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Lululemon Studio offers unlimited access to 10,000+ workouts from top trainers. The mirror is the center of the membership, allowing users to track their metrics. Black students face racism and toxic environments in schools. Akilah S. Richards is an advocate for unschooling and believes in raising free black children. Black families are increasingly homeschooling to provide a safer alternative to public schools. Homeschooling allows for Afrocentric history and freedom from Eurocentric viewpoints. Unschooling involves letting children's interests and curiosity guide their learning. Education should focus on the survival and liberation of black communities. With unlimited access to 10,000-plus workouts from world-class studios and trainers, Lululemon Studio is everything you need to be your best. Take a class in cardio, strength, yoga, dance, boxing, stretch, or any of our 60-plus class types. Or get an exclusive offer to work out at one of our U.S. participating partner studio locations, including PureBar, Rumble, Y7 Studio, and more. The mirror is the center of your Lululemon Studio membership. Put your reflection alongside your trainer in a full HD display and track your metrics. All in an elegant design that fits any space in your home. Visit lululemonstudio.com and use code CADENCE700 to experience Lululemon Studio in your home for just $795. Experience Lululemon Studio in your home and change the way you work out by visiting lululemonstudio.com and use code CADENCE700 at checkout. Full price last offer, 10-4-22. Lululemon Studio content features and member benefits subject to change. The school system is working exactly how it was designed to. In academic institutions, racism taints every hallway students walk and every class they attend. It's toxic, lethal even. And it makes you wonder, what are black students internalizing? And what are they really learning in school? I'm Jay from Push Black and you're listening to Black History Year. Black folks have fought hard for an education. Our enslaved ancestors hid beneath the moon's light to read and write under the threat of beatings, dismemberment, death. A brave few endured vile emotional abuse to desegregate schools like the Little Rock Nine. And today, black students, our children, are still fighting and enduring that emotional abuse to get an education. But what if the type of education we're fighting for is all wrong? Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month, once said, For me, education means to inspire people to live more abundantly. To learn is to begin with life as they find it and make it better. One woman, our guest today, is expanding that vision and inspiring folks nationwide to live more abundantly by unschooling. Akilah S. Richards is a mother, author, educator, and founder of Raising Free People, a network committed to community organizing at the intersection of privilege, parenting, and power. Her weekly podcast, Fair of the Free Child, features Akilah and her guests talking about radical unschooling and what's at stake when raising free black children. Now, Akilah doesn't play about decolonizing, healing, liberation, and raising free people. It's an interview you don't want to miss. But first up, a story about a growing phenomenon that might be here to stay. Black homeschooling. It's a disturbing fact that black people aren't truly safe in this country. Whether it's having our votes suppressed or being slain in the street, safety eludes us. Even schools have become violent playgrounds that target the most vulnerable of all, our children. Between racism and bullying, public schools are often unsafe environments for black students. And as a result, an increasing number of black families are taking matters into their own hands to protect their young. When the coronavirus struck, the world forever changed. Striking like a Category 5 hurricane, it catapulted many families to conduct remote learning, which subsequently benefited some black students by shielding them from racist teachers, schools, and peers. After pandemic restrictions were lifted, some parents have refused to send their children back to school. In October 2020, 16% of black students were homeschooled. This was up 525% from the pre-pandemic rate. This trend doesn't show any signs of slowing down. Through homeschooling, black families are rejecting Eurocentric viewpoints and incorporating Afrocentric history into their lessons. Additionally, many parents consider homeschooling a safer alternative to public schools. We don't need white institutions to educate our children. Despite restrictions and laws banning us to do so, we've always educated ourselves. We must continue to lean into that sense of self-determination for the betterment and liberation of black communities. Breaking from the grip of an oppressive school system, one that's deeply ingrained in us, won't be easy. But today's guest has trusted the journey of unschooling to at last actualize a vision of black liberation. Akilah, what does black liberation look like to you? Yes, I love that question. Black liberation for me in this moment looks like multi-generational freedom to examine who we are and what freedom looks like for us individually. Because as my good friend Shauna Mowrey-Brown says, freedom is individual and liberation is collective. And so if we are in spaces where our individual freedoms and the exploration of that is not only welcomed but normalized, then that's what I think the movement towards black liberation looks like, feels like. I like that. Freedom is individual. Liberation is collective. Collective, yes. Shauna Mowrey-Brown. That's great. Shout out to her. Yes. And you mentioned a multi-generational aspect. Can you dig into that a little more? As I continue to examine in my adulthood the tools of oppression that are normalized, like for me school is one of those, like a school-centric, automated, standardized life is an example of a tool of oppression. We often are very school-centric in ways that while we as adults might be doing liberation work individually or collectively, we kind of put our children, we tuck them in to the same oppressive Euro-centric system for means of protection sometimes, or sometimes because we just haven't questioned it, or logistics, because school is safe enough daycare for many families. And so if we are giving our children the same space to examine that we as adults that grew up in this Euro-centric structure that we're examining, that's why that aspect is important because oftentimes our liberation work does not extend to our children. They are often the most oppressed. Can you talk to us about how your work contributes to leading us, helping us get closer to the vision you shared of collective liberation? So my family, myself, my husband, my partner, Chris, and our daughters, Marley, who is now 18, and Sage Nyambi, who is now 16, we are an unschooling family, and all that means is that we're just not school-centric. School is a tool, like any other class you take or a car you drive, or it's just not our whole lives are centered around what school they get into or what it looks like or their grades or all of that. And that began for us in 2012 after our daughters were in school, and they both for different reasons were pushing back against school. Marley would say, I don't have time to think my thoughts. And she would have her little hands in the air, and I'd be like, she is so dramatic and sweet. I just didn't give it any sort of legitimacy, essentially. And then after some time and recognizing the ways that a school-centric life, one, it felt like oppression for them, and two, it changed. Like Marley was this very assertive, mad, question-asking type kid, and then she moved over to something very different. She was afraid to ask questions. She wanted to be right all the time. She was being ostracized from the other kids because she got the gifted label, and the other adults were doing and saying things that had her feeling like she was somehow better than those other kids because she could read. And so we had to do a lot of undoing at home to be like, look, your parents just had the time to teach you to read in this moment, and theirs did not. That does not make you better or smarter. We just started to see the effects of that on our daughters. And then Chris and I were just in so much conversation about what we realized eventually is that we were essentially agents of the system because if the schools were telling Marley and Sage who to be, how to show up, what was valid, and we were talking to them essentially based on whatever the teachers said, who was writing for Marley and Sage? So we eventually withdrew them from school prison, as I call it, and then we just started to homeschool. We were just doing school at home. Same thing, just a little bit nicer, a little bit more space to get into what they would get into. So now that the girls were not in school, and by that time Chris and I were both full-time entrepreneurs, we just started being able to go to different places for a lot less money. We're Jamaicans, so we would go back to Jamaica for like four or five months at a time and spend so little money on such richness in terms of quality food, experiences, all of these things. I was writing about it at the same time because I'm a writer and I tend to struggle out loud through writing. So I continued that, continued that, and then in 2016, when Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were murdered by police, I got several messages from black folks in particular saying, you know, this is why our children can't be free. They can't be at the park to play at 2 o'clock in the afternoon because it ain't safe, you know, all those things. And I started this podcast called Fare of the Free Child to push back against the idea that we could not be free despite whatever. I felt like because of that, that is especially why we needed to understand and practice multigenerational liberation work. Can you dig a little deeper? In what ways did the homeschooling and unschooling process look like compared to what they were receiving in the traditional school? Was it a public school they were in? It was. It was a conventional public school, yeah, because traditionally learning doesn't look like that. So school is not tradition. School is convention. So one of the big differences, as I said, when we first pulled them from school, we were definitely just doing school at home. This is the K-12 thing. We're going to do the same thing, but if you like dinosaurs, then we'll focus on dinosaurs instead of, you know, something else. We were definitely assigning them things. They had bedtime. You know, it was just very much a conventionally structured life, just nicer and not in a classroom. On the point of tradition versus convention, I'd like to hear you speak a little more about that. What distinction are you making and what does it look like? Yeah, because convention is almost like the situation of the time and culture that we're in, whereas tradition, particularly for Indigenous people, Black Indigenous people, Native Indigenous people, was much more intergenerational. Children learn things as a result of being in relationship with adults and with environment, not because they were made to do specific things. School, in terms of the history of school, was created to house children and people who were studying to become teachers, essentially because of the Industrial Revolution. It's a relatively newer concept. And then later on, even when we think about things like Brown versus the Board of Education and the struggle for us to get into the same schools as white kids or to have the same level of education, that education was never for us. The foundations of that were not informed by our culture, our patterns, our needs. It was basically a survival mechanism, a way to tuck our children and ourselves safely enough into something while we survive the white gaze and the focus on Eurocentric life. So that's what that big difference is. And so when we first started just homeschooling, and because we were also traveling and immersed in culture, at the time it was just Jamaica. We weren't going to other countries until later on. But at that time we realized, one, they were still pushing back. Like, for example, we would go to the beach most days because we lived in very close proximity to our beach. And Marley would say, well, I don't want to bring my textbook. And I would say, girl, this is the best of both worlds. We're going to learn about seashells and sand and we'll have that stuff. And then we'll learn about the, you know, you have the book and the real life. And she was basically like, yeah, nah, I don't want that. And so personally I just got so frustrated that I was like, you know what, we're going to take a break. You're not going to learn anything because that's how I looked at learning back then. You won't learn anything, but you'll have a good time. And then maybe we can pick up on some things that you might be learning and then create curriculum out of that. And so Chris and I just loosened the reins a bit. And then once we did that, we realized that it was us who were actually in a very warped relationship with what learning looked like. In terms of, one, learning is not always measurable. It's not always something that you can take a test and notice whether somebody understood something or not. Also that there were certain nuances to what Marley and Sage were learning that didn't come from a curriculum or a book. It came from them observing the environment and noticing the differences and similarities and just doing a lot of things that we attributed to adulthood and maturity that was really just about like humanness and the ways that human beings are naturally scientists and that learning is not something that you have to force. It's actually the opposite. You have to be deliberate about trying to stop somebody from learning, actually. And that if you place validity around whatever their processes look like for learning, then we could actually support and facilitate that, which is what unschooling is. It's devoid of curricula. It is devoid of anything forced. It doesn't mean there isn't structure. It actually means that you're in a trustful relationship so that there are things that Chris and I and other people, because there are teachers or everyone, there are things that they learn in very structured ways because they consent to that. And because there's nothing that you can learn that lives in a vacuum. Everything is everything, as we say back home. I'm hearing a big element of letting their interest and their natural curiosity guide the process. And, you know, in the absence, in the intentional absence of a conventional structured curriculum, they're sort of or they are creating their own curriculum. Absolutely. And they meet resistance and all of that. It isn't. There's this notion of like this whitewashed Lord of the Flies idea of what unschooling is. And definitely in a lot of white-centric spaces, I have found, because I've been invited to speak and work in many of them, that there's this notion of freedom being this like wild, wild west situation. But as a black person, I don't understand that because freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. So if your freedom encroaches on somebody else's capacity to be free, that is not freedom. That's another form of oppression. So I love being able to go into spaces and dismantle that idea, bust that myth that it means they're just doing whatever and that they won't do the things that don't feel good to them because I see Marley and Sage and so many other unschooling kids all the time buck up against like, oh, I like this, but I don't like that. But if I'm trying to get better at this, I'm going to have to do that, just like me as an adult when I became an entrepreneur. I didn't care about WordPress. I didn't want to learn any coding or anything like that. But I could do that in my sleep now because something that I wanted to do required that other element and that we're also, Chris and I are raising black women and that we could not acclimate them to non-consensual relationships because then that would be what was normal for them. And we could not afford to do that, especially since we're raising them in America. If dog people made dog food, it definitely wouldn't look like dusty burnt brown pebbles. It would actually be food. It would be made with real fresh meat and veggies, gently cooked to preserve the nutritional value. You know, like food. The Farmer's Dog was created by dog people who cook and deliver fresh, healthy food. Try The Farmer's Dog and get fresh pre-portioned meals tailored to your dog's needs. Tell us about your dog, build your plan and get 50% off at thefarmersdog.com slash podcast. That's thefarmersdog.com slash podcast. I want to circle back on a point you made when you touched on the history of the conventional school approach in this country, in the West in general, and how it was birthed out of the Industrial Revolution. And you also mentioned that the traditional way of learning and education focused on our culture and our needs. And that resonates, reminds me of something that I've heard Dr. Amos Wilson speak about when he talks about, you know, how our education in general should be focused on the survival of a people. And in the absence of that, in the context that we're existing in now, you know, we're essentially being trained to be high-paid servants for somebody else. For somebody else, another group's survival. That in and of itself makes it very clear that they cannot receive the same education as the white child. They cannot be reared the same way the white child is reared because they have very, very different tasks to perform. It is when we recognize then the future tasks that our children must perform, and when we reflect on that task, we then use those future tasks and knowledge of those future tasks to reorganize our present circumstances, to reorganize the schools, to reorganize our relations one to the other, to reorganize our perception of ourselves, and, yea, even to reorganize our history. One hundred percent. Like, I used to have that as my screensaver back in the day when we started and I was meeting my own internalized oppression around, like, okay, they're going to get freedom, but not over here. Or if they're pushing for this, they can't get that. Like, bedtime was a big one. It was like, come on now, how do you not have a bedtime? First of all, I need that time. And second of all, children have bedtime and I don't want to be irresponsible and, you know, all these things. But then to evolve that and say, wait a minute, what is education? Education is not this simulated experience. Sometimes it needs to be. Like, if you're training to be a medical doctor, you're going to need some very specific things. You might need to simulate surgery before you actually go into surgery, but not everything. So if they're at home with their dad and me in a safe space and they stay up until 4 o'clock in the morning, and after doing that for two months they're getting headaches or their eyes are blurry or they're cranky, then we can have a conversation about what it means to be in touch with your body, your natural ecology, and also your environment because if you're cranky and you talk to me like you're crazy, you're not going to get the things that you want because I'm still a Jamaican mom. And so certain things just aren't going to happen, right? So that's an example of the education went from, okay, well, I'm going to manage this thing for you, which is your body, over to if we're talking about confident autonomy, then you also have to hit your own walls in this safe space and then we can have a conversation. And then it turns out that we didn't even need to have the conversation. They noticed this themselves. And it doesn't mean that we don't tap into some school tools, but, one, it's consent-based because, again, we are raising black people in a predominantly white culture, so they cannot be acclimated to things that are non-consensual, and, two, they get to discern. So they know if they're reading Chaucer because they like the book, they can also be critical about the elements and discerning about what is not for them because they're not seeing this person as the light in the way as we tend to see school. So those are some of the ways that we unpack, really, and discern what education means and how we live into that in a very real way. I want to circle back to something you said. You've said a couple times around non-consensual relationships, and I want to dig deeper in that. It resonates because I have two daughters as well, and one of the things that I've started doing, I've noticed how it's easy for little beautiful girls to be, people think they just have access to them and want to pick them up and hug them and squeeze them and kiss them. And I started asking them, like, hey, can I give you a hug or a kiss? Just want to get them in that mindset of you have the power to say yes or no, and depending on what you say, and that's fine with me, and sort of training that early on. And I'm curious, you know, the way you're speaking about it in terms of the unschooling as part of developing that mindset of consent. Can you speak a little more about that? Absolutely. I love the example you gave, Julian, because that's where we started, too. We started with that with us, and then it was really hard with grandparents, you know, with Chris's and my parents, because it's like, oh, put those niggas away. And Sage in particular, who's 16, she's just not lovey-dovey like that. She doesn't want that. She doesn't like it. And I even used to take offense, like, oh, my God, at one point we were in the same body, bro. Like, how are you not? I'm your mama. And I started to recognize that as a type of manipulation, because it is her body, her choice. And so we would say, you have to ask her, you know. Then when she got older, then she would say it herself. Or even things like being in the doctor's office, and the doctors would talk to us. And I would be like, oh, see right there where, like, she can tell you, because she's, you know. Or even when I was pregnant, that's actually when I started noticing it. People would walk up to me and just put their hands on my belly. And then it traveled right over to when the child themselves. So things like that, bath time, all of these elements, how they do their hair. Both of my girls had locks for a very long time. And when I had locks the first time, they were, like, super neat and long, you know, because I was working in the legal profession and all of these things. And Sage had to sit me down one day and be like, mom, neat locks are your thing, not mine. You keep grooming. And at first I was like, girl, bye. What we are not about to do is have you da-da-da-da-da. And then I had to really sit with that and be like, wait a minute. Back to that thing again about what education is for. And education is not just what's happening in a classroom. We are educating our children all the time. We are acclimating them to certain things and certain expectations, right? We are the government, is what I like to say. Think of yourself as the government and your children as the people. We know what happens when the government is disconnected from the people, right? So if she's saying that how she wants her hair to grow out of her head is one thing and I am demanding and requiring something else, how is that not the same as the respectability politics that caused me to have to take out my nose ring or when I was on the Steve Harvey show and they had to hide my tattoos. How are you all doing a show about unconventional parents and you are requiring me to cover my butt, right? So to be complicit in these tools of oppression or to choose not to be is a part of my education and Chris's as well as our daughter's. So your example is exactly one type of consent when it's like, what do they wear? Even Marley, some years ago we did a talk together. She was 14 and I was 41. I remember because we called it 1441 and she wanted to wear these shorts to the talk and I was like, girl, and I could have definitely just did my aggressive Jamaican mom thing. I live on that block as well. I could definitely do that but I'm like, wait a minute. I'm really practicing something else. So we just had the conversation about what is being centered in that moment. It's not about what's right or wrong. Yes, you have the right to wear whatever you want but communication is verbal and nonverbal and if I speak one language and somebody speaks something else, no matter how loudly or specifically I do it, they're going to hear what's in their language pool and socially the language pool is booty shorts is I'm paying attention to your booty whether I should or shouldn't. Is that what you want to center? She got it immediately and she talks about it all the time. She was like, oh, I could just put these shorts on when I go to the pool after that. She wasn't happy about it. She was annoyed but she understood and I didn't use force or manipulation to communicate. I did the harder thing, which was to have the conversation with this 14-year-old who constantly challenges. Oh, y'all said we free. So how come we can't do this? Right? For sure. Yeah. I appreciate that. I'm going to use that one when the time comes. And it will come. I'm sure. What's up, beautiful people? I'm so glad to share the good words with Kirk Franklin is back with the second season. Good Words is hosted by your boy, your cousin, your nephew, me, your boy, Kirk Franklin. And we're going to be having candid conversations about faith, perseverance and the realities of today's world with folks like Jennifer Lewis, Karamo Brown, Yalda Van Zandt, just to name a few. Listen and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts from. One thing that is clear to me as far as the conventional approach to schooling is that there is absolutely no intention put behind developing a knowledge of self for black kids specifically. We're given knowledge of other people and other people's experience in the world. But we're not necessarily provided knowledge of self, which I think evidence shows that sort of trains us to exist in a certain place in the world. And that is usually going to lead us to taking actions that are against our best interest. So I'm curious as to how you all think about knowledge of self as part of the unschooling process. It is the underpinning of the unschooling process. That's the whole point to develop that. Even now, as Marley is 18 years old and, of course, getting all the questions about are you going to college, which she is actually, she opted into that. Sage, who's 16, opted back into high school because of a specific college in Osaka that she wants to go to and recognize that she needed some particular things. She opted into that. And even how we navigate school as parents is so different. But they understand how they learn. They understand what they want. They understand what their challenges are. And so they are designing their lives. As I look at Marley, I am so impressed, so heartened by her approach to her life design. She's very interested in what is it called? I think it's critical archival theory or something like that. But she's deeply interested in that. And so she is, like, talking to people who work in archival studies here and in England and in different places. She's volunteering for the societies here, the historical societies here. She understands what her biological clock looks like. So her work hours are designed around the time that she is most awake. She understands the ratio of what's good for her in terms of watching something versus reading something. The things that I'm 45 years old and I feel like I'm just getting into that level of knowledge of self as an entrepreneur, not working with clients just for money but really looking at what it means to be fulfilled and looking at the ratio of which projects need to bring in this amount so that I actually have the space to do the spiritual work that I love to do. I'm in seminary right now. To be able to design my life in that way. Julian, I get that education from being around Marley and Sage. As educated as I am, as gifted as I was labeled, as traveled as I am, I am still, so I have this now, de-schooling. I'm de-schooling from so much of the notions of how I need to show up and who I need to be. They have such a keen understanding of that and they often in their friend groups are supporting their schooled friends because they are so frustrated by what their schooled friends don't get to do, don't get to develop. That's what's normal for them. They are so compassionate and emotionally intelligent and are able to articulate oftentimes to other teens some of the ways that they can begin to practice confident autonomy even inside a schoolish household or system. That's great. I can clearly see there, to reference your original definition of black liberation, how that knowledge of self can contribute to that individual freedom. Then to take it further, I'm curious, when it comes to the collective liberation, are there ways that you all approach ethnic and race consciousness through the unschooling process? Yeah. So much of that is just organic to the process because, again, it's like learning. You would have to, even if you lock somebody in a room by themselves, you couldn't stop a person from learning something. So when we think about a school-centric life, that's when you have to be deliberate and intentional about bringing in aspects of race and talking about it in ways that go against what's being told and taught and embedded in school. If you're not in that, it's pretty normal. It's pretty prevalent that you're going to go to, again, we do a lot of talks. Marlee does workshops with me. She's very interested in youth advocacy. We see in those spaces, sometimes we're invited into agile learning centers, which is a type of unschooling structure, and we're the only black people in there besides the one black person who works there, and we're able to have conversations with them and, with their consent, speak in a sense to the things that they can't speak to there because they have certain things to lose because that's where they get their paycheck from. Also, even how we approach funding. When we're working in black and Latinx spaces, it's often like backyard, potluck, pay what you can type deal. I usually come in through a conference that's being paid for by a predominantly white space, but black and brown people know I'm going to be there, so they organize so we don't have to be there on their dime. We talk about why we do things like that. We're not doing anybody a favor. That's actually a normalized part of community when you think about some of the disparities around income and why those things exist, so we're constantly in those types of conversations. You're in different spaces where the nuances of the isms of class and race and gender are being discussed, whereas in school, it's not. It's being co-opted in certain ways or distorted in others, and that's what you have to be deliberate about. Okay, the kids are already asking what's for dinner, but breaking news, empty fridge. That's okay. I'll Instacart. Let's add some organic asparagus and some farm-fresh chicken. Easy. Wait, is the oldest vegetarian this week, or was it gluten-free? Gluten-free pasta. Covered either way. Cart it. And finally, some vegetarian gluten-free olives for my well-earned cocktail. When your family's shopping list has more footnotes than groceries, the world is your cart. Visit Instacart.com or download the app and get free delivery on your first order. Offer valid for a limited time. Minimum order, $10. Delivery subject to availability. Additional terms apply. I'd imagine most of the folks that are listening to this podcast may not be in or believe they're in a position to take a full leap into full-time homeschooling and unschooling. How can folks be thinking about this concept if they're not able to jump fully into it? One is to try to make sure that you're not looking at the Eurocentric definition of unschooling, which is that your kids are not in school and they do whatever they want to do. It's not that. First of all, unschooling is not about school or not school. It's about confident autonomy. It is about knowledge of self. It's about recognizing the tools of oppression that live in your household, in your mindset, so you can start looking at, even if your kid is in school every day, you can start looking at your relationship to consent in the household. You can start looking at your relationship to manipulation. As parents, there's an inherent manipulation vibe that we do. Oh, that made mommy sad when you're little. Is that what I want to do? Do I actually want them to be accountable for my emotional process? Which things are their issues? Which things are mine? Where can I loosen the reins a little bit? Where am I listening more to the teacher than I am to my child? These are some of the things that you can start to do right now. I keep talking about mad question asking and the word question. Everything that you hold for the school system in relation to your child, question it. And that's something that you can start doing right away because this is liberation work. It's not about a class or not class. What challenges did you all face when you first started this? What challenges did we not face, Julian? Again, I come from, as a Jamaican, a very British colonial idea of what education is and that you need to sound this way and look this way. All the respectability politics, Chris and I, we were definitely on that train. We were afraid of both girls got the gifted label, for example. I was like, are they going to be less smart because we're not doing this? And these are black girls. They're not even light-skinned. They don't have any of the privileges. All of those things came up. What about college? What about math? What about science? What about attitude? What if they start acting like some of these white kids who talk to their kids like they ain't got no sense? We had all those things in our brains. And so those were some of the challenges that we faced. And I can tell you now, years in, not only did we move past them and move through them, we unlearned so much about our perspective in the process. So you will meet the challenges. Your kid will push back against things that you're just like, it would be so much easier if you just did what I said because I said to do it. But then you'll also get to the point of, but is this what I want to acclimate you to in that black body in particular? Do I not want you to have the skills to know when to be quiet and when to speak, as opposed to so many schooled kids who just go push, push, push, because school culture and prison culture are very similar. And if you treat somebody like a caged animal, you're going to get elements of that. So we began to unlearn, to de-school from the notion that if we gave them back their power, that it would somehow compromise something. Akilah, thank you for being on Black History Year. You're so welcome. My absolute pleasure, Julian. That was Akilah S. Richards, founder of Raising Free People and host of Fair of the Free Child. For more information about unschooling and the incredible work that she's doing, visit Raising Free People dot com. At Push Black, we agree with Marcus Garvey when he said, a people without knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. And I'm guessing you probably feel like that's important, too. I mean, you're here at the end of a podcast about black history. You matter. Your choice to be here matters. It lets us know that you value this work. And you make Push Black happen with your contributions at Black History Year dot com. Most folks do five or ten bucks a month, but really everything makes a difference. Thank you for supporting the work. Black History Year is a production of Push Black, the nation's largest nonprofit black media company. Our team includes Tariq Alani, Brooke Brown, Tasha Taylor and Lily Werkner. Producing this episode, we have Sydney Smith and Lynn Webb for Push Black and Ronald Young, Jr., who also edits the show. Black History Year's executive producers are Michael El Cesar for Lemon of House and Julian Walker for Push Black. Peace.