Dr. David E. Kirkland
Love is called hate. Care is called harm. And the act of seeing those whom society has long refused to see—especially young Black men and boys—is now, paradoxically, framed as a form of discrimination. This is not simply a distortion of language. It is a dystopian erosion of truth.
For close to two decades, we’ve built schools and systems to repair what the American experiment has so often broken: the futures of Black boys. Our work—as educators, organizers, and truth-tellers—has never been about exclusion. It has been about restoration. Because no group in this country’s modern history has been so consistently and visibly failed by its institutions than young Black men and boys. And no group has had its pain so loudly denied in the very moment we are trying to address it.
Today, organizations like Kingmakers of Oakland, which center the educational, social, and emotional well-being of Black boys, find themselves under siege—not for failing, but for succeeding. Our model of education, grounded in cultural affirmation, STREAM innovation (Science, Technology, Reading, Engineering, Arts, Math), and community healing, has helped reshape possibilities for thousands of young people. Yet this work is now threatened, not by lack of evidence, but by a coordinated campaign to defund the apparatuses of racial justice upon which Kingmakers was built.
We are watching the very meaning of equity hollowed out by Orwellian doublespeak. Programs targeting the most vulnerable are being dismantled under the false premise that such targeting is itself discriminatory. In Texas, a Black male leadership initiative was shut down for allegedly “violating equal protection” because it named race. In California, equity offices are quietly being scaled back. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights faces funding threats and potential closure. And the Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice is once again under scrutiny. Most recently, the Trump administration issued an executive order framing efforts to address racial disparities in school discipline—including disproportionate suspensions of Black boys—as themselves “racist,” arguing that such measures constitute discrimination against white students. In this new political script, confronting racism is now considered an act of racism—a distortion so severe it borders on absurdity, yet it is gaining traction in policy.
Chris Chatmon
And it is not just public funding that is retreating. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action, a chilling effect has swept through philanthropy, higher education, and corporate America. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—once the banner of collective progress—is now whispered like a slur. Institutions, afraid of lawsuits or political backlash, are pulling back support for race-conscious work, even when that work addresses the very disparities they claim to oppose.
These attacks are not coincidental. They are ideological.
What is being dismantled is not merely funding streams or social programs. It is the moral architecture of equity itself.
Let’s be clear: Black boys are not overrepresented in opportunity. They are overrepresented in the places where our nation stores its grief—prisons, detention centers, hospital beds, morgues. They are underrepresented in the places where we store our promise—honor rolls, college campuses, leadership pipelines.
Only 10 percent of Black eighth-grade boys read at grade level (NAEP, 2022), yet they are nearly four times more likely than their white peers to be suspended from school (OCR, 2021). They comprise only 6 percent of the U.S. population, yet they make up nearly 40 percent of the incarcerated male population (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2023). They face the lowest life expectancy of any racial or gender group in the country. And by all accounts, many are opting out of life, with Black male suicide rates rising and college enrollments plummeting.
This isn’t bias. It’s design. And unless we name that design, we cannot undo it.
Organizations like Kingmakers exist to upend this reality—not to reify race but to dismantle racism. They train teachers, develop culturally rooted curriculum, build ecosystems of care, and amplify the joy and genius of Black youth through art, music, and technology. They’ve embedded STREAM education in turntables and coding labs, brought science to the barbershop and reading to the basketball court. Their work is not just academic—it is soulful. It is a testimony that Black boys, too, are worthy of love, and that loving them can be revolutionary.
At Kingmakers, we don’t just help young Black men and boys become more school-connected—we help them become more self-connected. The work here is rooted in the radical notion that possibility is not taught, but remembered. When a young man writes a rap verse about quantum mechanics, he’s not just learning physics—he’s authoring himself into a future that once felt off-limits. When a student builds a beat from scratch in the Innovation Lab, he’s not only mastering technology—he’s remixing joy. When boys meditate before class, study Black thinkers, or speak their truths in brotherhood circles, they’re not performing wellness—they're reclaiming it. These moments, though quiet, are seismic. They stitch back a sense of dignity that history tried to unravel. The goal isn’t compliance. It’s consciousness.
These innovations are not hypothetical. They are the result of decades of work. Our model draws from nearly fifty years of research and practice—from the nation’s first Black Male Academies in Oakland to the My Brother’s Keeper initiative launched by President Obama. We know what works because we’ve seen it at work. And we’ve measured the impact: increases in school attendance, higher GPAs, improved graduation rates, and reductions in disciplinary referrals.
And yet, this revolution is being starved.
New policies, introduced under the guise of “non-discrimination,” have frozen or withdrawn funding from Black male achievement programs. In some cases, entire offices dedicated to racial equity in education have been shut down or defunded. These actions are not neutral—they are a deliberate undoing of progress. The double speak here is chilling. Efforts to repair racial harm are now framed as racial harm. And the truth is being rewritten to serve an agenda that denies the existence of structural inequality.
Let us be clear: Equity is not a zero-sum game. Helping those most harmed by our systems does not mean hurting others. It means healing us all. The work of Kingmakers and organizations like it must not be seen as niche or political or divisive. It must be seen for what it is: essential. A blueprint for a more just and inclusive democracy.
The economic costs of this retreat are staggering. Incarcerating a young person in California can cost over $134,000 a year. Educating them costs a fraction. The Brookings Institution estimates that closing racial employment gaps could add $2.7 trillion to the U.S. economy. But this isn’t just about money—it’s about lives. A stable Black man in a community increases the life chances of children. A Black man with stable employment is one of the most predictive indicators of neighborhood stability, the life expectancy of children, and educational outcomes for families. In fact, the Equality of Opportunity Project found that the presence of Black fathers in communities—even those not living in the home—correlates strongly with higher outcomes for Black boys and girls. His presence predicts lower dropout rates, higher earnings, and better mental health outcomes (Opportunity Insights, 2022).
Life expectancy for Black men is significantly lower than any other group in America. But when Black men live longer and healthier lives, those conditions often reflect wider systemic improvements—like cleaner environments, more equitable access to healthcare, and stronger communities—which benefit everyone. However, we should not support Black boys because of what they can do for us—but because of what has been done to them. Because justice demands it. Because love requires it.
But even if you don’t love Black boys—and we must be honest that not everyone does—supporting them is still in your best interest. What’s good for the most vulnerable among us is good for all of us. Because when the floor rises, the ceiling doesn’t fall. It rises too.
To call this work racist is not only a lie—that we should deny help to those who need it most because this is somehow unfair to those who need help least—it is a moral failure. It replaces the hard truths of history with a comfortable fiction: that fairness means sameness, that acknowledging harm is itself harmful. It replaces justice with grievance, equity with envy.
Toni Morrison once wrote that “the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” And in this moment, we are watching that distraction metastasize—into policy, into pedagogy, into paralysis. We are being pulled away from the sacred task of repair.
But we still believe.
We believe in a world where schools can be built not just to transmit knowledge but to cultivate love. We believe in classrooms where Black boys are not feared or disciplined into submission but seen, nurtured, and liberated. We believe, as Baldwin did, that “love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
And we believe that the work of Kingmakers and organizations like it matters, regardless of who is in political office. Because funding them saves us more dollars than cutting them. More importantly, it saves more lives, period.
Chris Chatmon is CEO of Kingmakers of Oakland, and Dr. David E. Kirkland is founder of forwardED and former professor and vice dean at NYU.
