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Where you could once google “schoolishness” and get linked to the various places you would find Akilah S. Richards, now the first several pages of search results are of an author and anthropologist who’s released a book of the same name.
Akilah has spoken extensively on the topic of schoolishness and been instrumental in the SDE community understanding of schoolishness. She has invited so many of us in to excavate the ways that parents and caregivers act as agents of school to perpetuate schoolishness and all of its foolishness. She has shared many ways in which we can heal from school and liberate young people and ourselves from oppressive systems. This is about Akilah’s work, but this is also about the systemic erasure of work of people of the global majority, and in particular Black women.
Seeing a book with such a title and the author making no mention or credit to her was another reminder of the way Black women’s work is constantly erased. Whether intentional oversight or not, it is important to call attention to these patterns of erasure.
ASDE sees our place in this, and are looking at all the ways our community and groups show up for folks in these moments. We, unfortunately, missed an opportunity to point this out when the book was presented to the loosely affiliated ASDE research group. Since our core organizing team found out about this book and erasure of Akilah’s work several weeks ago, we have been working to make sure the groups who use our name are aligned in values, and we are more aware of what is going on in these spaces. We apologize for these mistakes and oversight, and are working carefully to make sure something like this does not happen again in one of our partnership spaces. We have also reached out to the author and asked her to confront her mistakes and erasure of Akilah’s work.
As Akilah pointed out in our conversations with her, this is also another reminder of how academia and other work around SDE is often not rooted in the very communities it seeks to write, research, and do work about.
We invite you to delve deeper into Akilah’s work, and join us in amplifying her work, specifically around schoolishness.
Websites:
schoolishness.com
raisingfreepeople.com
Book:
Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work
The vast and deep ways she has contributed to and formed our collective learning around SDE, deschooling, oppressive parenting and collective liberation cannot be lost in an algorithm.
Please support Akilah's work on a regular basis by becoming a patron aka a member of her Make It Happen Family at patreon.com/Akilah
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We realize that it’s hard to capture nuance and full context in a short written piece– to see a conversation that Bria and Meghan had about this, watch this Instagram video.
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