How to Fight: Resistance, Ownership, and Equity

What if school wasn’t just a place to get ahead—but a place to get free?

In this searing and poetic personal narrative, Caroline Hill invites us into a deeply intimate war story—not one fought on a battlefield, but in classrooms, cafeterias, and locker-lined hallways. From the vibrant roots of the Hampton Institute Lab School to the bruising frontlines of a post-segregation public school in Virginia, Hill traces her educational journey as both a student and a system navigator. Through her eyes, we see how schooling in America is never neutral—it either prepares us to be owners of the future or property of the past.

This essay is a time-traveling meditation on literacy, lineage, and liberation. It spans from the under-oak classrooms of Mary Peake to the quantum collapse of our current mechanistic systems. It grapples with the impossible task Black parents have faced for generations: how to prepare children to thrive in a world designed to erase them. It mourns the silent casualties of whitewashed curriculum and celebrates the spies—educators who subverted the system to protect children on the margins.

Hill challenges us to stop clinging to the comfort of control, and instead choose relationship over dominance, complexity over simplicity, ownership over obedience. If you’ve ever wondered how love, learning, and liberation intersect—or what it really means to build a future where everyone belongs—this is your invitation.

Read this essay not to learn about history, but to remember what you already know in your bones.