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In her powerful text, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks observed, “I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and private rituals, help maintain the culture of domination, help create an unfree world.”

At all levels of education, we need teachers who are not just committed to the mastery of a specific subject area but also, in hooks’ words, who are committed “to transform the curriculum so that it does not reflect biases or reinforce systems of domination.” In short, we need teachers who are willing to take risks, to take action against neoliberal logics and forms of state power that don’t seem to give a damn about the souls of our students, especially Black students and students of color.

While there is nothing new about the various ways in which Black students and students of color are treated with contempt when it comes to the distribution of equity and justice across various social indices, the Trump administration appears to know no limits in its war against the most vulnerable students. We must fully come to terms with this contemporary moment when the souls of PK-12 students are under attack.

To get at the heart of various historical educational injustices, forms of contemporary erasure and attacks on what should be educational priorities, I’m honored to conduct this exclusive interview with historian Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who is committed to transforming the curriculum in order to undermine systems of domination, who fights to create a free world, and who is concerned with and for the public good. Todd-Breland is associate professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago, and specializes in the history of education, African-American history, Chicago history, and public policy. Her newest book is titled, I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education.

George Yancy: How do you understand the importance and value of education within the U.S. at this particular moment, under an administration that is keen on rejecting and weaponizing dissent, rejecting critique, and pushing an anti-intellectual agenda that opposes the growth of academic and scientific knowledge?

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Elizabeth Todd-Breland: In this moment, it has become clear that controlling knowledge is very important to the fascist, authoritarian regime that is running our country. So, education is very important and is a key site of struggle right now. While parts of this are unique to our current moment, education has always been political and has always been a site of struggle. Enslaved Africans clandestinely taught each other to read and write to plan rebellions, write passes, share ideas, and dream of worlds beyond the confines of bondage. This was so threatening to the white elite that they passed laws banning Black literacy and learning. The many generations of Black folks since then who fought for greater access to education and quality schooling also made connections between education, freedom, self-determination, and knowledge as a means to connect with people around us and build community. In weaponizing dissent, in rejecting critique, in pushing an anti-academic, anti-intellectual agenda, the current administration is also seeking to hinder our ability to think critically and connect with one another. An uneducated population, alienated from their neighbors and communities, is easier to control. I think the current administration’s attempts to undermine science and their targeted attacks on education and formal sites of knowledge production are in service of tyranny and the consolidation of power amongst a concentrated elite.

Accenting your emphasis on education as a site of knowledge production and liberation, I would like you to speak to some of your work with K-12 teachers in professional development and curriculum development spaces. What are ways that Black History is continuing to be centered in this work?

It has become clear that controlling knowledge is very important to the fascist, authoritarian regime that is running our country.

It has become clear that controlling knowledge is very important to the fascist, authoritarian regime that is running our country.

Sure. I have been really energized recently working on a Black Studies curriculum project for middle school and high school students, led by my colleague Dr. Asif Wilson in collaboration with the Chicago Public Library. The project team includes scholars, archivists, educators, and curriculum specialists. I am part of the team working to create a thematically organized inquiry-based curriculum guide for teachers using items from the Chicago Public Library’s Black history and culture archival collections that are being digitized. The archivists on the project are teaching us how to think like archivists and how to teach students to think like archivists. The unit I’m working on now centers Black youth organizing and activism in the 1960s and 1970s through photographs, flyers, reports, and notes from the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC, Congress of Racial Equality, and the Rev. Addie and Rev. Claude Wyatt papers in the library’s Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature. With the larger group, I am thinking through ways for current students to be in dialogue with previous generations of young people in the archives. We are working through how teachers and students can use these sources to interrogate society (past and present), ask critical questions, share learnings, and dream liberatory futures. In the next phase of the project, additional middle and high school educators will join the team to work through and revise the curriculum. Educators are incredibly creative people, so I look forward to seeing what they come up with. The hope is that educators will be able to tap into these resources and guides to facilitate students’ engagement with a usable past and embrace a vision of education for social justice and societal transformation. Creating a curriculum that centers Black histories, ideas, culture, social movements, and politics in order to transform our communities and society is a goal that resonates with the liberatory work of Black Studies. At a time when there is a concerted effort to erase or misrepresent Black history in service of censorship and oppression, it is exciting to work with educators on a project that is explicitly lifting up Black history and expanding student and educator access to original historical texts and artifacts.

I love your idea of teaching students to think like archivists, especially as this requires processes of critical reflection, a deep passion for preservation and yet profound discovery. You know, there is that insightful phrase that goes: “When America catches a cold, Black people get pneumonia.” Within the context of education, Black people have historically faced entrenched economic, political, and other structural forces that negatively impact their access to education. What are the specific current problems (the pneumonia, so to speak) that Black people face when it comes to education in the U.S.? Feel free to talk about this from a national or more local perspective, such as your work within Chicago.

The current attacks on both PK-12 and higher education are explicit efforts to comprehensively undermine progress made through generations of struggle. In particular, the Trump administration is directly attacking legislative and programmatic gains of the mid-20th century civil rights movement — the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Head Start, a variety of affirmative action initiatives, TRIO programs, increased federal financial aid, and expanded funding for PK-12 students living in poverty. These laws, programs, and initiatives were the result of hard-fought community struggles and benefit many students across the country today. Accelerating during the late 1960s, Black campus and community uprisings, along with new laws and affirmative action programs, resulted in a significant influx of Black students into historically white colleges. Between 1966 and 1976, the percentage of Black students attending college tripled, from 282,000 to 1,062,000 students. Even with this growth, piecemeal affirmative action programs and new initiatives were never up to the challenge of addressing the scope and scale of systemic racism and inequities in society nor the historic harms done to Black folks by the systemic denial of educational access and opportunity. But by increasing access to higher education for Black students, they were successful in providing a significant number of Black people with a new pathway into the middle class.

In weaponizing dissent, in rejecting critique, in pushing an anti-academic, anti-intellectual agenda, the current administration is also seeking to hinder our ability to think critically and connect with one another.

In weaponizing dissent, in rejecting critique, in pushing an anti-academic, anti-intellectual agenda, the current administration is also seeking to hinder our ability to think critically and connect with one another.

While civil rights gains for Black students have been chipped away at for decades in the courts, the current administration is aggressively dismantling affirmative action, diversity, equity, access, and inclusion efforts by anachronistically and maliciously inverting the Civil Rights Acts in service of white grievance and white supremacy. These actions undercut the marginal gains that have been made and threaten to disproportionately limit access to higher education for Black students. The administration has been aided and abetted in this effort by colleges and universities that preemptively complied with the administration’s illegal anti-DEI directives, rather than fight for their students. While there has been more resistance at the PK-12 level, the federal government also withheld funding to promote equal opportunity from local school districts, like Chicago Public Schools, which refused to eliminate their Black Student Success Plan and halt their equity work.

The Trump administration is also accelerating efforts to privatize and defund PK-12 public education in ways that will have a disproportionately negative impact on Black students. The education privatization push entered mainstream long before the current administration, with bi-partisan support for the corporate reorganization of public education in the 1990s — imposing private sector business models of efficiency and competition onto a public good: public schools. In cities like Chicago, charter school expansion, school closings, and other market-based reforms disproportionately negatively impacted and dispossessed Black students, educators, and communities. This neoliberal era of education reform — championed by Democrats and Republicans — set the table for the more extreme policies from the Trump administration by ushering in an embrace of punitive accountability, vouchers, and privatization that failed to close opportunity gaps and deliver educational justice for Black students, and facilitated discrimination. The Trump administration is building on the previous era’s normalization of PK-12 public education as a private good by using long-trodden white supremacist calls for “states rights” and “parental choice” as weapons to push for more extreme privatization, raid the public coffers, gut public agencies to deny civil rights and Title IX protections for students and staff, and attempt to erase the histories and lives of Black people, people of color, women, and queer people from our public education system.

The U.S. has never adequately funded public schools at scale — particularly not schools serving Black students. I served as a member of the Chicago Board of Education from 2019-2024. During that time, we received COVID emergency funds that allowed the district to provide targeted resources to students that they had not had before — food, more counselors, after school programs, and other wrap around services. These funds made a real difference in students’ lives and their holistic outcomes improved as well. To meet students’ needs, public schools need more resources, not less. In the face of fascism and authoritarianism, we must collectively fight for fully-funded public schools as a public good, as community hubs that are equitably available to all, and where we teach the truth and affirm students’ identities, histories, and cultures.

Talk about civic engagement that recognizes the importance of solidarity that crosses racial lines.

I’m not sure if I would describe this as civic engagement as much as I would think about this question in terms of organizing and solidarity across racial lines. Particularly here in Chicago, there are a number of significant moments of multiracial organizing and solidarity in justice struggles that come to mind. I think back to labor and communist organizing in the 1930s, not just here in Chicago, but across the country. I think about the late 1960s, when Black, Puerto Rican, and poor white communities came together to form the Original Rainbow Coalition with the Illinois Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Organization, the Young Patriots. They organized based on their shared experiences of police brutality, urban renewal and dilapidated housing, and poverty. Building on the work of the Black Panther Party, this was a coalition that established survival programs — free breakfast programs, free health clinics, free legal services. As poor and working-class people, providing this type of community care across racial lines, pushing for a different vision of what society could be, and putting that vision into practice was powerful. So powerful that federal and local law enforcement infiltrated these organizations and assassinated Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. But their lessons of solidarity and community care endured.

The ways that communities of neighbors are showing up for each other, caring for each other, and fighting for the future are inspiring.

The ways that communities of neighbors are showing up for each other, caring for each other, and fighting for the future are inspiring.

I also think about more recent examples of powerful multiracial organizing in the education justice movement in Chicago, beginning in the 2000s and 2010s. This movement became anchored by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which by 2010 had embraced social justice unionism — bargaining for the common good and education as a public good, fighting education privatization, and working together with community-based organizations, parents, community members, and students to generate demands. These demands extended beyond just wages and benefits. The CTU argued that teachers’ teaching conditions were students’ learning conditions and reflected the conditions in the underserved communities where the majority of students lived.

Chicago’s multiracial education justice movement fought back against the privatization of public education and demanded affordable housing, health care, sanctuary schools, and more resources for the predominantly Black, Latinx, and low-income students that the district served. This was a powerful movement that went up against a Democratic Party establishment mayor, Rahm Emanuel, during the Obama administration and stridently pushed for a more progressive vision of a robust public social safety net that met the needs of our communities. Across the country, and internationally, other communities learned from and leveraged this movement’s multiracial solidarity in fighting for fully resourced public schools as community hubs and necessary public goods.

I see echoes of these earlier movements right now in the fight against authoritarianism, particularly against ICE and the terrorizing of our communities, in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Maine, North Carolina, and on and on. Across the country, the ways that communities of neighbors are showing up for each other, caring for each other, and fighting for the future is inspiring. And there is much to learn from, and find hope in, holding the uniqueness of our current historical moment in conversation with these longer histories.

What are you currently working on? Give us a sense of the direction that you see your work moving us in as a society.

How can history help us “freedom dream” a better world?

How can history help us “freedom dream” a better world?

I just finished a project that I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work on. I co-authored the memoir of the late CTU President Karen Lewis — I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education. Karen was a formidable fighter and staunch defender of teachers, students, and public education. She’s best known for leading the CTU to their historic 2012 strike, challenging establishment political leaders, and paving the way for an unprecedented wave of teacher strikes nationally in the decade that followed. Before becoming a union leader and entering the political spotlight, she organized Black Power student protests as a teenager, lived in Oklahoma and Barbados, and did stints in medical school and film school before teaching science for more than 20 years. She was president of the CTU when the union shifted to forcefully fight against privatization, school closings, and racial and economic justice issues that adversely impacted Black and Latinx students and communities. And she helped build multiracial coalitions with educators, students, parents, and community organizations to fight for a robust vision of the schools that students deserve. Given the times we are living through, it has been uplifting to have the opportunity to elevate Karen’s story and the many lessons that she still has for us today — as a Black woman who fought for public education as a public good, challenged billionaires, built solidarity in multiracial coalitions for racial justice, and struggled against establishment politicians both locally and nationally.

I’m also collaborating with the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials organization on an oral history project with survivors of police torture, their family members, and activists. This is a project that’s been in the works for a while. In 2015, after decades of organizing by community members and survivors, the Chicago City Council passed a historic first-of-its-kind reparations ordinance for the overwhelmingly Black survivors of police torture from the 1970s-1990s under police commander Jon Burge. This hard-won reparations policy required, among other things, the development of a mandatory curriculum about this era of police torture for Chicago Public Schools and the construction of a public memorial to share the stories of survivors and the struggle for reparations. The memorial is expected to finally break ground soon. In speaking with survivors, they often say that documenting this history is so important because for so long they were not believed. The oral history project will archive and share their stories, alongside the physical memorial and public schools’ curriculum, to document, preserve, and honor their truth.

This comes back to where our discussion started, with the importance of education, knowledge, and history. Across my work, I try to elevate histories that challenge power, center justice, and speak to our humanity and capacity for empathy. I try to ask: how can history help us “freedom dream” a better world?

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George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).

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