“Certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation... They talk about the people, but they do not trust them: and trusting the people is the indisputable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.”
-Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
In the high school Cultural Studies Seminar I co- taught in 2016-2017, my students knew that when we didn’t know what a word meant, we looked it up. One day during the school year, a few weeks after President Trump’s inauguration, we came across the word “radicalize” in an article about DeRay Mckesson and other Black Lives Matter activists...