The fall of my junior year at Barnard, I saw a flyer for a class with a course subtitle made just for me — The Mississippi Semester: Race, Inequality and Childcare. The seminar was part of the History department and was a collaboration between the Barnard Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC) and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative (MLICCI), where the former would help develop an index and report that could then be used to support the work of the latter. The class would take place during the spring semester and would include a trip to Mississippi for all seven days of spring break. Students needed to apply to enroll in the class and eight would be selected. I enthusiastically applied, crossed my fingers, and ended up being one of the eight.
Our professor described herself as a scholar-activist and explained to us how this course was a way of exploring how to use the academy as a way to serve local organisations making day-to-day, meaningful impact. In order to do this, we needed to study the history of the nation and understand what was happening currently in Mississippi. We read articles and essays and full-length texts like Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped. We analysed census results and used GIS to make our own little maps showcasing the data. We video chatted with the team from Mississippi to find out from them what they would like us to do when we got to Mississippi in a few weeks.
The weeks sped by and suddenly the ten of us — eight students, one research assistant, and our professor — were in Biloxi, Mississippi. We rented a bus from the airport and drove to our hotel that had a view of the beach, the Gulf of Mexico, and a humongous Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. We checked in and walked to dinner, garnering stares from every passerby transfixed by our group of young, racially diverse women, but still making sure to greet us all. We had the first delicious dinner of many, wiped out back in our beds, and woke up the next morning ready to work.
Zadie Smith did an interview years ago where she spoke about duties, rights, and gifts as structuring our social and intimate lives. One way to consider all that our lives are is by taking inventory of the gifts we have, the rights we hold, and the duties we owe one another. But the three can also be used as a means for us to consider all that an education is. An education as a gift that holds and adds value. An education as an unalienable right to pursue knowledge. An education as a duty that obligates us to put our betterment towards the betterment of others.
It is the final idea that has found itself out of vogue. Education continues to be a gift that people spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on because to function without it is becoming near to impossible. Education continues to be a right fought for valiantly by parents, teachers, and students in school board meetings, picket lines, and ballot boxes. But the idea that an education bestows onto us a duty to get others their gifts and their rights? That we see less and less of as education becomes a means of achieving individual success and glory.
What is the duty of an education? How do we put to use the knowledge and skills developed in classrooms and lecture halls? How do we bestow in students a sense of civic responsibility to their fellow human beings? And how can we use education systems to provide those opportunities for students to see all that still needs to be done in their world and the duty that they have — that we all have — to do something about it?
One of the projects established by the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative was a job-training program for single mothers interested in working in construction, a higher-paying, predominantly-male profession. On our second day in Biloxi, our team held a focus group for interested participants to hear about their experiences that we would use to accompany the empirical data we were mapping. Almost all the women cited childcare as one of the biggest obstacles to economic empowerment, and how the free Head Start provided by MLICCI alleviated that tremendously. Many spoke about holding bachelors degrees, associate degrees, and other certifications, but being unable to find jobs due to a lack of work opportunities. And as grateful that they all were for the Women in Construction initiative, they shared that they remained in a tenuous economic situation, where if they missed work because of car trouble or unreliable bus schedules, or if they got sick or injured and lacked healthcare, they would be back to square one.
We took their stories with us when we traveled to Jackson the next day where we visited the state capital to meet with local representatives and members of the Mississippi Black Caucus as they discussed childcare with MLICCI. We heard what policies were already in place and what was in the works as MLICCI advocated for more affordable and accessible options and the difference that would make in the lives of Black women and Black children. We were then able to sit with Black teenage girls visiting with the Nollie Jenkins Family Center who told us about how they were able to use the Center as a safe space to do homework and have sleepovers and be teenagers in the ways that young Black girls are often denied.
On one of our last days in Mississippi, we visited Cooperation Jackson, a worker-owned co-op with a restaurant and cafe and a growing farm at the back. They taught us about the history of Black Power activism and the education work they were doing, providing literature and events open to all in order to inspire those in the community to work towards self-reliance and unity. Riding back home, close to the end of our trip, we reflected as a group on the importance of making sure both grassroots efforts towards progress co-exist with top-down changes happening through policy and legislation, brainstorming and planning on how we were going to synthesise the past seven days into a text that could be used as a snapshot of where the state was as all these different groups worked in the direction of where they wanted the state to be.
Bar the last hundred years, an education was seen more as a privilege and less as a right. When opportunities were more scarce and their provision not a given, only the most elite in a society or the most academically talented in a community were given the honour of an education, and that brought with it certain duties. Educated folks were expected to look after their families, transform their communities, and come back to educate others. And whilst these realities still exist for many outside of the Western World and for those who are historically marginalised and may be the first to graduate high school or go to college, the duty component of an education has fallen with the rise of a more individualist society.
That being said, there are still schools and institutions looking to instil in students a responsibility to others. The Mississippi Semester was not the only course at Barnard centered around serving community organisations. Around the same time that we were taking our seminar, a different class was researching and recording the history of our neighbouring Harlem neighbourhoods, whilst another class took a trip to an ICE facility in Texas to support the work of a legal aid group. Mississippi was also not my first experience in which community service was part of my education. In high school, it was compulsory for us to work with a local organization at least once a week, and I spent one year teaching elementary-aged kids to swim, another year teaching middle-school girls about feminism and gender equality, and many other years involved in other projects. Years later, living and teaching in Oakland, where education and activism go hand in hand since the days of the Black Panther movement, the district makes an effort to encourage and engage students to be a part of change in their communities, growing and distributing their own produce and engaging in sustainable design projects.
How do we make civic engagement not an accessory to an education, but central to it? First, it requires us naming and being honest with students about the myriad of issues affecting cities, states, and countries around the world. Many of these issues, students already see and have experience with but require us to name, explain and contextualise, such as houselessness and gender inequality. Along with educating students though, we also need to make the effort to educate ourselves. This is often easier on a larger level, where national news is broadcast constantly, but local news is overlooked. However, in order to be effective in this work with our students, it must begin locally, and starting small and meaningfully by collaborating with groups already doing the work is one place where we can begin.
We came back from Mississippi and completed our empirical graphs and wrote up our report, using the real-life testimonials of the individuals and organizations that we had met to ground the data in their lived experiences. We published “The State of Women’s Economic Security in Mississippi” on Issuu, mapping median earnings, education level, healthcare, coverage, poverty, and employment levels to display the specifics of where women were across the state and included paragraphs describing all that we learned in the words on the women themselves. We then shared it with MLICCI to complete our original objective of engaging in work that will support their efforts, which it did. The group was able to use the report and index to advocate for the best policies for the communities they serve, backed by the data and research we were able to do.
In her 1979 commencement speech at Barnard College, Toni Morrison said that, “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” Not paternalistically, not because others need saving, but because we have a duty to one another as human beings. For those who hold special privileges in society — and the gift that education is does make it a privilege — a particular duty falls on us to pay it forward and to make life better for others the way others have made life better for us. We can use schools as cornerstones of our communities, modelling modes of civic engagement that we would like to see where we all support each other not just because we can, but because we should. We owe it to each other.
We cannot be ambivalent about the state of the world and our role in it. The problems our world face will not be suffered by individuals alone and thus require more than individuals to respond to them. Climate crisis, rising inequality, threats of violence, all seem daunting and all are daunting when we stare at them from the screens of our phones. Getting out there, meeting people doing the work, tackling it bit by bit, and taking our kids with us, might be a more manageable solution and a more effective one too. It takes us shouldering that responsibility towards others. But we never have to shoulder it alone.