Seeds of WizDoom Podcast

I did not plan this episode. I was on Threads sharing what I was reading when someone I follow responded. By Tuesday we were recording. JDaniel Richer is a philosopher and decolonization thinker who came to Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior by Marimba Ani , through a path I recognize even though it looks nothing like mine. Transracially adopted, raised...

I took two weeks before this one because I knew what I was walking into. Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior by Marimba Ani , is not casual reading, and I was not going to come to it carrying book-launch energy. What I did do when I first encountered Yurugu about a year ago, before I had the bandwidth to sit with the full text, was go straight to the glos...

I read the opening chapter of Know Thyself on the eve of my own book launch , and the timing couldn't be more impeccable. Na'im Akbar opens by going back to the root of the word — educare, to draw forth. Not to fill. To bring out what is already there. He identifies four functions that a genuine education must perform which I explore in the episode. By the time he finishes outlining them all, the...

Woodson showed us what was kept from us. Akbar goes inside what was put there instead. Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery is behavioral archaeology. Every pattern we've been told is a moral failure — the relationship to work, to property, to leadership, to family, to self-worth — Akbar traces each one back to a specific condition of chattel slavery. I kept having to stop reading because...

I finished The Miseducation of the Negro on the last day of Black History Month and the same day I completed Module 1 of my certification in African Black Psychology (CABP) through ABPsi. I did not plan that. And by the time you finish this episode, you will understand why I am telling you it landed the way it did. These final chapters are Woodson's turn from diagnosis to prescription. After eight...

I went into these chapters thinking I was reading history. I came out understanding I was reading a diagnostic report on the present. Chapters 8 through 12 of The Miseducation of the Negro are where Woodson stops cataloguing the conditions and starts tracing the logic. The miseducation was not passive. It was targeted. Law schools for Black students were shut down at the exact moment that Black pe...

In Episode 2 of We Been Knew, I continue my reading of The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson (Chapters 4–7, pp. 23–54). This episode centers on “education under outside control” and the psychological training embedded in atmosphere, hierarchy, and institutional design. Woodson’s critique moves beyond false history into something more structural: how authority, access, and social separ...

For Arc I of my We Been Knew series, I chose to begin with The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson — the scholar who founded Negro History Week in 1926, which later became Black History Month. As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of that founding, it felt necessary to return to the source. In this first episode of my We Been Knew series, I walk through Jarvis R. Givens’ introduction a...

For years I’ve watched organizations applaud civility while avoiding the deeper questions: * Whose comfort does this civility protect? * What truths get silenced in the name of professionalism? * And how much brilliance, honesty, and human potential get lost when authenticity is mistaken for disruption? This presentation grew out of those questions and the research I completed for my M.S. in Appli...