Decolonizing the mind to change lives

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

our minds have been colonized

yes yours and mine and no i’m actually

not talking about the next sci-fi

thriller

mine colonizers from outer space so

let me explain where do you start

when you want to take away a person’s

freedom do you

begin by taking away their land their

children

the ways in which they worship or work

no you start at the real frontier of

freedom

a person’s mind you begin extracting

their thoughts and inputting in your own

and that’s

dangerous for all the reasons we might

suspect but also because it limits our

best selves that the best

version of our thinking of our dreaming

and ultimately

the best co-creation of our world

and so in order for us to truly be free

we have to decolonize our minds so i bet

you didn’t think that your mind was

colonized i mean well i certainly didn’t

didn’t

but here’s where my journey actually

began

it began with sister mary pat

so this is sister mary pat and she was

with me during

all of my formative years i mean she was

kind and

generous and loving i mean all the

things you can see in her smile

but she was also incredibly strict i

mean if

you ever aired there was an immediate

and there was a swift

and there’s one other thing i guess i

should tell you

about sister mary pat she’s actually my

mom

okay i’ll let that sink in for a second

um like the good nun she was sister mary

pat was ministering to men in prison and

that’s where she met my dad

and well you might say that things went

just a little bit

off script i mean after all you know

nuns don’t meet their soul mates in

jails because they really already have a

soulmate

i mean if you know what i mean but alas

after about

20 years in the convent sister mary pat

got pregnant with me then decided to

leave the convent

then married my dad and eventually as

you could say

the rest is really history so why do i

tell you this

perhaps your mind has been colonized too

about what a nun

does or doesn’t do or who that white nun

in that picture was and how she relates

to the black woman you see standing

before you

but don’t feel bad it really happens to

all of us but our challenge is to do

better and to be better and to really

free the colonizers ultimately from our

minds

it was thanks to my mom that i actually

realized the whole notion of what it

means to have a colonized nine

you see i began my journey as an

educator

and became a principal shortly

thereafter

i became the principal of finger high

school on the city’s far

south side of chicago and finger was an

incredible

school but it also had incredible

challenges

let me just give you an idea of what

those challenges actually were

so we had about 1400 young people at

finger high school

and out of those 1400 young people on

any given year

only 40 percent of them would ever

graduate

20 percent of them dropped out every

single year

and there were roughly 300 arrests

inside of the school building

i was drawn to finger high school

because it really represented the

merging of two worlds if you will it was

a chance for me to

write the wrongs of what had happened

with my dad and all the systems he had

been involved in

but it was also a chance to practice

some of those

rules and consequences that my mother

drilled into me in terms of making the

world right

and so when i became the principal of

finger high school i walked in that

first day

rules and consequences in hand for my

students

to bring order and along the way i met a

young man one of my students jason

who was absolutely incredible i mean

just picture this

kind and loving young person he was

funny he was smart he loved basketball

he loved the fast food restaurant

wendy’s i mean

he was just the kind of kid that would

even at 15

give you the shirt off his back so

meet jason this is jason

i wonder if this is who you pictured

when i talked about jason

and if not why not

i think it’s because the way our minds

are colonized again

of preconceived notions of people of

what we hear in

media and the inputs that are put into

our mind

i met a lot of young men at finger high

school who were like jason i mean they

might appear

tough and tattooed or even angry or

aloof

but actually they were incredibly

fragile very similar to my dad in a lot

of ways

after about a year and a half at finger

high school

i realized that all those rules and

consequences that i brought to bear

actually weren’t changing those numbers

that i mentioned earlier there was

really no difference

and that’s when the journey of the

decolonization of my mind

actually began i had to reach out to

other people

who were a part of the school community

was social workers and school

counselors community members teachers

parents

and i had to ask why wasn’t it working

and what i found out after digging

deeper was that our young people were

incredibly traumatized

and they were traumatized by an

incredibly harsh

environment i mean just imagine having

to walk

back and forth from school on any given

day

and being concerned about your safety

and not just concerned about your

general safety

but having to be worried about whether

or not you’d make it home

alive not to mention the unrelenting

poverty

that plagued our community once i really

fully took that in i had to change the

question that i was asking

of my young people in the school i used

to wonder like what was all what was

going on

and asked the question what’s wrong with

you

but i had to change the question from

what’s wrong with you

to what’s happened to you

and with a shift in that question i mean

the whole game change we began to

institute things like anger management

and grief counseling we

embedded restorative practices and peace

circles we began to look at academic

interventions in a different way and

really look at the whole child and once

we began to do

that everything shifted with those

numbers

that didn’t move before the needle began

to slowly progress

and before you know it that 40

graduation rate

went to over 80 percent and that dropout

rate

that was once 20 went to down below two

percent

and the 300 arrests

that were happening inside of the school

that first year slowly over time

dwindled down to just 10.

we disrupted the culture of fear and

failure

at finger and we created a

trauma-informed

template that got replicated not just

across the city but ultimately across

the country

but the biggest thing that was

transformed during all of this

was me i still love my mom but she was

no longer

colonizing my mind i went to finger to

transform that school

but that school transformed me

you