Nationwide — This Black History Month 2026, Dr. Angeline Dean, educator, systems thinker, and unapologetic Cultural Gap Architect, shares her dissertation in book form, The Whiteness of Akkkademia & The Making of a Slave: I Was Never Down With OPP, a searing and necessary intervention for those who have endured the often-unnamed violence of higher education.
This book is written for Black and Brown scholars who have been harmed not by overt brutality alone, but by institutional violence that masquerades as professionalism, mentorship, and progress. Dr. Dean names how violence in academic spaces shows up not only as public humiliation or disciplinary threat, but as betrayal, closed-door decisions, selective enforcement of rules, gaslighting, abandonment, and punishment for truth-telling. These are violences that leave no bruises, yet fracture bodies, spirits, and futures.
“Secrets lose their power once they are exposed.”
Through a raw and poetic autoethnographic lens, Dr. Dean chronicles her survival inside akkkademic systems that proclaimed justice, DEI, and liberation while functioning as modern-day plantations, complete with overseers, gatekeepers, and white accomplices in Black spaces. Drawing from the language of Baba Wekesa Madzimoyo, she interrogates the supremacy mindset embedded in those suffering from white-injected oppression (commonly misnamed internalized racism)-yes, Black and Brown faces, while introducing her own original framework, the Oppression Plantation Paradigm (OPP).
The book traces the emotional, physiological, and psychological roller coaster so many melanated scholars are forced to endure in silence, betrayal, repression, depression, resistance, and ultimately sur-thrival, not resilience. Dr. Dean rejects resilience as a badge of honor earned through harm and instead centers survival as a system response to systemic violence. Dr. Dean also confronts the psychological taxation of masking; the many selves’ Black students are forced to perform in order to survive academic spaces never designed for their wholeness. She names code-switching not as a skill, but as a survival tactic born of surveillance, punishment, and proximity to power. In The Whiteness of Akkkademia, she makes clear that masking is not freedom, professionalism, or growth; it is evidence of captivity. The constant shifting of tone, language, posture, intellect, and emotion becomes a form of embodied labor that fractures identity and severs students from their full humanity. Dr. Dean insists that liberation cannot exist where one must disappear to belong.
At its core, The Whiteness of Akkkademia is also a meditation on why preserving Black history is urgent, not ceremonial. As institutions flinch at truth, rewrite narratives, and punishes those who disrupt sanitized histories, preservation is once again forced back into the hands of community, story, and embodied memory where it has always lived. Dr. Dean refuses the erasure of Black identity through flattening language such as “BIPOC,” instead affirming children and students as melanated, HUEman, HUEman BE-ings- deserving of wholeness, dignity, and truth, not conditioning.
This is Part One of a story the academy attempted to silence and control. It is also a reckoning, a witness, and a call to FULL liberation.
In tandem, Dr. Dean proudly lifts her powerful children’s book, Not Just a Slave, which she will soon reimagine as a table-top conversation book designed to spark intergenerational dialogue, truth-telling, and restoration. The book centers expansive narratives of Black presence and brilliance drawn from the Bible, the Qur’an, ancient Egypt, and histories deliberately stolen, distorted, or erased over time.
Together, Not Just a Slave and The Whiteness of Akkkademia & The Making of a Slave operate as companion texts, one protecting the imagination of children, the other confronting the violence endured by adults both rooted in the urgent work of preservation, remembrance, and liberation. Both books are available at this critical junction, when truth must be named, history must be guarded, and silence is no longer an option.
Visit www.intersystemz.rocks to learn more. Dr. Dean continues her lifelong mission to protect Black brilliance, dismantle whiteness’s social reproduction in education, and build new systems where children, families, and communities can learn free from inherited psychosis, poisoned narratives, and plantation politics, even when white supremacy shows up in Black face.
For press inquiries and/or speaking engagements, contact ang1dean@yahoo.com