I’m a bi-gender person—masc and femme together in parallel unison. Like a Tootsie Roll, a Twinkie, a Ho-Ho, or a KitKat, I have a more brittle, masc outer layer; and a creamy, femme inner core.
The femme part of me has been surprised when I have proposed activities to femme friends that I think of as normal and platonic, like getting together to braid one another’s hair or do nails or other grooming activities, along with gossip and food and music. The response I’ve gotten doesn’t tell me that the idea is being rejected because it came from someone with a masc presentation, but just that the idea itself feels icky or weird or frivolous, regardless of who proposed it.
I think we’ve reached a time of cultural compression when the the need to mask in public makes casual intimacy too costly—if we forget for a couple of hours that we’re supposed to be competing with one another, and stepping on one another’s shoulders and fingers and toes, we’ll miss an opportunity for social advancement. Moments of casual intimacy remind us of the brutality of the work environments we operate within, and since it seems that brutality is unavoidable, it is the intimacy that becomes the thing to avoid.
And since I experience this casual intimacy as a kind of vitamin—an important part of a balanced social diet—I recognize that we have created a condition where everyone is starved of something that would always be available if we would collectively let down our guard and stop performing invulnerability. We hunger for it, but someone’s rules say that we are only allowed to experience it within a contractually sanctioned relationship, so when we get feelings outside of those pigeonholes, there is a conflict—between the natural tendency toward connection, and the imposed imperative to suppress the connection.
This being so, I own that I will always be perceived as too much—”too familiar,” “flirty,” “inappropriately intimate,” “overly emotional,” “dramatic,” “too informal,”—simply because I refuse to accept the inevitability of the brutality that many people face in their work and social environments. I refuse to suppress the natural tendency toward connection. I refuse to impose a contractual constraint on where I experience intimacy. I feel it is actually my whole job to remind my community that productivity is not the goal, that free time is a virtue to be cultivated, and that casual intimacy is our actual settled and natural state.
That being so, I might describe the grief I feel about the loss of a loved one in the middle of a work meeting. I might express that an interaction with an especially loud and reckless motorcycle made me feel vulnerable when applying for a business license. I might point to the behavior of a person in a management position, and show how that person is taking an opportunity to punch down, rather than being accepting, inclusive, and supportive. “Too much” means “not silent,” and in spaces where we are expected to disappear, “not silence” equals “too much.”
And to be clear, what I am calling intimacy has nothing to do with sexuality or even physical touch. Intimacy is simply the willingness to return to our basic, true character in the presence of another, and to drop the mask that work and social navigation require of us. Intimacy is simply abandoning the performance of invulnerability for a moment or two. Intimacy is simply acknowledging the fiction of independence, and experiencing the wonder and joy of interdependence, even if only for a couple of moments.
At the present moment, I propose that the most radical and revolutionary act we can engage in (but the most powerful, since we can engage in it any time) is simply the act of casual intimacy—when we acknowledge that each of us has a way that we care for ourself, and that we could just as easily care for one another in the same moment.
As we brush our hair, realize that we could be engaging in casual intimacy by brushing someone else’s hair. As we manage our pet’s excrement on a walk, realize that we could be engaging in casual intimacy by helping a loved one who needs support to manage their excrement. As we feel a moment of grief for the loss of a loved one, recognize that we could just as easily feel a moment of grief alongside a friend who is experiencing a similar moment.
I propose that the more we engage in casual intimacy, the less we demand that our contractual relationships fulfill our needs for intimacy, and that that quality in itself is liberating to both sides of our relationships.
So, on that note: let’s get together soon to braid each other’s hair, or do our nails together, and have some snacks and music and gossip time, and maybe cry about our dog that just died, or about the parent that doesn’t remember us that we are caring for.
In this economy, this is the type of care that cannot be monetized, and that is only available to the privileged. Let’s privilege one another with casual intimacy, and invite whomever we can into that state of privilege—because if everyone is included in it, it is no longer a privilege, but a right—simply a natural state of being, around which we organize ourselves, around everyone’s comfort, and not just our own.
all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us.
the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us. it requires that power be centralized in such a way that concerns about water and land use are deprioritized. it requires that people who don’t have our best interests in mind influence elections. it requires that we relinquish our rights to our own ideas in the tos agreement required to use it.
ai is not local: it requires centralized control of a vast network of resources from around the globe. it doesn’t fit in a backpack.
ai is not democratic: the algorithms that deliver it’s results are designed by a small team that does not answer to us. it doesn’t respond to community review.
ai is not neutral: it’s knowledge base is a collection of writings that represents centuries of colonizers writing about encounters with beings deemed lesser. it doesn’t weight indigenous voices higher.
ai is not embodied: nothing in its database includes information that can only be experienced through the senses. it didn’t smell what you smelled.
ai has not experienced loss: it can tell you what grieving people have said, but it cannot experience their pain, and console you in the ways that only someone who has experienced loss can console you. it can’t adjust the way you’ve adjusted.
ai has never attended a birth, nor tasted the final breath of a loved one. it doesn’t know the poem your mother needed to hear for comfort.
ai is a performance by someone who was never there, but who requires you to hand over all rights to land, water, minerals, species diversity, diplomatic nonpartisanship, labor justice, bioregional congruity, indigenous stewardship, ecosystem integrity, economic equity, cultural heritage, family legacy, intellectual architecture, emotional elaboration, and environmental renewal.
Saying that autistic people who question the current paradigm of neurodivergence are seeking proof of a superpower does real harm. Diagnostic criteria are a snapshot. To refer to the snapshot as reality, without considering the hand that crafted the lens it was taken with, and for whose benefit, or what it distorts, cannot be seen as anything other than harmful to an understanding of complex systems.
Downstream of that, to then force people to identify with a disability designation that hints at accommodation, while the already meager care infrastructure is being actively dismantled by a government that wants to put autistic people on a list and ‘cure’ us, while at the same time removing funding from research that doesn’t agree with their agenda… to watch this all unfold is beyond heartbreaking. It’s criminal and cruel, and to enter neurodiversity justice spaces and hear the rhetoric from people who are claiming to advocate for the best interests of autistic people is just another example of the gaslighting being replicated by the gaslit.
It’s also understandable. We work from the models we’ve been given to work with. We recognize that there are privileged people and marginalized people. It seems to make sense to keep the structure intact and simply reset the algorithm to bring marginalized people in. But the system depends on there being marginalized people, and changing the algorithm simply shifts the suffering onto a different group of people. If we want equity to work, for real and for everyone, we need to learn how to work together differently.
Western science is good at some things, but it is also a paradigm that is easily gamed. What question we choose as a thesis determines the field of inquiry, the variables we can see (and the ones we can’t from our viewpoint), and the output is a snapshot. If we limit our questions to support a funding requirement, a political climate, a class preserving mechanism, or a corporate agenda, the snapshot is distorted, and this has real consequences.
I live in Berkeley California. Do you know how many people I have crossed paths with who are engaged in a research project that is losing funding due to the political climate? Let’s just say that we are not living in a time when good information is on the ascendancy, even at the academic level. I know people whose whole departments are fundraising to keep the lights on, and funders are not neutral.
In hostile times, it’s time to circle the wagons and protect the children within. The wagons here are perhaps a poor metaphor, being a symbol of colonial expansion. But what works is the idea of a circle protecting the future health of our community. The civic infrastructure that was supposed to protect us is being dismantled and defunded, along with the research institutions that were ostensibly designed to help us describe ourselves in ways that align with our nature.
But there is so much we can do if we train ourselves to abandon those decaying structures and find support through cooperation. Tōjisha Kenkyū is a self-study paradigm developed by people in the mental health community in Japan, who recognized that the stories being told to them by clinicians did not match their experiences nor provide support in the ways they needed. Through deep inquiry and information sharing, people working in this modality are learning bottom-up strategies and new language that allows them to access mutual support and offer more effective advocacy.
Every healthy community has access to its own story, that changes and unfolds within its very ecosystem. The questions that arise might not fit a funding landscape, but mutual support makes things possible that top-down institutions won’t.
The understanding of neurodiversity is in its infancy relative to Western scientific paradigms. As far as I can tell, the word neuronormativity only emerged within this century. Paradigms this new are bound to experience shifts that change the landscape of our understanding. When I hear people in the neurodiversity community loudly advocating for top-down paradigms that view neuronormativity as a standard of human growth and ability, and neurodivergence as a collection of abberant deviations from the norm, I can’t help but wonder who they are representing, and why they feel so confident in articulating the boundaries of an emerging paradigm.
Nature has amazing ways of achieving balance in a changing ecosystem. The whole reason we look like we do, and not like our ancestors Australopithecus, is that we diverged. Does that make us disabled versions of our ancestors? No. Evolution is a series of mistakes, that sometimes end up being helpful to the community, even as they are divergent from what came before.
Sometimes, what’s helpful to the community is someone tall enough to reach a food source inaccessible to most, and perhaps communities who had a few statistical outliers in height were more successful. In the context of industrial productivity, maybe the tall ones are just a liability, but is that the driver of change we want to follow? Look what doing so has done to biodiversity on the planet.
Sometimes what’s helpful might be someone with sensitive hearing, who can hear the approach of a predator or track game hidden in the canopy. Again, in an office, they are just seen as annoying, asking for accommodation again. Sometimes what’s helpful might be someone who thinks differently. When I think of the process of getting nutrition out of cassava, I wonder who on earth would have the patience and determination to figure that out. I’m sure it wasn’t one person, and parts of the process probably unfolded over centuries. But it’s not hard to imagine that at some point in the process, someone with cognitive differences might have thought to try something new. That’s not evidence of a superpower. It’s a person working the way they work, in the context of a team that values them. That’s the person we all know who we find frustrating, because their thinking seems so contrary.
In a society that’s not conforming to an origin story that pathologizes differences and that recognizes that through drought and famine and herd depletion and times of bounty, differences in the community are an asset, not a liability. They might develop ways of doing things that build respect for these differences. If we look at the practices of various cultures we can actually see that this is true.
Are autism advocates who advocate for the model of neurodivergence as a deviation from neuronormativity simply trying to practice realpolitik in social terms, accepting that industrial agriculture, production, and the administrative mechanisms that support them are the way it will always be, and we should engineer ourselves to align with that reality? If so, count me out. That’s the project I thought we were trying to abandon at all costs. If not, where does your confidence come from, and why does it feel so much like a story we’ve heard before, that got us into this mess?
this is one kind of harm caused by the abled/disabled binary when it is applied as a permanent designation to people: it erases from view the environment that enables or disables a person, and it makes invisible all of the ways that the environment is designed to enable the abled person.
it functions to other into a social class an experience that everyone is living, but some don’t recognize—the experience of needing to exist in relationship.
if we recognize that no one can live outside of relationship, and that we play both roles continuously—the carer and the cared for—then we start to recognize the moment of need without needing to label someone needy.
In designating certain people as disabled, without the embedded values of care and reciprocity at the cultural level, then the abled person gets to sidestep the role of caregiver, and there is not enough care to go around, leaving the disabled to have to negotiate for care that in a different culture would be considered a human right. I’m not just talking about healthcare. I’m talking about basic human dignity.
binaries are useful conceptual shorthand that should never be applied to people without their consent. if you can understand the value of going beyond the binary based on biological gender, and the real harm that strict adherence to that binary causes, you can understand why permanent status as a disabled person might leave some people out. What I hear when I hear “autism is always a disability” is “there are only two genders: male and female.”
Two people in a boat. One can row, but cannot navigate. The other can navigate, but cannot row. If we view each as a whole, each has both an asset and a liability—each is both abled and disabled. If we view the relationship as a whole, we can describe things differently.
If participation and cooperation are both given, and both needs and abilities are transparent, we can say, for the sake of argument, that we have a balanced system. Ability and disability are actually complementary parts of a balanced system.
For the system to remain balanced, the requirement is that we do not judge one by the standards of the other. Both are necessary for the system to be balanced. It is only in separating the ability and disability within the system—through creation of a standard that applies to each equally—that disability as a permanent status arises (or ability, as a permanent status, for that matter).
Humans are a social animal, and no human can be said to exist in isolation. The work of survival as a cohesive community is complex. If we view human evolution as a community project, rather than a process of creating ideal and identical individuals, perhaps it’s fairer to say that humans are more like the two people in the boat that opened this narrative than like individuals striving toward undifferentiated perfection.
I believe that as our understanding of neurodiversity deepens, we will begin to see the complementary nature of different sensory, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, somatic, and relational expressions within a community of people engaged in the work of surviving within an ecosystem, and start to recognize the unique socio-ecological niche that each is adapted to.
That being said, humans have created systems that separate us from the ecology we evolved over millions of years to function within—capitalism being the most recent and totalizing form this separation has taken. Any framework, whatever its organizing logic, that substitutes an abstracted, portable standard for embedded relationship will distort our ability to view each type of expression fairly, in context. In the deepest sense, it is these imposed frameworks—not one’s specific neuropsychobiology—that create the permanent state of ability or disability.
Is this an argument that disability does not exist, or should not be accommodated? Absolutely not. Does the human organism itself demand that we recognize the various socio-ecological niches for which each individual may be uniquely adapted? Also no—evolution continues, and each part of any ecosystem is changed by interaction with the others—just as we were once single-celled life forms adapted to an underwater ecosystem that no longer exists, we will adapt to whatever conditions our survivors find themselves within (if there are survivors—evolution is a slow process, and the changes we have made to our ecosystem have arguably outpaced it).
What, then, is the good of understanding or accepting a principle like complementary adaptation, if we are eventually going to change anyway? From a human sociological perspective, it allows us to be both kinder and more accommodating of difference. In recognizing the many ways that variations in human adaptive expression contribute to the well-being of a complex social organism within an ecosystem, we can move people toward societal roles for which they may already be well adapted, rather than forcing them to adapt to environments where their permanent disability status is the only option. It changes the framework for our application of care—to use our earlier analogy, to match rowers with navigators, those who thrive as nurturers with those who thrive with care, across a broad spectrum of socio-ecological niches.
What this requires of us, as those who study human variation, is to recognize the many ways that current conditions game the system for the comfort of some, at the expense of basic human dignity for others, and to recognize the gatekeepers who enforce the conditions we find ourselves in, be they actual humans, economic systems, or simply cognitive frameworks. It would be naive to think that we can simply abandon every framework we’ve inherited outright, but making the shift to recognizing human variation as a relationship affords us a direction for a new field of study—and nudges us toward a kinder, more integrated relationship with our world and with one another.
to be woke is to have a visceral sense of justice, as reliable as the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and cognition—that allows one to recognize that the current language of justice is inadequate, as justice is not applied equitably across all who would access it; and to participate in creating language that leads to equitable application.
to be a woke ally is to recognize that one lacks the visceral sense of justice; to believe those who experience it; and to use the other senses to fill the gap, trusting that the language will mature if allowed to do so—to be blind, but willing to coexist with the sighted.
to be anti-woke is to deny the existence of the visceral experience of justice; to belittle those who would enrich its language—to be blind, to deny the existence of sight, in the most literal sense, and to refuse to coexist with the sighted.
only a person who has had the sense of justice bred out of them can own humans or force them through contract into unpaid labor; deny them equal access to the right to vote; justify and continue to fund genocide; or accumulate wealth while others starve.
knowing that the path of the ally is available, one follows it to redemption.
never suspecting that justice is lived experience, the whole world becomes one’s adversary.
I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.
I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.
I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.
I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.
With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.
But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).
Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.
The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.
I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.
Part 1 in a series. In my study of what works in the effort to serve children’s needs and help them to become happy and healthy adults, I take copious notes. I find it helpful, occasionally, to compile and summarize these notes into a narrative. Why? Because my brain saves all of these notes, and may conversations are built from them, but sometimes the conversations don’t last long enough to articulate the internal narrative I’m working from. This series is an attempt to share my internal narrative, and open it to peer review. I take my notes from memory, and almost never cite sources. That being said, I invite the reader to connect any of the points made here to existing research and share their conclusions. This is a conversation, not a dissertation.
Most histories of American education tell a story of progress: a nation that began with schooling reserved for the privileged few, and gradually, through democratic idealism, reform movements, and federal legislation, built a universal public system open to all. That story is not wrong, exactly. The institutions changed. The rhetoric evolved. The paperwork became more equitable. But a careful look at each era reveals something more stubborn than progress: a sorting mechanism that didn’t disappear so much as go underground—moving from explicit, externally enforced separation by class, race, and sex to subtler forms of stratification woven into the internal logic of schools that called themselves common. What follows is a sweep of that history in roughly fifty-year intervals, with attention to who the system was actually built for, who it served, and who it left out—which is often, in retrospect, the same question asked three different ways.
Note: This is not original scholarship: it’s simply an overview in a legible timeline to point out trends and policies that have been covered in depth elsewhere. Let it be a springboard to deeper inquiry, rather than a document of record.
1750–1800: The Colonial Inheritance
Education for school age children (roughly 6-18) in colonial America was a class-sorted branching system with no pretense of universality. At the top sat the Latin grammar schools, preparing boys of means for Harvard, Yale, and William & Mary—a curriculum descended from European scholasticism, oriented toward ministry, law, and civic leadership. The classics of Latin and Greek literature, philosophy, science, and morals, for the purpose of the cultural reproduction of a specific kind of man.
Below that: dame schools, itinerant tutors, apprenticeships, and church-sponsored charity schools for the poor—when anything existed at all. Girls of any class were educated in domestic management. Enslaved children were legally barred from formal learning. Indigenous children were beginning to encounter the first missions, the early edge of a centuries-long civilizational assault framed, with grim consistency, as education.
The tracks were not hidden. They were considered natural—a reflection of a divinely ordered social hierarchy in which learning, like land, followed the contours of birth.
The baseline: Explicitly multi-track schooling sorted by class, sex, and race, with no universal access and no pretense of it. Classical grammar schools at the top; charity schools, apprenticeships, or nothing below.
Who benefited: White boys of property and standing, educated for ministry, law, and civic leadership. A small sliver of the population receiving a coherent, purposeful education.
Who was excluded: Girls of every class, enslaved people by law and violence, Indigenous children by conquest, and the white poor by economic circumstance. The majority, in other words.
1800–1850: The Republican Experiment
The new republic needed citizens—or at least a story about citizens. Horace Mann and the common school movement began making the case that democracy required a literate public. Massachusetts led: the common school—free, public, non-sectarian in theory—began to take institutional shape.
But common was relative. The common school was, in practice, for white Protestant children. It ran on rote recitation, McGuffey Readers, and moral formation. Its hidden curriculum was assimilation—to Anglo-Protestant norms of industry, deference, and civic identity. The revolutionary claim was not that everyone deserved an equal education, but that a certain kind of American deserved a common one.
The tracked system persisted beneath the common school ideal. Academies and preparatory schools served the wealthy. Apprenticeship and early labor absorbed the working class. Black children were excluded in most states. The Indian boarding school logic was beginning to solidify at the margins. The track had not been dismantled. It had been papered over with a rhetoric of shared citizenship that the structure declined to honor.
The baseline: The common school ideal emerges—free, public, non-sectarian—but applies in practice to white Protestant children. Private academies and prep schools continue serving the elite in parallel.
Who benefited: White Protestant children of the middle classes, given a common civic formation. Wealthy white families, still sending their sons to academies that fed higher institutions.
Who was excluded: Black children in most states, Indigenous children facing early boarding school assimilation, Catholic and non-Protestant immigrant families, and girls beyond basic literacy instruction.
1850–1900: Industrialization and the Sorting Machine
The Civil War and Reconstruction forced a brief, violent expansion of the common school ideal. The Freedmen’s Bureau established schools across the South; Black communities built educational institutions with extraordinary energy and sacrifice. Then Reconstruction collapsed, and with it most of those gains.
Meanwhile, industrialization was reshaping what schools were fundamentally for. The factory needed disciplined, punctual, task-following workers. Schools began to look more like factories: age-graded classrooms, standardized curricula, bells, rows of desks, a teacher functioning as foreman. The Prussian model arrived and was adopted with enthusiasm.
The Morrill Act (1862) began federalizing agricultural and mechanical education for white men. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879, its founding superintendent offering the institution’s purpose in plain terms: kill the Indian, save the man. Education as cultural genocide entered its full institutional phase.
At the upper end, the private academy and boarding school circuit was consolidating—Exeter, Andover, the New England schools—feeding the Ivy League and reproducing an intergenerational owning class with increasing sophistication. Two systems, one called universal and one called elite, were producing what they were designed to produce: workers and managers.
The baseline: Public schooling becomes factory-modeled, oriented toward producing compliant industrial workers. The elite boarding school circuit consolidates in parallel. Indian boarding schools institutionalize cultural erasure as federal education policy.
Who benefited: Industrial employers, who received a trained and disciplined workforce. Wealthy white families, whose children attended institutions that preserved class continuity. Black families during the Reconstruction window, briefly.
Who was excluded: Black children after Reconstruction’s collapse; Indigenous children subjected to boarding school erasure; the white working class, offered schooling calibrated to their station rather than their potential.
1900–1950: Progressive Reform and Its Contradictions
John Dewey arrives with a genuinely radical vision: education is for democracy, for experience, for growth. Learning by doing. The school as a model community. It is widely influential and almost nowhere fully implemented.
What gets implemented instead is a managed version. Vocational tracking enters the public school officially. The Smith-Hughes Act (1917) funds vocational education, formalizing a two-track system within the nominally universal public school. The guidance counselor emerges—partly to support students, partly to sort them.
IQ testing, imported from France and rapidly weaponized by American eugenicists during and after World War I, provides the pseudoscientific infrastructure for tracking. Students are measured, sorted, and placed on trajectories—academic, general, vocational—that correlate almost perfectly with race and class, now laundered through the language of aptitude and potential.
The GI Bill (1944) produces a brief, anomalous democratization of higher education for white veterans. For Black veterans in the South, it mostly funds separate and unequal institutions. The common school ideal reaches its widest nominal coverage — and its most sophisticated internal mechanisms of stratification.
The baseline: Progressive ideals enter the discourse but the implemented reality is a tracked public school with academic and vocational lanes. IQ testing provides scientific cover for sorting students along lines that map closely onto race and class.
Who benefited: White middle-class families whose children were steered toward academic tracks; white veterans through the GI Bill; employers who received pre-sorted workers matched to predetermined roles.
Who was excluded: Black, immigrant, and working-class children consistently sorted into vocational tracks regardless of capacity; Black veterans largely denied equitable GI Bill access; students whose intelligences didn’t conform to the narrow testing instrument.
1950–2000: Desegregation, Standards, and the Accountability Era
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is the legal end of de jure segregation. The actual desegregation of American schools is incomplete, fiercely contested, and largely reversed over the following decades by residential sorting, white flight, and the systematic dismantling of busing programs. The ruling changes the law. It does not change the neighborhood.
The 1960s bring a surge of federal investment: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), Head Start, Title I—money flowing toward low-income students for the first time at federal scale. The rhetoric of equity reaches its legislative peak.
Then A Nation at Risk (1983) reframes the conversation entirely: the problem is not equity, it is excellence. American students are failing to compete internationally. The response is standards, testing, and accountability—a framework that will dominate the next four decades and fundamentally reorganize what schools understand themselves to be doing. The track hadn’t been eliminated. It had been internalized—Advanced Placement versus general versus remedial, operating within the same building, reproducing the same demographic gradients with slightly different paperwork.
By the 1990s, the private school market is mature and growing. Charter schools emerge, initially as experiments in progressive alternative pedagogy, and are quickly captured by a privatization logic that uses the language of equity to accelerate the defunding of public systems.
The baseline: Legal desegregation without structural integration. Federal equity investment in the 1960s followed by a standards-and-testing turn in the 1980s that reorients schools around measurable outputs. Internal tracking replaces external segregation.
Who benefited: Families with the resources to navigate the system — selecting neighborhoods, accessing honors and AP tracks, using charter and private options as public funding eroded the common school.
Who was excluded: Black and Brown students in re-segregating schools; low-income students in districts where property-tax funding meant unequal resources; students sorted into lower tracks from which upward movement was statistically rare.
Change Brings Resistance To Change: The Backlash Grammar (1970s–1990s and beyond )
Something important happens in the negative space between the equity legislation of the 1960s and the accountability turn of the 1980s. It is not an event so much as a reframing—a political and rhetorical operation that converts the modest redistribution of public educational resources into a story about unfairness to white families. Understanding this is essential, because the logic it establishes doesn’t stay in the 1970s. It is still operating now, in more sophisticated form.
The starting point is busing. When federal courts began ordering mandatory busing to achieve racial integration in northern cities—Boston, Detroit, Louisville—the resistance was immediate, organized, and often violent. The public argument was rarely made in explicitly racial terms; it was made in the language of neighborhood, choice, and parental rights. Families, the argument went, had a natural claim to the school nearest their home. Forced busing violated that claim. What went largely unexamined was the prior question: how those neighborhoods had been racially engineered in the first place, through redlining, restrictive covenants, and federally subsidized white suburban flight. The injury being remedied was invisible; the remedy was presented as the injury.
This rhetorical move—erasing the history that made a corrective necessary, then framing the corrective as the original offense—becomes the template. Affirmative action in higher education is recast as discrimination against white applicants who played by the rules. Bilingual education programs are framed as preferential treatment that disadvantages English-speaking children. Title I funding directed toward low-income schools becomes, in this telling, a subsidy that drains resources from districts that earned them. In each case, a policy designed to counteract a documented structural disadvantage is inverted and presented as itself a form of structural disadvantage—against people who had benefited from the original structure without ever having to name that benefit.
A Nation at Risk is partly a product of this climate. Its effectiveness is that it reframes the entire conversation away from equity and toward excellence—a word that sounds universal but lands differently depending on where you’re standing. If the problem is that American students aren’t competitive, then resources should flow toward competitive students. The logic of remediation becomes a drag on the logic of achievement. What looks like a neutral turn toward standards is also, in effect, a withdrawal of the equity framing that had briefly organized federal education policy.
By the 1990s, the backlash has acquired institutional infrastructure. Think tanks produce research framing school choice as a civil rights issue—using the language of the movement it is, in many cases, designed to undermine. The word merit does enormous work during this period, naturalizing outcomes that are in fact the product of accumulated advantage while delegitimizing interventions designed to account for accumulated disadvantage. The common school, already strained, begins to be discussed as a failed experiment rather than an underfunded one.
What this period seeds is a political grammar that the anti-woke movement of the 2020s will inherit and extend. The core structure is consistent: identify a corrective measure, strip it of its historical context, reframe it as an act of aggression against a neutral baseline, and then defend that baseline as if it were natural rather than constructed. Busing becomes an assault on neighborhood schools. Affirmative action becomes racial discrimination. Equity-focused curriculum becomes indoctrination. Diversity training becomes ideological coercion. In each iteration, the move is the same: the remedy is made visible; the wound it addresses is made to disappear.
The anti-woke movement does not invent this grammar. It inherits it, amplifies it, and applies it more broadly—extending from education policy into corporate culture, medical care, military service, and public accommodation. What is new is the explicitness: where earlier iterations maintained a studied neutrality, claiming only to defend fairness, the current iteration is increasingly willing to name its targets directly and frame the defense of existing hierarchy not as neutrality but as virtue. The mask, in other words, has come off.
The through-line is unbroken. Each generation of American education has produced a backlash proportional to how seriously it threatened the sorting mechanism. The 1960s reforms were serious enough to produce a serious backlash. The seriousness of the current moment’s reaction is, in that sense, a rough measure of how much was at stake.
2000–Present: Accountability, Austerity, and the Fracture
No Child Left Behind (2001) makes standardized testing the organizing logic of public education. Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) modifies but does not dismantle it. The school-to-prison pipeline becomes a named and documented phenomenon. The achievement gap becomes a major policy object—widely discussed, essentially unmoved across a generation of intervention.
The 2008 financial crisis produces a wave of teacher layoffs, school closures, and defunding from which the system never fully recovers. Arts, music, counselors, libraries—the enrichment layer is stripped first, and stripped disproportionately from schools serving low-income and non-white communities. The result is a system where the wealthiest public schools increasingly resemble private ones, and the poorest increasingly resemble management environments.
COVID accelerates every existing fracture. Families with resources exit into private schools, microschools, and homeschool pods. Public schools are left holding the highest-need students with diminished capacity. Remote learning reveals, without ambiguity, that access to broadband, quiet space, and adult support are themselves educational infrastructure—and that their distribution follows the same lines privilege always has.
The neurodiversity framework enters the mainstream slowly and unevenly. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (1990) established rights; the practical implementation has often been punitive, siloed, or institutionally self-serving. Genuine intercognitive design—building environments where multiple modes of being and learning are structurally welcomed rather than merely tolerated—remains the exception rather than the rule.
The baseline: A testing-and-accountability regimen that narrows curriculum while failing to move equity outcomes. Austerity strips enrichment from under-resourced schools. COVID accelerates stratification. Neurodiversity rights exist on paper; inclusive design rarely follows in practice.
Who benefited: Families with the wealth, flexibility, and cultural capital to exit the public system or navigate it selectively. Testing infrastructure companies. Charter networks with access to public funding and private governance.
Who was excluded: Low-income students in resource-stripped districts; neurodivergent students in schools without meaningful support; students of color caught in the school-to-prison pipeline; every family for whom exit from the public system was not an option.
The Through-Line
What looks, from a distance, like a progressive arc—from explicit multi-track sorting to universal public education—is more accurately described as the internalization of the track. The mechanism moved from external enforcement (separate schools by class, race, and purpose) to internal architecture (sorting within a nominally common institution). The rhetoric of equity arrived faster than the structure. In each era, the question of who deserved what kind of education was answered—consistently, if not always consciously—in favor of those who already had privilege.
Understanding this pattern is not an invitation to despair. It is an argument for looking at things precisely. Reform efforts that work within the sorting logic—adding a program here, adjusting a metric there—have had limited purchase because they accept the flawed premise.
What a genuine alternative requires is not a better version of the mechanism, but a different foundation: one that treats the full range of human cognition, culture, and circumstance not as a variable to be managed but as the very material of education itself.
We have been acculturated to the language of equity masking a reality that simply doesn’t add up.
When a business is telling you they pay a living wage, 9 times out of 10 they either don’t understand the term or they are gaslighting you. This is allowed to happen because most people don’t do the math, and most people over a certain age grew up in a very different ecosystem.
Living wage for the East Bay is $100,000/yr. Most people think that looks like a big number, but if you figure for living alone in a market rate apartment, current food, utility, and healthcare costs, $100k is modest at best. Living wage, then, if you factor in 50 40-hour workweeks, a living wage is $50/hr. It’s just that simple. So if you’re working anywhere that’s paying $20/hr, the only way that’s a living wage is if you have another job paying far above $50/hr to make up for the deficit that is created by working a $20/hr job. And it’s clear that most small businesses would not be able to pay the equivalent of $50/hr full time for most positions.
Life no longer adds up. When I was my son’s age, I could work less than full time at a cafe and pay all of my rent and bills and save money and travel a few weeks a year. My son works at an equivalent job, and doesn’t have enough to rent an apartment.
We can battle with small business owners all day. It doesn’t add up. That’s why everyone is trying to unionize, and getting tons of pushback. If we don’t solve income inequality, places like the East Bay will just become unlivable for the average person.
About tip culture: Because I’ve worked lots of restaurant and service jobs, I don’t buy into the “tipping as a reflection of service quality” mindset, and see tipping for what it is—a wage subsidy for low paid workers. Tipping-as-merit is a way to make the consumer think like a privileged person—the power to bestow and withhold is intoxicating, until you recognize the reality that low paid workers often simply couldn’t afford to work their jobs without tips factored in, because employers, due to margins being what they are, simply wouldn’t be able to pay what a worker needs to make without that subsidy.
Because it’s become part of the ecosystem, it buries a portion of the cost of doing business—in other words, consumers would be unwilling to pay the price that businesses would have to charge for goods and services if they reflected the actual cost of doing business. Understanding this, I automatically add 20% whenever I’m at an establishment where I know the workers are making a lower-tier wage; but first, I ask an employee how the management distributes tips—some businesses keep them outright, while others distribute them equitably.
I’m writing this as a person who has never earned what has been considered a living wage for the area. Rent control, beans and rice, and making sure to never become sick or injured are all that are allowing me to stay in the area.
Please vote! And remember that as long as capitalism doesn’t have safeguards that manage the ratio between the highest and lowest earners, things can only get worse.
I was recently trying to explain equity in education to someone who experiences language around equity as “mumbo jumbo,” (in their words). My mind makes analogies, and tries to find common ground. As we (me and my debate partner) are both Californians, my mind latched onto car culture—Americans love their cars, and California has a specific stake in the dissemination of car culture. Also, there is a deep relationship between car culture, social structure, and education culture, and, for reasons that will become clear, the Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, is a major player in this landscape, and works elegantly as a character in my story.
Thanks for bearing with my complex sentences. Neurodivergents love sentences with bonus content.
Recognizing that this metaphor might be helpful for others, I submit to you: the difference between equality and equity in education.
You have a central auto shop system, implemented around the country, set up by the Ford Motor Corporation when they were the dominant maker in the marketplace. You advertise that you will work on any make and model of car. That being said, when the shop is set up, the shop only receives shop manuals for the Ford Taurus. So for a while, any car that comes through the shop gets spark gaps, valve clearances, and timing settings for the Ford Taurus.
At some point, the vehicle owners, the shop managers, and the mechanics notice that all of the Tauruses that leave the shop are running great, but the Focuses, the Transits, the Broncos and Mustangs, along with Chevys, Dodges, Jeeps, Subarus, Kias, Volvos and Land Rovers are not running their best.
A shop manager from Ford comes in to investigate. “I see your problem right here: All of these cars are being tuned to Taurus specs. Where are your shop manuals for the other models?” They order the manuals for the Focus, Transit, Bronco and Mustang, and lo and behold, every Ford that leaves the shop runs at its best.
The other makes still have timing issues, are not firing on all cylinders, and experience electrical problems. The Ford Motor Corporation claims that this is evidence that the other makes are just deficient.
At some point, a team of independent investigators, with an understanding of the wider market, looks into how the shop is servicing its vehicles. They see right away that no shop manuals or supply chains are being made available for non-Ford vehicles. They submit their recommendations: that manuals, parts, and training specific to non-Ford makes and models be provided immediately, and that this will result in a) all vehicles being tuned to the proper specs; and b) all vehicles receiving appropriate parts, without the need for modifying inappropriate parts or fudging adjustments.
There are many Ford-only communities working on the same shop model, and all of their vehicles appear to be doing fine. The Ford Motor Corporation, having set up the shop model in the first place, with significant influence and a vested interest in their vehicles appearing to be the most reliable, moves decisively to thwart these findings and advocate for the Ford-only model to be enforced throughout the country.
A few communities that service a wide variety of makes and models adopt the independent investigators’ findings: they provide manuals and supply chains that ensure that all vehicles leaving the shop are running at their best.
The Ford Motor Corporation sees this as a threat to their ascendancy in the marketplace, and they advocate strongly that only Ford manuals and supply chains be standard, and that other accommodations are simply designed to steal market share from a native maker and transfer it to makers who are encroaching and have no claim to a place in the market.
They never point out that serving each vehicle to its unique specifications does not make Fords run worse—it simply ensures that each vehicle runs at its best. No one is asking that Chevys be supercharged, or that Subarus get special fuel injectors, or that Dodges get enhanced suspension. It’s just about servicing each vehicle with the appropriate parts and adjustments.
Equality is treating each car like a Ford Taurus. A move toward equity without actually achieving equity is treating each car as some model of Ford. Equity is providing the proper parts and tuning for every make and model that comes through the shop.
Equality is treating each vehicle the same. Equity is treating each vehicle like itself.
Someone who says, “but children are not as different as different makes of cars” has a fundamental misunderstanding of the trajectories that different children travel before they enter the education system. Some people have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance that every child has had access to the same resources and comes from backgrounds with the same cultural expectations. This is similar to maintaining the appearance that all cars are Fords. Only the Ford ecosystem benefits from this. By treating all cars equally (as if they were Fords) we are not treating them equitably (by giving them the parts and adjustments specific to their needs).
The Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, provides a good analogy for the foundation of our education system. Like Henry Ford, (the parent of the factory model of human organization), the people who designed the sorting system that is expressed in standardized testing in education were racists, eugenicists, capitalists, and anti-unionists. They designed a sorting mechanism that recognized the need for low-paid workers, middle managers, and highly paid executives, and devised a shop system that was predicated on labeling these social tiers early, and making sure everyone stayed in their lane.
Being a diverse and unevenly distributed nation, we have what are essentially Ford-only communities—communities that are predominantly white and culturally homogeneous—alongside mixed-make communities—communities that include a vast variety of different cultural and relational realities, as different as different makes of cars.
The culture wars around education are really an expression of different priorities regarding a variety of specific needs, and a breakdown in the translation layer between understanding the diverse needs of different models of vehicle and a variety of makes of vehicles—between communities loyal to the Ford ecosystem and open-market communities.
Since single-make communities exist, distributed throughout the country, there is a significant voice within the national conversation that advocates for the Ford-only model. Consider a variety of predominantly white Anglo communities throughout the US:
Provo, Utah
Bismarck, North Dakota
Owensboro, Kentucky
Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Rutland, Vermont
Southlake, Texas
Findlay, Ohio
Florence, Alabama
Altoona, Pennsylvania
Medford, Oregon
Alongside this homogeneous cultural distribution, just as widely represented and on the ascendancy, are the open-market communities, where a variety of makes and models are part and parcel of everyday life:
Dearborn, Michigan
Flushing, Queens, New York
Lowell, Massachusetts
Anchorage, Alaska
Houston, Texas
Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota
Oakland, California
Clarkston, Georgia
Garden City, Kansas
Miami, Florida
Viewed in this way, the culture wars we are experiencing are not so much about a competition for resources, but simply a difference in scale of specific needs. For those acculturated to a monoculture, there is a cognitive load required to understand the needs of a more diverse community. And this cognitive load becomes weaponized by actors who have a stake in maintaining a monoculture.
This is the Ford Motor Corporation’s most effective move: not the shop design itself, but the management of the conversation about it. By framing equity as a threat to Ford drivers, they redirect the legitimate frustration of communities whose own Broncos and Transits are sitting in the remedial bay—tuned to Taurus settings, diagnosed as deficient—toward the communities asking for their own manuals. The Bronco in Altoona and the Kia in Oakland are being failed by the same structure. They have been positioned as opponents. The people who benefit from the Taurus-only model funded that positioning.
The Ford Motor Corporation’s original pitch was simple: bring us any make, any model. We’ll get it running. Equity doesn’t challenge that pitch—it holds the Ford Motor Corporation to it. The independent investigators found nothing that undermines Ford’s stated goals. They found only that those goals were never applied fairly. Serving the Kia to its own specifications doesn’t make the Taurus run worse. It makes the shop better. The players in the open market that Ford made possible are simply asking the Ford Motor Corporation to honor the contract it wrote.
Equity is not the subversion of the shop’s mission. It is, finally, its fulfillment. Aren’t we better, together, when each is at their best?
