Good Life Project - Dr. Yusef Salaam & Ibi Zoboi | Punching the Air

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Today is a special conversation, featuring two guests. Dr. Yusef Salaam was just fifteen years old when his life was upended after being wrongly convicted with four other boys in the “Central Park jogger” case. In 2002, after the young men spent years of their lives behind bars, their sentences were overturned. Now known as the Exonerated Five, their story has been documented in the award-winning film The Central Park Five by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon and in Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed series When They See Us. Yusef is now a poet, activist, and inspirational speaker. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from President Barack Obama, among other honors. Ibi Zoboi is a novelist and editor, born in Haiti, and raised in Brooklyn, she found a love of writing, and poetry and eventually pursued an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, before launching a career in journalism and then fiction. Her novel American Street was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Pride and My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, a New York Times bestseller, and it the editor of the anthology Black Enough. The two met briefly some 21 years ago, for a walk and talk that would eventually bring them back together to collaborate on a YA novel called Punching the Air (https://amzn.to/2PkcRND) that integrates Yusef’s story, poetry and illustrations with Ibi’s powerful storytelling to create a novel in verse that speak powerfully to issues of equity, dignity, art as a form of therapeutic depression and restoration. We drop into so many points along each of their journeys, how they first met and the context for that meeting that would change both their lives and nearly 20 years later, they came back together to co-create this rich novel in verse.You can find Ibi Zoboi at:Website : http://www.ibizoboi.net/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/ibizoboi/You can find Dr. Yusef Salaam at:Website : http://www.yusefspeaks.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/dr.yusefsalaam/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today is a very special conversation, as are all the conversations, featuring two guests. Dr. Yusuf Salam was just 15 years old when his life was upended after being wrongfully convicted with four other boys in the Central Park jogger case. In 2002, after the young men spent years of their lives behind bars, their sentences were overturned and now known as the Exonerated Five. Their story has been documented in the award-winning film The Central Park Five by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, and in Ava DuVernay's acclaimed series When They See Us. Yusuf is now a poet, an activist, an inspirational speaker, and he is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from President Barack Obama, among others. My other guest, Ibi Zuboi, is a novelist and editor born in Haiti and raised in Brooklyn. She found a love of writing and poetry and eventually pursued her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts before launching a career in journalism and then

fiction. And her novel, American Street, was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times notable book. And she's also the author of Pride and My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, which was a New York Times bestseller, and the editor of the anthology, Black Enough. And the two met briefly some 21 years ago. That led to a walk and talk

that took them from Midtown Manhattan to Harlem, which, if anyone knows anything about the city, is a very long walk and a deep, deep conversation that would eventually bring them back together decades later to collaborate on a YA novel called Punching the Air that integrates Yusuf's story and poetry and illustrations with Ibi's powerful storytelling to create a novel in verse that speaks so deeply to issues of equity, dignity, art as therapeutic expression and restoration. We drop into so many of these points along each of their journeys and explore how they came back together to create something truly extraordinary. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need them. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So you both met originally. It was 99. There was a class at Hunter College where you were both attending. And I want to talk about that moment and what came out of it, because I know there was a

conversation that began that took you on a walk from 68th Street up to Harlem, which for those who are not familiar with New York City, is not a walk that's often done. And then it kind of vanished into the background for a number of years before it led to this recent collaboration. But let's sort of put a hold on that for the moment, because I'm also curious. So the decade or so leading up to that meeting in 99 was profoundly different experience of life for each of you. And I want to talk about that a little bit,

and then we'll work our way back to that meeting and then forward from there. Why don't we actually start with Ibi with you? I know, originally born in Haiti, raised in Bushwick in Brooklyn, at a time where, for those who know Bushwick these days, a lot of times people associate it with gentrification, a lot of hipsters, amazing street art, and quote, artisanal food. 80s and 90s, very different place. Right. I immigrated to the United States from Haiti in 1981. I was four years old. And the neighborhood that my mother could afford, and it was just me and my mother, was Bushwick. So Bushwick at the time was very broken and dilapidated, very much like the Bronx and Harlem.

So these neighborhoods had run down buildings, burnt out buildings because of the economic strife that was in New York City in the 70s. So she rented a top floor apartment in a brownstone by a friend of a friend, another Haitian immigrant who had his own business in the basement floor and he was a tailor. And Bushwick at the time was affordable for a lot of immigrants because it was sort of no man's land. And for a long time, it was just me and her. I left Bushwick in 1987 and we moved to East New York, Brooklyn, another broken and dilapidated neighborhood. That's another place that she could afford. So as an immigrant, I was aware of New York street culture, but was not part of it. I was a child, of course. So as a single mother, she was very overprotective. And I watched New York City through the top floor window of a building or a brownstone apartment. And when I was allowed to

play with the neighborhood kids outside, I got made fun of and teased. But one important aspect about my growing up in New York City is the level of fear that my mother had around the neighborhood kids. So now I know that kids are just being kids. They are a product of their environment. But as an immigrant, as a single mother, my mother was a single mother, as her only daughter for a time, neighborhood kids were sort of a threat. She was mugged in Bushwick Park and she was mugged a few times, in fact, and that sort of fear she instilled in me for a very long time up until high school when I started having boyfriends. She still remembered the neighborhood kids being sort of a threat. And I was actually in sixth

grade in East New York, Brooklyn, when the Central Park Five case had happened. But before that, I remember Bernard Goetz and the subway vigilante trial. I remember all those other racial violence incidents in New York City. I watched it in the news. I was a latchkey kid. And this all filtered into just my whole view and perspective of New York City as a child, as an immigrant child, and as a girl, quite frankly. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a sense of danger that is built into you. And I mean, and tell me if my understanding is wrong also. I mean, part of, I know your mom sounded incredibly protective. I'm curious also whether that was entirely a response to just what she was experiencing in and around New York in the 80s, or whether some of that also was drawn from

the circumstances that led her and you to originally leave Haiti in the first place, where she was essentially fleeing a relationship for safety purposes for both of you. Yeah, exactly. My mother was a broadcast journalist in Haiti and my father was the owner of the radio station and he was 30 years older than her. So what she was fleeing, in a sense, was another form of patriarchy that looks somewhat different than it does here in this country, in that women go into relationships for financial support in a different way, or fear. There is no choice. As I tell young people, when I talk about my immigrant story, is that there is no sexual harassment in a third world or developing country. There is sexual harassment, but there's no calling it out. Me Too movements look very different in the developing world. And my mother fled Haiti because she was in a very toxic relationship that wasn't a relationship

with my father, who was already married with two children. So yes, that sort of relationship to the men who are in our communities, the sort of violence that can result from that sort of power structure, we both took that with us to New York City, where idle men were a threat. A boyhood culture, that sort of brazen boyhood culture that was so much a part of New York City was a source of fear for her. And over time, my little brother was born. Over time, she just understood New York City culture and American racial politics a little bit more. And that, of course, changed. But she was in her 20s.

I was a child. And I can't forget the fact that that was part of our worldview, along with the violence that was so pervasive in New York City at the time. Yeah. It sounds like for you also, at least in part, art and eventually writing almost served a dual purpose as a form of expression, but also refuge to a certain extent. Absolutely. I didn't want to be a fiction writer at first. I wanted to be a journalist because, as I mentioned before, I was a latchkey kid. And the, you know, the four, five o'clock news, the six o'clock news, 10, 10 winds playing in the background. New York just was, it was an endless news cycle in New York. There was always something happening

and it was always making the news. And that was part of my subconscious as a child. And of course there was the New York Daily News and Newsday and New York Post was always at my home. And I was just inundated with information. I was fascinated because I was an immigrant and I wanted to understand this world that we had just moved into. So for me, processing what was going on and what sort of planet that we had just come into, because I always felt that we were how I processed a new country and a new culture.

It was through the news, but the news wasn't always, you know, the fluffy and, you know, it wasn't always good news. And in New York city, black boys and black men were always the headlines and it was just not the descriptors for black men and boys were not always good, not good at all, actually. And that also shapes my worldview. Yeah. You end up going to school, moving through a window where you start, it sounds like focused

in the early days, in a very politically minded, almost thinking you might be a lawyer and then somehow navigate to vegan slam poet artist, but come out, I guess, with more of that sort of like journalist intent and really pursuing writing, eventually getting the master's. And so you're pursuing this and sort of saying, okay, so this thing that was a form of refuge, synthesis and expression, now I'm going to study, I'm going to pursue an education in it, and then move into the world and start to do it, which I think brings us pretty close to that first meeting in 9900 College. Meanwhile, Yusuf, your life leading up to this point is profoundly different. Absolutely. Absolutely. My life, actually, no, I shouldn't say it's profoundly different. I wouldn't necessarily describe it that way up until I was at the age of this terrible incident happening to me. I think

prior to that incident, the experience that we would have in this country was a shared experience. I used to wonder, why was I cool with everyone? Why was I accepted by everyone? And it wasn't until I got older, and I want to say even until maybe a few years ago as well, where the realization of what other people saw when they saw me was not what my roots in this country was. And I say that because most people, when they looked at me, they said, oh, he's not from here. And in that being seen almost in a way like Evie is saying as an alien, a foreigner, a person who is not necessarily here, I took that differently from what Evie was, I think, alluding to, not necessarily even being from this planet, being like an alien, if I'm thinking about it correctly, Evie? Yeah, you are. Yeah. I just kept saying, wow, I can go to Brooklyn and nobody messes with me. I can go

to Queens and no one messes with me. I can go to the Bronx and no one messes with me. And like I said, it wasn't until I got older, much older, that I realized that no one associated me with being an African American, a person born in this country. Everyone associated me with being a person who immigrated to this country, whose roots weren't from this country where my father was born in Chicago, but my father's family is from Barbados by way of Africa. I always say that. Whereas my mother, she was born in Birmingham, Alabama. And of course, if you look at her features, she looks almost Somalian. She has an African, so to speak, feature set. And then you look at me, it's like, oh no, this guy is from Senegal. He looks like he's from Senegal. And so no one ever associated me with the struggles that we as Africans in America or African-Americans experience.

And almost to a detriment for ourselves, we get trapped. Whereas a lot of folks who come to this country as immigrants, as people who have experienced life other places, knowing the value of education, knowing the value of hard work, knowing the value of family, to be born in this country in the mid-70s, late 70s, early 80s is to be born in a war. And really that war was perpetuated against us before that time. But it's to be born in a war where you are not manufacturing any of the tools of that war that is being heaped upon you. And so you're not creating, you know, you don't have a gun manufacturing place in your garage and a warehouse where you can create these things. In your backyard,

you're not growing poppy. You're not growing cocaine stuff. Whatever the paraphernalia is, you don't have marijuana plants in your backyard. And so somehow these things are inundated in the black and brown communities. And I don't want to necessarily just say it from that perspective because it's also inundated in America. It allows for people to see this as a crisis, to see this as a, instead of us locking people up and throwing away the key, we need to open up the Betty Ford clinics of the world. We need to really assist these people who are having this trouble to try to help them get out of this trouble that they're in. Whereas in the 80s, I remember very clearly walking around my neighborhood and neighborhoods, any neighborhood I was in, and in the blackest neighborhoods and the most downtrodden neighborhoods and the most marginalized neighborhoods, we would see what looked like skittle tops. And those tops were tops of crack, crack vials, the tops of crack. You would see it, and it wouldn't be unnatural to see that. It would be very normal.

It would be very normal to see young men and young girls, young boys and young girls playing in alleys that homeless people also frequent at night, flipping on dirty mattresses. I mean, when I think about that now, I'm like, that is the most horrific reality a parent wants to even have, like for my child, for my sons, my daughters to have to have gone through what I went through. It's like, I would never want them to have to play in an alley where there's a dirty mattress that has rusted coils coming out of it. But that was what we experienced. It was so natural. And coupled with that was the oppression that wasn't abnormal. It was very normal to see police officers in the streets and the relationship to be a relationship in some ways that was a balanced relationship. Hey, so-and-so, hey, Mr. Officer, you would see them and it would be cool and all of that. And they would know you. There was a more familial type of bond that was happening. But then there was also the officers. There was always the officers, how small they may have been, who would be considered

the bad apples. They would be the ones that would be given those famous names in our communities, like RoboCop. They would be the ones who would come into the community to transfer, and I'm trying to explain it this way so that it can be very clearly understood, transfer their low sense of self-worth and value into the community to make the community fear them, which then elevates their own sense of strength, right? And so to see people get beat up by cops was normal. To see people and when I say beat up, I'm talking about

people being beat up, people being handcuffed, people being hit with the batons, you know, hitting their private areas, all of that stuff, and also never be taken to the precinct. Be like, literally like, just let out of the car. Next time, it'll be different, would be sometimes what you would hear.

And you would never understand what that meant until, fast forward a little bit, to the era of the late 80s. The era where an attorney who would become my appellate attorney, who was perhaps one of the legends in America, was fighting a trial for a young man named Larry Davis. and how the story kind of exploded into this like unimaginable, unrealistic, real life movie slash Jason Bourne slash all of the stuff that you can see today. Here's a man who had aspirations and dreams according to his own story that he wanted to be a hip hop artist, but he was marginalized. He was part of that marginalized community. He was part of the war that he didn't know he was born into. And because of the inability to become successful yet as a hip hop artist, he then began to sell drugs. And who did he sell drugs for? For the police department. And at this point he wanted to get out. He felt like he had had enough.

And I've never heard him say this. Of course he passed away. He was murdered in prison, but I suspect that his conscious got the best of him because we always knew in the communities that we came from, even the people that were selling drugs to the community, they also provided the community with a certain level of security. They gave parties, they gave back in a way that was kind of weird when you think about it now, but it was their way of saying, we know we're doing wrong and this is our way to try to do right. And so they would give out turkeys on Thanksgiving. They would be the ones that would pay people's rents. They would also be the ones that would make sure that nobody

said anything by the paying of the rents and the, the turkeys giving the turkey giveaways and the block parties and all of that stuff. It was a, it was a, it was taking those lemons and making lemonade. You know, it was really a different type of New York and a different type of experience. But to those of us who were growing up in that timeframe, we didn't know. Like we had no idea that the communities that EB was talking about that we both experienced were manufactured that way. Meaning people were really burning down buildings or setting fires to buildings to drive the property value down so that later on, and this is, you know, when you think about, when you think about planning, we have to, and by we, I'm talking about those of us who care to live in a future

where the kaleidoscope of the human family is able to become the dream of a Dr. King and really a dream of our ancestors, right? That same shirt that Ava DuVernay had on that said, I am my ancestors' wildest dreams. The hope of the future being able to survive, but survive in a great way, not by hook or by crook, you know? And we didn't know that we were experiencing that. We were experiencing redlining happening right now, but that redlining was a part of a hundred year plan, right? We may plan for, hey, it's great in our communities when we can begin to train our young people to think you have to have a plan. Like what are you planning to do tomorrow? What do you plan to do this week? What are you planning to do this month? Hey, how's your yearly plan going, right?

And getting them introduced to that, getting them introduced to planning five years out. But we're also, as we begin to experience this war, we're realizing that we're not even in the game yet, even at that level. We're not in the game because we're coming against a people who have planned centuries into the future. How to keep power one-sided, how to let those of us who have been born in this country without the seeds of value that says you have to work hard, education matters, things of that nature, who, you know, you leave your home. You know, many young women experience this. They'll leave their homes in the morning to go to work. And the same individuals that are outside holding up the side of the building, are there when they return home after working eight-hour shifts, sometimes more than that. And you wonder, why is it that they can't or haven't

yet decided to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? It's because they don't have no boots in the first place. It's that old story that when you become relatively conscious as Dr. Baldwin, I'm going to call him Dr. James Baldwin, right? To be relatively conscious in America and to be a black person is to be in a state bilingual reality where you are careful to keep your own mind arrested so that you can just keep moving forward and not fall apart. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. Thank you for that. I had a conversation with Austin Channing Brown a couple months back, and the first line of her book is, white people exhaust me. And then when you read the rest of her book, especially as a middle-aged white male, I'm like, oh, oh, oh. And this is just the tip, the very, very, very, very tip of the iceberg. And so when you describe it, you know, and I think there's been this really interesting, expanding conversation right now that we're going to circle back to. But this is the backdrop of what both EB&U are experiencing coming up in New York City, especially at a time in the city where they're emerging from the 70s. And like you said, there were literally parts of the city that were burning, not because

they just happened to catch fire, because a lot of landlords were torching their buildings so they could clear away for gentrification and higher values and things like that. And this really strange dynamic between law enforcement and kids in different neighborhoods. Your story has been pretty well told and documented. 89, what starts out as a woman jogging in Central Park, you and some other people are brought in through a lot of coercion and pressure, end up in various different levels confessing to something that nobody did. And shortly after, in 90, convicted. You end up in a juvenile prison, effectively, for close to seven years. Horrific experience.

One of the group, which becomes known back then as Central Park Five, and since then the Exonerated Five, ends up in Rikers, I guess because he was 16 at the time. Which, for those of us who are from New York, everyone knows the reputation of that place as just being horrendous. And to imagine an adult being there is horrifying. To imagine a 16-year-old kid being there is horrendous. So you all endure this absolute devastation for anywhere from 6 to 13 years. Quote, do your time, which was never your time in the first place, and then emerged, I guess you

end up released, timing is right, 96, late 96? 97. 97. Early 97, yeah. Right. So you and E.B. meet a couple of years later. One of my curiosities is, and we'll circle back a bit to what that experience was like, because you end up writing about this in this really powerful book together, but you would eventually become exonerated in 2002 because the person whose DNA was actually a part of this ended up confessing. And then definitive testing shows that all of you never should have been there in the first place. In the window between when you're released from prison and that happens, what's happening in your mind, in your heart, in your life?

Because in theory, you've done your time, which was never your time to do. You're out. But in the mind of the world, you're still guilty of a crime. Right. What's happening is hiding in plain sight. You're literally hiding of a crime. Right. What's happening is hiding in plain sight. You're literally hiding in plain sight. I've been over six feet tall since I was 12 years old. I was very recognizable.

And the only thing that was different was that I didn't have a flat top. Like I looked similar to my youth, you know, and the struggle to figure it out took years. I think part of figuring it out is still happening. a rest that happened in my development that needed to not be true and not happen in the first place in order for me to live life freer. There's a certain reality that happens, I think, when you become conscious, like Dr. James Baldwin said, where you're like, oh, sugar, honey, iced tea. You mean to tell me that poverty is a manufactured thing, that there's a school to prison pipeline that is designed and planned as young as four years old, or in the fourth grade, I think it is, if it's not four years old. There's this thing that's going on right alongside of regular normal

life that I've often, as I began to understand it a lot more, what I realized is that it's appearing as racial inequality, but the truth is that it's not. The truth is that it's really spiritual wickedness in high and low places. And so we're battling the appearance of wanting to have our skin color matter. But the truth is that there's people who don't even experienced youth, right? Your toolkit, your tool bag is you open it up and you don't have the same tools that others have who've been able to make mistakes and say, oh, right, my mother said, make sure I read my work and try to do my homework. So therefore, when I'm prepared for the next day, I wake up in the morning and I'm reviewing my notes so that I

can go into class prepared and ready as opposed to trying to do my homework just before I get to school, being completely unprepared in some ways and in many ways not prepared at all. On the one hand, those become the building blocks to help you succeed as a person through trial and error. You don't even have that. And what you have is this overwhelming sense of, I'm thinking about the word mistake, but I'm thinking about it in the context of you being a mistake, you being seen as worthless, and you begin to move throughout your life as a mistake and you're trying to hold it together, you're trying to keep it all under wraps and everyone else on the outside is looking in and doesn't see that. They don't know that that's what your struggles are. You put a suit and a tie on and you change your mentality for yourself because of that.

And so there was times where I would work in healthcare. And this was, of course, this was afterwards. This is after I started understanding things, right? I was in the school, I was in the classroom of life, but I was skipping grades because I was trying to figure it out. And I realized that I could change my thoughts by changing my appearance. It had nothing to do with however, how anyone else saw me, It had nothing to do with how anyone else saw me, but it had everything to do with how I saw myself. And so if I walked by a mirror and looked at myself, I said, wow, I clean up real nice. And feel good about that. Feel like, okay, I could hold my head up a little bit more. And so on the inside, my head was down, but I'm training myself to have

thicker skin. I'm training myself to survive. I'm training myself to be able to know why so that I can live anyhow. It's that old statement of Nietzsche. If you know the why, you can live anyhow. And I'm trying to understand and I'm trying to live that. I'm trying to figure out, like I'm already knowing spiritually that the hand of God is in everything. I'm already knowing that because that's the foundation of family. That's the foundation of spirituality that I came from. But now I have to know it in truth as opposed to theory. I have to begin to live it, right? And I have to begin to believe it.

And so now I'm walking throughout life on purpose. I'm careful about where I step because the rug was pulled out from me as a 15-year-old. I'm making sure that I'm intentional about where I go, right? I'm walking out of the store that I bought things from with the receipt in my hand, right? I'm doing all of these things to protect myself, but I'm also hopeful. I'm also desirous of knowing that this struggle that I went through was not for nothing. And so as things begin to progress, Ibi doesn't know this. I don't think she knows this, but there was a time where before coming to the classroom that we both met, I was looking for a professor named Donna Richards.

And I'm looking, looking, looking, and I can't find Donna Richards anywhere. And so it's one of those things where, you know, it's almost like looking for a job. If you don't have the stick-to-itiveness, the wherewithal to keep going, you knock on one door and say, oh man, it didn't work. But I had the stick-to-itiveness. A friend of mine said, listen, there's a professor at Hunter that you need to meet. And her name is Donna Richards. And so I'm at Hunter looking for Richards, who had changed her name to Marimba Ani. I can't find Donna Richards. No one knows who Donna Richards is. Until I go back to the friend and I say, listen, I've been looking for a few weeks now. I can't find her. Am I spelling the name right?

Is there a different spin? Is it Italian? Is it French? What is it? What am I getting wrong? And they say, hold on, let me find out. And they get back to me. Mind you, this is still the era where we don't have cell phones. We have beepers. We have pagers. We have quarters in our pocket that we can use to make a phone call after we get a message on our pagers. We have quarters in our pocket that we can use to make a phone call after we get a message on our pager. And I get this message back from her letting me know, oh, she changed her name to Marimba Ani. The world opened up. I find Marimba Ani, Professor Dr. Marimba Ani. And the truth about the matter was that I was not a student per se, an official student. I shouldn't say a student. I wasn't an official student in her class. This was part of the classroom of life. I wasn't an official student in her class,

but I was allowed to be in her classroom, a classroom where she was very selective about who was able to be taught by her. She would tell us often that, look around, half of you would not be here by the end of the week. And it wasn't because she would tell people that they couldn't be here. They just wasn't prepared for the level of scholastics, for the depth of the vibration that she was about to take them to. And I was there being tuned, listening to expression. I'll never forget, there was this one class, I was in her class, and she asked a question, and it was an African statement. And in the statement, she said the students had already been in her class. They were returned students. And so they were more familiar with her teaching style. And she said, what do you hear? What's similar? What's familiar? And someone said, muntu, or muntu, right? And come

to find out, she was getting us to think, even even outside of the box that we didn't know this language we hadn't been brought up in this language but this was a part of our africanness right one student says after we found out that it meant a person right the i think the literal definition of umuntu ungamuntu ungabantu was a person is a person because there are people. And so as she asked all of us, one of the students said, well, that's like saying, I be me, you be you, you be me, I be you, We be we. The level of community that is created from that thought process, if I can walk in your shoes, if I can experience life vicariously through you, through conversation, and you can experience life vicariously through me through conversation, xenophobia is gone. The idea that you are that different becomes a myth, defunct. And we're able to see each other for the first time. We're able to move

with each other for the first time, even though the experiences may be different. But you are allowed to be, and I am allowed to be, because we allow each other to be. And it was that kind of thing where it was like, wow, the epiphanies that were going on, the ability for me to begin to think about the meditations that I learned about in prison began to take root in a different way. I began to play around on the movie of my mind of the possibilities of what could be. And then I began to be introduced to various folks, you know, like Dre Oba that Evie may know, you know, and various folks and meeting Evie, you know, and how that happened.

It was like the stars were lining up. It was like, you are ready now. When the student is ready, the teacher will come. Yeah, I'm curious about that moment too. I'd love, Ibi, I'd love to hear sort of like your lens on it as well. Well, I want to add that Donut Richards did change her name to Marimba Ani. So Dona Richards was part of the Student Nonviolent Coronating Committee, and SNCC, basically. And she was part of the cohort that went to Guinea to learn their sort of decolonizing ways at a time when they were just trying to figure out independence.

And part of that cohort was also John Lewis, the late John Lewis. So she and John Lewis worked closely together and she was married to Bob Moses, who was also an important voice in SNCC. So Donna Richards was radicalized in a different way, where she became more African-centered. She studied African culture. She earned her PhD in anthropology. So she took her political awareness and savvy and combine that with what she understood and learned about African history and culture, merged the two and her classes were incredibly innovative. And it wasn't just a class, it was a rites of passage. There was ritual drama. I broke down several times in her classes. One of the things that she would do was present a silent slideshow, and she would show images of indigenous Africans, and then showed images right after that of the Middle Passage.

Then she showed images of slavery. She would show children in the cotton fields, then white families with their Black nannies, and then several images of Black men being lynched, and then the civil rights movement, and then the Black power movement. And it was just a succession of images. And just the, you know, this was in the late 90s. So those old school slideshows where you heard the click and the image, and about, you know, 45 minutes of that. And you'd see those images play black and it hits you. There is no lecture or book can capture that moment when it finally hits you. And we're young and we're finally figuring out what the slavery thing means and what the consequences are. So from me being scared of Black boys in my neighborhood to

being radicalized at Hunter College through Mama Rumba's classes, that's exactly what happened. By 1999, I also changed my name. I wrote for the college newspaper. I was part Marimba Ani had, well, we formed a club based on Marimba Ani's teachings called Daughters of Africa and Stolen Legacy. And we were just a bunch of Black kids coming together and figuring out how do we survive this world? And as you're talking about New York City, Yousef, I'm realizing if you were a Black or brown kid who grew up in New York City or an immigrant child growing up in New York City, I think we suffer from a little bit of a PTSD. Oh, absolutely.

All the news stories. It's not just the news stories. It's for the kids who were playing outside and who lived it. There's so much trauma. And I think some of the Irish and Italian kids who lived in Bensonhurst and other neighborhoods throughout New York City, there's some really horrible things that happened in the classrooms and on the street. We played outside and we had to interact with each other without adult supervision. So by the time I meet you, Yousef, Amadou Diallo had just happened in February. I met you in April of 1999. And that incident radicalized a lot of us. And that was part of the spoken word movement. And this is how we figured things out. We got on the stage and just blurted out our truths. And at that time, everyone was writing a poem about 41 Shots. And it was rage, a lot of rage, a lot of hurt. We were taking to the streets very much like what's happening now across the country. I like to say New York City, 80s and 90s New York City, is a microcosm of what is happening now in the country. Because we had

Donald Trump was not a political figure, but he was a political figure, if you understand, sort of the underhanded, passing money under the table kind of politics. He was part of that. We had Giuliani. We had Koch before that. We had David Dinkins. All of that racial, you would think looking back and you would think it's a, you know, it's the South, but it was New York city and racial tension was huge. By the time I see you in the class and what Dr. Marumba Hani had done when you walked in was hold your face. I don't know if you remember that. She said something to the effect of, I knew you all didn't do it. Wow. Yeah.

She knew who you were as soon as you walked in and you had not yet been exonerated. You were still falsely registered as a sex offender. And you did come in with a peacoat. What you were saying about a shirt and tie, you walked in that classroom extremely well dressed. Wow. But you were our age. Yeah. At first, we didn't know for all of, you know, the case happened.

And we sort of forgotten about it because we were thinking about Amadou Diallo. And you walked in and who's this guy? Who's this guy? And then within a few minutes, wow, Yousef Salaam of the Central Park Five. I was a features editor for the envoy, the hunter envoy and managing editor of the Shield magazine. There was the college newspaper and there was the black magazine. And I was chasing that lead. I was going to get that story. Wow, Yousef Salam of the Central Part Five just walked into our class. We didn't even know if you were out. And he's out. And he's right there. I got to go get the story.

And of course, you know, I followed you out. And you walked with me. And we talked. The longest conversation that we had was about Donald Trump. Until this day, it is the longest conversation I've ever had about Donald Trump. And you were kind of explaining to me, I remember the feeling of like, I didn't do it. This man was responsible for us going to jail because he put out an ad in the newspaper. And I was like, I remember that ad. It was in my sixth grade classroom. So for me, I was trying to get the story. I was writing about Mumia Abdu-Jamal. I was writing about the hands off Assadur and Afeni Shakur. So I was my goal was to get a byline in The New York Times.

But before that, The Village Voice, The Village Voice, a radical newspaper at that time. So all that was just me chasing that story. I wanted to get you on paper interview about your experiences. I knew you were in and around the school, but I never saw you again. Again, you were not part of the school, but I never saw you again. Again, you were not part of that class, but you were around. I had asked around, you were around, people knew you, we have some mutual friends, but I didn't follow up with that story. And I think it was because, you know, years later, this was supposed to happen. So yeah, that's what happened in spring of 1999. And then we ran into each other

again in the fall of 2017. And that was a debut YA author. And I was wondering why no young people knew of your story. This was before than when they see us Netflix movie. And again, I chased that story. I wanted to tell that story because it's part of my New York upbringing too. One of the beautiful things about this experience, this shared experience that Evie is talking about and describing, what I didn't know, which I was able to experience through some of these classes, was there were moments of specialness that were going on. It was happening in the classroom, but then there were times where people would pop up. I remember one time she had everybody close their eyes and there was a, you could hear like way off in the distance. We were talking

about something and then she said, okay, everybody closed their eyes and we were doing this thing i forgot what she described it but we all closed our eyes in the distance was the sounds of africa there was a man playing um man i forget the name of this instrument i know what you're talking about. It's around with a, yeah, and a string. And he's playing this instrument and he's, I mean, it's like, we don't know where he's at. It just sounds like it's like a mile away. And slowly it gets louder as he comes closer and closer and closer.

And he's in the classroom now. And we're being led in a meditation by Dr. Marimba, Ani. And then she tells us to open our eyes. And we all slowly open our eyes. And there's this man who looked like he just got off of the plane from Africa. Now, he didn't, of course, but he looked like that. He looked like he was the motherland, you know, and he had this beautiful smile on his face and he was playing this instrument and we were all just absorbed in emotion. And what I realized about the beauty of what was going on in Dr. Marimba Ani's classes is that she was also taking us through Sankofa. She was also giving us these beautiful experiences that

were in us, like this trauma in us through what she described as mitochondria DNA, where we could break those generational curses. We could literally dive into self and become physicians of self to then release self from the trauma of being a person who continues and perpetuates that trauma. And so I'm saying all of that to say that all of that was supposed to happen. All of that was necessary. All of that was valuable. And perhaps as Ibi is alluding to, the moment of me being able to tell my story in the fullness of where it is now and where it became, perhaps I wasn't ready yet. You know, the world had not experienced the things that they have been experiencing. And even when we think about this beautiful book that we have written, this time that this book is being birthed into, it's like we didn't plan this, but it appears as if we did. This is an answer to what's going on in America right now.

This is a part of the change. This is like the story of the marathon continuing. The breaking of the generational curses happening in the pages of this book and therefore in the minds of its readers. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

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Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. Yeah, I mean, it is when you read the book, the timing is unusual.

But it is just right. I mean, you mentioned that you two had essentially gone your separate ways, you know, like and spent 15, 16, 17 years, probably loosely aware of each other. Maybe you're building a writing career as a YA novelist, use of your continuing education, and then speaking all over the world and becoming an advocate for these things that you sowed, that you experienced personally and for change that you fiercely wanted to get behind. And you come back together in 2017 and reconnect with the intention of saying, well, let's co-create, let's collaborate to create something specifically for that audience that Ibi had been writing for for years. And that, I guess,'s a novel, but it really is a window into everything that we've been talking about. It's loosely based on a character, Amal, who has a similar experience and is accused, and then he's in prison, and his emotional and cognitive and spiritual experiences while he's there. And there's interesting as we're having this conversation, now I'm getting the benefit of your deeper relationship and individual experiences. And it's informing. Now, when I think about the book, I can see so many different things moving out of it.

Even the experience you just described about hearing this instrument in the distance or having the professor invite you to experience different things. I wonder now, there's a character in the book, Imani, who is this poet slash teacher. I'm starting to wonder, well, who's that actually based on? And I think I'm getting a pretty good idea. And part of my fascination also, I'm curious about something structural. The book is powerful and it speaks to so many of the things that are happening in the moment. And I do want to pull a couple of specific topics to explore with you. But the structure of the book that you both chose, I thought was really powerful.

It added not just to the content, but the structure, which was you chose to write it as a novel in verse, which I've actually never really seen before. And I was curious about that choice. Well, when I ran into Yousef in 2017 at a book festival, he was there to speak and he was also selling his book of poetry, his self-published book of poetry. And of course I already knew his story.

And I was shocked a little bit to know that he self-published this book of poems and still the world doesn't seem to have known the depth, the level of depth and just the importance of the Central Park Five jogger case. Of course, the Ken Burns documentary was out, but I needed young people to know his particular story. It's very unique. The Central Park Five story is unique. His particular worldview adds another layer of perspective. And I just didn't think it was fair that he was self-publishing when I was in the midst of, in the young adult literature world, a boom of social justice books, books addressing police brutality and different things that we're talking about right now.

And I told him, look, people will pay you to tell your story. You don't have to self-publish. This isn't an important story. And, you know, the rest is history. And there are books, there are, you know, lots of wonderful books written in verse. Jason Reynolds, Long Way Down, Elizabeth Alvarez, The Poet X, and several books before that. But his poems were there. There are about five of his poems in Punching the Air when you don't know which ones they are because I seamlessly wove them in,

but the foundation was already there. I was a spoken word poet in college. Yousef wrote poems while he was incarcerated and I built the story around his poetry. And I took Yousef's worldview, all the things that he just mentioned now, it's sort of a perspective that I shaped into different poems. Just trying to capture what it means to be a Black boy in a classroom, the school-to-prison pipeline, the 13th Amendment. I convey them all in poetry through the lens of a 16-year-old boy.

And that's basically because of Yousef's poems. Yeah, I mean, reading it, I had this weird experience of it reading from a narrative experience as a novel. But you get the rhythm and the beats and the flow of poetry, which almost pulls you into a semi-trans like state while you're reading. You know, it's like when you go and see really powerful spoken word, you're transported. And there was something about this where the story is powerful, the writing is powerful, and the way that it was written and the verse, it allows you to move beyond the experience of just reading. And I wonder if that also allows you to transfer into it and to understand. I wanted this to be about a child, first and foremost.

And we step into the shoes, the skin, the body of a child. We get into his soul. So this is, you know, through him writing his poetry, there are illustrations in the final copy. You have to get the final copy to see the illustrations. The illustrations take it to another level. Omar, T, Pasha, just some spot illustrations that really convey what the poems are trying to say. But we wanted to get into the heart of this boy. When you're speaking to Yousef, you're getting, yes, you're getting an understanding of the criminal injustice system, but you're also getting a sort of wisdom that we don't always see from young people.

He had about three or four, some of the other poems were a little rough, Youssef, but three or four very powerful poems that he wrote as a teen. And I was of the understanding that he was incredibly aware, self-aware and conscious of what was happening and why it was happening. Sometimes we think young people get into these situations because they don't understand not to talk to the police or they don't understand not to say something without a lawyer present or without a parent present. Yousef knew all those things. If you saw the movie, his mother advocated for him and he was the only one who did not speak on tape. A Black child is not immune to injustices by virtue of knowing what those injustices

are. So Amal is incredibly self-aware. He understands the school of prison pipeline. He understands the 13th Amendment, but he's still trapped in it. So what is the antidote to all of that? It's not just awareness and it's not just people saying that we need to change it because there isn't a prison abolitionist in the story. There is something that happens in the end. And I think that is his salvation in the way that it was Yusef's salvation. We don't want to give too much away.

Yeah, yeah. No, of course. You both mentioned the timing of this book. You know, a book like this, you know, speaks so much to the moment we're in, but clearly it's written before this particular moment. And yet, I think it was you who first referenced that, maybe it was both of you, that in fact, the protests, the awareness of violence, of the deeper understanding of the

prison industrial complex, the protests, the uprising that we are seeing now on a mass scale, there were flashes of very, very similar things and moments, especially in New York City back in the late 80s and 90s. And now, so as we sit here having this conversation now in 2020, living through this moment where there's a global pandemic, where it feels like there is an expansive wave of awakening, not as a state, but as a process and protests, uprising, calls to defund the police, calls for communities to become much more involved in the way that we take care of each other. I'm curious how both of you are experiencing this moment and if and how it feels different to you. I think the difference of this moment, the specialness of this moment, feels like we are ready to receive the blessing of change. And I say

that because on a global scale, for the recognition of Garka skin to be important, to be valuable, for the understanding of the things that are discussed in this book, like the school to prison pipeline, the fact that art is a medium that allows people to be great. And we explore that in a way that is really powerful in this book, how all of these things play into the time right now. Like this is the time. This is our time, right? There's never been a better time than now for us as a people to stand in unison, right? There's this explanation of unity being more powerful than an atomic bomb. And the reason why it's more powerful than an atomic bomb is because

once you are unified, if you are a part of America and you realize that the part that you are playing, the role that you're playing in America doesn't suit you, your conscious is speaking to you and allowing you to say, choose different, then when the oppressor says, shoot, kill, maim, there's no one there to carry out those requests. Because then all of the people who are there become almost like the spook who sat by the door, right? They are very aware that it is more important for the value system to be raised up than for me to get a paycheck.

Because what does it benefit me to live lavishly when my neighbor is struggling? Right. I become food then for my neighbor. But if we collectively can raise everything up and say, hold on't be a crime for you to the example that we see on the side of the cop powers throughout America. You represent to serve and protect, not the inception of what that was to be, right? So we know that through, as we go in and do the knowledge, as we would say, as youngsters, and we go into the history to know the ledge of what it is to get the knowledge of what it is to be a police officer, we realize that that was an outgrowth of slavery being abolished and slavery needing to be continued by another name. And so we see the Confederacy and we see all of these things happening and all of these things that have

been happening. And we realized that part of the part that the role that people play is the spotlight has never been shown on good policing. the young girl in 2013 who stood up and asked me a question. She said, I'm a cadet. I'm 13. I want to become a cop. What advice can you give me? My initial thought was tell her to run. Do not go into that profession. Do not be a part of that. It was quickly stifled and arrested and killed by a better thought. That thought was I was talking to the future. And my responsibility at this time is to plant the seed or rather provide the water for the seed that is already planted for the beautiful outgrowth to happen in this person. And this person then becomes a antidote. I was going to say virus, but of course she is the antidote, not the virus, right? To what it is to be a good cop.

So my advice was that she does her job. We've all experienced, those of us who live in New York City especially, that on the side of the cop cars, they also add the three ideals, courtesy, professionalism, and respect. And so what we get from that is if this young girl who was 13 years old at the time becomes a police officer who understands that she is serving and protecting all, that she is to treat people with courtesy, professionalism, and respect, she will be the best officer. That's the type of officers that we need. And so all of it is like this gumbo, and the best gumbo has the best ingredients. Right. And so we're adding to the pot of ingredients of what we want to imagine the world to be so that we become our an opportunity to provide real change and resources for everyone.

Because when you give people the opportunity to understand that they matter, psychosocially, they begin to move as if they matter. They begin to be a part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem. They realize that in Dr. King's speech, where he said, when you realize what your purpose is in life, do it as if God himself called you to do it at this very moment. And instead of giving the most grandiose example of it, hey, the president of the United States, the person running the greatest corporation in America or the world, perhaps. He said, if it is your life to become a street sweeper, sweep the streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Le streets in excellence to be the best that there was and is. Because all of those things are needed.

We need somebody on all levels of life to show up in those levels of life. But more importantly, we need for their value to be recognized and to be compensated as such. Yeah. Evie? Well, listening to Yusef and us reminiscing about New York City, I'm realizing that if we were older, let's say 20 years older, and we'd be reminiscing about New York City, we'd have much more incidents to add to the ones that we already have. And I do have older friends. Well, we were taught by Professor Marimba Ani, who is, I think she is in her early 80s now, if I'm not mistaken. Wow. She looks very young. But to sit at the feet of

elders and to listen to them recount their experiences with dealing with racial injustice in the world and in this country, you start to wonder, will it change? Will it ever change? And sometimes I often ask my older friends, well, how has it become better? What's better? And they do have, the list is just as long as the things that have not. I am so grateful that young people are talking about defunding police. There's also dismantling the police. There's abolishing the prison industrial complex. Some really radical ideas are making it to the forefront of our conversations, collective conversations. We used to talk about these things as college students in New York City, in our clubs. Never did we think that it would be a headline in the New York Times. I wrote the word abolition into punching the air three years ago, not thinking that this would be part of the mainstream

conversation. And I went back and forth between reform and abolition. And I wanted to make Imani the character of radical teaching artists who has big hopes for the young people that she teaches. So she's not a suit and tie kind of a politician where she would ask for prison reform. She's an artist. So she's asking for abolition. And I said, okay, I'm going to go with that. This sounds radical, but let me just put it in there. And now it's not so radical. It is still, we're talking about it. That's the first step. And some of us have a hard time trying to wrap our minds around what that would look like. But the way that these things begin to change is to start having those conversations.

Maybe talking about abolition means that there will be greater reform. We can meet in the middle. But the point is young people are talking about these things. And that's my job as a writer for young people. I listen to what 15 and 16 year olds are talking about. They're hopeless right now. They don't know what college is going to look like for them. They don't know what the job market is going to look like for them. So they want to tear it all down. Why not? It's not working for us. It's not going to work for us. There's a pandemic. What is the 30%? What's

the unemployment rate at right now? Wow. So there is a sense of just like, this is not working. This has never worked. This is not working for us now. And this will not work for us later. What can we build? What's the new thing that we could build in its place? So in that sense, Amal in Punching the Air is that kind of radical kid who's still caught up in the system. But the way that he pushes his radical ideas is through his art. And again, it is what saves them in the end. I just gave it away. No, I didn't. But it is what ultimately saves them. And we didn't talk about you. I know we're out of time, but Yousef is an artist as well. And I was inspired by his illustrations. I saw his notebook. I saw the pants that he wore on the night, on that fateful night in Central Park, was covered in illustrations and art. So, yep, this is just as much a book about art as it is about criminal injustice in the prison industrial complex. Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting how both of you came to art in different ways at different moments of your life,

but it became central for similar reasons. So the circumstances that you moved through were different and the things that caused suffering and caused pain that you grappled with were different. The underlying turning to art as both a form of expression, refuge, and understanding was similar. And I think for so many of us, it's a powerful place to go. And that story is really beautifully told in Punching the Air as well.

And now I do wanna see more of Yusuf's art and illustrations and anything that you can put up there. Now I'm really curious, now I'm hungry for it to a certain extent, but I think this feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So I always end with the same question that I'd love to invite each of you to respond to. So in the context of this Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Wow. I think to live a good life for me would be to live a life of value, of worth, of purpose, to understand our ability to plant seeds of goodness in the future so that the shade of those trees will be experienced not by your own family alone, but also by community and by the world? Well, the idea of radical honesty comes to mind. Radical honesty, not in a way that it would hurt someone, but radical empathetic honesty. I love it when people say, I don't know, or they say, I don't understand this, or I'm still working through it. I still have a lot of room to grow. I think we could all stand to be radically honest with ourselves, our family members, and the people in our community to say, this is what I want. This is what I don't want. This is what I understand. This is what I don't know. This is what I know.

All those statements can come from a truly honest, radical place in our hearts. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jonathan. a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button

in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

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