By Dwuana Bradley & Kahlila Williams
Overview of Project Contributions
The Black Ontology Project captures collective sensemaking across images and verse, illustrating how intergenerational learning emerges as a central practice between educators, researchers and school adjacent community partners. Through collective arts-based methods, elders’ memories, youth perspectives, cultural symbols and everyday artifacts appear side by side, refusing linear narratives of expertise or progress. Art becomes the site where history and futurity meet, making space for dialogue across age, experience and position — legitimizing knowledge that is otherwise routinely marginalized in higher education research, institutional practice and teaching particularly during times of repressive legalism (Garces et al., 2021).
This year, community members were invited by Melissa Morgan — Renaissance HS Sankofa Parent Village member and founder of the B-Well Collaborative — to help articulate a shared vision for 2026 through collaborative collage-building. As a member of the community and in partnership with community leaders, parents, and educators of Long Beach, California, I’m excited to bring forward these collective expressions, images, words and layered intentions, which we have interpreted and re-presented as mini-poems that follow. Together our vision looks like:
A Larger-than-Life Commitment
A superhero FLEX…Ambitious even.
I thank God for the WORK, for
sexy,
legacy-defining
reasons to celebrate —
to CELEBRATE
A resounding triumph!
A superhero FLEX…Ambitious even.
I thank God for the WORK, for
sexy,
legacy-defining
reasons to celebrate —
to CELEBRATE
A resounding triumph!
JOY is…
Who we are
LOVE is
Who we are
The Beauty of LIVING
is in the way you
PROTECT the world you LOVE.
In that truth lies
powerful possibilities,
easy LOVE.
In that truth lies the answers as to how we
HEAL our planet
and those with so called, “urban” roots.
Finding Peace
in the age of PROTEST
What’s your attitude toward the government
in the midst of
The Revolutions of Revolutions?
The JOURNEY is the reward.
So to HELP PROTECT
my last great place, I’m
FINDING PEACE
to PROTECT, and
to INSPIRE.
LB can BE the Blueprint
Like a blue suede Clark’s Original
They’re good people.
Our culture PRESENTS as FREEDOM
STOP WORRYING and LEARN to LOVE
Ode to space worlds
New worlds
Where one must GO humbly
Little by Little
you’re DOING your part for nature…
The ultimate solution.
Brave Solutions
Seen in the joys of life
A beautiful Black community
where age is no barrier
as long as you got your boots on the ground.
A wise (wo)man knows the best time to begin is right now.
5 ways to DESTRESS:
DEMAND financial futurity
LOVE
BREATHE
RELAX
UNPLUG
Beyond Red Flags
Y’all!
We are beyond red flags!
The long-lasting repercussions
will BE
more than fair.
…in the words of Zora Neal Hurston
things might be best described as
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick.
From our sister’s beauty salon
to Afri-cola Black art,
Jet Black is Back.
Ebony Unseen,
like the History of Africa
Harmony & Heartache
SUBSCRIBE now
or RENEW for free.
Hidden, Backwards, and Turn’t Around
The Big Idea
We are the originals
who STAY outside —
because real action is off the field
because we KEEP PUSHING
effortlessly
to BECOME a community.
We UNITE,
UNITE,
UNITE, UNITE, UNITE
because we are a community.
Because Black beauty through unity is real.
One chill year?
KEEP PUSHING.
Community-engaged learning requires all the pieces to the metaphorical puzzle. However, the last piece to our 16-piece community puzzle presented what others might have named as a challenge. The orientation was shifted vertically, rather than horizontal; and the visuals were attached to the physical puzzle piece on what turned out to be the back, when fully assembled — a conundrum. However, when theorized through Black socio-poetics (as is the objective of the Black Ontology Project) the hidden piece — the distorted piece, the disoriented piece — becomes key.
In political moments that demand spectacle, Black communities often organize effortlessly and collectively outside of view. This piece models how collective sense-making works through turning, questioning and (re)assembling. We must understand that what appears misaligned may actually hold the clearest strategy for survival and transformation. The hidden piece is the one that carries the longest memory, the most direct form of resistance, and richest possibilities. When we unite, Black beauty is real, not because it fits, but because it transforms the frame. Only by turning toward the overlooked piece can one see the full vision — collectively (re)visioning what comes next.
