The Memory Behind the Map

Editor’s Note: Pathways Visible and Hidden

Throughout this series, we’ve explored how systems shape educational journeys, from the coded biases of algorithms (The Data Gatekeepers), to the institutional erasure unfolding in today’s political climate (The Hollowing), to last week’s Maps That Mislead, where we examined how digital tools can quietly narrow what students believe is possible.

Before we move on to next week’s Strange Lands, I want to pause and share something more personal: a poem from an earlier chapter of my own journey.

I first wrote a version of this poem over a decade ago while applying to a PhD program. But the experience it reflects took place in the mid to late 1990s, when I was a teenager coming of age and navigating high school across Oklahoma and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was a time shaped by violence, loss, and systemic invisibility.

The Virgin Islands, in particular, embodied a unique convergence: the geographic isolation and limited access to resources often experienced in rural communities, alongside the density, complexity, and layered inequities more commonly associated with inner-city environments. These parallel realities—rarely acknowledged together despite affecting communities across America—became deeply intertwined in my lived experience.

I applied to only one college, encouraged by my high school basketball coach who believed I might find belonging at a small school in rural Maine. That recommendation came well into senior year. Without it, I’m not sure college would have happened at all.

The themes we’ve traced, agency and system, misrecognition and resilience, are not abstract. They were lived then, and they are still lived now. Even now, after earning a doctorate, I often feel as though I am navigating systems never built with students and professionals like me in mind. The exclusion I once faced has not disappeared. It has simply become more subtle, more automated, more embedded in the design of modern policy and digital platforms.

This poem is a departure in form but not in purpose. It holds the memory behind the map. The story beneath the system. It is a human bridge that links past and present, theory and truth. In this moment of reckoning and choice lies the seed of transformation, a personal reset that reshapes the path forward.

The piece honors those who walked beside me during those years: Lamar, whose powerful poetry and spoken word artistry deeply influenced me before his life was cut short; and peers like Shybo, whose journey took a different turn but who has since pursued and earned a college degree. It is written for them and for the young people moving through today’s terrain, still building their maps, still choosing possibility in the face of constraint.

With deep appreciation for walking this path with me,

Bless up,

Dr. G

The Memory Behind the Map 🎙

I sometimes wonder how I navigated my way into and through postsecondary education.
After completing the 9th grade in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
I enrolled at a public high school in St. Thomas, VI.
In sophomore year, my 14-year-old longtime schoolmate Shybo fatally stabbed Lamar, 18, during a school fight.
Shybo and I were both aspiring student-athletes
Dreaming of playing college and professional ball
Shybo might have received a scholarship were it not for the fight.
Instead, he was charged with first-degree murder and incarcerated at a youth prison.

Walking home alone from Lamar’s on-campus memorial service,
I felt the weight of my circumstances.
Lamar had often conscientiously captured these feelings in poetry —
Poems chanted into captivating spoken words was his musical artistry.
His pedagogy — continuously schooling about our culture belonging to history
Reveals systemic trappings that so many marginalized youths are predisposed and forced into taking.
They slip and fall into the only visible choices.

I could refuse that supposed inevitability
And begin the hard work that would come from that refusal
In pursuit of that ever-elusive American dream of economic independence.
I aspire in my #HeArtistry to tell the history of untold narratives.
They dubbed me Dr. G.

P.S. Special shoutout to one of my best and longest bredrins, Valentino “Roc” Flemming aka Selectah since back in the day. Your path in the trades has been as skilled and steady as your belief in me, ever since we were kids dreaming big under the St. Thomas sun. I see you. I honor you. One day, I hope to feature your story here, alongside others like us, because your voice, your journey, and your genius belong in the map we’re drawing. Your story is part of that refusal of “supposed inevitability” too. Respect every time. Love always. Yes I.