Become A Good Ancestor with Layla Saad
Ep002: This Here Flesh with Cole Arthur Riley

The Black history I carry with me: Cole Arthur Riley
By Jeneé Osterheldt

This column is a part of A BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE: Black joy, Black lives, as celebrated by culture columnist Jeneé Osterheldt

Cole Arthur Riley created a literary communion in Black Liturgies.

On Instagram, she’s made a space to lift her innermost thoughts as well as the holy wisdom of our writing legends like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and the Bible, too.

“When I’m most honest, I tell people that Black Liturgies was born out of anger. I began the project in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, and the resurfacing of the murders of Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain,” says Riley, the spiritual teacher in residence with Cornell University’s Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making.

“I was hungry for a spiritual space where Black grief, Black anger, my Black body was honored in a meaningful way. I had belonged to white-dominated, Christian spaces for long enough that I was desperate for a community of spiritual liberation. So I began connecting Black literature and poems, sometimes with prayers, sometimes with a breath practice. And very quickly a community much larger than I had an imagination for began to form,” she says.

Having drawn in a “congregation” of over 140,000 followers in a year and a half, Riley is releasing her debut novel, “THIS HERE FLESH,” published by Penguin Random House later this month. Get to know her.

The Black History I carry with me is:

Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Zora Neale Hurston. All the Black women who’ve understood what their words were worth, particularly in times when the world was trying to convince them otherwise.

I sometimes walk around with the first line of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters in my head. It gets stuck in there like a song, and I’ll find myself kind of chanting, “Are you sure sweetheart, that you want to be well?” It has made a home in me. There is a magical canon of Black women authors who’ve expanded our imaginations for liberation, who’ve articulated nuanced Black characters with quirks and flaws and beauties. If I could write a sentence even a fraction as tender and complicated as theirs, I would feel proud.

Why is it so important for us to author our own stories and share them?

When I wrote THIS HERE FLESH, I didn’t immediately know it would be a book of storytelling. I thought it was just going to be this serious book of philosophical contemplation or something. But when I picked up the pen, all I was capable of writing were the stories that had formed me. I couldn’t talk about dignity without talking about my father lathering cocoa butter on us in the evenings. I couldn’t speak of lament, without telling of my gramma lying, trembling, on the linoleum floor. We must tell our own stories, because so many stories have been stolen from us. So many of us have not been allowed to tell the truth of us with the passion it demands, or without being censored and rewritten. We must become our own historians.

It was Toni Morrison who said, “Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald … But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

So there is also something really powerful in knowing that as we share our stories, it doesn’t always need to be so literal and succinct. As I wrote THIS HERE FLESH, I kept reminding myself that I was free at last to unshackle my creativity. So you’ll find a bit of magic and myth in the book. Myth sadly can have a negative connotation; I’d like to reclaim this. It’s a beautiful and worthy form for our storytelling. The ancestors have shown us that much.

What gives you joy?

I’ve always loved being alone. A few years ago I would’ve felt too much shame to answer this question with “solitude,” but I’m learning to resist this. I rest best when I’m alone– when I’m not engulfed in the emotions or experiences of others. For some of us, solitude possesses a rare path into our interior worlds. And I feel so at peace, so alive with joy when I travel into myself. To remember who I am and all that has made me. It risks sounding self absorbed, but the reality is, my solitude often takes me into memories and stories of people that have passed on. And it also makes me more attuned to the interior lives of others. It makes me a better friend, a better daughter. Solitude is, maybe in paradox, a practice of collective care.

So I write and I stare at the wall and I watch Netflix documentaries and water the plants. And I’m alone, but there’s joy there.

My life is a beautiful resistance because:

I refuse to live a disembodied life. Even as I survive the violence of white supremacy, the judgment of white intellectualism, the pain of a body that is chronically ill, the memory of a body that has endured abuse, I refuse to abandon my body. It contains more beauty, more mystery than I am able to articulate. And in befriending and honoring it, I communicate belief in my inherent dignity.

Follow @blackliturgies and learn more at colearthurriley.com. This column was originally published by the Boston Globe.

To change the future of work for the better, let’s prioritize people-first, not tech-first, businesses.
By Sherrell Dorsey

In my hometown of Seattle, at the age of 14, I stepped onto the Microsoft campus for my first internship feeling like a big shot. My experience within this epicenter of tech innovation was a significant step in my career journey, but it was not the launching pad for my future in the workforce.

Before I built my chops on Bill Gates’ turf, I’d learned the world of work through Monica McAffee. “Auntie Monica,” as we called her, had been my mom’s nail technician since I was five years old. By the time I’d become a teenager, I’d mastered the art of styling my own hair in between visits to the salon. One day, observing my technical talent for tresses, Auntie Monica invited me onto her team to assist her with styling clients in the shop a few hours a week.

The shop was a masterclass in business and developing a supportive workplace culture. Auntie Monica was precise. She’d run her business for over 25 years, with clients who grew up with her. She served church folk, regular people, Black women of all backgrounds, shapes, sizes, and styles. Some were grandmothers. Moms. Wives. Sisters. Cousins. All were like family to her.

Auntie Monica saw them grow up. She nurtured them, and often fed them when Uncle Kev, her husband and business partner, would fry chicken after a long week and serve up guests when appointments would seep into the late evening.

Auntie Monica represented fullness in entrepreneurship. She ran a business that enabled her own personal wealth journey, which consisted of a hefty real estate portfolio and a well-traveled life—on her terms. For me, she set a standard for hard work, relationship development, company culture, customer service and financial intelligence. This valuable incubation, which was skipped over by leaders who downplayed the genius on our side of town, is at the core of my audacious dream for the future of work.

Imagine for a second if startups were understood to be more than just what occurs in a garage, dorm room, kitchen table, or tech conference—but also what builds a community, wherever that may be. Consider what would happen if we didn’t only focus our attention and investment in what is high growth and high tech, but also paid attention to the microcosms of communities that are people-first versus tech-first: the daycares, coffee shops, bakeries, plumbing services, and more. What would our cities look like in that case?

I’ll tell you.

We would see widespread development. Inner cities and lower-income or disadvantaged communities, for the first time in history, would be deemed hubs for innovation instead of urban problems. The creators and trailblazers who live in these underserved hotspots would no longer be neglected.

Imagine for a second if startups were seen to be more than just what occurs in a garage, dorm room or tech conference—but also what builds a community, wherever that may be.

Black women entrepreneurs who, like Auntie Monica, are skilled in effectively incubating young Black entrepreneurs would be recognized as the training institutions that they are for the future of work. Thus, the nature of the service and vocational industries become centers of empowerment, job training, economic mobility and community stability during a time where the sector at large is experiencing high turnover.

This would hold especially true in the service industry, where Black women are overrepresented. In 2021, 25% of Black women workers worked in service occupations, compared with just 18% of white women workers and 12% of white men. As a result, if nothing else, we must direct our focus in that direction.

I imagine a city concerned with inclusive innovation and job growth as one that undoubtedly intends to provide Black women-owned service businesses with the utmost support they deserve. At the surface, this support means funding them to become accelerators to small business growth and providing resources for them to offer paid internship programs for locals.

A 2021 census report found that businesses owned and operated by people of color tend to employ people within their own communities. And yet, these aren’t the business owners often considered to be launching pads for educating and training the future of the workforce. Reshaping a city to be conscious of this would yield a significant impact on the local service industry.

When Black women are let down and left out of the growth equation, cities lose a valuable source of economic and social capital.

Now, the urge to argue that service occupations are a source of automation risk, particularly for the African-American workforce, is understandable. But I would counter that notion by presenting this as an opportunity to invest in training. Progressive cities must consider taking steps toward up-skilling and retraining Black-owned service-sector businesses for positions that can’t yet be claimed by automation.

According to a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute analysis, Black service-industry workers have access to fewer economic resources to address their potential displacement on their own, so it will take collaboration across the private, public and social sectors to promote retraining opportunities for African Americans. I’d like to see us do it, changing our approach and making an effort to build forward-thinking communities, even in the inner cities. By dismissing opportunities like this all around us, we have consistently squandered possibilities to be revolutionary in our communities.

Take a snapshot of any city in the United States today, and please, zoom in. You’ll notice that much more can be done to drastically improve the livability for Black women and to prioritize them in the work landscape of the future. From the west coast to the east, I’ve spent years living and working across the country, and the root of the disappointment is the same: a lack of support and accessibility.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, I worked alongside Black women who fought tooth and nail to no avail for their voices to be heard, the value of their work understood, and adequate resources put in their reach.

Illustrated by Steffi Walthall for Bloomberg Magazine

It’s obvious that when Black women are let down and left out of the growth equation, cities lose a valuable source of economic and social capital. So why not reshape a city designed to work for them rather than against them in every way possible? For the workforce that extends beyond the workplace, let us also rethink how we structure coworking spaces.

My best friend and business partner of over 10 years, Enovia Bedford, enrolled her son in a school with a coworking space on campus. She is able to run her remote business in close proximity to her son during work and school hours. What a lovely sight! He is taken care of, while she handles what she needs to in order to provide for their family.

Consider reshaping a city with more setups like this. Rather than jumping through hurdles of discrimination and facing the psychological warfare of male-centered corporate systems, Black mothers who want to focus on growing businesses and creating their own income can do so without jeopardizing their availability for their children.

The worth of Black women’s contributions to building communities is not exclusively measured in terms of their output. With education and careers being the focus for many policymakers, it can be easy to forget about the minds and bodies behind those institutions. Wellness amenities, as of now, are a luxury for many, mainly located in places where white folks raise their families.

I would like to reimagine such environments and centers as a requirement for health and productivity in spaces where Black women live. Dare to provide neighborhoods populated by Black families with top-tier therapeutic services, a comprehensive spectrum of maternal care, nutrition and exercise, and fill every corner with green space. Through the collaborative effort of public and private partnerships, we can create safe, culturally rich environments that prioritize services for physical and mental health.

This future I speak of may take time and directed investments to realize, but it is not out of reach if we can agree on where the movement must begin—at the top. The lack of representation at higher levels of business and government pervades our cities, resulting in the disproportionate work landscape we see locally.

Through it all, the Black woman has been an underrated pioneer, an overlooked incubator, an interrupted power, and—far too often—a missed opportunity for investment. It is past time to reevaluate our priorities and reimagine the destinies of our cities to say no more.

This excerpt was originally published by Bloomberg Magazine with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us. by Sherrell Dorsey. Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. All rights reserved. Dorsey is also the founder and chief executive officer of The Plug-a news platform covering the Black innovation economy and available on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Editors: Brentin Mock, Jennifer Sondag
With assistance from Kelsey Butler and Jordyn Holman

_________________________________________

Featured Curator: Courtney Napier

Courtney Napier is a writer, journalist, gatherer, and liberation coach from Raleigh, North Carolina. She has written for national outlets like NewsOne and The Appeal, as well as regional and local publications such as Scalawag Magazine, WALTER Magazine, The Carolinian, and INDY Week. She is also the founder of Black Oak Society, a collective of Black creatives in the greater Raleigh area. Their flagship publication, BOS Magazine, is a literary magazine focused on giving Black Raleigh her flowers now. Finally, Courtney has coached individuals and organizations as they seek to lead and live in a way that undermines white supremacy and honors the humanity of all people. She loves to love her spouse, David, of ten years, and her two little humans who are endless hilarious meme reels.

New Motherhood, a Dictionary
By Namrata Poddar

Motherhood: Goddess squad gracing the walls of Hindu temples, wifehood and motherhood balanced perfectly in those slender waists and big breasts, ever ready to nurse.

Motherhood of the Goddess Consort, a male fantasy like their Virgin Mother.

Motherhood: a border, a wall sundering your life into prebaby and post-baby days. Wait till he grows up, they say. It comes back—the physical mobility, the energy, the yoga, the reading, brunches with girlfriends, happy hour with colleagues, the love-making too.

Motherhood: your new role—now  that you’ve given them a legacy with a baby boy—as an addendum in their parties, neither the text you’ve aspired to be nor the footnote you used to be.

Motherhood: its own game of power in heterodomesticity, one you keep fighting for dignity, one you keep losing for sanity.

Motherhood: shield for your baby boy from the silence and self-hatred of those mother figures, wired to perpetuate toxic masculinity.

Motherhood: quarantine before quarantine becomes a global thing, worthy of empathy.

Motherhood: a feminine logic of love. How it strips romantic love of its luster, that transactional love between adults driven by a capitalist logic of profit.

Motherhood: an unending play of paradox, a dance in chiaroscuro.

Motherhood: Adi Shakti, primordial Goddess Mother, Creatrix to all that was, is, will be. How she empties you of the masculine drive to possess meaning. How she anchors you into the fleeting, into what is yet to be born. Your alignment with eternal becoming.

This piece was originally published by Raising Mothers.

Treva Lindsay and Melissa Harris-Perry on misogynoir, poverty, and violence
By Courtney Napier

On a recent girls’ trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, my friends and I made the visual arts exhibit our final stop. I glimpsed the work of Bisa Butler out of the corner of my eye and ran towards it, giddy with admiration. Before me was Butler’s quilted portrait of Harriet Tubman, with her black velveteen hair and full skirt adorned with purple and yellow flora—an icon of liberation, wrested by the hands of Black women.

Just over my shoulder, the presence of a vacuous black space interrupted the triumphant moment. I slowly turned until I was face-to-face with Amy Sherald’s arresting portrait of Breonna Taylor, hanging in solitude in a blackened enclave. The people who stood in line waiting to both admire its beauty and pay their respects could not hold back their cries. In front of me, a Black teenage girl buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. My friend Gloria did the same in mine while she wept.

The visceral sense of anger and hopelessness that we experienced in the presence of Breonna Taylor’s portrait captured some of the same emotions that propelled Dr. Treva B. Lindsay to write her latest book, America Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. 

On April 22, media host and scholar Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry joined Dr. Lindsay at Rofhiwa Book Café, a Black owned bookstore, for the Durham launch of America Goddam. There the two discussed Lindsay’s new book and the ways that harm—economic, medical, police, and intimate partner violence—shows up in the lives of Black women.

“I want Black girls and gender-expansive people to curl up with my book and feel like, ‘Wow, she sees these issues that I’ve experienced, that friends have experienced. I’m not alone.'”

Dr. Lindsay has experienced these kinds of violence first hand. Her book names the same truth that the murder of Breonna Taylor and the layers of political violence that followed, revealed to the rest of the world. It’s a truth that Black women have known our entire lives: America doesn’t give a damn about us. The fact that we only learned about Taylor’s killing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd—which occurred three months later—along with the fact that none of Taylors’ killers were sentenced for her death, proves that Black women have never been regarded as full humans, let alone full American citizens.

What makes Lindsay’s book unique from others that deal with the violence against women is its expansive definition of the word “violence” itself. Each chapter of America Goddam addresses a distinct, death-dealing system that causes harm to Black women and gender expressive people.

Lindsay wrote of her book, “I bear witness and with-ness to what’s on these pages.” America Goddam is a mandate from her ancestors to pass down not just her intellectual knowledge of how our country became such a violent place, but her hard-won wisdom on how to survive it.

Lindsay’s own journey began in Washington D.C. “I grew up in Chocolate City when it was still Chocolate City,” she said with a wry chuckle. Her parents, both North Carolina-bred Fayetteville State University graduates, instilled in her both a love for the South and a love for Black people.

Too often, Americans from the North and the West love scapegoating the South as the nation’s Superpredator. America Goddam examines the murders of Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor, two women slain in Southern states. The last chapter of her book, however, is written as a letter addressed to Ma’Khia Bryant, the teenage girl murdered by the police in Columbus, Ohio, where Dr. Treva Lindsay lives and teaches as Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University.

“I always wince when I hear people over-determine that the South is uniquely violent in the context of America,” she explained. “As though once you move from there, somehow the anti-Blackness, the patriarchy and all of that just just disappears and that it’s not entrenched in these other regions across the nation. I’m very intentional in talking about violence that’s happening all over America to really make it America Goddam.”

She also acknowledges that certain cases of violence that stood out to her needed to be examined and written about specifically in their Southern context, which made her conversation with Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry at Rofhiwa all the more significant.

“Each region—and sometimes regions within regions—have their own distinct histories and have their own resistance histories that I think are super important to put [certain cases] into context.” But while the South has a uniquely oppressive history, it also carries an amazing organizing history, rich with incredible traditions of Black radical resistance and reverberated throughout the country.

Lindsay shared the story of Francis Thompson, a trans woman who, in 1866, was one of the first people to testify before Congress about being sexually violated. “It’s a Black woman from the South who is speaking in front of Congress—one hundred plus years before Anita Hill, and later Christine Blasey Ford—about sexual violence. The South to me means so much in terms of the documenting of the violence, and the documenting of the incredible resistance.”

“We see such an acute attack on Black communities, Black kinship networks, Black families, and then at the core of that Black women and girls who feel that disparate impact of this targeted divestment from the public good.”

Lindsay herself is another living example Southern femme resistance, and looms large in the field of Black feminism as a historian and prolific writer. She has also been awarded an array of awards, fellowships, and grants for her work, including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship—and has made a significant impact on her community outside of academia, founding the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative and co-founding the Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House, both in Ohio.

Appearing on my computer screen with a crown of locs down past her shoulders and a stunning dress in a springtime green, her smile accented a soft yet focused countenance. Her presence was powerful, like her words that followed. The depth of her love for Black women and gender expansive people was effervescent.

“This book is for Black girls and Black women,” Lindsay replied with pride when asked about her intended audience of readers. “I wanted them to know that there are those of us who deeply care about our stories, who deeply care about the lives we live before this moment of harm, that deeply care about highlighting and amplifying the work of those who are working to end violence against Black women and girls.”

She has made herself accountable to Black women and girls concerning the impact of America Goddam, too. “If other people find it and can take something away from it, that’s awesome,” Lindsay explained. “But I want Black girls and gender-expansive people to curl up with my book and feel like, ‘Wow, she sees these issues that I’ve experienced, that friends have experienced. I’m not alone.'”

One chapter that especially struck me is entitled “Unlivable: The Deadly Consequences of Poverty.” I had recently been introduced to the term “the feminization of poverty” in my Introduction to Sociology class, and it resonated deeply as memories of various family members, nightly news clips, and my own past experiences of trading WIC vouchers for milk and eggs swirled together in my mind. It also reminded me of one of a famous quotation by one of America’s unsung orators and activists, Coretta Scott King:

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” 

Lindsay was unsatisfied with the treatment of poverty in mainstream conversations about violence against Black women as incidental instead of a system of violence in its own right. “We have millions of Black women and girls who are barely surviving, without resources, but overworked, underpaid, and hyper exploited,” she said.

It is common to hear a poor Black woman or gender-expansive person describe their lifestyle as “making a way out of no way.” Lindsay points out that this effort of navigating the impossible nature of poverty with a disappearing social safety net is just that: Impossible. “We see such an acute attack on Black communities, Black kinship networks, Black families, and then at the core of that Black women and girls who feel that disparate impact of this targeted divestment from the public good.” Here, she is referring to the “welfare queen” and “crack baby” tropes that were created to dehumanize and demonize Black women and girls and turn white voters against everything from public housing, to unemployment insurance, to pell grants.

She also reminds the women, girls, and gender-expansive people of color that we gave birth to the wealth this country works so hard to keep from us. The impact of this lack of access to wealth, plus the hyper-exploitation of our bodies for productive and reproductive labor, results in multiple layers of violence including kidnapping and trafficking, workplace injuries and abuse, mental health decline, and “weathering,” or physiological decline due to chronic racism-induced stress—which, studies have shown, are linked to the most common killers of Black women: heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

In our conversation, Lindsay pointed to the internalization of these tropes as evidence of capitalist violence. “Why have we constructed an imagination in which we maligned welfare, so much to the point that we then do the work to dissociate from it?” she asked, rhetorically. “The impulse to dispute the stereotype of [the welfare queen] as a Black woman still leaves intact the lie that receiving welfare is a negative or something to be maligned for, instead of a part of the robust safety net of a nation that proclaims to care.”

Much in the manner that James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens inspired a generation of Black people to not settle for survival, America Goddam grasped the torch and carried it passionately into the 21st century.

In her endorsement, journalist and author Melissa Harris-Perry says America Goddam is “not a memoir, but it’s personal. This is not journalism, but it reports. It is not an easy book, but it’s necessary. And in the end, Lindsey challenges you to choose hope.”

Dr. Lindsay’s book is, indeed, a work that defies category. It is a tapestry of narratives from the past and the present, from the personal to the global, and from the familial to the political. These narratives tear off the cape of invincibility forced upon Black women in an anti-Black world and instead wrap us in quilts that gather us up in a future safety.

This article was originally published by Scalawag Magazine.

Nurturing a Narrative
By Courtney Napier

What would you do if you held a link to the humanity of a near-mythical figure in history? Through a serendipitous series of circumstances, Victoria Scott-Miller came to possess such a treasure, and it set the course for her future in an unexpected way.

Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, the Scott family lived a life surrounded by art and beauty. Father Victor Scott was a freelance photographer, plugged in to the opulent lifestyle of famous friends like Lena Horne and Al Jarreau. These relationships were exciting, but also opened him up to the world of drugs. By 1986, he and his wife, Pamela, had just celebrated their daughter Victoria’s first birthday and were expecting their second daughter, Jessica. If they were going to survive as a family, they had to make a drastic change. They left behind the life they knew and moved to Philadelphia to begin the road to recovery.

During a rummage trip to the basement of their new home, Victor Scott found a Bible trimmed in gold. His wife noticed right away that it was special. She pleaded with her husband not to pawn the book to satisfy his addiction, but after realizing that this was a losing battle, she insisted on at least keeping the thick stack of papers tucked inside.

The years passed. Victor Scott overcame his addiction, but the couple divorced in the 1990s. Pamela Scott had the papers examined by Sotheby’s—they were indeed valuable, appraised at $50,000—but even though she was by then a single mother and needed the money more than ever, she declined their offer. Her intuition said that this possession was more significant than money. When Victor Scott passed in 2017, Pamela Scott finally gave the papers to her eldest daughter, Victoria Scott-Miller.

A detailed look at the letters belonging to Victoria Scott-Miller. Photos by Eamon Queeney

Scott-Miller immediately went to work to untangle their origin story. The handwritten notes, she soon discovered, were an exchange between legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nathanial Knight, a white bookstore owner and justice of the peace. As described in his biography, Douglass met Knight in his Baltimore bookstore, Greedy Reid’s, at just 14 years old. Defying the law, it was there that Douglass purchased his first book, the Columbian Orator, which had a major impact on the trajectory of Douglass’s life.

In January of 2019, the Miller family was contacted by a prestigious historian, who offered them $2 million for the papers. All they had to do was agree to a non-disclosure agreement concerning her family’s role in the discovery of the letters, allowing the origin story to begin with him and his institution.

The money was tempting. Scott-Miller and her husband, Duane Miller, had just relocated to Raleigh. Miller had been medically discharged from the military, and Scott-Miller had left a teaching position to care for their boys. They were on food stamps, just making ends meet.

Then she had a conversation with John Muller, a Baltimore historian and friend of the Douglass family. “It was as if he delivered a message from our past,” says Scott-Miller. “He said, ‘If you sell these papers, you will no longer be part of this story.’”

She declined the offer with a new thought: “How can we safeguard our legacy the way that my mom did for us?”

Scott-Miller’s son, Langston, had just started writing his own stories. So the Millers went to a bookstore and played a game: count the number of children’s books with Black protagonists on display, extra points if the author is also Black. After over an hour, they counted just five books. At that moment, the vision clarified.

“We thought about what it would look like to have a space that provided books with characters that looked like our children,” says Scott-Miller. “Then we thought about what it would look like if we provided that space.”

Scott-Miller had just received a gift of $250 from her mother to help make ends meet. She decided to use $225 to buy her first round of children’s books that featured Black authors and characters, and the remaining $25 fed her family for the week. Scott-Miller hosted her first pop-up bookshop on May 3 of last year, and Liberation Station was born.

Having a mobile store was a key part of the vision. The Miller family was familiar with moving around in the military, and they also understood that—due to forces like gentrification—neighborhoods of color are constantly changing. “We could set up a bookstore somewhere right now, and that would be great,” she says, “but what about the kids who are displaced and homeless across our city? Why can’t the bookstore be in their hotel room? We have to think about accessibility.”

In just a year, Liberation Station has seen astronomical success. They began a fruitful relationship with VAE Raleigh in August, when the pop-up bookstore earned their Awesome Grant for their Walk & Read program, which hosted storytime gatherings in Chavis Park and Pullen Park. They hosted storytime at SparkCon, and book readings and signings with local authors of color during VAE’s Writing On The Wall celebration. To kick off 2020, Liberation Station hosted a pop-up for the release of My N.C. from A to Z, a children’s book by Michelle Lainer, executive director of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, illustrated by Dare Coulter.

This year, Liberation Station will have programs across the state, including developing culturally sensitive programming for several public schools in Wake County and a creative collaboration with the African American Cultural Festival.

Although her family encouraged Scott-Miller to create Liberation Station, the bookstore is the product of Scott-Miller’s own extraordinary imagination. “I had to practice arriving in my power,” she says. “It’s one thing to know your purpose, but it’s another thing to fully arrive in it. For me, that means recognizing that this is an extension of my brilliance, my giftedness, and my genius, and fully owning that.”
In March, Scott-Miller connected with a second near-mythical figure in history, when Liberation Station received the Obama Foundation certification. Scott-Miller explains: “This certification gives us the opportunity to garner federal partnerships and gives us access to a global network of advocates and mentors.”

What started as a mission to safeguard her family’s legacy became a calling to provide access to literature in which children of color—and everyone connected to them—can see themselves. “The representation we provide through Liberation Station bookstore is necessary,” Scott-Miller says. “We are the living link to this community, and to narratives that must be shared.”

“This is what was bequeathed to us”
By Gregory Orr and Taian Lu

Click the image or here to hear “Careful”.

“Careful”
By Devin Bustin

Careful
You’re about to get an earful
Or even get a mouthful
And wouldn’t that suck?

You’re not
The only story at the bus stop
The only one who needs a day off
But you’re the loud one on the phone

I know
I’m the one who’s got the headphones
With the monologues of my own
But it’s the one that I choose

I’m not
Trying to keep you within earshot
So I’m applying earlock
To hear myself think

Take me
Where I can think clearly
And maybe
I won’t mind my mind

This city
Where everybody sits near me
And I’m learning how to sit beside myself

Tell me
Who’s the tallest in your family
Who’s carrying a baby
Who’s carrying grief

Me, I was an ocean in my past life
I don’t know why I look away
When people wave

Pádraig Ó Tuama on Finding Uncommon Ground

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Pádraig Ó Tuama, originally aired in September of 2019. The Isle of Éire (Ireland) is rich with stories held by the land, both ancient and modern, laden with both fierce culture and colonial violence. Pádraig Ó Tuama perceives these complex layers of history with acute insights into the lingering impacts of imperialism and sectarianism that have divided Ireland. By acknowledging deeply rooted cultural pain, Pádraig calls for Irish, English, and the rest of us to heal by reckoning with the past and embracing the creative potential held within our differences. Enter a poetic journey where the land awaits us beyond the divide of borders, history, and suffering. Ayana and Pádraig explore the language of uncommon belonging; how we must learn from our shame, the life cycle of violence, and how to confront the inheritance of privilege. Poet and theologian, Pádraig Ó Tuama’s work centers around themes of language, power, conflict, and religion. Pádraig presents Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and in late 2019 was named Theologian in Residence for On Being, innovating in bringing art and theology into public and civic life. From 2014-2019 he was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community.