Will Brehm 2:08
Hakim Williams, welcome to FreshEd.

Hakim Williams 2:11
Thank you very much for having me, it’s really a pleasure to get a chance to talk about my work.

Will Brehm 2:17
So a lot of your work has focused on Trinidad and in a recent article that you’ve written, you speak of the logic of colonialism as having tangible and latent effects on subjects and knowledge and institutions of today. So can you give us a quick overview of colonialism in Trinidad?

Hakim Williams 2:38
Sure. So I was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, and I left after high school. So I grew up within that entire system. And then I’ve spent all of the rest of my life in the United States, for undergrad and graduate school. And I have gone back to study Trinidad, but through different lens, so to speak, because you know, growing up in a certain context, you are really enmeshed in it and you have what Barry Oshry calls that kind of systems blindness. And so, now that I have lived outside the system for so long. I have this, sort of, insider-outsider positionality that allows me to interrogate the system in a different kind of way. And I started looking during my dissertation study, seven years ago, looking at youth violence. So violence in schools among youth, it’s a problem in and throughout the Caribbean, actually. And I wanted to study something with potentially practical implications. And in studying youth violence, I recognized that the discursive boundaries around youth violence were so narrow, that they will also, and it makes sense that they would inform really narrow foci on particular kinds of interventions, which I found to be problematic, because the problem is not going away. So it means that the interventions are quite ineffective. And in looking at youth violence, and sort of widening the discursive parameters around how we describe it, how we discuss it, how we analyze it, how we research it, I hit upon, I guess, the sort of structural violence of the educational system, which hasn’t grown overnight and not within a vacuum.

And so, I become really interested in this logic of coloniality, which is not my phrase, it’s from Walter Mignolo, and I’m really fascinated by his work, and his work has lots of resonance for my study in Trinidad. And so around 1498, Christopher Columbus, with a historic voyage into the Caribbean, took a more sudden route and stumbled upon what was then called “I-ere”, which is the indigenous word for a land of the hummingbird because they were indigenous folks living in the Caribbean, and in between 3000 to 6000 years before Christopher Columbus’s arrival. And he saw three mountains in the base of Trinidad and called it La Trinidad, which is like the Holy Trinity in Spanish. And the Spanish didn’t pay much attention to Trinidad because it was such a small island. So they paid more attention to what is now Cuba, Puerto Rico, you know, Islands of the Greater Antilles, and in about 1790s or so, the British took over Trinidad from the Spanish, and they are the ones who ruled over Trinidad until Trinidad procured its independence in 1962. And it’s two islands: Tobago, which is the smaller of the two. So Trinidad and Tobago became a republic in, I think 1976. So that’s a little bit about the history of colonialism in Trinidad.

Will Brehm 6:06
So it’s like, nearly 500 years of colonialism.

Hakim Williams 6:10
Absolutely. And, you know, Trinidad is one of the Caribbean, really, constructed out of a triad of oppressive regimes. So not only colonialism, but slavery, and indentureship, I think is probably one of the few places in the world that experienced all three of those processes.

Will Brehm 6:31
So let’s turn to schools and and talk about how the school system in Trinidad and I guess Trinidad and Tobago, formed, you know, over colonialism and into its independent, kind of, contemporary moment.

Hakim Williams 6:53
Sure. So education in the Caribbean, as in many places around the world, tracing its history is so complex and complicated. But when the colonial apparatus was set in place, clearly slaves and those were colonized were not recipients of. really, any kind of formal education because they were thought to be inferior. And of course, indigenous cosmologies were denigrated as such, and so colonizers were not interested in educating their subjects, because you know, because of fears of slave revolts, and things like that. But when any kind of education did take place, eventually, it was primarily religious education, it was through missionaries. And, and then, as colonialism was winding its way down, there were bureaucratic posts that needed to be filled. And so therefore, they started training former slaves to read, but it was really just to staff those bureaucratic needs. And so those were really token positions. So I would not even call it any sort of mass education the way we understand it today. And so what emerged in Trinidad specifically is that the best performing schools in the contemporary era were both in the colonial era, because they have all of this sort of historical social capital, and they emerged from religious education. But today, they’re the ones who get the best performing students on the national exam around the age of 11. All students sit in this particular exam, and they go to those schools built in colonial era and we call those schools prestige schools. And then when we procured independence in 1962, there was a clamoring for mass education. And so therefore, the government set about to do so. But there was already this sort of dual education model in place. And a couple of years before Trinidad sealed into place its independence, the schools that were run by religious institutions, they created this agreement with the government, today it’s called the Concordat and the Concordat, essentially, concretized the supervisory role of religious denominations. So the best performing schools today are still religiously affiliated. And they’re all government schools,  and they get lots of funding from the government. But however, they have far more say in the curriculum and their pedagogy, and their fundraising apparatus, etc. So now today, we have an intricate system where  it’s a dual system, part created in the colonial era, and a great part created in the post-independence era.

Will Brehm 10:12
So this dual system that you’re speaking of, this is about, on one side is this set of religious schools that were set up under colonialism and continued today to have this legacy of being prestigious and elite. And then on the other side, are you saying that there’s a system of mass schooling that is, in a sense, lower and not elite and mass?

Hakim Williams  10:37
Correct. And so the prestige schools are part of the overall national school apparatus. And so when, and I had to sit this exam, and then it was called the common entrance exam, now it’s called the SCA. When all children, at the age of 11, and you could imagine how much pressure that is exhibited upon these children, I felt very honored just taking this exam, because it kind of determines the rest of your life. You know, and so because as you go, you sit in this exam, and then you get siphoned off into either prestige school or non prestige school. And if you and I didn’t, I didn’t initially pass for one of the prestige schools. And so of course, you feel very disappointed, you feel like an intellectual reject, and so on. All those things have ramifications for students’ subsequent performances, not all the time. But you know, many children who I interviewed, they are perturbed by how their parents and teachers treat them when they fail to pass one of these prestigious schools. And so the colonial schools are still part of the national educational apparatus but they have lots of say in the kinds of students they get. And so the politically well-heeled parents will send their children to these schools, those who have money, not granted all children are sitting the national exam, but somehow you don’t really find children of the elites going to schools that are not prestige schools.

Will Brehm 12:17
It seems like there’s a clear class hierarchy in the education system.

Hakim Williams 12:22
Oh, yes, absolutely. I do argue that the dual education system plays a major role in maintaining a deeply class-stratified society that is contemporary Trinidad and Tobago.

Will Brehm 12:33
So you have this idea that hierarchy is a “attractor”, what  is an attractor and how are you using it?

Hakim Williams 12:42
Sure. So I appropriate the term attractor from complexity science and dynamical systems theory. And there are some folks, AC4, which is based at the Institute at Columbia University, they look at the intersection of conflict and violence and systems thinking. And I am interested in that intersection as well. They will not to the intricate ends to which they pursue, but an attractor is an organized pattern of systemic behavior. And so it is something that happens over a really long time. And it’s almost like an ethos. And I guess it’s very similar to I guess like a habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term. And so, it is an ethos that sets and trains over time. And its influences, it sets the contours for the behavior of a system and the ways in which people will behave and respond in that system. And so, I make a link between the colonial apparatus and neocolonial education in today’s system. And I argue that colonialism was in place for such a long time that it created this logic of coloniality that is itself an attractor that still shapes the processes and institutions and systemic behavior withinTrinidad’s educational system and the society writ large, that we are not able to escape from it. So that’s why I call it a neocolonial warp that the system, the educational system is caught within the system. And it’s not able to step outside of it.

Will Brehm 14:37
So it’s constantly reproducing it as well.

Hakim Wiliams 14:40
Exactly, exactly. And so the logical coloniality, which is like the major attractor has other attendant attractors, I guess you can call them sub-attractors or co-attractors, and some of those are a logic of hierarchization. And you and you see it in the curricula and some of the disciplinary technologies that are used within schools.

Will Brehm 15:06
So we’ll start turning to those now. I mean, so you have been looking at youth violence for some time in Trinidadian schools.

Hakim Williams 15:15
Yes.

Will Brehm 15:16
When you were a student, did you experience or see violence inside schools?

Hakim Williams 15:23
So I grew up in a place called ‘Laventille’ which, if you mentioned it to a Trinidadian and you ask them, what is a quick association, they think of it they will probably say it’s known for violence. And it’s known for cultural innovation. So violence and drugs and things like that, and lots of poverty. So I grew up in a pretty poor community, poor home. And my primary school I went to, right across from the school, there was this, what we call planning, this is akin to, I guess, projects in the United States. And sometimes during our break time, you could hear gunshots right across from the school yard. And within the school, yes, I myself was bullied, not so much physically, but definitely lots of verbal bullying. But then also back then, corporal punishment was still permitted in schools. And teachers use it quite a bit. And, it would be for behavioral issues, or it could be for something as simple as not knowing a particular answer to a question, they would have this long cane, and they would sort of beat students with it. And I mean, those things are absolutely outgrowth from the colonial era. So that’s just one example of certain disciplinary technologies that linger on from the colonial era to the contemporary era, ways of, sort of, you know, policing and controlling the body and the mind.

Will Brehm 17:00
And would these sort of disciplinary techniques, this school violence, or youth violence, would this happen in some of these prestigious religious schools that are, you know, at the top of the hierarchy?

Hakim Williams 17:12
So yes. So by the way, corporal punishment is no longer allowed in schools. But from my research, I’ve discovered that it still happens. It’s sort of hush hush, but it’s still going on, the extent to which, I’m not certain, because I haven’t surveyedall schools. But it’s certainly part of that, I guess, an extension of that biblical injunction “to not spoil the child by sparing the rod”. And so, kids are still beaten, it still happens in schools. But yes, absolutely, in the prestige schools, schools builtin the colonial era, kids were still caned, still beaten. And it still happens, it still happens today, as well. And what is different in terms of the prestige schools or the non-prestige schools, the non-prestige schools, many parents think that their children are not getting the same caliber of education. So first of all, the top performing students, they get to go to the prestigious school. So the prestigious schools are already getting the “crème de la crème” of the student body, and this is just based on an exam. So you know, I say crème de la crème in quotes, because, you know, there are differentiated intelligences, which are not recognized by the system. Again, another part of the colonial outgrowth of setting a hierarchy of intelligences. And so many students who don’t pass for the prestige schools, they start off on a kind of footing where they feel as if they are already thrown away, they feel disposable, and they feel as if teachers are not that invested in them. No, that is not completely true, because I have them too, I do most of my research at non-prestige schools. And I’ve seen where there are many, many dedicated teachers who are pushing their students to excel and to do very well. But I have also done some research on the prestige schools, and it’s very clear, night and day, in terms of the differential social capital that the schools have, and that the parents bring to the table. And we obviously know that there is some kind of linkage between the social capital and the educational outcomes of students at these various schools. So they do play a role, although children at the prestige schools do experience a certain kind of violence, I would argue that it’s far more compounded for children who attend the non-prestige schools.

Will Brehm 19:59
And so you talk about this sort of youth violence as structural violence, why?

Hakim Williams 20:08
So first of all, I do think that we do need interventions for the youth violence that’s occurring in schools. And because, and I come from the field of peace education, which is interested in both negative peace and positive peace, and negative peace is really the cessation of direct violence, or physical material violence, and positive peace is really interested in the dismantling of structural violence. And so really going beyond just ending physical violence. And so, although we have taken out the corporal punishment from schools, that is not enough. And so, my research, I’m really hoping that it pushes against what McLaren calls a discursive violence, right? Because I think the ways in which we talk about violence that when policymakers and teachers and parents talk about violence in schools, they’re definitely not thinking about structural violence of the educational system. They’re really talking about the poor communities where kids come from, perhaps some of the the trauma some kids are experiencing from sexual violence in their homes, and all those things, I get those from teachers and students, I know that those things are real issues. But those things are attributing the causes of violence solely to individualistic causes. And the influences are far more reaching. And this is why I’m really interested in sort of a systems thinking and systems intervention around youth violence, because the youth violence is happening is anchored within a wider web of structural violence. The very fact that we have a dual education system that is codified in law and in practice, to me, that’s where the structural violence begins. The fact that some kids go to schools where there is a starkly differentiated set of resources that they have access to. So at one school where I have been doing my research for the past six years, the principal told me, he said, “Listen, I need about $5 million to run this school very well.” He says, “I probably get about 2 to $2.5 million of what I really need to do a very good job for these children”. And he says that, “I never even know when exactly I’m going to get the money, so I can’t really plan very well.”

And then, I step across the street and I go to a prestige school, and then they have computers and their parents are far more involved. It’s just an entirely different plane we’re talking about here. And so when I see those things happening, and I see kids who come from single parent homes, coming from poor communities, kids experiencing sexual abuse at home, some kids coming to school very hungry, and there’s almost nothing in place, hardly any social workers, hardly any therapists, we have some of those, but it’s definitely not enough to deal with the need that’s there. I think that many of these kids are starting on from day one, set up for failure. And because of that entire structure, I really call it structural violence, because it goes beyond just a kid hitting another kid in the classroom, lots of those issues, we’re looking at it at the symtoms, we’re looking at the deep, deep issues, the influences that lead to these kids behaving in such a way. And then what happens is that the kid does this and so as to address it, we have this myopic intervention, where we will suspend the kid, instead of really trying to get some kind of therapeutic intervention, etc, etc. The kid is then sent home, and the kid loses a week of instruction, the kid is already not the most academically inclined. So therefore the kid comes back and he has fallen behind in his studies. And, therefore, we recognize over time, the kid ends up dropping out and dropout rates for non-prestige schools, it seems to be very, very high. And then lots of these kids, they return to their communities. They end up selling drugs on the street corner or they end up in a low-paying job. And so therefore they reinforce, as Paul Willis showed in his fabulous study in England, in what, 30, 40 years ago, they are reproducing the class structure. So we really see social reproduction here at play. And I argue that the educational system is doing exactly what it’s intended. And so we see the attractor of hierarchization, of marginalization, of exclusion, of order and control, all of those things that were part of the colonial era, we see those things absolutely at play in a, sort of, the neocolonial system of education in contemporary Trinidad.

Will Brehm 24:51
It’s interesting that you say that the interventions that exist currently to address school violence, in a way, reproduce the coloniality that you’ve been speaking of. And in a way it’s reproducing the structural violence itself.

Hakim Williams 25:07
Right, exactly. And that’s why I use the term attractors, because attractors, if you have that image of a mountain and a valley, the attractor is down in the valley. And the deeper the valley is, the steeper, it’s harder to nudge that attractor out of that and onto a mountaintop. And so the attractors are really the valley, so it pulls peoples, behaviors and institutions into the valley. And that’s why, the longer the attractor has been at play, it is harder for folks to really step outside that system, because they’re really caught within that steep valley of systemic behavior over a really long time.

Will Brehm 25:51
So what would be an alternative way to address these systemic issues that you’ve been seeing, rather than addressing it from an individual point of view?

Hakim Williams 26:01
Surre. So because I’m interested in structural violence and systems thinking, I argued in this most recent paper for something, what I call a systemic restorative praxis, and SRP. And I have stitched together literatures and approaches, not just from the systems thinking and complexity, science, but also from the field of restorative justice. And also, this notion of practice from the way Paulo Freire has conceptualized it as. sort of, a symbiosis of reflection and action. So one, I believe that the colonial system, I know, and neocolonial system, they have rendered much material and psychic harm and damage to many of our people. And restorative justice, which it’s not new to us, ít’s really used in indigenous communities in North America and Australia. Essentially, where the community would sit in a circle and if someone did something that harms that community, they would not be sent off or banished to some sort of prison or something like that, they would have to make amends. But they would have to do it in community. So the community believes that you are an integral part of us, you are an important component, and will hold you accountable. But you will, it will also help you heal and you will also help heal the community that you have harmed. So it wasn’t about exclusion, it was about inclusion. And we see now restorative justice being increasingly used in schools and in the justice system. So instead of, if a kid does steal something from, and this is not in Trinidad as yet, they’re trying to implement it, but let’s say in the United States, where a kid steals something from a corner store. Instead of sending him to juvenile prison, they would use the restorative justice model so the kid can remain within the school and not be excluded and not eventually dropped out. And you know, the old school to prison pipeline, trying to really interrupt that.

Will Brehm 28:00
So it’s non punitive, it doesn’t actually make the student, like the example you used earlier about the student who did something in Trinidad and then was sent home and expelled for a week and then misses a week of lessons and then is more likely to drop out. This is something that you wouldn’t necessarily do these punitive measures when a child misbehaves in whatever way?

Hakim Williams 28:23
Right, exactly, because right now, our system is so heavily focused on punishment. And punishment, to me, is a neocolonial attractor, because I was part of the colonial era, that our system is so interested in creating sort of docilecitizens and children being submissive, not really speaking back, not really challenging the status quo. And, so I really want to step outside of these punitive frameworks, these ways in which we even conceptualize human relationality. And so I would like to see restorative justice used more in the schools. But I tapped on systemic to the phrasing because restorative justice has been sometimes critiqued because it’s often used only for low level infractions. And I believe that our entire system needs to be disrupted, that we can no longer be trying to tweak individual students or trying to tweak one classroom. And of course, that’s not to say you don’t have individual interventions, but they must not end there you know. So I argue that restorative justice can be scaled up to a systems level. So, for example, Trinidad is a very hierarchical society, which mirrors the colonial era. And so you really don’t see parents having a great say and how schools are run. So I think schools should be not as vertical, should be horizontalize. They should become community hubs, where parents are welcome, where perhaps someone who is retired can return and offer their wisdom and their skills. So things like that. So right now, our system is very exclusionary, and it’s very elitist. And I would like to see restorative justice scaled up not just from interpersonal interactions, but also on a systems level. That we, sort of, horizontalizing the ways in which we engage each other. So I’m really calling for a democratization of the educational system, that hopefully, over time, can create counter attractors to colonial attractors. And so, I would love to see the emergence of system attractors of inclusion, and attractors of participatory ways of engaging with the school system, things of that nature, where all the attractors that were existing before, I would like to see a sort of counter-hegemonic attractors being set in place.

Will Brehm 31:01
It seems like a I mean, a rather huge project, I mean, the momentum of 500 plus years of colonialism, it seems like, you know, this is a daunting task to set up systemic change that creates counter attractors to the ones that you’ve articulated are so embedded in the system of, we’ve just been talking about schooling, but I’m sure in other systems of society, also have the similar attractors.

Hakim Williams 31:33
Yes, absolutely. You know, I also anchor Trinidad within its region and within the international fora of global governance, educational structures, citizen education regimes, because the logic of coloniality  is not specific to Trinidad. That, you know, it’s absolutely a part of a global apparatus. And so the things that we’re seeing in Trinidad today, I see echoes of it in many other parts of the world. And yes, indeed, it does seem daunting. And you know, I’m not under any illusions that this is something that could be, you know, fixed, you know, in a year, five years, 10 years, you know, I’m committing the rest of my life to building capacities, in communities, in schools, with teachers, engaging policymakers. So because I’m taking this, eventually taking a systems approach, I think that the interventions need to be on not only the micro, which is what we’ve been doing, but on the miso levels, in terms of working communities, working with the Ministry of Education, but also on the macro level. Just this year, I was in Trinidad for my sabbatical leave. And they had a national hearing inParliament and a national hearing on school violence. And I guess they encountered my work, I was called before parliament to present on my work, and I submitted a report to them. But that’s just one intervention, I believe that all of those things have to happen simultaneously to make a dent in the system over time. So I’m really optimistic. I’m really hopeful. By the end of the day, I’m reverting to building capacities and community. So I spent seven months offering free restorative justice trainings and running actual restorative circles in communities with parents, running them with students, teaching kids peer mediation skills, conflict resolution skills, I worked with children’s homes, with their staff members on how to engage youth differently. And I believe that over time, in building capacities, that people will begin to see each other in different ways, in using these skills that will engage each other, engage the system in different ways. So over time, my hope is that differentiated attractors will develop, and hopefully provide a counter weight to the prevailing attractors.

Will Brehm 34:05
It just sounds like such an amazing project. I mean, I wish you the best of luck with it. And hopefully in, you know, the coming years and we can have you back on to get an update about how it’s going. Hakim Williams, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It was really a pleasure to talk.

Hakim Williams 34:23
Thank you so much for having me on. It’s a pleasure and I look forward to speaking with you again.

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