What Kind of Mind Will Thrive in the Age of AI?

What Kind of Mind Will Thrive in the Age of AI?

The idea for this lesson came to me a month ago while I was preparing the rollout of classes that I will be teaching with the Marcus Garvey Education Academy. I was reading Garvey’s autobiographical essay, “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy” -- Garvey’s first experience of what he called “race distinction.” Sooner or later every Black child will experience this moment, and there are usually five responses. Carol S. Pearson, in Awakening the Heroes Within (which I have modified in some parts), maps the archetypal patterns. What I saw in Garvey’s story, and in the children I was trying to reach, was that those patterns were all present. And most of them share the same hidden problem. The Shadow Innocent pretends the event never happened and continues as if racism does not harm them or their people. The Orphan accepts the injury as evidence about the self. Something is wrong with me. The child internalizes the judgment and begins to live within its limits. This is how mental slavery begins. The Uninformed Warrior spends life answering every insult, correcting every slight, fighting every battle placed before them. The enemy determines the battlefield, the tempo, and the expenditure of energy. Their life becomes a rebuttal. The Uninformed Caregiver offers comfort without transformation. Let me ease the pain so we can endure what is happening. Comfort matters. It may help people survive for a while, but comfort alone leaves the conditions intact. What connects all four is that they are all still locked inside the paradigm of mental slavery. Each is still contending with the system and its values. The system still sets the terms. The system still determines what deserves attention, what deserves resistance, what deserves care. The Garvey Mindset arises from a completely different set of premises and follows its own logical order. Garvey did not organize his life around the system’s assumptions. He built from the premise that Black people possess the intelligence, dignity, discipline, and creative power to construct a world of their own making. But how did he do that? That question drove the lesson. But this lesson could not be like any of the other lesson plans that I created for Teachers Pay Teachers (thegarveyclassroom.com/store) because AI has changed the way we should be teaching. The idea for the change came from a TikTok I had been watching. You can see it here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Gxm1Lm/ Nate B. Jones said something that stopped me. “We are gated by our imaginations.” He was talking about AI models. He was arguing that 95% of the utility of these tools remains undiscovered, not because the models are limited, but because we lack the imagination to ask. The machines are getting better faster than we are coming up with imaginative new uses for them. AI can now write essays. It can generate images. It can imitate voices. It can answer almost any question. But it cannot decide what is worth believing, building, or becoming. I heard something else in that statement. I heard Garvey and Carter G. Woodson. Garvey warned us more than a century ago: “PREPAREDNESS is the watch-word of this age.” Our schools are failing our children because they are not creating the environment in which the foundational habits of mind needed for the AI era can flourish. They are stifling the imagination of Black children by banning books about our heroes. This limits our children’s sense of possibilities and agency, and disconnects them from our history. Also, our schools are asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking, “How do we teach students to use AI?” The better question is, What kind of mind will thrive in the age of AI? Because information is no longer scarce. Judgment is. But before I could continue, I would have to meet the demands of Black parents: 1. Academic excellence that prepares their children for college, work, and leadership. 2. Safety and respect without racial bias, lowered expectations, or excessive punishment. 3. Cultural affirmation so their children learn Black history, see themselves reflected, and develop confidence. Becoming Marcus fulfills all of these. But it wasn’t until I had finished creating the lesson that I realized that for ethical and legal reasons I could not teach the course because it asks personal questions that only a parent or a teacher in loco parentis should teach. So, I have created a family package for parents and an educator’s companion for teachers who want to prepare children for their moment of “racial distinction” or help our children to reframe the moment into something positive: nothing is wrong with you. Do not accept the system’s values of beauty, intelligence, or worth. Both lessons are available on my website. Becoming Marcus — The Garvey Classroom: https://thegarveyclassroom.com/becoming-marcus-series/ In the coming months, I will be writing on Becoming Marcus: Awakening to the Importance of Purpose, after the launch of my new children’s book, The Story of Marcus Garvey, which has only taken me thirteen years to write, and will be released on Garvey’s birthday. Until then, wish me luck and walk good. References Garvey, Marcus. “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy.” Garvey, Marcus. “PREPAREDNESS is the watch-word of this age.” Jones, Nate B. “We are gated by our imaginations.” TikTok, 2026, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Gxm1Lm/. Pearson, Carol S. Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperCollins, 1991. Share this with someone who needs it Get full access to The Garvey Classroom at geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe [https://geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Purpose

There is a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from searching for something that was never lost. Half the content on your timeline right now is about purpose. Find your why. Follow your passion. Trust the universe to reveal your calling. It arrives like gospel. Urgent. Confident. And entirely useless, because it describes a feeling without giving you a method. Marcus Garvey gave us the method. In Message to the People, the text we use as a primary source in The Garvey Classroom, he said, “Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as much as possible to be intelligent.” That instruction has a shape. What Garvey Actually Prescribed Garvey did not tell his students to meditate on their gifts or sit quietly until a calling arrived. He told them to read. Novels. Biography. Poetry. History. He prescribed four hours of reading per day and he meant it as a minimum. Garvey understood something the pop culture purpose industry has systematically buried: the mind does not reveal purpose through stillness. It reveals purpose through contact. Contact with ideas. Contact with lives lived differently. Contact with struggle and its outcomes. Garvey inherited this from a tradition older than the industry that replaced it. The Kemetic principle at the root of this practice is Sia. Deep perception. The capacity to understand before you act. In the ancient African tradition that gave Egypt to the world, Sia was a cultivated faculty. You developed it through sustained attention to the world. Through reading. Through writing. Through observation. Sia was the ground from which right action grew. Garvey absorbed that tradition, distilled it into a curriculum, and handed it to a people who had been deliberately starved of it. What the Spiral Does Pop culture treats purpose as an event. A moment of revelation. The lightning bolt. You wake up one morning and you know. And if you have not had that moment yet, something is wrong with you. You have not meditated long enough. You have not journaled deeply enough. You have not found the right coach.You missed out on something and the FOMO is real. Garvey understood purpose as a process. A spiral that moves upward and doubles back on itself. You read something. It shifts the angle of your perception. You write one sentence about what shifted. The next book lands differently because of that sentence. The observation you make on Tuesday connects to the biography you read on Saturday. The spiral tightens. A direction becomes visible. A direction, not a destination. Purpose is not given. It is grown. And the growing requires the same thing Garvey required of every student who sat in his School of African Philosophy: daily contact with ideas larger than your current situation. What Was Installed Instead The advice you receive from pop culture is a substitution. Find your passion keeps you searching. Follow your why keeps you feeling. Trust the universe keeps you waiting. None of these ask you to build anything. None of them ask you to read anything or ask you to sit down and write one honest sentence about what you observed today. That substitution has a cost. A people always searching for a feeling never build a thing. Garvey was almost cruel on this point. He said, “It is better that you be dead than having no purpose in life” An African person who reads and writes every day and tracks the movement of their own mind across months and years cannot be sold a dopamine hit in place of a life’s work. That person is on the way to what Garvey named in The Philosophy and Opinions: “For man to know himself is for him to feel that for him there is no human master. For him Nature is his servant, and whatsoever he wills in Nature, that shall be his reward.” The destination of a disciplined mind. What You Do Tonight You do not need a revelation. You need a practice. Open one book tonight from any of Garvey’s four categories. Make it something that interests you. Read for thirty minutes. When you are done, write one sentence about what moved in you. A sentence about what shifted, not a summary, not a review. Do that again tomorrow. And the day after. Watch what the spiral does to your sense of direction over sixty days. How the work compounds. The feeling you are waiting for will not arrive before the practice. It arrives inside it. That shame telling you your purpose should feel obvious by now, that you are behind, that other people found theirs and you are still looking was installed. It keeps you searching instead of building. This is not to say that the yearning for wholeness that was sparked during your awakening was not real. It was. The difference between Garvey’s method and all other requires diligence in following through with the unlearning and learning and then the choice of ancestor’s work to continue during your lifetime. The work is there and it is waiting for you. Confidence is your inheritance. Visit thegarveyclassroom.com. References Marcus Garvey. Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy. Edited by Tony Martin. The Majority Press, 1986. Marcus Garvey. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Edited by Amy Jacques Garvey. The Majority Press, 1986. This Substack funds The Garvey Classroom — curriculum, courses, and free daily teaching for students, parents, and teachers. Free subscribers receive the writing. Paid subscribers fund the work. Get full access to The Garvey Classroom at geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe [https://geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Reorientation

We live in a time of mass distraction, and it is easy to get pulled back into a life of compromise that promises nothing except the loss of integrity. The distraction is the point. It keeps the attention moving so the small surrenders never get counted. One concession, then another, and the integrity is gone before you notice. Reorientation asks two things of you. Unlearn the reflexes the old world installed, and learn who you are underneath them. Distraction is built to stop both. Unlearning needs stillness. You have to catch the reflex in the act, the flinch, the lowered voice, the apology you never owed, and to catch it, you have to watch your own mind without moving. The feed never lets you stop moving. The reflex fires, and three screens later, you have forgotten it fired. You cannot audit a mind that is never still. The same feed pours the old rankings back in, who counts as beautiful, who counts as worth hearing, faster than you could subtract them. You cut one reflex, and the feed installs two more. Learning needs depth. To know your heroes is to sit with them long enough to be changed. Distraction trades for a feeling. You save the post with the affirmation, and you feel you have done the work. The algorithm serves Garvey between a sneaker ad and a stranger’s grief, and by the next swipe, he is gone. You collect fragments that never add up to a self. Reorientation carries a cost no one names. The world sells it as gain, more knowledge, more pride, more confidence. The bill comes in people. You start to change, and the ones closest to you feel it first. You stop laughing at the joke you used to laugh at. You correct the word you used to let pass. You carry yourself like someone who answers to your own name now. And the room cools. They say you are doing too much. They say you have gone all the way conscious. They say you killed the vibe. The invitations thin out. The group chat moves on without you. The fear of losing them is what holds people in limbo. The work itself is survivable. The shunning is what people cannot face. The fear that if you stand up in your own name, the ones who love you will love the old you instead, and leave the new one standing alone. So you make yourself smaller to keep the table. You trade the self for the seat. That is the compromise, and it promises nothing except the slow loss of you. Unlearning also has an outside. It draws lines. The first line for most of us is the N-word. You stop saying it. That part is quiet, between you and your own mouth. Then comes the harder part. You stop letting it pass. You say it plainly at the table, in the car, in the room where your children are listening. Do not use that word around me. The word is the colonizer’s name for you. Every time it leaves your mouth, you do his naming for him, you call yourself the thing he needed you to believe you were, and you save him the labor. A boundary takes the labor back. And the second you draw it, the cost arrives. It is just a word, they tell you. Why do you have to make everything so deep? You are too serious now. The boundary is where unlearning leaves your head and costs you the room. It only counts when someone else can feel it. The work is the answer. Stillness against the feed. Depth against the fragments. The boundary against the room that wants you small. Garvey called it being “re-educated after he has imbibed the present system of education” (Garvey 97). In 2026, the present system is the feed, and the re-education is the same. You sit still. You go deep. You hold the line and pay for it. Do that work and you have already begun the next stage. Reorientation is the turning that makes the road appear. References Garvey, Marcus. Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy. Edited by Tony Martin, The Majority Press, 1986. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Garvey Classroom at geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe [https://geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Confrontation

The air conditioner hummed as I stacked copies of My Name Is Marcus on the table, then sat in one of the chairs reserved for the audience and waited for the first guests to arrive. As I fidgeted in my seat, a man approached me and asked what the event was about. I told him it was the launch of my new book. I handed him my card. He looked at it, turned it over twice, and said: “What do you know about Marcus Garvey?” I rattled off a few dates from memory that silenced him. But I knew this would not be the last time. Nor was it the first. The man’s question was not curiosity. It was a checkpoint. Who gave you permission? That is the lie in its internal form. The war on Black imagination does not only come from outside. We carry it in and turn it on each other. The empire does not need to be in the room. We run the program ourselves. Every generation inherits the lie in the form that its time demands. In 1452 it came as papal authority. In Garvey’s time it came as laws, as prisons, as perpetual harassment. In that room in Miramar City Hall it came as a question from a man who did not know he was asking it on behalf of five hundred years of a program designed to make us doubt ourselves and each other. In my own poems I ask the form the lie takes now. In a time of climate change, do Black and brown lives in the Global South matter? The empires have changed their instruments. The verdict remains the same. The question is coming for you too. It may not sound like “What do you know about Marcus Garvey?” It will sound like whatever your generation’s checkpoint sounds like. But it is the same program. How will you answer it? Next week we talk about reorientation — the work of learning and unlearning. Walk good. This Substack funds The Garvey Classroom — curriculum, courses, and free daily teaching for students, parents. Free subscribers receive the writing. Paid subscribers fund the work. Get full access to The Garvey Classroom at geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe [https://geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Awakening

There is a day in Black childhood when the world stops pretending. For Marcus Garvey, the day came at fourteen. He and the girl next door had played in the same yard for as long as either of them could remember. Then her parents drew the color line. They put her on a ship to Edinburgh and told her she was never to write to him again, because he was Black (Garvey). That was the whole reason. The girl was Joyce Rerrie (“Look for Me in the Whirlwind”). He had led their games. The other children had looked up to him. Until that summer, he had not known he was supposed to be less than anyone. “It was then that I found for the first time that there was some difference in humanity” (Garvey). The line had been running through that yard the whole time. He had only now been shown it. That is the awakening, the first of the eight stages, and nothing else moves until it lands. The world hands you a name and steps back to watch. What you do with the name is the rest of your life. There are three things you can do. You can believe it. You can take the weight they handed you, and let it sit in you and turn. Baldwin knew the temperature of this one: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.” The rage is accurate. They installed it in you. But rage with nowhere to go turns and feeds on the one carrying it, and you become the proof they were waiting for. You can hide from it. You can spend your one life trying to outrun the name, filing your “accent” down, and learning the manners of the house that locked you out, until you reach the door wearing a face the house agrees to tolerate. Fanon gave a whole book to the men who chose this and called it Black Skin, White Masks. The title is the entire diagnosis. A man wears another man’s face over his own long enough that he forgets which one he was born with. The house may let him in. It never lets him forget what it charged at the door. Somewhere in the trade, the authentic life ends, quietly, with no one to mark the date. Or you can refuse it. This was Garvey’s road, and it is the steepest, because no one hands it to you. You see how the line got drawn, and you stop being the one who keeps drawing it on yourself. Garvey said plainly what slavery actually is: “When a man is a slave, he has no liberty of action; no freedom of will, he is bound and controlled by the will and act of others.” Notice the path. Break that belief, and the rest comes loose. That is the work the other seven stages are built to do, the slow construction of a mind no one else holds the keys to. It starts with a child who has just learned the price of the ground under his feet. The only question the awakening leaves behind is what we hand to the child standing in it right now, watching to see whether we believed the name, whether we hid from it, or whether we did what Garvey did. References Baldwin, James, et al. “The Negro in American Culture.” CrossCurrents, vol. 11, no. 3, 1961. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, 1967. Garvey, Marcus. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Edited by Amy Jacques Garvey, The Majority Press, 1986. “Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind.” American Experience, directed by Stanley Nelson, PBS, 2001. This Substack funds The Garvey Classroom — curriculum, courses, and free daily teaching for students, parentsFree subscribers receive the writing. Paid subscribers fund the work.. Get full access to The Garvey Classroom at geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe [https://geoffreyphilp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]