159_Akilah Richards === Monica: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Revelation Project podcast. Today I am welcoming back returning guest, Aquila Richards. Akilah wrote the book, raising Free People, unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work, and I'd like to begin with an excerpt from her book and also to let my audience know that this episode is all. Reframing how we parent and how we think about schooling and how we think about education. And so I'm gonna start with this, but I really wanna also invite anybody who didn't hear our first episode to go back and listen to it. Because the goal today is not to, , necessarily pick up where we left off, but to, to really talk about kind of where we are now. and to really kind of deepen this conversation and explore even more deeply what this process of de-schooling is really about and how we might reframe parenting and our relationship to our children, and how we raise free people in the world. Adults tend to look right past who a child is right now, the present child over to who they might become or the potential in that child. As that child grows into adolescence, adults still look past who that young person is now, and even who and how they were as children over to who they might become. We trade in the present and the past for an idea of a well-designed future. We look ahead to the future that could be, and we discount that person's history of freedom and our histories are important for some of us. They inform our identity and help us define ourselves outside the pressure of parents in school and society. And even though I had my own childhood issues with schooling, it took becoming a mother to realize that particular connection between freedom and c. that connection between what I believed as a child and what I'm healing from as an adult, and that connection is basically a belief that trustworthiness is a characteristic of adulthood and therefore was not applicable to me as a child, and the way that feeling of not being trustworthy, including not having trusted myself to make decisions for myself. Affects how much I trust myself now as an adult to make choices without consciously and relentlessly relying on the need for external validation from a person I perceive to have some sort of power over me. I mean, wow. If this is not at the heart of our work right now, then I don't know what is. So I'll stop talking now and please join me with a warm welcome in just bringing this beautiful, radiant voice and person and being back to the podcast. Hello, Akilah. Akilah: Thank you. Thanks so much, Monica. We had a wonderful, ripe conversation the last time and it's good to be back and not necessarily pick up where we left off, but like where we find ourselves now. So I'm glad to be here. Monica: Yeah, I mean, where we find ourselves Now, I, I wanna go back to what I said to Akilah when, you know, we first jumped on, which is that I feel like from the time I spoke to her, I had one understanding of her work, but, Akilah, I cannot even tell you how talk about a seed kind of that just broke open inside of me and began to grow this whole other way of looking at the world. And once I kind of really got my hands on your book and started to really pay attention to this really much, I mean, I, I wanna be like, this is everything. Like this is everything this unschooling, because it literally intersects all of the ways that I talk about the trance of unworthiness. And I, I wanna just kind of start out by just going to this place where, I loved Bayo Akomolafe , like I can't pronounce his name. Bayo? Yes. Yeah. Ba. Mm-hmm. Bayo. So, , he talked about this book is an opening and a risk. Right. And I loved also how he described your writing as rude. Like I was like, yes, . You know, like I was like, it is so direct. And it's like we don't have time to make this comfortable and nice. Yep. Like we need to have a conversation. And I love how even the book is like not huge, right? It's just this. Yep. Little missile and . My hope is that everybody gets this little book and allows it to just be the seed that unfurls truly. So this book is a risk. How does, how does that, how does that feel? How does that land over there? Akilah: Yeah, like first of all, just shout out to Bayo my brother Bayo Akomolafe , who is just an amazing being. He is also an unschooling parent and there's, he was just the right person to do the forward of the book because, He gets how Chris, my partner and I flow, and the ways that we struggle out loud and the ways that, you know, I like, I love to use the term mad question asking comes from a, a hip hop lyric from Biggie Smalls. He talks about mad question asking, and that way is, is very much my way. And so this idea of risking, I remember years ago when I. Uh, working primarily with women as a women's emotional wellness coach, I talked about risking expression. Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: you know, the, the notion of risking expression and what it meant to risk internally, externally, all the ecological factors, and it, it tracks, it, it, it lands well for me in relation to me because so much of it is risking and risking in a very expansive way, not just risking the response of. The gaze, you know, the, the adult gaze, the cultural gaze, the white gaze, the schoolish gaze. Like not just that, but internally, you know, the, the idea that you begin to question the things that you didn't even question before and how that rearranges your entire situation, and sends you kind of on this path. Unraveling and that that unraveling can be, it can feel like we need to figure it out and fix it and tuck it in and correct it, but nah, the risk, the unraveling is the work. It is the process. It is the practice. Monica: It's so true. And for me, I could use that same expression that you just. , you know, so eloquently put like the unraveling like that, that's for me what the revelation project is. Akilah: Mm-hmm. Monica: It's the risk of the unraveling. It's that is the work is the allowing yourself to continue to pull that thread of all that has been, you know, kind of like hidden, suppressed, denied. Controlled, Akilah: Standardized. Mm-hmm. Monica: Standardized. Yes. And you know, I was even thinking about, you know, just a metaphor, like kind of imagine if we were to meet children at the intersection of liberation and control and recognize actually the roads, the road signs. You know, like actually know where we were either about. drive them or, yeah. Guide and partner with them would be the other road, right? Akilah: Yes, exactly. And that's exactly what unschooling aims to facilitate, discover, notice, prioritize center is that is the move over from. This sort of colonized way that we view childhood and children over to a partnership, over to a partnership where there is just so much discovery. And I like to make the distinction that I'm not talking about discovery of the Columbus kind. Right. I'm, I'm not talking about a place that exists with, with culture and beings and it's so an ecology that you come in and take over. I mean, Real discovery, right? Relationship discovery where you recognize a thing as sovereign and and filled with its own rights and ways, and that you discover in relationship how to meet that and how not to get in the way of that. What support looks like and feels like along the way for a child and not just for society's idea of what it should look like, which is why for us, Needed to be eliminated from our, our priorities. And it's not that unschooling inherently is anti school. It just acknowledges and names that we come from a school centric culture and that that's a, that's an option. That is an option. You do not need to live a school centric life. And what if you didn't? And what if your children were whole beings that we didn't rely on school for them to become something that it was just one other skill set or space they can tap into like the myriad others that are available for us. Monica: Yeah. And if it's okay, I wanna read this other piece here because you say, Our family defines unschooling as a child, trusting anti-oppression, liberatory love centered approach to parenting and caregiving, right? Like even, even that is this idea of. You and your children operating with a core belief that children own themselves. Yeah. And that parents and other adults work with children to nurture their confident autonomy, not their ability to obey adults directives. Akilah: Yeah. Yeah, because so many of us, Monica, I feel like our, our adult lives, so much of our adult lives are really about unbecoming. All of those things, the things that happened when someone else had agency over our time, our thoughts, how we showed up, that's what the deschooling process is for us. For so many of us, it isn't about, You know, for each year you're in school, you need this amount of time to, to do something else. No, like everyone is deschooling, especially right now, you know, this pandemic has brought in so many opportunities for deschooling, ones that we chose and ones that chose us. When we started to recognize that there was a way we were showing up that was just. More of the very same thing that we grew up trying to come out of. I'm of the belief and the, the noticing that we don't evolve from childhood to adulthood. It's not actually a transition. Adulthood is actually stacked on top of childhood. So the child. You as an adult still exist. Not only does that child still exist, they are still driving decisions. They are still part of why we do what we do and don't do what we don't do and show up how we show up that child. Self still exists, and then we stand on the shoulders of that child as the adult, and we try to play adult, whatever that means when really there's this one being that as we work towards a sovereignty and a confident autonomy by removing the layers of the things that were piled upon us. That is when we become this whole self. That's why the book talks about liberation and healing work, because it isn't about becoming a certain type of adult. It's, it's about a whole self. It's about moving from grind culture and how I look and how I sound to savor culture. S A V O R, what, what can I savor? in my sovereignty and what does that look like in a moment by moment basis in myself and in my relationships. Monica: Mm-hmm. , I love that. It also really, you know, I was thinking about that child, that eternal child that you speak of, and also that so many of those adults who are performing adulthood, and I say performing adulthood because. there's a, I also see, you know, a double meaning to that, that child metaphor and or archetype, which is that there is still an inner child who actually has been arrested in his or her development toward true adulthood and maturity. Because they were not allowed to have that autonomy. Akilah: Yes Monica: They were not allowed to have that agency, and they actually don't even know who they are. Akilah: Exactly. We don't know who we are because those things, the practice grounds were colonized the by school culture that the time and space that we have as younger, earlier, newer beings to explore, to make mistakes under the protection of adults who trust that process. got completely colonized by some idea of the could, should, would if only, and, and then, so we try to reclaim that because it's natural. We try to reclaim it. At the cost of other things, and we try to reclaim it in adulthood when we got all these other responsibilities and the stakes are so much higher and we have the baggage of that arrested child in the mix. Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: And then we raise other people. You know, it's like, and whether we have children biologically or through whatever other blessed means, they come to us. We are all a part of raising people because there's the child within us. And then there's the ways that adults impact children, whether they are ours or not, as educators as essentially the people in power. I like to say that adults in relationship to children we're the government. Mm-hmm. we are the government. So if you think about a government that just is not connected to the people at all, just the idea of what they want and what looks right and the gaze of the other governments, that that's kind of what we've fallen into. Monica: Yeah, I mean, it, it really , it really puts a whole new. Wider lens upon all of the various ways that we have played into this. But this also goes back to we don't know what we don't know. And what I loved so much about your book, Akilah, was your transparency with your own journey. because you had, there were so many crossroads where you had to embrace what you call the beautiful mass. Yeah. You know where you had to, if you were committed to walking together with your children, then you had to be very transparent about where you were unraveling something that was triggering you. Yeah. That was getting you all like, and, and there's a way that I think as parents, we can have the best in intentions to go into our relationship with our children or our parenting role as wanting to do it differently. Yeah. But as soon as we hit these. Edges, right? Where we hit our own discomfort, we fall back into the pattern simply because we being with the anxiety, the anxiety and the angst, and the discomfort of the unknown, and having no one around to model it for us, it's like, shit. Now I get why my parents did it this way. Right? Akilah: Exactly. Yes. And I, I love that you named that because it's, this is why community and communal care are such important parts of the broader self-directed education movement, which unschooling is one, one type of self-directed education. . It's the communal element is so important because we are often trying to create from, as you said, something that we don't even have a background in. Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: We, we have it in our souls, we have it in our bellies, but we do not have it in practice. We do not have models of it, often time, or we don't recognize what those models look like because the other elements are pervasive and. , all of us end up in that space where it's like, ugh. You know, even now, you know, Marley and Sage are 18 and 16 and there's still times when I'm like, man, if you could just do what the hell I'm saying because I said it, you know, like, I just wanna, I'm like, you just, you know, like I just get all in my bag of like, you know, why can't you just, but what's different? and when they were like eight and six is that we have so much practice being ourselves together. Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: We have so much practice being ourselves together, which means that we recognize and honor each other's boundaries as they shift. Sometimes they can notice when I'm, when I'm doing something that like I'm about to get out of sorts because of the direction that I'm going in, and they might be able to pull me back in and be like, I see that you're kind of moving towards this expectation that I do this. Do you notice that? And I'm like, oh shit. Oh damn. I thought I was over that one. My bad, my bad. You know, like we have those types of conversations where. , we are actually in partnership in terms of supporting each other through these normal human, super normalized ways of power over that power over dynamic. And so when they were younger, it looked like apologizing about something or. Opening the space for conversation in many forms, not just verbally. When I don't apologize and I don't change my mind and I still feel how I feel, even though I'm clear about how it makes you feel, what do we do with that? You know? So it just, we have gotten language and practice for being ourselves together. , which doesn't mean that it's perfect and that we never do the power over things. We just have different tools and containers and better skills for not weaponizing our, our feelings and needs. Monica: Ugh, not weaponizing. Like, oh, that is like, that just hit home so, so deeply and I love to, it kind of goes back to what a bio said about the God of change. Who knows the urgency of the awkward, it's, it's, It's these awkward, awkward interactions that invite us, that dare us to get transparent with our kids Akilah: And ourselves. And ourselves because often we are in hiding again because of, because of the reality that we are not adults raising children. We are peopling. The word Sage made up in school that I talked about in the book where she's like, they keep peeing on me and we're trying to move away from peopling on to peopling with, and so we come from this school culture that is deeply dehumanizing standardization. On a person is a form of dehumanizing. It is a form of colonizing to, to move it into these silos and, and labels that move away from the nuance and the needs of it. And so, so much of the work is that it's to, to embrace the awkward to. As we talk about now with belonging and diversity and equity, it's about recognizing when someone feels like they do not belong, what does othering look like? And instead of trying to move to fix it so quickly, , or to create another set of standardized things to remedy it. No, you, you actually allow for the discomfort to be the curriculum. I say all the time that when it comes to my children, their resistance is my roadmap. Resistance is the roadmap. Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: And it's not the map that's gonna tell you exactly where to go. It's the map that tells you where you are and what the culture is in the space that you're in, so that you can move with the knowledge of the reality that resistance is the path. And that the disruption and the discomfort is actually what you need to lean into, not try to fix, because the leaning in is where you actually start to develop the knowledge, the wisdom, the information, the tools, the treaties. I talk a lot now about writing treaties, from where we are to where we're trying to be and who we're trying to be with. This is where you can discover those things and put them into practice, not before that. Monica: Yeah. It brings up for me, Something that you refer to as well as slave master behavior. Hmm. And I think, like, I was just kind of thinking as I'm sitting here that it's literally like we have enslaved our children. I mean, I, I know that that's not the foot we were leading with. Right, that there was like, I, right, like I want him to be like, but were we, you know, like I'm, I'm like questioning everything. I'm mad questioning. . Akilah: I love it. I love it. I love it. Monica, like, go off. Go in. Yes. Mm-hmm. . That's exactly what, that's how it appears to me. That's why the, the premise of colonization and more importantly, decolonization applies because we know that when we talk about. decolonizing, the, the origins of that were rooted in the focus on land, returning the land back to indigenous peoples, to whom it belonged, and who have been caring for it for all this time, and our respect and value and honor, and work with that energy as well. And in the unschooling movement, it has been expanded by people including native, indigenous and black, indigenous peoples that. , our children are a form of. In many ways, and that we do colonize them, we, we use these tools of oppression. You know, I talk about we can't keep using tools of oppression and expect to raise free people, but we use these tools of oppression. We use what I learned from translating unschooling work into corporate spaces. Now, as you know, I've been brought in to do DEI focused things, belonging work, to really recognize that overseer culture. Is dominant. It is prevalent in many places, including in the adult child dynamic, but also in the corporate world. It's overseer culture. You, you have these ideas of who they should be and what they should get done, and you, for some of us physically beat. for others, it's emotional beating. All these other ways that we go in and say like, if you, if you not doing this, you're a problem. And here's how I deal with a problem. That is overseer culture. That is slave master mentality. That your worth, your value is based on what I see, what I deem, what I validate, how it benefits me, and the people who are looking. To me or at me, the other adults, the other plantation owners, the other schooled children and their families who's getting as, what's your problem? Why you not get, like they're connected. Yes, they're connected. They are. So, so sovereignty is such an important part, and I talk a lot about confident autonomy and that comes from. Sovereignty. I have a a website called schoolish.com and on that site, my intention there and Chris is my partner, we created that space together because we wanted to have a space where we were continuing to build upon and expand and offer and invite. Conversation and movement and deepening of understanding around this schoolish foolish way that we've all been indoctrinated into. It's a part of the air we breathe, like colonization. . And so when we on there, I have some of these definitions as I understand them, and invitations for people to create their own definitions for things like sovereignty and deschooling and schoolish and reparenting and, and giving specific examples of what it might look like to approach something from a schoolish space, and then to approach it from a sovereign space because these are some of the things that we can begin to allow to unravel us as we recognize these connections as you were doing Monica and being like, oh shit. All of this is all it. Like, everything lives in this notion of unschooling, unraveling, mad question, asking partnership. We, I, I am so excited about and feel such a consistent urgency. around our capacity to be with the discomfort and to let that unraveling help us imagine and create something different than what most of us are used to. Monica: Yeah, and I'm just gonna name what's coming up for me now, right? This moment, which is this shock horror that I don't, that, that I hit these walls in my own brain, that I realize that I don't even. In this moment have the capacity to ask a question. I'm just kind of sitting with what feels like this very. almost like I go blank. Like I go into the trance for a minute because I'm like, right, like I, I can't ask a good question right now because I actually don't have neural pathways built around asking questions that go deeper and take me deeper. And that's how I know how programed I amactually . Akilah: Yes. And you are not alone. Like this is not a Monica thing, right? Like this is where we live. We, we live and swim in those waters. And this is why, you know, a part of Deschooling is to move outside of the schoolish ways of, of exactly what you just experienced. And, and I have experienced it, too many of us have to be like, okay, great. This is going great. This is clear for me. What other question would make this even more clear? What can I, it's like, We, we can, we can put all of that on pause, , and trust what is happening. Put all of that on pause and to say, you know what? This, this call in for stillness, this space making, this savoring of what, how this energy is moving through you is actually a part of the education that is part of the curriculum. We can trust that just as much as we can trust a profoundly. Or answered question that too is trustworthy. That is something that is something brewing. That is something that is now trusting you to show itself to you to say, what would it look like if I did not? know the question to ask what would happen? Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: If we were silent for a moment, what would happen if we were moving the energies of this through our bodies in different ways? Through, you know, creating symbols and sills and drawing shit, and painting things and looking outside, being in nature, taking my shoes off. You know, moving outside of what we have become accustomed to when something moves us. Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: Even that is part of this, Monica: Even that is part of this. Yes. Yeah. Because, um, you know, there, there it is. And, and there it will continue to be. And so instead of me, you know, Getting silent and or in shame where I'm bumping up against my own colonization, bumping up against my own enslavement, bumping up against my own trance. Is, yes, I'm not alone. And even modeling what it looks like to opt out of shame. Yes. And to actually move into permission and approval that that's actually , you know, a wonderful thing. Right. Akilah: You got it. That's exactly it. And I, and I love that you used the term modeling because in this beautiful mess in, in our commitment to struggling out loud, That's where those possibility models come from. When I last season on, on my podcast Fare of the Free Child, we had, I called it Pause Cast Season, right . We were focused on the pause all season long and some of the things that we did, some of the ways that we centered that was being quiet on the podcast together. My co-host, Domari Dickinson, fantastic unschooling Mama, we. be recording. And when one of us would face, just like you did a moment of like our own shit, we would just like stop. And then when we went to Juan, who's my fantastic editor, I would say, nah, don't close that gap. Like, let that sit there. Let it sit and the feedback that we got, Monica, people who are still now listening to, are just listening to or re-listening to Pause season. I have a bazillion voice memos on SpeakPipe from people being like, thank you so much for doing that. How you did that. If you didn't pause. I would not have paused if I didn't. If you didn't invite that in and leave that in, I wouldn't have come to this thing. I wouldn't have actually then put the podcast on pause, press the two parallel lines, press it and pause and give myself a day or two to just be with that. One thing that somebody said on your podcast that actually was able. Move energy and bring me to a space of either clarity or my favorite further beautiful mess so that I could trust into that as well. Disruptions in the form of just silence and space making and, and naming that as valid and valuable and trustworthy. These are some of the ways that we. Influence and impact the type of change that we wanna see by offering this possibility model of like, what if I wasn't afraid of the dead air? Because it's not dead. Actually it is thriving and teaming with things that we can use. Monica: Yeah. Thriving and teaming. And it actually, you know, brings up emotion in me as I think about these spaces because. I imagine it made people emotional because to your point, you were, you could feel the deep energy of connection and presence in those pauses as you were being with each other when you hit those walls and it models how we. Be with each other period, like through these unfamiliar places. Akilah: That is it. That is it. And to, to name it as trustworthy, right to name. Emotions, feelings, these fleeting, potentially volatile things as trustworthy because that is also a part of school culture. The omission, the ignoring, the suppression of feelings, because in school culture, there's no place for that. We gotta be efficient, we gotta pass the test. We gotta look like the kids are getting the things that the state or the county or whoever the hell said that we needed to get there. There's like, Similar in corporate culture because one is, you know, they're parallels, they run parallels that school is training for corporate culture. And corporate culture reinforces a lot of the same schoolish. And whether we are in school or not, or at a job or not, we are also impacted by, because it is pervasive, it is dominant culture. And, and that comes from a very, um, white centric, Eurocentric, colonizer minded way. So that's how they are all connected and we are all. impacted by it. Even when we are a part of dominant culture, we are all losing things. We are all at a loss for our humanity as a result of these things in a variety of ways. And so when we name silence and questions that don't have beautiful answers and messily composed questions as trustworthy, that is how we chip away. Pervasive school culture where we say, oh my God, what if I asked the question and I did not have some beautiful recommendation for the answer? Where school culture says, in corporate culture says, if you're gonna speak up with a question, then you better have some kind of answer, because otherwise, how is the blah blah, blah, blah. No, we, we trust that I can bring what arose for me with what arose for you, and we could put that all in one pot. and see what we can stir up together that is trustworthy Monica: And that is, you know, love You know, that Is that, is that also component of true, truly being in partnership with another human being? Exactly. Exactly. It is because. just tolerance or inclusion it. It isn't that it is far more vast than that. It is trying to see and hear someone recognizing that we each have our own biases and lens and that our feelings are oftentimes a part of how we can chip away at the biases and lens. There's a, a type of intelligence, a type of intimacy that comes from knowing more about how someone feels. As I'm working in these corporate spaces and seeing the gosh, it, it makes me so emotional, the ways that people are. Like the dehumanizing is so normal in corporate culture. You tuck away, you put away your Eunice for the ex, for the experience of this job, getting this money, getting the status, you know, whatever a job means to a person at a time, our identity is so wrapped up in it yet our actual identity. Is not even a factor. We, we do some of these little exercises, , in these corporate spaces working with like Ivy League schools and big corporations and. People in the room have worked together for 4, 5, 6, 7 years and don't even know, like who likes Chocolate and who doesn't, and what's their favorite color and what song sends them over the moon. Mm-hmm. Akilah: Who has a pet cat, who has a dog? Like little basic shit, you know, that can be such a significant part of how someone feels and sees and shows up that they have no idea about. They know titles and background and who went to what school and who messed up on this thing. And it, it is. So it's like all these alarms are going off. And we don't even know what to do. So then we talk about writing these treaties among the people in a space to say, I am acknowledging harm as someone who perpetuates it and someone to whom it has been done. And here are some of the things that I'm committed to in this moment for now, just to try to minimize harm as we move into the discomfort of not knowing what the hell to do different. If you take. Five point system for showing that I did the DEI work, what the hell are we left with? I'm committed to just unraveling that this month. That's it. Like those things have been so liberatory in those spaces that I'm constantly like, yo, yo, I don't even have the words. for what is happening as we do these sort of accelerated intimacy exercises to move away from the titles and into the humans in the room. And that's what I think we need to, you know, just develop more skills around, Monica: well, I, I, I couldn't, you know, agree more. I'm the alarms, right. You talk about the alarms. It's, it's, . It is so alarming. , the unbecoming is so alarming because we, we start to scratch the surface of it and we're like, my God, all of the ways that we have been taught to not have needs, yes, to deny ourselves, to withhold from others, to hide, to manipulate, to. It's just, it's mind boggling. And then it gets so overwhelming it, it like threatens to short circuit and yet this Exactly, this is where we kind of come back to the beautiful mess because it is in a way like this coming back to life. It's there. I mean there's so many things that come up in me as you're speaking because. But the thing that becomes most prevalent, I think, for so many people is this grief. Akilah: That is it. Monica: Because when you know the difference, when you can sit with somebody, I said this in our recently in a group that I'm leading. to the, to the co-leader, and I just said, what, what I'm really, the revelation in this moment is how the most simple things are the most profound. Akilah: Yes. And that is rehumanizing work, Zach, because. humanity, human being human. There is so much simplicity and acceptance. Even when I think about things like grief and death and how in western culture that is like, da, da, don't you better not show that you're grieving, especially if you're at work or at school, you try your best not to die. Essentially, you do everything to as if, as if that is not a part of life, as if that is actually inevitable. And we, we think about death in that way in terms of death itself. And we also think about death in other ways that are equally harmful. It's like the, the idea of the potential of our kid. It's like you're gonna die and not reach your fullest potential. And your potential is whatever I think and whatever your teachers think. And at this job, you know, this project we're working on that is devoid of the humanity of the people in it. It's like, oh, this is gonna die and we're not gonna get this thing. And we're like, We really need to be in a different relationship with grief and death and loss and, and so much of it's, it's exactly what you said. It's about love. It's about rehumanizing and not in the like kumbaya. We're all one bullshit sense and not at all. It's about being able to see each other. It's about being able to be a disruptor and accept, disrupt. , it is about being able to recognize the ways that we are looking differently at racism right now as a part of this. Unraveling that has come from the pandemic and a and of a lot of the murders of black bodied people that now bring us into these conversations where these corporations are like, okay, now we're ready to do the belonging work. And three quarters of the time, , not really. You're just trying to look like you're doing it. But if, if you really wanna be doing it, then we really have to talk about grief and death. I worked with one organization where I was working with a friend of mine, Dr. Kelly Lymes Taylor, and we came to the conclusion that the organization in its form should not exist. There was no changing it with any DEI, whatever, with the foundation on which it was built. That cursed foundation needed to be dismantled and the people involved in it could then come together and grieve that and let the grief from that then determine what it looked like to build from a different ground. Monica: Hmm. Akilah: But we not ready for that. We trying to recover. We trying to resolve. We trying to fix, we trying, no. Mm-hmm. . Some things have to die off, and the process of that decay is what will feed the life of what it can become. Monica: Yeah. That becomes the compost. Akilah: Yes, exactly that. That is the compost that that gives us the room to create the ritual for the death of the thing. When we're trying to, like, instead of trying to resuscitate or build upon a thing that was deeply inappropriate and deeply colonized or minded to begin with, you cannot build on that. You cannot try, as you might. You cannot build on that. And if you do, there will always be people and energies that see right through that shit, and you will not be able to do what you're saying you want to do from that space. Monica: I'm gonna read this other paragraph because I think it's pointing back here. , what many families are facing now is not a crisis. Founded in lack of going to a classroom. No friend. It's evidence of another pandemic. One where severely underdeveloped social and emotional skills are overshadowed by the performance competition and one upping that schools teach us to value much of the stress in homes in my current time, Inc. Got shit to do with learning. It's about adults and children being together all day with no tools for being around each other comfortably for more than a few minutes at a time. Tools like healthy conflict and stress management, and having to face the open wounds of certain personal challenges instead of hiding from them a working mother's dictator type parenting style suddenly collides with a stay-at-home dad's more relaxed approach to his children. Suddenly this is a thing they're having to face seven days a week instead of just on weekends with wine and whatever else. And it's, it's these glimpses, you know, into our poverty. Akilah: Yes. Monica: Into what true poverty really is, and it's the poverty of our humanity, say that we don't know how to be with our children, and it's breaking our hearts. and we don't know how to be with our broken hearts. So we continue to do the thing. The only thing we know how to do, but we know, we know it's actually not working. And I Akilah: Exactly, Monica: Yeah. And like pretending not to know that it's not working does not make it work. Akilah: Exactly. Or, or deciding that because you don't know what to do differently, that you're just not gonna do something differently. , right. Yeah. Like that. That is one of the, the elements. It's like we, when we get to that point, all of those points that you just noted, that is the time for discovery. That is the time to trust into leaning into the risk, the disruption of not knowing because in that lives, cuz that's the seed we talked about at the top of this, in that lives what we can possibly do different because there is no standardized way. But there are things I say all the time that I feel like. When people come to me about like how to start unschooling or in corporate spaces, like, okay, so then what do we do if we're not focused on DEI in the standard ways? It's like so much of it is really about being together and being willing to hear what shows up when you didn't come with an answer. Because it, it comes from that. And that's a hard sell for a Schoolish person I know because I am one. Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: Type A student, you know, all the things. My, my studenthood was my currency in so many ways, especially being brought to America. You know, my, my family is Jamaica and I was born in Jamaica, brought here at 10. There was a lot. pressure and ideas about what I was gonna be and do and become and cause . And because of that, schoolish was very much my currency. And so when my children came and disrupted that, I was like, I don't know what the hell y'all are on, but what I do know is the way you get to this is that, and eventually Chris and I were able to recognize their alarms as alarms and not things to squash. Which then led us to so much turmoil and fear and guilt and doubt, and not knowing what the hell to do, but being really clear about what was not okay. Not really clear. Eventually really clear. It was just so confusing and, and. Muffled and one minute we felt like, okay, we got it. Now here's the perfect harmony of school and not school. Great. And then that worked for like seven minutes and then they didn't want the, it was just, it was so chaotic. But in that chaos, I could tell you now, years in as they're 18 and 16, as I said, , that thing that looked and felt like chaos was the curriculum it in that we developed things that were instructive, not prescriptive. And that they were things that were right for that moment. For who I was, for who Kris was, for who Marley was, for who Sage Niambi was and that it didn't necessarily last, we couldn't take it with us into two years from then. It was for that moment, the medicine was for that moment, and we just continued to notice over time how that worked. It. Oh, we're not gonna come up with some other version of the same school as shit. We're gonna have a bunch of different moments of medicine for that moment. And all of that is healing work and all of that is trustworthy. Even the parts that didn't quote unquote go right, even the things that quote unquote blew up, they, they were also a part of. Medicine, the process. The journey of getting to what was good for then and being able to trust that as the practice to know that there'll be another moment of turmoil and that we will also develop and discover. the medicine for what will be right for that time. It, uh, you, you feel me like it's a series of practices like that and not one overall thing. Monica: Well, yeah, and it takes me, you know, right back to the opening, uh, Paragraph that I quoted. Right. It's like that, that tendency, we have to look right past the moment of now. Yeah. You know, and it's, it's, it's actually like the now it's, it's in this moment, this relationship, this love. Yes. In which we create moment by moment. Yes. And so Akilah: it's the resistance is the roadmap. Yes. Monica: Yeah, the resistance is the roadmap and just, you know, really seeing, seeing their, I mean, I'm like speechless. There's this. Part two that I think is important to just quote you on unschooling is a liberatory practice that empowers communities and families to raise each other and to resolve the generational trauma of attempting to force I our dynamic selves into limiting and inherently racist, foolish schoolish mindsets. Akilah: Yes. And it applies not just to school. school is a cultural thing, not a building. It is a part of our culture. And so deschooling is something that is for everyone, not just people who withdrew their children from school. as an entrepreneur, you know, as someone who's been an entrepreneur for a very long time, I find that so much of my own unschooling and deschooling work lives in how I do business. What I even consider doing business as someone who's a content creator and a creative, all of these things are subject to my schoolish and my colonized mind. . So when we talk about things like developing a saver complex to move outside of grind culture and hustle culture, that is a form of deschooling that is a type of decoloniality. It's this way that we have been taught to do the most, fill the gaps, make sure our children are learning, learning, loss, and all those. Ridiculous, ridiculous. Remember I said that learning loss, that concept is ridiculous because it assumes that learning is measurable. like, come on. All of these things live not just in whether or not our children are in. They live in the culture of pervasive schoolish. That is in all of us, in the way we think, in the way we approach things, in the way we beat ourselves up when we're too tired or we can't engage mentally in a thing. The way that we thought we should or wanted to. When we woke up this morning and we were like, I'm gonna get these seven things done, and by six, 7:00 PM you only got three of them done. The way you beat up on yourself and the way you think that you only do it to you, you don't do it to other people. You do all of those things live in the ways that we do business, the ways that we collaborate with our friends, even when we are like sole-preneurs. And I identify as that. Monica: Mm-hmm. Akilah: and you know, someone whose work is really rooted in like what's present in my soul and what I believe I'm made for and from even in that is so much schoolish. So much schoolish. So these recognitions allow us not just to be in. Healthier relationships with children, which is vital because they are the oppressed in this dynamic, but also in the child versions of ourselves that live in us and make decisions and relate and how we do business in all forms, whether we're entrepreneurs or working for somebody else. It's, it's in all of it. It's in all of Monica: it. Well, Akilah, I'm just going to. continue to invite my listeners to not only listen to our first episode together, but you know, to get this beautiful seed, which is your book, because you know, I'm. , I'm speechless and I think that that's a good thing in this moment and, and I'm gonna call it good. And I'm gonna just thank you, you know, thank you for your work in the world because I'm really getting it. Akilah: You are so welcome. Monica: Yeah Akilah: You are so welcome and I appreciate the invitation for us to just talk, you know, which is, which is what this is, is to just, again, exposure to these questions and these feelings , and not trying to create a perfect fricking episode of whatever the hell , but to just be together and to really speak to. The things that tug at our hearts, the things that beat in our bellies. It's, it's so important, and I love that you talk about revelation, this revelatory, you know, way of looking at these things and, and being able to say like, what is present here? What is present, and what do we do with what is present? How do we honor that? It feels really. Powerful. And I, I will also bring this invitation of savoring good friend of mine, Vanessa Bradley Beconde, that's, that's who I got this concept from, of savoring because her, she embodies savor culture. When you have a conversation with Vanessa, you're gonna have a lot of pause points. There's gonna be a lot of silence. So powerfully disruptive, and I love that you were able to bring that in when you're like, oh, I'm speechless. I don't have good, yeah, let us remember that. That is trustworthy. . Yes. Thank you for the conversation. Monica: Thank you, Akilah. And for our listeners, All of the rest will be in the show notes. And until next time, more to be revealed. We hope you enjoyed this episode. For more information, please visit us@jointherevelation.com and be sure to download our free gift, subscribe to our mailing list, or leave us a review on iTunes. We thank you for your generous listening and as always, more to be revealed.