EP 19: Cultivating Black Arts Curriculum, Critical Literacy, and Identity with K-12 Students with Dr. Kazembe

[MUSIC PLAYING] This is the Equity Experience Podcast, a space created for every educator or school leader who is authentically pursuing equity and inclusion in their classrooms and schools. I am your host, Dr. Carla Manning, and I welcome you. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Equity Experience Podcast, where I am your host, Dr. Carla Manning. As you are hearing this podcast, I hope you are well. I hope you are blessed. I hope that you are enjoying yourself and enjoying life. On today, we have a very special guest, my good friend of mine, this brother and I. We go back for years. And I wish to give an introduction of Dr. Kazembe, if I can. Kazembe has been a very solid person in my own professional and personal development. And I don't think he really even knows it, but he has also been a person who had encouraged me to get my PhD, because when I met him at the time, he was working on his PhD. And I was just so astounded by Kazembe and just his determination, his insight, just everything about him. And then speaking with him over the years really gave me some more inspiration and motivation to work on my PhD, amongst other things. So I thought it would be a great idea to have a conversation with him on this podcast, because he is doing a lot of work around African-centered teaching and education, culturally responsive teaching, anything and everything dealing with black education and black intellectualism and education. So I thought it would be a great idea to have a conversation with him. So Kazembe, welcome, welcome, and welcome. Dr. Karla Manning, thank you very much for the invite. It's an honor to be with you in your global classroom. And so thank you for those kind words of introduction. And I'm very-- I should say for the record, very proud of you, all right, and the work that you're doing and the evolution and the cultivation that you're doing. I can think of a few other things that are as important as putting people in conversation with one another. So this is the next thing. Indeed. And well, thank you. Thank you, Kazembe. So let's just go ahead and jump right on in, Kazembe. So why don't you introduce yourself to us, please, and tell us about the work that you do. Sure, absolutely. Thank you. I am from Chicago originally. I'm a Chicagoan through and through. I work at Indiana University in Indianapolis, Indiana, at a university called IUPUI Indiana University Indianapolis. And I teach there as an assistant professor in the School of Education. And I also teach in the Africana Studies program. My home department is the Department of Urban Teacher Education. And what we do is we prepare pre-service educators to become practicing or professional educators, specifically to teach in urban multicultural contexts as a scholar. My areas of interest sort of overlap. There are three areas that I inhabit as a scholar, as a writer and a thinker. And those three areas are the Africana or Black Intellectual Tradition, also the world of the arts and art-based pedagogy. And the third world is the world of urban education or urban teacher education and pedagogy. Those three worlds overlap. I call them actually the three interrelated zones of my scholarship in the praxis. So those worlds overlap. And if you can imagine overlapping circles, you imagine the space where the circles actually overlap. We call those interstitial spaces or the in-between spaces. So I do a lot of work, a lot of writing, thinking, teaching, in each of those areas independently, but also collectively and in the interstitial space. It's a great pursuit of mine to interrogate what those spaces look like. And then what I do is my work happens in schools, communities, juvenile detention centers, and prisons. So I do a lot of work. And the work that I do with young people, with adults, touches all of those worlds. So I bring the bear and the work that I do myself as a scholar of urban education, myself as a poet and spoken word artist and teaching artist. I try to find ways to-- what we call a Ariadne thread, the thread of continuum that sort of moves through all of those worlds. That is what I spend my time interrogating and pursuing. That's a very beautiful introduction. If you can, would you mind talking a little bit about the work that you do in prisons and with men who are incarcerated? Absolutely, yeah. It's work that I've done as an educational consultant going all the way back to 2006 is when I first started. And I started working with young people at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, in which they have an Illinois right on the west side of Chicago. They actually have a public school inside. And for a lot of young brothers that are on the inside, I don't like to call them locked up. Like Dr. Welsing used to call it greater confinement, because we're all in confinement. That's greater confinement. But anyway, there's a school inside there, and they try to provide arts-based and educational services to these young people in the form of after-school programming. So I started there back in the day as a creative writer, a creative writing consultant. So I came in, would actually develop and facilitate creative writing circles and introduce young people to poetry and other forms of literature, but also to creative writing and try to introduce them to the power of the arts to sort of free. The work was continued in my work with certain grassroots organizations and foundations there in Chicago. The Prison Neighborhood Arts Project, which is still around, the Poetry Foundation of Chicago. I was recruited there recently, I'd say in the last couple of years, 2015-16, to actually facilitate a program at Stateville Prison, which is a maximum security prison, not in Chicago. It's in Crest Hill, Illinois, which is about 45 miles outside of Chicago. But again, it's working with brothers on the inside, and there I taught for a year in a program, developed a creative writing and poetry workshop that I call Words Free. And that was the really wonderful experience because it introduced them to not only poetry traditions, like the Black Arts Movement tradition, the tradition of dub poetry, we even dealt with hip-hop. So we dealt with things in terms of poets, the poetics, the poetry, but we also dealt with the technical side of writing poetry, right? So they learned about different poetry forms, different poetry movements, like the beat generation. They learned about craft and line breaks and all of those sorts of things that go into the craft of poetry, as well as editing. And then the culminating project that we did was we put out a book. We developed a book, an anthology of poetry called Right to Beat, Poets from the State Bill. So what I've been doing in the last three and a half years since relocating to Indianapolis is take the work that I've done for the last 28 years in Chicago with young people, with adults in these various spaces, and then transplant it and plant it in ground here, but also to refine that work, work with newer and different audiences here, and to broaden the work so that I could do this kind of work on a regional level. My thinking is that if you come up with a really, really engaging art space program, if it's good for young black and brown males in Chicago, it'll be good for young black and brown males in Jackson, Mississippi and Milwaukee and Louisville, Kentucky, et cetera. So that's what I've been doing in this work for the last three and a half years here in Indianapolis. - Okay, so thank you for that information 'cause they'll be very powerful. Can you talk about the work that you are doing now with young people and literacy of arts, specifically with your program Elevate? - Right, yeah, good question. Elevate is a literacy and a creative arts project that I started about two years ago, almost three years ago. And what it is is actually a curriculum that interrogates six global black arts movements. And the curriculum interrogates these sixth 20th century global black arts movements. The Ndejiste movement that occurred in Haiti during the 1920s up to the 1950s. The Negritude movement, which occurred in Paris and French Guyana and Martinique during the 1930s and '50s. The Negrismo movement, which occurred in Cuba and Puerto Rico during the 1930s and '40s. The Harlem Renaissance New Negro movement, which occurred in 1917, 1933, roughly. The Black Chicago Renaissance, which occurred around, I'd say, from 1935 to 1950. And then, of course, the Black Arts Movement, which developed between 1965 and 1975. So those six global black arts movements represent nearly one century, 100 years of black art, black creative expression, poetry, song, dance, drum. Also, a search for meaning, a search for identity. Also, a rejection of imperialism. They also represent movements of poets and visual artists and performing artists, young black African people in all of those various locations around the African diaspora, the black diaspora, as well as on the continent. But Senegal played a major role during these movements, as well. And so, I mentioned earlier about this thing we call it Greek mythology, though, that Ariadne thread. And that's that thread of continuum that just sort of runs through everything. So my interrogation of these movements has been to explore not only the art side, but also the political thrusts that brought those movements into being. What was it that caused young black poets and essayists and theorists and Haiti to start this end-day G-state movement of these young radical, rudical, revolutionary-minded artists? Why did they do that? They did it because of the invasion of Haiti by the U.S. military in 1917, 1934. So you find with each of those movements, there was a political thrust that brought the artistic expression about. And so, you can even see that in hip-hop. It was the creation of that cross-bronx expressway, the busting up of black neighborhoods, poverty, the benign neglect of Robert Moses, right? And so out of that was born this expression of I want to tell the world who I am. So the end-day G-state movement, if you even look at the origins of the term end-day G-state, indigenousness, negrismo, blackness, that was, it was a search for meaning in Cuba. They were like, we're not native Indians. We're definitely not Spaniards. Who are we? Trans-Planet Africans, as Duke Ellington said, my music is not American music. My music is African music interpreting an American experience. And so that's what these young black artists were doing, with every stroke of their paint brushes, with every stroke of their pens, right? With the dance, with the song, they were trying to go black, go black to who they were and trying to represent who they were now in a post-colonial context. As they're pushing back against imperialism, they also engage in a search for meaning. So these traditions are very, very, very important. It was important for me as a scholar and a true fan and just have a love affair with our history that this stuff needs to be introduced to young people, young black and brown people, particularly, because this is their history. And so my work with the Elevate program has been to create what I call a usable past, to go into this material and to use my skills as a curriculum designer, as a pedagogy specialist, and as an educator, to craft a curriculum that was arts-based, that was culturally sustaining, that had Africa and the love of black people, the love of black children at the center of it, right? And that celebrated and leveraged what Dr. Joyce King calls the heritage knowledge or the cultural memory, the sankofa of those young, of these African people. And it puts it right smack dab in the center of curriculum. And this is why we differ, or I differ in my approach from a lot of people, because they want to put culture into the curriculum. My approach is to put the curriculum into the culture, right, because the culture is the thing, that's the nucleus, that's the center. And so it's been a program that I've developed over the last three years, and I've implemented it here in the Indianapolis Public Schools. I was very fortunate last year, I received a grant from the Allen Whitehill Clunes Foundation, and they actually have funded Elevate, it's a grant for about $75,000, and they funded it for the next two years. So that's going to enable me to sort of do even more outreach and work on this curriculum and history set of books that I'm producing that can teach practitioners and teachers how to implement this in their classrooms, whether you're a language arts person, a social studies educator, an arts teacher, you'll be able to use these curriculum guides in order to implement the Elevate program. - You know, and I don't want you to give too much of the goods away, but if you can, can you maybe talk about what one day in the program may look like, or what might be some of the deliverables or outcomes that children can receive from participating in this program? - Absolutely, because we're dealing with six different movement, I've developed six different aspects of the curriculum for each movement. So for example, week one, and I spend roughly around 10 weeks on each movement. So that's basically a year per movement, if you will, or we try to do it within a school semester, a school year. So what young people are introduced to is background on, for example, we're dealing with the Interstate movement, where they're gonna be getting a lot of information around the history of Haiti, its cultural history, its social history, and then they're gonna be introduced to the social and the cultural conditions of Haiti. They're gonna be shown what those African connections are. So I introduce also the architects of the movement. So I talk about the forerunners in the movement. We also learn about the philosophical underpinnings of the movement, like there was this quest to get away from the shake loose the skin of white global imperialism. So they're learning a lot about the European slave trade or African enslavement. You can't teach that because we gotta find out how did Africans get to Haiti? And then of course we're dealing with indigenousness, so we're dealing with the indigenous names of Haiti. They also learn about the rada drum. They learn about a lot of the instrumentation. We're doing literary criticism. So they're actually reading poems and breaking down poems. And where I can't find them, I'm actually having Haitian poets actually read their poetry. So they're able to actually interface with what we call primary sources. And they actually can hear from these poets. And there's a component of the program that deals with art, of course. And we're dealing with the paintings and the sculpture of Haiti. They learn about the four forms of art criticism. They learn how to look at a painting, how to critique a painting, how to interpret a painting, and then how to express what it is you're thinking about. And then they also are learning about the music. They're learning about the music of Haiti. What is Vodou? What is that? What is this spiritual system, this syncretic spiritual system that was transplanted out of Africa? It was Europe when it left Africa, but when it crossed what the Arabs used to call the Green Sea of Darkness, the Atlantic Ocean, 3000 miles. And it met the indigenous Native Americans in Haiti and it mixed the African thing and it had that French influence. It became something else, right? Then of course they're introduced to something that I call geoliteracy. Because it's very important to me, there's something that we deal with in this country. Unfortunately, you mentioned the Solomon Islands or Lisbon or Azerbaijan. People gotta run to a map 'cause they don't know where these things are. So there's a great deal of illiteracy around geography in this country. Some people call it immapency. Some people call it geoliteracy. So I introduced geoliteracy because I need, it's very important as we're dealing with this subject matter. We need to know where is Haiti in relationship to Cuba in relationship to Miami, in relationship to New York, right? So I'm teaching a lot about geography and geoliteracy, showing them images of Haiti and what Haitian children look like and how Haitian people live and work every single day. Another crux of the program is that it's a workshop. So they're not just learning about this stuff. They're creating art. They're creating poetry. They're performing poetry in the classroom. And then each of the students receives like a big binder. And so by the end of 10 weeks, they have this huge binder full of vocabulary terms, full of cultural terms, full of African history, full of notes that they've made, poetry they've created, right? And they're able to now put all of this stuff together. And from there, we move to the next movement. And as we move to the next movement, say, negritude, we're learning about negritude and all of the stuff that I mentioned before. But we're also learning about the connection between negritude and the endager history. The connection between the Grismo and negritude. And one of the things I should say that young people find out is that the Gadfly in all of this was Langston Hughes because it was Langston Hughes who actually is considered one of the forerunners of the Harlem Renaissance. But Langston Hughes was also a major contributor to negritude poetry and to the Grismo poetry because he knew, for example, the Cuban poet Nicholas Guillen. He knew Ames Césaire. And so what Langston Hughes did, he would visit Cuba. He would visit France. He would visit Paris and Martinique. And he would actually translate into English the poetry of these African poets from throughout the diaspora. And now he's introducing their work to English-speaking audiences here in North America. And he would do the same thing and actually help get the poems in English, translated into French and Spanish and some of the other colonial languages. And so he was the center of that movement that pulled everybody together. So we put a special emphasis, of course, on Langston Hughes, teaching Langston Hughes in a way that he's not typically taught. These movements, a lot of people are quite familiar even if in name only with the Harlem Renaissance and maybe with the Black Arts movements, but these other movements, not so much. And that was one of the major reasons that I created it because I wanted to teach this history, but I could not find a single book or a text or a curriculum source. So I decided to create my own and that's how this came about. - Powerful, 'cause they'd be powerful. You know, one thing that I heard from you, even though this was an incredible introduction to this program, it was also about the access in the presence and absence of curriculum. So can you talk about that? Can you talk about why a curriculum that is significant is this, why it is absent, and why is it that you really had to create your own curriculum? Even though I know oftentimes great things are born out of a need, I wanna know if we can maybe have a conversation around the politics of curriculum and why a Black Arts curriculum, such as the one that you have created in our teaching, why is it that students, particularly Black students, don't have access to curriculum like this in K-12 schools? - That's a great question. And I'm glad you put it in the context of politics because that's exactly right. I created an acronym that I use and publish and write about, an acronym for art. And I refer to art, A-R-T, a revolutionary tool. And so there are certain constants that are just true in any profession. There are philosophical ideas and constructs that are just constant across your profession. There is a way that we know works for how to teach students who are in a dental program, how to clean teeth. There's a curriculum, there's a pedagogy in dentistry that we know how to teach this in a way that the students who are striving to become dentists, they are taught the philosophy and the praxis of how to scale teeth, how to check for gingivitis, how to assess gum health. There's certain constants across every profession that people are not born knowing, but these things are got at through the scientific method and through trial and failure, but also through empirical investigation. The same is true in medicine, right? 200 years ago, the way they deliver babies by cesarean section now is different than it was because we've advanced the knowledge because of the practitioner. And we taught medical students how to do this, right? How to assess a person's health, right? Same is true in the world of physics and in the world of electricians, the world of law and jurisprudence. There's certain constants in every profession. The profession of teaching is no different. There are certain things that we know work, right? And one of the things that we know works is a formula that I refer to as connecting children to culture and connecting culture to academic excellence. That's pyramid consciousness, all right? Those things work. That is to say, when we have qualified knowledgeable teachers or educators and they are in a situation where they are introducing culturally inclusive principles into their teaching, into their pedagogy, which is the content and instruction. And when they introduce culturally sustaining pedagogy and curricula into schools, we know for a fact that the children, the young people respond to it. We know that introducing that increases the overall engagement with school, satisfaction, grades go up, right? Across the board, it just improves them when you center the culture of young people. The same is true with art space learning. We know, for example, through studies that have been done at the University of Houston, the Rice Kinder Institute published in 2018, I believe, a major longitudinal study on the benefit of introducing art space learning into schools. It increases engagement with school. It makes young people cooperate more. It expands their sensibilities, right? It engages them in a way because it touches the senses. So when you have these things in education that we know work and then you look on the other side as to why it is not happening, you begin to answer a question for yourself. Because I used to think that people not wanting to include African centered material and stuff, they had that disposition and did that because they didn't understand the benefit. But now I'm convinced after looking and studying and writing about this stuff, that the reason it's not emphasized is because they do understand. They do understand what impact, what transformative impact it would have on these young black and brown children. It would unleash their potential and unlock what Dr. Amos Wilson called, what awakened the natural genius in black children. And so to do that is tantamount to freeing or liberating someone from enslavement, right? All of a sudden now they become a new class of competitors. They begin, you know, like we do black cream rises to the top. So we become just the top of what we're doing. So it's very much a politically expedient thing to not have this. I saw a report, WGN Channel 9 in Chicago the other day. They did this little news report on House Bill 264 that just got introduced into Chicago. What is House Bill 264? It's a new law that was passed that says every public school shall introduce curriculum in the public schools that deal with the history and the culture and the heritage of African-American children, Latinx children, Native American children and white children. Now, this is a law that was on the books back in 1996 in Chicago. Laws are only as strong as people who enforce them. And in fact, a few years ago Chicago Public Schools came out with this history, this black history curriculum. I actually was recruited to do a three day training with around 300 Chicago public school teachers to help them with understanding optimal ways to actually implement this black history curriculum in classroom. So we did this enormous, massive three day training. I was hired by the DuSable Museum as a educational consultant. And I took this three day training dealing with African contributions to science, mathematics, engineering and medicine from antiquity all the way to the present. And I made connections to the very curriculum that they created. This is the problem in schools today. 84% of the national teaching force in this country, white female here in Indiana, 93% of the K-12 teachers are white female. That's a civil rights issue. And so we have this lack of teacher diversity in the pipeline. And we have the overwhelming majority of teachers that are white, that are insular in their thinking, that are racist to the bone, a lot of them, most of them. And so now they're plugged into these schools where you have a context where K-12 schools are getting and are getting increasingly multicultural but also increasingly segregated, especially in the so-called inner city. So there's a real problem. You have a preponderance, a high percentage of white female teachers. You have a high percentage of black and brown, boys and girls going to the principal's office, getting out of school suspension, in-school suspension. You get classroom management issues. Every February, you can set your watch by this. We have from Boston to California, teachers getting in trouble. You see this in the news all the time. In February, because they want to be culturally relevant. Miss Reading, Bell Hooks and Miss Reading, Gloria Lats and Billing, they want to be culturally relevant. So the way they wanted to do it is with their fifth graders, they instituted in the classroom a mock slave offer, right? Or they introducing math, quote unquote, culturally relevant math. So if you got 4,000 slaves on your slave ship and you got 2,000 slaves jump overboard, that is how they teach it in a very disrespectful, diminished, reductive way, because they don't have the knowledge base and they don't want to come to the champions. And it ain't me. I'm plugged into the juice. They don't want to come to the champions who are plugged into this juice who can actually show them something that is beyond some little surface implementation or some little cosmetic thing. So we can say we're culturally competent and stuff. No, we have to make this thing the very heart and center of what you do. And as Dr. Hakeem Adaboudi asks us, we have to ask continuously this question. Who loves black people? And so what I do in my work, the work that I do in these various spaces in this program itself, it is undergirded by something that I write about and I call it a love praxis, right? You got to have a deep and profound unconditional love for black people. And that, if that's not at the heart of what you're doing, then it's insincere and it's short-term and it's not going to prosper. - 'Cause then be, 'cause then be. Powerful words, powerful words. I don't even know how to come back from that. - Well, it's serious because, you know, you're familiar, I know you are with Lisa Delpitt and writers like that. And some of the titles that you read in some of these journal articles, they're sticky, meaning they stick with you for, and when you read it, you're like, "Man, why can't I write something like that?" And one of the titles that I encountered when I was in grad school years ago, back when the earth was cooling, one of the titles I encountered is from Lisa Delpitt. It's now a book called Other People's Children. Then I love all children, all children. But I can think of no higher calling, no more noble calling, maybe being a physician, then working with other people's children. And when you think about the trust that's involved in that, not so much in the age of Rona, but pre-Rona, you know, and this is what we were doing, we turn our children over to these schools and they're in these schools upwards of 50 to 60 hours a week. Let me just say, whiteness and anti-black racism does not stop at the boundary of phenotype. That means you can be black in a self-hater. You don't believe me, ask Candice Owen. You can be black in a self-hater. You can be black and not have been introduced to your history. You can be black and the only thing you've been taught all your life, if you were given access or exposure to your history, are three things. Slavery, Martin Luther King/Rosa Parks, Barack Obama. My response to that is that when you're talking about Africana people, I'm talking about brothers and sisters on the continent, I'm talking about brothers and sisters in the African diaspora. I'm talking about African people in Detroit. Let me say it the way they say it on the street. African people in Detroit, African people in Chicago, Cleveland, Michigan, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, wherever you are. When you start the history of African people with enslavement, you've already mis-told the story. If African history were represented by a book of a thousand pages, the story of our enslavement would start on page 999. We have a vast amount of history that is there to interpret if people would read. I wish someone would really read the Miseducation of the Negro. I wish someone would read The Colonization of Africa by Alien Racists by Sir Harry Johnston. I wish someone would read Galbraith Welch's book, North African Prelude. I wish someone would read The Great Book by the retired history professor, University of Pittsburgh, Patrick Manning, entitled The African Diaspora, A History Through Culture. I wish someone would read Great NYU Professor Michael Gomez's book, Exchanging Our Country Marks, or his other book, Reversing Sale. I wish someone would read these books that not celebrate some sort of mysterious or black supremacy past, but books that actually deal with the cultural and the social history of African people and shows that we were thinkers, we were contributors, we were institution builders, we were in the world and we are the oldest people and the people of creation. And so when you start our story in enslavement, you have bypassed millennia of history. And so going back to elevate real quick, and the other work that I do, it is a job, really an occupation, a vocation, a calling of me being able to interrogate, apprehend, excavate, and then curricularize this material and turn it into what I call a usable past. We have all of this valuable, rich, deep, substantive, exciting history, just engages me in my work so much because we've just done so much and it's a struggle and it's our burden, but every generation has to be reintroduced to its history. And one of the great problems that we have today with this era we live in of short attention span, this era we live in of people trying to institute and facilitate generational divides and stuff, just separating the older generation from the younger generation just to sell stuff to young people, this youth obsessed culture we're in where you see people with white in their beers, don't trust nobody over 16, you know, all of that kind of madness. That is the hallmark of a people and of people, not just black people, but people in general who just have disdain for their history. And that's part of the struggle that we're up against now, not only the cultural ignorance, but the apathy. The cultural ignorance would be, I don't know, the apathy would be, I don't even care that I don't know. And so that's the stuff that we're dealing with and the go-to teacher in these kinds of situations is to look at, well, what's wrong with the children? What are the defects? No, I don't do that. I look at these flawed adults, these damaged adults that are in these classrooms every day, black, white, brown, who are doing a disservice to our people. And so rather than stay stuck there with the critique, 'cause we don't wanna engage with Dr. Joyce King calls an endless analysis of dominance. We don't wanna do that. We wanna have the critique, but from that, we wanna move on and do like August Wilson's character, Joe Turner. Joe Turner's coming gone. He said, you have to find your song. You gotta find your work. And that's what I'm trying to do with everything that I do, including especially this program dealing with young people. - So, 'cause that was a very powerful conversation that we've had. What is one piece of advice or one word of advice that you would have for K-12 teachers and school leaders, particularly those who are white and who are working with and around students of color, black and Latino students? What is a good starting place for them? And particularly for teachers who wish to develop an anti-racist or racially equitable identity. Where should they begin? What is one good starting point for them? - Well, I think I would offer the first thing is that you have to listen to the children. That's number one. You gotta listen to the children and you cannot be confined by these conceptual boxes that they like to put, especially new teachers in, where you gotta just follow the standards. No, you gotta hack the standards. But you gotta be more creative than that because the standards are a low goal and you gotta go beyond that. The second thing I would say is that you gotta be suspicious of anything that leaves history out of it. Whether you're talking about curriculum development or pedagogy, you cannot leave history out of what you do. Lesson planning, all of it. You cannot leave history out of it. You can start also by looking at the names of the schools that you're in. A lot of the names of these schools are named after former slave masters. Some of them are named after very, very, very, very high achieving black people, but there's a lot of low achievement going on in the school. I would also point people to a recent piece that I wrote in Nuvo, N-U-V-O, Nuvo Magazine. It's called "Five Not-So-Easy Pieces." And what I do in there is I do brief book reviews on five books that deal with racial literacy and equity. And the other thing they can do is they can contact this podcast. They can email you because I'm going to send you a book list. Call it your "Free Your Mind Resources" list. And on that list, a large number of books must read books, must view DVDs, must view podcasts, must surf websites. So there's a lot of information there as well. And I would encourage people to do that. And I would also encourage people, especially teachers, you have to become a self-conscious agent of your own education and liberation. You can't wait for the district to do a PDO. You can't wait for anything like that. You have to, if you love children, if you love black and brown children in particular, you have to become better than your parents. I tell my students this all the time, and they're majority white. If you were born in this country and you're white, you were born, raised in school, to become a racist. And what you have to do is fight against that script if you're interested in becoming more fully human. So you have to interrogate that. You have to inspect, do it. Dr. Karanga calls an evening inventory. You got to inspect your mind, and it has to be a constant thing. You have to choose which side of history you want to be on. You got to choose and keep choosing, right? Because the struggle is real, especially the age that we live in with the pandemic and of course the blue plague that's out here. So these are very contentious times. You are not engaged in this kind of work of dismantling white supremacy, inspecting and interrogating and dismantling your own bias and tearing that down. Not replacing white supremacy with black supremacy, but replacing white supremacy with justice, racial and social justice. If you're not about that work, then you should switch jobs and maybe head on over to the convenience stores of Speedway. - So Kazemi, what are some other projects that you have going on right now? Any other activities that you care to share? - Yeah, sure. I'm doing this one project, which is a grant funded project also. Back in 2015, I wrote a blues poetry opera. And the blues poetry opera, it tells the story of the migration of Richard Wright from Natchez, Mississippi up to Chicago. The opera is called The Blues of Hell's Halfacre, the traveling genius of Richard Wright from Natchez to Chicago, a blues poetry opera. And what it is is a live theatrical performance that features spoken word poetry, live music, prose narration. I have a live painting that occurs on stage. I got young little sisters jumping double dutch. And what we're doing, I'm performing poetry and the musicians, we have an ensemble of around 12 musicians. We have heart, we have cello, we have saxophone, upright bass, African drums, percussion. We have all of these sounds. And what we do across 90 minutes is we tell the story artistically of Richard Wright's migration from the South to the North, it's significant historically because he came to Chicago circa 1924 during that first great migration. And so he came up with a lot of blacks from the dirty South to the Jim Crow North. And so I wrote a grant proposal last year for a grant here at IU called the New Frontiers of Creativity and Scholarship, $60,000 grant, which was funded. And that grant calls for the dissemination of this blues poetry opera to the local community. And also the creation of a public exhibition on Richard Wright through words and images, a lot of period photos. And Richard Wright wrote over 3,000 haiku in his lifetime. So I'm gonna feature a lot of that haiku. And of course, there'll be a scholarly article coming out of it. And I'm actually also based on this blues poetry opera, writing a curriculum, a lesson plan, a unit, if you will, that deals with Richard Wright, his art, and of course, the great migration. So that's the current project that I'm working on. It's a little difficult to do it this summer because it's kind of difficult for us to gather as a species. But hopefully that veil will be lifted real soon. We'll come together and we'll put this thing out in the world. - Excellent, excellent. If any of our listeners want to stay connected with you, how may they be able to do so? - Yeah, they can actually connect with me through my website, my faculty page at IUPUI. Just do a search for my name or just go to the IUPUI School of Education website and you'll find me, my last name starts with K. They can also email me if they want to at [email protected], [email protected]. Or they can shoot me a tweet at my Twitter handles @kazimby. And they can also find me on Facebook if they search for my name or if you search for Third World Press Foundation, you'll find me on Facebook as well. - Excellent, excellent. Kazimby it has been a pleasure and honor and indeed a blessing to have you onto this show to share your knowledge, wisdom, your passion, your beliefs, your teachings, everything. This was a profound episode that I recorded with you and I'm just so glad and honored that you decided to come on and share your words and thoughts with us. - All right, well you're welcome. And again, thank you for having me. I do you no favors. You've done me the favor. So I really thank you for making space in your day for this and I'm excited to have this out to your listeners. Yeah, I'm just very proud of the work that you're doing and will never underestimate its importance 'cause you're needed. This voice and this work and this particular way that you're doing it is so necessary right now. So please keep it up and reach out to me anytime. I'm happy to support in any way. - Thank you, thank you Kazimby. - Well, of all, sister Carla, stay black. - Indeed, indeed, Kazimby indeed. Well listen, thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Equity Experience Podcast. I hope that you were able to take some major gems and nuggets away from this conversation. Please do not hesitate to reach out to the Good Brother Kazimby. He is very open to having conversations. I will share his contact information in the show notes. Thank you for tuning in to the Equity Experience Podcast where I'm your host, Dr. Carla Nanny. Be well and be blessed.