Everybody Loves Gladys’ Sweet Potato Pie: Cultural Knowledge for Collective Wisdom
Everybody loved Gladys’ sweet potato pie. On the highest of holy days, this was our communion—in each bite, we shared the memories of the fingers that assessed the size and readiness of the sweet potatoes, the hands before that selected the right ones, boiled them, and peeled the skin; and the muscular and tender arms that whipped the cooked potatoes—thick, sweet, buttery— also held the stories that never got outdoors. They stayed inside and folded into family secrets and spices.
I know this intimately, not because I watched my grandmother make the pies. For most of my childhood, I was the pie eater, not the pie maker. Then, one Christmas, my grandmother gave me an envelope. In that envelope was the recipe for her sweet potato pie, written by her hands, in her handwriting.
Recipes are secret, cultural knowledge. This knowledge is passed down from generation to generation, sometimes orally—told to the younger generation from the elder. This knowledge is also passed down through generations bodily—watching elders make and create, adjust, add, and subtract based on taste and smell. Rarely are these recipes passed down in writing with precise measurements or steps. Black food and soul nourishment are taught through an apprentice model. It was not the head that only held the knowledge; it was our arms and hands. The hands were the conduit of knowledge. As she aged, my grandmother never said she forgot the recipe; she lamented, “I lost my hand. I lost my hand.”
Knowledge—synthesizing facts and data into an intentional form and function— is accumulated and disseminated as a cultural inheritance. In a culture, schools and broader education systems serve to share and spread knowledge, and learners are expected to accumulate knowledge. Trained well, learners can reorder accumulated knowledge to meet the needs of the times. Trained poorly or not at all, learners can reproduce the knowledge of the past in the present. This passive reproduction is sometimes done in the name of tradition. And sometimes, the reproduction is actively designed to respond to threats or fears of the unknown.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad reminds us that when the earliest emancipation writers went to the South to document black life in freedom, they did so without the imagination to ever abide by black teachers, lawyers, doctors, or even presidents. Thus, the information and data synthesized and spread as knowledge also reflected their masochistic mythologies of self and sadistic mythologies of others.
Knowledge, however biased or unbiased, creates visible and invisible lines connecting the bodied and spirit worlds across time. With my grandmother’s recipe in my hands, we both commune across time and realms; we share hands when I make the pie.
My grandmother, Gladys, was born on January 4, 1926, in Greensville County, Virginia. Geographically, Greensville County sits 8 miles from the North Carolina border. It was a commercial business hub in the South, and its central city, Emporia, was a small but bustling business district and transportation crossroad with proximity to two major rivers.
My grandmother did not talk much about her childhood and upbringing. Primarily agricultural and rural, I've learned as an adult that she spent time in Virginia's tobacco and cotton fields. I knew her as a strong, solid, independent fire starter who sewed dresses better than JCPenney, made dolls for us to add to our growing Cabbage Patch Kids collection, killed hogs and shared the meat with friends and family, caught fish for breakfast, and made the best biscuits that stayed warm and flaky even at room temperature. But that was Gladys as an adult.
Gladys, the child, was born into Virginia when the Racial Integrity Laws were actively designing relationships between black people and themselves, black people and public spaces, and black people and white people. Grounded in the knowledge of eugenics and designed first by eugenist William Plecker and with an iteration by Harry Byrd, the 1924 act reduced indigenous identity to colored, functionally erasing the indigenous population in the state unless they had at least 1/16 of indigenous blood. This amendment was integrated to appease white people who wanted to claim relations to Pocahontas. Next, they banned interracial marriages and defined whites as having no blood of other races. Finally, in 1926, Harry Byrd used the law to separate the races legally. Then, in 1930, when Gladys was four years old, Black was defined as a person “having one drop of black blood” and defined that “human as negro”—casting her by law into a subjected social class, regulating her body, and legally restricting her range of motion, her arms and hands, legs and feet.
Policies like the Racial Integrity Acts are also cultural knowledge. Like recipes, they organize and order human behaviors, size, quantity, and direction. Rarely secretive, they loudly signal the beliefs, level of understanding, and sentiments of the most powerful ruling class. For every grandmother subjected to live through the human catastrophe known as the Racial Integrity Act, there was another grandmother that rationalized, advocated, and killed for the social order. The recipes that helped us design ourselves were the quantities of chance and choices we each received, the proportions of intelligence we developed, dashes of human interactions and memories of our mothers and grandmothers as they held us and fed us.
As leaders and educators emerging as equity advocates and agents, our ability to see and make sense of the present is foundational to developing our ability to make the invisible visible. Tasting the moment and discerning the ingredients, portion, and process is required and necessary to rework the dishes and preparations that might taste familiar but may no longer be healthy or healing. Understanding and wisdom, not just knowledge, are necessary to approximate and create the new recipes to scale our collective healing, which is required to speak the future and design the future. In other words, we need test kitchens. Third spaces, freer from the heat, physics, and dynamics of the social hierarchies, help us rebuild the multicultural and multiracial staples in ways that restore all of us instead of one group at the expense of another.
As we face this change in era, we are also trying to figure out how to solve the most pressing problems of our times— the recipes that will sustain us daily and the political recipes that heal and nourish us collectively. We are faced with an undeniable climate crisis. The paradox of the literate racists—humans who have accumulated antiquated knowledge pass our standard literacy tests, but lack the understanding to see others as themselves—is resilient in our learning institutions and schools even with our espoused beliefs about equity.
These are real dilemmas.
We are trying to rebuild the relationship with our earth home and get daily reminders that the earth is warmer than ever, yet find it more and more difficult to change our behavior individually and at a scale. The heartburn is real. We continue to produce more and more goods and services, contributing to our gross national product, only for it to create a decline in life expectancy. At the same time, we have AI that can synthesize more knowledge and information in seconds than ever before, mostly with technical precision and incredible accuracy. But it is overwhelmingly grounded in the ideas and the creators of the past. This alone should not be cause for dismissal, but to think that any technology without human understanding will solve and reconcile our relationship with each other, ourselves, and the earth is naive and intellectually lazy.
As the great ones have repeated time and time again, we can not use the same thinking that got us here to heal or save us. Broken people have broken ideas, and if AI is a synthesis of the ideas of the Enlightenment, Industrial, and Progressive eras, we must admit that more of the same will reproduce the past.
We must not solely think more and harder; we also have to think differently. But how do we do that?
The first step to thinking differently is accepting we must do it. Humbly acknowledging that more of the same, even if it's faster, will only produce the same, is the equity pause needed at this time. As we move into an age of brilliant chatbots that can mimic human conversation and interaction, we must radically protect what makes us human. We think AI is an incredible technological advancement and can accelerate our collective healing only when integrated with human wisdom, intelligence, and understanding. It can get us started.
My grandmother's humanity was not recognized by the white elite at the time. Her humanity was nurtured and developed by the soil that fed her and her family, the ground that supported her knees when she prayed, danced, and grieved, in the friends and families with whom she shared food, broke bread and consoled. Her humanity was affirmed in the communion. These learning experiences expanded her knowledge and her humanity, creating the capacity for her children to run and her grandchildren to fly.
Expanding and developing the humanity of humans is currently outside the realm of responsibility of traditional educational institutions, but we are not in conventional times. It has been a passive transmission. This may be the time to make it more active.
This acknowledgment is significant as educators and leaders try to find ways through school and learning in this new era of AI. Our AI test kitchen is designed to help educators emerge privately as public equity leaders. With trained models like Gladys, the Equity Co-Pilot, we are working on disseminating the knowledge and know-how to design more equitable lessons and learning experiences and be an at-the-elbow coach and companion to help us move the old ideas out of our minds and create the space to cultivate our collective wisdom.
We all need that help.
But even with Gladys, we must still create space on the counter for human elbows. We need to preserve the essence of what only we can do—connect, learn with each other, move with each other, and cultivate and humanize the new knowledge needed not for the past, but for the present and future. We should not expect AI to do something it was never designed to do. It was designed to synthesize ideas of the past quickly and with precision and make space for a new present and future. We can make the decision to see the technology this way and raise our collective expectations. There will always be a need for slices of human intelligence. We must work differently and create the time to enjoy a slice of sweet potato pie together.