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Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People

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Campfire Learn Together: Cogens and Being Ratchetdemic

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Home » Blog » DEI-AB » Campfire Learn Together: Cogens and Being Ratchetdemic

Come as you are and be brilliant as you are.

Christopher Emdin, Teaching & Being Ratchetdemic, TEDxBerkeley

I will not hide my ratchet self to make a broken system powerful.

Christopher Emdin, Teaching & Being Ratchetdemic, TEDxBerkeley

For our Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK Campfire Learn Together, we are watching and discussing two talks by Christopher Emdin: Teaching & Being Ratchetdemic, given at TEDxBerkeley, and his keynote at BMEC 2024, a convening of Black educators held by the Center for Black Educator Development. Emdin is a science educator, the creator of the #HipHopEd movement and the Science Genius program, and the author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too and Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success.

Two days ago we published Cogens and Cavendish Space: A Crosswalk, and a page on cavendish.space on how to hold a cogen with Cavendish Cards. A cogen — short for cogenerative dialogue — is Emdin’s: a small, regular conversation where a teacher and students work out together how to change their classroom. His words are already on our education entry and our mindset marketing entry, and now a whole crosswalk leans on him. We had never brought his voice into the room. This week it gets the room.

A cogen is the method. Ratchetdemic is the stance under it. It is Emdin’s word for being equally ratchet and academic — your whole loud, funny-dressed, accented, hip-hop self and a scholar, at the same time, with nobody making you pick one. The stance is a promise. The cogen is the meeting where a room keeps it.

He is talking about Black and Brown young people in urban schools, and we are going to be careful about that. Ratchet is not our word, and those students are not a metaphor for us. But the machinery he describes — rules nobody explains, brilliance nobody can see, a self you are told to leave at the door — is machinery our community knows from the receiving end. And the Black Autistic and Disabled students in our community live where his story and ours cross.

It is also our first Campfire in the Events Room on Stimpunks.World. A new room, and two talks about what rooms do to the people in them. We will end by asking this one what it needs to change.

We watch. We reflect. We bring our whole bodyminds. And we come as we are.

Videos

We’ll watch both together — subtitles on, sound up, cameras optional. No need to have watched ahead. We’ll take a bodymind break between them.

Teaching & Being Ratchetdemic — Christopher Emdin at TEDxBerkeley, posted March 2018. About fourteen minutes. A boy from Brooklyn and the Bronx, a theory about rainbows, a dinner with too many forks, a diagnosis for the whole field of education, and a pledge he asks the audience to say back to him.

BMEC 2024 Keynote — Dr. Christopher Emdin, for the Center for Black Educator Development, posted April 2025. About thirty-eight minutes. Emdin calls his approach a Pentecostal pedagogy, and the keynote moves like one: call and response, a blessing, and then the role a system hands every teacher, the classroom as plantation, a peacock raising its feathers, dreams that have been colonized, and escape velocity.

Content note. The keynote opens with a prayer and speaks in Christian terms throughout. It calls the American classroom a contemporary plantation. It was given after the 2024 election and before the inauguration, and it spends several hot minutes on Project 2025, America First, and the people then being appointed to run the federal government, including the Secretary of Education. Its captions are YouTube’s automatic ones and they drop out in places, so we quote it only where they are clear. Take it in pieces. Leave the room whenever you need to, and come back, or don’t.

Two talks, one question: what would it take for a room to let you come as you are — and still see how brilliant you are?

Table of Contents

Rainbows Over the Projects

The rainbow just needs the perfect conditions to allow its brilliance to be expressed. It cares not where it happens.

Emdin grew up in Brooklyn and the Bronx, with cars playing hip-hop for lullabies. Ten or eleven blocks from his home were the housing projects, and the adults around him had a warning about the kids who lived there:

They’re loud, they’re abrasive, they don’t want to learn, they are not who you want to be.

He was already a scientist, he says, so he turned it into a hypothesis: maybe then loud people aren’t smart. He had a second theory, about rainbows. Every picture of one hangs over a lagoon or a mountain, so he decided the colors came from the beautiful places underneath. Then one morning he looked out and saw a rainbow over the projects. Rainbows are not supposed to be made in those places. He went and read about them. Rainbows need sunlight and drops of water, and nothing else. Rainbows don’t care where you are or where you come from. You can make one with a cup of water, a flashlight, and a mirror.

That is the whole talk in its first three minutes, and it is an argument about conditions. Brilliance is not a property of a neighborhood, or of a kid. It is what shows when the conditions let it. Our crosswalk makes the same claim about the man our Cavendish Space is named for, in the words of its origin story: the environment made the person possible. We say it in five words: broken systems, not broken people.

So he went into the classroom, in the places they said rainbows could not be made, and found all these different forms of brilliance. Then he left the classroom to tell the world, and at his first education conference two people came to hear him. Around the corner, five hundred people were listening to a man talk about the same students. Emdin listened too:

He said he cares about them, but he doesn’t see the value in them.

This is deficit ideology with a caring face. Our entry defines deficit ideology as a worldview that explains inequality by pointing to supposed deficiencies within disenfranchised individuals and communities. Our community meets it in every meeting where someone says how much they love working with these kids. Care without regard is not the opposite of deficit ideology. It is the most comfortable version of it.

What Emdin did next is worth noticing. He did his homework. The man worked at an Ivy League institution, so Emdin got a job at one. The man published in certain journals, so Emdin published in them. Man, I learned that he wrote a book. Shoot, I wrote a damn book. He climbed the same ladder to get to the same stage. Hold on to that. The next story is what was waiting at the top.

Four Forks, Five Knives, Three Spoons

I was hungry. I didn’t know the rules, and because of that, I didn’t feel comfortable enough to share.

A letter came — a real one, on paper. Dear Professor Emdin, it said, you are one of the select few invited to a meeting of impactful educational researchers. He was so nervous he could not eat all day. He studied instead: sociology, education theory, the politics of urban education. He walked in at seven, full of knowledge and empty of food, under chandeliers. I thought y’all were teachers.

There were crackers and grapes. Dinner was served, and none of the researchers ate; they were full on crackers and grapes. He sat with the food under his nose, unable to follow the conversation for hunger, and did not eat either, because I didn’t want to be the new invitee who was the first one to eat. Finally he counted down, five, four, three, two, one, and looked at the plate.

Fam, there’s four forks, five knives, three spoons.

This had nothing to do with the fact that I was prepared. Then he turns to the audience:

This is the experience of young folks in urban classrooms today. It’s not about their ability. It’s not about their willingness to engage. It is all about the rules of engagement that we construct for them that have nothing to do with their brilliance and the fact that we attach what they naturally are to being anti-intellectual and anti-academic.

Two things kept him quiet, and neither was in his head. The first was hunger — a bodymind need, sitting underneath every idea he had brought. The second was a place setting: rules everyone else at the table already knew and nobody would say out loud. Our philosophy page Authenticity Is Our Purest Freedom names the rule of that table: Be like us, or explain yourself.

Our psychological safety entry describes four stages — feeling included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo. Emdin had a letter on good paper that said he was included. He never reached the third stage. An invitation is not a welcome.

He also did everything respectability asks. The Ivy League job, the journals, the book. It got him a chair at a table where he still could not eat.

Human needs come before the conversation, not after it. That is why our Campfire page ends its access list with Come as you are. Bring your pets, your fidgets, your safe snacks, and why our bodymind break is a pause to move, stim, snack, step away, or just breathe. It is not a nicety. It is what participation is built on.

Now read the first rule of a cogen, as Emdin wrote it in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood and as our crosswalk quotes it:

The rules should be given to students in the most succinct version possible:

  • No voice is privileged over another, or, “Everybody eats, everybody speaks.”
  • One person speaks at a time; or “one mic.”
  • The cogen results in a plan of action for improving the classroom.
Christopher Emdin, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, p. 73

Everybody eats. We cannot say whether he had that dinner in mind. It is hard not to hear it. A cogen is a conversation about the place setting. It asks the people who were never told the rules what the rules are doing to them, and it ends in a plan to change the table, not the guests. Our crosswalk adds one extension, for people whose words do not come on demand: Everybody eats. Everybody gets the mic. Nobody has to take it.

Brilliance When It Looks Like Them

They can recognize brilliance when it looks like them, but they can’t identify it when it doesn’t.

Emdin gives the problem a name. The whole world of education is suffering from a disease called agnosia. Agnosia, he explains, is a condition where a person could once identify something and, after a lesion in the brain, no longer can. Educators, he says, have a cultural agnosia:

And it’s so insidious that we don’t even recognize that we have a disease. But guess what, y’all? I got a cure.

We will argue with the diagnosis in the Synthesis. The observation underneath it is exact, and our community knows it from the inside.

Damian Milton named a version of it, from the Autistic side of the gap. The double empathy problem is the mutual incomprehension that occurs between people of different dispositional outlooks and personal conceptual understandings when attempts are made to communicate meaning. Both people miss each other. But only one of them gets blamed: the locus of the problem has traditionally been seen to reside in the brain of the autistic person. We spent a whole Campfire on Milton’s keynote in May.

Emdin is describing the same gap from the other side of the desk. A teacher reads a student across a difference, cannot read what is there, and files it as absence. A loud kid from the projects gets filed as not smart. An Autistic kid whose brilliance comes out sideways — in a monologue, a rocking body, a typed line instead of a raised hand — gets filed as a deficit. Brilliance that only counts when it looks like you is a mirror, not a measure.

Our page Presume Competence carries Steve Silberman’s answer: presuming competence is the ability to imagine that the person in front of you is just as human as you are. And it carries the loop Emdin is describing, from Disability Is Natural:

It’s easy to see that our actions put people with disabilities in a no-win situation: because we presume they’re incompetent, we don’t give them opportunities to demonstrate their competence, and this, in turn, is taken as “proof ” that they are, indeed, incompetent.

That is Emdin’s housing-project hypothesis, confirmed by the evidence it produced. I tested my experiment. It kind of came to be when I saw them. A teacher who expects nothing finds it. Our name for being discounted as a knower is epistemic injustice, and a classroom is where most of us first met it.

Equally as Ratchet as Academic

To be ratchet is to exemplify all negative characteristics associated with urban spaces, right? To be loud, obnoxious.

Emdin’s cure is a word he made: ratchetdemic, to be ratchet and academic. He keeps the insult’s own definition on purpose, so the room can watch him turn it over. Some of y’all have a ratchet friend. Some of y’all are the ratchet friend. Then he names the trap:

We’ve constructed a scenario for young people that you either have to choose to be ratchet or academic. And because of that, they choose what’s most comfortable and they believe it means that they can’t be academic.

And he makes an offer:

You could be as you are, but I won’t lower expectations. The rigor is still high. The standards are still high. But if you come in a little loud, that’s okay. If you dress a little funny, that’s all right. If you speak with a voice inflection, that’s okay. If you’re English language learner and you have a thick accent, that’s okay. You could be who you are and I will accept you as you are, even if it makes me uncomfortable in the pursuit of our academic attainment.

Even if it makes me uncomfortable. That clause carries the whole ethic. The teacher’s discomfort is the teacher’s to hold. It is not the student’s job to fix it by shrinking.

Again: ratchet is not our word to take. What we can say is what it does in this talk. It stands for the whole self a student brings through the door — the part school asks them to leave outside. Our word for that is authenticity. Authenticity Is Our Purest Freedom puts it this way:

For neurodivergent and disabled people, inauthenticity is often a survival strategy, not a choice. Masking, code-switching, suppressing stims, flattening emotions, or hiding needs all consume cognitive and emotional energy.

Code-switching is on that list. Its answer has a name too. Our code-meshing entry carries the linguist Vershawn Ashanti Young’s argument for it:

Code mixing, or what I call code meshing, means allowing black students to mix a black English style with an academic register (much as I do in this essay).

That is equally as ratchet as academic, said by a linguist. Young’s case is the one Emdin makes about brilliance: teachers who make Black students strip the black talk that gives their papers verve and zest from their writing are reinforcing sociolinguistic barriers that are impossible for students to cross.

If you dress a little funny, that’s all right. Our dress codes entry is blunter: School dress codes are reliably sexist, racist, and ableist.

Then he shows what it looks like. In Science Genius, students in advanced science classes in New York City public schools take what they have learned and go through the critical process of constructing a rap around that knowledge — then battle other schools. The winner goes home able to say Yeah, I got bars, plus I’m scientific. That is learning allowed to arrive in a student’s own form, which is the whole case for multiple modalities. The #HipHopEd T-shirts say the rest: I am more than what you think I am.

Read his list of what is okay once more. Loud. Dressed a little funny. A voice inflection. A thick accent. It is a list of culture and language, and it is a good one. We would add to it from our side of the room: rocking, flapping, pacing, headphones on, eyes on the floor, a typed answer, a long silence, leaving and coming back. We take that up in the Synthesis.

I Will Not Hide

I will not hide my ratchet self to make a broken system powerful. I will not be made to be less than because I choose to be myself. I will not judge my brilliance by how I think it looks or sounds. I will be equally as ratchet as academic.

He closes by asking the audience to say it after him, and then, for the young people watching who get called corny for going to school: We are teaching and being ratchetdemic.

Every line of it is about masking. To make a broken system powerful is exactly right: the hiding is what keeps the system running. Our Masking and Burnout Why Sheet puts the bill where it lands: The classroom sees the child’s best hours. The family sees the invoice.

I will not be made to be less than. In August we mourned Professor Jason Arday at Campfire, and his phrase for it was made to be small. We read it then as Not feeling small — made, by someone, on purpose, with a person assigned to the putting-back. Emdin’s pledge refuses the putting-back.

And remember the dinner. Emdin had done everything respectability asks before he ever sat at that table. The pledge is what he says after. Our respectability politics entry opens with Lydia X. Z. Brown:

Respectability politics didn’t save me then, and they won’t save our community or movement now or in the future either.

We said it ourselves in the Arday post: respectability did not protect him, and it was never going to, because the machinery does not run on your conduct. Respectability is a survival tactic, not a defense.

A Projection of a System

That’s not who we truly are. That is a projection of a system on who they think we should be when we work with our children.

The BMEC keynote turns the argument on the teachers in the room. Every educator, Emdin says, holds a role identity, handed to them by a system that does not wish them well, and a core identity underneath it. You have to fight the role on purpose:

If you’re not intentional about attacking the role somebody placed you on and you just walk around all apathetic like it ain’t there, you will become it unbeknownst to you.

Then he names the role:

The classroom in contemporary America ain’t nothing but a contemporary plantation. The students are placed in that space to be workers, you are put in that place to be a warden.

He means it historically, and he means it about this audience — a hall full of Black educators, told that the system has a part for them and that the part is warden. We will not borrow the image. We will notice what it says about compliance. A teacher whose job is to produce stillness and quiet is being asked to police children, and our answer to that job is the title of Fix Injustice, Not Kids: Justice, not behavior “management.”

A role identity is a mask a system hands you on your first day. Emdin’s warning — wear it without noticing and you become it — is the one masking teaches. And it is why our crosswalk said that Cavendish Space has to remember the teacher’s own wounds. It quotes a question Emdin asks in Ratchetdemic, in the spirit of Septima Clark:

In the spirit of Septima Clark, the ratchetdemic educator asks, What piece of this system is doing violence to my mind, body, and spirit, and what chaos can I bring to this space so that my students do not have to undergo the same violence that I had grown accustomed to or adjusted to?

Christopher Emdin, Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success, p. 7

Teachers are bodyminds in the room too. Some of them are Autistic.

Then the peacock. Young people, Emdin says, are not inherently bad, but they’re responding to oppression:

When a peacock is attacked, it raises its [plumes]. It makes itself larger than it actually is. For what purpose? To be able to scare off the person who is attacking it. Its inherent self is not to be violent, but its first line of protection is to scare you off.

If a teacher gets scared off by the plumes and starts policing them, he says, that young person will never learn anything from that teacher. Our Seeds for Classrooms say the same thing about a different attacker: Overload looks like defiance. Shutdown looks like laziness. Emdin’s peacock is often answering racism. Ours is often answering a fluorescent light and a fire drill. Sometimes it is both at once. Either way, Education Access names the mistake: Sensory responses become behavior problems. Distress becomes noncompliance. Don’t police the plumes. Ask what attacked.

Even Their Dreams Have Been Colonized

Full self, unapologetic, raw, expressive, beautiful in our blackness and its varied forms, and concurrently the sharpest tool in the shed, the smartest individual in the room.

That is how Emdin describes what he calls a ratchetdemic season, and the keynote asks the room to say it is one. Not to say that it’s an ego-driven thing, but it’s a God-given genius that I hold.

Then he talks about dreaming. A dream, he says, is not necessarily a reflection of your imagination. It’s a reflection of the situation that you’re embedded in. He asked some students what they would do with a thousand dollars. They wanted another pair of sneakers. It was not that anything was wrong with those students, he says:

They live in an environment where they’re so conditioned to projections of the imaginations of the oppressor that even their dreams have been colonized.

My brothers and sisters, we’re in a season now where we cannot afford to not dream. And if the dream ain’t radical, it ain’t a dream at all.

Lydia X. Z. Brown, on our respectability politics entry, lists what will actually get us free: Radical, militant anger — and radical, militant hope, and radical, wild dreams, and radical, active love. Emdin and Brown are describing the same refusal. A dream that only rearranges what the system already offers is the system dreaming through you.

Then he gives the dream a physics. Gravity, he says, is the invisible norm we stop seeing — If the lesson plan exists, if the standards exist … that the rubric exists … It is just there as a norm, but it’s the invisible norm. Escape velocity is the speed at which something stops being bound by it:

When you teach, you teach at escape velocity. You teach on the pace that the divine offers you. I don’t care when the bell ring and when it don’t.

I don’t care when the bell ring is a sentence our community would put on a T-shirt. The bell is the oldest clock in the building and it was never set by any learner. Crip time refuses it from one side. Emdin refuses it from another. In May we spent a Campfire on lines of flight — Deleuze and Guattari’s name for the ways out of a classroom’s fixed lines — and escape velocity is a line of flight with a sermon in it.

He closes on this:

You have to let go of the gravity to fly. … And all our babies want from us is a model of how to fly.

The Stimpunks Synthesis

The following is a Stimpunks synthesis — our own extension and critique, not a claim made by Christopher Emdin or either talk.

Grant it all first, because it earns it. Emdin puts the problem where it belongs, in his own words: the rules of engagement that we construct for them. His test — whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student — opens our crosswalk and is the hinge of Fix Injustice, Not Kids. He puts race at the center, which our own crosswalk admits Cavendish Space does far less often than it should. He took a word used against young people and handed it back to them with its definition intact and its meaning reversed. And he gave teachers the cogen, one of the most practical tools for co-design in a classroom that we know. We are arguing with two talks, not with his books, and talks compress. Here is where we would push, and the last push is aimed at us.

First: the problem is in the rules, not in anyone’s brain. The whole world of education is suffering from a disease called agnosia … I got a cure. Agnosia is a real condition that real people live with, some of them in our community. Using it as the name for a moral failure is the move the disability studies scholar James L. Cherney warns about, in the passage on our ableism entry:

If we locate the problem in disability, then the ableist absolves his or her responsibility for discrimination and may not even recognize its presence. If we locate the problem in ableism, then the ableist must question her or his orientation.

Cherney names the exact pattern — blindness to convey ignorance — and says that using it would endorse and perpetuate ableist rhetoric. And notice what the metaphor does to Emdin’s own argument. A minute earlier he had put the problem in the rules: It is all about the rules of engagement that we construct. A rule can be named in a cogen and rewritten by Friday. A lesion cannot be argued with. The diagnosis moves the problem out of the place setting and into a brain, which is the move the pathology paradigm makes on our children every day. The double empathy problem says what he means without the diagnosis: a gap that runs both ways, between people, in a room. Keep the observation. Lose the disease. His better sentence was already in the talk.

Second: brilliance cannot be the price of admission. Come as you are and be brilliant as you are is a beautiful sentence. The next sentence is a door with a test on it: Now, if you come as you are and you ain’t brilliant, you ain’t down with hip-hop ed. We know what he is guarding. The rigor is still high. The standards are still high. That is a refusal of low expectations, and Disabled students know the cost of low expectations as well as anyone. But a welcome that has to be earned is a belonging test, and our entry defines belonging as participating without constantly having to explain yourself, hide parts of who you are, or push past exhaustion just to keep up. Presume competence is the answer, and the page is clear that it requires no proof. Presume the brilliance. Don’t check for it at the door.

The two talks also disagree with each other, and that is a gift to a campfire. The TEDx Emdin promises that the standards are still high. The BMEC Emdin calls the standards gravity — the invisible norm — and tells teachers to escape it. Which standards are rigor, and which are gravity? Whose are they? Our Campfire page ends its access list with Come as you are. No second clause. That is on purpose.

And his list of what is okay needs to grow. Loud, dressed funny, an inflection, an accent: a list of culture and language. Our crosswalk caught the same gap in his book, where cosmopolitanism names race, ethnicity, gender, and academic ability and leaves out neurotype and disability. A loud kid may be loud because the room is too loud. A kid who will not look at you may be listening harder than anyone. Add stims, headphones, silence, AAC, and leaving the room to the list. A Black Autistic student needs all of it on one list, in one room.

Third: a pledge not to hide is a promise only a room can keep. I will not hide my ratchet self. Said by a person, it is courage. But our Cavendish Space authenticity page says what unmasking is: Authenticity isn’t a personality trait. For neurodivergent and disabled people, it’s often a risk calculation. Lydia X. Z. Brown, on the same respectability entry that refuses respectability, refuses to blame anyone for using it: I will never blame, shame, or guilt any other marginalized person … for using respectability politics as a(n imperfect, and not guaranteed) survival or coping mechanism. So turn the pledge around. The room should say it to the person: You will not have to hide here. Our Cavendish Space page names the job: Cavendish Space changes the conditions so authenticity becomes survivable. The pledge is the student’s. The promise is the room’s. A cogen is where a room makes that promise out loud, and comes back next week to check whether it kept it.

Fourth: don’t reach escape velocity alone. Lower the gravity together. The keynote asks every teacher in the hall to break free of the system’s pull, by spirit and by will. That is stirring, and it is also a lot of fuel. Escape velocity is the most expensive way out there is, and the people with the least fuel — the burned-out, the Disabled, the teachers carrying racial weathering and minority stress to work every morning — are the ones the system pulls on hardest. Our Campfire for Arday said it about another heroic answer: a finger never penetrates a wall; a collective fist does. Emdin’s own best tool is the collective one. A cogen does not ask a student to fly. It asks the room what is weighing it down and writes a plan with the room as its subject. That is collaborative niche construction: The difference is agency — who holds it, and how many people share it. All our children want from us is a model of how to fly. We would add: and a room where they don’t have to.

Fifth, and aimed at ourselves: every room has a place setting, including this one. Today is our first Campfire in the Events Room. To get in, you type the name you want to be called and knock, and you wait in a lobby until a moderator lets you in. Your camera and microphone start off, and the room says You do not need to speak to belong here. Those are good rules, and we chose them. They are still rules. Somebody arriving for the first time at 10:02 does not know whether a knock with no answer means wait or go away. That is a fork they were never shown. And a Black Autistic newcomer may be weighing more than the knock: whether this room will see them whole, or only half of them. Our own crosswalk admits that Cavendish Space names race far less often than it should. We will not know what this room is missing until we ask. So we will.

None of which makes Emdin wrong. It makes him an argument in progress, which is the best kind to bring to a campfire — especially in a room we have only just moved into.

Join Us

Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central in the Events Room in Stimpunks.World. This session is on Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK — our first in the Events Room. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.

Getting in: the call in the Events Room is open to anybody. Type the name you want to be called, and knock. You’ll wait in the lobby until a moderator lets you in. Your camera and microphone start off.

We’ll watch both talks, take a bodymind break between them, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can take part by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.

There is no designated expert here, including us, and including a professor who brings his own pledge. This is omni-directional learning in a Cavendish Space campfire — and a cogen is a campfire too, as our crosswalk says, so we’ll end with one. Following a cogen’s own advice, here is the question first, before anyone meets: What makes this room hard to be in? What would help? Answer it out loud, in the chat, or after the session in writing. Every line of the plan we make will have the room as its subject, not a person.

Join our community, and our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.

Come with one thing you were told to leave at the door. A voice, a way of moving, a word, a way of dressing, a way of thinking out loud. Bring it in. You can keep it to yourself, or put it on the table.

Main Takeaways

  • Rainbows don’t care where they are made. Brilliance needs conditions, not a better neighborhood or a better kid.
  • Care without regard is deficit ideology with a caring face. He said he cares about them, but he doesn’t see the value in them.
  • It is not the guest. It is the place setting. Four forks, five knives, three spoons, and nobody saying which one.
  • An invitation is not a welcome. Included is the first stage of psychological safety. Safe to contribute is the third.
  • Everybody eats. Human needs come before the conversation, not after it.
  • Brilliance that only counts when it looks like you is a mirror, not a measure. Presume it. Don’t test for it at the door.
  • Keep the observation. Lose the disease. The problem is in the rules, and a rule can be rewritten in a cogen. A diagnosis puts it back in a brain.
  • Respectability is a survival tactic, not a defense. Emdin did everything it asks and still could not eat.
  • The pledge is the student’s. The promise is the room’s. Unmasking is a risk calculation. Change the risk.
  • Don’t escape the gravity alone. Lower it together. That is what a cogen is for.
  • Every room has a place setting, including ours. Ask the people in it which fork they were never shown.
  • Deficit Ideology — Explaining inequality by the supposed deficiencies of the people who have least. The man with five hundred listeners.
  • Double Empathy Problem — Mutual incomprehension, blamed on one side. What Emdin calls cultural agnosia, without the diagnosis.
  • Epistemic Injustice — Being discounted as a knower. The loud kid from the projects, filed as not smart.
  • Code-Meshing — All dialects equal in complexity and value. Equally as ratchet as academic, said by a linguist.
  • Respectability Politics — Buying safety with conduct. Emdin climbed the whole ladder, and the table still had four forks.
  • Masking — Hiding yourself to get through. The thing the pledge refuses.
  • Psychological Safety — Included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, safe to challenge. The letter got Emdin to the first stage.
  • Belonging — Participating without explaining, hiding, or pushing past exhaustion. A welcome with no test on the door.
  • Human Needs — What a human needs to thrive. He was hungry before he was anything else.
  • Dress Codes — Reliably sexist, racist, and ableist. If you dress a little funny, that’s all right.
  • Ableism — Including the habit of using disability as a metaphor for ignorance. Why we would keep the observation and lose the agnosia.
  • Pathology Paradigm — Putting the problem in a brain. What a diagnosis-shaped metaphor does to a structural argument.
  • Intersectionality — Black Autistic and Disabled students live where both lists cross.
  • Co-Design — The people affected hold power over the design. A cogen is co-design that meets every week.

Reflection Questions

On the place setting. Think of a room you walked into where everyone else seemed to know rules nobody told you. What were your four forks? Did you eat? What did not knowing the rules cost you — and did anyone ever tell you afterward?

On brilliance that doesn’t look like theirs. When has your brilliance been missed because it did not come out the way someone expected — too loud, too quiet, too sideways, too much? When did somebody finally see it, and what did they do differently?

On what you left at the door. Emdin’s word for the whole self is ratchet. Ours is authentic. What part of you were you told to leave outside school, work, or family? Where did it go while you were inside? Has any of it come back?

On the pledge. Read the pledge again. Is there a line you could say today, out loud, and mean? Is there a line you could only say in a room that had already made you safe? What would that room need to have in it?

On the role you were handed. If you teach, parent, or support someone, what role did a system hand you on your first day? Is there a part of it you became without noticing? What would it look like to attack that role on purpose?

On the plumes. Remember a time your feathers went up — a meltdown, a shutdown, a sharp word, a walkout. What was attacking you? Did anyone ask, or did they police the plumes?

On dreaming. What is one dream you have had that was not just an answer to what was done to you? If the bell did not exist, what would you be learning right now?

On this room. This is our first Campfire in the Events Room, so here is the cogen question: What makes this room hard to be in? What would help? Answer with words, with the chat, with a pass, or later in writing. What would you change first?

—

This page draws on two talks by Christopher Emdin: Teaching & Being Ratchetdemic (TEDxBerkeley, posted March 2018) and his BMEC 2024 keynote for the Center for Black Educator Development (posted April 2025). Quotations from both are transcribed from YouTube’s automatic captions, with capitalization and punctuation ours and obvious caption errors corrected in brackets. The captions spell his word ratchademic, and the TEDx video’s YouTube title spells it Rachetdemic; we follow his book and the talk’s own description, ratchetdemic. Emdin’s books are quoted from our crosswalk, Cogens and Cavendish Space, with page numbers. Damian Milton, Steve Silberman, Disability Is Natural, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Lydia X. Z. Brown, and James L. Cherney are quoted from entries on our glossary and philosophy pages that cite them, and Jason Arday’s words from our Campfire in his memory. The Stimpunks Synthesis section is our own extension and critique, not attributed to Christopher Emdin.

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