Anchored in the work of Fanon (1952), Mbembe (2019), and Spivak (1988), I take an autoethnographic journey that traces colonization and the subtle forces of coercion that exist in the academy and society, particularly in the US. I draw on Holland et al. (1998) to position myself in a figured world, a unique constellatory network of histories, relationships, geographies, and more. Through this autoethnographic account, I describe my role as a music teacher, one who seeks a transgressive pathway in the fragile territory of a new awareness of diversity that continues to perpetuate subtle epistemic violence. I locate my work as "situated knowledge" within the geographies of marginalization, from the colonized world to prisons.