Dear Educational Leaders,

Some of you may know of Dr. G’s love letters to educational leaders (see Reyes, 2022, 2024), which were written in response to racialized assaults against our collective and individual work. Less than three months since the inauguration of the 47th president of the U.S., the time comes again to write us all another love letter — a series of love letters. This time, three of us are writing to you. We write you because the barrage of social, cultural, institutional and financial assaults that have been assailed on the daily by the federal government may leave you feeling overwhelmed, distracted and dejected. Grounded in a radical form of love that is intended to assist with collective preservation and uplift, we wish to offer some insights that may help you navigate these difficult times with grace, agency and transformative solidarity.

To intentionally overwhelm others can be a violent tactic. As a strategy in war, the federal government is using “battle recognizance,” a flurry of daily assaults designed to create frenzy, destabilization and hopelessness, all while assessing where we are weakest. For example, we’ve been experiencing attacks on the cultural front with the assault on “forbidden” words. We’ve been experiencing attacks on the structural front with the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education. We’ve been experiencing attacks on the repressive front with the policing of “DEI” (i.e., “DEI portal”) and immigrants (via U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). We’ve been experiencing an intersection of cultural, structural and repressive fronts with attacks that take away essential funding. These attacks seem to be happening on the daily. This is why we begin with drawing from the language of war. Rest assured, we will not continue with such language, because war is not our end goal; love and justice are.

Battle recognizance What can help us counter this strategy? First, we need to believe that we can be strategic, too. Strategy starts with studying. In his classic text “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu talks about knowing yourself and your opponent. Knowing yourself helps you understand the current limits of your strengths, the extent of your weaknesses, and the essence of your potential. Knowing your opponent helps to uncover their intentions, strengths and vulnerabilities, ensuring their moves cannot surprise you.

Second, a psychotherapy concept called “cognitive restructuring” can help with how we respond to feelings of overwhelm. The basic idea of cognitive restructuring involves how we take in and reorganize information, especially when it comes in a flurry. If we can name the emotions that are rising within us and restructure how our brain understands the multitude of messages it receives, then we can better determine how we respond. Why is this important? If we cannot systematically disentangle this bombardment of messages, especially those that cause distress, then we resort to primal emotions such as fear. That fear can cause a great deal of distress, leading to feelings of immobility, powerlessness and isolation. Such feelings can cause us to spin all sorts of narratives in our heads, thereby causing our distress to intensify.

Fear is also blinding and reactionary. As educational leaders, fear can cause us to react or even proact in ways that often do not align with the best interests of our students, teachers and other stakeholders, such as families. Fear in the form of reaction can cause us to pre-emptively self-censor or censor others, fearing what might happen if “too much” truth is spoken to power. Fear in the form of proaction is particularly unsettling, because it means that an administrator makes decisions in anticipation of being pressured or forced to enact a policy or practice that a leader positioned higher in a hierarchy might demand. Historian Tim Snyder names this “anticipatory obedience” in his book “On Tyranny.”

As we study ourselves and our opponents, naming and addressing our emotions along the way, we can then categorize the types of attacks that have been launched. We must understand that the attacks we are receiving are not only violent, but they are also anti-intellectual. Such attacks seek to repress, distort, deflect and erase. We develop our analysis and understanding of attacks on a specific level, particularly in situations where our collective strengths can impact them. Through our developed understanding and analysis, we then must share our insights and trust that opportunities will be unveiled that inform our next responses.

Categorizing the barrage of attacks Third, amidst chaos, there is still opportunity. That’s where we are now. Throughout history, even when there is chaos, even when there is uncertainty, there are those who draw upon their collective creativity, their collective cleverness, their collective strengths to notice and take advantage of opportunities, even when they seemed hidden.

We offer three analytic questions to guide your own cognitive restructuring. Where are the opportunities we need to seek right now? What strengths can we draw upon? Whose dreams, struggles and ancestral lessons do we lean on during these violent (fascist) times? We are in the field of education, so we have the strength of the critical content we teach. We have the strength of our analysis. We have the strength of pedagogy and our commitment to truth telling. We understand the potential of words as weapons that can counter the oppressive and distorting rhetoric attempting to control the narrative.

Let us take this opportunity, then, to give pause so that we may both invite and invoke your expansive capacity to make critical sense of these words and create a pathway. Let us take pause to offer spaciousness for you to strategize and imagine. Next week, we will write you a second letter focusing on how we seize control of the narrative. The third letter will focus on drawing upon our ancestors’ practices of fugitivity.

Until then, remember the challenge put forth by James Baldwin in his 1962 essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind”: We must now dare everything. No more water, Baldwin invokes from a Negro spiritual, the fire next time. That time is now. The fire now.

In transformative solidarity and community, Dr. G, Dr. Carreón, Dr. Nava

G.T. Reyes, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University, East Bay. Orlando Carreón, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University, Sonoma. Pedro Nava, Ph.D., is the Director of Educational Leadership and Associate Professor at Santa Clara University.