Editorial Opinion: Fruitvale Station and the Pedagogy of the Black Experience

By Don Allen, Ed.S., M.A.Ed., MAT - Educator and Researcher

As a high school and higher education English instructor, I ask my students to do more than decode texts; I ask them to interrogate systems. This includes looking beyond novels and into the visual language of Black storytelling, especially films that function as counter-narratives. Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013) is one such text. It is not only a movie; it is a lesson plan, a curriculum, and a dissertation on the fragile state of Black life in America. And for the listeners, it is also an indictment of how education, both formal and informal, has failed Black children since the time of desegregation.

The story of Oscar Grant is all too familiar. Young, Black, human, struggling.

Yet, as with George Floyd in 2020, Oscar's humanity was destroyed in one violent, irrevocable moment. When George Floyd was killed by police just blocks from where I teach, it channeled the final few minutes of Fruitvale Station. That same haunting sense of powerlessness was seared into our survival syllabus. It reminded everyone: our students do not merely walk into classrooms; they carry the weight of American contradictions on their backs.

Education, especially for Black kids, has forever been a space of paradox. We tell kids to dream big, yet offer them the shortest stools at the table. We tell them to read Langston Hughes, yet their lives are more like Native Son. White kids inherit education, but Black kids inherit it as a fight for attention, for resources, for respect. Fruitvale Station exposes what educational systems work to conceal: the intersections of race, power, and institutional disregard. Coogler doesn't preach to the audience—he educates them. The subtext of the film shouts what textbooks dare not: Blackness is criminalized before it is educated. We all know it, but are too scared to print in state standards.

This is why Coogler’s vision is revolutionary. He is not just making films—he is building a curriculum of consciousness. His work belongs in classrooms because it expands the definition of what counts as educational material. Coogler dares to suggest that the lived experiences of Black people are worthy of academic inquiry, emotional investment, and policy response.

There is an economic perspective here as well that educators and policymakers usually ignore.

Coogler, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele represent what happens when we finally stop asking permission to tell our stories. His life, which started with Fruitvale Station, is part of the greater reclaiming of narrative power and cultural capital. For Black America, this isn't just entertainment—it's an economic strategy. Telling our truth isn't just healing; it's profitable. And it starts with education that values our stories. Yet, while Black creatives ascend, our children remain at the bottom of every measurable academic construct—test scores, graduation rates, disciplinary actions. This dissonance is infuriating. We are exporting genius and importing trauma. We create billion-dollar franchises, but can’t get functioning HVACs in predominantly Black schools. The system works as designed.

If education is the great equalizer, why are we still dying to be considered equal?

Coogler's movie instructs us: Education must move beyond the classroom. It must include the media we consume, the histories we excavate, and the critical thinking we demand of ourselves and each other. Fruitvale Station is not a film but a master class in empathy, storytelling, and structural resistance. So I teach it. I deconstruct it. I pair it with Baldwin and hooks. And I push my students to realize that education isn't handed to you—it's something you demand, reclaim, and rebuild. Ryan Coogler's vision is a blueprint. The question for Black America is: Are we bold enough to make it a requirement?