been held in check 
announced the laws they had been holding.

The Senate had the votes. 
They said they believed in voting rights. 
They said John Lewis deserved a law in his name.

The bill passed the House. 
It passed the House again.

Not enough votes, the Senate said. 
We cannot change the rules, the Senate said.

The Senate had the votes to change the rules.

There are people 
genuinely kind to their cleaners, 
their gardeners, 
their caretakers -
generous at the table, 
respectful at the door, 
the same people who reject 
the language of vigilantes, 
who say they believe 
everyone deserves dignity.

They were taught it was fixed. 
They go to the polls. 
They come home. 
The signs stay in the yard.

Whether neoliberalism or white conservatives, 
Black Lives Matter or 
We Support Our Police signs -

there are still few Black neighbors 
living in historically Whites Only neighborhoods.

You’ve never wondered why?

The very people least affected by crimes of the body 
are the most vocal about needing protection 
from dangerous people.

The founding fathers 
wrote freedom into law 
while writing other people’s names into deeds.

In God We Trust, 
stamped on the currency 
that measures human worth.

Whose freedom. Whose father. 
Whose name in whose document. 
Who gets to write the law 
and who gets written into it.

But whose father enslaves them?

Not the ones they blamed. 
The ones who built the Castles. 
The ones told their neighbor was the danger 
while someone else held the deed.

The ones who cleaned the houses, 
guarded the gates, 
went to the polls, 
and voted to keep the walls 
they were never offered a door through.

Some people watch from windows 
where streets don’t reach them.

The rest of us 
built those windows, 
cleaned them, 
guarded them -
and were never let in.

Whitnessing is what they do from windows. 
The rest of us live in what they call the view.

Afraid was never the word for it.

We have been watching back 
the whole time.

They dubbed me Dr. G.

Over this series, we’ve been inside three lives.

Lester turned breakdown into breakthrough through art, ancestry, and the kind of community that shows up when institutions don’t. Julien – Juru – built relational infrastructure where systems forgot to provide it, and called what others mistake for luck by its real name: design. Edimbo learned that belonging starts in your own skin, then extends outward through drum circles, murals, and the persistent act of proper representation. All three are building what wasn’t there. All three are doing, quietly and deliberately, what institutions have not.

This week, we turn to a report – what it can see, and what it cannot.

The Golden Ticket, released this spring by Georgetown, contains a finding I don’t want to get lost: California reaching its credential attainment goal without all demographic groups reaching it would widen prosperity divides, not close them. That finding is worth $2 trillion. And it is right.

Lester, Julien, and Edimbo have already shown us what navigation looks like from the inside. This essay asks what institutions would need to look like from the outside – designed to receive people who’ve been navigating without a map.

The question isn’t whether to invest. It’s what to invest in building.

Access Achieved, Belonging Not Yet Designed

A student arrives having done everything the system required.

The application is complete. The acceptance has been earned. Financial aid is secured, enrollment confirmed. At some point in that process, she encountered what the institution said about itself – its mission, its promise, what it claimed it would help her become. She held something from that encounter. A phrase. A vision of what the next few years would make possible.

Stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory imagine access as something magical – a ticket found, a door that opens. This piece begins where those stories end: inside, where what was promised at the door meets what was actually built.

What comes next is different.

The next set of decisions is less visible. There are still requirements, but they are not always presented in sequence. There are still deadlines, but they attach to choices not yet fully explained. Questions arise that assume a starting point the student may not have: What will you study? Which track are you on? Who have you spoken with about your plan?

Nothing here is hidden, exactly. But it is not arranged in a way that makes it easy to see.

Some students arrive already knowing how to move through this. They know which questions matter, and when to ask them. They know who to speak to, how to interpret what they hear. When something is unclear, they have a way of making it clearer – through prior experience, through networks, through a felt sense of how the system is meant to work.

Others arrive with the same admission but not the same orientation.

They listen closely. They follow the instructions given, even when the larger structure is still forming. They persist. They do what institutions ask. What they need to move forward is not absent – but it has not been built into the conditions they arrived in. It must be assembled, piece by piece, as they go.

From the outside, the difference is difficult to detect. Everyone is enrolled. Everyone has access to the same courses, the same offices, the same resources.

But access is no longer the only question.

The question that remains is not whether they are ready. It is whether the institution was designed to receive them.

The Report Enters

In April 2026, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce released The Golden Ticket – a California-focused report asking what it would take for 70 percent of adults to hold a postsecondary credential, and for that level of attainment to be true across every demographic group. The projection is expansive: $4.4 trillion over fifty years. The title borrows from Roald Dahl – a golden ticket to something extraordinary – and it is exactly the right frame, as far as it goes.

The report answers its central question with scale. Reaching the 70 percent threshold is not only a matter of increasing overall attainment. It requires closing the gap between who is currently counted and who is not. The difference between those two realities – aggregate attainment and equitable attainment – is not marginal. It is $2 trillion. That finding is right – documented, defensible, consequential. It reframes the policy question entirely: the goal is not a statewide number. It is a statewide number that every group reaches.

That is the report’s best contribution, and it deserves the attention it will receive.

The report is specific about where the distance is greatest: adults returning to education later in life, those balancing work and family alongside enrollment, communities least well served by existing pathways. Closing that distance, the report makes clear, requires not only bringing more people into the system, but ensuring those who enter can move through it.

Among the recommendations that follow – expanded funding, aligned pathways, stronger transfer systems – one shifts the frame. It proposes recognizing learning that has already taken place outside formal academic settings: through work, through experience, through forms of knowledge that do not always register within institutional categories. California would automatically award retroactive credentials to adults who qualify, acknowledging what they have already built.

Most of the recommendations extend what already exists. This one changes what the system recognizes. It is easy to miss.

It appears without fanfare, listed among its peers as though it were one intervention among many. It is not. It points toward something the report does not fully name: an institution designed to receive what students already know, rather than one that requires them to translate themselves into its categories before they can count.

If entry is secured, and if the system can begin to recognize learning that did not originate within it, then what remains between arrival and completion is not only a matter of expanding programs or increasing participation. It is a question of how the system receives the people it has invited in – and whether the conditions they encounter are designed to carry them forward.

That gap is where the report’s causal chain does not yet fully account for what happens next.

The Two Broken Links

The report maps two critical transitions: from access to enrollment, and from enrollment to completion. Those are the links the 70 percent goal depends on most. For most of the causal chain, the evidence is real.

Except two.

The evidence that access – secured through funding, proximity, and outreach – reliably produces enrollment for the populations the report most needs to reach is not established in the report. It is assumed. The evidence that enrollment reliably produces completion for those same populations is not absent, but it is incomplete. These are not gaps in the data. They are gaps in the causal logic – places where the chain requires something the report does not specify.

This is not a critique of the researchers. The methods that make large-scale economic projection possible – quantitative modeling of attainment rates and earnings trajectories across demographic groups – are excellent tools for seeing destinations. They were not built to see what happens in the space between access achieved and enrollment confirmed, or between enrollment and completion. That space is real. It is full.

What occupies those two broken links is not a random assortment of student characteristics or institutional programs. It is something specific: the conditions of belonging within the institution, and whether they are designed to receive the people the report most needs to reach.

A different question clarifies what happens next: where does the map live, and who holds it?

In some institutions, it is built in. The sequence of decisions is legible. The next step is visible before it is urgent. When something is unclear, there are established ways of making it clearer – through relationships, through prior familiarity, through signals about how the system is meant to work.

In others, the map is distributed unevenly. It exists, but not in a way that is readily accessible to everyone. Students assemble it as they go – through trial and error, through piecing together partial information, through repeated efforts to translate their questions into forms the system recognizes.

From a distance, these two conditions look the same. The same programs are in place. The same resources are available. The same expectations apply.

But the experience of moving through those conditions is not the same.

If the goal is to bring more people into the system and support them through completion, then what matters is not only what the institution offers. It is whether the conditions those offerings sit within are structured to carry people forward – or whether progress depends on what students are able to construct on their own, piece by piece, as they go.

The Conditions, Named

These conditions are not hypothetical. They have appeared in this series, in specific moments, over the past year. They look different in each case. Their structure is the same.

Erica was searching for colleges at 5 in the morning, three browser tabs open, following the results as they came. She was doing what you do without a map: working with what was available, as it appeared. What she could not yet see – what no one had helped her see – was what the search was not showing, and whether the tools in front of her had been designed with her situation in mind. She followed the map available to her. The map was not wrong, exactly. It just wasn’t built for where she was trying to go.

The map exists. Not everyone arrives knowing where it is, who holds it, or how to read it when they find it.

Then there is what asking costs.

In campus environments where belonging is uncertain, a question reveals what you do not yet know – to someone whose assessment of you is still forming. A student calculating whether to go to office hours is not calculating the academic benefit against the inconvenience. She is calculating it against the belonging risk: what it costs to appear uncertain in a place where she is not yet sure she belongs. If a chatbot sometimes feels lower-stakes than a door with a professor’s name on it, that is not a statement about the student. It is a statement about what the environment has been designed to make possible.

She is not calculating the academic benefit. She is calculating the belonging risk.

Lester received a D on a paper. The feedback: your writing is not strong. You have a lot of grammatical errors. Your story is not flowing. His response, years later: it’s really like how I talk. So that’s how I write. His professor was evaluating a paper. He was also, without intending to, using a particular set of conventions about what academic writing sounds like as a proxy for whether the thinking inside it was worth taking seriously. Lester’s thinking was worth taking seriously. He was on academic probation by junior year. Not because he could not do the work. Because the assessment of his work was entangled with an assessment of his voice.

Edimbo grew up with uncles who could speak at length about Lumumba, about pre-colonial Congolese history, about what the Congo had built and what had been taken from it. That knowledge was extensive, passed down, held in community. When he arrived at an institution, there was no category for it. The curriculum did not ask for it. What he knew from the world he came from was not what would be counted in the world he was entering. The institution was not designed to receive it.

These are not separate problems. They are versions of the same structural condition: an institution designed for a specific kind of student, encountering students for whom it was not designed, and producing – through that mismatch – the conditions that sit inside the two broken links.

The report’s data can see the distance. What it cannot yet see is what occupies the space.

What Changes When Recognition Changes

If the space between arrival and completion is shaped by the conditions students encounter, then the question is what it looks like when those conditions change.

The report offers one answer, quietly.

Among its recommendations, one shifts the frame. It proposes awarding credentials retroactively to adults who already meet the requirements through prior learning and work – recognizing what has already been built, outside the classroom, across time, in forms that do not always register within institutional categories. Tens of millions of Americans have already done this work – the system was never designed to see it. At first glance, this reads as a policy adjustment: a faster path to completion by accounting for learning that has already taken place.

It does that. But it also does something more fundamental.

It changes what the institution is organized to recognize. Not its capacity – its understanding of what counts. That is not one intervention among many. It is a prototype of what it looks like when an institution extends recognition outward – toward what people know from lives the institution did not design.

Seen from this angle, the recommendation generalizes.

For a student like Erica, it would mean the map is not something she must assemble on her own. It is made more visible, earlier – built into the conditions she arrives in. For knowledge like Edimbo’s, it would mean recognition is not limited to what originates inside the institution, but extends to what students bring with them.

If that principle holds in one place, it raises a broader question.

What else would change if institutions were designed, from the outset, to receive what students already know? Not as an exception, applied after the fact. As a condition built in from the beginning.

That question is where the work begins.

Invest in Building What, Exactly?

The report projects $321 billion in investment for California – and the case for investment is real. The question this piece has been asking is not whether to invest. It is what to invest in building.

More of a system designed for students who already know how to move through it? Or something designed for the people the report says it most needs to reach – the people who have been navigating, piece by piece, through conditions that were not built with their arrival in mind?

Lester had an answer – not as abstraction, but as a blueprint. Alumni needed to partner with students, to check in on them, to connect before the difficulty made the distance too wide. He had been building the relational infrastructure he hadn’t found when he needed it. Juru called what others mistake for luck by its real name – design – and built accordingly. Edimbo built what he knew onto walls across Seattle and Tacoma, because what he knew deserved to be seen. None of them were waiting for institutional permission. They were building what the institution hadn’t designed.

The question this series has been asking, quietly, for nearly a year: if a chatbot sometimes feels lower-stakes than a door with a professor’s name on it, what does that reveal about the environments we’ve built?

Not about the students. About the environments.

That is the question every institution responsible for closing the distance the report describes now has to answer – not by waiting for $321 billion, but by asking, right now, what the conditions they’ve built are designed to do. Whether those conditions dissolve the gap – or leave it in place, piece by piece, for the next student who arrives.

For institutions working on these questions, the work is already closer than it appears.

Investment, on its own, does not reach these conditions. Design does.

WeBe,

Dr. G

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This essay is part of an ongoing series on belonging, institutional design, and what it costs to ask for help in spaces not built with you in mind. It follows three previous stories – Spiritual Downloads, Natty Dread, and Random by Design – and draws on a recent webinar and a public Padlet that remain open. If something here resonates, the Padlet is still waiting. Your expertise is part of the record.

“There’s absolutely no way I’m gonna go to confirm to these people what they already think about me.”

She said it plainly. No drama. She was describing why she would not accept a tutor – not because tutoring was hard to find, not because she didn’t have time, not because she didn’t need it. She needed it. She knew she needed it. She was failing pre-calculus at a selective college for the first time in her life, and the resource was right there, available, offered.

She refused it because using it would cost her something tutoring cannot give back. She wasn’t refusing help. She was reading the room. She was making the most rational decision available to her given what the environment had built around her.

I know that cost. I navigated systems that assumed knowledge I had never been given, and I learned early that asking for help in the wrong room carries a weight that the help itself cannot remove.

This wasn’t the first time a room had made the decision before I could. The afternoon I left a schoolmate’s on-campus memorial service – I was fifteen, a sophomore at Charlotte Amalie High School in St. Thomas – I slipped out through a side door and walked home through a shortcut I knew well. For the first time, I considered military service my path forward. Not because I had been counseled toward it. Because the other paths were not visible to me. The guidance was well-meaning but abstract. No roadmap was provided (Garnett, 2025a).

I wasn’t giving up. I was doing what students do when the institution assumes knowledge it has not provided: I was adapting. Making the most rational decision available to me given what the environment had and had not built. And to be clear, that environment was not the product of individual failure. It reflected a broader system – underresourced, historically shaped, and operating within a territorial context that constrained what even the most committed adults could make visible. The absence was real. So was the effort. Both can be true at the same time.

That understanding shaped the research I have spent the last decade building. It also shaped what I heard when Lester described getting back his first paper.

He had arrived at Bowdoin College from Seattle’s Central District – first-generation, connected to the institution through a network of mentors who had built a bridge he could follow. Strong. Prepared in the ways his community had prepared him. Prepared, too, within a K-12 system shaped by pressures that compound across years – where what counts as strong writing had been defined elsewhere, and resourced unevenly. The professor’s feedback on his first paper was direct: the writing was not strong, the story was not flowing. Lester knew exactly why. “It’s really kind of like how I talk. So that’s how I would write” (Garnett, 2025b).

His voice was oral. The institution had no room for it. That moment did not just give him a grade. It told him something about whether he belonged there.

He eventually found belonging – at the African American Society’s gathering space, which he described as the place “closest to home to me” (ibid.). Junior year. It should have been from the first week.

The student who refused a tutor and Lester, who received a D on a paper written in his own voice, are not the same person. But they encountered the same designed condition: an environment that read their knowledge, their voice, their way of asking as evidence of inadequacy – not as an institutional failure to make room. They knew each other, in fact. She was a fellow Bowdoin student – someone Lester would later describe as giving him “big sis, big cousin vibes” and count as a peer mentor (Garnett, 2025b). And when Lester told his story publicly – years after graduation, in a piece on this Substack – she was among the first to read it.

She recognized it.

What the Room Revealed

All of this started with a question I couldn’t stop thinking about.

In October 2025, Lance Eaton delivered a keynote at Connecticut College called The Sleep of Liberal Arts Produces AI. Drawing on Goya’s famous etching, he asked: if the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of the liberal arts produce? His answer: AI – not because AI is monstrous, but because it rushed in to fill a void the liberal arts had been quietly creating. Dismissing what students found meaningful. Fetishizing forms of knowledge that excluded as much as they elevated. Externalizing the costs of learning until students had nowhere affordable to turn.

Lance named something real. But it’s worth being precise about what kind of “sleep” we’re talking about. For many students, the liberal arts didn’t fall asleep. They were never designed with them in mind to begin with. The question isn’t when the system drifted. It’s who it was built to serve – and who learned to survive inside it anyway. What AI has done is not create that condition. It has made it harder to ignore.

I wrote a response: The Monsters We Made Invisible. Lance joined me for it. And that conversation became the seed of two webinars – first, Awakening Together: Building Community Around AI in the Liberal Arts, exploring what waking up might look like in practice. Then Who Built the Room? Belonging by Design in the Age of AI, which asked something harder: not what AI replaced, but what it revealed about the rooms we had already built.

I brought these questions into that second room on March 24, 2026, to see whether what I had observed across years of research held across institutions. The panelists were faculty and administrators from Bowdoin, Carleton, Colby, and Connecticut College. The audience was wider: librarians, online educators, practitioners, from access institutions, administrators who had been first-generation students themselves.

I had designed a Padlet – a structured set of prompts, still open, still available – to capture what the panel conversation might not. Five questions, each naming a gap where belonging tends to break down. And one throughline question I placed at the center of everything:

If AI sometimes feels lower-risk than office hours, what does that reveal about the environments we’ve built?

That question generated more responses than any other prompt. Not because it was easier. Because it named something people already knew but had not had language for. The most precise answer came not from the panel but from the audience, in a written comment:

“I think this one is often because of institutions giving teachers more and more students, which makes it harder for teachers to have enough time for office hours, even if they wanted to encourage students to come.”

Class size is a governance decision. Relational availability is its consequence. That is not theory. It is description. The relational availability that makes institutional resources feel safe is a governance decision – made when class sizes are set, workloads are assigned, staffing ratios are determined. Individual faculty willingness is real and matters. It is not sufficient.

Eric Chown, a faculty member on the panel from Bowdoin, named what others were circling: “We’ve taken that freedom away from them.” He was talking about AI policies – the inconsistency of three different policies in three courses, leaving students unsure what was permitted and afraid to ask. But the sentence reached further than he may have intended. We have taken that freedom away from them. The freedom to be uncertain in a room where uncertainty is safe.

The Padlet also revealed something about which gaps are hardest to name publicly. The prompt about voice – where students feel their way of seeing is evaluated rather than engaged – received a single response. One. In a forum where participants’ names were attached to what they wrote.

The silence is data too. Some gaps require a different kind of room to surface. A smaller room. A less visible one. A room where the cost of naming what happened to you is lower than the cost of staying quiet.

What Students Learn About the Room

That is the same calculation the student at Bowdoin was making when she refused a tutor.

That is the same calculation Lester was making when he found his way – junior year, not freshman year – to a room that felt like home.

That is the same calculation Edimbo was making every time he walked back into a history classroom where the teacher’s version of the past did not include the past his family had lived. He eventually stopped correcting the record in that room. He had learned what speaking up cost.

That is the same calculation Juru was making across four institutions over eight years – not wandering, but navigating a system that never made its routes visible, choosing each next step based on what the institution had and had not built. His graduate thesis is called Random, By Design. That title is its own structural argument: what looks like randomness from the outside is precision from the inside, the accumulated intelligence of someone who learned to build what wasn’t there.

These are not four stories about four students. They are one story about what institutions have been producing – and what students have been doing with it. The calculation each of them made was rational when it formed. Repeated often enough, it stopped being a calculation. It became who they were in that room.

Here is what a practitioner wrote during the webinar that produced this research:

“I’m both a teacher and a student, and I work full time. For me, AI is available at 2 am when I’m working on my homework. I like to keep this in mind about my students as well.” (Padlet participant, March 2026)

She is not describing a failure of discipline. She is describing a condition of her life. At two in the morning, the professor is not available. The tutoring center is not open. The study group disbanded hours ago. But the question will not keep. And the chatbot – whatever its limitations, whatever it cannot understand, whatever it might get wrong – will not judge her for not knowing.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

The dominant explanation for AI use in higher education is friction. Students use AI because it is faster and easier. Reduce the friction, the logic goes, and they will return to the institution’s resources. But friction is about effort. What the practitioner is describing is not effort. It is risk – the social and relational cost of being seen not-knowing in a context that has not been designed to protect you from the consequences of that visibility.

Another participant put it plainly: “the cost of help-seeking to your social reputation can seem steep” (Padlet participant, March 2026).

Steep. Which means calculable. Students are doing the calculation every time they decide whether to send the email, walk into the office, raise their hand. And in many of the environments we have built, the calculation produces the same answer: the chatbot is safer.

There’s another layer to this that’s harder to name. As Ike Lage, a faculty member on the panel from Colby, put it in a follow-up exchange, in most classrooms, the same person who is there to help you learn is also the person who will evaluate you. That alone changes the risk. Asking for help isn’t just about learning – it’s about revealing a gap to someone whose judgment carries consequences. Even in the most supportive environments, that tension remains. The goal is not to remove that tension. It persists not because faculty intend it to, but because the structure makes it so. Challenge is what learning is made of. The goal is to ensure the difficulty students face is intellectual – the kind that grows something – rather than social and reputational, the kind that shuts the attempt down before it begins.

This is not students failing to engage. This is students engaging – precisely, rationally – with the environments we have actually built, rather than the environments we imagine we have built. When Lester had to search for belonging inside his own institution, when he found it accidentally, junior year, in a gathering space rather than in the daily architecture of his academic experience – it was not designed to find him. That is a design finding, not a character finding. And it is not unique to one student, or one college, one kind of voice.

When Edimbo, who grew up between France and Washington State, corrected his high school history teacher – accurately, drawing on knowledge his uncles had taught him – he was sent out of class. Not for fighting. Not for disrupting. “I got kicked out of class not for fighting – I got kicked out because I’m checking you for lying to me in my face,” he said (Garnett, 2025c). His knowledge was more accurate than the curriculum. The institution’s response was to remove him from the room.

A chatbot does not do that. It does not police the origin of what you know.

What the webinar confirmed is that the pattern is not exceptional. It is designed. Not by malicious intent – the panelists who showed up to that room cared, genuinely. But care at the level of individual effort does not redesign the conditions that make asking dangerous. The faculty member who extends office hours does not change the grading architecture that makes uncertainty costly. The administrator who posts a belonging statement does not change the advising ratios that make relational investment structurally impossible.

What would redesigning those conditions look like? That is the question the webinar could name but not yet answer. It is the question the next conversation in this series will try to build toward.

If students are turning to AI, the question isn’t only how to stop them. It’s what their behavior is telling us about the environments we’ve built. AI is not just a tool – it’s a signal. It shows us where asking for help has been costly for a long time. And if students will use it regardless of policy, a second question follows: how do we help them use it well, critically and deliberately, in conversation with other people? That’s a design problem

In practice, that work does not happen in the abstract. It happens inside institutions willing to examine the rooms they’ve built – and to test, together, what it would mean to build them differently.

What It Would Mean to Build It Differently

My grandmother used to tell me: the little mountain things are the most extraordinary (Garnett, 2026).

She worked in the sugar cane fields in the Caribbean – outside every institution that might have certified her – through that labor, through faith, and through the kind of knowledge that accumulates in the body and not in degrees. She did not need a PhD to understand how systems measure people incorrectly. What she was telling me was not that small things eventually add up. She was telling me the measure itself was wrong. That what looks small from the outside is often the accumulation of everything that has been survived, built, and carried forward.

She passed early in my doctoral program. She never saw me finish. But she had already given me the framework I would spend the next decade trying to prove.

She had not studied belonging design. She was practicing it.

I am still learning how to recognize what she already knew.

What she understood – what Lester found in the African American Society’s gathering space, what the fellow Bowdoin student understood when she later guided the students who came after her, what Edimbo was defending when he corrected the record, what Juru was designing when he built relational infrastructure where the system had not – is that belonging is not a feeling institutions produce. It is a condition they either design for or design against. And like any condition, it is produced – intentionally or not – by the structures people are asked to move through. And when they do not design for it, people build it themselves. In the margins. Junior year. At 2 am, in a chatbot that will not remember what they asked.

The work of this series is to name that condition clearly enough that something different can be designed in its place. Not a program. Not a statement. Not an AI policy that addresses the symptom while leaving the environment unchanged. An infrastructure – relational, architectural, funded, accountable – that makes asking safe before a student ever has to calculate whether it is.

The hardest part of redesigning a room is that the people inside it have already learned who they are in it. The student who never asks has an identity now. The faculty member who holds the line on evaluation has an identity now. Changing the conditions is necessary. It is not sufficient. The design work includes making it possible for people to become someone slightly different than the person the old room required them to be.

If you have sat in one of these rooms – as a student, a faculty member, an advisor, an administrator – the Padlet from the March 24 webinar is still open here. The prompts are there. The questions about where voice gets evaluated rather than engaged, where the map is missing, where admission and belonging diverge. Your response is part of the record. Your experience is data.

If you want to watch the conversation that produced this essay, the recording is available here.

The student who refused a tutor is not a cautionary tale. She is evidence. She read the room accurately. She protected something the institution was not designed to protect. And in doing so, she told us more about the environment than any survey, any retention report, any dashboard could.

What would it mean to build a room where the calculation was no longer necessary?

Where the asking was safe?

Where the little mountain things were recognized as extraordinary – not despite the institution, but because of how it was built?

That is not a rhetorical question.

It is a design brief.

WeBe,

Dr. G

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Since January, the budget has made the argument.

When this essay went up on MLK Day, King’s warning felt urgent but still somewhat abstract. The country has since provided the evidence.

We say we protect families, stabilize households, and build opportunity at home. The budget tells a more precise story.

Military action in the Middle East disrupted oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. This week, a gallon of regular gasoline in America costs $3.79. Diesel, which moves food, medicine, and nearly everything else, costs over five dollars. In a country where nearly seven in ten workers still drive to work, that kind of price shock does not stay at the pump.

These are not weather events. They are the domestic face of a foreign policy decision, traveling home through supply chains and arriving hardest at households already stretched thin. The same pattern communities have been naming and living for years. Meanwhile, federal spending on Medicaid and food assistance will decrease household resources by $900 billion. Not a separate story. The same story, expressed at a different address.

In the war’s first two days alone, the Pentagon used $5.6 billion in munitions.

King called it a “demonic destructive suction tube.” Not metaphor – mechanism. War doesn’t stay abroad. It travels home through budgets, prices, and the quiet withdrawal of public protection.

The families absorbing that withdrawal are not random. They are the ones the essay named: the worker one bad month from collapse, the household whose belonging has always been conditional.

For some, this isn’t a theory. It’s already a memory in the body. They don’t experience the Strait of Hormuz as foreign policy. They experience it as the price of groceries.

Systems don’t need to announce their priorities. The allocation does it for them.

And the damage runs on indifference – not hostility. A word I’ve used before. Abandonment doesn’t require intent. It requires only that enough people stay comfortable while others absorb the cost.

People can name a problem. Systems can survive the naming. But naming – done clearly, done together, done with structural honesty – is still where any repair begins. This was always a budget-and-belonging story. The youth in these pages already know it. They have been doing the math quietly, tracing patterns shaped long before them. Their elders named the mechanism first.

The full argument is in the essay. It was written in January. The news is still catching up.

WeBe,

Dr G

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In subzero Minnesota, January 23, 2026, that sound was doors closing. Not slamming. Closing – deliberately, in coordination, across the Twin Cities. Businesses where commerce normally hums fell silent. Streets where people normally hurry alone filled with bodies moving close for warmth. Breath made visible in the cold, rising together. Organizers described it as a general strike – potentially, they said, the first in eighty years.

But the sound wasn’t historical. It was immediate: the city’s usual chorus interrupted by collective refusal.

You can hear what chorus does when institutional belonging collapses. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t plead. It gathers. It synchronizes. It breathes together. And in that breath – in that gathered silence and coordinated withdrawal – people create a temporary homeland when the official one has failed them.

The next day, in the reported timeline, a man was shot during protests. That man was identified as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and ICU nurse who was fatally shot by an ICE agent – the second such death in Minneapolis within three weeks. What followed, in coverage, often reads less like a search for truth and more like a contest over whose voice gets to name reality first.

The First Voice Sounds Certain

In the early hours after the reported shooting, what arrived fastest wasn’t clarity. It was record-voice – the kind of speech that sounds like conclusion even while the event is still unfolding.

Within hours, according to multiple news accounts, an official characterization emerged. The language described in reporting: “defensive shots,” “approached,” “resisted.” Whatever the underlying facts turn out to be, this language performs a recognizable voice function. It turns a volatile, human moment into administrative grammar.

That move has a sound. It’s measured. It’s tidy. It’s calm enough to feel like competence. The emotional weight – a man dying, a family grieving – gets drained into procedure. As if the death were an item being processed. As if a human moment were a form that just needed filing. Not “we killed someone.” The shift from human action to technical event is how power sounds like neutrality.

And here’s what this does to belonging: If you speak in that register, you sound credible. If you speak in grief, you sound biased. Caring becomes a tone problem. Tone becomes the gate.

That’s how a public record can be built before the public is even allowed to breathe.

When the record is contested, listen for who gets to sound calm.

How a Word Becomes a Weapon

In reported accounts, the language escalated within 24-48 hours. Not just “approached” and “resisted” anymore, but phrases like “domestic terrorist,” “tried to assassinate,” “wanted to massacre law enforcement.” These weren’t tentative characterizations pending investigation. They were declarative, circulating from the highest levels of government.

Listen for inversion – when legal status sharpens into character verdict. The armed framed as endangered, the subject framed as maximum threat. And it doesn’t need to be proven to work. It only needs a stable emotional stance that listeners can inhabit: “They were defending. We were under attack.” That posture recruits belonging through a simple trade: repeat the label and you belong to the side of safety. Question it and you become visible as something else.

“Domestic terrorist” has three properties that make it spread: short enough to repeat, strong enough to carry fear, broad enough to flatten complexity. It’s rhythmic. It’s memorable. And when coverage describes the phrase appearing simultaneously across aligned media ecosystems, federal channels, and social platforms, you’re watching consensus being manufactured through echo.

This is sealing. Not “convincing.” Sealing is what happens after the room no longer treats doubt as a live option. The sealed room has a sound: fewer questions, more repetition, more certainty. More people speaking as if they were there.

And in that room, silence becomes risky.

Lincoln said it plainly in 1858: “He who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” The battle isn’t over laws yet. It’s over what sound gets to count as sentiment – and whose voice gets to do the molding.

And once you hear who gets to sound calm, you can hear who’s being asked to go quiet.

When Doors Stay Closed

One of the most punishing chorus technologies isn’t shouting. It’s making non-participation visible.

When a room’s unified sound reaches a certain volume, the people who aren’t singing stand out. Not because they’re loud. Because they’re quiet. And that quiet becomes a kind of statement – whether they intend it or not.

In the Minnesota case, there’s a different kind of silence described: the silence of access denied. State investigators reportedly sought to examine the scene. Federal authorities reportedly blocked them, despite warrants. The sound of investigation – cameras, evidence collection, interviews – never happened. Or rather, it happened behind closed doors where the public couldn’t hear it.

When evidence can’t be collected, it can’t speak. When testimony can’t be gathered, competing accounts can’t emerge. This is silence as control. Not the silence of consent, but the silence of doors that won’t open.

Everyone Watches the Same Video

At some point – reports vary on timing – video reportedly emerged. Bystander footage, described in multiple outlets as showing the sequence of events. And immediately, a battle began. Not over what the image showed, but over what voice gets to tell you what you’re seeing.

One caption, from official sources: threat, aggression, handgun.

Another caption, from journalistic analysis described in coverage: phone, sequence disputed, contradiction of official account.

The same image can “prove” opposite claims depending on whose narration surrounds it. In this case, coverage described multiple major outlets reporting analysis that contradicted the official characterization. But contradiction doesn’t automatically override first framing. Which caption persists often depends less on which is accurate and more on which institutional network keeps amplifying it.

Then His Parents Speak

In accounts of the family’s response, there’s a phrase that cut through: “sickening lies told about our son.”

Not “we disagree with the characterization.” Not “the facts are disputed.” Just: lies. About our son.

That’s not an argument. That’s a re-humanizing force. It’s lament – the ancient form that doesn’t ask power for permission to grieve, but insists grief itself is evidence. A family doesn’t merely challenge official facts. A family says: You are talking about a person we know. And you are lying about him.

Kinship authority operates on a different register than official announcements or journalistic verification. It operates on moral clarity born from intimate knowledge. The family’s voice creates a different acoustic space – one where “our son” resists being flattened into “individual” or “subject” or “threat.”

And underneath the public refusal, there’s a quieter technology at work: the shelter that families create for each other when the public sphere turns hostile. Even when spoken to cameras, kinship language can function like a whisper – making a small room inside the loud one where truth can still be said without performance.

This pattern repeats. In reporting about an earlier shooting – Renée Good, 17 days before – her family also spoke. And they didn’t just dispute facts. They named a pattern: two U.S. citizens, two federal shootings, less than three weeks. “Trust your own eyes,” they said.

Pattern recognition is its own form of interruption. It refuses to let each incident be sealed off as isolated. It insists on connection. And when families name patterns that officials want kept separate, they’re not just challenging facts. They’re challenging the acoustic structure that keeps power’s contradictions from resonating together.

What People Did in the Cold

Not all chorus is enforcement. Sometimes chorus is what people build when institutional belonging collapses.

Return to that cold January day. The strike. Doors closing where commerce normally speaks. Streets filling where people normally hurry alone. Bodies moving close for warmth. The city’s usual hum interrupted by deliberate absence.

You can hear chorus as resistance. Not asking to be saved. Not begging for protection. Just: gathering, synchronizing, breathing together, refusing to participate in business as usual.

The cold matters here. Subzero temperatures make the choice visible – literally. Every breath becomes vapor. Everybody needs another body for warmth. Eisenhower, warning about the arms race, once said that every gun made represents “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” The people in those streets knew both kinds of cold: the weather and the calculation. What does a militarized response cost the people who live here?

The physical cost of standing outside together makes the chorus undeniable. These aren’t people clicking “like” from their phones. These are people whose presence required courage, coordination, and collective commitment to each other’s survival.

This kind of chorus doesn’t request state protection. It withdraws consent. Economic blackout. A silence that finally means something: we will not work, we will not buy, we will not cooperate with what you’re doing.

And in the reported sequence, after this collective refusal – when that chorus was still echoing through the city – force entered the soundscape. A man was shot at a protest. The official narrative tried to frame it as isolated violence. But the timing described in coverage suggests something else: chorus forming, then collision.

When Someone on the Inside Says “No”

And then – this might be the most important sound of all – a voice that wasn’t supposed to interrupt, did.

A Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, Chris Mattel, announced he was ending his campaign. Not because he lost support. Because he could no longer support what he described as “retribution” against Minnesota citizens.

The context matters: Mattel had previously offered legal counsel to the officer involved in the Renée Good shooting. This wasn’t a progressive critic or an outside activist. This was someone inside the expected chorus – someone whose voice was supposed to harmonize with federal enforcement – breaking ranks.

His statement, captured in transcript: “United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens carry documents to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong.” And then, with legal precision: “ICE has authorized its agents to raid homes using a civil warrant that need only be signed by a Border Patrol agent. That’s unconstitutional and it’s wrong.”

Not “I disagree with the policy.” Not “I have concerns.” Just: “That’s unconstitutional. And it’s wrong.”

Two precise, moral sentences. Said by someone who wasn’t supposed to say them.

And here’s the part that bends the Constitution into a question mark: the U.S. military allows lawful permanent residents – not just citizens – to enlist. That means some of the same families being told to carry papers proving citizenship are also allowed to wear the uniform defending it.

Martin Luther King Jr. once named this bargain in another war: men sent to defend freedoms abroad that they could not safely enjoy at home. The language has changed since Vietnam. The structure hasn’t. That bargain hasn’t disappeared. It’s widened.

This is chorus crossing ideology. When belonging is threatened – when constitutional violations become visible enough – the expected alignments break. Someone who defended police in an earlier shooting now says the current operations are retribution.

“I have to look my daughters in the eye and tell them I believe I did what was right.”

That’s not policy analysis. That’s chorus built on kinship, just like the families. Voice operating at the level where belonging to your children matters more than belonging to your party.

What This Is Actually About

This isn’t a claim about motives. It’s a map of functions.

You can believe in immigration enforcement and still believe the public deserves an accountable record. You can support federal authority and still ask: Why was investigation access blocked? Why did the official characterization arrive before evidence could be collected?

These aren’t partisan questions. They’re constitutional ones.

When a public crisis breaks, several voice technologies race each other:

Record-voice arrives first, draining emotion. Inversion frames power’s actions as defense. Labels become singable, sealing space. Silence is enforced – doors closed, dissent visible, evidence inaccessible. Images appear, and caption wars begin. Small voices interrupt: families, investigators, officials from inside who break ranks. And sometimes – rarely – people gather in the cold and refuse. They build a chorus that withdraws consent rather than requesting protection.

Chorus doesn’t argue. It breathes.

Belonging is enforced or liberated through sound long before it’s argued in policy.

When the record is contested, listen for who gets to sound calm. When you hear a phrase becoming singable, ask what it’s doing to the room. When you hear detachment masquerading as neutrality, ask whose grief is being disqualified. When you see an image, ask who is captioning it – and who benefits if that caption persists. When you hear a voice from inside the expected chorus break ranks, listen carefully. That break is often where the truth has been hiding, waiting for someone with positional authority to finally name it.

Because the battle is often not between “truth” and “lies” in the abstract. It’s between choruses. One chorus says: Believe the first voice. Repeat the label. Trust the record. The other says: Trust your eyes. Count the pattern. Notice who’s silenced. Breathe together until you can’t be ignored.

The chorus that wins gets to call itself the record. But the chorus that gathers in the cold? That chorus is singing something older and more durable than any official record could ever be.

It’s singing: We’re still here. We know each other. We’re breathing together. And you can’t make us lie about what we’ve seen.

That’s a freedom song. Not because it wins every time. But because it survives to be sung again.

WeBe,

Dr. G

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“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

~Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967

King isn’t arguing for weakness. He’s arguing that strength has prerequisites. A nation that can bankroll force but can’t bankroll a stable homefront isn’t secure – it’s brittle. Call it “social uplift” or call it “domestic capacity”: when people can’t live, fear rises, and fear becomes policy.

December 2025

In December 2025, Dave Chappelle took the stage and described a town in Ohio where he’d quietly bought most of the property over twenty-five years. The town, he explained, sits like “a little itty-bitty Bernie Sanders Island in the Trump Sea” – poor whites, the “dirty hippie” kind, who’d welcomed him until the math changed. “Liberal white people,” Chappelle observed, “let Black people do whatever [they] want until you buy most of their town.” Then the suspicion arrived. They wanted affordable housing. He reminded them he’s “not no public servant. I’m a capitalist.”

The bit landed as comedy, but it exposed something structural: when a Black man accumulates property in a white-majority space, the expectations shift. Liberal tolerance, it turns out, extends only so far as economic power remains where it’s expected to be. Chappelle wasn’t gentrifying – there’s no word for what he was doing, he said, because the language of displacement only applies one direction. When the script flips, the mechanism shows itself.

He moved on to other observations. The federal government had deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and cut government jobs through something called DOGE. The housing market in his hometown plunged twenty percent.

And in recent moments, across different cities, federal enforcement operations shifted from exceptional interventions to more familiar scenes – barriers and crowd-control tools appearing in public spaces, clashing with community members – suggesting that conflict is becoming less unusual, more part of everyday civic life. For some people, that shift isn’t an idea – it’s a memory in the body. Economic destabilization, then military intervention. The pattern felt familiar even if the acronyms were new.

And then there was the line about certainty: “The last person I trust is the [person] that’s sure.” It wasn’t a joke about ignorance. It was an observation about how power operates – through confident narratives that foreclose doubt, through systems that reward certainty even when it’s wrong. Certainty, he seemed to suggest, is often just fear with better lighting.

Young people have noticed the same thing more quietly: uncertainty isn’t always a failure of direction – sometimes it’s the signal that something new is being asked of us.

These observations – property suspicion, economic destabilization justifying control, certainty as costume – weren’t isolated incidents. They were symptoms of patterns, mechanisms that don’t announce themselves but operate beneath the surface of events. And they weren’t new. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. named these same mechanisms with different details, different cities, different wars. The question isn’t whether the patterns persist. The question is whether we’re willing to see them.

And when the floor moves like that – when jobs thin out, rents climb, and people feel one bad month away from collapse – the system goes looking for someone to carry the contradiction. The easiest target is rarely the owner class or the policy architecture. It’s the neighbor with the least protection: the newcomer, the worker without papers, the family whose belonging can be revoked with a headline. Immigrants don’t create the scarcity. They inherit it.

What keeps breaking down isn’t our desire for peace, but our refusal to build the conditions that make it possible.

This isn’t a Democrat or Republican story. It’s a budget-and-belonging story.

April 1967

King spoke on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, one year to the day before he would be killed. The speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” and it broke silence in ways that fractured the civil rights coalition. He didn’t just oppose the war; he connected it to domestic betrayal. “A few years ago,” he said, “there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program.” Then Vietnam escalated. “I watched this program broken and illusory, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.”

The language was precise: war as “demonic destructive suction tube” draining resources from communities. This wasn’t metaphor about priorities. It was structural analysis. The war wasn’t separate from domestic inequality – it was the mechanism producing it. Every bomb dropped abroad was a program defunded at home. Distance mattered: 8,000 miles away, poverty becomes abstract. Bombs fall somewhere else; budgets cut right here.

King named who paid the price. “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia, which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” The cruel irony was structural: “Negro and white boys on TV screens... kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools... they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago.” They could die together but not live together. That was the bargain.

He anticipated the question: why speak about war when civil rights work remained unfinished? Young men in ghettos asked him about nonviolence. “But they ask, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problem.” Their question hit home. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

The diagnosis went deeper. King called them “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.” Not separate problems – triplets, born together, feeding each other. The war was a symptom of “a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

Later that year, in a speech called “The Other America,” King laid out the economic anatomy the Vietnam speech assumed. “There are literally two Americas,” he said. One overflowing with prosperity and opportunity, the other where “millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist,” where people “find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

And King named who lived in that other America. “Some are Mexican-Americans, some are Puerto Ricans, some are Indians, some happen to be from other groups. Millions of them are Appalachian white.” This wasn’t rhetorical inclusion. It was stating a fact often obscured: poverty crosses racial lines. The largest group proportionally was Black Americans, but the condition itself wasn’t race-exclusive. The other America included millions of poor whites, and their economic interests aligned more with poor Blacks and Browns than with the wealthy whites whose cultural symbols they were often encouraged to protect.

King also named the pattern of refusal. “I would like to honestly say to you that the white backlash is merely a new name for an old phenomenon.” It didn’t start with riots or Black Power – California voted down fair housing before any of that. The pattern was three hundred years old: progress offered, backlash delivered, new excuse given. And the consequences of that refusal showed up as riots. “In the final analysis,” King said, “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

He refused to romanticize riots, calling them “socially destructive and self-defeating.” But he insisted on equal condemnation of conditions. “What is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.” Then the mechanism: “And so in a real sense, our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.”

And King dismantled the bootstrap myth with surgical precision. People told him poor communities should lift themselves up, that other immigrant groups had done it. He explained why that comparison failed. “I went on to remind him the Negro came to this country involuntarily in chains while others came voluntarily. I went on to remind him that no other racial group has been a slave on American soil.” And then the line that exposes the cruelty of individual responsibility rhetoric: “it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” Millions had been “left bootless” through “centuries of denial and neglect.”

The Patterns That Didn’t Retire

Pattern 1: War Draining Domestic Resources. King called it a “demonic destructive suction tube.” In 2025, the tube has different labels – DOGE cuts, efficiency initiatives, restructuring – but the mechanism remains: economic destabilization justified in the name of fiscal responsibility or security, followed by interventions that concentrate control. Chappelle noted the housing market crash, then the National Guard deployed. Not separate events – sequence. The instability creates the justification for the control.

Pattern 2: Class Convergence Obscured. King said, “Millions of them are Appalachian white.” Poverty crossed racial lines then; it crosses them now. Chappelle distinguished between the “dirty hippie whites” in his Ohio town and the Trump-supporting whites surrounding them. The difference wasn’t wealth – both groups were poor. The difference was culture, politics, the stories they told about who was responsible for their condition.

This is how class convergence gets sabotaged in real time. Poor people of every color share the same material wants – steady work, affordable housing, a hospital bill that doesn’t end your life – but the story they’re handed points elsewhere. It tells them the problem is immigrants, or people without documentation, or the families at the bottom who are supposedly taking something that was never theirs. Grievance gets redirected downward, and the people who could have formed a coalition get trained to guard the gates instead.

Pattern 3: Moderate Refusal Protecting Comfort. King said the white backlash was “merely a new name for an old phenomenon,” that there had “never been a single solid monistic determined commitment” from the white majority. The pattern continues: progress proposed, discomfort expressed, delay justified. Large segments of society remain, as King said, “more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.”

Pattern 4: Unheard Voices, Predictable Outcomes. King said, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” The conditions that produce riots – systemic exclusion, promises broken, voices ignored – don’t disappear when riots are condemned. When systems refuse to hear until chaos forces attention, the problem isn’t the chaos – it’s the refusal to hear. “Our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.”

Pattern 5: Individual Blame for Structural Problems. King called it a “cruel jest” – telling bootless people to use bootstraps they were never given. The contemporary version keeps the jest alive: “personal responsibility,” “pulling yourself up,” “making better choices.” As if centuries of structural denial can be overcome through individual willpower. Belonging is not soft. It is structural. You can’t bootstrap your way into belonging when the structure is designed to keep you out.

A nation can’t be strong abroad if it’s breaking at home.

What This Demands Now

The mechanisms persist because they serve a purpose: they maintain stability by requiring someone to absorb contradictions. The comfortable stay comfortable by refusing proximity to discomfort. The powerful stay powerful by redirecting grievance away from concentrated wealth toward vulnerable populations. The system protects itself by making individual stories visible and structural patterns invisible.

Peace keeps failing not because people reject it, but because the conditions that make peace possible are endlessly deferred. At the human level, it looks like a preference for order over justice – stability over repair – where discomfort is managed rather than addressed. At the system level, it emerges when institutions preserve legitimacy by substituting control for care, enforcement for investment, and delay for reckoning. What sustains this pattern isn’t chaos or extremism, but normalization: conflict becomes routine, harm becomes background noise, and responsibility dissolves into procedure. Managed conflict replaces peace – not as a failure of ideals, but as a functional arrangement that allows inequality to persist without ever naming itself.

A growing number of technologists are warning that automation won’t just change work – it will compress it. If that’s even partly true, then “social uplift” stops being charity language and becomes stability language: a floor sturdy enough that fear doesn’t become the easiest political instrument in the room.

What King’s 1967 speeches demand today isn’t nostalgia or canonization. They demand we see the mechanisms still operating and name them clearly. They demand we refuse comfortable narratives – the ones that blame poor people for being poor, that treat riots as causes rather than symptoms, that frame war spending and domestic austerity as unrelated budget items.

King said the destinies of Black and white Americans are “tied together.” Not as sentiment – as structural fact. “There can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white roots. There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster.” The interdependence isn’t optional. Separation doesn’t protect anyone – it dooms everyone differently.

This means building belonging structurally, not sentimentally. It means recognizing, as King did, that “social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals.” It means choosing proximity – to suffering, to contradiction, to the unheard voices our systems work hard to silence.

King didn’t live to see the progress he fought for realized. He was killed one year after the Riverside speech, in the middle of organizing a Poor People’s Campaign that would have brought together poor Blacks, poor whites, poor Latinos, poor Asians, poor Indigenous peoples to demand economic justice. The campaign threatened something that race-based civil rights movements hadn’t: it threatened class convergence, the recognition that millions of poor people across racial lines had more in common with each other than with the systems extracting from all of them.

That threat remains. Which means the possibility remains. The mechanisms persist, but they’re not inevitable. They’re maintained by choices – to delay, to refuse, to prioritize comfort, to redirect grievance, to demand bootstraps from bootless people. And if they’re maintained by choices, they can be interrupted by different choices.

WeBe,

Dr. G

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A child asks the question in Wicked (2024), and Glinda – beautiful, beloved, good – offers a binary instead of an answer: “Are people born Wicked? Or do they have Wickedness thrust upon them?”

The question is perfect. The answer is a trap.

Both options locate wickedness in the person labeled, not in the system doing the labeling. Born that way or thrust upon them – either way, the wickedness lives in Elphaba, not in what made her wicked. Neither asks: what does calling someone wicked allow everyone else not to be?

Three texts across 85 years hold the answer: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Wicked (2024), and Wicked: For Good (2025). Together they show how wickedness happens – not through individual evil, but through systems that need someone to absorb contradiction so everyone else stays innocent.

In Oz, belonging is not a feeling. It is a cross-level enforcement system: rehearsed in relationships, enforced as culture, formalized by institutions, and compounded across time.

Track how a moment of belonging becomes a norm, becomes an official fact, and then hardens – over time – into history.

“Because They Don’t Want To”

Elphaba comes to the Wizard’s throne room in Wicked: For Good believing truth will destabilize his power. She’s watched him enslave Animals, manufacture propaganda, turn her into a national threat.

If people knew what she knows, she thinks, the system would collapse.

The Wizard knows better.

“Once they’re told the truth –” she starts.

“They won’t believe it.”

She pushes back. He shrugs: “Because they don’t want to.”

Five words that rewrite causality. He’s not saying people are fooled. He’s saying they refuse.

Truth-telling fails not because truth is unclear, but because accepting it costs too much – comfort, status, innocence, and the safety of not examining one’s place in the system.

He names what the scripts call “the mechanism”: “The truth is just what everyone agrees on.” Then he specifies: “Back where I come from, we believe all sorts of things that aren’t true. We call it... history.”

What happened matters less than what everyone agrees happened. He’s not claiming his lies are true. He’s explaining that truth is whatever narrative has enough institutional backing to persist.

The song continues: “A man’s called a traitor / Or liberator. A rich man’s a thief / Or philanthropist... It’s all in which label / Is able to persist.”

The question isn’t what you did. The question is: which story about what you did has more power behind it?

Then this: “Once folks buy into your blarney / It becomes the thing they’ll most hold onto / Once they’ve swallowed sham and hokum / Facts and logic won’t unchoke ‘em / They’ll go on believing what they want to / Show them exactly what’s the score / They’ll just believe it even more…”

In his mouth, truth isn’t a lever. It’s a trigger.

This helps name why whistleblowers often face backlash rather than gratitude. They don’t just reveal institutional failure; they threaten the comfort of not knowing.

Before Elphaba leaves, the Wizard offers one more thing. Not power. Family: “We can be a family. You know, I never really had a family.”

The script shows him manipulating what he knows about her: father rejected her at birth, mother died, sister resents her. He knows what she wants – belonging, recognition, rest. And he offers it on one condition. You could belong here, the offer says. Just stop telling the truth.

Glinda joins in with the pragmatic frame: “Your way hasn’t worked. You’ll accomplish so much more!”

This is how the scripts position “good people” as system-stabilizers – not through cruelty, but through reasonable-sounding appeals to effectiveness and belonging. Complicity as pragmatism. Silence as strategy.

Glinda’s right that Elphaba’s resistance has cost her. But the script codes that cost as proof of the system’s enforcement, not proof that resistance is futile.

This is 2025’s version – explicit, named, sung. But it starts elsewhere.

“Take It Away”

In Wicked, the labeling begins before Elphaba has a name.

Mrs. Thropp is in labor. Dulcibear the bear nursemaid and a Wolf Doctor assist. The baby arrives green. Governor Thropp – her father – stares at the child. The script specifies: “in shocked disbelief.”

He doesn’t ask to hold her. He sings one word: “GREEN.” Then he says two more, twice: “Take it away.”

Not “her.” “It.”

The baby cries. Every object in the room flies into the air, sticks to ceiling and walls. The father stares, the script notes, recognizing he’s “clearly the source of this perversion of physics.” When Dulcibear finally carries the baby out, the objects tumble back to earth.

The greenness isn’t random. The script reveals it’s the result of her mother’s affair with a mysterious traveler who gave her a green elixir. The Governor’s devastation isn’t his own shame projected; it’s his wife’s betrayal made visible. But Elphaba still absorbs what cannot be acknowledged. The affair unspoken, the traveler unmentioned, the greenness appearing as if without cause. Her body displays the family’s fracture.

The script frames this as the mechanism at its origin: Elphaba must exist as “wrong” so the father can remain innocent. The family system needs someone to carry what it cannot hold.

When the baby cries, objects fly into the air. The father’s immediate response, per the script: “clearly the source of this perversion of physics.” Not gift. Not potential. Threat.

The greenness is permanent, visible, impossible to hide. Perfect for systemic scapegoating – she’s always identifiable.

Dulcibear, the bear nursemaid, carries the baby out. This is the only belonging Elphaba gets – from someone outside the human family system, someone also marginalized as an Animal.

“Take it away” functions in the script as a belonging transaction: the father trades his daughter’s inclusion for his own comfort. He can’t hold both his innocence and her presence.

This is the moment of rejection that will become a cultural norm (how families treat visible difference) that will become an institutional fact (greenness equals threat) that will harden into history (she was born wicked; no one questions why).

The script’s point isn’t that people never learn. It’s that learning has a price – and systems are built to make someone else pay it.

“Witch Destroys Public Property”

In Wicked: For Good’s opening, that private moment becomes public machinery.

The script shows Bison chained together, building the Yellow Brick Road. Stage direction specifies: “panting in the heat, in pain.” Forced labor in plain sight.

Elphaba appears. Uses magic. The chains explode. Some Bison escape.

The next day’s newspaper headline: “WITCH DESTROYS PUBLIC PROPERTY!”

The headline doesn’t say “chains.” It says “property.”

The Bison are “property” in the official narrative. Their personhood erased by the label. Once they’re property, freeing them is theft. The system defines Elphaba’s resistance through its own vocabulary – not “she freed enslaved workers” but “she destroyed infrastructure.”

Unlike 1939 where mechanisms operate invisibly, 2025 shows the machinery on screen. Madame Morrible – script identifies her as “press secretary” – gives a press conference. Flying Monkeys literally crank a propaganda machine. Leaflets spew from Palace windows. Headlines manufactured, telegraphed, posted.

Power learning to speak over 85 years: what was naturalized in 1939 becomes visible apparatus in 2025.

Morrible addresses the crowd: “Like some terrible green blizzard / Throughout the land she flies / Defaming our poor Wizard / With her calumnies and lies! / She lies!”

Accusing Elphaba of lying while lying about Elphaba. The script stages this as projection: it creates confusion about who to believe, makes countering harder (if she says Morrible is lying about her lying, does that sound defensive?), and benefits from “both sides” framing.

The crowd responds: “SAVE US FROM THE WICKED!”

They’re not forced. The scripts position them as wanting this villain. Belief requested from below, not imposed from above. The public demands the story that protects them from self-examination.

Another chant: “Every day more wicked! / Every day the terror grows! / All of Oz is ever on alert!”

Perpetual threat. Justifies extraordinary measures, loyalty tests, surveillance. The crowd stays focused on external danger, not internal contradiction.

The cascade the scripts show: Bison chained (forced labor at relationship level) becomes “property” language (cultural treatment of Animals as things) becomes “destroying property” in headlines (institutional fact) which will harden into official history (not “the government enslaved workers” but “the witch destroyed public works”).

Freedom riders became “outside agitators.” Protesters became “rioters.” Striking workers became people “sabotaging the economy.” The pattern holds: systems name resistance through their own vocabulary, and that naming protects them from examination while giving the public permission to dismiss the resistance without investigating what’s being resisted.

“Pay No Attention”

But this machinery existed in 1939. You just have to know what you’re looking at.

Dorothy and her friends reach the Wizard’s throne room. He appears as a giant floating head, surrounded by fire, voice booming. Pure spectacle.

Toto – just a dog, no agenda – runs to the curtain and pulls it back.

Behind it: an ordinary man operating machinery.

The Wizard’s first words: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

The curtain is open. The machinery is visible. And he asks everyone to pretend it’s not.

Dorothy confronts him: “You’re a very bad man!”

His response is crucial: “Oh no, my dear. I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.”

He separates moral character from fraudulent power. Not evil – just incompetent at magic. The script frames this as a move that protects the person while acknowledging the fraud. Systemic harm becomes technical failure, not moral failing.

Dorothy sees this. Knows he’s a “humbug,” as he admits. And she still asks him for help getting home.

She wants to go home. He’s her only option. So she participates in the performance of his authority even after the curtain’s been pulled.

This is 1939’s version of “Because they don’t want to” – belief as desire, not deception.

Then the Wizard distributes credentials. Diploma for the Scarecrow. Medal for the Lion. Testimonial and heart-shaped watch for the Tin Man.

And they function.

The Scarecrow receives his diploma and immediately begins speaking differently – more complex vocabulary, philosophical observations. The script shows him transformed by the credential itself. The Lion accepts his medal, stands taller, his voice stronger. The Tin Man receives the heart-shaped watch, places his hand over his chest, moved by the symbol of what he thought he lacked.

The credentials work as if the Wizard has authority, even though everyone in the room knows he doesn’t. The diploma matters more than actual knowledge. The medal matters more than actual courage. The testimonial matters more than actual heart. The system’s ability to credential persists despite its claim to truth being exposed.

What the script shows: symbolic capital maintains legitimacy even after substance is revealed as fraud. Degrees from exposed institutions still confer jobs. Certifications from compromised bodies still get required. Awards from suspect organizations still boost careers. The institution can admit it’s a humbug and still distribute markers of legitimacy that function in the world – because enough people need those markers to mean something.

From 1939 to 2025, the mechanism hasn’t changed. Only the explicitness has increased. The Wizard knew then what he’d say in the future: They’ll never stop believing in me. Because they don’t want to.

What Recognition Costs

The script’s point isn’t that people never learn. It’s that learning has a price – and systems are built to make someone else pay it.

Elphaba’s path shows what recognition costs: rejected at birth, isolated at school, exiled from every system of belonging. The price of naming what the system needs hidden is total institutional abandonment. She ends alone not because wickedness isolates – but because the system isolates those who name its mechanisms.

There is another detail the scripts reveal quietly – almost reluctantly. The mysterious traveler who visited Elphaba’s mother, the one who gave her the green elixir, was the Wizard himself. Elphaba is not merely harmed by the system.

She is born of it.

She carries its contradiction in her body – the unintended consequence of charm without accountability, power without responsibility. Later, when Glinda says Elphaba is “from the two worlds,” the line lands with deeper force. Elphaba belongs to both the machinery of Oz and the moral reality it refuses to acknowledge. She is what the Wizard cannot accept – not because she is evil, but because she makes denial impossible.

The scripts track this cost across scenes: at Shiz, students who witness her treatment say nothing – silence protects their position. When she frees the Bison, those who might know she’s right still call her wicked – speaking up would cost them the story that keeps them comfortable. When she tells the truth about the Wizard, Glinda offers her one more chance to recant – because Glinda herself has chosen position over truth, and wants Elphaba to make the same choice so Glinda doesn’t have to face what that choice cost.

Glinda’s path costs differently. She maintains position by stabilizing the system that requires someone else to be wicked. She keeps belonging, influence, the title “the good.” All it costs is participating in making sure someone else stays labeled. The script shows her lighting Elphaba’s effigy while narrating Elphaba’s story – performing goodness while constructing wickedness.

The choice the scripts offer isn’t “be Elphaba or Glinda.” It’s: recognize the mechanism or don’t.

Recognize how belonging might depend on someone else’s exclusion. How innocence might require someone else to carry blame. How comfort might rest on someone else’s visibility as threat.

Recognition doesn’t mean becoming a hero. It means noticing when a story is too neat – one villain, clear victim, problem solved. It means asking why someone’s visibility makes you uncomfortable. It means questioning when belonging is offered conditionally. It means wondering what gets excluded when history is written as consensus.

The scripts suggest what different systems might look like by showing us what these systems hide: Animals weren’t enslaved because they deserved it, but because the road needed building and someone needed to be property. Elphaba wasn’t wicked because she was born wrong, but because the Wizard needed someone labeled so his legitimacy could persist. The question isn’t “How do we make better people?” It’s “How do we build systems that don’t require someone to be wicked?”

Not individual goodness but structural accountability. Not “be better people” but “build different systems.” Systems where belonging isn’t conditional on conformity. Where complexity is allowed instead of just heroes and villains. Where truth doesn’t require total exile to speak. Where history includes what everyone didn’t agree on.

The Question, Answered

“But Miss Glinda, why does Wickedness happen?”

The child asked. Glinda gave a binary. The system moved on.

Here’s what Glinda couldn’t say:

Wickedness happens because systems need someone to absorb contradictions so everyone else can remain innocent. It’s rehearsed in relationships – the father’s “Take it away.” It’s enforced as culture – norms about who belongs and who carries what. It’s formalized by institutions – Morrible’s “She lies!” from the podium, headlines that say “property” instead of “chains.” It’s compounded across time – 85 years from curtain pull to “Because they don’t want to.”

What the system offers instead is illusion – belonging without reckoning, goodness without cost.

“Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained. Now everywhere is war. War.”

The Wizard knew it in 1939. Glinda knows it in 2024. The Wizard says it explicitly in 2025: “They’ll never stop believing in me. Because they don’t want to.”

Belief can precede evidence. Agreement becomes history. Labels persist.

You’re reading this, which means you asked the question the child asked. Which means you were willing to look past the binary Glinda offered.

The next move isn’t heroism. It’s recognition.

Notice when a story is too neat. Notice when someone’s visibility makes you uncomfortable and ask why. Notice when belonging is offered conditionally and ask what’s being protected. Notice when history is written as consensus and ask what was excluded.

The scripts give us the tools: When you hear “They were born that way,” ask who benefits from that story. When you hear “We didn’t know,” ask what knowing would have cost. When you see someone labeled wicked, ask what contradictions they’re being asked to absorb. When you feel relief that someone else is the problem, ask what examining your own position would require.

Somewhere a child is asking: “Why does Wickedness happen?”

Somewhere an authority figure is offering a binary.

Somewhere someone is being asked to absorb a contradiction.

The question is: which role are you playing? And is there a role you’re not seeing – the one where you notice the system, name the mechanism, and refuse to participate in making someone else wicked so you can remain good?

Because once you see the man behind the curtain, you can’t pretend he’s not there. You can only decide what you’ll do with what you know.

WeBe,

Dr. G

As the year turns, we’re writing with neither cheer nor despair, but with attention. Many of us are gathering – around tables, across screens, or quietly within ourselves.

If we could sit with Bob Marley today, we wouldn’t tell him anything he didn’t already sense. He spoke of something moving through the air – a shift you feel before you have language for it. Not prophecy – pattern. Not panic – recognition. A threshold.

We write at that threshold – one with echoes our grandparents would recognize. Across the world, institutions speak the language of dignity while designing exclusion. Traditions teach care for the stranger while systems turn strangers into threats. People long for peace while being trained, daily, into suspicion and withdrawal.

Belonging is not soft. It is structural. Peace is not luck. It is discipline.

Before naming wars or doctrines, we want to return to a simpler, older question – one every generation eventually faces: what actually holds people together, and what quietly tears them apart?

We know this in our bones and in our lived experience: when people know each other’s stories, fear decreases. Not always, not perfectly – but reliably. Contact across difference changes us.

Across centuries, traditions noticed.

Judaism: “You were strangers.”

Islam: care for “the neighbor farther away.”

Christianity: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Hinduism: “The guest is God.”

Buddhism: loving-kindness to all.

Sikhism: “No one is my enemy, none a stranger.”

Indigenous Caribbean communities: hospitality and reciprocity as survival, not virtue.

Bahá’í: “The earth is but one country.”

Confucianism: the Silver Rule.

Taoism: the sage does not hoard.

The convergence isn’t coincidence. It’s humans mapping what works. Across geography and theology, the same insight: belonging prevents violence. Belonging doesn’t guarantee peace – but without it, peace cannot last. Restraint of power preserves dignity. Hospitality builds infrastructure. Not because God commanded it – but because humans noticed what tears communities apart and what holds them together.

Traditions institutionalized this wisdom. Sikhism built Langar – community kitchens dissolving caste by feeding all equally. Judaism embedded rest in Sabbath – time liberated from empire’s demands. Islam made redistribution structural through Zakat – obligation, not charity.

Every community has its versions of this. Mutual aid networks. Harambee. Stokvels. Tontines. Labor unions. Community fridges. Time banking. Harm reduction circles. The practices differ. The principle holds.

Belonging is not sentiment – it is infrastructure. When systems cannot see human worth, they replay history’s worst patterns. Peace is not accident – it is architecture. What we build either enables flourishing or ensures harm.

Yet the gap between teaching and practice yawns wide. Not because people are hypocrites – but because systems operate invisibly, harming without feeling.

In Ukraine, scripture teaches restraint of power while the machinery of war keeps moving. In Gaza and Israel, Jewish and Muslim traditions both command care for the stranger – yet borders become sites of dehumanization. In Sudan, Islamic teachings on mercy echo across a landscape of mass atrocities met with global silence. Even within America, Christian teachings on loving the stranger clash with border enforcement that separates families and renders suffering administrative.

This pattern isn’t unique to these places or these traditions. It’s how systems work when belonging infrastructure fails. When we can’t see someone’s humanity, violence becomes policy.

Belonging isn’t what we say. It’s what we build. Peace isn’t what we hope for. It’s what we practice. Silence in the face of injustice betrays our shared humanity.

Will learned music by feel before he knew theory.

He showed up at the Union keyboard late nights, trying things out, listening to what worked. No one handed him a manual. The space invited him in. The instrument was available. Other musicians made room. His hands found patterns. His ear learned to hear. Skill became identity became confidence – all of it built inside relationships that were possible because someone designed a room where music could happen.

Will’s story isn’t singular – Juru, Lester, and Edimbo trace the same pattern.

People become who they are inside relationships. Relationships become possible inside systems.

When a child cannot see themselves in their classroom, their textbook, their teacher’s expectations – belonging fails before it starts. When a worker must hide their accent, their faith, their family structure to survive – mattering becomes impossible. When a nation treats migration as invasion – violence becomes policy. This isn’t bad luck. It’s bad design.

The inverse matters just as much. Traditions understood that you could build the conditions for flourishing. Sikhism’s Langar doesn’t just feed people – it builds tables where caste dissolves because everyone sits and eats as equals. Christianity’s Eucharist doesn’t just remember – it rehearses belonging through shared bread, bodies at one table. Islam’s Zakat doesn’t just help the poor – it makes wealth redistribution structural, written into the year’s rhythm as obligation, not charity.

Every community has designed its versions. Harambee builds schools collectively. Stokvels circulate resources when banks won’t. Cooperatives redistribute ownership. What looks like tradition is often just infrastructure that worked – human design tested across generations.

Belonging is infrastructure we design, not sentiment we feel. The room matters. The table matters. Who gets seen, who gets erased, who gets a chance to try – these are choices, not accidents. Small shifts cascade. One door opened. One table built. One system redesigned.

This isn’t idealism. It’s realism. More African American adults are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850. Systems upgrade. Slavery found new forms in Jim Crow, then mass incarceration, now algorithmic surveillance. But wisdom upgrades too. Those who survived exclusion already know how to build across difference – they’ve had to. Communities carry practice, not just trauma.

Peace is something you build, not something that happens to you. Traditions knew this. Prayer is structured pause – attention training, solitude that resists constant noise. Sabbath is rest as resistance – time claimed back from empire’s demands. Fasting is embodied solidarity – shared hunger, consumption interrupted. Service is reciprocity in practice – isolation broken, need witnessed through action. Forgiveness is relational repair – resentment released, cycles broken, futures reopened.

You might call these by other names. Meditation. Boundaries. Conscious consumption. Mutual aid. Letting go. The language changes. The function remains: practices that interrupt harm, redistribute power, make space for repair.

This week, you could try something small. Practice one act of restraint when you hold power – pause before you speak when you’re angry, step back when you’re used to stepping forward. Listen to one person whose life differs from yours, without fixing, without reframing, just listening. Name one system that operates invisibly in your world – at work, at school, in your neighborhood – and speak its pattern aloud to someone who hasn’t seen it yet.

Belonging isn’t theory. It’s practice. It doesn’t require perfection. It requires attention. Peace is this week’s work – and the work of the year that follows. And it begins with what we choose to notice, to interrupt, to build.

Marley understood something we’re learning again: time doesn’t save us – it reveals what we’ve built. Systems eventually show themselves. You can live in what feels like order while structures around you remain unchanged. But time will tell. What remains is endurance and truth-telling – not waiting for rescue, but building what time will expose as real or hollow.

Choose what you can sustain. Small acts accumulate. One table widened. One repair made. One truth spoken aloud.

Belonging is not what happens when we’re lucky. It’s what we build when we’re brave. Peace is not what happens when we’re safe. It’s what we practice when we’re afraid.

Every tradition teaches this. Every generation chooses it anew.

Time will tell the truth about what we chose to build – together.

WeBe,

Dr. G

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Will’s relationship to music began with a small plastic piano and a father who listened without correcting – a quiet form of belonging, the kind that doesn’t try to fix what it hears. What followed wasn’t a straight path into training or recognition, but a series of rooms where sound became a way of thinking: a Montessori classroom, a student union piano, a third-shift maintenance job, a jam session where everything fell apart.

The turning point didn’t come from a mentor or a class. It came from what he did next – how he rebuilt understanding from the inside out, one video, one pattern, one late-night realization at a time.

If the last essay traced the systems that leave certain people without maps, this one pauses to honor what that absence costs – and what it sometimes makes possible. It shows what it looks like to build one yourself – slowly, quietly, in plain sight, finding home in every room you keep returning to.

Feel first.
Let theory wait.
Keep showing up, and listen for what returns.

WeBe,
Dr. G

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The Small Piano

The piano was small enough to fit on a bed. Plastic keys, white and black, numbered one through eight. A tinny speaker beneath them. Maurice set it on the bedspread one afternoon when his son was five, maybe six – the age when hands begin to understand what they’re reaching for.

Will didn’t know what the numbers meant. He pressed them anyway.

The sound that came out wasn’t music yet. Just notes, one after another, finding each other in the air. But something about the way they connected made sense to him. Not in his eyes. In his hands. In the part of his body that listened before it could explain.

Maurice stood in the doorway. Heard his son playing something – not a song from the radio, not a melody anyone had taught him. Just sound, arranged by feeling. He called for Daphne, Will’s mother. “Look at this. What the hell!?”

They watched. Will kept playing.

There was no lesson in it. No theory, no names for what his fingers were doing. Just a kid finding his way through sound. He didn’t read the notes. He felt them.

Maurice didn’t correct him. Didn’t try to show him the “right” way. Just let his son explore. For Will’s sixth birthday, they bought him a better keyboard – more keys, a fuller range, built-in songs he’d learn by ear and then reshape into his own. The old plastic piano went into a closet, then an attic. Years later, he’d find it again, yellowed keys still intact, and take a photo.

But by then he already knew what it had taught him: music isn’t something you see on a page. It’s something you find in the space between your hands and the sound they make. His father listened without correcting – a different kind of teaching.

Feel first.

Early Tuning

At Craig Montessori, music wasn’t taught. It was just there.

In the back corner of the classroom sat tone bars – long metal rectangles on wooden blocks, arranged like a xylophone. Anyone could play them. No permission needed. Will and his classmates would gather between assignments, one person starting a pattern, someone else answering. They weren’t playing songs exactly – more like conversations in sound. No one was in charge. No one was wrong.

That was the Montessori way – hands-on, exploratory, students setting their own pace. For math, they had physical blocks. For music, they had tone bars. Learning happened through doing.

Will stayed at Craig through ninth grade. Many of his classmates followed him to Montessori IB for high school. Friendships built around sound have a way of lasting.

He grew up on Milwaukee’s north side near Mill Road – a quieter neighborhood then – after his family moved when he was nine. His parents worked steady jobs: Maurice on an assembly line, Daphne answering 911 calls. They weren’t musicians. But they recognized something in the way their son leaned into sound.

In middle school, something shifted. One day in class, Will noticed his central vision was gone. The center disappeared first. Not blurred – just gone. He turned to a classmate. “Wait, are you seeing this too!?” They weren’t. The diagnosis came back: Stargardt’s disease. His central vision wouldn’t return.

For most people, losing sight would mean losing access. But for Will, it just clarified what he’d already been doing – listening, feeling his way through sound. Not compensation. Just continuation.

He didn’t read sheet music before Stargardt’s. He didn’t start after. He kept doing what he’d always done: playing by ear, memorizing through repetition, trusting his hands to find what his hearing told him was there. The music didn’t change. The method didn’t either.

High school felt more traditional – lectures from the front, homework stacks, less room for exploration. He didn’t play sports or join clubs. Mostly, he just went to class and came home. But in the summers, starting tenth grade, he’d take a bus to UW-Madison for PEOPLE – three weeks on campus, living in dorms, getting a preview of college life. He remembers the first morning, walking across a quad so big it felt like a different country, the hum of students moving between buildings like a tide he’d have to learn to read.

It was designed for minority students, early scaffolding toward higher education. He went back for three summers. It wasn’t the same as Craig’s tone bars or his father’s small piano. But it was another room where he could start to hear what came next.

By the time he graduated, he knew two things: his older sister Katherine had gone to college, so he probably would too. And wherever he went, music would come with him. Not because he planned a career around it. Just because it was the way he made sense of things.

Feel first. The theory could wait.

Cardinal Stritch

Will’s first year of college wasn’t where the learning happened. But it was where some of the friendships did.

Cardinal Stritch accepted him quickly. He didn’t have a clear plan – it just seemed like the next room to walk into. The campus was small, Catholic, majority white. He went to class, but not seriously. Mostly he partied. Mostly he met people who would matter later in ways he couldn’t see yet.

Robbie played guitar. They’d end up collaborating years down the line – Will sending piano tracks from Milwaukee, Robbie recording guitar parts in LA and sending them back. The kind of friendship that doesn’t need proximity to stay alive.

But academically, the year was a wash. Few credits transferred when he left. He doesn’t regret it – some rooms teach you something other than what’s on the syllabus. But by the time his second year rolled around, the financial reality was clear. He needed a different path.

UW-Milwaukee offered a scholarship for students with disabilities. Free ride. He transferred.

The Union Piano

At UWM, the music found him again.

The piano sat in the middle of the UWM student union, public and unguarded. A real one – eighty-eight keys, decent sound, open to anyone who wanted to sit down and play.

Will was twenty. He’d heard there might be a public piano somewhere in the student union, and when he found it, he sat down immediately. Not because he was confident. Because he wasn’t. Playing in front of strangers terrified him. But the only way through fear was through.

He started with something safe: a video game soundtrack he’d learned as a kid, reshaped into his own arrangement.

Someone stopped. Listened. Sat down next to him when he finished.

That’s how he met Teddy.

Teddy was studying Japanese, planning to move to Japan after graduation. But before that, he spent a lot of time at the union piano. He and Will had the same hobby – learning video game music by ear, recreating the melodies, trading techniques. When Teddy heard Will playing, he recognized the song. They started talking. Then playing together. Then showing up at the same time, consistently, like a standing appointment neither of them had to name.

Avery came later. Quieter player, softer touch. He showed Will how to smooth out transitions, how to let a phrase breathe instead of pushing through it. They didn’t talk much about theory; they played, watched each other’s hands, traded ideas.

It wasn’t a formal lesson. It wasn’t mentorship in the official sense. It was just three people who kept showing up to the same piano, learning from each other by doing the thing they all loved.

Will is thirty-three now. He still talks to both of them.

In class, he sat near the back, listened, took notes, and left when it was over. The piano was where connection lived. But at the UWM Union piano, belonging wasn’t something he had to announce or perform. It was just there, built through repetition and presence.

He’d sit down. Someone else would sit down. They’d play.

Feel first. The rest came through showing up.

By the time he graduated with a degree in computer science, he knew two things: he’d met the people who mattered most to him at that piano. And whatever job he ended up taking, music wasn’t going to be the thing he left behind.

Music was the thing that made him recognizable to himself.

“I Hate My Life So Much”

The computer science job started fine. Will interned at a startup, passed the coding tests easily, got hired. Software development felt like solving puzzles – clean problems, clear solutions. For a while.

But the work had a way of eating itself. Code he’d written five months ago would break when he added something new. Hours spent hunting for the one line screwing everything up. Then it would happen again. The system kept collapsing under its own weight.

The crunch came during a sprint – twelve days straight, eight-plus hours from home, trying to push a new feature live. By the end of it, he was done. “I hate my life so much,” he told a friend. “I hate this.” The feeling wasn’t dramatic. Just true. He was pouring his life into something that wasn’t his. Time for money. A bad trade he couldn’t keep making.

“I don’t care if it’s sweeping floors,” he said. “I just need to find a different job.”

A friend mentioned an opening at Prospect Towers – third shift, building maintenance. The pay was lower, but the terms were different: as long as the tasks got done and he stayed present for emergencies, the rest of the night was his. He took it.

Downtime at Prospect Towers meant something. He brought a small portable keyboard to work on what he’d failed to do a few weeks earlier.

The jam session had been a disaster. His friend Srijan played guitar and called him up with a drummer. Their keyboard player couldn’t make it. Will said yes, even though he’d never jammed with them before. When they started playing, he was lost. The guitarist shouted chords from across the room – “Play this! Now that!” – and Will froze. Drowning in sound with no way to sort it.

That night stuck with him. Not as shame, exactly. More like a problem he needed to solve.

Hundreds of Videos

The jam session stuck with him. Not as shame but as a problem with a solution.

He had been playing piano for fifteen years. He could recreate almost anything by ear. But the moment someone shouted a chord name from across a room, he froze. He didn’t have the language to translate what he heard into what other musicians needed him to play.

So he made a YouTube channel: Willfox Piano.

The goal wasn’t to go viral. The goal was repetition.

He’d pick a video game soundtrack – something he loved, something intricate – figure it out by ear, record it, upload it, move on to the next one. One became ten, then fifty, then hundreds.

Some videos were polished. Early on, he spent hours editing. Perfect takes. Clean audio. Studio-light precision. After four years, he scaled back. Less editing. More live play. More real time. Practice mattered more than production.

And somewhere in that work, something shifted.

Patterns emerged. Progressions became familiar across keys, across genres. The shapes his hands made stopped being isolated solutions and became relationships – movable, adaptable, shareable.

“I made the channel to apply what I learned with theory,” he told me. “And because of the hundreds of videos, I started to quickly recognize patterns in music. That unlocked the ability to jam with anyone with minimum assistance.”

The channel has grown steadily over the years. Not a brand. Not a persona. Just practice in plain sight.

At Prospect Towers, during the overnight shifts between cleaning rounds, he’d watch YouTube videos about music theory – the thing he’d avoided his whole life, the thing he thought would kill his creativity. Music theory wasn’t what he thought it would be. It wasn’t rules. It was language for what his hands already knew.

“It’s like having a freaking map,” he’d say later, “and you can go wherever the hell you want and you won’t get lost.”

“I wasn’t learning to play differently,” he told me. “I was learning how to understand what I was already doing.”

He wasn’t abandoning the method that got him this far. He was adding language to it. Before, he could play what felt right, but if conditions shifted – different key, different tempo, unfamiliar musicians – he couldn’t adapt. He’d just memorized shapes. Now he was learning why those shapes worked.

Feel first. Then learn the names. Then play until the names become instinct.

The theory sharpened what was already there. Gave him a way to hear the distance between notes, to recognize patterns he’d been playing instinctively for years. Functional harmony. Chord progressions. Key relationships. Concepts that had always been there in the music he loved, but invisible to him until he learned to look.

Or rather, until he learned to listen differently.

“It’s Like Having a Map”

The theory didn’t replace what he’d always done. It made what he knew transferable. The names made the shapes shareable – portable across keys, tempos, musicians.

Before, he could play what felt right in the moment. But if someone called out a different key or changed the tempo mid-song, he’d have to stop and recalibrate. Now he could hear where the music was going before it got there. The map showed him not just where he was, but where he could go next.

By the time the shift became visible, he wasn’t at the Union anymore. He’d graduated. Teddy was in Japan. Avery had moved on. But the work they’d started together showed up everywhere else.

New musicians, new contexts. Someone would start a progression at a house party, at an open mic, at a friend’s rehearsal space. Will would answer without hesitation. Someone would shift keys mid-song. He’d follow immediately. No stopping. No recalibrating. Just conversation.

“You just know, don’t you?” someone asked once.

Will shrugged. He did but it wasn’t magic. It was just that the shapes his hands had been making for years finally had names. And the names made the shapes portable.

Around 2021, near the end of the pandemic, he met Jojo at a party. Jojo played guitar in a band – Wonderful Bluffer – and they needed a keys player. Will watched them perform. The sound was tight, energetic, the kind of thing he’d want to be part of. When Jojo asked if he’d be interested, Will didn’t hesitate.

The first show was at The Bend Theater in West Bend – old marquee, red velvet seats, the kind of room where the sound gathers and lifts. Will rolled in his organ, set up, and played. It wasn’t like the jam session years earlier. He wasn’t frozen. He wasn’t lost. He knew where he fit in the soundscape – when to fill space, when to let the guitar lead, when to answer the rhythm section.

He’s still with them. Two bands now, actually. Plus solo gigs – cafes, nursing homes, private events. Each one a different room, a different audience, a different set of expectations. But the method stays the same.

“I can walk into a room and other people are playing music,” he told me. “They don’t have to tell me what key we’re in. They don’t have to tell me what chords they’re playing. I just know.”

And when someone asks how he does it, he doesn’t overcomplicate the answer.

Feel first. Then let the theory tell you why it worked.

“I Just Know”

There’s a café where Will plays some Tuesday nights – Bistro on the Glen, in Glendale. Small place. Two dozen tables, warm light, low ceiling. The kind of room where the piano isn’t background music. It’s part of the atmosphere, part of the way people settle into themselves while they eat or talk quietly across a table.

One night, a couple asked if he knew any Stevie Wonder. Will nodded, set his hands on the keys, and started without hesitation. No sheet music. No chord chart. Just the feeling of where the song lived.

Someone watching asked him afterward how he did that – how he knew the key, how he found the progression so quickly.

Will shrugged, like Teddy had years earlier at the Union piano.

“I just know.”

Theory, Lived

When people talk about music theory, they usually mean scales and notation. Roman numerals and harmonic functions. Will learned that part, eventually. It helped. It made things clearer.

But that isn’t what this story is about.

For Will, music theory is something like a life theory: Listen first. Feel what’s actually happening. Respond instead of forcing. Let understanding come in its own time.

Belonging worked that way. So did purpose. So did friendship. So did the Union keyboard, the jam sessions, two bands, cafe sets, nursing homes on the north side where people close their eyes and remember something they haven’t remembered in years.

He didn’t chase any of it.

He just kept showing up where music lived.

And the map formed around him.

Feel First

The small plastic piano sits on a shelf now, keys yellowed but whole. Maurice didn’t know what he was setting in motion that afternoon. Neither did Will. No lesson plan. No prophecy.

Just sound. Just hands. Just a beginning.

He plays different keys now, in different rooms, for different people. The map stretches farther. The principle stayed the same.

He felt the notes before he could name them. He feels them still.

Feel first. The rest is just theory.

Will Matthews is a Milwaukee musician who performs with Wonderful Bluffer and plays in cafes and nursing homes across the city – places where the piano isn’t background. He works part-time in building maintenance on the north side and posts arrangements on his YouTube channel, Willfox Piano. You can often find him Tuesday nights at Bistro on the Glen. Saint Kate’s has a lobby piano. He’d like to sit down at it someday.

Images and Video Credits

Cover photo courtesy of Will Matthews.

All photographs courtesy of Will Matthews.

Videos courtesy of Will Matthews and Robbie (collaboration) and Wonderful Bluffer (live performance).

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This series keeps finding the same pattern: when institutions forget what they’re for, people build belonging anyway. Lester found it through art. Juru through community gardens. Edimbo by declaring “I belong in my skin.”

This essay asks a different question: What if we examined the institutions themselves? What systemic patterns produce the very absence these individuals had to overcome?

My friend and colleague Lance Eaton’s keynote, The Sleep of Liberal Arts Produces AI, offered the framework that sparked this essay. Drawing on Francisco Goya’s etching of reason asleep while monsters circle, Lance traces how dismissal, fetishization, and extraction became the invisible architecture of education. I saw immediately what he was naming through teaching and learning that I study through belonging – they’re the same injuries, viewed from different angles.

This synthesis is also personal: I’ve lived the gaps I study – from stopping out because of finances to recruiting in schools where zip codes determine access.

When students trust chatbots more than classrooms, when AI offers more recognition than institutions, the problem isn’t technological. It’s architectural. This essay sits at that intersection, where friendship becomes scholarship and collaboration models the belonging we’re trying to build.

If belonging is the bridge to everything, this piece asks: what might we build together once we see what we’ve been building alone?

With gratitude to Lance for granting permission to include and adapt images from his keynote presentation in this collaborative exploration.

WeBe,

Dr. G

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Look closely at Goya’s etching: a sleeper at a desk, owls and bats circling overhead. Once, our monsters were visible.

In selective admissions, we named them – “fit,” “readiness,” “sound right.” Too often, resources passed as merit.

Lance Eaton sharpened the lesson: the monsters didn’t vanish; they dissolved into infrastructure. Or, as he puts it, “The call is coming from inside the house.” We keep hunting for outsiders – AI firms, “unprepared” students – while the problem lives in our committee rooms, syllabi, and budgets.

When institutions tell students their audiobooks “don’t count” or their gaming knowledge “isn”t real learning,” we commit a double injury. We sever belonging – you don’t fit here – while erasing purpose – what you love has no value. The student who learned Roman history through Assassin’s Creed doesn’t just feel excluded; they lose the thread connecting passion to any meaningful future.

This is how gatekeeping creates its own monster. Students, finding neither belonging nor purpose in our halls, turn elsewhere. They find an entity that never judges their questions, never dismisses their references, never tells them their knowledge comes from the wrong sources. AI becomes what our systems failed to provide: availability, patience, recognition.

Still the recognition AI offers is reflective, not relational – a mirror tuned to please more than to understand. Like the partner who always agrees, it simulates attunement but cannot risk honesty or care. What draws students in is not the illusion itself, but the silence it fills – validation without the risk of care or challenge.

When a chatbot provides more belonging than a classroom, we haven’t just failed as educators – we’ve forgotten what education is for.

“The Dismissal”

The monsters are still visible here, but they’re sharing space with moral panic. Every emerging medium meets the same ritual suspicion. What corrupts the youth? Dime novels. Radio. Television. Video games. Now TikTok and ChatGPT -- often the only places young people feel seen enough to ask real questions.

The medium changes; the reflex doesn’t.

I learned this pattern long before I had language to name it. The cultural terrain “matched no map I’d been given,” so “I drew my own map in the dark.” At college, classroom conversations about poverty were “framed through a white lens” – legitimacy defined by those already inside the room.

Dismissal works through small invalidations. They accumulate. A storyteller who honed craft in online communities hears their expertise treated as a guilty pleasure. The message lands twice: your knowledge isn’t legitimate (belonging injury) and what you love leads nowhere (purpose wound).

Lance’s summer before senior year in high school, he read thirty books – fantasy, sci-fi, whatever pulled him in – and walked into English ready to discuss any of them. The response? “That doesn’t count.” Read 2 of the 10 assigned titles or nothing – a rule that made sense for grading, but not for growth. His voracious reading, genuine engagement, demonstrated love of ideas – none of it mattered because it arrived in the wrong package.

Curiosity lost to compliance.

What we miss: these “informal” sources cultivate the very capacities we claim to prize – coordination, inference, translation, systems thinking. When we dismiss them, we don’t protect standards; we reveal our shared poverty of imagination.

Students turn to AI because it offers what we withheld: curiosity without judgment, questions without shame, exploration without gatekeeping.

“The Fetish”

If dismissal hides knowledge, fetishization embalms it.

Look at Slide 7: the monsters have almost disappeared beneath our newest panic – AI detection tools that disproportionately flag Black students and multilingual writers. We’ve moved from dismissing alternative literacies to worshipping a specific performance of intelligence, one so narrow that even our algorithms enforce it.

The fetish manifests in devotion to particular forms: the five-paragraph essay, the properly formatted citation, the academic voice stripped of personality. Institutional conventions mistake containers for knowledge itself, forgetting they’re merely one culture’s way of organizing thought.

When I worked in selective admissions, these ratios were impossible to ignore: one counselor for nearly two thousand predominantly Black students at Chicago’s Hyde Park Academy versus teams of seven for fewer, wealthier students at suburban New Trier. The essays that “sounded right” came from places where college was a fluent language, not a translation task. Fluency tracks resources.

Then the body speaks. In a graduate seminar, Lance couldn’t make sense of twenty pages of Foucault. “I just remember trying to make myself physically smaller,” he recalls, “because I was terrified someone would call on me and I’d have to admit I had no idea what we’d read.”

His solution? Fake it. Wait for someone else to speak, then “yeah” his way through a response that sounded engaged enough to avoid follow-ups. This is what systems that prize performance over understanding produce: brilliant people learning to hide their intelligence to survive. Belonging dimmed; purpose deferred.

“I would have loved a Foucault bot,” Lance admits. Not to replace the learning, but to have a patient guide through the density – someone he could ask without judgment, “Explain this to me like I’m five.” Classrooms structured for coverage over depth can’t provide that scaffolding consistently. AI can.

This fetishization doesn’t just exclude; it impoverishes. When form matters more than function, when performance trumps understanding, students learn that education is about mimicry, not meaning. They master the genre but lose the why.

The AI detection tools now flagging “unusual” writing patterns expose the old fetish: the belief that intelligence looks one way, sounds one way, moves through the world in one approved manner. When these tools disproportionately flag students who are Black, international, or multilingual, they’re not revealing cheaters – they’re exposing our narrow definitions of legitimate thought.

“The Extraction”

The monsters have vanished beneath the spreadsheet. Slide 8 shows a single scientific paper generating over ten million dollars in access fees – knowledge transformed into commodity, understanding into extraction.

Lance calls this academic fracking: publishers extract free labor (writing, reviewing, editing), then sell it back to libraries – and now license it to AI firms – at prices rising faster than tuition. The system that produces knowledge can’t afford to access it. Researchers, librarians, and students labor within these extraction economies, doing the right work inside the wrong design.

In dissertation interviews with scholars locked out by paywalls, nearly a third of scholars told Lance, “If these shadow libraries shut down, I don’t know if I can be a scholar anymore.” Not “it would be harder” – I cannot continue. This isn’t convenience; it’s identity – belonging to scholarly community severed by paywalls, purpose gated by economics.

How do you belong to a scholarly community when you literally can’t afford to join its conversation? The student researching community health disparities hits a $39.99 paywall for each article. The first-generation scholar discovers that “building on existing work” requires institutional wealth they don’t possess.

Meanwhile, toll booths multiply: textbooks costing more than weekly wages, expiring access codes ensuring knowledge can’t be shared, platforms harvesting student data while charging for basic features. Systems claiming to serve the common good operate as transaction engines.

When students turn to shadow libraries, pirated PDFs, or AI summaries, they’re not cheating – they’re routing around extraction systems that routed around them first. They’re drawing their own maps around the toll roads institutions erected.

The irony: AI companies scrape paywalled research to build systems students can access for free. What extraction economics prices out of reach, AI offers without credential checks: immediate answers, no institutional affiliation required.

“The Awakening?”

The paradox crystallizes in Slide 10: a robot pleading for the liberal arts to save it. Not us pleading to be saved from AI, but AI asking for what only we can provide – context, meaning, ethical grounding.

The awakening Lance proposes isn’t about competing with AI but remembering what we’re for. As Lance defines it, the liberal arts offer “an education in seeing” – developing critical thinking and discernment you can transport across contexts, learning to ask “Is the thing in front of me real?” Drawing on stories, research, and art to navigate complexity. Slides 11-13 map three destinations: Engaging, Unleashing, Opening. Each reverses one of the patterns that lulled us to sleep.

Engaging means moving past the dismissive reflex. But it also means redesigning for human scale. As Lance observes, we ask students to navigate complexity while faculty face impossible demands: “You’d have to be an AI to do all the things we ask of faculty” – publish, teach exquisitely, mentor deeply, serve constantly, fundraise endlessly. When systems stretch people beyond capacity, connection becomes structurally impossible. The void students experience isn’t faculty neglect – it’s structural overload by design – a systemic injury to both the belonging students need and the purpose educators want to provide.

Students already engage: using AI to translate academic gatekeeping into accessible language, to route around paywalls, to imagine possibilities institutions haven’t shown them – not because AI is better, but because our systems made it feel necessary. The question is whether educators, freed from impossible demands, can meet them there.

Unleashing requires trusting students as critical thinkers. Lance’s data reveals our inversion – we have more meaningful AI conversations with colleagues than with students. Yet students navigate AI’s promises and perils daily, developing sophisticated frameworks we miss because we don’t ask.

Trust has a concrete starting point, from Jesse Stommel: “Start by trusting students.” Begin with their questions. Build bridges from their worlds into disciplinary inquiry. Design courses where their knowledge counts as the foundation, not the obstacle.

As Juru, now a Milwaukee County Parks coordinator, told me: “Programs don’t create belonging. People do.”

Opening returns us to first principles: knowledge serves “the common good,” requiring “free search for truth and its free exposition.” Yet we built the opposite – privatized truth behind paywalls, restricted exposition to the credentialed.

Real opening means infrastructure, not charity. What Lester – a Porsche technician who turned his Bowdoin experience into a blueprint – suggests is simple: alumni who partner with students early, check in often, and fund paid internships before graduation. Building the bridges students need before they have to cross them alone.

The figure in Goya’s etching wakes – but alone. That’s our choice: wake together or let students find belonging elsewhere.

Designing Seeing Systems

Return to Goya.

In Slide 2, the monsters are undeniable – owls and bats circling a sleeper who might still wake. By Slide 14, the figure stands, but the frame has emptied. The awakening happened in isolation. The monsters haven’t been defeated; they’ve dissolved into the very architecture we inhabit.

This is our choice: wake up alone or wake up together.

The work ahead isn’t about returning to some imagined past when the liberal arts held unquestioned authority, or competing with AI in a battle we’ve already framed wrong. The work is building what Lance and I both call “seeing systems” – structures that recognize diverse ways of knowing, that create belonging through recognition rather than gatekeeping, that understand purpose emerges from connection, not extraction.

Let’s name the causation plainly: it’s not that AI filled a void. We created one. Through dismissal – declaring certain knowledge illegitimate. Through fetishization – worshipping narrow performances of intelligence until brilliant people learned to hide. Through extraction – locking publicly-funded knowledge behind paywalls while researchers, librarians, and students labor inside economies designed to exclude them.

Each pattern produced predictable injuries. When institutions dismissed Lance’s thirty books as “not counting,” they didn’t just wound his sense of academic belonging – they severed the thread connecting curiosity to purpose. When classroom structures prize coverage over depth, faculty stretched beyond human capacity can’t provide the scaffolding students need. The void isn’t neglect; it’s structural overload. When a chatbot offers more recognition than a classroom, more patience than a overwhelmed mentor, more access than an institutional library, we haven’t just failed pedagogically – we’ve revealed what our systems value.

But here’s what gives me hope: students aren’t waiting for permission to see differently.

They’re already drawing new maps. Using AI to translate academic gatekeeping into accessible language. Routing around extraction systems that routed around them first. Building communities in spaces institutions never imagined – community gardens where Juru found belonging, art studios where Edimbo transformed chemistry into “the study of Black people,” online platforms where dismissed knowledge finds validation.

They’re practicing the liberal arts we forgot we taught: asking “Is this real?”, drawing on multiple sources to navigate complexity, building bridges between worlds. The difference is they’re doing it outside our halls because inside, we made belonging conditional on performing intelligence in one approved dialect, on accessing knowledge they couldn’t afford, on waiting for systems to see them.

The question isn’t whether they’re capable. They’ve already proven that.

The question is whether we – educators straining against impossible demands, administrators navigating extraction economies, researchers locked out of their own work – can join them in redesigning for human scale.

What would that look like?

(1) Start by trusting students. Not as sentiment, but as practice: begin with their questions, build bridges from their worlds into disciplinary inquiry, design courses where their knowledge counts as foundation. When Edimbo discovered chemistry via “the study of Black people,” purpose ignited. The difference wasn’t aptitude – it was recognition.

(2) Build infrastructure, not charity. What Lester – a Porsche technician who turned his Bowdoin experience into a blueprint – suggests is simple: alumni who partner with students early, check in often, and fund paid internships before graduation. Not rescue missions, but bridges built before anyone has to cross alone. Systems where belonging doesn’t depend on knowing the hidden curriculum, where purpose isn’t reserved for those fluent in institutional dialect.

(3) Open what we enclosed. Return knowledge to the commons it was meant to serve. When nearly a third of scholars tell Lance they cannot continue without shadow libraries, we’re not measuring convenience – we’re documenting systematic exclusion from scholarly identity itself. The liberal arts cannot be an “education in seeing” if access to that education requires wealth.

(4) Redesign for connection at human scale. Acknowledge what Lance names clearly: “You’d have to be an AI to do all the things we ask of faculty.” When systems stretch people beyond capacity, connection becomes structurally impossible. The awakening requires building systems where mentoring is possible, where care is sustainable, where both students and educators can breathe.

Maps can be redrawn. Architecture can be redesigned. As Edimbo says, “We don’t need sides – we need a handoff.” Between critique and possibility. Between what we’ve built and what we might build. Between waking alone and waking together.

The monsters we can no longer see haven’t disappeared – they’ve become the water we swim in, the air we breathe, the algorithms we trust. But if we can bear to see what we’ve built clearly enough, if we’re willing to name how dismissal, fetishization, and extraction became infrastructure, then we hold the blueprints for building differently.

Students and alumni are already showing us how. They’re building belonging where institutions failed to provide it. They’re creating purpose through connection when systems offered only transaction. They’re practicing an education in seeing – the very thing the liberal arts promised – because they couldn’t wait for us to wake up.

The figure in Goya’s etching stands alone. But the frame isn’t empty – it’s waiting. Waiting for educators to join students in the work they’ve already begun. Waiting for systems to value connection over extraction, recognition over gatekeeping, access over enclosure.

The sleep of liberal arts produced AI. What might our awakening produce?

___

IMAGE CREDITS

Eaton, Lance. The Sleep of Liberal Arts Produces AI (Keynote Slides), 2025. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Available at: https://aiedusimplified.substack.com

Goya, Francisco. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters), 1799. Etching from Los Caprichos. Public domain.

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Edimbo’s journey – from questioning the official story to painting Black pharaohs and Congolese kings across Seattle and Tacoma – isn’t about fitting into broken systems. It starts with belonging in your own skin, then extends through drum circles, murals, and the persistent act of proper representation. When OG John named him “Natty Dread” in that Everett living room, it wasn’t just a nickname; it was an intergenerational handoff this series keeps tracing.

The recognition continues: on a Seattle bus, Edimbo meets Lester Pearson, carrying canvases wrapped in bedsheets – the quiet rattle of wheels, the weight of work – and both knowing what others miss: art isn’t decoration; it’s infrastructure. Like Juru pressing roots and waiting, Edimbo turned a margin sketch into a logo and a living-room nickname into community architecture.

We don’t need sides – we need a handoff.

~Dr. G

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The nickname arrived before the name made sense.

Edimbo was twenty-two, sitting in OG John’s living room in Everett, Washington – a small house that served as unofficial headquarters for young Black men trying to find their footing in a city that didn’t always make room for them. OG John was from Louisiana, maybe twenty years older, with a drawl that softened hard truths and a habit of giving people names that stuck longer than the ones their parents chose.

“ND,” OG would call out when Edimbo walked in. “What’s up, ND?”

Not Edimbo. Never his given name. Always ND – short for Natty Dread, pulled from Bob Marley’s refrain: Dread, Natty Dread now / Dreadlock Congo Bongo I. The nickname was a gift, though Edimbo didn’t fully understand its weight at the time. He knew the song. He’d heard it countless times growing up, first in France where hip-hop and reggae moved through immigrant neighborhoods like shared breath, then in Washington State where music became one of the few constants across multiple displacements.

What he didn’t know yet was that the name would outlast the space where it was given. That ten years later, he’d build a business around it. That “Natty Dread” would become the signature on paintings of Black pharaohs and Congolese kings, on murals in Seattle and Tacoma, on prints shipped to Switzerland and Brooklyn and Albuquerque.

But in OG’s living room, it was simpler than that. It was just a name between friends. A place to exhale. A reminder that someone saw him clearly enough to name what they recognized – even if Edimbo himself was still learning to see it.

The Education Outside School

Long before OG’s living room, there was France.

Edimbo was born in Creil – “a predominantly Black city with African, Afro-Caribbean, and Arab mixture,” as he puts it – an inner-city hub in Oise, north of Paris. He says it plain: “Keep it real – it’s the hood.” His family lived up the hill. His elementary school, Carnot, sat down in Nogent, a predominantly white space where being one of the few Black children meant learning to read more than textbooks.

“I got to see their minds,” he recalls of those early years. “Adults don’t really think that kids will pick up on certain cues and some subtleties. So I got to pick up on that early.”

The racism was overt, he says – none of the coded language that would come later in American schools. In 1990s France, the lines were clear. What Edimbo learned was how to hold two geographies in his mind simultaneously: the white school where he studied, and the neighborhood up the hill where he returned each afternoon to “our life, my people that relate to what I was going through.”

His father, Maurice Lekea, understood the necessity of this dual navigation. At eight years old, Edimbo began taking public transit alone to school. What he didn’t know until years later was that his father had followed the bus for weeks – not hovering, just watching from a distance to ensure his son knew the route. Once Maurice was satisfied that Edimbo could find his way, he stepped back.

“It developed my sense of geography and location,” Edimbo reflects now. The lesson wasn’t just about bus lines. It was about learning to move through spaces that weren’t designed with him in mind, about building independence not as abandonment but as preparation.

But the deeper education happened at home, around tables where his uncles and other elders spoke without filter about African history – not the sanitized versions taught in schools, but the stories of what was taken, what was built, what persisted. They talked about Patrice Lumumba and pre-colonial kingdoms, about raw materials from the Congo that powered space shuttles, about the ways colonization didn’t end but merely changed its vocabulary.

“I used to hear this at a very young age,” Edimbo says. “These things were at the back of my mind. I wasn’t doing anything with that information, just knowing it.” He pauses. “I didn’t think it would serve me at some point. It was just same ole talk, same ole talk.”

His mother, Charlotte Mongengo, held the household together – Congolese food and the unseen labor that sustains a family – while those stories layered into foundation.

“Jumped in the Shark Tank”

At thirteen, Edimbo’s father brought him to America. The plan had been to wait until he was eighteen, after high school in France. But as Edimbo puts it plainly: “I was getting into too much stuff back home. They had to snatch me up.”

He landed in Kent, Washington – a city southeast of Seattle where the Liberian community had established itself, where Samoan and Mexican families lived alongside Black Americans, where the school system required uniforms but students found ways to make them their own. “White tees, Air Forces, trying to trick it out,” he remembers, smiling at the memory of teenagers negotiating conformity.

Kent Junior High School introduced him to English as a survival skill, not an academic exercise. He developed a strategy: deliberately mispronounce words in class, trigger laughter, wait for the correction. “I removed the element of being embarrassed,” he explains. “Now it’s funny, and at the end of laughter, someone’s going to be like, ‘No, this is how you say it.’ Thank you. That’s what I was looking for.”

The method wasn’t about pride – it was about efficiency. He needed the language, and he needed it fast. Already fluent in Lingala and French, he had frameworks to build on. Book in Lingala was buku. Milk was miliki. The cognates helped, but syntax required immersion. So he watched children’s television: Dragon Tales, Clifford the Big Red Dog. “I don’t care, I was thirteen years old watching this. I need to pick up on this language quick.”

Sports became his other language. Soccer, then wrestling, then track – each one a doorway into peer networks that didn’t require perfect English, just commitment and skill. He made lifetime friends through soccer, particularly in Kent’s Liberian community. “We’re black, you don’t speak English, but you somewhat look like us. Like, what’s up with you?”

The question was genuine curiosity, an opening. Edimbo walked through it.

At Kent Meridian High School (grades 9-11), he built community. The Liberian population in Kent welcomed him. Soccer gave him two Liberian friends – brothers to this day. Wrestling taught him how to establish himself. Track revealed hidden capacities. These three years gave him roots – people who knew him, spaces of his own.

Then came Roosevelt High School for senior year. Another transfer. Another shark tank.

“You’re Lying to Me”

By senior year at Roosevelt High School in Seattle, Edimbo had grown comfortable with English. What he couldn’t reconcile was what got taught in it.

His history teacher presented information that contradicted everything Edimbo had learned from his uncles. Dates were wrong. Raw materials misattributed. The role of African resources in global development minimized or erased entirely.

“I was like, ‘That’s false. We just watched a documentary about this,’” Edimbo recalls of one confrontation. The class fell silent. Most students wouldn’t know to correct the teacher – they’d never been exposed to alternative narratives. But Edimbo had grown up with elders who shared information “with no filter.”

He knew, for instance, that cobalt – essential for aerospace technology – came from the Congo. He knew about the Songhai Empire, about Timbuktu as an intellectual center, about how contemporary governance structures borrowed from pre-colonial African systems. When his teacher presented a different story, Edimbo spoke up.

“I got to the point where if you’re getting this information wrong, I can’t take your class seriously,” he says. The confrontations became routine. So did the detentions. “I got kicked out of class not for fighting – I got kicked out because I’m checking you for lying to me in my face.”

The teacher couldn’t see past Edimbo’s delivery, which was sometimes sharp, maybe disrespectful, definitely disruptive. Edimbo couldn’t see past the misinformation being presented as fact. Neither could bridge the gap. He stopped taking his cues from the crowd.

He carried out a sentence that still guides him: “You are not a slave – you were enslaved.”

But the deeper education continued elsewhere. At Roosevelt, he also discovered track, specifically hurdling – something he’d never attempted before senior year. Starting from scratch, he dropped times dramatically through the season, qualifying for district meets where he raced against athletes already committed to college programs.

“That experience unlocked this thought about myself,” he reflects. “What else I might be good at, but I just don’t know?” The question would echo.

The Invisible Student

When Edimbo talks about college, he mentions it matter-of-factly: “I was homeless going to college.”

The episodes happened in his late teens, early twenties – blurry years in the early 2010s. He was attending Everett Community College, running track on scholarship (which only covered two quarters), taking graphic design classes, participating in the Black Student Union. From the outside, he was fully engaged. From the inside, the calculation was different.

“People complain about things, man,” he says of overhearing classmates. “I don’t give a damn about that.”

The housing instability clarified priorities. It also clarified what belonging meant – or didn’t mean – in institutional spaces. “I got to the point where if I’m not comfortable in my skin, I ain’t going to be comfortable anywhere,” he explains. “So I’m going to be comfortable even in places where I’m not supposed to be comfortable.”

This wasn’t bravado. It was survival mathematics. If external validation couldn’t be counted on, internal certainty had to be absolute.

I belong in my skin.

OG’s house became one of the few spaces where that certainty could rest. It wasn’t formal mentorship – no structured programs or official titles. Just a living room where young men could talk without performing, where OG listened more than he lectured, where the nickname “Natty Dread” carried affection and recognition without scrutiny.

“He was like an uncle,” Edimbo says. “He became like an uncle.” OG helped him “stand in line” when everything else felt unstable.

At Everett, transformation accelerated. He met Dr. Joy DeGruy speaking about post-traumatic slave disorder. He watched Hidden Colors and felt his mind “revolutionize.” He read Marcus Garvey, listened to Dr. Sebi, stopped eating pork and cheese. His coach, Norm, became another anchor – a Black coach who “didn’t take no shit” and kept him accountable.

When community college classes connected to his questions, he excelled. Chemistry became “the study of Black people.” Geology revealed Earth’s resources. An essay on Ivory Coast became research he couldn’t stop pursuing. “Once I figured that out, it was a wrap. I was just knocking papers down.”

“The Work Was Always There.”

The surprise wasn’t that Edimbo could draw. It was that no one had known for twenty years.

His sister was first to notice, watching him sketch detailed Egyptian masks – the shading around eye sockets, the texture of gold leaf, the precision of hieroglyphic borders. “She’s like, ‘Twenty-plus years, this is her first time seeing me draw detailed work like this.’”

His friends at Everett reacted with similar astonishment. He’d been in their lives for years – playing sports, attending BSU meetings, carrying himself with the same energy. The art had been there all along, private work on the backs of old bills during phone conversations, small doodles that no one thought to ask about.

“I didn’t want that kind of attention,” he admits, recalling a friend in France who drew well and became everyone’s go-to for portraits. “Can you draw me? Can you draw me? I was like, I ain’t gonna tell them nothing. I’m gonna tell them I don’t know my right from my left.”

But at Everett, the calculus changed. He was tired of staring at computer screens for graphic design work. He wanted to create with his hands. And there was something else – a realization crystallizing around history, representation, and the stories that get told through images.

“Any representation of us is always us getting our ass kicked or doing the short end of the stick,” he observed. Movies like Roots and The Color Purple – important, painful, but also limited in what they showed. “Why do I need to watch it over and over again? It’s a psychological attack by way of art.”

So he started painting pharaohs. Black kings. Proper representation, as he calls it – not sanitized or colonized, but melanated, golden, powerful. His first piece was a pharaoh from a magazine photograph, a beige statue with Afrocentric features. He painted it with “the right pigmentation” – dark skin, gold headdress, full dignity intact.

The reaction was immediate. Friends lost their composure. Family members who’d known him his whole life stood speechless. At an art sale at Everett, one of his three submitted pieces sold before the event even started – purchased by a staff member for $100.

“The light bulb went on,” Edimbo recalls of seeing that hundred-dollar bill. Not just the money – though that mattered – but the possibility it represented. He could do something he was naturally good at, talk about topics he cared deeply about, and sustain himself financially. “Man, I feel like I hit the jackpot.”

He bought a stack of canvases and didn’t look back.

Jessica Marquez, an artist at Everett, confronted him: “What are you doing? Get you some canvas… you don’t need to be putting this on paper with a #2 pencil.” She saw before the system did. Even after graduation, his graphic design teacher let him use the art studio and gave him supplies.

The BSU needed a logo. He offered. They passed. He watched them scramble for a month, then kept working on his own art.

Natty Dread Becomes a Business

The logo had been there for years, actually. That small emblem he’d been sketching in the margins of assignment sheets since he was twenty-one or twenty-two – just a personal mark, a way to claim his work. His graphic design teacher once deducted a point for it: the assignment asked for name and date, not a symbol.

Edimbo laughed at the minus one. Kept drawing it anyway

When he started selling paintings, the question of a business name arose. He remembered OG’s nickname, remembered Bob Marley’s song, remembered the way the name carried both threat and pride. Dread – not lock, he’d tell people who challenged the terminology. “Is this a hair product? I’m not selling hair products.”

The word dread means fearful, threatening. But fearful to whom? “Empowering us is fearful to others,” he’d say. “So what?”

Natty Dread Illustrations became the brand. The emblem he’d been drawing for years became the logo. And OG’s gift – that casual nickname from a Louisiana man’s living room – became the signature on paintings that would travel far beyond Everett.

He got on buses carrying canvases wrapped in bedsheets. He worked as a mover and in restaurant kitchens to fund supplies. He did after-school programs with elementary students, painted murals across the region.

His work now marks spaces: Kezira Ethiopian Restaurant in South Seattle, Safari Kenyan Restaurant, Taradise Bar in White Center, Sound Performance Gym in Lynnwood, Ayeko Farm in Enumclaw. In the Central District, a Dr. Sebi portrait remains visible even though the shop closed.

On a city bus in 2020, he met Lester Pearson – another artist carrying wrapped canvases. Recognition was instant. “I do art too, man. I just see you on the bus with this – it’s what I do. Respect.” Different paths, shared understanding: the art isn’t decoration; it’s infrastructure.

“Old Versus Young”

At thirty-five, Edimbo works in the space between generations. The stakes feel higher. What drives him is bringing together “the old versus the young” – elders with wisdom and youth still figuring themselves out.

He runs drum circles. Works with farmers. Shows up to elementary schools and universities, to city council meetings and community events. The art is the vehicle – the shared language that lets a grandmother’s hands and a sixth-grader’s hands find the same beat.

“We don’t need sides – we need a handoff,” he explains. “How to bridge that gap between the wise and the ones still figuring life out.”

In a moment when generational divides are sharpened into weapons, his work insists otherwise. The drum circle doesn’t ask your age. The mural wall doesn’t care.

He thinks of OG’s living room – how it worked precisely because it wasn’t formal or transactional. Just space held open for young men to vent, to question, to exist without having to perform competence they didn’t yet possess.

“He would let us vent,” Edimbo recalls. “Sometimes he would just sit there quiet, but he’s twenty years older than us. And he’s letting us into his space.”

That model – space without hierarchy, listening without lecturing – shapes how he works with youth now: make room, hold silence, offer what’s useful when asked.

He’s also thinking about trades – plumbing, electrical, construction. Not as backup plans but as crafts, as artistry in their own right. “There’s still some level of artistry that goes into building a road, building a house, building a bridge,” he argues. Old heads teach the craft; young ones bring new eyes. The negative association with manual labor – the way it evokes plantation work – needs reframing. “What if you could build that for your own community? Are you really slaving? Or are you building a self-sustaining way to live?”

It’s the same question that animates all his work: not just what you create, but who it serves and who controls it.

“I Belong in My Skin.”

Ask him where he belongs and he doesn’t name an institution.

“I belong in my skin. That means I belong on this planet right now.”

Not in institutions. Not through validation from external systems. In his skin – the first and final container.

“If I’m not comfortable in my own skin,” he continues, “it doesn’t matter what kind of T-shirt I got on. I ain’t gonna be comfortable.” The metaphor extends: if you can’t be comfortable in your first skin, no second skin will fix it.

This isn’t self-help rhetoric. It’s philosophy born from necessity. When you’re thirteen learning English through children’s cartoons, when you’re navigating housing instability while attending college, when you’re challenging teachers in front of classmates who don’t have the alternative knowledge to support your corrections – external belonging becomes unreliable. So you root differently.

“I’m already in a country that’s not mine,” Edimbo says. “Everything I’m going to get into is going to be new anyway.” The foreignness isn’t just geographic – it’s structural, cultural, systemic. So instead of waiting for spaces to welcome him, he asks different questions: What can I learn here? What can I take with me? Where’s the door, and what’s on the other side?

The nickname OG gave him – Natty Dread – carried that same energy. In Bob Marley’s song, the Natty Dread walks through Babylon unshaken: Don’t care what the world say. Not defiance for its own sake. Just clarity about who you are in spaces that would prefer you be someone else.

Edimbo didn’t choose the name. But once given, he understood it. Recognized himself in it. Made it literal – turned the nickname into a business, the business into a practice, the practice into infrastructure for others.

What Carries Forward

He left a security job. He’s living now on drum circles, murals, and art sales. He took a break from teaching but plans to return in a different format. It’s not stable in the conventional sense – there’s no salary, no benefits, no retirement plan. But there’s sovereignty in it, the kind his father started teaching him at eight years old on a bus in France.

“I’m making a living using what I like to feed my people,” he explains. “Not exploit you, only empower you. And I’m making a living off empowering you.” The circularity isn’t redundant – it’s the model. Give something that sustains you while sustaining others.

When I ask what he’d tell his younger self – that thirteen-year-old kid at Kent Junior High, navigating a new language and a new country – he doesn’t reach for inspiration. He reaches for instruction.

“Calm down,” he says, laughing. “You’re all over the place. Sometimes when you relax, you can make better decisions.”

Then, more seriously: “Don’t belittle your own skills when someone is congratulating you for it. Do not minimize a compliment sent to you.”

It’s the kind of advice that only makes sense in retrospect, after you’ve spent years being invisible in plain sight, after your art sells before you even arrive at the show, after the people who’ve known you longest react with shock at capacities you’ve always possessed.

The art was always there. The name was given. The work continues.

And in living rooms, drum circles, and murals across the region, that nickname – Natty Dread – keeps doing what OG John intended when he said it: recognizing what’s already present, calling it by name, making space for it to be seen.

I belong in my skin.

Unshaken, he keeps his line.

Edimbo is an artist living in Tacoma and showing work across Seattle, operating as Natty Dread Illustrations. His parents, Maurice Lekea and Charlotte Mongengo, raised him between France and the U.S. He founded the KABULA ART EXHIBITION – the first showcase centered on Congolese artists and culture – with the third annual slated for June 2026. His current work includes collaborations with Congolese artists, new murals, and partnership with the Congolese Integration Network.

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Julien “Juru” Phifer’s journey – from Milwaukee’s Believers in Christ Christian Academy to Community Engagement Coordinator for Milwaukee County Parks – isn’t about overcoming individual deficits. It’s about recognizing systemic gaps - counselors who don’t push scholarships, programs that don’t prepare you, cities that underinvest in the commons – and choosing to build bridges anyway.

What people call luck is often preparedness meeting community that notices. Press the roots, water, wait.

This piece continues our ongoing work tracing how people build belonging and infrastructure where systems don’t – alongside stories like Spiritual Downloads. If this resonates and you want to sustain the interviews and craft behind it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

~ Dr. G

“Upgrade to paid”

The soil gives a little under his hands. March morning at Westlawn Neighborhood Center, and Julien Phifer (who later dubs himself Juru) is helping prep garden beds for spring – building infrastructure. A UW-Milwaukee volunteer works nearby. They get to talking.

“What program you in?” Julien asks.

“Sustainable Peacebuilding.”

Julien pauses. He’d been told about that program – combining policy, mediation, systems thinking – but dismissed it. Peacebuilding sounded like nonprofit world, which he’d learned to approach carefully – too much performative caring without follow-through. But dismissing fast can cost you. So he listened.

Press the roots, water, wait.

He’s out there with his sister when the UW-Milwaukee student lays it out: stakeholder analysis, conflict resolution, how everything connects. He stops, looks at Julien: “Man, you’re already a peace builder. You see the connections. You move with empathy. You know how to be patient.” The student introduces Julien to Laura Hermanns that day. Two weeks later, at a maternal health event, Hermanns says the fellowship covers most students’ tuition. He’s sold. He applies; two days later, the acceptance email lands.

People think a lot of what happens to us is random – a chance conversation, a person in the right place. But look long enough, and you see the pattern. Julien had been volunteering at Westlawn gardens for months, building relationships, showing up when nobody was grading him. The convergence wasn’t magic. It was preparation meeting opportunity.

He calls it Random by Design – his master’s thesis title, his working theory of how the world actually moves. “We think things are random,” he says, “but it’s really designed. And you gotta be the one designing it.”

This is the story of how one man learned to build what systems forgot to provide: the relational infrastructure that turns potential into motion. It’s about belonging – not as a feeling you wait for, but as something you practice into existence.

“We Was All There”

Julien started school at four – too young for kindergarten by most standards, but his June birthday and his mother Patricia’s determination got him into a YMCA program in Milwaukee’s Parklawn neighborhood. Within weeks, he transferred to Believers in Christ Christian Academy at 26th and Capitol, where his cousins already attended.

“It was days where we didn’t know who was picking us up,” he remembers. “Could’ve been my mom, could’ve been an auntie, could’ve been a big cousin like Aphelia Phifer-Hill. Like we was all there.” When one parent couldn’t make it, another stepped in. “Hey, I can’t get them today – can y’all grab them?” The net was infrastructure disguised as family.

Everything at Believers in Christ was designed for belonging. Black principal, Black teachers you called by first name – Miss Brenda, Mr. Reggie, Coach Dart. Daily praise and worship from 8 to 8:30 a.m., with a song called Beloved, Let’s Love One Another where the whole school hugged. “As a kid, it used to be uncomfortable,” Julien admits. “Some days, you know, we didn’t’ have the best deodorant.” But now he understands: they were teaching him to move through the world with care.

Bishop Bucks – the school’s reward system – taught economics through incentive. Sweep the classroom after lunch, earn some Bishop Bucks. Collect them all month, trade them at the birthday celebration for extra cupcakes and candy. “I never got to celebrate my birthday at school,” Julien notes, his June birthday landing after the school year ended. “I used to be jealous. But I was with my family every year. That was the trade-off.”

In second grade, five students – Julien and four girls – joined Explorers Club, a gifted program where third, fourth, and fifth graders learned together. “I loved being in that program,” he says. “But it put a target on my back. ‘Oh, he’s special. He’s the smart one.’” They studied Native Americans and first settlers, took buses to Virginia and Boston to see where settlers first arrived. “I was nine, ten years old when I got on a bus with my own spending money, staying in hotels. And we didn’t have cell phones. My mom just trusted them to take us across America.”

But Uncle Julien had laid the real foundation years earlier. A paraprofessional at Craig Montessori, he understood something about literacy and power that four-year-old Julien couldn’t yet name. Sight words appeared everywhere in the house – on the cupboard, the refrigerator, every light switch. “I couldn’t go in or use a room without stating what it was,” Julien says. The house itself became curriculum.

“Cupboard.” “Refrigerator.” A four-year-old claiming language in every doorway.

“Speak up,” Uncle Julien would say, snapping fingers to mark rhythm. “Speak up.” It wasn’t enough to know the word – you had to claim your voice in any room.

The literacy worked. By third grade, Julien was the only boy in Explorers Club, building confidence that would carry him through rooms that weren’t designed for him. But literacy alone wasn’t enough. Years later, when older students from Believers in Christ tried college, “it was hard for them to transition. We didn’t have the computer science. We were still looking at encyclopedias and dictionaries.” Uncle Julien had built one bridge. The next system would demand another.

Milwaukee Lutheran and Beyond

By eighth grade, Patricia made a hard call: Julien wouldn’t continue at Believers in Christ. She’d watched older family members struggle to transition to college – unprepared for the technological fluency universities demanded. She wanted something different.

Milwaukee Lutheran was majority white. All his teachers were white. The chapel songs were different – slower, no call-and-response, no praise dancing. “They liked white Jesus,” he says plainly. “We had Black Jesus at home.” He’d skip chapel on purpose, come to school late. But his mother had been clear: “Don’t go in there trying to debunk their stuff. You know what it is. You’re here because it’s a safe school.”

Discipline felt punitive. At Milwaukee Lutheran, it felt like control: No ID badge? Pay $5 for a replacement. Late too many times? Pay to sit in detention for two hours, staring at a wall, no talking, no reading. “Like some jail shit,” he says. He spent a lot of time there.

Fourteen years old, freshman year, Julien’s dream was simple: play football, maybe make it to the NFL. Then, right before school started, he pulled his hamstring returning a kick during practice – pulled it so badly a piece of his pelvis came off with it. “Man, I was so hurt,” he remembers. The star athlete became “the little dude with the crutches who was supposed to play football.” Embarrassment, again – that childhood fear returning.

But sports eventually gave him back his footing. Sophomore year he ran track, made alternate for the state team. Junior year, he was on the card – one of the main runners, fast enough for college letters to start arriving. But his guidance counselor never pushed it. Never talked about scholarships, never organized campus visits. “I’m sure the other kids got that guidance,” he reflects. “I’m sure of it.”

That spring, near the end of seventh grade, home shifted. His mother sat him and his brother Terrence (Terry) down. She was pregnant. He didn’t want a sibling – “life was leveling up.” Then he learned: a girl. “A switch flipped. ‘Cause it’s like, yo, I’m finna have a little sister – Naomi. I gotta show what a great man is, a great young boy. I can’t be in school just trying to get all the girls and going crazy.” It grounded him in ways sports couldn’t.

His real guidance came from family. Cousin Maggie Beckley had gone to Xavier University in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, then finished at Marquette. She was part of the Black Achievers program at the YMCA – college tours, networking, mentorship for college-bound Black youth. Julien tried joining. “But I didn’t feel like I fit. They all went to public schools. They had mamas and daddies who went to college, who were in fraternities and sororities. I had none of that.” Same choir, different sheet music. He called it “uppity” then, but the room ran on the language of college he hadn’t learned yet – parents who’d done it, counselors who showed the steps, programs that taught the unwritten rules. The program works for many; he needed maps first. Belonging gets built when starting lines match – or when someone reaches back. He left the program.

Senior year, Uncle Julien saw a partial scholarship offer from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota and knew someone who’d succeeded there. They drove Julien up the day before the semester started – no campus visit, no preparation. Just go. The loans started immediately – interest didn’t wait; every stop-out grew the balance.

Julien lasted until Thanksgiving.

St. Cloud was where he first experienced overt racism. At an off-campus bar one night, his friend Izzy – over his limit – had words with skinheads. Outside, the skinheads followed, shouted the n-word, and threw bottles. Police arrived but didn’t help: “Y’all need to take care of yourselves. Go home. Y’all shouldn’t be out anyway.” The message was clear: they were the problem.

His track scholarship turned into a redshirt situation – practice but don’t compete. The apartment didn’t feel safe either; a roommate repeatedly crossed boundaries with guests. Campus security followed him and his friends through the bookstore even after they’d paid, receipts in hand. “Lady in the bookstore said y’all look suspicious.”

“I came back home,” Julien says, “and I was like, ‘I ain’t going back.’” He felt like a failure. “I felt like I let people down.” But then the harder truth: “Those same people who pushed me to go to college? They disappeared.”

Building What Wasn’t There

Patricia had her own navigation strategies. When Julien was five, watching late-night commercials about children needing ten cents a day, he told his mother they should send money. She looked at him: “Jay, no we don’t. That ain’t for us. You a day away and a meal away from being just like that.”

He was confused. “I got school, I got a house, I got water – I ain’t poor.”

That’s when she made the choice: radical transparency. She worked second shift at Lydia’s World of Children daycare so her children could be with her – sacrificing pay for presence. Childcare deductions left roughly $200 every two weeks – gas money and the lights. They lived in subsidized housing at Westlawn. Sometimes they’d come outside and “car gone. Our car gone.”

Patricia’s transparency didn’t eliminate poverty. But it built something else: the ability to name reality without shame. She named her depression without shame – not weakness, weight. Julien remembers the darkened room, the bone-deep fatigue. Later, when he shut down after St. Cloud, he recognized it in himself: “Yo, this is real.” Dr. Marcellus Merritt’s lab would give language – “allostatic load” – but his mother taught the practice first: name the thing so it doesn’t control you.

When Julien left St. Cloud feeling like a failure, he understood what his mother had modeled: systems fail people. People don’t fail systems.

Back in Milwaukee, he worked survival jobs – commission-only Kirby vacuum sales, going door-to-door in a suit for pay that often didn’t materialize. Then Menards as a morning stocker. He enrolled at MATC for anatomy and physiology classes, thinking maybe nursing – his cousin Aphelia Phifer-Hill had become a nurse – bought a house, moved her family out of state, built it from the ground up. “Maybe that’s just our family. Like we got that nurse in us.”

But nursing didn’t fit. What fit was understanding why. Why did his hamstring injury in high school never get proper physical therapy? (“My mom didn’t have time to take me... The doctor said it can heal on its own.”) Why did Derrick “D Rose” Rose keep tearing his ACL? Why did so many young athletes – especially Black athletes – lose their careers to preventable injuries?

He pivoted to thinking about physical therapy, about being the person who’d help kids like him recover. Then he thought bigger: psychology. What if he could understand the whole person – mind and body, stress and recovery, the weight people carry that doctors call “enlarged heart” but is really just exhaustion?

By 2015, he’d transferred to UW-Milwaukee for kinesiology. Seventy percent through his degree, he went to his advisor: “I’m gonna be real with you. I ain’t retaining none of this information. I’m not going to be able to find a job.” The advisor laughed. “Dude, you’ve been doing this school junk for a long time. You just need to finish.”

But Julien refused to “just finish” into irrelevance. He went to the Black Student Union. A counselor named Tiffany drew a jar on paper and asked him to describe himself. Brother. Son. Athlete. Caregiver. Team player. She filled the jar with those roles, then asked: “What do all these have in common?”

“They care for people. They’re people-oriented.”

“You ever thought about psychology?”

She looked at his transcripts. An extra year would do it. He switched majors.

In Dr. Marcellus Merritt’s health psychology lab, everything converged. Dr. Merritt – a Black professor who’d studied his own parents’ health decline – taught about John Henryism, that tendency of Black Americans to work themselves to death trying to beat systems designed to break them. He taught about allostatic load – the cumulative wear and tear that grinding leaves on the body. He gave Julien language for what he’d been living.

“My great-grandma was dealing with Alzheimer’s and dementia,” Julien explains. “I was seeing my aunties be these super caregivers, and I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want them to croak.’ Dr. Merritt was teaching about self-care, how stress literally enlarges the heart. My mom had those heart monitors on her my whole life. I thought she was dying. But no – her heart was just stressed.”

In 2018, after Dr. Merritt’s lab gave him language for the load his family had been carrying, he chose a name to match the practice: Juru – not a guru above people, but a guide among them. A reminder to move with mindfulness, to notice patterns, to design the day on purpose. He’d joked he was “Mr. Random.” He wasn’t. He was practicing design.

Press the roots, water, wait.

From here forward, we use Juru for events after 2018; Julien refers to earlier scenes – and Uncle Julien is his namesake and first literacy teacher.

He graduated in December 2020 in psychology. Mentors pushed grad school, and he enrolled at UW-Green Bay’s Sport, Exercise & Performance Psychology program in fall 2021. That winter his “father by marriage,” Kendall Johnson, was carjacked en route to youth practice and hospitalized for months. He uses that phrase intentionally – echoing Lincoln’s Lead Park Maintenance Worker Luana Caraway (“Lu”): “we don’t want to be stepped on.” His mother said he didn’t have to stay. He did. Green Bay felt wrong anyway; after pandemic isolation, being home mattered more than the credential. That’s when the garden found him.

From Theory to Practice

The entrepreneurial idea arrived when he was single and frustrated with hookup apps. He’d call it Link Up Greatness – originally a social bonding app. Then came what he experienced as divine clarity – God speaking during prayer: Nah, bro, it’s bigger than that.

What young people needed wasn’t dates. They needed mentors. “18- to 25-year-olds – that’s the time people just think you grown and you just alone.” Through UW-Milwaukee’s Startup Challenge, he worked with partners Tiera and Tyler to learn about stakeholders, funding models, business structure. The app never launched. But the blueprint was clear: social capital shouldn’t be inherited. It should be infrastructure. And he’d already started building it – one relationship at a time, reciprocity first.

That philosophy showed up when Venice Williams, director of Alice’s Garden Urban Farm and Fondy Farmers Market, offered him a market manager position. He’d applied for work there years earlier when he desperately needed it; she hadn’t hired him. Now she wanted him back. He sat for the interview anyway, but opened with honesty: “I’m not going to take the job. But I’m not coming empty-handed. I know somebody who’d be perfect.” He recommended a recent graduate from his program.

Venice asked what he wanted instead. “I really want to help the parks.”

“You ever heard of Adam Carr?”

Adam walked through the hallway two seconds later. Venice called him over. Juru introduced himself: “I’ve been hearing your name for a whole semester. I’m interested in parks. My family used the parks to nurture us – we didn’t have money, so we got there to play, have fun, get energy off.”

Adam: “Give me your number. I have something for you, but I gotta call you in two weeks.”

Two weeks passed. No call. But Juru saw the C21 Story Experience fellowship online – a program that partners students with nonprofits to tell their stories. One of the partners listed: Milwaukee Parks Foundation. He applied, emailed Adam directly: “Are y’all going to be a partner? Do y’all have a person already?”

Adam replied immediately: “I was one digit off with your number. Your timing’s amazing.”

Like a running back – be patient, stay on your toes, trust your people, then hit the opening. What folks call luck is practice meeting timing.

They brought him on as a Story Experience fellow, then connected him with Tony, a Parks community engagement coordinator working on an aquatic study. Tony met him at Estabrook Park – Juru’s neighborhood park, where he’d been spending hours in his hammock during the pandemic, thinking about how the land could be used. They walked the trails for two hours. Saw a bald eagle together. By the end: “Do your I-9. You’re hired.”

When the county approved funding for an engagement team, Tony called in December: “They gave us the money. I need you to apply.” By spring 2024, Juru – eight years after leaving St. Cloud as Julien – became Community Engagement Coordinator for Milwaukee County Parks (North Region).

“Press the Roots, Water, Wait”

His first job as a teenager? Earn to Learn, summer 2008, removing invasive species at Hawthorne Glen. His current job? Community engagement coordinator for Milwaukee County Parks. The circle closes where it began – hands in soil, building the commons.

“It wasn’t random,” he insists. “Believers taught accountability and exposure: coast-to-coast travel through Explorers Club, leading students to Asheville, NC with UW-Milwaukee, publishing poems with my little sister through Susana Antunes’s Portuguese classes. Uncle Julien taught me to name what I see. My mama taught me transparency keeps you whole. Dr. Merritt taught me you can’t out-work broken systems, but you can design better ones. The garden taught me three unpaid hours can open locked doors.”

What looks like luck from the outside is, from the inside, a practice. Show up consistently. Build relationships before you need them. Offer your network first. Recognize that “safety so the weather don’t break you, and access so you can move” are the two hands that lift.

“Programs don’t create belonging,” he says. “People do. Black spaces aren’t automatic belonging – I learned that with Black Achievers. You need people who want to listen, who want to hear the whole person, who want you to feel loved. Who make you feel like if you crash out, you’re messing up generations. But also like if you stay consistent, everything you want is coming.”

The soil gives a little under his hands. Press the roots, water, wait. Design is daily: who you keep close, what you practice, where you place your word. Random by design. And Juru – born Julien Phifer, named himself in 2018, now 32 – is still building what wasn’t there. One conversation, one garden plot, one relationship at a time.

Julien “Juru” Phifer completed his undergraduate degree in psychology from UW-Milwaukee after eight years across four institutions, then earned his Master’s in Sustainable Peacebuilding. His graduate thesis, “Random, By Design,” explores how intentional practice and relational infrastructure create what others mistake for luck. He currently serves as Community Engagement Coordinator for Milwaukee County Parks (North Region). In 2025, he was recognized as an Environmental Rising Star by the African American Environmental Pioneer Awards. He describes his work as building a survival toolkit through entrepreneurship, craftsmanship, philanthropy, and therapeutic practice – designing infrastructure that helps communities not just endure, but flourish.

Connect: LinkedIn | UWM Feature

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“While this application is probably a long shot… you have a great deal to offer this position and others like it.”

He meant encouragement. What he revealed was a pattern: how institutions quietly define “qualified” by measuring what they had systematically withheld. My PhD program offered minimal funding, limited publication support, and few networking opportunities – then measured my readiness by the very resources they hadn’t provided. This isn’t about individual departments. It’s about how under-resourced programs create the deficits they later diagnose.

That gap – the space between merit and means – is what this poem emerged from. I wrote and recorded “Since 1493” as both lament and reclamation: the “long shot” is not a personal deficit. It’s inherited geography, historical pattern, generational resilience.

My ancestors were long shots when they migrated across oceans, built nations from sugar and saltwater, and raised families in lands that called them foreign even as they laid its foundations. Every immigrant knows this: you’re told to prove you belong in spaces your labor created.

When Columbus landed in St. Kitts in 1493, he didn’t just rename the island. That landing helped inaugurate centuries of being told: this space isn’t for you, you arrived without credentials, prove you belong – even as our labor underwrote the ground beneath their feet.

This piece sits at the heart of what this series has been asking: What does it say about our institutions when they create the barriers, then measure you by your inability to clear them? When they encode historical exclusion into “objective” standards, then call your exclusion inevitable?

In earlier essays, we traced how algorithms learn from decades of redlining, how admissions AI perpetuates who is seen as “qualified.” This poem is what that pattern sounds like when it presses on a life – when systems tell you to prove yourself worthy of space you helped create.

This is what data can’t capture – the sound of persistence coded in flesh, faith, and refusal. The sound of someone who understands the rules weren’t written for them, yet chooses to show up anyway – not to win by their terms, but to redefine what success means.

If you’ve ever been told you’re a long shot, if you’ve ever had to prove you belong in spaces your work helped build – this is for you – not as consolation, but as confirmation: you’ve been mounting small, extraordinary things since long before they learned your name.

Next: Random by Design – how one person turned “long shot” into blueprint by building the relational infrastructure systems forgot to provide. From sound to system; from critique to construction.

This reflection continues the series tracing how systems inherit their biases – and how we build belonging anyway.

Dr. G

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Life of Art continues that exploration in a different key. Traveling through France within generous family networks – from a wedding celebration in Provence to shared meals where laughter crossed generations – I found myself witnessing how recognition moves between people, across difference, and outside official channels. The essay traces that movement from Paris museum walls that curate selective memory to street corners where art insists on its own life, from a harbor that holds both migration and return to moments when strangers become family through shared joy.

Baldwin’s voice becomes a quiet companion throughout, not as mystical presence but as someone who understood how distance can sharpen sight – of what institutions preserve and what they quietly set aside, of how community forms when people see who you truly are and choose connection over distance.

Readers familiar with Without a Map will recognize the method: personal narrative as a way of knowing, attention to how belonging gets built when official systems fall quiet. Where Lester found purpose through craft and kinship, this piece watches similar forces – music that makes foreign rooms feel like home, water that connects distant shores, celebration that transforms groups into community.

Consider this a companion chapter to Lester’s blueprint, arriving at the same truth from another direction: belonging isn’t granted by institutions. It’s practiced, together, in the countless small acts of recognition that carry their own authority.

~Dr. G

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Arrival and Street-Level Belonging

The journey began as just that: a passage from one continent to another. Twenty-four hours earlier, I had left the thick humidity of a Midwestern summer. Now Paris unfolded before me – not the Paris of film reels and literature anthologies alone, but a lived place humming with layered histories my elders once spoke of in reverent tones.

Jet lag pressed down as I lay on the unfamiliar mattress of our Marais apartment. For a few suspended hours, Milwaukee via Chicago felt like another life entirely. When I woke, the city called me through the open window: voices in languages I couldn’t place, the metallic scrape of shop gates, footsteps pressing into centuries of cobblestone. I was no longer in an imagined Paris.

By evening, hunger pulled us into the 3rd arrondissement. The streets carried their own choreography: Tunisian cafés beside vintage bookshops, Orthodox Jewish families crossing paths with West African vendors, graffiti threading across stone walls like dialogue between past and present. Diversity wasn’t a curated exhibit here; it was lived reality.

At Breizh Café, recognition arrived in the form of sound. Between the low murmur of French conversation, Biggie Smalls’s voice spilled through the speakers, followed by Tupac’s unmistakable cadence. The waiter, Caisse, moved easily among tables, the soundtrack woven into his evening as naturally as the language surrounding me. For a moment, the music felt personal – not because it belonged to me, but because belonging can transcend formal channels. I heard home in this foreign place, and this place seemed to hear me back.

Later, walking toward Notre Dame, the cathedral’s towers caught the last light of the day. The jet lag clung, but so did a sense of unexpected connection. Not the belonging of ownership or invitation, but the belonging that emerges when cultural currents collide across oceans.

And in the quiet between those steps, Baldwin surfaced. He had once landed in this same city with forty dollars in his pocket, seeking reprieve from the discrimination that stifled him at home. I had arrived with wedding plans and tourist comfort. Yet perhaps, beneath those differences, we both sought the same thing: a kind of belonging that cannot be purchased.

The Generative Museum Moment

The next morning, rain patterned the streets as we made our way to the Musée d’Orsay. Once a train station, the building rose like a cathedral, its great clock windows casting muted light across galleries of Impressionist masters. Monet’s haze, Renoir’s color, Degas’s form – human genius assembled in one place, a choreography of brushstrokes and vision.

But beneath the splendor, a quiet tension pressed forward. Moving from room to room, I began to notice not only what was present but what was absent. There were Black figures, yes, but few, and when they appeared, their framing carried its own weight.

I paused before Bartholdi’s Liberty, a symbol of freedom steeped in transatlantic irony. In another gallery, a sculpture titled Black Youth with a Sword was presented as an “académie” – its technical perfection quietly reducing the subject to a study rather than a full humanity. A Cordier bust held both dignity and distance, as though the gaze couldn’t decide whether to admire or contain.

The question didn’t come as a dramatic intrusion but as an echo sharpened by my own attention, Baldwin’s presence rising as I lingered over what was shown and what was left out. The absences weren’t accidental; they revealed what official culture had chosen to elevate and what it had quietly set aside.

What stories are these walls telling, and whose stories are they refusing to tell? When you stand in spaces where your ancestors were never welcome as equals, what truths become visible that others cannot see?

I stood in that silence, unsettled. The museum was not neutral; it curated memory. In doing so, it decided who belonged within its grandeur and who remained peripheral. Baldwin’s voice did not demand an answer. It lingered, as if to say: notice what is here, and see what is not. The rest of the journey would take up that work.

Day of Recognition

August 30th arrived with the kind of crystalline light that transforms familiar spaces into revelation. I had learned to walk Paris differently by then – not as a tourist checking landmarks off a predetermined list, but as someone learning to read the city’s multiple, simultaneous conversations. The museum visit had sharpened my attention to what gets centered and what remains peripheral. Now the streets themselves would teach me about other forms of artistic life.

Near the Louvre, the first lesson presented itself through pure sound. A Black opera singer had claimed space in the courtyard, his voice rising and falling with the authority of someone who belonged wherever he chose to stand. Tourists gathered in loose clusters around him, some pausing mid-stride, others fumbling for phones to capture a moment they couldn’t quite categorize. But what struck me wasn’t the performance itself – it was the performer’s complete ownership of that space. Here was artistry that required no institutional approval, no curator’s validation, no wall text to explain its significance. It simply was, and its presence demanded recognition through sheer excellence.

The contrast with yesterday’s museum silence felt intentional, though I knew it wasn’t planned. Street-level artistic expression flows through different channels than institutional preservation. One lives completely in the present moment; the other aspires to permanence through careful curation. Both possess validity, but only one had made room for this particular voice, this specific form of Black artistic presence in French daily life.

That afternoon, wandering through the Cour d’Honneur at Palais Royal, I encountered a different kind of recognition. The courtyard held its own quiet energy – striped columns creating rhythmic shadows across weathered stone, tourists and locals sharing space with equal comfort. An elderly Black woman in a vibrant red scarf moved through with the unhurried dignity of someone who belonged there completely, who had perhaps belonged there for years.

Our eyes met briefly across the geometric pattern of the courtyard. The moment carried no words but seemed to acknowledge something profound: shared histories, shared experiences of moving through spaces not always designed with us in mind, shared knowledge about how belonging gets negotiated daily through presence and quiet assertion. She reminded me of my late maternal grandmother, who had once told me that even small mountains hold extraordinary power if you know how to see them properly.

This woman’s presence felt like that – small perhaps to casual observers, but extraordinary in its quiet insistence on belonging, its refusal to seek permission for occupying space with dignity intact.

Later that afternoon, while walking through the 6th arrondissement, a jewelry shop window stopped me in my tracks. Across the glass, in lavender lettering, the words appeared: Life of Art, Montmartre. The phrase struck me with unexpected force. Not “Art in Life” or “Artistic Life,” but Life of Art, suggesting that art itself lives, that it moves through the world as a way of being.

Standing before that window, three moments from a single day crystallized into pattern: street performance claiming public space, intergenerational recognition across a courtyard, and now a phrase that seemed to name what I was experiencing. This felt like the city’s response to institutional silences, its daily demonstration that artistic life flows through multiple channels simultaneously – some preserved behind museum walls, others living boldly in the streets, shops, and spaces where people gather.

The question Baldwin had posed the day before echoed differently now. What stories are these walls telling? Perhaps the more generative question was:

What stories are these streets telling, and how do they answer back to institutional choices about who belongs in cultural memory?

Here, where the shop window had named it plainly – Life of Art – the answer seemed clear: art makes its own life, creates its own forms of belonging. No institution can fully contain that.

Journey South and Community Formation

August 31st began in the echoing halls of Gare de Lyon, the kind of place where every sound – rolling suitcases, hurried footsteps, the faint hiss of espresso machines – seemed amplified by anticipation. I found my seat on the upper deck of TGV 6274, Coach 18, and watched Paris recede through the wide glass windows. The city’s edges gave way to suburbs, then to stretches of countryside framed like moving paintings.

On the ticket in my hand, a small line caught my eye: 3 grams of carbon emissions by train versus 260 by plane. A detail Baldwin’s generation would never have considered, yet now even the act of travel carries moral weight. Our choices – how we move, how we consume – trace invisible maps that shape not just destinations, but responsibilities.

As the train pulled south, I carried the museum’s silences with me, settling alongside anticipation for the wedding, forming a rhythm of absence and gathering – questions about cultural memory traveling with me into new landscapes.

For 2 hours and 39 minutes, the landscape transformed. Factories softened into fields, vineyards replaced warehouses, and the northern light of Paris melted into something warmer, more golden. But the land itself suggested new questions, not about absence or recognition, but about how people choose to gather, how they choose to make belonging visible through love.

By late afternoon, I arrived in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a Provençal town cradled by canals that once powered mills and now reflected the warm light in their steady currents. The Grand Hotel Henri stood at a corner where water, stone, and street converged, its windows opening onto a pace of life unhurried, complete. The setting felt like a continuation of what I’d been tracing since Paris: currents meeting, blending, flowing together.

That night, the hotel restaurant filled with voices – French and English, Arabic and Spanish, laughter rising above language. Family members from different continents, friends from scattered cities, strangers slowly weaving themselves into kin. Belonging was happening in real time, not through curators or institutions, but through the simple act of celebrating together.

Baldwin surfaced again, not with questions this time but with a quiet reminder: community begins when people see who you are and choose to love that person. In this small town, bound by love rather than obligation, I could see what he meant.

Tomorrow we would move to La Bastide de Laurence, a 500-year-old estate where the ceremony itself would unfold. But already, in this hotel where voices mingled and strangers became family, I understood: art is not only painted or sculpted. It is lived in celebration, carried in the recognition that joy itself can be a form of belonging.

Harbor Convergence and Historical Echo

September 2nd brought the Mediterranean into view like a promise kept. The wedding at La Bastide de Laurence would unfold the next day, vows waiting to be spoken beneath plane trees on an estate carrying five centuries of memory. But already, belonging was being rehearsed – not yet in ritual, but in motion, in water, in the gathering of people choosing joy.

We were aboard a sailboat approaching Marseille’s old harbor, limestone buildings rising from blue water as if painted by the masters whose names filled the museums I had wandered days earlier. The seas were rough, the ride uncomfortable for many, yet we pressed on toward something larger than weather or unease.

As we set out, the groom’s sister shared a detail that gave the harbor its particular weight: her father, Sauveur, had first entered France here from Tunisia at eight years old. For him, this sail marked the first return to those waters since that childhood arrival. The harbor carried memory differently – as both departure point and homecoming, a place that marked both beginning and return.

We anchored in thirty feet of water, and one by one, wedding guests dove into the Mediterranean. I followed, the salt closing over me before I surfaced again. The water felt like recognition – its currents reminding me of my own Caribbean heritage, where seas bind islands into archipelago rather than divide them into fragments.

As we swam, the sun broke through. By the time we began our return, the roughness had given way to clarity – seas smoothed, light turned golden, and conversation unfurled across the deck. Strangers became acquaintances, acquaintances folded into the beginnings of friendship. I spoke with Kalena, a longtime friend of the bride who identified as African American and mixed race, while noting Imani nearby – another friend from the bride’s New York years – planning to introduce myself properly during the ceremony. Kendra, Kalena’s younger sister, I would meet later that evening.

Around us were others whose own paths bore the marks of migration and return. I could feel recognition moving between us, across all our different histories, and many on board also carried identities within the LGBTQ+ community, another quiet thread of connection to Baldwin, whose own life had moved through exile and belonging in ways that reshaped art itself.

When we docked, Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier was playing from a restaurant across the street from the harbor. The timing felt less like coincidence than recognition – Caribbean rhythms meeting Mediterranean afternoon, music weaving together stories of exile, survival, and joy.

Buffalo soldier, dreadlock Rasta… fighting on arrival, fighting for survival…

The song gathered everything the day had held: Caribbean and Mediterranean currents, childhood memory and communal celebration, strangers turning toward each other in recognition. [Libération] Music created belonging for me that no institution could grant or deny.

Baldwin’s echo rose with the music, not as interruption but as gentle synthesis:

Every journey is a confrontation – with yourself, with history, with the truths you’ve been avoiding. What does it mean when water connects rather than divides, when the sea becomes a bridge instead of barrier?

In that harbor, under the Mediterranean sun, the answer felt undeniable: belonging happens when we recognize our shared capacity for movement, for adaptation, for finding home in unexpected waters – and when we discover that joy itself can be a form of art.

Coastal Recognition and Mountain Distance

September 5th found me in Cassis, a fishing village pressed between limestone cliffs and the Mediterranean, where Hotel Liautaud occupied a corner that felt both familiar and impossibly distant. The familiarity wasn’t in the details but in the rhythm – the way coastal light shifted across water, the unhurried pace of people who seemed inseparable from their landscape.

On our first evening at a restaurant near our hotel, Ben, our waiter, offered a different kind of reminder. When asked where he’s from, he smiled and said he was from the Alps – a mountain boy drawn to the Mediterranean by reasons he couldn’t quite explain. His story underscored what I was learning daily: France, like everywhere else, contains multitudes that refuse neat categories. Mountain and sea, north and south, local and newcomer – all coexisting in ways that complicate simple narratives about who belongs where.

The next day, I entered the same Mediterranean that had connected us to Sauveur’s story and Marseille’s harbor. The salt was the same, the buoyancy the same, the sense of continuity unmistakable. Swimming here felt like extending a conversation begun days earlier, each stroke a reminder that water links histories and geographies that land often keeps apart.

From the sea, I could see the fortress of Cassis perched on the hillside – stone walls and watchtowers built over centuries to guard against threats, many of which never materialized. They reminded me of Caribbean fortifications, relics of colonial fears scattered across distant waters, echoes of power and defense repeated in places that had never touched each other directly yet bore the same imprint.

Later, walking through Cassis, I noticed again what had accompanied me since Paris: graffiti. From airport walls to this fishing village’s ancient stone, hip-hop culture had written itself into the French landscape with persistent creativity. Tags and murals spoke a visual language spanning continents, claiming space without permission, transforming surfaces into conversation.

This wasn’t tourism or decoration – it was living expression, community speaking across borders and generations, another reminder that art insists on its own life wherever people claim space for it.

Standing on the harbor wall as evening light turned the limestone cliffs to rose-gold, I understood something Baldwin had always known: sometimes clarity comes from distance. The questions that pressed so sharply in Paris – about presence and absence, about who is remembered and how – looked different here. Not less urgent, but part of a broader pattern: recognition moving through the world in countless small acts of creative courage.

The Mediterranean stretched toward horizons I could not see, carrying stories beyond my reach. Yet as fishing boats returned beneath cliffs that had witnessed centuries of arrivals and departures, I felt joined to something larger than myself: the enduring human capacity to make home in unlikely places, to create art across every border, and to find kinship in waters both familiar and strange.

Return and Synthesis

September 7th brought a different train: TGV 6122, Coach 15 on the lower deck. The fare was 136 euros, compared to the 33 I had paid heading south. Same journey, altered vantage point. From the lower windows, the landscape moved at a different angle – closer to the ground, more intimate with the passing fields and the mountain ranges that might have been the Alps, where Ben had grown up before the sea called him south.

The return to Paris felt like approaching a city I had never left and never fully known. The questions I had carried south – about museums and recognition, about who belongs in cultural memory – traveled back with me, but they had been joined by others. What had I learned about the ways belonging builds itself outside institutional walls? How did celebration and recognition create their own forms of art?

At Gare de Lyon, I stepped once again into the city that had first greeted me with Biggie and Tupac playing in a Breton café. Paris looked unchanged, but my way of seeing had shifted. The graffiti I noticed now read as conversation rather than decoration. The diversity on the streets felt less like performance and more like the city’s ordinary truth – people living their lives, uncurated, uncontained.

That evening, after checking into our hotel in the 9th arrondissement, we headed out for dinner. Walking through the neighborhood, I passed a mural painted across the metal shutters of a closed shop. A Black face in bold strokes faced the street, part of the same graffiti language I’d seen from Paris to Marseille to Cassis. Presence claimed in pigment, insisting on visibility where institutions had often been quiet. Later that night, after dinner, we walked to the Moulin Rouge, neon spilling across the dark streets, its history of reinvention pulsing in the air.

Baldwin’s voice rose one final time, not as mystical presence but as hard-won wisdom:

To tell the truth, one sees things better from a distance. You can make comparisons, from another place, from another country, which you aren’t able to make when you’re inside looking out. You see how people live, how they build community, how they create space for joy.

The museums would always matter, preserving what can be preserved, telling the stories that official culture chooses to remember. But this journey had shown me something else: art also makes its own life in cafés and harbors, in wedding celebrations and street corners, in the courage to enter unfamiliar waters and discover they had been waiting for you all along.

Standing once more in that Paris evening, surrounded by voices speaking languages I still couldn’t place, I understood what the shop window in the 6th arrondissement had been trying to tell me. Life of Art was never just about what hangs in museums or rests in galleries. It was about art as a way of being in the world – graffiti on shutters, music in courtyards, neon on boulevards. Each act refused to wait for permission, creating belonging where official memory had fallen quiet, another reminder that art insists on its own life wherever people claim space for it.

The journey had taught me that belonging doesn’t depend on institutional permission. It emerges when people see who you are and choose connection over distance. It grows when joy itself becomes a form of recognition that crosses borders.

I was no longer quite the same person who landed in Paris. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps that is what travel at its best can do: not change who you are, but reveal who you have always been capable of becoming.

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~ Dr. G

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“How can people be really sane in this world when there’s so much chaos and destruction and lying and cheating and death happening?”

Lester poses this question not as despair, but as spiritual inquiry. At 33, he has lived through what he calls “spiritual downloads” – moments when systemic injustice and personal loss collided, looking like breakdown but revealing themselves as breakthrough. While medical professionals once diagnosed these episodes as bipolar disorder, Lester has reframed them as necessary spiritual and political awakenings, recognizing his deep connection “to the spiritual connections of my ancestors in the universe.”

Lester navigates the world through heroes like Static Shock and Black Panther – figures who embody resilience and fight injustice – and mechanically engineered innovators like the Transformers, Dominic Toretto, and Shaft. This is not the polished trajectory institutions prefer to celebrate. It is the messy, essential kind of journey that builds bridges between who you were and who you are meant to become.

“My K-12 Journey Was Black. Hella Black.”

Lester grounds his story in this foundational truth. Growing up in Seattle’s Central District (CD) and South End – both predominantly Black – and South Park, home to both Mexican and Black families, his early education was anchored in community spaces where he saw himself reflected everywhere. This environment fostered profound relationship-centered belonging – the kind that comes from being known, seen, and valued.

At Leschi Elementary, Mrs. Debbie Harris Cavitt’s choir was more than a before-school activity; it was a launching pad. “My sister got to sing for Nelson Mandela when he came to Seattle,” Lester recalls. Their crossing guard, Mrs. Henrietta Swan Price, a 70+year-old woman featured in the Seattle Medium for her dual artistry and dedication, embodied the community’s investment in every child’s future.

This web of Black excellence was intentional, not accidental. From the Negro Little League baseball club in the CD, where Lester played for the St. Louis Stars and learned about legends like Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige, to his participation in systematic college preparation programs, every institution was designed to build knowledge and pride.

At Madrona Middle School, Lester joined AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), a schoolwide reform program specifically designed to prepare underrepresented students for college eligibility and success. Through rigorous coursework paired with structured portfolio projects, peer accountability, and targeted skills in writing, inquiry, and collaboration, AVID built both academic capabilities and college awareness. For Lester, it became a place where academic skills and future vision developed side by side.

This environment provided “teachers and mentors and choir directors that look like you, that are giving back to the community because they want people that look like the children that look like them to build them up – to be amazing.”

At Franklin High School, his world expanded as he encountered Seattle’s Asian and Pacific Islander communities. “I asked one girl, Hey, are you Chinese? She got mad. She said, No, what do you mean? I’m Laotian.” The lesson stuck: “From this day on, I would never assume someone’s cultural background.”

It was also during high school that Lester connected with College Access Now (CAN) – founded in Seattle in 2005 to help public school students navigate the path to higher education. At CAN, counselors Jennie Flaming and Kerry Donlan provided sustained mentorship beyond what his school could offer. Through their intentional networking, they connected him to the Bowdoin Bound program – a summer initiative founded by Bowdoin alumnus Dan Spears to introduce inner-city youth to his alma mater and other East Coast liberal arts colleges. Though Baltimore-based, the program had expanded to include students like Lester from across the country, including Naema Said, a fellow CAN participant from rival Garfield High School who had attended the year before and became an important peer connection at Bowdoin.

At Franklin, Lester also discovered another piece of his identity. His father, Lee Pearson, had migrated from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, by Greyhound in 1988, carrying Mashpee Wampanoag heritage. While Lester knew from an early age that he was part of a Native tribe, it wasn’t until he attended Bowdoin that he could visit and connect with the other half of his family. When Lester later visited the Mashpee library during college, he found tribal books that told a different story than the one he had learned in middle school – not about “savages,” but about Indigenous people who taught newcomers to fish and live on that land, only to watch them take it, fencing off what had been free and calling it theirs. This awakening illuminated how history’s narrative often favors victors – a critical understanding for navigating institutions that perpetuate those same distortions.

Finding Home at Bowdoin Experience

Before stepping foot on campus as a student, Lester had two powerful previews of Bowdoin. The first was through Bowdoin Bound during the summer – a beautiful but eerily quiet campus tour, with Maine’s crisp air and empty quads that left him impressed by the architecture but uncertain about fit. The second visit changed everything.

During his senior year of high school, Lester returned for the Bowdoin Experience, a fly-in program specifically for prospective students of color and first-generation students. This time, campus was alive with current students, and the African American Society held a welcome party. “That was the trip where I was sold,” Lester recalls. “I was like, oh yeah, this campus would be lit, because they have a community of Black people here. And it looked so large.”

Among the student hosts was Raven-Seymone Johnson, a Bowdoin Experience counselor who gave him “big sis, big cousin vibes.” She understood what it felt like to be so far from home, having made her own journey from Chicago. That weekend felt like a preview of belonging – seeing where students ate, studied, and celebrated together.

What Lester didn’t realize was that the concentrated presence of Black students during the fly-in program wasn’t representative of the daily campus experience. “What I didn’t realize is that it wasn’t as big as it looked that weekend.”

“Welcome to Bowdoin Moment”

The transition to Bowdoin College revealed the invisible architecture of elite education. While the fly-in program offered genuine community and connection, nothing fully prepared Lester for being a first-generation college student among peers whose families paid tuition “out of pocket.” The financial reality was stark: he was there on grants while others treated $50,000 annually as an ordinary expense.

His “welcome to Bowdoin moment” came via his first D grade. He remembers the shock of seeing that paper – red ink bleeding across the margins, the stark D circled at the top. “I looked at that paper, I was like, what, what you mean?” The professor was direct: “Your writing is not strong. You have a lot of grammatical errors. Your story is not flowing. It’s really kind of like how I talk. So that’s how I would write.” This academic culture shock revealed a systemic gap in preparedness, amplified by classroom moments where classmates expressed shock he hadn’t learned about the Korean War. “In that moment, I didn't feel like I belonged.”

But academic preparation was only part of the challenge. Within weeks of arriving, his first relationship ended, and a close friend from home was murdered. The emotional weight made studying impossible. “I couldn’t focus, and I didn’t know how to process that.” A dean recommended therapy, but Lester’s cultural understanding initially framed it negatively: “My first connotation and thought about going to therapy was that it was negative. It was for crazy people.” The cultural mismatch extended beyond academics into the most fundamental questions of mental health and healing.

By junior year, Lester was on academic probation. The mechanical engineering path proved unsustainable – not because he lacked capability, but because the curriculum was designed for students with different foundational preparation. He strategically switched his major: “What else can I do to still get a diploma, but also something that I’m still passionate about. And I totally remembered that I love art.”

This was not failure; it was resourceful reconstruction of purpose. Art had always been part of his story, and at Bowdoin, working with a former Marvel artist, Lester found his academic home. More importantly, he found spiritual and spatial belonging in the John Brown Russwurm House, the African American Society’s gathering place. “That’s where I felt the most belonging,” he reflects, describing it as a space “closest to home to me” where he could “lock in” and study, transforming his grades.

The Network Gap

But graduation ceremonies don’t build job networks. The diploma represented four years of growth – but it couldn’t guarantee a job.

The transition to the workforce brought its own revelations about invisible barriers. Lester’s first job came through a high school friend who had never attended college: working for a valet car company. “That blew my mind. I was like, what? I just did four years of college. And I’m coming back to a place where I got a network.” The irony was bitter – his pathway to employment came through someone the system would have deemed “unsuccessful,” while his educated peers leveraged family connections and alumni networks he couldn’t access from 3,000 miles away.

“These kids were already having jobs. And I was like, what the heck? Like, how are they already getting jobs?” he realized. “These kids were already set from the day they touched Bowdoin freshman year. I was already 10 feet behind where they were at” – running uphill while they started at the finish line. The playing field had never been level, but now the advantage was undeniable. While he scrambled for opportunities, his peers were already positioned for success through networks he had no way to enter.

The cognitive dissonance between educational achievement and economic reality created a pressure that would soon find its release in ways Lester couldn’t anticipate.

To educate a student without building the bridges they’ll need to cross afterward is not preparation – it is abandonment dressed in ceremony.

Lester’s first major “spiritual download” – a sudden, intuitive clarity he describes as a kind of inner revelation – came after Trayvon Martin’s murder. “That affected my conscience a lot. That’s when you’ve seen the world really pause and look at this. That could have been me.” These converging pressures were eventually labeled by mental health professionals as bipolar disorder. But Lester proactively reauthored his experience: “I didn’t come into this world with medication and drugs. I found other herbs and remedies and got around more people who know me, who know how to deal with my spiritual connection.”

His healing practices became painting (his therapy), workouts (lifting, basketball, flag football, walking in nature), yoga, meditation, plant-based diets, and simply breathing – taking three deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling. These weren’t alternative treatments; they were ancestral technologies of wellness that reconnected him to his spiritual foundation.

His second major download came during the George Floyd protests, coinciding with his parents’ divorce and the COVID-19 pandemic isolation. This time, however, he responded differently. He channeled his heightened energy into direct action and self-expression. In the months that followed, two CD anchors helped ground his healing: Coach Omari Garrett – his little league St. Louis Stars coach, whom he encountered daily outside the Northwest African American Museum, where he was protesting – encouraged him to channel his energy into art and cars. Around the same time, he met Imani Blake of Rooted in the CD, whose wellness space of sage, herbs, and community markets welcomed him.

With these supports, he co-founded Fun(d)-A-Mental, a Black and brown art collective that built community through creation, conversation, and public showcases. “I was able to, once I went through those high points, I feel like I got it this time. I had a method to my madness.” Each download, disruptive yet clarifying, became a catalyst for deeper self-awareness and a broader purpose rooted in healing and community.

Rebuilding Through Purpose

The path back to purpose wound through teaching, art, and ultimately, automotive technology. After his second spiritual download, two pivotal figures helped him refocus: his big brother, Dr. G, and his Bowdoin sister, Raven-Seymone. Raven, whom he’d first met during the Bowdoin Experience as a counselor, had become someone he always came to for advice. She understood the journey from the Midwest to Maine and the challenge of being so far from home. After listening to him work through his experience, she offered the clarity he needed: go back to school and pursue your lifelong passion for cars.

That passion had deep roots. His father, Lee, had introduced him to car culture early – car meets, drag races, car TV shows, and working together on a 1966 Ford Ranchero. When Raven suggested he explore automotive technology, it felt like coming home to himself.

Lester moved to Arizona and enrolled at Universal Technical Institute. “Learning how to work on these cars was everything I wanted, was everything I needed.”

The academic skills Bowdoin had taught him – how to study, how to focus, how to “lock in” – proved invaluable. “It felt like a breeze. I graduated there with a 3.9 and had all these accolades. It’s because I knew how to study. Bowdoin had taught me how to study.” Even when he was dismissed from the prestigious Porsche training program three weeks before graduation, Lester persevered. “That was my goal. That’s not going to stop me from still getting a position.”

Today, as a Porsche technician in Tacoma, Lester has found what he calls values-career integration. “My life now is exactly where I want it to be. Even the times that have been a little bit of a challenge, because guess what, it was an experience that I learned from.” The work combines technical precision with the sensory satisfaction of high-performance engineering – the finely stitched leather, the balanced growl of a perfectly tuned engine, the seamless response of a Porsche GT4 RS brought to peak condition under his care. For Lester, it’s not about speed, but about the craft of making automotive excellence possible.

“Alumni to Partner With Them”

Lester’s blueprint for institutional change emerges from lived experience, not theory. “What these students that look like us need – they need alumni to partner with them, check in on them. Before you get into that, you have to connect with one of the mentors.” He advocates for formal mentorship programs pairing incoming Black and brown students with alums who understand the relational navigation required. “Their transition will be smoother. Guaranteed. Because for me, I had you [Dr. G]. So it worked.”

His second recommendation cuts to the heart of the network gap: “Find internships that you can do while you’re in school. Don’t wait until you get out of school.” The social capital built during college years creates pathways often unavailable to students who return home each summer without established networks.

These are not suggestions; they are survival strategies drawn from someone who transformed every supposed breakdown into breakthrough. Lester’s spiritual downloads were not mental health crises – they were moments when individual experience collided with systemic injustice, creating conditions for deeper understanding and purposeful action. His journey from the Central District to a Porsche dealership is not a neat success story. It is a master class in building the bridges you need when institutions fail to build them for you.

“Life was really life,” he reflects. But through it all, his parents, Ramona Wrothwell and Lee Pearson, raised him and his siblings “in the good times and challenging ones too.” That foundation of love, extended forward through mentorship and backward through ancestral connection, transforms personal resilience into collective wisdom.

In a world that often pathologizes struggle, Lester offers a different framework: What if our breakdowns are actually breakthroughs? What if the chaos is not random, but spiritual? What if the journey itself – messy, nonlinear, deeply human – is exactly the curriculum we need?

Lester is a Porsche automotive technician living in Tacoma, Washington. He is a proud member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and continues to create art under the brand LCP (paintedbylcp.com). His next goals include Porsche Motorsport and opening his own custom car shop.

If you have a story about navigating education, work, and identity, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out in the comments or email if you’d like to share your journey in this series

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Voices Across Time

This week’s poem emerged from a question echoing across generations: What does freedom mean when systems meant to protect become instruments of harm?

The voices that answer span centuries. A Cherokee elder might observe: “You speak of heritage while standing on our stolen earth.” Frederick Douglass might add: “Your Constitution promised liberty, yet chains persist in new forms.” A Mexican-American soldier returning from battle might wonder: “I wore your uniform, bled for your flag; why do you hunt my family?” An immigrant mother today might whisper: “We crossed deserts seeking safety, only to find our children caged.”

Recent rhetoric about “heritage-based citizenship” – the idea that bloodline grants greater legitimacy than shared values – demands we examine who truly belongs in America’s promise. This pursuit of power, often built on false pretense, presses on the conscience of a nation that claims to uphold higher ideals. This persistent division, far from humanity’s true nature, stems from a lamentably defective order.

Yet our founding principles explicitly rejected such “blood and soil” nationalism. The Declaration’s “all men are created equal” wasn’t just a hopeful phrase or beautiful ideal; it was a political thesis, a core principle meant to shape the nation’s laws and ensure fundamental equality among its citizens.

Throughout this series, we’ve traced how exclusion evolves from explicit segregation to algorithmic bias to systematic abandonment. This poem’s “Three Americas” framework reveals how what appears broken is actually working as designed: systems where the powerful consume the vulnerable, leverage institutions meant for uplift to control narratives and sow division, and choose to sort rather than bridge, extract rather than invest.

The economic analysis here – “adverse selection,” “market failure” – becomes moral indictment of policies that abandon entire populations while enriching those who profit from division.

This isn’t lament but clear-eyed diagnosis, a defiant surfacing of truth in an age of technological inhumanity. Our strength lies not in conventional power, but in recognizing the oneness of mankind, understanding these designs, and collectively building the relational re-architecture our democracy desperately needs.

~Dr. G

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How Free Are We as a Nation?
Dr. G

Dear America,

You’ve adopted a myopic view in response to far too many social problems,
A highly individualistic stance of “me and mine have what we need.
Y’all are on your own,”
Defying the conventional American belief that individual effort triumphs over circumstances.
Every single one of us knows someone who is surmounting difficult circumstances.
Why do we allow the drawing of an ideological line in the sand?
Why do they perpetuate the neglect
The wholesale abandonment of segments of our population?

Why do we participate in “adverse selection”
The neglect of whole people groups?
Why do they support practices that result in market failure
Benefiting those few who are investing in building and maintaining
An ever-expanding prison system?
Straining social programs,
Forcing more people to rely on government assistance to feed and house themselves?
It seems that they willfully starve public education of critical funds and, instead,
Direct those funds to incarcerate the uncooperative and “dangerous” poor
Scape-goating “Third America.”

Remaining is the frontline population of “Second America.”
Forced to work for non-living wages,
Risking their lives without benefits
Working longer hours to make ends meet.
This essential class is left exhausted
And without representation in decision-making venues,
As this systemic failure cycles through and becomes intergenerational.

Meanwhile, “First America,” calling itself the elites make more and more money,
Influence policies more to their benefit,
Privatizing the prison system, for example,
On it goes.
As I write, few are experiencing record profits,
While the rest grow poorer and more desperate.
This starved reality continues to erode “freedom” for far too many.

When Black sons die in streets,
When children with brown dreams are caged,
When mothers fleeing violence are hunted,
When soldiers with Spanish surnames are criminalized—
All at the hands of those
Our tax dollars pay to protect us?
When heritage becomes hierarchy,
When accent becomes evidence,
When seeking safety becomes criminal?
How free are we as a nation?

They dubbed me Dr. G.

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