The Smart Brown Girl School Is Open

I’ve spent a long time thinking about why history feels so hard for so many people.

Not because it’s complex, complexity can be taught, but because most of us were never taught how to read historical narratives in the first place. We were presented with conclusions, but not the reasoning behind them. We were given stories stripped of structure. We were shown outcomes without the historical or factual context needed to understand them.

That’s the gap this work is meant to address.

I’ve published my first course, Learning How to Read History, as the foundation of the Smart Brown Girl School. It’s a course about orientation, how narratives are shaped, why simplification protects power, and how patterns repeat when they go unexamined.

Learning to Read History Course

This is not a survey course. It doesn’t attempt to cover “everything.” Instead, it teaches a way of thinking that makes future learning clearer rather than heavier.

From here, the work expands.

The school will include courses focused on underrepresented histories, not as side stories or special topics, but as essential to understanding how systems actually function. These histories explain outcomes that are otherwise framed as accidents, exceptions, or inevitabilities.

Pattern recognition is central to this work. History doesn’t repeat because people forget dates. It repeats because structures, incentives, and narratives remain intact. Learning how to recognize those patterns changes what feels normal, reasonable, or acceptable in the present.

If history has ever felt intimidating, politicized, or deliberately confusing, this school is designed to meet you where you are, without gatekeeping and without urgency.

This is not about telling people what to think.

It’s about helping people see clearly.

The Smart Brown Girl School is open.

The foundation is live.

The deeper work is underway.

-Smart Brown Girl