🎙️ Jesse Hagopian’s New Substack: Teach Truth & Sing the Blues

I’ve launched a new Substack newsletter called Teach Truth & Sing the Blues—and I’d love for you to be part of it.

This is a space where truth-telling meets soul-singing. A space where I can share not just the public work I do—articles, essays, podcasts, and speeches—but also the creative work that doesn’t always fit into academic journals or op-ed pages.

On the Teach Truth side, you’ll find a regular roundup of my latest writing and media—pieces that take on what I call “truthcrime” laws, which aim to ban honest accounts of history and silence discussions of systemic racism. I’m the author of Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, an editor at Rethinking Schools, and I serve on the national steering committee of Black Lives Matter at School. In this newsletter, I’ll share critical analysis, organizing tools, cultural critiques, and reflections from the classroom to the streets—all rooted in the fight to defend the right to learn and to teach the truth.

But Teach Truth & Sing the Blues isn’t just a dispatch from the frontlines of the struggle for education justice—it’s also a space for creativity, memory, and healing.

On the Sing the Blues side, I share my original poems, short stories, blues songs, films, and other creative works. I perform and write music as part of The Blue Tide, an acoustic blues duo based in Seattle. We’ve released two albums, regularly gig around the region, and are currently working on our third. Our music is deeply rooted in the Mississippi Delta blues tradition, and we’re proud to collaborate with organizations like The Rhapsody Project to help young people learn the heritage of the music.

I’m also working with my family on a deeply personal film project called Where I Got My Name—a documentary that traces my family’s journey back to the plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana where our ancestors were enslaved. The film explores what it means to return, to uncover what was buried, and to meet descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers in a search for truth, healing, and reckoning.

Because this kind of creative work doesn’t always find a home in mainstream outlets, I’ve made it available to paid subscribers who want to support the full scope of my work. These are the pieces that carry my heartbreak, my resistance, my joy, and my imagination—the ones I want to share with a community that values not just the fight for justice, but the feel of it too.

Here’s how I describe the newsletter:

A newsletter where I cut through the noise of the lies they teach, sing the truths they try to mute, and channel the healing power of the blues to survive it all.

If that resonates with you—if you care about teaching honest history and listening to the echoes of it in a blues riff or a family story—then this space is for you.