OUT OF TOUCH
The children who created this global juggernaut attended school in the shadow of the school reform movement that punished them for the very creativity they expressed in hip-hop.
Dr. Bettina L. Love is the author, most recently, of Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal and the bestselling We Want To Do More Than Survive. She is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 Leaders making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate. She is a co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN), whose mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities; they have granted over $250,000 to abolitionists around the country. She is also a founding member of the task force that launched the program In Her Hands, distributing more than $15 million to Black women living in Georgia. In Her Hands is one of the largest guaranteed income pilot programs in the U.S. In 2018, she was granted a resolution by Georgia's House of Representatives for her impact on the field of education.