Dr. Camika Royal

IT’S MY BOOK PUBLICATION DAY!!!!!!

Come virtually kick it off with me and Marc Lamont Hill tonight at 6pm EST!!!

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/notpavedforus

My book, ‘Not Paved for Us: Black Educators and Public School Reform in Philadelphia,’ is now available for pre-order here: https://www.hepg.org/hep-home/books/not-paved-for-us #

I’m so excited about this! Pull up, y’all.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaZKBx2rEmtjFzULB7aTLbDUXgLUvlojMO9cLedOV9ORSL8A/viewform

Y’all.

I don’t think enough of us are taking this seriously.

Fauci: Americans are 'going to have to hunker down significantly more' to fight coronavirus "I think we should really be overly aggressive and get criticized for over-reacting," Fauci said.

Pay us what you owe.

Yesterday I gave a talk to Teach For America Baltimore’s new 2019 incoming teachers. It was surreal. This year marks 20 years since I moved to Baltimore for Teach For America to begin what has become my life’s work of being an educator who resists and disrupts systems of oppression. While I’ve worked for TFA in many different iterations over the years, I’ve come to be known as a TFA critic. And I’m ok with that.

In 2014, TFA uninvited me to speak at the Opening Ceremonies of the Summer Institute in Philly. I wasn’t asked back to anything for TFA until 2017, I think. So every time they invite me to speak at something now, I’m slightly surprised and somewhat suspicious. And I tell each subsequent TFA audience about my 2014 rescinded invitation.

So yesterday, I told TFA Baltimore’s 2019 teachers that Baltimore has been a national model for racism. That what’s here is intentional. That alleged school “choice” is a diversion tactic that was first used in Baltimore to subvert the Brown school desegregation decision in 1954. That Baltimore maintains its racism today. That folks co-opt the language of “social justice” and spin it to meet their colonizer conquests. That schooling for liberation means learning their craft, studying these systems, and then disrupting them.

Said it before. I’ll say it again—

This country doesn’t deserve Harriet Tubman on its currency. It is disrespectful to her legacy of freeing those of us who were seen as property and were traded for currency.

A title and a little bit of power turns the slave into the overseer. But the overseer is still a slave, y’all.

So many of us didn’t feel like much before these degrees, titles, and this pseudo-power we wield. And when we get them, we weaponize them.

So folks ain’t really mad at oppression. You’re just mad you aren’t in charge of the oppression.

It’s sad, really.

“i wanted to be a new person but my rebirth was stifled, not by the master but the slave.”
—Nikki Giovanni

Never forget—

Institutions will always fight for themselves, their self-preservation, more than they will fight for people.

We can be in an institution and not of an institution but only if we’re vigilant and intentional. Otherwise, we are complicit with the institution.

Thank you, Elder Nathan Phillips.

Any adult who accompanied those kids to DC and didn’t stop them from taunting the Indigenous yesterday in DC is complicit. Folks keep saying the kids should learn something valuable from this. What adults in their lives will facilitate this learning? How?

TRANSLATION: They like their racism, just don’t call it that. They’ve even hired a Black. In 2019.

These people accepted no responsibility for their situation. If someone tells you about your racist practices & your response to is merely do some “non-white” hires in the year 2018/2019? Nah. Unacceptable.

Haverford leaders defend township and schools against racism complaints The hearing debated issues raised by a report from the Havertown-Area Community Action Network alleging a worrisome pattern of racial bias and profiling.

I am ENRAGED at that video of those awful adults cutting that boy’s locs. LIVID!

But y’all wanna play around talking about “implicit bias”?!

That violence that looked like a haircut was brought to us by false notions of white supremacy, anglonormativity, and anti-Blackness.