The Myth They're Calling Greatness.

Does This Photo Make You Feel Nostalgic?

Screenshot of U.S. Dept. of ED post taken by the author.

An old looking photograph. A classroom full of children standing at their desks, hands over their hearts, facing the American flag. All white children. A classroom that looked like it was lifted straight from 1959 — because it was.

And across it, in bold white letters: “Make Education Great Again.” This was an official post from the U.S. Department of Education.

I wasn't surprised. I mean, I’d just written about whiteness in the U.S. government messaging here and here. This isn’t new.

But I was disturbed. And I was sad. And honestly? I was a little shaken in that way that happens when something you've been bracing for actually arrives.

Because I'm a white person in the U.S. I'm also a parent to children of color. I'm a partner to a black man. And that image — that vision of "great" — is a world that would have had no place for my family. My partner. My kids. The people I love most in this world.

So. Here we are again. Because I hope we can’t keep scrolling past this.

Here's what I want to be super honest about — when I first saw that picture, something in me recognized it. Not in a good way. But in the way you recognize something you've been fed for a long time.

That classroom looked a lot like mine. I grew up white in one of the whitest states in the U.S. — and I was handed a story to match. It wasn’t always spoken out loud. It lived in the textbooks that centered certain histories and skipped others. In the TV shows where the families that looked “normal” looked a certain way. In the coded language of “safe” neighborhoods and “good” schools that was really just a map of race.

That felt familiarity is exactly what makes it so worth examining. Because familiarity isn’t the same as truth. And comfort isn’t the same as great.

I think that image is meant to land somewhere soft and warm inside white folks in the U.S. It seems designed to make us reach backward — to a "simpler time" — without stopping to ask: simple for whom?

Here's the thing about that story — the one that says greatness looks like that classroom, that era, that particular vision of America. It's built on something that was never actually true, and is becoming less true every single day.

The story says whiteness is the default. The center. The majority that will always be the majority. The face of American greatness, American education, American everything.

But that's not the reality we're actually living in. It’s not the reality we’ve ever lived in.

When we build our identity, our politics, our vision of "great" on a story that isn't real — we lose. We lose connection to what's actually here. We lose the ability to see clearly. And we make decisions, personal and political ones, based on a foundation that was never solid to begin with.

The photograph from 1959 isn't just nostalgic. It's a fiction being sold as truth. And that fiction has consequences for real people — including my kids.

I want to be clear about something: I'm not writing this from a place of rage, even though I feel that too. I'm writing it from a place of love. Deep, stubborn, see-the-good-and-the-bad kind of love — for my kids, my partner, and honestly, for this country, which I believe can be so much more than this.

But love without honesty isn't really love. And staying quiet in the face of something like this — an official government account using a segregation-era classroom to signal what "great" education looks like — isn't neutrality. It's participation.

So I'm naming it. That image is not a vision of greatness. It's a vision of exclusion and lies dressed up in nostalgia. And as a white parent to brown kids, I don't have the luxury of letting that go unremarked. My kids don't have that luxury either — they live inside a world that sends them these messages constantly. The least I can do is see it and say so out loud.

But here's what I really want to say — whether or not you have kids who look like mine — whether or not you're partnered like I am — I believe this matters to you too. I really do.

Because that story — the one the image is trying to sell us — doesn't actually serve white people either. It keeps us small. It keeps us afraid. It has us holding onto a version of the world that was never really real  —  and that grip gets harder to hold every day.

What if we let ourselves be curious instead? What if we asked — genuinely asked — what makes education great? What makes this country worth loving?

I'd argue it's not the 1959 classroom. I'd argue it's the moments when a kid who doesn't see themselves anywhere suddenly finds themselves in a story. When a teacher holds space for a history that got left out. When children learn alongside kids who don't look like them, don't sound like them, don't come from the same place — and grow bigger because of it.

That's the greatness I want for my kids. For all of our kids.

I'm not here to tell you what to think — really, that’s never my goal. But I am hoping you'll think — really think — and maybe share what comes up for you.

When you saw that image, what did you feel first? What story did it tell you, and where did you learn that story?

What version of "great" were you raised to reach for — and does it actually include the people you say that you love, the communities you're part of, the world as it really is?

And what would it mean — for you, for your kids, for the people around you — to push back? Not perfectly. Not with all the right words. Just honestly, from where you actually stand?