(*Note* You can listen to the audio version of this post above)
Hello everyone! Welcome back. I have been a bit quiet for a while—It’s been — *checks notes* more than a month since I last spoke to you all.
And… whew… what a month! I’ve been hella busy.
The last time I spoke to you all, I announced that I would be teaching my Columbia course, Race, Media, and International Affairs, to the public this summer--- after it was cancelled by Columbia’s School of International Affairs last year.
It took me a long time to go public about the cancellation— I was told not to say anything- that it could make it hard for me to find a new home in academia, that I should *wait and see* if conditions would get better.
But as someone on the inside of these institutions, I felt like I couldn’t wait anymore. I watched the capitulation of Columbia to the Trump administration. I have been warning for years about the absolute failures of legacy media to address racism as a social and political force to counter the threat to democracy we face.
Columbia Canceled My Course on Race and Media. I'm Going to Teach It Anyway.
When I got the opportunity to teach at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in the fall of 2023 for the spring 2024 semester, I was elated. My dream of teaching in a global environment had come true.
So! I stepped out on pure faith—and announced that Race Media and International Affairs 101 was open for enrollment, and more than 500 people signed up in 48 hours. We had to cap it. There are now over 2,300 people on the waitlist for the next offering!
Also, thanks to everyone’s contributions, we were able to award nearly 40 scholarships to people who were interested in taking the course but were experiencing hardship. This is all thanks to contributors and people who paid at a higher tier to fully fund others to take this class.
I just want to thank everyone on Substack, Bluesky, Instagram… everyone who supported the vision thus far. We have a full school!
And we even have a logo!
AND..
THE RESISTANCE SUMMER SCHOOL HAS A HOME. YES. WE HAVE A PHYSICAL SPACE.
The Resistance Summer School will be at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library !!
About MLK Jr. Memorial Library
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library is the central library of the DC Public Library system, located downtown at 9th and G Streets NW.
Designed by modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, it’s a historic landmark in both architectural and cultural terms. It opened in 1972 and remains the only public building named after Dr. King during his lifetime.
In 2020, after a $211 million renovation, the library reopened as a reimagined public space—featuring a new auditorium, rooftop gardens, recording studios, exhibit galleries, and community classrooms. It now stands as a 21st-century beacon for education, culture, and justice. And I couldn’t be more proud, and excited to host this here next month.
The course will begin July 14th, and be held on Monday and Wednesday evenings at 6:00 pm, and will run through August 20th.
And this all came about because of the power of social media, community and…Badass librarians!
Amazingly, when RSS was just an idea on Bluesky a month ago, I wondered out loud if I could find a space to host the pilot course in person.
MLK librarian Michele Casto reached out and responded:
Look, yall. I believe in kismet and alignment. And librarians.
In my reporting and travels across the country, I’ve seen the power of librarians up close. Librarians have stood as some of the last, fiercest defenders against the onslaught of censorship, book bans, and the erosion of intellectual and academic freedom. They’ve been community pillars, often working quietly under threat, continuing to make space for truth-telling, resistance, and care, for EVERYONE.
I asked Michele what compelled her to reach out.
Everything about Karen's idea spoke to my librarian's soul - this class as a statement against censorship AND making this content accessible to all! When she posted about looking for space in DC, I reached out immediately to suggest MLK Library. What better place than the public library, the People's University in the figurative sense that it's a place of free self-directed learning open to everyone.”
Michele also mentioned that this felt like a full circle moment: In 2018, the MLK Library created “The People’s University”, a series of seminars commemorating the 50th anniversary of the teach-ins at Resurrection City during the Poor People's Campaign.
So… the People’s University lives. Michele, if you are listening, you rock! Thank you so much for making this happen. And to all the librarians out there who are resisting the censorship and anti-education waves crashing over the country.
For those who have signed up, stay tuned for the course layout, topics, and the syllabus! We move.
On Education and Resistance: Studying to Survive
I have been getting a lot of questions, and perhaps even some mild pushback, as to explicitly calling this “resistance.” I was recently on with Michele Martin for Christiane Amanpour & Co. on PBS.
During the show, Michele asked me something to the effect of, “Why name this ‘resistance”.
And then recently, I got a lovely and meaningful question from a student that I haven’t stopped thinking about for days.
Alicia asked..
“IN ADDITION to calling it Resistance, you describe the class in neutral terms that would make you less of a target…”
I found this question interesting, and a lot to unpack here. I will start off by saying, I was half-joking when I posted, “Get in, everyone, we are going to resistance summer school”! But the name caught on, and who am I to say no to the people? We are in a moment where there is a real feeling of powerlessness, where the marches, the rallies, the writing to lawmakers, the doomscrolling, the tweeting, the anxiety spirals.. don’t seem to be helping anyone. So this—— at least was something that could be done.
That said, I understand the fear and anxiety for safety. America is in perilous times, and people are being rounded up off the streets. Universities are betraying their students and faculty. Long before Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil’s detention by ICE became national news, my former SIPA classmate sounded the alarm… he was her TA for SIPA. One thing has been clear— Columbia — and powerful institutions have never been safe for those who challenge the status quo.
But I refuse to operate in fear and anxiety. I am coming out of a place of desire, curiosity, passion for this subject, and an honest desire for freedom, and expansion of knowledge. This really is it.
The reality is--- it has always been perilous for Black educators in this system. There has been resistance all along to courses like this, teachers like me from the white-dominated status quo. both in journalism and in academia. And this is not a Democrats vs. Republicans thing— this is in industries that are supposedly “liberal”.
A place like Columbia, a faculty of hundreds, I was one of a few Black women to teach, the others, as far as I know, we This resistance to knowledge is evidenced in the fact that it took nearly 15 -20 years for a course like this to even be offered at a place like Columbia SIPA. The *absence* of people like me has been considered the neutral, the default.
Who is playing the role of the resistance here?
The only reason SIPA brought on more faculty of color is because they were pushed, forced by students to do it after the murder of George Floyd.
The status quo of higher education is the resistance to progress, the resistance to bringing on educators who may challenge the dominant, western, and white point ov-- not the other way around. In fact, so much resistance that the history of race and international affairs that I am about to teach this summer, has been *erased* from public memory — long before Trump even came on the scene.
So I ask again— who exactly is the resistance to progress, to history, to memory?
As I have been saying, all I cared about was wanting to teach this history and media in any way I could and not have to wait for the elite systems to toss me some performative breadcrumbs only when they get pushed or embarrassed. I am not interested in waiting to ride the ups and downs of the cycles of white anger/ white guilt in this country to be “given” a chance. This is not freedom. This is a cage.
And as far as the right-wing, there has been an active assault on knowledge production from anyone who is non-white, non-male, non-cis, non-Christian for years. There has been an active assault on public education—— especially* since the days of racial integration, hell, ever since Reconstruction. For Black people, we have always had to fight white supremacy on both sides of the political spectrum, which uses supression, control, neglect, and erasure to keep itself in power. You see how much
In an op-ed for the New York Times, called “How Universities Can Escape Trump’s Trap” journalist and professor M. Gessen writes:
There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump’s will, and it requires more than forming a united front. They must abandon all the concerns — rankings, donors, campus amenities — that preoccupy and distract them, and focus on their core mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. Intellectuals have adopted this strategy to fight against autocrats in other countries. It works.”
Gessen goes on to write:
In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Polish dissidents operated what they called a flying university in apartments across the country. Run by the country’s leading intellectuals, this university wasn’t selective and didn’t charge tuition; its only goal was to get knowledge to as many people as possible. These were the people who went on to build the only post-Communist democracy that, so far, has been able to use electoral means to reverse an autocratic attempt. In the 1990s, Kosovo Albanians responded to the Serbian regime’s forced takeover of their education system by walking out and creating a parallel underground school system, from first grade through university. Classes met in boarded-up storefronts. I met Albin Kurti, the current prime minister of Kosovo, in 1998, when he was a student — and a student activist — in the underground university.”
In this piece, Gessen is naming two fronts of education as resistance, not just Trump, or singular autocrats, but the education system itself that exists to serve money and endowments, not students or well-meaning faculty. Too often, as Gessen writes, when universities have public-facing or free initiatives, they are treated like charity or side projects. But the spread of knowledge is the core mission.
The problem with capitalism is the constant mission creep it introduces into what should be the purest of human-to-human exchanges— the passing of knowledge and wisdom from one person to another. The system has profited off that desire so much that these universities have become real estate companies and hedge funds with a side of education— if you can even call it that. No, rather, these institutions have become social credentialist sites rather than educational. This credentialism has turned students into customers who must always be pleased and comfortable— that education is just something one must have to suffer through to get into the capitalist race.
Which leads me to my next point: As artificial intelligence tools are being pushed upon us from the top down, we are having to fight the very act of learning, writing and creating being destroyed by the mindless push for AI.
I’m sure you all have seen the stories about students cheating their way through college with AI and universities caving in. Today’s students, who also went through having to learn remotely during a pandemic, have lost writing, reading and critical thinking skills.
Make no mistake, a population that cannot read, write, analyze, innovate or create for themselves will be easier to manipulate and force into not only ignorance, poverty and powerlessness. It sounds like the mark of an American empire that has run out of ideas. And once you run out of, ideas then….. you’ve lost your power.
Once you lose the ability for people to trust that your words are your own, your thoughts and your reasoning are yours— you cannot build intimacy, you cannot build trust, connections. Meaning we will be less likely to collectively come together to fight what is coming for all of us.
As for Resistance Summer School, like I’ve said before on social media, all my writing, lessons, and this experience are certified AI-free. I do my writing and thinking the old-fashioned way— pen and paper, sourcing from books and the connections I have had with interesting, brilliant people on race and media all my life. I joke that my writing is handmade, traditional—artisanal, even.
So to learn, we are fighting not only against political forces and universities that have abandoned their core missions, but against an imminent, and deeply anti-human tech future where the forcing of AI is separating people from their ability to think. And is forcefully separating people from the joy and pleasure of learning, of wisdom sharing. This is a form of death. True learning is a joy and delight— and joy, passion, and expansion are what we need, not just to resist, but to choose lives with meaning.
So yes, we study to survive. And we will survive. With joy and pleasure, we will learn to get through this… together.
See you all in class!
-Karen
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