It's All of Us. It's Our Humanity. It is the Excellence We Choose to See and Not See. Yesterday Was a Great Day & I'm Fortunate

I've been a lucky guy since I was 19 years old and Carol Boyce Davies took me in, mentored my mind, challenged me, pushed me forward, and asked me to think. 33 years later I'm thankful to have the wisdom from Tonya Perry, Marcelle Haddix, Alfred Tatum, Mark Lamont Hill, Ernest Morrell, Gholdy Muhammad, Yolanda Sealey Ruiz, David Kirkland, and Betting Love pushing me even further through their professional mentorship, intellectual guidance, and genius that has allowed me to do the work I do, shape the scholarship in action I aim for, and put history into the center of it all.

B. Love. Don Sawyer summarized it best. B. Love, but Be Joy, too (that's a natural nod to Gholdy and Stacey...I see you, poet and NWP friend). 

Yesterday was the Fairfield University convocation and because of the vision of the MLK committee they brought Bettina Love to campus. Her talk was timely, important, brilliant (what else would it be) and beyond necessary. I especially appreciated the drawbridge exercise she did for faculty beforehand because it helped me to see the arguments I've been trying to make for a long time. Who's to blame? Who's at fault? It's all of us within a system that shames us, builds upon our fear, and needs consequences that sometimes are the results of the systems, themselves...the institutions...the power structures...the traditions. 

Who has ownership of property and the constructions for how the land is used and understood? They are usually the ones that have the power over policy, laws, economics, and justice systems. 

I'm a CNY guy, and that has to be extended to the Rochester world, too....parallel cities with varying histories and interactions with wealth...both with schooling systems that deserve so much more from our government and institutions. 

Zip code apartheid. Gold Coast chess board. Inequities. Opportunity gaps designed and maintained because it's at the core of American history. 

Prudence Crandall. Reuben Crandall. Frances Scott Key. MLK. bell hooks. James Baldwin. Thomas Jefferson. Columbus. 

Narratives and how the truth unfolds. 

Keep me on the ground doing the work. That's the only solution I've ever known.