[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 380 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Marcus Croom joins me to talk about how to discuss race, racism, and politics in education.

[00:00:15] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:25] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. As a racial critical researcher and an experienced educator, Dr. Marcus Croom’s mission is to cultivate more human fulfillment and mitigate human suffering.

This means that he uses research and experience to help individuals and groups develop racial literacies and thereby, advance the justice, anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of schools, universities, businesses, organizations, and communities. Publications from Dr. Croom scholarship include Real Talk? How to Discuss Race, Racism, and Politics in 21st Century American Schools, Black Lives Matter Panel: A Generous Invitation to The Archive, coauthored and published in Literacy Research Theory Methods and Practice. A case study from Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” with Practice of Race Theory published in The Journal of Negro Education.

If “Black lives matter in literacy research,” then take this racial turn: Developing racial literacies, published in The Journal of Literacy Research and many more so of which you’ll hear about in this episode and can learn more about on the show notes page for this episode @teachinginhighered.com/380, but for now please join me in welcoming to the podcast Dr. Marcus Croom. Marcus, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:29] Dr. Marcus Croom: Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here with you Bonni.

[00:02:31] Bonni: The bio that I just read really struck me in my gut, and especially this part from it that I’d love to have you talk a little bit more about. The part I read that really struck me is that you are about cultivating more human fulfillment and mitigating human suffering. Would you share about that, Marcus?

[00:02:52] Marcus: Yes. That came to me actually while I was a doctoral student working with a group of African American boys who were elementary and high school aged boys in a summer program that we had developed at University Illinois Chicago under the direction at that time of Dr. Alfred Tatum. Since that time of crystallizing what is my mission, what is my work about it, it’s come all the way into understanding my scholarship, the way that I live my life.

In simple terms, it’s focused on or relates, I should say, to the way that race and race practices have had such almost indescribably will impact on human lives, on human possibilities. You really can’t wrap your head around the way that race and race practices, especially practices that are harmful, and not to good effect have impacted lives. When I say more human fulfillment and mitigating human suffering, I do think about it in broad terms but I am thinking specifically about the way that race itself has had such an effect and such a role on determining human fulfillment in ways that it really didn’t deserve to, and certainly, creating harm, creating suffering that was not deserved because of racial rationale. That’s a quick way to talk about it.

[00:04:26] Bonni: In your book very early you have two epigraphs, would you read them for us?

[00:04:32] Marcus: Sure. Happy to do that. These are two epigraphs are from Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois. I began the book this way. The first one was written in 1903. He wrote the function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a center of polite society, it is above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life and adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

The second epigraph was written in 1906. A lot of people think about Du Bois’ 1903 publication. He was a Black folk but he went on to write a great deal after in 1903. In 1906 he wrote this, either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

[00:05:32] Bonni: Thank you. I know you already touched on this a little bit. A lot of being able to cultivate more human fulfillment and being able to mitigate human suffering comes down to racial literacies. Would you talk about what racial literacies are and when or when not we actually reach the end of this? Are we ever fully literate, or is this continuous work?

[00:06:00] Marcus: Absolutely, yes. It is not something that we check off or comply to and move on. That’s not at all the way it works. I want to start by making clear that racial literacies is not new. The term is new, is something that I’m adding to the literature and hopefully, to human knowledge and the way that we understand and make sense of the world, but racial literacies itself is actually something that goes way, way, way back.

We see evidence of it. I just published recently in 2020 a case study about the life of Kossula also known as Cudjo in Zora Neale Hurston’s own research that she actually completed in the 1930s but the work wasn’t published until 2018. We see evidence from the life of Kossula of him practicing and demonstrating racial literacies. We certainly see it in the work of Dr. Du Bois Boys, Carter G Woodson, Ida B. Wells. The list goes on and on.

There are musicians that evidence the practices associated and that are included in what I define as racial literacies. I want to make that point very clear that when we talk about racial literacies we’re not talking about something just came to be in the 21st century or the 20th century, it’s not something that just came to be in response to the horrific murder of Mr. George Floyd and all the other kinds of things that we’re wrestling with right now or even January 6th, it’s not a recent thing. This is an ongoing thing.

What we mean by racial literacies is when we think and do race for good and not harm. When we think and do race in ways that nurture and support human beings rather than harm and undermine human thriving, undermine human potentials and so forth, human dignity et cetera

[00:07:56] Bonni: The title of your book resonates with me for so many reasons but one that really starts at the very beginning is that it has a question mark in it. The question mark comes after something you call real talk would you say what real talk is and how would we know if we were doing it or not.

[00:08:16] Marcus: There’s a couple of ways. You could think of it as a double on contra. Real talk goes back to discourse communities that I’m familiar with and I talk about my own life and my own history and how I came to write this book in 2021 as a Black male from the South groomed in Black worlds and spaces, Black legacies of excellence, historically Black colleges, universities all those things, the language, the beautiful gems and treasures that we have had passed down to us as African Americans, all of that is encapsulated in that term real talk.

For those who are familiar with that discourse community they’ll recognize it immediately. The other way to think about real talk as a question is because it’s actually the end of the very first line of the book. I literally asked, are we going want to have a real talk? It’s the last two words of a question because it really is open for us to make the decision about, and that gets into how I think about race and race practice. It’s up to us to think and do race in ways that are beneficial and are good, as opposed to doing in ways that are harmful or to ill effect and ill consequences.

It’s a double meaning there. I’m revealing my own linguistic background, and my own community, and my own cultural connections, but I’m also raising a really important question that really, again, is a very old question as Du Bois’ epigraphic points out, this is not the first time the United States of American, in particular if not the world has been asked to really face some real truths and real facts with veracity, with honesty, with courage. I’m a part of that grand tradition that’s here to do it again.

[00:10:09] Bonni: I had the honor of getting to work with 13 new faculty members at my university this past week. We had such a rich conversation, and came out of the area having to do with self-efficacy and a sense of belonging in the classroom. It was fascinating to me because it was this tension between some of the people in our cohort were describing the importance of their professors telling them that they believe they’re capable of this work and yet– it was in the context of Zoom so you have the private chat going on. I had a colleague of mine, a dear friend for many years, she was writing in there. “Oh God, I’m concerned that if White people hear this, that they’re going to be like, all I have to do is stand up in front of my class and go, I believe in you, like a cheerleader or something like that and that they can check the box off and their work is done and they’ve done all the great things that they should be doing.”

Then I had a chance to have a follow up conversation over lunch where we can really just, whoever wants to share, wants to share. One of the people at the lunch table was talking about, he says, “Oh no. When I said that, I didn’t mean in front of the class. I meant right down the street,” because he he’s a graduate of our university. He said, “No, there used to be a coffee shop right there.” I’d sit there. He talked about that for him as a Latino man having a White man who was in a position of power like that, tell him specifically that he believed in him that it actually helped him navigate, at the time, predominantly White faculty where perhaps there wasn’t those kinds of conversations where a faculty member might boost up his own sense of belonging and self-efficacy.

Anyway, I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about any dynamics that you see where, I guess, just this idea that we’re not done sometimes, that it’s so easy, I think– Maybe I’m just speaking of [laughs] Whiteness here, for people to get tempted thinking it’s over, that this is a checklist, that this is not easy, but just, “Oh, I’ve done it. I’ve accomplished this.” Could you share a little bit about this just messiness and we’re not ever done, and also anything that strikes you as far as the difference between who it is talking about these racial literacies.

[00:12:43] Marcus: Yes. There’s two different things I want to lift up here. I’ll just take a moment and read it. The book, if you take a look right before the contents page, there’s a dedication. The dedication reads this way, “Racial literacies and post-White futures for us all.” The important thing about that is when we think about what it means to be post-White, what you have to understand is that there has historically been two broad ways that Black, indigenous, people of color, there’s a few different ways that we talk about people who are not regarded as racially White.

There have been two broad ways that we’ve typically talked about them, thought about them, imagined them in human history and specifically United States. One is according to the deficiency philosophy. It really means exactly what it sounds like, where, and this is also a quote that I can draw on later that’s also in the book from Du Bois, that everything that is the worst, the pathological, the mindless, the non-literate, all those horrible stereotypes, all those horrible fake ideas about what it means to be Black, for example, or what it means to not be White more broadly, all of that is encapsulated under this deficiency philosophy. It showed up in so many different forms and it’s so many different ways across medium, across texts. It’s a pervasive idea.

That’s important to lay out there because there’s another perspective or philosophy that categorically rejects the deficiency philosophy, and that’s the vindication philosophy. We see evidence of that, as I said before, in Du Bois’ work Woodson and many, many other scholars over many years, long before critical race theory came about and all these other kinds of things, multiculturalism, all that stuff.

The vindications philosophy predates all of that and really is the antecedent out of which all of that later work would arise, even if people don’t necessarily know their history. When I write about that in my publications, I make the point that we have to reorient ourselves out of every form of the deficiency philosophy and into instead the post-White vindications philosophy. The post-White is important because it’s important to not only to be vindications, but also to decenter the idea that White and Whiteness is the norm, is the standard by which we should guide ourselves, judge ourselves, that we should aspire to.

We do this in all sorts of ways. We do it certainly in terms of beauty standards, for example. We do it in terms of what we think a good school or bad school is, to use a really practical example. We do this idea of White and White as above anything that’s not White in all sorts of ways. The post-White orientation is about rejecting all of that because it never has been true, is the first thing. Even though it was made to appear as if it was true. It was never true.

Humanity has always been broader and larger than whatever White is supposed to mean at the time, and it certainly has changed over many years. The post-White orientation is really an invitation for us to get back to reality, so to speak, in a broad view of human history, in a broad sense of what it means to be human and not this really narrow, limited, false view, that’s based in usually five European countries, the United States, a very truncated understanding of what it means to be human, a very truncated understanding of what it means to be civilized, literate, and all those kinds of things.

It’s a really fundamental and deep shift that this is tapping on, but you can’t necessarily jump straight to all of that at first, but it absolutely it is important to set from the very beginning that this is a project that’s going to ask you to reorient yourself out of ways that you’ve been socialized into understanding the human beings around you, the world around you, even yourself, and reorient away from that towards something that is far more justifiable, far more true, far more helpful not only for those who you’re interacting with, but even for you.

This is a project that requires serious attention and a deep engagement to rethink what it means to be human, and rethink what it means to be who I understand myself to be.

[00:17:36] Bonni: If we are then to engage in some aspect of this project, it’s going to take planning. You talk about that in terms of structure, and then you also speak about it in terms of this is not one event. Would you speak about both of those aspects of planning, both the timing and also the structure?

[00:17:59] Marcus: Yes. In the book, the very first step of the real talk protocol is to plan. That planning process is intended to do two things at once. If we have been socialized across all racial groups into certain ways of understanding race and have assumed that racialized logic then begins to tell us about other people, other things in the world, about God, about all sorts of stuff that we think race informs in some way. Really, we believe it informs it in very serious ways, even if it’s not necessarily true.

If we think like that, then we have to interrogate ourselves. The planning process is not just planning for the sake of carrying out the real talk. The planning process is also to interrogate who you are, who is the human being that would like to carry out the real talk protocol? Have you questioned yourself? Have you examined yourself? Have you addressed whatever assumptions, false ideas, and false notions that may be driving and may have been driving you up to this point in your life?

On one hand, it’s interrogating and informing the person who’s carrying out the real talk, but it’s also beginning to shape and structure what is the public issue that I’m going to address? What am I actually going to have this discussion about? Then when am I going to have it? Why at that time? Why am I picking this time to talk about it as opposed to some other time?

Again, this is about interrogating yourself, what’s going on with you that you want to do this at the time that you set out to do it? Who’s going to be involved in that real talk? What types of materials will I need? How will I prepare that ahead of time? What are the sources that I’ll need to draw upon and all of that? All that stuff is a part of that planning phase. You also decide the structure as well to get to the other part worth talking about.

Am I going to structure this as a class conversation? Is it going to be structured in an online environment, a face-to-face environment, hybrid in some way? Is it going to be a team effort where a team of teachers, let’s say a grade level team, is working on this issue together, or is it an event or are we just going to have a school-wide event or an after-school event or whatever?

You decide about structural kinds of things all within that planning stage but, again, it’s two-sided. It’s to interrogate, prepare, think through, spend time examining the person who would like do the real talk, but it’s also at the same time, getting informed, gathering sources, structuring, all those things so that by the time you finish that planning phase and you ready to do your preview step, that’s step two, you’re ready to do the preview, you’ve got a really clear game plan for what you’re going to do and why.

That’s why that previous step is important because as you prepare to actually carry out the real talk, which is the last three steps is actually where you actually launch and carry out the real talk, you do need to be able to articulate why it’s important and have a community within your school or within the grade level, whatever situation you find yourself, you really do need to have a community around you and some support because you should expect some difficulties. These are controversial issues. Public issues are typically controversial issues, and especially when they start filtering into school as many often do.

[00:21:30] Bonni: That’s the perfect segue then for us to talk about this tension between if I’ve got a good plan, I thought through the structure, as you described it, if I’ve done my homework well on those things, we can’t expect that that’s going to be enough. As you said, we need to expect those difficulties yet still persist. One of the approaches that you talk about, I really could have used probably 15 years ago because I get scared.

I still get scared, but now I just know I have my tools so it makes me a little bit less fearful, but I still it does become– I’m afraid of my own anger in these situations, but then we can get past that when we have an approach that we know we can have more trust in than ourselves. I don’t know if that makes any sense when I say it that way.

[00:22:17] Marcus: No, it does because when we think about other fields, for example, let’s just use planes because I as a teenager, I was a part of something called Civil Air Patrol or CAP. One of the cool things about being a part of CAP was that you learn how to fly Cessna planes. One of the things that you learn in the process of figuring out what it takes to fly a plane safely and so forth is that you have a checklist.

You use a checklist to go through everything you’re supposed to do to make sure, like, for example, is the gas mix okay? Have I checked the wheels? Have I done– Then you yell prop clear. You have all these things you do to make sure that the process of starting the plane, taking off, flying, and landing works well. Same thing happens in medicine and other fields.

The real talk protocol, I absolutely think your point, yes. I want to rely on a protocol, a systematic approach that’s laid out rather than simply relying on off the cuff or less well thought through or spelled out kinds of approaches that can go left, if you will, pretty quickly if we don’t have something to really guide us and help us to remember this, that, or the other details we’re trying to do this important work.

[00:23:37] Bonni: Oh, thank you so much for saying that. I really appreciate the connection with the preciseness that a checklist has and also that it can override whatever may or may not be going on in our own brains, because I do think some of this is my own default settings, because at this point it’s no, it’s not about you, it’s about them. It’s like shut that part of my brain off that goes into the rage and is fearful of that rage and then turn the part on that’s going to be more helpful in both the short and the long run.

To that end, one of the things on my own checklist I wish I would have had back then when I had so many failures around these things, is this idea of a pin up and return. Could you talk about what that is and why we might want to use it?

[00:24:26] Marcus: Yes, and I just want to be clear, do not think of the real talk protocol as a checklist, that is not the point. I’m making a metaphorical connection. It’s not literally a checklist. This is a protocol. This is a living process that systematically walks you through the things that you need to consider in a reliable way that helps you to feel confident, to be critical and so forth. I want to make that clarification, not because of you, but just want to make sure the listeners understand the point.

Yes, so getting to the pin up and return, that’s really a key item that I think calls out something that sometimes people know and some people probably do it in ways that they don’t necessarily call it that, but it’s so vital to understand the difference between concluding a real talk and resolving a public issue. Those are not the same thing.

On some level, I think a lot of educators and a lot of people broadly get that, but to have it really explicitly laid out that, listen, you’re going to plan this conversation and expect that at some point, in some way, you’re going to have to end the conversation, but it’s not going to be a haphazard willy-nilly end, it’s going to be a thoughtful end that creates the possibility for us to return to it because in all likelihood, by the nature of it being a public issue, by the nature of many of these public issues existing long before any of us were born, what’s the likelihood that we’re going to bring it to a resolution in one conversation, or even in some cases, a series of conversations?

That’s why the pin up and return is important as an explicit way of making it clear you have not failed if you’ve had this real talk and it all didn’t get sorted out, you have not failed. You’ve done an outstanding job and now you set yourself up for further success, again, through your planning process if you take these next steps in light of what you learn. One of the things I point out in the book is that educators who take up this challenge will need to listen and learn, unlearn and relearn as human beings in addition to who they may be as professionals.

You’re going to listen and learn and process during the real talk along with the participants that you’re having this with. Certainly, teachable moments, well, absolutely. You’re going to be alert to the possibility of teachable moments that popped up outside of whatever you had planned to say or whatever you had planned to address, or whatever the structure had planned to be. You’re going to respond to that. That’s the teaching and learning.

At the same time, you’re also going to know that this is not finished. We’re not done with this, but we do have the codes because either the bell is about to ring or we’ve only allotted an hour to talk, or whatever the reality is on the ground that creates an end point that you’ve got to address and respond to, but that doesn’t mean that we’re done with this. That’s why it’s important to understand this is not a checklist, but it is a protocol that sets up the possibilities and the conditions for success if you use it.

[00:27:35] Bonni: You used the word confidence, that a tool like this can give us some more confidence, and part of that to me is knowing that I’m part of a larger system. When we collaborate as colleagues and we have the real talk together on a regular basis and are able to recognize our smallness in it, but small steps through multiple people can add up to a lot, but then also what an absolute blessing it is to be able to hear from people or see their expressions of the way they see the world in other ways, such as social media, and to recognize that this is a long game, as you said, we’re not going to do it in one class session. We’re most certainly, probably not even going to do it just in the years that we might get to walk alongside some of these individuals.

That, to me, just brings me great hope and I’m appreciative of those opportunities. Speaking of those opportunities, you talk about the difficulties. You describe it as being hard to imagine what a post-White world would look like, and you write “I’m resolute in 2021 because the post-White future that I see would become a reality through the same processes that have created our past and present finite accumulated thought and practice. As we close this portion of the episode and before we go to our recommendations, would you reflect a bit on this idea of finite accumulated thought and practice?

[00:29:07] Marcus: Yes, and so at that point of the book what readers will have experienced by then is a real world demonstration that I include so that not only do I invite readers to make a decision, are we going to have a real talk? Are you going to have a real talk? That question that’s on the title of the book, real talk, it’s an invitation. Once you’ve made your decision and I hope you will, I felt that I owed readers a glimpse at what it would look like in real world conditions, today’s real world conditions if they indeed took this challenge on.

I took the legislation that’s been already talked about publicly in the State of Tennessee that was recently passed this this year, and I use that legislation has a real world conditions kind of demonstration of what to think about on a state level, certainly, but it also would apply on a local level as well, if you do, indeed, decide to take this on. That legislation has certain language and policies and prescriptions about what can and can’t be talked about so forth so I just demonstrate if you use the real talk protocol, according to what this legislation says, you haven’t done the thing that they’re saying you’re not allowed to do.

In fact, the real talk protocol creates some opportunities to not only think about, talk about, discuss, be informed about public issues, but the real talk protocol can be applied to interrogating and thinking through the curriculum itself, the legislation itself and so forth. I felt that I owed readers a real world right now glimpse of what this means, not within the neat margins of a book, but within the messy realities of the world in which we live.

That brings me to the next step of really getting into why I felt what is important to talk about the post-White future that I see, because there’s obvious reasons to feel deflated, to feel degrees of regression, retrenchment, despair, concern, et cetera. There are real reasons for all of that. If we look back historically, that’s not a new thing. Moving toward better human conditions, moving toward broader regard, broader respect, broader recognition of all human beings has always been a push and pull, advancement retrenchment, that sort of thing.

I don’t at all deny the difficulties, the ongoing and unforeseen problems that are likely on the horizon. I don’t deny any of those things, but I don’t limit my vision to that. I see something on the horizon, so to speak, that is much better than what we’ve had in the past and even what we have today, and a part of where that optimism, or I shouldn’t say optimism, I don’t want to be too idealistic.

A part of the hope, and I mean that in a Black tradition of hope, I’m going to be clear about that, a part of the hope that informs where I’m coming from is because I’m drawing on a grand tradition that made it possible for me to be where I am today. My forebears and ancestors didn’t necessarily see this moment that I’m in today, but that didn’t mean that they resigned, gave up, relented to forces that were not for their good and were not in their best interest, and so I’m drawing on that historically, but I’m also drawing on current day issues.

For example, the literal demographics of the United States and the globe are pointing us to a very different understanding of demographics who’s going to be politically important to consider, like at one time everybody was talking about the baby boomers because of their literal numbers. Well, that same shift is happening in some other ways, with regard to racial demographics and other differences that are being made in the United States and across the world.

I’m drawing on current realities that are indicating that the idea that White and Whiteness above all is not tenable. It never should have been the case in the first place, but I’m seeing the possibilities that it’s not a tenable thing to expect to have continue. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that we’re all angry at White people and we want to hurt White people, no. It’s an interesting thing when you go from, to use this analogy, to go from having everything to having a share and you feel somehow offended, or you feel somehow put upon, you feel somehow deflated when all you’ve been asked to do is share.

We’re not saying you can’t have anything, we’re saying we need to share as human beings in terms of the racial logics that have created the conditions that we’re facing. Like I say, when I talk about the post-White future, I’m talking about things that I’m drawing on historically, but I’m also drawing on what I see in the makings and reactions to those makings.

That’s the reason why, again, I’m resolute about what what the future holds because I really do believe our racial past and our racial present doesn’t have to be our racial future, I don’t know if it will change, I don’t have a crystal ball, but based on how I theorize race and how I understand the world, there’s absolutely nothing stopping human beings in the United States, especially, from making a different racial future than our racial present or our racial past. There’s nothing preventing that except us, if we choose, and that’s again, while the book is an invitation, it’s a question.

One concrete step that we can take toward that different racial future, is to begin to have a real talk about what is as opposed to validating and somehow giving credence to unreal talk.

[00:35:27] Bonni: This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. My overall recommendation has to do with puppies, not really literal ones, but figurative ones. I’d like to invite everyone to evaluate your puppies. My colleague, Renea Brathwaite, who’s actually been on the show before, he told me a joke or a reference that I had not heard, but he says he’s heard all the time. He grew up in Barbados, so he says maybe it came from there, but it was this idea that we can get all different gifts in life.

He mentioned you can get a free lunch, you can get free beer sometimes, and then there’s getting a free puppy, and the idea here is, of course, that a puppy over its lifetime might need out 3000 hours of time and money to take care of this puppy. Ever since we have started to discuss puppies around some of the leadership of my institution, we’re all sending each other pictures of adorable puppies and making jokes about sending the puppies, not the real puppies, but the figurative puppies to go live on a farm somewhere.

I’m link to a post in the show notes from Seth Godin and it’s titled, Can we get a puppy? In this particular case, he’s talking about social media and how for some of us social media becomes a puppy, and we don’t realize it seems like a cute, adorable wonderful way to spend our time and then doesn’t end up often nearly providing the value that one would hope to get out of their puppies.

I’m going to take it a little bit broader and suggest that now would be a great time to evaluate our puppies in general. What I mean by that, the things that we spend time on, can we be more intentional about that time and investment, and we’ve really got to scrutinize these things now perhaps more than ever. That’s going to be my encouragement to you today, to evaluate your puppies and, of course, also to read that great blog post it’s very short by Seth Godin. Now, Marcus, I’m going to turn it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:37:36] Marcus: I’m going to start with at my university, Indiana University Bloomington, Shannon Sipes, through The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning has been providing an annual summer reading list for the past five years, and so I’ll provide all these recommendations to you Bonni so you can provide the clickthrough for the links. That’s my very first one for higher ed folks if you’re looking for a way to think about what you want to read over the summer, that’s one possibility. New York Times and other places offer list, but there’s one offered at my own university that I think you might want to check out.

Another one, I want to talk about a documentary that I just saw, I think it was yesterday or day before, it’s called NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½, and it’s by Spike Lee available on HBO max, and then I want to offer four books. One book goes back to a comment I made earlier in the show is by Zora Neale Hurston. I mentioned that she did her research back in the 1930s, but that work was never actually published until 2018.

That book is called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, baric, the story of the last Black cargo. Again, that’s by Zora Neale Hurston. A second book is The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee, and that’s another one of those current examples I could have pointed to in my comments earlier about the post-White futures that I see, not where we’re we’re angry or somehow trying to reject White people, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about making space for all of us and making sure all of us prosper together.

A third book is Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism by Jelani M. Favors. I’m mentioning that in this higher end context, because often very little is understood about historically Black colleges and universities, historically or currently, and Favors is now a professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, my Alma mater, and so thrilled to recommend his book and also to congratulate him for coming back to …

My last book recommendation is the The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal And How to Set Them Right, by Adam Harris. I heard about his book recently, and also just last night I had a chance to hear him do a talk on the book at the podcast I want to recommend. This is called Entrepreneurial Appetite’s Black Book Discussions with Langston Clark, who’s a professor in Texas. From here, I’ll just mention a list of songs I’ve written about the archive.

Recently, I did a coauthor publication that appears in journal Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice. I talk about the archive as this really broad things, but I want to include some music. I think you should check out The Dancing Monk by Eric Reid. I think you should check out A Love Supreme, Part IV, Psalm. The live in Seattle version by John Coltrane. There’s a piece called Him to Freedom by Oscar Peterson. I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free by Nina Simone. Misrepresented People is a hidden gem by Stevie Wonder, you probably haven’t heard that song, but check it out, and then another piece, two pieces. One by PJ Morton called Religion featuring this artist named Lecrae, and then a p p l y i n g . p r e s s u r e by J Cole. Those are my music recommendations.

Just sit back, take it in, and think it through, and you might find some interesting connections as you think about it. My last recommendation is, if you decide to check out the book, make sure you don’t miss the real talk protocol planning template. That’s absolutely free. These are things I just think everybody should think about in higher ed and even beyond.

[00:41:35] Bonni: Marcus, it’s been such a pleasure to get to know you a little bit, and also, thanks to Shannon Sipes, who you mentioned earlier for recommending you for the show, and connecting me with you. I really appreciate you taking your time and thank you so much for this wonderful book and all of your other work.

[00:41:49] Marcus: Thrilled to be here.

[music]

[00:41:54] Bonni: Thank you to Dr. Marcus Croom for joining me for today’s episode, and for expanding our imaginations for how to discuss race, racism, and politics in education. Thanks to all of you for listening, and to being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community. I hope, if you haven’t already, you’ll consider extending that community by joining the weekly update. You’ll get an email in your inbox once a week with the show notes from the most recent episode, along with other resources not mentioned on the show. You can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thank you for listening and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:42:55] [END OF AUDIO]

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