Jaylen Daniels testifies on Junior Scholars and epistemic crisis
Jaylen Daniels, Jasson's sister and a Junior Scholars alumna, testifies about the program's impact on her education and career. She discusses the current epistemic crisis and the importance of preserving rare books and archives.
Good morning, council members and constituents.
My name is Jaylen Daniels, and I'm Jasson's sister.
And I'm also a proud Junior Scholars alumna here at the Schomburg Center.
As native New Yorkers, our favorite thing to do is question.
We all have an insatiable desire to know why.
Naturally, my New Yorker parents would always tell us the same warning, the people perish for lack of knowledge.
Though my sister and I attended a great K-12 private school in Manhattan, our truest education and our true wisdom blossomed at home, outside of the classroom.
Our parents showed us banned and rare books, manuscripts, documentaries, and artworks often buried by schools and algorithms.
We attended underground debates in church basements, barbershops, and living rooms.
Where we were exposed to the coolest dissenters often not celebrated in media.
It was a very Harlem Renaissance childhood.
My mom came across the Junior Scholars program here at Schomburg.
Walking over Langston Hughes'ashes and seeing my hero, James Baldwin, revered at the front at age 15 was confirmation that this program would be a sacred experience for me.
As a junior scholar, digging through the archives and struggling over the work cultivated my joy for the pursuit of truth.
I learned the science of the word, prophetic utterance, and the power of storytelling, the sacred elements that make us human, and that's exactly what the Schomburg did.
It enchanted my humanity.
The community at Schomburg is its superpower.
While you learn about the greats, you're surrounded by the greats.
Your peers are the next Basquiat's, the next Baldwin's, the next Bell Hooks's.
One of my mentors, an award-winning filmmaker, ended up writing my letter of recommendation to Harvard.
And I work with him on films today.
At Harvard, I studied African American studies and philosophy alongside the greats like Dr.
Skip Gates and Dr.
Cornel West, who treated me as a scholarly peer thanks to the training I received at the Schomburg.
My thesis, Enemies of the New, Transhumanism, Blackness, and Fleshless Imaginaries, questioned the ontological consequences of a merger between man and machine.
And today we're living in the stakes of this scholarship.
We're in an epistemic crisis.
More than half of American adults read below a sixth grade level.
Our leaders of AI are destroying rare books to feed their models.
And our nation is falling into...
Time expired.
Oh, sorry.
Okay, well...
We're reclaiming.
Okay.
We waited since 10.
Our nation is falling into mass cognitive resignation as our children swipe on screens rather than pages.
The consequences are dire, and intellectually atrophied people is a people susceptible to deception, groupthink, and fascism.
In the last paragraph, I left my job to build a rigorous non-AI software in a community
where we surface treasures like the one in this building, rare books, and suppress ideas hidden by algorithms in the school system, and we match you with underground thinkers to contest these ideas online and in real life.
My technology maps your epistemic development over time, and we're empowering private collections to become residential.
libraries, the same kind of spaces that powered the Harlem Renaissance.
While death lies in the lack of knowledge, it's places like the Schomburg that revitalize life, so we should work to protect it.