Teach the Babies w/ Dr. David J. Johns

Dr. Tiffany Crutcher joins the class ten years after a Tulsa police officer killed her twin brother, Terence. She is a descendant of Black Wall Street and the founder of the Terence Crutcher Foundation. She talks about the mother who taught her quiet strength and about the brother the news never showed. She shares her freedom dreams for the next generation and her plans for Greenwood North, a 65,000-square-foot home for rebuilding Black Wall Street. She also answers the hardest question: who takes care of Tiffany?

NOTES

• Terence Crutcher Foundation: terencecrutcherfoundation.org 
• Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, held each year around May 31 in Greenwood
• The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the destruction of Black Wall Street in the Greenwood District
• Former officer Betty Shelby was acquitted of manslaughter in 2017.
• Terence Crutcher's estate filed its civil suit in June 2017.

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Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones chose a school for her daughter and called it the just choice. Now she has told the world what that choice cost.

Dr. David J. Johns takes the class past the arguments to the questions underneath them. What did Brown v. Board give us, and what did it cost? What does the Black tax take from us, generation after generation? Why do Black teachers matter so much? And why does a systemic problem need a collective answer? Grace for every parent making constrained choices they did not design, and one rule for all of us: keep the children out of our mouths.

No absolution for any of us. An assignment for all of us.

Let's All Get Free.

SHOW NOTES
In this solo class, Dr. David J. Johns responds to Nikole Hannah-Jones's New York Times Magazine essay with gratitude, grace, and an assignment. He traces the unpaid bill of Brown v. Board and names the Black tax as a set of architected, constrained choices. He shares the story of his former student Nala. And he makes the case that collective action, not one family's sacrifice, is how we win schools worthy of Black children.Historical context

• Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the more than 38,000 Black teachers pushed out of their jobs in the decade after the decision: https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/05/10/black-teachers-lost-jobs-after-brown-vs-board-ruling
• How Black teachers lost when civil rights won in Brown v. Board (The 74): https://www.the74million.org/article/how-black-teachers-lost-when-civil-rights-won-in-brown-v-board/
• November 14, 1960, New Orleans: Ruby Bridges integrates William Frantz Elementary. The same morning, Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne integrate McDonogh No. 19.
• February 3, 1964, the New York City school boycott: more than 450,000 students stayed out of school to protest segregation. https://crdl.usg.edu/events/ny_school_boycott/ and https://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/day-history-february-3-new-york-city-school-boycott
• Freedom Summer, Mississippi, 1964, and the Freedom Schools tradition it launched.

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In March of 1972, ten thousand Black folks went to Gary, Indiana, and came out with an agenda. Fifty-four years later, we wrote it down again.

Dr. David J. Johns takes the class inside the State of the People Black Papers, the community-driven policy briefs built by more than a hundred Black experts across ten states, and the two companion documents being built on top of them: a Day One list of five asks for the next Congress and the fuller people's platform underneath it.

Then he takes us to Tulsa, to the Terence Crutcher Foundation's tenth anniversary gala, where a decade of work built out of grief is doing in practice what the Papers describe on the page. Honoring Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, celebrating honoree Dreisen Heath, and asking what legacy actually requires of the rest of us.

Preorders open October 9th. Via StateofthePPL.com and routledge.com

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We never left. But this is the first new class since June.

Dr. David J. Johns opens the fall with a correction he's been carrying in public. For years he told rooms full of people that PBS should bring back Schoolhouse Rock. He was wrong twice—and the second mistake turns out to be the whole episode.

In 1979, ABC shelved a three-minute cartoon explaining checks and balances because network executives feared the government being checked would come after their broadcast license. Nearly fifty years later, a third of American eighth graders score below basic in civics, which means they likely can't describe the structure of their own government. Nobody has to shelve anything now.
This solo episode walks the three rings we should have all been taught, then shows what happens in the gap between how government is supposed to work and how it's being worked.

Congratulations to Congressman Everton Blair, sworn in September first as the first openly LGBTQ+ person Georgia has sent to Congress—a seat decided by fewer than fifteen hundred votes, won by a man who came up through a school board. Appreciation for Senator Shevrin Jones and Representative Michele Rayner, who both lost on August eighteenth after a smear about a candidate's health status and dark money moving through a committee formed weeks before the vote. And a hard look at Inglewood Unified, where an elected school board has kept its seats and lost its votes for fourteen years.

Plus: why Black joy is not the intermission, what Afrofuturist dreaming has to do with organizing, and why the real AI is Ancestral Intelligence.

We're heading into the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's 55th Annual Legislative Conference. Come find us at NBJC's OUT on the Hill.

Let's All Get Free.

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ICYMI: A Back-to-School Special Rerun

Stephanie Allen does God’s work.  A career educator for more than two decades, Ms. Allen currently teaches high school in Guilford County Schools in Greensboro, North Carolina, the third largest school district in North Carolina. She was recognized as a Teacher of the Year in 2019 and 2024–a recognition she’s earned. This episode features the front-line experiences of a classroom teacher, centers stories about under-supported students, and describes necessary steps to dismantle the social hierarchy that relegates Black students to the lowest rungs of every quality of life indicator ladder.

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ICYMI!

Andrea Foggy-Paxton brings a unique perspective to leading change across sectors, drawing from leadership roles in start-up organizations, established organizations, and philanthropic organizations supporting systems transformation.  This episode answers the questions: What is civics, and why should it be taught to all students? Andrea shares lessons from her experience as an industry titan and appointed school board member.  She also talks about philanthropy and corporations' responsibility for ensuring educational equity.

edloc.org
@afoggypaxton


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Summer Rewind Episode

In this deeply personal and politically urgent conversation, Dr. David Johns welcomes his White House family—Deesha Dyer, former Social Secretary to President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama—for a raw discussion about what we lose when power demolishes history, and what endures when community builds with intention.

Deesha takes us inside the moment she saw excavators tearing down the East Wing of the White House in October 2025—the space where she orchestrated state dinners, opened doors for people who never thought they'd walk through them, and made the People's House truly belong to the people.

This conversation moves from the rubble of demolished institutions to the unshakeable foundation of community organizing. Deesha shares lessons learned from Michelle Obama about grace under pressure, why she wrote Undiplomatic for Black girls who "risk it all," and what defending democracy actually looks like in practice: investing in local organizations, letting leaders lead in their expertise, documenting our work, and showing up for each other with intention.

Deesha's story is a masterclass in refusing to let imposter syndrome—or anyone else—define your worth. As she reminds us: buildings can be demolished in 72 hours, but they can't demolish the memories, the legacy, or the collective power we build together.

This is required listening for anyone who believes that mutual aid isn't charity—it's how we survive, build, and love each other into liberation.

Website: DeeshaDyer.com
Instagram: @deedyer267
Email: [email protected] (She answers every email!)
Book: Undiplomatic: How My Attitude Created the Best Kind of Trouble
(Available at libraries and independent bookstores)


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I'm from Los Angeles. So when I picked up Dr. Terrell Winder's Shameless: The Making of Black Gay Identities in LA, it read like a love letter to a home I'm watching change—and a map of how young Black gay men build family, selfhood, and joy inside all that change anyway.

This week, Dr. Winder—sociologist and urban ethnographer at UC Santa Barbara—pulls up to the classroom to teach us unspoiling: his framework for refusing shame and rejecting the burden of stigma outright, no matter what it costs. We get into the affirming spaces that keep our babies alive and why they're under attack right now; why intersectionality can't keep being told to wait its turn; and what Noah's Arc's first-ever Emmy nomination means in a season when Black and Black gay stories are being pulled off shelves.

Because when you take these spaces away, Dr. Winder is clear about what we lose: lives.

Go get the book, sit with it, and then go build a room where somebody can put their burden down.

About the guest
Dr. Terrell J. A. Winder is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. A Baltimore native, he earned his B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia and his Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA (2017). His research spans race and ethnicity, sexuality and sexual health, qualitative methods, and education.

Key ideas & theory

• Unspoiling — Dr. Winder's framework: a stigma response that centers the stigmatized person rather than the comfort of the stigmatizer; refusing shame instead of managing it.
• Spoiled identity / stigma — Erving Goffman's foundational concept, and the classic responses of passing and covering that Dr. Winder argues break down for people carrying more than one stigma at once.
• Intersectional stigma & "intersectional recovery" — holding race, sexuality, and gender together rather than deferring one for later; recovering the full selves of figures history flattened.
• "Visibility is survival" — his argument that ethnography documents threatened histories and everyday Black LGBTQ life.

People mentioned

• Erving Goffman — sociologist, Stigma and the "spoiled identity."
• Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter — sociologist and chair of African American Studies at UCLA; credited with first posting the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter (August 2012); the BLM movement/network was later co-founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Co-author with Dr. Winder of "Space, Place, and Urban Future."
• Bayard Rustin — Black gay civil rights strategist, chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.
• George Washington Carver — scientist cited as an example of a flattened, partially-told legacy.
• Patrik-Ian Polk — creator of Noah's Arc.

Organizations & spaces

• Better Brothers Los Angeles / The Truth Awards. 
• Native Son.
• Hilltop Coffee + Kitchen (Issa Rae's LA spot) and Bricks & Scones (Larchmont). 

Media & culture

• Noah's ARC — Patrik-Ian Polk's groundbreaking series, the first scripted show centering Black gay men; Noah's ARC: The Movie (the 20th-anniversary reunion) earned a 2026 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Choreography, the franchise's first-ever Television Academy recognition.
• Pose, Insecure — referenced in conversation and This or That.
• My Best Friend Rodney — Rodney Chester's interview podcast.
• Anita Baker & Luther Vandross — the This or That showdown.

Further reading — Dr. Winder's scholarship

• Shameless: The Making of Black Gay Identities in LA (NYU Press, 2026).
• "Unspoiling Identity: An Intersectional Expansion of Stigma Response Strategies" (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2023).
• "Visibility Is Survival: The Chocolate Maps of Black Gay Life in Urban Ethnography."
• Marcus Anthony Hunter & Terrell J. A. Winder, "Space, Place, and Urban Future," in Research Handbook on Intersectionality (ed. Mary Romero, Edward Elgar, 2023).
• "The Discursive Work of 'Bottom-Shaming'" — 2024 SSSP Outstanding Article co-winner.

Connect with Dr. Winder
Social: @BmoreTerrell · Web: terrellwinder.com

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In case you missed it... In this rewind episode, I'm in conversation with the brilliant Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw—legal scholar, civil rights advocate, chief architect of Critical Race Theory. 

From her parents' kitchen table discussions that shaped her critical consciousness, to her groundbreaking work challenging legal institutions, to founding the African American Policy Forum, Professor Crenshaw has spent decades translating academic theory into tools for resistance. 

In this powerful conversation, we explore what it means to be "a born back talker," why pivoting away from our truth won't save us, and how we can resist critically—and in community—during these challenging times. Enjoy!

Resources

• Backtalker: An Amercian Memoir 

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In this Rewind episode, listen as Dr. David J. Johns discusses voting and our rights under attack.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is gone. Not weakened. Not under threat. Gone. The legal architecture that turned 7% Black voter registration in Mississippi into 60%—dismantled, decision by decision, by a Supreme Court that was never neutral and was never on our side.

But that's not even the whole story. Because while the courts were killing the VRA, the Justice Department was being turned into a weapon. FBI agents raided a Black state senator's office mid-day—Fox News already on the scene—while allies under federal investigation had their evidence destroyed. Ballots from Fulton County are in federal custody. Arizona. Michigan. They are building the architecture of election interference before the midterms. In public. And most people don't even know it's happening.

This episode is about all of it. The Proud Boys as a militia. The Roberts Court as an antidemocratic enforcement mechanism. The Southern Strategy, sixty years old and running on steroids. And the organizing tradition—Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Hungary's opposition movement—that proves rigged maps can be beaten and stolen futures can be reclaimed.

This is the class I didn't want to have to teach. But you need it. Pull up.

SHOW NOTES

• The death of the Voting Rights Act—Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Brnovich v. DNC (2021), and the April 29, 2026 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which Justice Elena Kagan called "all but a dead letter."
• The pardon of 1,500+ January 6th participants and the DOJ's move to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders.
• The FBI raid on Fulton County's election center, the subpoenas targeting Arizona and Michigan 2024 ballots, and what it means for the midterms.
• The mid-day FBI raid on Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas's office, with Fox News cameras already rolling—and not one charge filed.
• The two-tier justice system in plain sight: evidence destroyed for allies, prosecutions launched against opponents.
• Elie Mystal's proposal to add 20 justices to structurally change the Supreme Court's incentive for extremism.
• How Hungary's opposition built 208 local chapters and 50,000 poll watchers—and won a supermajority against a gerrymandered map.
• The Afrofuturist tradition of Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin as the organizing inheritance we carry forward.
• Black Power War Room — blackpowerwarroom.com 
• National Black Justice Coalition — nbjc.org 
• NBJC Equity Week — nbjc.org

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