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