DeAmon Harges is interviewed by Lisa Greenwood and Casper ter Kuile on Igniting Imagination Podcast. The 2021 Locke Innovative Leader Award Winner discusses the sacredness of remembering and storytelling as a way to reinforce the innate value of our neighbors.
Having New Eyes
“The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes,” Marcel Proust says. Each day offers an opportunity for re-orientation. So long as yet another chance at turning around, at allowing the scales to fall from our eyes, exists, we have some hope. There is the opportunity to say “yes” to something new; the nagging need to finally say “no” to something not serving us. Thus the work of discovery begins in our own neighborhoods, and in our own souls.
James Baldwin: Speaking Truth in Love
40 years later, Baldwin’s words still sear. They could have been spoken yesterday. This recently uncovered interview is characteristically insightful. Besides its boldness, though, is also its joy. Seeing Baldwin beam at the rehearsal of a play, or relax among his family, is a reminder of the deep hope that pervades the master’s work, however fierce it was.
Watch a Never-Before-Aired James Baldwin Interview From 1979
By Adrienne Westenfeld
Never Aired: Profile on James Baldwin ABC’s 20/20, 1979 from A Closer Look on Vimeo.
In 1979, up-and-coming television producer Joseph Lovett scored the opportunity of a lifetime. Just a few months into his stint at 20/20, ABC’s upstart television news magazine, Lovett was assigned a profile of James Baldwin, pegged to the publication of Baldwin’s nineteenth book, Just Above My Head. Lovett was “beyond thrilled” to tell the titanic American writer’s story—but it’s taken until 2021 for that interview to see the light of day. Buried by ABC at the time, the segment has resurfaced over four decades later, revealing a unique glimpse into Baldwin’s private life—as well as his resounding criticism about white fragility, as blisteringly relevant today as it was in 1979.
Re-Orienting the Critical Race Theory Debate
Common Good co-conspirator Courtney Napier offers a re-orientation. Amid a manufactured controversy about Critical Race Theory, Napier places the focus where it should be: on children, and especially on those children whose parents and elders and ancestors have suffered under previous generations of backlash from the elite. Part analysis, part clarion call, this is certainly one of our favorite pieces of the week.
How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
by Courtney Napier
“Raise up a child in the way that he should go and, when he grows old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6
“It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men.” Frederick Douglass
“To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible—and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people—must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.” James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers, 1963
This is not a research paper. This is a reorientation.
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