The miseducation of the US: How America learned to misread itself

In 1995, Lauryn Hill asked in the song “Ex-Factor,” “Tell me who I have to be, to get some reciprocity.” Nearly three decades later, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill continues to generate academic scholarship, curricular study, and institutional analysis—evidence that Black musical traditions have long carried sophisticated civic, pedagogical, emotional, and political thought often encountered aesthetically before they are fully interpreted intellectually.

In another example, consider Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning author of novels that ranged from the trauma of slavery, the impact of European beauty standards, and the African American experience during the Great Migration. She famously wrote to the precision of jazz and blues music. Yet Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison details the persistent misreading of Morrison and the dislocation of her work from its intended representations. Serpell argues that while Morrison endures as a literary titan, her intentions as a writer are persistently misread—not through deliberate distortion, but through the conditions of the world she was writing into.

Morrison did produce something that functions as a canon, but that was a byproduct—the consequence of her intellectual and creative precision working within a tradition that the white literary world could not see and therefore could not accurately name. Celebration and misinterpretation are not mutually exclusive. The interview questions Morrison fielded, the critical suspicion her work attracted, the demand that she translate herself for a public skeptical of her perspective—all of it evidences how a writer can be praised and still fundamentally misread. She was not trying to invent a tradition apart; she was writing from inside one that had always existed.

Both Hill and Morrison are part of the fabric of American epistemics and history. The former was a gifted young artist in 1990s New York singing with Fugees. The latter edited the autobiography of Angela Davis and taught at Princeton University before venturing into fiction writing in her 40s. The convergence of Black thought with American history, literacy, and historical imagination is nothing new. It may be fragmented and foundationally unsettled, but it follows a long pattern. It comes down to the matter of fluency and the ways English has shaped what stories are perceived as true, which inheritances are counted, and most importantly, who gets ignored.

The history of United States enslavement constructed an inequitable balance. When whole people are reduced to three-fifths, narrative and language become tools for stifling comprehension and fluency, while the mechanisms of that stifling are rarely announced. This mechanism operates through cadence, through colloquialism, through what gets counted as legitimate expression and what gets dismissed as dialect, noise, or deficiency.

Decoupling from colonial language structures is not merely a linguistic act. It is reparatory, democratic, and pedagogical.

This becomes the architecture of whose voice gets to mean something. The question then becomes not just what was lost, but what might be recovered and how. The matter of “de-Englishing” is less about abandoning English and more about decolonizing the supremacy that has rendered others illegible and misunderstood. The subtlety lives in the familiar transformation of American colloquialisms and euphemisms that can make exclusion quotidian. The everyday practice of such stunted understanding spills into modernity leaving a legibility gap in the heart of American literacy.

Decoupling from colonial language structures is not merely a linguistic act. It is reparatory, democratic, and pedagogical. With Black epistemics as an anchor, the devised infrastructure of English dominance can be traced from the literacy tests that enforced civic exclusion to the AI systems now automating that exclusion at scale. What would it mean for American institutions to genuinely expand their linguistic legibility? For the nonprofit sector, in particular, this question is not only rhetorical—it is organizational.

As the United States celebrated its 250th anniversary, English remains a dominant mechanism of understanding in American pedagogy. Even amid low literacy rates, insufficient standardized testing models, and increasingly inaccessible higher education, English supremacy has remained largely unchecked. The systems that test fluency rarely account for equitable legibility. A country unwilling to expand its epistemic history—linguistic, historical, emotional, and cultural—risks becoming a byproduct of its own ignorance.

De-Englishing the American legibility gap

The other side of this is the lifespan of Black scholarship and influence. The dominance of institutional English has narrowed the sophistication of America’s interpretive capacities in ways that carry consequences far beyond language itself. Nonprofit organizations that rely on standardized and flattened language to address “minority” communities play a role in reinforcing those limitations. Black history and scholarship are used as an anchor in this essay to showcase the multifaceted, multiregister, beat-to-beat forms of knowledge carried by these writers, artists, and researchers.

The argument is not for separating Black epistemics from American history, but for examining the work without dilution—an explanation without subtitles. Lauryn Hill was writing her youthful angst into music that painted a quotidian and universal narrative. The lyrics printed inside CD booklets became a kind of scripture listeners used to match the words to the rasp of the artist’s voice.

To stretch understanding linguistically may come with cultural friction, but to force one language onto a diverse population is a grave intellectual failure.

In the American classic Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain repeatedly refers to the Black character Jim by the N-word throughout the novel. Conversely, In James, Percival Everett reimagines that same character through a richer and more expansive interior life. Everett is a masterful writer, but what, then, does that make of Twain’s perspective? How does this fragment our understanding of a “great American story”? To be familiar with something is not the same as fluency. One does not have to be fluent in something to enjoy it, consume it, or claim proximity to it. But proximity is not awareness, and institutional language often educates us into the limits of its own vocabulary. Suddenly, people become “vulnerable,” “marginalized,” and “voiceless”—entire groups reduced to conditions not of their choosing. The distortion is subtle enough to become uncontested, much like the language itself.

Nonprofit legibility is often theory first, practice second, and nowhere is this more apparent than in language. Closing that gap requires bridging disciplines that institutional English has kept artificially separate—the humanities from the sciences, oral history from economics, lived experience from policy.

Brazilian writer and educator Paulo Freire argued that literacy was never neutral. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he insisted that teaching people to read and write in the master’s language, without interrogating that language’s power, was itself a form of oppression. To de-center English is not to abandon literacy, it is to insist that literacy serves liberation rather than assimilation. For H. Harvey of Black Revolution Theatre Workshop, de-Englishing is a decolonial agenda:

De-Englishing the nonprofit industrial complex is one reformist step toward stripping colonial and capitalist violence from the ecosystems of arts, culture, research, and service. It buys an inch of air beneath the vice grip of dead presidents on our throats as communities attempt to tell stories of liberation. ‘Englishing’ here is not the English language itself, but the industry of reducing Global Majority expression into increasingly narrow frameworks—not to be understood by white supremacist systems, but to audition for exploitation within them.

Harvey points to the distinction between fluency and familiarity diagnostically. The liberatory work of scholars like Sylvia Wynter reminds us that extraction and class are not accidental byproducts of the system, but evidence of its design and dominance. Decoupling from colonial language structures would aid society in ways that extend beyond narrative sovereignty alone.

This brings us to the socio-technological issues, the data ethics issue. Because if data mining exists and language can produce group vulnerability, then there is an ethical responsibility to design large language models capable of accounting for the nuance and legibility of all Americans regardless of race, culture, or English fluency. Organizations such as Measure of Austin, Texas, are working to close the gap between data and dignity, demonstrating how ethical AI, community-led research, and lived experience can make entire populations legible to systems that have historically overlooked or misrepresented them.

To stretch understanding linguistically may come with cultural friction, but to force one language onto a diverse population is a grave intellectual failure. Black epistemics are now entering technological architecture itself through ethical AI and data justice initiatives such as Latimer, a culturally fluent AI platform designed to confront the bias and historical erasure embedded within dominant language models.

The fluency of imagined futures 

Octavia Butler is often described as a prophetic writer. Yet Butler herself resisted this characterization, insisting she was simply paying attention. Writing in the 1980s and 1990s, she extrapolated from the conditions around her: widening inequality, environmental instability, political polarization, and social abandonment. When readers encountered Parable of the Sower decades later and declared it predictive, they were often responding less to prophecy than to the continuity of the conditions Butler had already observed. What appears visionary in hindsight is frequently the result of sustained attention in the present.

This attentiveness is not incidental to Black intellectual traditions. W.E.B Du Bois described a double consciousness that required Black Americans to navigate multiple realities simultaneously. Such conditions demanded broader interpretive capacities. This enabled the ability to read power, history, identity, and possibility at once. The result was not merely survival but worldbuilding. Black epistemics have long operated across temporalities, connecting ancestral memory to future possibility, the local to the global, and lived experience to structural analysis.

Afrofuturism extends this tradition. It is not an escape from reality but a disciplined engagement with it. If Butler demonstrates what attention can reveal, Afrofuturism asks what imagination can build from that knowledge. It is an exemplary ecosystem that holds beauty, possibility, and inheritance without collapsing into deficit or despair. Ingrid LaFluer, founder and director of The Afrofuture Strategies Institute reflects this ethos in her own worldbuilding work:

Afrofuturism provides an imaginative infrastructure for expanding collective vision and transforming possibility into reality. It is foundational to futures visioning practices that move beyond colonial and institutional frameworks that have historically limited how communities imagine themselves and their futures. Inspired by Afrofuturism and the need for culturally specific futures, I developed the Dinkinesh Method, a framework that reclaims Afro-Indigenous spiritual traditions while integrating systems analysis and futures research to help communities reconnect with ancestral grounding, expand possibility, and envision liberated futures.

Collective reimaging does not have to follow a singular American accent. Perhaps de-Englishing must function less like a syringe and more like a greenhouse: regenerative, patient, and capable of respecting what was without sabotaging what is while still ushering in what will be. Too often in this country, we ask what Black people have endured after centuries of being made familiar without proper fluency. The more urgent question may be: How can America catch up to the epistemics and liberatory nature of Black thought itself?

The United States is still a relatively young country, comparatively young as Lauryn Hill was when she sang her Grammy-winning ballads of heartache and reciprocity. “How you gon’ win, when you ain’t right within?” Hill asked decades ago. Maybe America should be asking itself the same coming-of-age question. But before it answers with sterile disclaimers or pleads the fifth, America must confront the reality that the call is coming from inside the house.

It’s the same language, made illegible.