I wanted then, what I want now — what we all want — freedom. I refused and will always refuse to accept any and all imprisoning categories. I am not what they see and laugh at; I am not what my uncle is; I am not what I was before I came here. I am what exists between “I am not” and “I will be…”

The place between “I am not” and “I will be” is where you will find W.E.B. DuBois and Dr. King. It is the spiritual homeland of all African-Americans, because it is the truth about America’s promise and it is hope, always hope, for a people who have experienced evil at first hand, who are, in a sense, journeying home from exile.

Both Dr. King and W.E.B. DuBois, but also James Baldwin, Maya Angelou (look at their smiles and at their eyes when they smile), Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison and so many others can help you get there. They want you to join them on this journey. They (and we) are still struggling.

And still we are not saved…

Here are some of those struggles: from Sojurner Truth, who asks, “Ain’t I a Woman?” From W.E.B. Du Bois, who asks, “How does it feel to be a Problem?” From Martin Luther King, Jr., who asks, “Can we bank on this dream?” And from Barack Obama, who claims that, “Yes, we can.”

Watch: “Alice Walker reads Sojourner Truth”
Watch: “W.E.B. Du Bois–140th Anniversary”

Sojourner Truth’s speech, “Ain’t I a Woman” (read by Alice Walker), and from W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (Read the whole text at Guttenberg.org.)

Watch: “The Urgency of Now”
Watch: “Barack Obama at 2008 DNC”

From the March on Washington, 1963 (read Drew Hansen’s, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation for a deeper analysis of the speech and the reasons for its impact, and visit the Civil Rights Digital Library for resources on the modern American civil rights movement.); and from the Democratic National Convention, 2008 (here is the transcript).

As for the deeper impact of this last speech, well–that is up to all of us.

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1st, 1863, but it took two and a half years, until June 19th, 1865, for that proclamation to be announced publicly and enforced in Galveston, Texas by General Gordon Grainger and his 2,000 Union troops. Ever since then, “Juneteenth” has been a day to celebrate this proclamation of freedom to the captives. It has been an official state holiday in Texas since 1980, and as of this year is officially recognized in 28 other states. It is also a day to reflect on the two and a half year delay, and on the patience, persistence, and force needed to establish justice in our society.

Also celebrated in June is Loving Day, which I only know about by the grace of the amazing street photographer Michael David Murphy of While Seated. The U.S. Supreme Court case of Loving vs. Virginia finally established the legality of interracial marriage in the United States (which was then illegal in Virginia and 16 other states), as of June 12th, 1967. Yes, you read that right: 1967.

BOF stands for Brain On Fire, and it is our family’s term for the state of passionate engagement with complex ideas. BOF happens when you try to communicate important, real world information to novice learners without oversimplifying its relationship to everything else, i.e. without dumbing it down intellectually or ideologically.

BOF happens when my kids ask complicated questions before bedtime so Dad will delay sending them to bed, or when a child can’t sleep because he is wondering how the spider DNA could combine with Peter Parker’s, or when a child’s passion for baseball inspires his mother to visit a museum exhibit that ignites in her a passion for the game. It’s part of the culture at our house, and one of the reasons we homeschool. It is the raw material of our learning, which we shape into unit studies, reading lists, and field trips. BOF powers our children’s education and our own continuing education. (As a family, we will probably be spending some time surfing the Civil Rights Digital Library year by year. As parents, and as friends of adoptive and non-adoptive inter-racial families, we will be keeping up with the Anti-Racist Parent blog. And maybe we’ll even read Blood Done Sign My Name out loud with the kids.)

BOF is not just for homeschoolers, of course; it can be nurtured between parents and children wherever they are willing to help one another learn. Kirsten Keller (over at This Mommy Gig) nurtures BOF intentionally with her son. And, yes, even the structures of the Educational Industrial Complex can’t stop a passionate, gifted professional classroom teacher from igniting BOF in his or her students.”Star teachers have not come to rescue the system. Actually, they do not expect much from the system—except for the likelihood that it may worsen. They focus on making their students successful in spite of the system,” writes Martin Haberman in Star Teachers of Children in Poverty. More and more in our networked world, BOF is an powerful guide for learning. When high quality expertise is just a few links away, why sit in a box and wait for someone to feed it to you? If you’ve got the passion, why not chase down the knowledge yourself? The homeschool community (among many others!) is figuring out how to properly support the pursuit of knowledge, even when it means letting go of the old “knowledge-transfer” structures.

Which brings us back to prejudice.

The homeschool world was in a kerfluffle ¹ this Memorial Day weekend over an essay contest sponsored by the Subway restaurant franchise, which included this gem on the registration form:

Contest is open only to legal US residents, over the age of 18 with children in either elementary, private or parochial schools that serve grades PreK-6. No home schools will be accepted.

Why were home schools excluded? While there were lesser prizes appropriate to individual students, the grand prize was $5000 in athletic equipment; apparently, the contest-makers were unable to conceive of any sort of “educational” activity (like kids writing stories) occurring outside of an institution that needed to field a sports team.

A boycott of Subway ensued, and apparently the pro-boycott /con-boycott rhetoric has gotten pretty heated. Debra Hanley at Pricipled Discovery writes:

It isn’t pretty out there, and it is rare that I really see this much division in the boards I frequent. I never knew someone’s choice to boycott or not boycott could be so personal. That my shoulder shrug at the whole thing would result in impassioned defenses of how boycotting does work, and an insistence that we have to remain vigilant even in the little things. Or that those who are not boycotting would see fit to not merely state why they think it is not necessary but go so far as to belittle those who have chosen to do so.

But really, do we make this big of a deal out of other companies who choose to support traditional schools? ….Corporations have gotten away with donating money to schools for some time without raising the ire of homeschoolers. Simply because it comes in the form of a contest, we are suddenly boycotting? And worse, flaming each other?

She quotes American Thinker for the reason behind the offended feelings:

But why is this snub at homeschoolers even an issue? Homeschoolers face constant harassment from “officials” at the state and local school board level, as well as from teachers unions, and they are therefore more than a bit sensitive to perceived commercial discrimination. By banning homeschooled children from their essay contest, Subway has — accidentally or intentionally — placed themselves firmly in the “enemy’s camp.” [emphasis added]

Being conscious of the history and state of education in America could have saved Subway some headaches. Education simply does not equal school, and Subway should have operated with that awareness. And as Debra points out, a very small amount of creative thought on the part of the contest organizers would have been enough to include people who learn in situations, like homeschools, that are different from the institutional school “norm.” (Heck, we even play organized sports…)

Instead, Subway sacrificed homeschoolers to it’s unimaginative notions of education. They asked homeschoolers to go along with second-class citizenship, losing out to institutional schools, and to allow Subway the luxury of ignoring the fact. It was a sacrifice that many homeschoolers were unwilling to make. We refused to acquiesce; we’d been slighted and we stood up for our rights. And, for what its worth, the culprits apologized.² They didn’t change the rules of this contest, but promised to write new rules for future promotions. End of story, yes?

No.

Where there is a history of discrimination, sensitivity runs high. Little things make us suspicious, indignant, rationally and irrationally angry; it does not matter if the slight is real and consequential, or imagined and trivial. History makes us ready to fight, to marshal our strength against the enemy, because we believe that is what will make us safe, and (even more) we know that that is what makes our side strong. And who does not want to feel strong? How else, except through our own strength, are we to be protected from political harm from the powers that be? Even if it’s just a stupid sandwich shop.

And homeschoolers weren’t through flexing their muscles. Here was an enemy that made an easy whipping boy, a target that we could vent all our frustrations upon without noticeable consequences. (I mean, really, who cares about Subway? Our dollars give us power, and if their business tanks, it’s not like we’d have to give up fast food or anything….) With so many things to be frustrated about, and perhaps in some circles a tradition of using persecution as a source of political strength, why should we calm down and let the enemy off the hook?

Its not all consumerist indignation or political opportunism, though. We live in a world of surface impressions, where people’s attitudes and treatment of us can be transformed by a T-shirt. Though prejudice against homeschoolers doesn’t even begin to be in the same league as the brutality and oppressiveness of racial prejudice, it is real, and we understand that it matters how people see us. As homeschoolers, we strive to construct a life worthy of recognition and respect on its own terms, however modest, and then someone comes along and doesn’t even bother to look at what we’ve done.

“I am an invisible man,” writes Ralph Ellison’s protagonist. “When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination–indeed, everything and anything except me….Who knows but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

In some ways the anger of homeschoolers is that of Ellison’s Invisible Man, a just response to the refusal to see homeschoolers as valid on our own terms, or even to see us at all, to be unaware and uncaring about where the system–the Education Industrial Complex–shuts us out.

But still–all this over a sandwich story contest?³ As usual, Principled Discovery asks a penetrating question:

Rights are something we can fight for…. When it is a matter of rights, we dig in our heels, put up a fight and resist compromise. That is what has gotten us where we are today.

But is this the model we should follow for every fight? It is one thing to march on the capitol; it is quite another thing to march on the general public. It seems to me we should be building bridges…

So there may be a time for war–but there is also a time for peace, and for learning together how to live together, when we all lose out to somebody sometimes. Overcoming prejudice and distrust is an ongoing project of bridge-building and, as one parent put it, of continually “pulling out the roots that are embedded in your own heart.” It requires, as Danielle Allen argues in Talking to Strangers: On Little Rock and the Art of Political Friendship, the book that sparked my discussion of school desegregation with my kids, an awareness and understanding of who is losing out to whom, of who made that choice, how that loss will be recognized, and how both that sacrifice and its validation will be reciprocated. It’s not a one-time attitude adjustment, but a continuing journey in the company of people who are not like us, but who may become our civic friends. Such a strategy might go a long way toward more important goals: building a supportive environment for homeschoolers, and reinvigorating the varied practices of education & learning in America today. BOF and all.

Here is how one Christian homeschooing father chose to begin that journey, showing humility and recognition of the intended purpose of the Subway contest rules, without giving up the claim for recognition by the company:

Dear Subway,

Please forgive us for acting like anyone else would. The truth is, we claim to be followers of Christ, but we aren’t perfect at it. We truly hope that you succeed in your efforts to provide exercise equipment to kids that desperately need it. In the future we hope that those of us who choose to home school will be more of a blessing to your franchise. We hope that you won’t see us as a community of self-isolating complainers, but as a community of people who feel so strongly about our kids that we are willing to go the extra mile with them.

Sincerely,
Homeschoolers

This homeschooler turns his loss of eligibility for the contest into a claim for recognition and an invitation for future relationships. I hope that we, as our Teacher instructs, will be ready to go the extra mile with our oppressors as well. And while we’re at it, we might use this episode to remind ourselves of the deeper, harsher prejudices that exist in our society, among the people with whom we live, and of journeys in their company to which we are called.

“The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.”

So here are some manifestoes of the present day on books, education, faith, and civic life. Though their weight for good or ill, for much or little, is as yet unknown, these are some of the words that will shepherd us into our shared future:

Sara Lloyd has blogged “A Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st Century”¹:

…the very nature of books and reading is changing and will continue to change substantially. What is absolutely clear is that publishers need to become enablers for reading and its associated processes (discussion; research; note-taking; writing; reference following) to take place across a multitude of platforms and throughout all the varying modes of a readers’ activities and lifestyle.

Follow this up with Clay Shirkey’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations:

…individual weblogs are not merely alternate sites of publishing; they are alternatives to publishing itself, in the sense of publishers as a minority and professional class. In the same way you do not have to be a professional driver to drive, you no longer have to be a professional publisher to publish. Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities, and the most obvious precedent is the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.

I am a former public school teacher and current homeschooler, and John Taylor Gatto’s works, including Against School have been influential for my family as well as many others²:

What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would “leave no child behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?

Dana Hanley made the connection between Gatto’s work and the commentary of Harvard Kennedy School’s Paul Peterson on The Education-Industrial Complex³:

If politicians in America attended more closely to the needs of the next generation than the interests of unions and bureaucrats, the country could use its ingenuity to create once again an educational system the world would seek to emulate. To do so, however, politicians will have to take on the education-industrial complex.

Christians believe that God Himself has a manifesto, but that does not stop us from feeling the need now and then to proclaim the meaning of that revelation for our present circumstances. The Evangelical Manifesto, penned (with others) by Os Guinness (a faithful friend of his fellow manifesto-writer, the late Francis Schaeffer) attempts to speak, with words of both affirmation and repentance, to the call on Evangelical Christians at this moment in time⁴:

…we boldly declare that, if we make clear what we mean by the term, we are unashamed to be Evangelical and Evangelicals. We believe that the term is important because the truth it conveys is all-important. A proper understanding of Evangelical and the Evangelicals has its own contribution to make, not only to the church but to the wider world; and especially to the plight of many who are poor, vulnerable, or without a voice in their communities.

The place of religion in human life is deeply consequential. Nothing is more natural and necessary than the human search for meaning and belonging, for making sense of the world and finding security in life. When this search is accompanied by the right of freedom of conscience, it issues in a freely chosen diversity of faiths and ways of life, some religious and transcendent, and some secular and naturalistic.

Nevertheless, the different faiths and the different families of faith provide very different answers to life, and these differences are decisive not only for individuals but for societies and entire civilizations. Learning to live with our deepest differences is therefore of great consequence both for individuals and nations. Debate, deliberation, and decisions about what this means for our common life are crucial and unavoidable.

We ourselves are those who have come to believe that Jesus of Nazareth is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and that the great change required of those who follow him entails a radically new view of human life and a decisively different way of living, thinking, and acting….Here we stand. Unashamed and assured in our own faith, we reach out to people of all other faiths with love, hope, and humility.

Barack Obama’s speech or race in American life, “A More Perfect Union”:

The document [the framers of the U.S. Constitution] produced was eventually signed, but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations. Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggles, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time….

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America: to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through, a part of our union that we have not yet made perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care or education or the need to find good jobs for every American….

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past….”

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years…. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of that old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.

That anger is not always productive. Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems. It keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our own condition. It prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community….Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation….to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns, this, too, widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now.

It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. And contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle or with a single candidate, particularly — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own. But I have asserted a firm conviction, a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people, that, working together, we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds and that, in fact, we have no choice — we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

Obama’s speech on race in America can be read in the larger context of the challenge of civic engagement. In this sense, we might do well to read him along with Richard Harwood’s call to Make Hope Real:

My fear all along has been that “hope” would become a casualty of this campaign – that its very meaning and currency would be diminished through overuse and sloganeering….For not all hope is created equal…. But no matter what results emerge…I believe we must see hope differently if we wish to make it real. We must distinguish between authentic and false hope.

…and also with Danielle Allen’s amazing tour from Aristotle to Ralph Ellison and beyond in Talking to Strangers: On Little Rock and the Art of Political Friendship:

Of all the rituals relevant to democracy, sacrifice is preeminent. No democratic citizen, adult or child, escapes the necessity of losing out at some point in a public decision…. An honest account of collective democratic action must begin by acknowledging that communal decisions inevitably benefit some citizens at the expense of others, even when the whole community generally benefits…. Their sacrifice makes collective democratic action possible. Democracy is not a static end state that achieves the common good by assuring the same benefits or the same level of benefits to everyone, but rather a political practice by which the diverse negative effects of collective political action, and even of just decisions, can be distributed equally, and constantly redistributed over time, on the basis of consensual interactions. The hard truth of democracy is that some citizens are always giving things up for others.

Allen’s book is a beautiful example of how to read manifestoes wisely. Her reading studies carefully the testimonies of Aristotle, Hobbes, Ellison, and our own recent headlines & history, sifting through their words to bring deep truths to light, and make visible the places where we stand.