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Black History Month came and went in February, and if you were scanning the inboxes, LinkedIn feeds, and websites of companies in the EdTech and broader education space, you may have noticed something that didn’t happen. Or not the way it used to. The emails didn't arrive. The social posts didn't go up with the same confidence. The blog tributes to Black educators, the acknowledgments of history and of ongoing struggle, the statements of solidarity that once arrived with some regularity simply didn’t appear with the same volume as in years past.
A handful of companies offered something, a muted graphic here, a reposted article there, but even those felt less like genuine expression and more like legal clearance had been obtained and minimum requirements had been met. For the most part, companies that had the potential to say something real instead opted to say very little. They went quiet and and they did it quietly, which was, of course, the point.
To be fair, the environment in which this is happening is fraught with legal and political pressure, so the fear of becoming a target is not unwarranted, nor the invention of timid minds. But there is a meaningful difference between being cautious and disappearing altogether.
What made it particularly notable was not simply the absence itself, but the smoothness of it. Companies won't acknowledge that a choice is being made to stop talking about social justice issues, particularly racial justice. Companies that once described themselves as deeply committed to equity and inclusion quietly revised their commitments or removed themselves from the conversation entirely. It’s as if those earlier commitments had a term limit that nobody had mentioned, so time ran out and the conversation got a lot quieter.
I have written before about white male executives who were slow to find their voices in 2020, and about the work of pushing some of them toward a more honest public posture. Some of them came around, and I believed at the time that something real had shifted, that they had thought about not just what to say but why it mattered, and what it would require of them going forward. What I did not fully anticipate the statements of solidarity were transactional. Making a statement was something the moment required, something that needed to happen given the temperature of the room. The retreat we are watching now suggests that, for some, the commitment was conditional, subject to revision if the calculus changed.
Inequity is not transactional. It's a lived experience that has not quieted down in the past six years, much less the past 400 years. Inequities and racial/social injustice didn't pause when political climates became complicated. The disparities did not soften. The work did not go away simply because talking about it became inconvenient for a company's brand. When an education company goes silent on race and equity because the optics have become difficult, it is making a transactional choice about whose discomfort gets prioritized and whose gets set aside. That deserves to be named plainly, without drama, but without apology either.
Ironically, February is the easiest month to make some noise, since it’s generally expected. Which makes me wonder just how intimidating the calculus must be for the other eleven months of the year. The companies that took a quieter route this year largely did so because they decided the risk of silence was smaller than the risk of speaking out. For the most part, it seems like this silence was enacted without notice, and that too few seemed to take notice.
Superintendents, curriculum directors, equity officers, and classroom teachers? They notice. A number of years ago, I wrote an article called, “A White Guy Walks Down the Street.” I used a simple side-by-side contrast between a white man and a Black man taking the same walk down the same street. I was trying to illustrate how profoundly different the experience of navigating daily life is depending on the color of your skin. I then turned that observation inward, acknowledging my own failure to speak up when it mattered.
So let’s be clear: the students, educators, and communities this industry serves are still doing the work. They are still navigating the same inequities that have always been present. That hasn't changed. One thing that did change, though, was the capacity for EdTech leaders to publicly vocalize their support. They quietly crossed the street, hoping that nobody was looking when they did.
