Art as Resistance: How Black Creators Keep Telling the Truth When Schools Won’t

They think erasing us is as simple as crossing a line in a textbook. Cut out the chapters on slavery’s brutality. Swap “enslaved people” for “workers.” Push Martin Luther King Jr. into a soundbite and leave Malcolm X on the cutting-room floor. Ban Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin from classrooms. That’s the game plan.

But what they don’t realize is this: Black art is the school they’ll never be able to shut down.

From murals in the street to films on the big screen, from TikTok reels to jazz records, our people have always built new classrooms when the old ones locked their doors. And in 2025, when we see this administration rolling back education and whitewashing history in real time, it’s clearer than ever art is not just expression, it’s resistance.

The Attack on Education: Why It Matters

Trump’s people are defunding public schools, cutting higher-ed programs, banning DEI, and gutting arts funding. They’re defending museums that erase nonwhite histories, while pressuring libraries to pull books that tell the truth about America.

And let’s be real: when schools collapse, our communities feel it first and worst. Black and Brown kids are the ones shoved into overcrowded classrooms with fewer resources. College tuition skyrockets. Arts programs vanish. The school-to-prison pipeline expands. This ain’t just policy it’s strategy. Keep us uninformed, keep us powerless.

But we’ve been here before. And we know exactly how to fight back.

The Classroom of Film: Spike, Singleton, Coogler

When Hollywood wouldn’t tell our truth, our directors did.

Spike Lee gave us Do the Right Thing (1989), a hot summer in Brooklyn that explodes under the weight of racial tension. That film is still studied today because it’s a history lesson and a prophecy rolled into one. Malcolm X (1992) turned a revolutionary into a syllabus. And BlacKkKlansman (2018) ripped open America’s racial hypocrisy—forcing us to confront how yesterday’s hate is still running today.

John Singleton gave us Boyz n the Hood (1991), showing the realities of South Central LA, gang violence, systemic neglect, and survival. That film was a sociology class for millions who never stepped foot in a hood.

Ryan Coogler is carrying the baton. Black Panther (2018) reminded the world that we are royalty, innovators, and visionaries, not just survivors. His latest, Sinners (2025), digs even deeper, mixing horror, folklore, and history to say: our past is alive, and if we don’t confront it, it will haunt us.

Every one of these directors said what schools wouldn’t: we exist, we matter, and we’ve always been the story.

Poets, Authors & Musicians as Truth-Tellers

While classrooms banned Morrison’s Beloved, she was teaching the world about trauma and freedom through fiction. Baldwin’s essays (The Fire Next Time) are still sharper than any history textbook. Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Audre Lorde were Black women who wrote our survival guide when America wouldn’t.

And then there’s music. From Nina Simone declaring, “To be young, gifted and Black,” to Kendrick Lamar weaving generational trauma and survival into To Pimp a Butterfly, Black music is the soundtrack of resistance. Even Beyoncé, with Lemonade, built a visual syllabus on Southern roots, Black womanhood, and healing all wrapped in one project.

Every verse, every stanza, every song, lesson plans in survival and pride.

Murals, Museums & TikTok Professors

When textbooks are empty, walls talk.

Murals in Ferguson, George Floyd memorials, Juneteenth art festivals—they are all public classrooms. Museums like the National Museum of African American History & Culture (which Trump’s people tried to undermine) stand as fortresses of memory. And now? TikTok is a whole underground school system.

Creators drop mini-lectures on Black history, decode systemic racism, and reclaim stories in 60 seconds flat. The medium changes, but the mission is the same: we will not be erased.

Parenting as Resistance

Here’s the truth we don’t like to admit: sometimes we hand our kids over to a system that never loved us, then act shocked when they don’t know their own history. It’s on us to change that.

Your kids should know before they hit middle school:

• Our story didn’t start with slavery.

• Africa is not a monolith; it’s the birthplace of kingdoms, math, science, and philosophy.

• Black Americans shaped every part of this country labor, music, food, style, and politics.

  
  

Teach them Baldwin before the school bans him. Play Sam Cooke before history books skip him. Stream When They See Us with your teenagers and unpack it together. That’s resistance. That’s love.

The Warning Signs: History Repeats

If this feels familiar, it’s because it is. Nazi Germany didn’t start with gas chambers it started with censorship. With book bans. With education stripped bare until one voice, one story, one lie was left standing.

We’re watching the same playbook right now. A president acting like a fascist dictator, rewriting culture in real time, trying to distract us with chaos (yes, Epstein files included) while dismantling truth from the ground up.

History told us what happens if we sit silent. We don’t have that luxury anymore.

So What Do We Do?

We fight back with the two things they can’t control: Our art and our money.

Support Black films, buy Black books, stream Black music. Take your kids to Black museums.

Put your dollars into creators keeping history alive. Teach at home, talk at the dinner table, pass down the stories that the system is trying to bury.

Because one thing is clear: when schools won’t, we will.

At Obsidian People, we don’t just sell art—we archive culture, amplify voices, and keep the lessons alive. This is bigger than a canvas or a blog it’s survival

They may defund schools, but they’ll never defund our spirit. Art is our weapon. Culture is our classroom. And as long as we keep creating, they can’t erase us.

This is the fight. This is the work. And the time is now.