One main tenet of the book is contained in the title: the use of education as the intentional activity of empowering and of using freedom. The book comes from the viewpoint of an African-American woman from the South. She experienced both racially segregated and desegregated schooling. She found that the political and social agenda of her black instructors better suited her than the conditions in the integrated environment. She notes that whether as a consequence of being female or minority, or white and male, the main teaching given in integrated schools run by whites was to obey and to respect the authority of 'authority figures.'

The work is a nonfiction book of the twentieth century. It was published in the 1990s, by a woman professor in New York City. Teaching is her day job; she is really a writer and she knew this long before she ever became a professional teacher. This book is dedicated to teaching. Through 14 chapters, an index and an introduction, the author elucidates a number of feelings, findings and theories about education. From the beginning, she asserts that the classroom and the skill of teaching are incredibly important. By the end of the book, teachers and students should both have new awareness and ideas they can implement about how to improve education in the classrooms in which they find themselves.

This book addresses a number of issues surrounding race, gender and class. It is clear in its motivation to dismantle repressive social forms, in this context they are named: white supremacy, patriarchy, and class. Heterosexuality is presumed. In each chapter, issues are addressed as they have appeared before the awareness of the author. Many of her observations, while based in at least one version of the truth, ran into difficulty within the context of racially integrated higher education during her years as a student. The reason for this is that many of them were viewed as possible subversion and rebellion. Her agenda is to educate for liberation. Here, the obvious problem is the relationship of trust, and the lack thereof within the system as one that sets some people up for failure even as it claims to set people up for success.