Reimagining the Future of Learning

     While romance novels isn't a commonly talked about field when it comes to discussing race and prejudice, following the 2020 premeire of Bridgerton  on Netflix, an upsetting history of exclusion and hatred was uncovered within the depths of the romance industry. Romance is after set aside as a genre not to be taken seriously, in reality it is much larger than that. Romance makes up more than 18% of fiction sales in the United States, and has proven to be an allegory for something much more than just sappy stories - it is love and joy, and for some reason, people seem to find it unfavorable that writers express the feelings of love and joy through the eyes of BIPOC characters.      Romnace has had a history of excluding Black writers and their stories, as well as white writers tokenizing and writing characters of color in an unfavorable way. When romance began to pick up speed in the mid 20th century, romance novels that contained or were focused ar...

     True Justice is a 2019 documentary that follows the life and work of Bryan Stevenson, a Black social justice activist and civil rights attorney, specifically focusing on his founding of the Equal Justice Initiative (founded in 1989) and the Legacy Musuem (founded 2018).      Focusing on his upbringing, Stevenson, who was born in 1959, went to an all colored school for his early education, and talks about his struggles for equity within education, and the struggles for the same opportunities that other student got once he attended integrated schools. After completing his bachelor's degree, Stevenson decided to attend law school, and went to Harvard University. However, prior to enrolling in law school, Stevenson had never met a lawyer, and did not see himself or his goals reflecting in what he was learning in the classrooms. It was not until he was able to do an internship working with death row prisoners that he began to understand what he wanted to do...

     Published in 2020, Begin Again by Eddie Glaude Jr. is a novel working to connect James Baldwin's interpretation of his America to the reality of our own, and the lessons that Black Americans can learn and tools they can use to try to survive the ending of the Trump-era and the increased focus on anti-racism in the public sector.      Glaude explains that his work with Princeton on African-American culture and literature studies developed from a early exposure to Baldwin during his undergraduate studies, which he received apprehensively. However, as he continued his education and his studies into Black culture and Black America, Glaude found himself drawn to Baldwin's writings in a way he had not been before. This connection that Glaude vocalizes having with James Bladwin is reflected in his writing, and his reference to Balwin as "Jimmy", which is the name his friends called him. Galude explains in an interview with NPR's "Code Switch" that in many ...