A Love Letter to Akilah S. Richards

Reflections on this influential leader in the liberation movement

I don’t know if I can claim that Akilah S. Richards was my first introduction into unschooling as a liberation practice, but I have a good feeling it was her work that started me down this path.

If you don’t know Akilah, she is a black unschooling mother who has dedicated a huge portion of her life to unpacking, writing, and sharing her own life raising two daughters. She hosted an incredibly influential podcast called Fare of the Free Child and has written an equally amazing book titled Raising Free People.

When I first came across Akilah’s work, I gave it a wide berth. I felt that she was holding space for black women (she is) and that I wasn’t welcome to take up space in her community (I am). Akilah’s work found me in this small window of time between when I started unschooling but hadn’t started unpacking my own internalized racism.

Fast forward maybe half a year, and Akilah’s work became inescapable. She was referenced everywhere. Clearly, I needed to take another look. I started listening to her podcast and listened in on a few Zoom calls where she was presenting. During this time, I was deep into the practices of radical unschooling (which I later found to be extremely harmful). Akilah’s approach seemed… different. Non-dogmatic, focused on intersectional liberation, and REAL. Like, REALLY REAL. She talked about the challenges—about the fears. It was so refreshing compared to the firm pressure from radical unschooling gurus that all echoed each other: if you don’t love it, it’s because you’re not doing it right. Akilah admitted the hard parts, but also was firm—so firm!—in the belief that youth liberation, no matter how hard, was an integral part of dismantling systems of oppression.

Obviously, this perspective became a critical part of my own belief system during a time where I was unpacking my own bias, my own whiteness, my own adultism, and my own complicity in capitalism and colonialism. In some ways, I can credit Akilah (with others, of course) with setting me on this path.

I wanted to come share this admiration of Akilah and her work because she is currently facing some really harmful erasure. You would think that someone this critical to the intersectional unschooling movement could never be missed, but as the call for youth liberation grows and there are more authors, more books, more podcasts, etc. out there in the world, against the odds, this seems to have happened.

Recently, there was a book published by academic author Susan Blum titled Schoolishness. You can ask anyone of my unschooling friends, and they would instantly credit this word “schoolishness” to Akilah. In fact, Akilah now offers support through her website, schoolishness.com. If you had googled the word two months ago, Akilah would have dominated the results. But now, Blum’s book is the only result for the first 2-3 pages.

I don’t doubt Blum’s book is a good one. It’s on a topic that is near and dear to my heart. But nowhere, not once, is Akilah’s work mentioned.

And that feels staggering to me.

I can’t actually imagine a reality in which Blum hadn’t come across Akilah’s work in her research. If, magically, that was actually the case and not a blatant dismissal of someone so foundational to the movement over the last decade, I would argue that the academic lens through which Blum was doing her research was fatally flawed. To write about youth liberation and about school abolition in a methodology that is so disconnected from the work that is actually happening on the ground is clearly misguided.

Again, I’m not here to slam on Blum’s work. Bringing this movement into the mainstream is an honourable goal. I hope the next reprint of the book will include an apology and give credit where it’s due.

What I am here to do is share my love for Akilah and her work.

If you are an unschooling parent or interested in youth liberation and (somehow) haven’t immersed yourself in Akilah’s work, please stop everything you’re doing and go read, listen, and watch. Her experience is vast, her perspective is rich, and her deep understanding of the intersectionality of liberation work IN PRACTICE is unmatched, IMO.

Here are some resources you can check out:

Akilah’s Website: https://schoolishness.com/

Akilah’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/akilah

Raising Free People Network: https://raisingfreepeople.com

Fare of the Free Child Podcast: https://raisingfreepeople.com/podcast/