I am Dr. LaTrina Johnson, EdD—a Black, Queer, and Southern educator who spent over 15 years in public schools trying to make them work for Black children. I came up in the rural South, in schools that taught me early what it meant to navigate institutions that weren't built for me. I became a teacher because I believed education could be different. I became a leader because I thought if I got closer to power, I could change things from the inside.

I did everything right. I led with excellence. I built systems, coached teachers, analyzed data, wrote strategic plans. I earned an EdD in Education Policy and Leadership from American University. I read the research. I implemented the frameworks. I showed up early and stayed late. And I watched Black children and Black educators—including myself—pay the price anyway. The exhaustion. The grief. The rage that sits just beneath professionalism. The slow realization that no matter how hard we work, the system keeps producing the same results.

My dissertation changed me. "We Know Black Excellence Ain't Neva Freed Nobody: How Black Women Education Leaders Embrace a Black Feminist Epistemology to Indict White-Led Charter Schools and Their Specific Role in Incubating Racial Battle Fatigue" is a long title for a simple truth: we cannot excellent ourselves free. What I found in that research was what I already knew in my body—Black women leaders are paying with our health, our relationships, our wholeness, trying to reform institutions designed to consume us. The system isn't broken. It's designed. Schools function as plantations, and no amount of reform will change that.

That research didn't just inform me—it transformed me. I stopped asking how to make schools better and started asking different questions: What would it mean to see clearly, without the comforting myths of progress and reform? What would it mean to grieve—really grieve—what we've lost trying to make the plantation work? And what would it mean to build toward liberation instead of excellence?

Now, I do different work. I bear witness to what's actually happening in schools—the daily violence against Black children's humanity, the impossible demands on Black educators' bodies and spirits. I sit with leaders in their grief and rage, not rushing toward solutions but honoring the weight of what they're carrying. I support those building toward liberation—not better schools, but something else entirely. And I hold space for the tension of surviving the present while building the future, because most of us are doing both at once.

This work is grounded in Womanist praxis—the tradition of Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, The Combahee River Collective, Aretha Franklin, Lucille Clifton, Alice Walker, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, my mama, my grandmas, my aunties, and my cousins - real and “play play.” A praxis that centers love, wholeness, and collective survival. It draws on Black feminist epistemology and the unflinching analysis of Afropessimism. It lives in the prophetic tradition of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, who taught us that love tells the truth and freedom's function is to free someone else.

This work is rooted in love. And it's for anyone with the thirst and audacity to seek liberation—not just survival, but thriving. Not just reform, but transformation. Not just making it through, but building a world where Black people are finally seen as whole and human.

If that's what you're hungry for, you're in the right place.

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