Transcript

- [aja monet] All right, give it up for yourselves really quickly. Come on, give yourselves some love. Everybody deserves a little self-love. It is really an honor to be able to host this podcast conversation here with you all in Austin, Texas for SXSW. Welcome to what we call The Sound Bath. Now live from SXSW. The Banned Book Library, in this special corner of the chaos, is brought to you by Lush in collaboration with the Zinn Education Project and the African American Policy Forum, they both do incredible work. So give it up for the Zinn Education Project, African American Policy Forum. My name is aja monet, I'm a surrealist blues poet, organizer and performing artist. And so I'm really, really excited, because I get the privilege of having conversations with very incredible people. And today I'm here with Bavu Blakes, and Erin Green to discuss Teaching Truth in the Era of Book Bans. Bavu Blakes is an incredible educator, a servant-leader, an award-winning musician, who's deliberately walking through the intersection of hip hop, education and spirituality His research looks at how hip hop and generation leverages its resources for today. He's joined the Austin Independent School District as a cultural proficiency and inclusiveness specialist and is now the lead partner at Transforming Education Incorporated. His participatory action research with Dr. Alina Adonyi Pruitt about anti-racist solidarity, English teacher agency, literacy of racism, and curricular choices within linguistically and culturally diverse classroom has been presented at multiple national conferences. He's also received several awards for his scholarly work and as a songwriter he collaborated with Grammy winners, Adrian Quesada, John Deus, and Brannen Temple, as well as many, many others. So please, please join me in giving a lot of love to Bavu Blakes. He's also an endearing father and husband and came straight from a game of his sons to be here with us. So please give some love. Say what up to the people Bavu, go ahead.

- [Bavu Blakes] Good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon. How's everybody doing? Glad to be with you and I promise to tell you the truth to the best of my ability 'cause that's what this is all about. It's an honor to be here.

- [aja monet] Yes, thank you, Bavu. Erin, give it up loud. Let's go into Erin Green, justice oriented educator, student writer and researcher, doctoral student in curriculum and instruction at the University of Texas. She has taught both elementary and middle school, specialized in integrated social studies and language arts curriculum, centered around social justice and the voices of the marginalized. Erin has also presented her approaches to social studies and language arts education at the National Conference for the social studies in both Washington, DC, and San Francisco, as well as at the National Conference for Teachers of English in Houston. Please, please, please join me giving it up for Erin Green.

- [Bavu Blakes] Hooray.

- [aja monet] Yes.

- [aja monet] It's really important. Educators are really, really the cornerstones of our society. So I really am so very excited that we have both people that have devoted their lives to the commitment of educating our young people and literally, we all still need educating. So to remember that every day we live, we are still the students of life. All right. I know that I just introduced both of you with those lovely introductions, but I always find it more enlightening for you to please share with us the ways that you see yourselves, that you feel maybe people don't often see you and doesn't get described in your bio and your description, how you identify and how you hope to move and be seen in the world that sometimes a bio just doesn't fully explore or demonstrate.

- [Bavu Blakes] I'll take it. I identify as a scholar emcee. I emcee with the mind of a scholar. I'm a scholar with the mind of an emcee. I identify as a learner who's always working on my learning agenda. Like what am I supposed to be learning? Have a deep belief that, you know, education is way more important than school. I feel like at school, you get what you have to learn, and in education you get what you need to learn. And most education occurs outside of school and most schooling is not intentional education. So I believe in learning from and with and kinda deconstructing that teacher role, I like to find the background knowledge that a learner has and leverage that for more learning. And I like to also leverage the agenda of the people learning, more so than giving them a thing that I have for them that I've determined that they need before I meet 'em in the first place. So that's a few things that I can share.

- [aja monet] Thank you. Erin.

- [Erin Green] Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here. I identify fully as an educator, whether it's with six year olds or 10 year olds or now with pre-service teachers. I think that being in the role of working with people and learning alongside people is very central to my identity. I also have the privilege of a white woman as being someone who's typically seen as an individual as well. And I haven't faced or fought back against those structural barriers and spaces in which I have to really claim that. But I will say that I use that positionality as a white woman to do some really disruptive work. I can enter into a space as an elementary educator and everyone's like, "Great, she looks the part, come on in, read some story books." And then I get in there and I really, you know, disrupt what's going on and bring in anti-racism and justice and I'm able to do that in ways that a lot of other folks aren't able to do that. And so that's my work and that's how I identify. And I think that's the portion that people don't always see. I'm viewed as a safe person who's gonna naturally agree with the status quo and I can use that for disruption.

- [aja monet] Hmm. Wow. Yeah, that's really insightful to at least position oneself and be aware of that positioning. I think here in the United States of America, as in many other so-called great nations around the world, long before social media was responsible or made to be the blame, there was a history of distorted information and blatant misinformation. We have a history within this country of distortion that has really misled where we are today and has made it so that many people do not really know, one, about themselves and about their own relationship to their communities, but about this country, and what role many other people play in the realities that they get to be a part of. And so the great scholar, W.E.B Du Bois, said that one cannot study reconstruction without first frankly facing the facts of universal lying. And I think what we are talking about today is recognizing that the project of the United States of America has been invested in the efforts of lying, in the efforts of misleading with information. So as we're in this conversation and the issue at hand is teaching truth in the era of book bans, I wanted to ask you both, what do you feel you're witnessing as educators in this moment that is not just terrifying you, right? But really laying to claim what's at stake in our current, not just political moment, but within our social relationships with people, what's at stake where we are now finding a country that is invested not just in lying, but maintaining the myth that it's not a liar, right? Maintaining the myth that it's devoted to justice and freedom and equality. What are the things that you find that are at stake right now for you in the state of Texas, but also at large?

- [Bavu Blakes] I'm glad you referenced Du Bois and Reconstruction because it seems that every time there's a very visible swing of, you know, socially a pendulum towards observable Black progress, that pendulum always swings back really hard. So after Reconstruction there was a swing back that really changed all of the movements in education, all the movements in government and all the changes in leadership. All the advancements of emancipation as it's called, there was a really hard swing back. And we had a president who was visibly Black and happy and unbothered and then there was a swing back. And then we had the most Black affirming month in the history of the United States. It was June of 2020, where the streets were painted and the roofs were painted and corporations made pledges and whatnot, so you could really see Black love is like a big mainstream trend and then the pendulum swings back and that's where we are. So for the word of terrorizing to connect to that, I think this is a pattern of terror that is protecting, what I've learned is that for a national identity to be upheld, there has to be an erasure of institutional memory. And so I think that there is a connection between fighting for preservation of a national identity and making sure that people don't really know a real well-rounded, accurate multi-perspective history, if you will. It holds the system together, and it's a conflict in my mind because, I mean, we're at SXSW talking about this, and so we're in the midst of all things capitalist and all things commercial, but I'm saying it's a observable lived tension that even us, who have our minds on liberation and justice have to accept each day.

- [aja monet] Or struggle with, right?

- [Bavu Blakes] Oh absolutely.

- [aja monet] Because I don't know if there's necessarily an immediate acceptance. I think the average citizen is struggling with that tension between values and the things that we wanna see and the institutions and the corporations and the ways that government has run. And I think that that struggle is often demonized, rather than seen as a part of the democratic process that in order to be a citizen, one must struggle and continue to struggle with these points of contention.

- [Bavu Blakes] I think that's a great revision on what I was saying for sure 'cause it's a more accurate way to put it. And I think that the lies that you referenced, even democracy to a very real extent is kind of a lie too. There's a game about that as well. So those are some of the considerations I have, given your question.

- [Erin Green] I think what's at stake is for us to continue doing things the way we've always done them. It's not like schools were doing this really radical stuff and then all of a sudden there's this right wing movement to pull all the books. A lot of those books weren't in classrooms to begin with, and we can, you know, sit up here and talk about our critiques against capitalism, right, which I have the same, but I work with my pre-service teachers who are 20 years old and I start to critique capitalism and they're like, "Wait, what's capitalism?" Right? And that is a product of the school system. And these are majority white women who want to be elementary school teachers and this is how we've always done things. And I think we have to go back to the history of looking at enslavement and the fact that Black folks weren't allowed to read or write, literacy was illegal. So this isn't new. This is something that has been continuing. And that's what at stake, right? Is to continue doing things the way we've always done them, under a new name and with a new legislative frame that makes that the norm, right? But I wanna clarify for folks these books that are being banned in this progressive or liberal or justice oriented curriculum that's being taken away from schools, in most cases wasn't being used in the first place, right? So we have to change things and it's this push in 2020, right? George Floyd, there is a push towards being more critical and then in response the right wing comes in. But it's not like we'd revolutionized the education system and then all of a sudden now we're going back like.

- [aja monet] Yeah, no, interesting. 'Cause as someone that was once young, was once in school, I would argue kind of a little bit the counter of that. Maybe it's because I grew up in a urban environment, in a city, but I know that there were ... I grew up with a lot of radical educators and I think that it's important to kind of highlight that because even though the institution might be might be corrupt or the actual establishment or the things that ... The roles that we are supposed to play are supposed to be very conservative, there are always people disrupting those roles. There are always people kind of pushing back. And so I wanna lift up the educators who have always, historically, been pushing back cuz we have some radical, radical educators who are doing incredible things in their schools. I know that's not the norm, but something I did wanna ask was, when we talk about history, you know, for those who do not know, can we offer a little bit of a, go a little further into a brief history lesson about some of the background information on institutionalized misinformation within this country, starting with the abolition of slavery and the Reconstruction era. If you can give people maybe a little bit of a context who don't have that history and didn't go to good schools or just it's been a while and what you think it's important for people to recognize about the past that's still impacting us today. You touched a little bit on it. I think one of the things I wanna try to instigate in that is that there's not enough emphasis on, while the banning of Black books and authors does affect Black history, it also impacts white history or white American history, that there were white abolitionists, there were people that were advocating and pushing for this country to actually live up to its ideals. So I wanted to ask, what are the things that we know about history that is important to bring into this conversation now that's not being brought into the conversation?

- [Bavu Blakes] I think that if you're going into a K through 12 school environment, you're learning a very narrow and nationalist and kind of made for TV version of history in general. So when I talk to educators as well as students and ask them a question as simple as what percentage of the world do you think would be classified as white people? Usually the answer is an average of about 50 to 60% and not 12 to 15%, which is evidence that they're receiving a perspective that suggests that this is the dominant viewpoint but also the dominant people group in the world, which is utterly ridiculous. It's more like the percentage of Black folks in the United States would be parallel to the white folks in the world. I think that when you go into Black history, a lot of times it centers celebrities and, more than anything, people who've been beat up or killed by white people. But I think that Black history obviously begins with human history because the first humans, according to science which we value, are Black people. So there's an ancient African history that's never typically considered and it spans thousands of years, but it's not considered because we're already tuned to watered down version MLK, Rosa Parks, watered down, kind of fictional version of Rosa Parks, and watered down fictional version of Harriet Tubman. So you always get Black, meaning victim, as opposed to Black meaning opposed to white in terms of the social construct of race. So I think what's often overlooked is what's true and I guess the dueling truths about race, which if you notice the word America cannot be spelled without the R in it and the A in it and the C in it and the E in it. And there's a reason you can't spell America without race. And if you pull race out of America, what you're left with is M I A. So I think the most overlooked thing for people being raised to function as American people is the fact that they don't really know what has actually been made in America in terms of social reality, and this battle is to hold that tradition in place, keep things narrow and keep institutional memories erased or clueless in order to hold the social structure we exist in together.

- [Erin Green] I think to speak more to the history of how white supremacy and our white supremacist nation has always censored history. Again, we have to go back to enslavement and the illegality of literacy and then also the fact that oftentimes, the only text that enslaved folks were given access to was the Bible. And even the Bible had passages removed, right? Anything that was about rebellion or liberation in the present was removed. And then post abolition, we still have places where free Black folks cannot go to school. And this continues through Reconstruction. During Reconstruction schools were burned to the ground, something like 600 schools were burned down. And then you look at the civil rights movement, right? And within all of this, I think that your point about the agency of teachers is so important because we have freedom schools arise during the civil rights movement, right? We have Black folks who are educating their own community, they're taking it upon themselves to do this work, because the white supremacist system that is the United States and is our school system refused to do that, right? And then we have Brown v. Board pass and I think the typical narrative of Brown v. Board is that everything got better afterwards, right? Schools were integrated, everyone's happy. The reality is that Black schools were shut down, and Black teachers and Black administrators were dismissed. And so we look at our school system now and we're like, "We need more Black teachers." Well, we fired all of them, legacies of educators, who were more educated than their white counterparts were fired, right? So we're not just censoring what books kids have access to, but the fact that kids might have have access to school at all. In Virginia, after Brown v. Board passed, there was a county that shut down all public schools for five years because they would rather not allow anyone access to public education than to integrate, right? And within those years, then we have the Black community coming in and having school at churches and in basements and at sometimes on boats. And this is all things that I've learned from children's literature that is now banned that I would like to point out, right? These stories I'm telling are told through children's lit that we're not allowing in schools anymore. So I think there is a long legacy of white supremacy, a long legacy of censoring education and even the education that white kids get, right? No one benefits from this, except for those in power who want to maintain power. So I think there's a long legacy of white supremacy and there's a long legacy of resistance and, particularly, by educators of color who have come together when this system is functioning exactly as it's designed to by not serving them right.

- [Bavu Blakes] Can I add one more? The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in Delaware, in New Orleans. It was only the places that the union did not have control of where slavery was abolished. You got me excited and I wanted to add that one. All right.

- [Erin Green] Well, I wanna add on to that too.

- [Bavu Blakes] Let's go.

- [Erin Green] Because now we have Juneteenth as the celebration of ...

- [aja monet] I was just about to go there. I was like wait.

- [Bavu Blakes] Welcome to Texas.

- [aja monet] No, now you brought it in. Okay, go ahead.

- [Erin Green] Okay, so now we have Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

- [aja monet] We're in Texas, we cannot be in Texas without talking

- [Bavu Blakes] Welcome to Texas

- [aja monet] Without talking about Juneteenth, come on.

- [Erin Green] It's fabulous. There's great children's literature coming out about Juneteenth. There's also probably some not great children's literature coming out about it. And this happens when something amazing, something revolutionary becomes part of the narrative that we're accepting in public, then it gets manipulated again, right? So kids in schools now, they know that Juneteenth is a holiday, like a five year old, a six year old can tell you that and then you ask why, and they're like, "I don't know, no one told me." So we have these narratives and then as soon as it feels like a victory, and it is a victory, I'm not gonna say it's not a victory, it absolutely is. But then the narrative is co-opted and it takes the agency of teachers to come in and decide to tell the truth because the system is not preparing us to do that.

- [aja monet] Yeah, thank you so much for that. I think what's really scary about it is that the way that institutions or people with power, right? Those who manipulate and abuse their power oppressive systems work is that they keep you so busy fighting for the bare minimum that by the time you're done fighting for the bare minimum, you're so tired that you don't realize there's a whole other large thing to be fighting for, right? You know, while people see the ban on Black history books and stories and culture as again just impacting Black people, I think this impacts all people and poor people primarily. And so I wanted to ask, what role do you think poverty and the government's almost manipulation of the people, what role does that play in specifically this book ban?

- [Bavu Blakes] For one, I think that is where you get the narrowest education because you have the widest gap between the cultural reality of the students and families that the schools intend to serve or claim to serve and the cultural reality of the community and the campus, between the school system and the students. And so you have a really wide gap in priorities and cultural reality there, and when you add book bans, to me, it's a huge barrier to engagement. When I use books that relate to students and things that they've learned from their parents or even just kinda learned through osmosis from their parents or felt through their parents, the level of engagement goes crazy. Some of my least engaged, I'm-gonna-drop-out- anyway-mister students, when I'm teaching a book that's bilingual and I'm thinking about "Separate is Never Equal," that book.

- [Erin Green] One of the most banned books right now.

- [Bavu Blakes] Crazy book, because way before MLK--

- [aja monet] Repeat the book and the author.

- [Bavu Blakes] "Separate is Never Equal" by Duncan T. I'm not gonna mispronounce his last name.

- [Erin Green] I watched a video earlier cause I wanted to bring up this book and I was like, I wanna say the name right.

- [Bavu Blakes] Say it.

- [Erin Green] And now I'm gonna say it wrong after that practice, Tonatiuh.

- [Bavu Blakes] So it's gorgeous and it's talking about Sylvia Mendez and their family and the fact that Sylvia Mendez's dad had his own business so he could say, "Hey mom, watch the business," and tend to the business of the fact that his daughter's being discriminated against because she's a dark-skinned Mexican American, born in the States but looks the part of, I should discriminate against you. Meanwhile, her white presenting Spanish speaking cousins are allowed to go to the white school. So she's at a school where they eat lunch near the cow patties, the poop with the flies on it, et cetera. And dad's not having that. And dad has the agency and the freedom to say, "Wife, watch the business, I'm gonna go call my lawyer friend and we're gonna take them to task." And what ends up happening is a big lawsuit that predates the Civil Rights movement. But the point that I'm making is students are into that and it's not because I have to tell them the truth, but it's because I have to bring that book in. I don't speak great Spanish but Luis does. And so he's from the back of the room to the front of the room 'cause I need him. And then the topic and the subject matter and the questioning that I insert with that book sets otherwise kind of bored, school-ain't-for-me students on fire, and it completely shifts the dynamic of engagement around educational opportunity in a classroom specifically because of the narrative being told and that I relate to that, that's about me. And if it's not about me in terms of demographics, it's about me in terms of like just how I feel in society. So when you take that away, the most impacted group that's losing the opportunity to engage academically and feel smart and feel like their background knowledge is the fire needed to keep the room warm at a school, right? Those are students who most likely are in low socioeconomic environments.

- [Erin Green] I want to start by referencing one book that's been banned and it's a book for kids ages like four to eight.

- [aja monet] That was my next question. Let's name some books that have been banned that you all wanna bring into the space.

- [Erin Green] So this is a lovely picture book, very appropriate for a four year old. It's commonly used in kindergarten classrooms. It's called "All Are Welcome." If we are banning a book called "All Are Welcome."

- [Bavu Blakes] Gasp.

- [Erin Green] What else do you need to know?

- [aja monet] It sounds pretty radical to me.

- [Erin Green] Crazy, right? But I do think that at the core of welcoming all and caring for all that is anti-capitalist. And we teach capitalism in school from as soon as kids are in pre-K, right? What behaviors do we teach? You sit down, you listen, you do what you're told and what happens if you do that? You're rewarded. As you move up in school, you have a class store that you can buy prizes from. You're rewarded for being quiet and doing what you're told. We are teaching students to accept a capitalist system in which they stand by and follow the rules that are set for them, and we don't ask them to ask questions. We don't ask kids to think about is that rule fair? Who benefits from that rule and who's harmed by that rule? Those are not things that we encourage students to ask. And so by encouraging this acceptance of a system, we are teaching them to accept capitalism, right? And so we know that within a capitalist system, by and large poor folks stay poor, right? And rich folks get richer. And so that is what we are socializing our students into, through things that we accept as so normal. Like a classroom store or a behavior management system in which students get points or privileges, right?

- [Bavu Blakes] And there's a sorting that's happening between smart and not so smart and not smart at all. And there's a sorting system of winners and losers, right? Based on what type of success you're experiencing, and they feel it and it sticks. And by the time they're in middle school, where we were teaching, right? Being those type of teachers that you referenced, it's really hard to wash that residue off by the time you've experienced it for six years of being sorted. I belong in this type of class, I belong in this part of the room, I'm not smart. She is, right? And where compliance is its own reward and there's no official compliance curriculum. I love the way you highlighted that because it's its own reward, and that all people are always learning skills and habits all the time. But if you keep giving me like my Pavlov dog treat for doing what you say, then I'm a good person. And that holds everything in place. So thank you for mentioning that too.

- [Erin Green] And I wanna add on to that also.

- [Bavu Blakes] Let's go.

- [Erin Green] I wanna clarify, Bavu said we taught together. We absolutely did. I also wanna clarify that I lasted as a middle school teacher for one year and-

- [Bavu Blakes] And I was pissed.

- [Erin Green] You left before me. I came to this school to teach with Bavu, and then he was like, "I'm on my way out. Bye." But I will say I experienced exactly what he's saying. I came in with this fire to do this work that I'd done with young kids that I like.

- [Bavu Blakes] Fire.

- [Erin Green] I keep being told as an elementary school teacher, "They're not ready for this, don't do this." And this is pre-book bans, right? They can't talk about racism. I'm like, "Oh that's crazy cuz they're doing it right now and everyone seems to be having a pretty educational time in here." So I'm excited to come do this work in middle school, where I'm told like, "Don't do it in elementary, middle school can handle it. Go do this work in middle school." And then I then I come to middle school.

- [Bavu Blakes] Hold on. Low income, non-white middle school. Go ahead.

- [Erin Green] Brilliant children.

- [Bavu Blakes] Oh super brilliant. But to the question, right?

- [Erin Green] Yes. Yes. And I come in and they have been conditioned into this system that he's explaining, right? They know their place in the classroom. You have kids who go straight to the back and you have the kids who follow the rules and do what they're told and they're in the front and yep. And there's a couple of 'em in every class. And everyone else is pretty pissed that they have to be here. And honestly, if I were a kid of color, a poor kid of color sitting in a classroom where they're supposed to learn U.S. history the way that this state wants them to learn it, I'd also be pissed. I'd be pissed as a white kid in that class. We should all be pissed about that.

- [Bavu Blakes] 'Cause they don't exist in the curriculum. And except for kind of as a, a footnote, afterthought. A sidebar.

- [Erin Green] Right.

- [Bavu Blakes] See, we're going now.

- [Erin Green] And so I tried to do this disruptive work, but it is so disheartening to see the effects of the system on brilliant children, right?

- [Bavu Blakes] Yeah.

- [Erin Green] And so I went back to elementary, I was like, "I wanna do this work where I'm like seeing it happen in front of me where their eyes are lighting up and they're school can be this way?" And they, and they work together, and I think part of that also is in elementary I was working with either one or two classes about 20 kids, right? So those relationships are deep and I spend all day with them and I know their parents and I can do a lot of community work. Come to middle school, I've got 150 kids. I learned all of their names by the third class and I was so proud of myself and they were like, "No teacher's ever done that before," and I was like, "Oh, they don't know your names?" And that continued into the school year of like, "This teacher does not know my name." But unfortunately it felt like at some point, it stopped with knowing their names. I don't have the capacity to know 150 kids the way that I could know 20 or 40. And these book bans, 19% of them are picture books. Picture books. The ones that we use to do that work in elementary, which is so necessary to sustain this work. We have to start soon. Starting in eighth grade, seventh grade is a-

- [Bavu Blakes] It's a lot of residue on a lot of residue on a child in middle school. Yep. And so you went to elementary and that sounds like you're ride off into the sunset. Everything was perfect then.

- [Erin Green] That's correct. No, it wasn't. And then I went and taught elementary for a little while longer. And then it feels like doing this work in Texas, to be a teacher in Texas, trying to do justice oriented work, you're gonna come up against resistance everywhere you are, regardless of book bans, regardless of CRT legislation. You're gonna come up against this everywhere. And part of what the research tells us is that teachers who teach for justice can sustain this work when they work in collectives, when they work together. And there's some really phenomenal groups doing this work and working together in places like New York City and in the Bay Area and in the Pacific Northwest, which are highly unionized areas, right? We're not a unionized state and we don't have those collectives here. And so to do this work in Texas can feel like you're doing it alone and that is not sustainable. And that is why I am not working in a K-12 classroom now, and now I have the privilege of working with pre-service teachers and I love that. But I have this tension of like, I'm preparing you to do this work and I know you can do this work and we can do it together. But I also know the reality of the system that I'm sending them off into, right? So I think when we're thinking about how teachers can do this work in the light of book bans or in light of anti CRT legislation, we have to think about what supports we're providing teachers and how we're continuing to work together once they start to face those challenges. Because it is not an easy job at all.

- [aja monet] Thank you for that. What are the things that you're seeing from your young people that is really inspiring and making you feel really excited around this time? What are some of the things that you're seeing as educators within the education system but also within young people that is inspiring you right now?

- [Bavu. Blakes] Short answer is brilliance. And what I mean by that is they know way more than they're typically given credit for in the school system. And now with the advent of social media and technology, 'cause every young person is now a native to a thing that, I mean, I didn't even have email 'til I was in college. I'm of a certain age, but I see sharing of information through social media like crazy. I see learning outside of their school day like crazy. And how similar to the book that I reference, you know, is getting children kind of fired up and leaning into learning. There's a lot of things that students do outside of school that also get them fired up. So I would say just the way that they share information. A common example would be TikTok. Another example would be just information where they get on fire about a certain subject. Even within our school, I recall students who, 'cause we didn't have a lot of, we had no actually Black and brown tension whatsoever across those two groups of people. And the one time that something popped up, students came into my classroom and said, "How do we fix this? Because we know that this is our responsibility 'cause we don't believe in that." And they basically showed up as a multiracial coalition simply asking for some input and knew that we had a venue and they just addressed it on their own. So I'm seeing a lot of growth in agency, not necessarily in the school during the daytime. But I will say that the reason that I left our school was to be able to work at a larger and way wider district, interestingly enough. Which at first I was uncomfortable about, but the reason I was there was to infuse concepts of cultural proficiency and anti-racism into the social and emotional learning framework in a way where I could reach the whole district as a professional learning specialist. And so in that particular role, we were able to pull students in and politically organized to where the school board is willing to meet with the students on a regular basis. They didn't understand that we were really gonna let students take the wheel on our side. So by the time that the students are meeting with the executives, by the time the students are meeting with the school board, and everybody can see it 'cause it's public, the students are really taking them to task and challenging them. And sure they experienced disappointments in what the school board would not do despite listening to their recommendations and kind of patting 'em on the head and saying, "Thanks for sharing, that was so brave." And just kind of doing that thing. But then a year later at a school board meeting in public, "What have you done since we gave you the recommendations last year?" And the superintendent having to say, "Oh we haven't done anything." And the students saying, "Oh, okay." Even that alone is really powerful to me because it spreads, students communicate, and basically just left to their own devices, they have all the devices they need to make something happen. And that's what I see continually is them leveraging their own ideas and their own power and really waking up to that. And I think these last few years since COVID has opened that up even more, 'cause there's just a little bit more pushback and unruliness and rebellion, typically respectfully, but disrespectfully when necessary that students are exhibiting every day.

- [Erin Green] I'll piggyback off the idea of accessibility of knowledge and how that is contributing to how our young folks engage with the world. And I don't work with K-12 students on a regular basis. I work with pre-service teachers and I work with pre-service teachers of college students, typically juniors and seniors in the same program that I'm a graduate of. And since I have graduated from that university, just the shift in how they accept new information is wild to me. So when I was a student and our professor told us something that we didn't know about, something about structural racism or discrimination towards LGBTQ folks, our response, and again, this is a heavily white female teaching force, we're talking about elementary teachers. It's been that way for a long time, specifically to reference back to post Brown v. Board. We haven't seen much change in this. So same demographics, right? And my cohort's response was, "I've never heard that before, so you're wrong. That is wrong because that's not my experience." And what I'm seeing now with this same demographic, just younger, right? The 22 year olds now, 21 year olds, when they're presented with new information, their response is, I didn't know that I'd like to know more. Or they come into a class session being like, I think I disagree with this idea, but I'm willing to engage with it. And that willingness to engage is something that I did not see prior to this generation.

- [aja monet] Please give it up for Erin. Okay. And Bavu, thank you so much. There's something in your book that I wanted to end us on.

- [Bavu Blakes] Let's go.

- [aja monet] That I thought he, before starting this.

- [Bavu Blakes] Wait, which book?

- [aja monet] This incredible, hold on, let me show it up. Let me show.

- [Bavu Blakes] Which book is?

- [aja monet] This incredible book called "El's Mirror," a picture book that he shared with me before we came to start speaking with you all, and I opened it up and the first thing that I read, I wanted to leave you all with, or at least one of the things I wanted to leave you all with where he quotes, "'Til the lion writes history, the hunter will be the hero," first people proverb. And I think that that's so important that 'til the lion writes history, the hunter will be the hero, and for those of you listening and tuning in today and being present with us in the middle of this mayhem, we're just really grateful that you showed up and that you were open and willing to engage, which is what we need and what's necessary moving forward. And so I hope that you do not see this as a one-off event, but that you continue to show up and remain engaged, and know that it is hard to do it alone. If you're fighting or resisting something alone, it's always harder, it's always gonna feel more burdensome. But when you recognize that there are people who are organizing together, I encourage you to find a political home, find an organization that you can affiliate yourself with that represents the values and the ideals that you believe in. Because that's where you can struggle with ideas. That's where you can fall back, that's where you can be held accountable, that's where you can ask questions, that's where you can go when you feel alone and you feel like no one else understands you. I know we all have jobs and things that we have to do that we're obligated to do, but just recognize that once you can find community, you can find solutions. And that solutions are in the community that we build together that we must create and foster and facilitate. Get to know some of our speakers, find ways to get involved and support what they're doing as educators because it's not easy. There are days I'm sure they want to give up. There's days when they wanna pull their hair out and you just coming up to them and saying, "Thank you for the work you do, keep going," will go a long way. It goes so much further than you could ever possibly imagine. So I wanna give it up to our educators who are here doing this work in Texas, wanna shout out to the educators across this country, this state, to the educators in Florida and ground zero of this work, trying to keep books alive and the authors, the writers that are continuing to write their stories, as a poet and someone that continues to try to tell our stories, I'm honored to know that people are in our classrooms, teaching our words, telling students about what we're sharing and the stories that need to be told. So give it up for yourselves last, you know? Give it up for yourselves for being attentive, showing up. Thank you, Lush, for hosting this conversation. Thank you so, so much. You're listening to The Sound Bath here, live at SXSW, all right, y'all,

- [Erin Green] Can we give it up for aja as well?

- [Bavu Blakes] aja monet.