there are so many things i could say about Barack Obama’s speech. there are moments when you read/hear something that just touches the core of your being. there are moments when you read/hear something that triggers memories of discussions of how ‘things fall apart’. images fade in and out of my mind as i read his words:

• flash cards my parents bought for us of famous black americans-my three favorites were Matthew Henson, Garrett Morgan and Shirley Chisholm
• discussions of my history-both sides of the family-full of strong, weak, human, smart, flawed, obscured, proud, ‘living out loud’, silenced, multi-ethnic people
• memories of looking at my two brothers and being so proud that they are MY brothers

Obama quotes my favorite line from Faulkner…words i wrote about years ago as a naive university student. words that i wrote about because i knew there was something to them…i didn’t know what and i still think i don’t grasp the full complexity of them.

Obama notes, “As William Faulkner once wrote, ‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.’”

it isn’t even past.

in this blog and in my work i am trying to talk about traditionally marginalized youth, inclusive education, disability, technology, discourse, identity, schools and curriculum-to name a few things. but what i keep coming back to is that we are 50 years removed from Brown vs. the Board of Edu.

it isn’t even past.

but what is so POWERFUL from this speech is the almost compulsion to have an ‘audacity to hope’. we can do something. we can bring the focus on the connection between the community and the individual. we can look to youth diagnosed with learning disabilities and digital technologies and work WITH them, theorize WITH them and innovate WITH them multiple other ways of being.

yes, we can.