What Does Revolution Sound Like?

I learned about Bayard Rustin as an adult but was taught about the March on Washington as a child. I learned that my grandmother boarded a bus like many black folks did in 1963 and rode to the March. The souvenir button emblazoned with the slogan March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with two human hands, black and one white–with August 28, 1963, rounding the bottom of the button is a family heirloom. 

As a child, I did not know that Bayard Rustin was a gay black man with brilliance, strategy, and a prophetic fire that fueled a vision that many could not see or imagine. As the chief architect of the March on Washington, few people could imagine what the multicultural, multiracial democracy would look like once realized. The dream, inspired by the imagination of a black woman—Prathia Hall, and rhetorically remixed by Martin Luther King—crystallized the dream for the masses. But the dream itself—an iteration of the multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural democracy may actually have been realized in the March on Washington, itself. 

Follow me for a second:

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250,000 converge on the nation's capital on the same day, at the right time, notwithstanding the barriers of distance, unwired communication, race, or creed. 250,000 people convened without violence to remind humanity how to live and be together. 250,000 people returned home, leaving the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial better than they found it. This alone did not inspire politicians to act. Still, it was a deafening reminder for black people, those who live under the haunts of white supremacy— a shadow that controlled how their bodies moved across the land— of their power to act out loud. 

That is revolutionary indeed. 

The field of education and teacher practice is no stranger to technology and innovation. For most of my public school experience of the 80s and 90s, vital tools and technologies were introduced to revolutionize the classroom and the learning experience. Before the wired technology of the internet, the hopes of VCRs, TVs, and green film projectors to revolutionize children's learning process or experience were bold and grand. As a student, I experienced the film whipping projectors fading into the white noise of TVs, the VCRs whirring reverb bouncing off the symphonic layers of iridescent laser discs (remember those). 

Duplication technology evolved from fragrant alcohols of mimeographs and Ditto machines to ephemeral warm burns of laser photocopiers. Computing evolved from four-function green screen calculators to black pixels of graphic calculators like the TI-81; from early 4-bit Macintosh PCS with Oregon Trail in the library to Windows-based machines with Eudora, Netscape, Telnet protocols, Internet Relay Chat, to interact with the earliest versions of what we now know as the Internet. 

Still, no mention of Bayard Rustin as a gay black man with brilliance, strategy, and a prophetic fire that fueled a vision that many could not see or imagine. No one mentions Prathia Hall, the black woman who inspired the words that were remixed by the King, which would be a movement slogan. We did not discuss the human intelligence that remixed language with prophetic vision or all the literacies needed to convene a quarter of a million people around a common cause. There was however much discussion on the misuse and abuse of graphic calculators, so much so that some teachers unfortunately banned their use in class. It was the 90s. The soundtrack of the revolution did not come from humans but from machines. 

In 2023, the tidal wave of excitement and anxiety accompanying the relationship between artificial intelligence and the discipline designed to cultivate and nurture human intelligence is not unfounded.  When a chatbot can synthesize language faster and with greater accuracy than humans, it begs educators to ask the hard questions of what's worth learning and how it is best learned. Fear-based restrictions and bans will only delay the inevitable and create further misalignment between the classroom and creative, work, and living spaces. 

At best, the restrictions create a dangerous misalignment, and at its worst, without thoughtfully designed equity-centered tools and AI learning experiences, the technology could render the classroom irrelevant. With any new technology that has the potential to automate and accelerate routine tasks and now even more novel and complex tasks, the question remains: 

What is worth learning, especially to create and design a more healed and equitable world? 

How is this learning best learned? 

And how do we ensure that learning is happening? 

Our AI learning journey started earlier this year when we hired two high school students to help us build our Liberation Library. I wanted to know how students developed their literacies around AI and ChatGPT. These students were at the top of their class, receiving academic scholarships to research universities. Their language and communication skills were highly developed—they were communicative, team players, asked for feedback, and could execute the project with minimal supervision. 

The surprises, however, were unsettling. These students were literate in 20th-century skills but not 21st-century skills. They were unfamiliar with AI, ChatGPT, Bard, or other large language models. This was unsettling but unfortunately, not surprising. Adopting new and modern technologies takes a while, especially in schools. 

As fast learners, they learned quickly that large language models like ChatGPT are rich tools that still require human discernment and wisdom. Discernment was required to determine the right sources to include, the quality of the summary, and the best questions to inspire new thinking and ideas.  But as unsettling as this was, what was even more unsettling was the gaps in modern history. 

The students did not know about Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, or Bayard Rustin. 

How do young people make sense of the current world without scions of freedom and justice in their conceptual frame? 

They were aware of racial oppression and gender oppression but unaware of ableism, classism, and stories of resistance and liberation. 

How do young people build strong relationships with others without the context of the structures that design their experience? 

The message was loud and clear–a revolution in the 21st century requires skill and aptitude in emerging wired technologies like AI and large language models as well as those unwired technologies like equity literacies. Equity literacy is a set of 21st-century competencies essential for participating in and designing inclusive schools, communities, and a democracy where everyone is acknowledged and valued. They involve understanding and deconstructing oppressive hierarchies and designing systems that prioritize the needs of the most historically marginalized. These literacies are crucial for creating a multicultural, multiracial democracy where visibility and dignity are afforded to all, especially those excluded or marginalized. These skills should be developed from adolescence through adulthood across all sectors, not just education, to ensure a lasting impact on society. 

Some critics would argue that and dismiss artificial intelligence by saying that it's biased. Well, it's only biased because we are. Rather than saying this to signal virtue, we could build better, humanely, equitably, and together.  Rather than stopping a conversation at “this is biased,” perhaps we should spend time building equity literacies to correct the bias instead. 

In 1979 in a conversation with scholars at the University of Washington at St. Louis, Rustin reflects on the success and failure of the Civil Rights Movement when he reminds us that learning from the movements requires that we understand the lessons from that time:

“Well, I think there are some lessons if we start where I start, and the first lesson is don't try to repeat what you've done because we're in a different period. That's the first lesson. The second lesson is that the protest is no substitute for the ballot box, which we have now. When we didn't have the ballot box, protest was the logical way. Once you have the ballot box, protest is useless…Oh, yes, and that's the reason we are not succeeding now. We got hundreds of thousands of people voting with their feet. Now. We cannot get them to use their feet to go to the ballot box, and therefore there is not the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people today. We are depending on rhetoric and a few people in the Congress to solve our problems for us.”

The idea of revolution can be seductive. It can answer our incessant human call for purpose and direction and belonging. It can seduce us into personas that are righteous, fixed, and defined. When it's fast and forceful, it is also costly and the price is not paid in human comfort, but rather in human grief and suffering. 

The weeping, breaking, and howls of mourners—children, women, and men—echo from piles of rubble, or seats of cars, bedsides, and under desks.  As sounds and sights narrow into our fields of vision, our awareness is shocked into response. With the aid of modern technology, we ourselves can become witnesses to grief, suffering, and mourning. And as witnesses, we respond. But, the revolution also can be slow. When revolution is slower, it's harder to see. We may not hear how resources like water, food, and fuel halt to a slow drip. And in turn, we tolerate human suffering because we are not aware, ignorant, and far from the experience. 

And without awareness, we do not respond.  

Revolution is neutral, but human intent is not. Vision matters. Mission matters. The dream, itself, matters. 

Our healing world needs not just a revolution but a nonviolent revolution, one that equips us with literacy and learning to build connection, community, and consciousness. One that enables change without violence to the body. One that can hold access to the conditions of wellness and health and the advocacy and environments for aspiration and inspiration.  

The revolution we need won’t be rolled in the classroom on a cart, plugged into the wall, or even integrated as a Chrome extension. Designing our classrooms and learning spaces to mirror the multicultural, multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy is part of the dream. It will require thousands of us to design new ways of interacting and connecting, challenging the bias coded into our information and knowledge, and learning the wisdom ways of discernment to determine a new response. It will allow these new ways of thinking and interacting to create the literacies needed for our shared evolution. 

Revolution is power and we all have it. We all have the power to change ourselves and inspire change in others. The new revolution moves with rhetoric and slogans to conscious responses that remind us to build that which can solve our problems for ourselves.  This revolution may just start with a whisper. 

My niece and nephew, 7 and 9, go to a school named after Bayard Rustin. They know who he is, and that is a signal of a revolution. They have not yet practiced the gait of protest, the guttural belly cries for justice, and are still too young to go to the ballot box, but they know. We have come a long way and have even longer to go. 

This knowledge is a revolution in the making. 

Can you hear it?