Doctor Dyslexia Dude Blog

     In seventh grade, my teacher announced that we would be reading aloud. Each student was assigned a passage. I was fifth. As the first students read, I wasn’t listening for meaning. I was preparing to survive. My body reacted before my thoughts—heat, tension, panic. When my turn came, I swore loudly enough to be removed from the classroom. Being sent to the office felt like relief.  At the time, the incident was recorded as misconduct. Decades later, I understand it differently: the convergence of undiagnosed dyslexia, racialized expectations, and school practices that treated reading speed as intelligence and hesitation as defiance. That moment—and many others like it—became central to my doctoral research on race, disability, giftedness, and literacy. When Research Reaches the Wrong People      My dissertation passed committee review. It was published. It was cited. And yet a contradiction became impossible to ignore. The students, families, and...