Tillumptoteljou.com, the podcast about pop culture, black history, and spirituality. It's about to be a great part. Doctor Till, gone and take it away. Tillumptoteljou.
Hey y'all, hey, it's your girl, Ted. Thank you for joining me for another edition of Tillumptoteljou. The podcast where I share with you all my musings about black history, black culture, and black spirituality. We've not talked yet this year, so happy new year.
Let me say a little something about my posting schedule this year and then we'll get right into it. I really want to focus on getting out one quality episode per month as opposed to every week and then losing my routine. I'm going to be diligent about at least getting one episode out per month. So you can look forward to hearing from your girl, Mothly.
If I have time, we'll do some mini segments in between, but I want to commit to something. I talked to you again on the back end about that. I just wanted to put that out there at front. So here's what I want to cover today.
I want to talk about, of course, the Ed Reed thing. If you heard my last podcast last year about Dion, you probably were waiting for me to say something about Ed Reed. His food was just, I got you today. So we're going to talk about Ed Reed.
We're also going to talk about the Santas and his foolishness with the Florida Department of Education. In concert with the Florida Department of Education, his rejection of the AP course on African-American history and studies. And then I want to nerd out on you just a little bit. We're going to talk about a Culturation, Axiology and all that kind of good stuff.
You ready? Let's just jump right in. So I wish you could under a rock. You know that yesterday, Bethone Cookin University released a public official statement about it's desired not to move forward with the hire of Ed Reed.
I'll let you go on a rock. You also should understand why they felt they need to do that. So if you don't know, you're not paying attention to HBC sports, you know, let me just try to, I'm going to make this concise. So let me say this before I get into this.
I am purposely trying to remain at a macro level. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the details of this particular thing. There are plenty of good podcasts out there, commentators, Twitter threads, social media posts, whatever what have you that explain what's going on. There's a petition out here by the players.
I'm not getting into all of that today. What I prefer to do is to talk about the greater context of what's happening. So I'm going to introduce to everything in its relationship to the other stuff I want to talk about today. So here's the deal, right?
Brother Ed Reed on a golf cart traveled around Bethone Cookin's campus and just lambasted HBCUs for having a broken mentality and mismanaging money and hoarding funds and so on and so on and so on. He went on his crazy rants, which my very first question ironically wasn't about how foolish the rant was against HBCUs. But my very first question was, did he say the contract did I miss something? No, now we know of course he did not sign a contract, which was the root of his frustration, right?
So you interview for this position, they tell you they're going to have it, you're going to get the job, but the paperwork isn't done. Now for those of you who may not know, Bethone Cookman was the victim of two natural disasters. They are trying to rebuild. On top of that, the job search was happening close to time that campus is usually shut down business operations for Christmas.
It wasn't long after we returned to campus in January that his rants started. So realistically, a campus has been the victim of two natural disasters, closes down for Christmas as do most HBCUs, if not all. And then you don't give them time to do anything. And now it's turned into not just a VCU problem, but now you're blaming all 107 HBCUs.
We got a broken mentality. Deon was right. So on and so on and so on. Now, I'm not even getting into the details of what happened at Bethone Cookman because quite honestly, I don't know enough about the details to really have a position on it, right?
Again, there are plenty of you can watch his lives. He came back and apologized for the rant, which means somebody was in his ear saying, you can't say that yet. I just want to talk generally about the lesson that's before our students right now. Who in their right mind would think it would be a good idea to have an unsigned contract and be out here talking foolish and reckless about the place about to employ you?
That's just the HBCUs aside. Who would think that's a good idea? And who would think that's a good role model for your students? Like, what is he going to teach them when he's doing this?
All right? I just want to let's float that. And then when the institution decides not to move forward because of your own actions, you come back and repeat many of the same things you said prior to the apology you issued. So that tells me the second thing.
Your apology was never since he was in the first place. One of the things, Ed Reese, and I said I wasn't going to get into details, but I do want to say this one thing. One of the things Ed Reese said in his initial rant was he had been on campus for a week and had already done more for the institution than anybody else. Where in this world can you work somewhere for a week and know the whole history of the institution, all of its supporters?
Are we that stupid? Or are you that area? Where is the combination of both? Y'all, listen, a week, I want to go back to what I said about Dion.
These men never had the intention, excuse me, they have the rhetoric, but they never had the intention of being institution builders. Because in order to build an institution, you have to properly assess the context. And neither has. Neither has, and then Dion pops up in the line to support Ed Reese and they lamb last at all.
Listen, if this had happened at Florida State, if it had happened at Kennesaw State, if it had happened at a small community college, that's a PWI. What happened at that institution would never be used as an example for all PWIs. You wouldn't take a school in the SEC, if Alabama did something crazy, you wouldn't blame everybody in the SEC. You just wouldn't.
You wouldn't know that situation is unique to that institution. The problem I have with the Ed Reese and Dion Sanders is they talk like they understand that these institutions have structural obstacles to overcome, but they don't operate like they understand that. Now, you want to compare that to something. You compare it to Eddie George and how he's talking about funding.
Not blaming the institution, but talking about the structural inequalities that make it difficult for these institutions to do what it is we need to do. Am I saying that all HBC is a perfect head on? I'm saying that I know better, but I am saying within a week of being anywhere you are unable to properly assess the problems. Unless you go in there, let me tell you what happened.
You went in there expecting deficiency. You went in there expecting pathology. That's anti-Blackness that a lot of Black people hold. A lot of you are in the cult of celebrity and just because Dion said it and now Ed Reed is saying that they are not the first thing HBC is a broken.
They couldn't do the work that they do if they were broken. Let me tell you that somebody who sits on the HBCU campus money through Friday, we are doing our best to overcome the obstacles that are in our place. And a good portion of the people on campus, our first mind, our first thought is to the protection and the academic progress and the social development of our students in these ranks at Dion. Now Ed Reed have the students are marginalized even in their discussion.
There is a lack of accountability on Ed Reed's part. You can't try to get a job at Chick-fil-A and talk reckless about Chick-fil-A all on social media and expect Chick-fil-A to follow through with the hire. Come on. Do you really want that as your model?
Now some folks are out here saying the players want it. Listen now, sometimes we have to make decisions that young people don't have the information to make. Do they like Ed Reed? It sounds like some of them do.
Do I have a problem with them having a relationship with Ed Reed? No, not at all. But are they thinking about what we are thinking about? Which is you cannot go through life believing that you can operate in the way that this man is operating.
He is not a good role model. He is not a good fit. HBCUs are about education, not just about sports. And so if I'm looking at the holistic education of this athlete, I can't have somebody in there that can't even teach them basic business logic of you can't be out here lambasting a future employee.
Come on, y'all. And let me say this, because I said I was going to keep it at the macro level. One of the most dangerous things to PWIs, athletically, that happened when Dion first went to Jackson State, was that he began to draw certain caliber of athletes back to HBCUs, right? Five star recruits were coming back to HBCUs.
If that trend had continued, what would have happened to PWIs sports and the money associated with it? I just want you to think generally about that. So if I want to disrupt that thing, what do I do? I sow seeds of discontent.
Yeah, some of us have allowed ourselves to become pawns in a game. And it's all based on the fact that we expect black pathology and deficiency. I'm going to talk to these men. Somebody got to have a conversation with them, right?
I'm going to get to the part that I want to get to. Let me just say how all this is linked in my head. Did y'all see the five cops arrested in Memphis for beating another five black male cops arrested for beating to death a black male motorist for a traffic stop? Did y'all see that?
They've not released a body cam footage, but it has to be horrible if they were arrested and terminated so quickly. We know there's some race at play there too, but I'm just saying. There's a divisiveness happening in our communities that we got to get a hold to. If you're on social media, there's this passport bro phenomenon with black women and black men eating each other up on social media all day.
There's some divisiveness, some seeds of discontent. We got to pay attention to how we are being pitted against one another and who benefits from us being who benefits when you attack 107, historically black colleges and universities, because you didn't get the football coach job. Who benefits from that? The black students at the institutions don't benefit.
The black alumni don't benefit. The institution itself doesn't benefit. Y'all keep saying you want these institutions to grow, but you can put this kind of media. You're not trying to solve the problem.
Anyway, I'm going to head myself. I'm going to head myself. You're not trying to solve the problem if that's what you're doing. All right?
Now I also wanted to say something about De'Andria. Is that how you say your name? De'Andria Sanders, who is now out here talking about it was shooting on Jackson State's campus every month. The campus wasn't safe.
So stop the lies. Stop the lies. Does this young lady know that we can look that up? And why are you lying?
I'm not with that. Let me keep going. Then we got Cop City being built in Atlanta. Y'all saw the protesters this week, downtown to express their discontent with Cop City being about it.
Not only is it an environmental threat to the city, y'all is urban warfare. We can't let them build that. But I want to say this about letting them be. Y'all Atlanta can't be Wakanda and be building the enemy in the midst of Wakanda.
You understand what I mean? How can you have a city that we want to believe is this black mecca that is doing something that's so anti-black, so anti-human as to develop a cop city where cops will be trained in the middle of a forest displacing black families, black businesses and the trees, bushes, the natural life we need to be healthy to build cops city and in the black mecca. Come on y'all. All my skin and we're letting it ride.
We're letting it ride. Now let me tell you why I think we're letting it ride. There is a concept called a culture. This is the part where I was going to nerd out for a minute.
There is a concept called a culture. So culture is largely acquired in two different ways. In culture, when you tend to learn your culture from within your cultural group. So you're watching my cooking greens, you're going to church on Sunday to mosque or whatever your family does.
You go into the river on Fridays, you wear white on Fridays, whatever. You're learning cultural traditions, characteristics and practices from people from your cultural group. You're acquiring the norms, the values, so on and so forth from inside your culture group. That's in culture.
Now there is another thing that happens which is a culture which is when the dominant group influences our cultural practices. I'm an educator. So here's my bias. When I pay attention to socialization, the incarceration and acculturation of children, I pay a lot of attention to what happens in the schools because for many of us, schools have our children more than we do.
Children are in these schools. They're receiving direct instruction. Whereas in culture, it tends to be less explicit, it's more implicit. What they're learning in the schools is propaganda in a lot of cases and they're learning it and they're learning it through repetition and it's sticking.
That's acculturation. What acculturation does, again, is to help these students be socialized into the characteristics, norms and traditions of the dominant group, the group that controls education. All right, now follow me. There's a concept called axiology.
It means what's important to this particular cultural group. Africans and their descendants for hundreds of thousands of years have been communal people. We've been cooperative people. We value the group over the individual, but we don't discount the individual.
The individual is a necessary part of the collective, but we are traditionally socialized to operate as collectives. All right. Westerners, on the other hand, Western society's whiteness tends to be individualistic, the collective be damned, right? Which is why capitalism is a westernized phenomenon.
Most people of color, most indigenous groups tend to be more social in their leanings. All right. Now, follow me. Because we, for hundreds of years, had more control over the socialization of our children, we maintained that center of collectiveness.
And if you talk to an old head, they talk about being on code. Now, if you're old enough and you spend a lot of time with some old heads, you know what that means. If you don't know what it means, let me tell you. Uncode means if I got a problem with you and you're black, we selling that problem in the house.
We don't go out. We don't air our dirty laundry. If I got a problem with this HBCU and how they handle in their business, I'm at alumni meetings. I'm at business meetings.
I'm on campus donating. I'm on campus in service, but I'm not telling the press nothing. I'm not putting it on social media for it to be shared because I'm on code, right? Because I value the collective.
I know what my individual voice can do to damage the collective. Y'all, we not socializing our children like that anymore. That's why you got to add read. That's why you got to Deion Sanders.
HBCUs have been institutions that teach us about code and the importance of it. Collectivism is imperative to African survival. It always has been. And thus, it is a place where we are vulnerable to attack because a lot of people that watch us and know our history better than some of us do understand that when we are united, what was the chair of people united will never be defeated.
You think they didn't hear you? Your ancestors when they were saying that? So now they can throw you $5 million. You go to Colorado and not only you, but all your children, lamb last, the institution that gave you a chance and not just that institution, but all 107.
Because now it's an HBCU thing and not a Jackson State thing or it's an HBCU thing and not a Bethune Cookman thing. Come on, y'all. We not on code. We not on code.
We're not on code. If we are in positions of political power in Atlanta and in some of these funding sponsors, companies and corporations and allowing cops to even be conceptualized, it should have made it off nobody's dream table if the right people were in the room. Some of y'all ain't on code. Harriet would have left a whole lot of y'all behind because you don't even understand the code.
You don't understand what it means to have a code because you have become so individualistic that you're not thinking about anybody else but yourself. Now, let's go to Rhonda Santis. How does it happen that an entire people lose the way they have lived for hundreds of thousands of years? You know how?
You no longer control the socialization of your children. So AP College Board, the most prestigious courses in the United States spent years developing a curriculum. Y'all, this one, let's throw up some together. Years of creating the curriculum is being tested in other states and the Department of Education in Florida, which means it's not just one man.
All right? Because the Santis has easily made a supervillain in this story. But I want you to know the Department of Education released a statement, not the Governor's Office. All right?
Because I think one of the things they don't like about us studying critical race theory is critical race theory tells you how to teach you how to look at systems. Systems have parts. And so as long as we're focused on the Governor's Mansion, we are not paying attention to how the parts of it work. They said it has little educational value.
And if you're on Instagram, go look at my stories. I posted and I put it in the show, I linked to it in the show notes. I posted what they're complaining about in the curriculum. Y'all, there is misunderstandings in what the, listen, they, some of the things that they say they have a problem with are literally untrue.
I don't know who your experts were. They sought to vet this curriculum, but they lied wrong. Just like every loud wrong. The danger is though, we don't have the power to socialize our children.
Let me tell you something. If you are leaving, and I'm saying this as an educator, if you are leaving the education of your children up to schools, public or private, your food, am I saying pull your students out of public schools? That is absolutely not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you must be supplementing.
You must be reviewing and you must be working to expose your learners to our cultural realities and understandings. We have philosophies. We have sciences. We have religions.
We have codes of ethics that our children need to be learning about. They're not going to get it in public schools. They're not getting it now. They're not getting it now.
But this glimpse into what Florida is doing, now you know they're not going to get it. Not even close to what they're getting now. Because they have found it is too easy to disrupt us if they control the socialization of our children. We have work to do.
Listen, this thing has left me in a tizzy. If you can't tell from today's episode. I'm in a tizzy. Because I'm trying to figure out, as an educator who works on HBCU, who has studied axiology and has been socialized by my elders to be on cold.
What am I supposed to do? I know I'm not alone in that. I know it's a lot of us looking around like, what am I supposed to do? In this moment, what?
So let's turn back to our cultural way of being. Our eceli. Aceli is what I remember I mean with Kali. Our cultural seed.
Our center. What does it mean to be African, right? We have to return to that. So let's go back to what I said earlier.
Africans are inherently communal people. We believe in the collective. But we also believe in something called expressive individualism. What that means is in order for the community, for the communal, the collective to be healthy.
Each person must express their individuality, their individualism, in a way that supports the collective, not in opposition to, but supports. We don't necessarily need you to start another nonprofit or another podcast about HBCU or another newsletter or another luncheon or another retreat. We don't necessarily need you to do that. What unless that's your thing?
That might be your thing. I'm not telling you not to do your thing. What we also need, even if you do that, what we need, though, is for you to be in concert and communication with other people who have singular passions and know how. You know what we need to develop?
A black think tank in every major urban area. I would argue every community needs one. But you need a black think tank. And I'm not talking about just skin folk.
I'm talking about people committed to the community and to our future. We cannot, you know how we say black people are in the future. I believe that. I'm Afrofuturist.
I believe black folk in the future. What kind, though? That's where the work is. I don't want just the skin folk in the future now.
You got to go with some substance and I'm worried. You know, when I entered into HBCUs, there were 120 something. Now there are 107. It is unacceptable for it to be attacked by people who look like me.
And somebody told me, again, I'm not in the micro level and y'all correct me if I'm around. Somebody told me, read parents or HBC grads. I'm going to need you to pull your son aside. It has some conversations about business and institutional legacies and institution building and code.
Some of us need to have those conversations in our groups. We need to understand. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about how we got to figure this thing out because if you're one of my students, y'all know I teach warriors for the classroom. If you're one of my students who has graduated, you know that I've taught you that in our lifetimes we're going to see the end of public education.
I just know it. Are we ready? Are we working in community and collective to be ready? We got to.
We're out here rightly lamenting how healthcare turns its eye to black pain. Black mothers are dying during child. It's unacceptable. So I'm so happy that there is an increase in visibility of black dualism midwives.
I hope more of us turn to those career fields. More of us that care about the community. I love that urban gardening and urban farming is becoming a thing. But don't forget your brothers and sisters out here in rural areas that have the space and the land, generations of knowledge of how to go from green.
Are you in collaboration and collective in conversation with them? Y'all, I'm in the middle of Southwest Georgia. Rural, Southwest Georgia. A lot of farmland around me.
You know how hard it is when we get fresh fruits and vegetables that don't come from publics? That's almost a more and more. We have to return to some of the things that we've held. A lot of us are moving towards, and I love it.
I'm moving towards ancestral reverence. I'm moving towards learning more about black history. Those things can't be in memorial only. They are supposed to guide our daily living.
That's why I'm one of my pet peeves of celebrating the first black list. What does that teach you to do? We study history. We study our ancestors.
We revere our ancestors for lessons on how to get this thing right. Anyway, let me look at my notes. Did I cover everything I wanted to cover today? Yeah, because my last question, which is the question I asked you, is what's our individual response that supports the collective moving forward?
If black people in the future, you tell me how we make sure it's the ones we want. Y'all have a good one. Tell them to tell you.