This Is What Empire Looks Like

Welcome to The RootED Weekly

Deeply Rooted in Education and Equity
Issue 12 | 23 June 2025

A Note from Dayson

I’ve been thinking a lot about noise.

Not just the noise on our phones, in our inboxes, on the House floor, but the deeper noise. The kind that keeps us distracted, overwhelmed, and uncertain of where to place our attention. It’s not accidental. It’s engineered.

I didn’t send out a newsletter last week. Not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I was caught in the noise, too. Trying to make sense of the headlines, the hurt, and the sheer volume of what keeps coming. I needed a moment to sit with it all.

One moment, we’re fighting for Black history in schools. The next, for LGBTQ+ students’ right to be safe. Then it's reproductive rights. Public land. War. Food insecurity. A book ban. A bomb dropped. Another silence sanctioned.

This is how control operates in our time. Not always through tanks and declarations, but through chaos. Through distraction. Through disorientation. Through what feels like a thousand separate fights that, together, keep us exhausted enough not to name the system behind them all.

But here’s what I know: colonialism isn’t just a chapter in a history book; it’s the operating manual of too many of our current institutions. And when we don’t name it, we risk treating symptoms instead of systems.

So this week isn’t a roundup. It’s a reckoning. A chance to look beyond the surface, to make connections, and to remind ourselves: what’s happening isn’t random, and it isn’t new. But neither is our resistance.

Keep reading.

Cuidate,
Dayson

Digging Deeper: The Root Is Still Empire

Lately, it feels like everything is unraveling all at once.

You wake up to images of burned bodies buried under rubble in Gaza. Scroll down, and there are ICE agents detaining someone outside a grocery store. Keep going, and you’ll find another bill banning trans kids from sports, another DEI office dissolved, another classroom told to stop teaching the truth. Before bed, you receive a notification about U.S. bombs falling on Iranian nuclear sites. Or the quiet announcement that public land is being handed over to private developers.

It’s dizzying. Infuriating. Exhausting.
And yet, none of it is new.

We are not witnessing a series of isolated events. We are witnessing what happens when empire tightens its grip. These are not cracks in the system. This is the system, doing exactly what it was designed to do.

I was reminded of that this week when I got a text from Siembra NC about possible ICE activity at the Home Depot near my house. They needed someone to verify. So I went. Drove to the lot. Circled slowly. Scanned for unmarked SUVs. Checked in with store employees. Rolled through adjacent neighborhoods, eyes alert. Looking for signs of agents, signs of fear.

I was able to report back: nothing confirmed. No detentions. No immediate threat.

But I left with that same pit in my stomach. Because the question isn’t just “Is ICE here today?”
It’s:
Why do we live in a world where that question even has to be asked?
Why are our neighbors afraid to run errands or walk their kids to school?

This is what it means to live under empire. Surveillance is normalized. Fear is ambient. And control is always just beneath the surface, whether it's through the curriculum, the border, the bomb, or the budget.

Banning DEI programming? That’s about control.
ICE raids? Control.

Genocide? Control.
Laws targeting trans kids? Control.
Bombs dropped overseas? Control.
Extracting public land for profit? Still control.

And all of it is rooted in the same logic: colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. The idea that some bodies matter more than others. That land is for the taking. That truth is dangerous if it doesn’t serve power.

So this week, I’m not offering easy answers or hopeful spin.
I’m offering this truth: until we name the root, we’ll keep mistaking the symptoms for separate fights.

And if the root is empire, then the response has to be liberation. Not tokenism. Not tweaking the edges. Liberation that centers land, healing, belonging, and refusal. The kind that reminds us we don’t have to carry this fear alone. We weren’t meant to.

RootED Resource: Teach the Root, Not the Symptoms

These two resources challenge us to move beyond shallow inclusion and toward a deeper, more honest engagement with history, power, and liberation.

Part I: Teach the Truth – Zinn Education Project’s Teaching Materials

The Zinn Education Project offers free, downloadable lesson plans that bring people’s history to life and refuse to sanitize or whitewash the past. From Palestine to redlining, these lessons help students understand why things are the way they are and what can be done about it.

Explore more: Popular Lessons – Zinn Ed Project

Part II: Rethink the Frame – “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” by Tuck and Yang

If you’ve ever heard the word decolonize thrown around in education without context, critique, or consequence, this is your required reading.

In “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang challenge educators, activists, and institutions to stop using “decolonization” as a buzzword divorced from the actual political, material return of land and Indigenous sovereignty. This piece is essential for anyone serious about justice work.

“When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization…”

Read the full article (PDF): Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor – Tuck & Yang

In the News: On Juneteenth, They Tried to Erase the Work

On the very day our nation commemorated the end of slavery, Juneteenth, North Carolina lawmakers gathered to debate House Bill 171, a measure that would ban all diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in state agencies. Legislators continue to advance bills that seek to silence conversations about race, identity, and structural injustice.

The symbolism is as loud as it is chilling.

The proposed legislation would prohibit state agencies from promoting, supporting, or even requiring DEI trainings or roles. It would impose financial penalties on those who do. And it was debated publicly on a day that is meant to mark a step forward in justice. As one speaker put it, this bill is “government overreach dressed as neutrality.”

But let’s be clear: this isn’t neutrality.
This is a calculated effort to reassert control over the narrative of who belongs, whose histories matter, and who gets to shape public institutions. And it’s not new. The strategy is as old as the systems that birthed it.

What we’re seeing is a rebranding of colonial logic. Colonialism doesn’t just conquer land; it conquers memory. It erases. It rewrites. It punishes those who name the truth. And just like the empires before it, white supremacy knows how to cloak itself in policy, procedure, and professionalism.

DEI didn’t end racism, but it gave language, structure, and space for many of us to start the work of dismantling it within the walls of government, education, and business. The backlash we’re seeing is a direct response to that progress. It is empire trying to close the door it accidentally cracked open.

When a legislature debates a bill like this on Juneteenth, it’s not a coincidence. It’s a message. One meant to intimidate, to humiliate, to reassert dominance.
But here’s the truth: our stories are older than their laws.
And we don’t need permission to keep building toward justice.

Read the full article from The News & Observer here: Debate on banning DEI in North Carolina draws rebuke over Juneteenth hearing

Equity Spotlight: Featured Leader - Kimberly Jones

At a time when truth is under attack, when teachers are silenced for telling it, and when the very purpose of public education is being rewritten by those with power but little proximity, Kimberly Jones stood before the North Carolina State Board of Education and told the truth anyway.

Jones, North Carolina’s 2023 Teacher of the Year and a veteran educator at Chapel Hill High School, used her final remarks as a board advisor to deliver a masterclass in courageous, justice-rooted leadership. Her words weren’t just a farewell. They were a charge. A challenge. A sermon in defense of every student who has ever needed school to be more than just a place; it needed to be a promise.

“Knowledge expands our worlds,” she said. “It shapes and sharpens our voices, and it empowers us to make change… Never confuse neutrality with justice.”

In a moment when lawmakers in her own state debated banning DEI on Juneteenth, Jones reminded us that inquiry is not a nuisance; it is the engine of liberation. She spoke of bus drivers and cafeteria workers, of front office staff and band directors, of every adult whose labor and love make learning possible. And she warned against mistaking proximity for understanding, or silence for equity.

“Hope is a discipline,” she said. And it shows.

What makes Jones’ leadership so powerful is that she never centers herself; she centers students. She understands that the future of our democracy doesn’t just depend on test scores or graduation rates, it depends on whether students feel seen, safe, and called into the work of building a more just world.

Kim Jones is a teacher-leader in the truest sense. Not because of awards, but because of how she uses her platform to speak truth to systems. Because she reminds us that our students are the message we send to a future we will never see.

In an era when education is being weaponized against the very people it should empower, Kimberly Jones models what it looks like to teach toward freedom.

And as she closed her final remarks, she left us not with comfort, but with conviction:

“Let your decisions continue to be guided by purpose, not pressure… The very future of our democracy and our society depends on how courageously you continue to steward this responsibility.”

May we rise to meet it.

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