Knowledge and practice refuse to be disconnected from contexts. They always already occupy historical spaces both cultural and personal. Those spaces intersect with lines of inquiry. This essay takes place in the United States in 2020, the fall of the presidential elections, a year marked by Black Lives Matter protests, and the rise of white supremacists. It intersects with the education of its authors while reaching into their thinking about the second year of a five-year continuous improvement project with 14 middle and high schools to address literacy with Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty in a large southern urban school district in States. The thread that ties together the observations, associations, and examples has to do with the ways in which action or praxis in literacy can change teachers' and students' beliefs and expectations.