Learning Will Save Your Black Ass
A Letter to the People Who Told Me Learning Was “Acting White”
“The future will have no pity for those who remain blind.”
—Frantz Fanon
Preface
I did not plan to write about this. I did not wake up craving another reminder of how casually we play with our own survival. But that clip found me, and something in me snapped. Not in anger. In recognition. In the quiet dread of watching my people laugh at the very knowledge meant to keep them alive.
All it took was one simple question. One thing we were all taught before we even had the language to describe ourselves. And it was met with shrugs, jokes, guesses tossed into the wind. I watched us stand in the open with nothing to hold on to. I watched us grin through what we did not know. And I felt the bottom drop out.
Not because the answers were wrong. Because the cost of not knowing has never been higher.
We are living in a country that is revising the terms of our existence in real time. Roe gone. DEIA gutted. Black history stripped from the Pentagon’s calendar. Calls to remove the Smithsonian’s Black museum. Books banned. Curricula sanitized. Legislatures tightening their fists while pretending their hands are tied. And somewhere between all that and the endless noise of the world, our curiosity fell asleep.
And the part that hurts is simple. Our grandparents knew better. They studied this country the way prey knows the hunter: by scent, by pattern, by the sound of its breathing in the dark. The system was not designed for them, so they learned the blueprint by heart. They knew the three branches because the branches held the rope.
Now here we are, fifty years after the ink dried on the Civil Rights Act, standing on the same ground with less urgency and more distractions. Less vigilance and more vibes. Less discipline and more performance.
And I can’t lie. It brought up old bruises.
I thought about every time I was mocked for speaking clearly, reading widely, asking questions no one else wanted to answer. I thought about the boys who told me I talked white, the girls who rolled their eyes when I cared too loudly, the adults who treated my wanting to learn like a character flaw. As if intelligence were betrayal. As if curiosity were punishment. As if knowing something meant abandoning my Blackness instead of deepening it.
And I remember the way my body registered it before my mind did. The quiet burn in my ears. The tightness under my tongue. The way I swallowed the answer I wanted to give because I understood, even then, that speaking truth in the wrong room could bruise you.
Meanwhile, the same people who made education a joke are standing on camera unable to name the structure controlling their lives. And somehow I’m supposed to pretend that doesn’t matter.
I am tired of watching us pretend that ignorance is harmless. It is not. Not for us. Not in this country. Not in this moment.
This is not a lecture. This is a warning. This is a reminder that we cannot afford to play small in a world that has never played fair. This is a letter to the people who told me learning was “acting white,” written from the other side of survival.
The truth sits heavy and it sits plain: learning will save your Black ass. Pretending otherwise will cost us more than we can carry.
“Americans have always known how to forget the people they fear.”
— June Jordan
Are Y’all Okay?
Are y’all okay? I’m asking with love and disbelief both, because I keep watching us move through this country like the ground beneath us isn’t sinking. And maybe that question sounds playful, maybe it sounds like I’m doing the most, but I mean it. Something in our collective pulse feels off. Something in the way we laugh at what should concern us, the way we shrug at what should sharpen us, the way we let the simplest knowledge slip through our fingers like it was never meant for us in the first place.
This country has always known how to forget the people it fears. It forgets us in policy. It forgets us in curriculum. It forgets us in public until it needs our bodies for labor or spectacle or blame. The forgetting is structural; it’s deliberate; it’s convenient. But what frightens me most is not the forgetting America performs. It’s the forgetting we have started performing for them.
Because when I watched that clip, it wasn’t the wrong answers that bothered me. It was the way we looked comfortable not knowing. The way the question landed like a game instead of a warning. The way generations of struggle, study, and survival had been replaced with a shrug and a joke. Our grandparents memorized the branches of government because those branches controlled their bodies, their futures, their children’s chances. They studied the predator because not knowing meant being eaten alive.
But now we are living in a moment where the stakes are just as high, if not higher, and somehow the urgency has evaporated. Roe is gone. DEIA is gutted. The Pentagon is wiping cultural months off its calendar. Histories are being removed from textbooks with the stroke of a pen. And too many of us are moving like the danger is theoretical, like the rollback is temporary, like the past cannot return wearing new clothes.
We should know better. Our bloodlines are full of warnings.
And the way some of us carry our unawareness feels less like innocence and more like surrender.
I want better for us than that. I want us to want better for ourselves. Before anything can change, we have to answer the question honestly.
Are we okay?
And if the answer is no, then it is time to stop pretending that not knowing is harmless.
“To live in the wake is to know the world is watching you drown.”
— Saidiya Hartman
Y’all Be Letting These Clips Run You Ragged
Y’all be letting these clips run you ragged. I say that with love that tastes like disappointment. Because the way we engage with these videos, the way we treat them like harmless entertainment, tells me we have forgotten something essential. We are not just watching. We are being watched. We are being measured, misread, mocked, studied, and circulated in real time. Every laugh, every stumble, every blank stare becomes part of a narrative that was already eager to degrade us. And somehow we treat it like content. Like a joke. Like nothing is at stake.
What Hartman names is exactly what we refuse to hold. The world is not just looking at us. The world is watching us drown and documenting the depth. These clips are not neutral. They are not simple interviews in the wild. They are a catalog of vulnerability disguised as entertainment. They become evidence for people who already decided what we are capable of. They become confirmation for those waiting to call us unserious, uneducated, unprepared. And we hand them the ammunition with a smile because we think the moment is light when the consequences are heavy.
I am not blaming the people who end up in front of those cameras. I know how unprepared life can leave you. I know how school systems fail us, how teachers underestimate us, how racist expectations carve themselves into our confidence before we even know what confidence is supposed to feel like. I know how exhaustion quiets curiosity, how generational survival teaches you to focus on what you can touch, not what shapes the sky above your head. I know how hard it is to care when life has already wrung you dry.
But I also know we have to stop pretending these moments don’t matter. Because the country is already shifting into a posture that wants to erase us in public and blame us in private. And these clips, innocent as they appear, become the story they use to justify the erasure. They take the systemic failures that shaped us and recast them as personal flaws. And we, trained to swallow shame that never belonged to us, absorb the humiliation like it is ours to carry.
Not knowing is treated like a punchline until the country uses it as a sentence.
There is no transformation without critical awareness.”
— bell hooks
Get Out That Mindset
There is a mindset we inherited without ever agreeing to it, a way of shrinking ourselves that became second nature before we even knew we were shrinking. And I see it every time someone laughs off their own unknowing. I hear it in the dismissive tone we use to hide embarrassment. I feel it in the way some of us would rather perform confidence than admit we feel unprepared. It is the mindset that tells us it is safer to appear indifferent than to risk looking uninformed. The mindset that claims humility while secretly enforcing smallness. The mindset that turns questioning into shame and learning into betrayal.
bell hooks named it clearly: transformation cannot happen if we refuse to see ourselves honestly. But too many of us were raised in environments where seeing ourselves was dangerous. Curiosity invited ridicule. Intelligence became arrogance. Wanting to understand the world? That was betrayal. That conditioning gets into your bloodstream early. It teaches you to equate your own growth with disloyalty. It teaches you to believe that anything too complex, too unfamiliar, too demanding is not meant for you.
And over time, that mindset becomes a kind of armor. A cheap substitute for confidence. We hide behind jokes instead of learning what we do not know. We pretend we are unbothered instead of admitting we need to stretch. We confuse pride with fear because the two learned to share the same face. And eventually, ignorance stops feeling like a gap and starts feeling like a personality. A stance. A way of moving through the world without ever risking vulnerability.
But that protection comes with a cost. When we cling to that mindset, we mistake survival strategies for identity. We mistake the instincts that once kept us safe for the instincts that will keep us stagnant. And the country benefits from that stagnation, because a quiet, numbed, self-doubting population is easier to control than a curious one.
I remember being inside that mindset myself. I remember feeling the heat rise in my face whenever someone asked a question I didn’t know how to answer. I remember the defensive laugh, the quick joke, the attempt to move the conversation along before anyone noticed the gap. I remember thinking the safer choice was to disengage, to roll my eyes, to pretend the information wasn’t important anyway. That was the lie working on me, the lie that tells you staying small is safer than risking growth, that ignorance is natural, that reaching for more makes you foolish, that learning is a performance you can’t afford.
You cannot grow inside a mindset built to keep you small.
You cannot transform inside a room that punishes curiosity.
You cannot build a future inside a belief system that teaches you not to want one.
Getting out of that mindset is not easy. It is emotional work, spiritual work, ancestral work. It requires you to unlearn the survival mechanisms that shaped you. It requires honesty. It requires hunger. It requires the willingness to look foolish for a moment so you are not lost for a lifetime.
It requires what hooks calls critical awareness: the courage to see yourself clearly, even when what you see is unfinished.
Staying in that mindset limits your power. Refusing to leave it will cost more than embarrassment.
It will cost possibility.
Please Tighten Up
Please tighten up. I’m saying that as someone who has been loose before, who has coasted, who has pretended things were fine when the truth was beating at my ribs. I’m saying it because we are standing in a moment where the smallest gap in attention can turn into a hole we cannot climb out of.
The country has already tightened its grip. Laws are shifting quietly. Rights are being reinterpreted in back rooms. Whole histories are being removed from textbooks with the stroke of a pen. And too many of us are moving like the danger is theoretical, like the rollback is temporary, like the past cannot return wearing new clothes. The predator is circling again. It never stopped. We just stopped tracking its movement.
Tightening up does not mean performing. It means paying attention. It means asking questions even when they make us feel exposed. It means caring enough about our lives, our rights, our futures to stop coasting on vibes and memory.
This country counts on our exhaustion. It wants us distracted. It wants us scrolling. It wants us laughing at what should alarm us. It wants us consuming instead of learning. It wants us comfortable in our own confusion. Confused people are predictable. And predictable people are easy to control.
Please tighten up. Not because the country deserves it, but because your life deserves more than autopilot.
The future is being shaped in rooms you are not in, and the least we can do is understand the architecture of the decisions being made about us.
We cannot keep handing this country the proof it wants.
They’re Lucky to Be in Our Orbit
There is something I need us to remember before we make this moment another punchline. We are not the joke. We never have been. The reason these clips travel the way they do is because our brilliance has always been threatening. Our insight, our imagination, our instinct for survival, our cultural intelligence, all of it has shaped this country more than this country will ever admit. They study us because they cannot match us. They mimic us because they cannot build what we build. They watch us because they know proximity to us is a privilege they did not earn.
They’re lucky to be in our orbit, and they know it.
That is what makes these videos so unsettling. Here we have one of our own brothers out there trying to spark something real, trying to connect, trying to offer a mirror, and instead the moment gets twisted into a spectacle that makes all of us look unprepared. The clip isn’t funny because people don’t know the answer. The clip is painful because the world sees our gaps and calls them our essence. It takes a moment of unknowing and recasts it as our entire identity.
But that story is a lie.
We are not a people without brilliance. We are a people whose brilliance has been intentionally interrupted. Our ancestors learned how to decode laws written to erase them. They mastered literacy under threat. They built political strategy from nothing but each other. They understood the mechanics of power because they had to. They studied by candlelight, by whispers, by stolen minutes that could have cost them their lives.
That legacy did not skip us. It is in our blood.
What we do not know is not a reflection of our capacity. It is a reflection of this country’s fear of what we might do if we knew too much.
We cannot let a moment of unknowing convince us that we are the embarrassment. We cannot let a clip define the depth of our lineage. We are more than the moment someone captures, more than the gap in a stranger’s answer. We are more than the narrative this country keeps trying to paste over us.
They’re lucky to be in our orbit. Lucky to witness us. Lucky to borrow our language, our culture, our imagination, our fire.
And we owe it to ourselves to remember exactly who we are.
I Don’t Ask For Much, But…
I don’t ask for much, but I do ask for this: that we stop confusing our exhaustion with freedom. That we stop assuming our survival is automatic.
It never has been.
What I want is for us to wake up to the moment we are living in. Not in fear. Not in panic. In clarity. Because clarity is its own kind of armor, and too many of us are walking around unprotected. I want us to care enough about ourselves to stay alert. I want us to trust our own capacity to learn what we were never taught. I want us to understand the systems shaping our lives, not because the country deserves our attention, but because we deserve to move through this world with our eyes open.
I don’t ask for perfection or encyclopedic knowledge. I ask for presence. I ask for curiosity. I ask for the willingness to stop laughing at the things meant to distract us from our own power.
We are living through a moment when laws are shifting faster than we can blink. A moment when rights are being redrawn in daylight. A moment when narratives about our intelligence are being resurrected and repackaged. A moment when the country is testing how much we are willing to overlook before the ground disappears beneath us.
And the world is watching. Some with hope. Some with envy. Many with calculation.
Which is why I need us to take ourselves seriously. Not in a way that kills the humor that keeps us alive. Not in a way that strips us of the joy that makes our culture magnetic. But in a way that honors the truth our ancestors tried to pass down: knowing the world is part of surviving it. Understanding the structure is part of protecting what we love. Asking questions is part of defending the future we claim to want.
Learn something that could save you. Ask something that could free you. Study something that could sharpen you. Remember something they hoped you would forget.
The future is already being negotiated. And the people in the room are counting on our absence.
Let us not give them what they want. Let us not become the evidence they use to justify our erasure.
Learn because you deserve to live fully. Your ancestors paid in blood for the right to think. This moment demands more from us than coasting.
I don’t ask for much. Just that we rise to meet the world with our minds awake. Just that we refuse to sleep through our own becoming. Just that we treat our knowledge like the lifeline it has always been.
Let that be enough—for now.
Author’s Note
I did not write this from a distance. I wrote it from the part of myself that still remembers what it felt like to be laughed at for knowing too much and ignored for not knowing enough. I wrote it from the part that learned to mask curiosity because it made people uncomfortable. I wrote it from the part that tried to shrink in rooms where smallness was the expectation. I wrote it from the part that had to unlearn that shrinking before I could call it what it was: a wound passed down as culture.
This essay is a warning. It is also a love letter.
I love us enough to tell the truth plainly. I love us enough to want us awake. I love us enough to be unsettled when I see us give this country the very narrative it has always wanted to write about us.
I also wrote this because I know what it feels like to come alive again after years of moving through the world half asleep. There is a clarity that returns to you when you finally stop apologizing for wanting to understand your life. There is a pride that rises when you realize knowledge is not a threat to your identity but a pathway into it. There is a steadiness that enters your body when you stop running from your own mind.
I want that steadiness for us. I want that clarity to become a collective practice, not just a private achievement.
Learning has never been about proving anything to a country that built itself on doubting us. Learning is about survival. Learning is about lineage. Learning is about refusing to inherit the same fears that tried to silence the people who came before you.
And the truth is simple: if we do not learn the world, the world will keep rewriting us without mercy.
So if this essay leaves you with anything, let it be this: your mind is not an inconvenience. Your curiosity is not a flaw. Your intelligence is not a betrayal. Every time you reach for understanding, you are reaching for your own freedom.
This essay is not a reprimand. It is a reminder. And I wrote it because I believe we can rise to meet the moment.
Not out of fear.
Out of dignity.
Out of love.
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