Episode 34: Akilah S. Richards - Raising Free People

07/29/20 • 56 min

I loved my conversation with Akilah S. Richards and walked away with a much deeper understanding of the value of unschooling in America. Conventional schooling is deeply rooted in colonization, industrial progress, and control over our personal autonomy.

Akilah is passionate about mindful partnerships and parenting. Since 2016 she has hosted Fare of the Free Child, a lifestyle and parenting podcast about the connection between liberation, learning, and parenting, particularly among Black, Non-Black Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Parents, educators, unschoolers, and entrepreneurs tune in weekly to connect about unschooling, deschooling, conscious parenting, and self-directedness. Discussions center around emotional wellness, learning and children, parenting, self-care, and self-love. The voice and work of this Jamaican-born, digital nomad have been featured on NPR, Forbes, NBC TV, Good Morning America’s blog, and in several literary and in-person spaces throughout the U.S., Jamaica, and South Africa. The TEDx Speaker, digital content writer, and facilitator’s highly-anticipated book Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work (PM Press), will be released in the Fall of 2020.

“We can’t keep using tools of oppression and raise free people.” -Akilah Richards

Unschooling is a life design choice but it’s also deeply linked to liberation and the idea of raising free people.
Akilah’s children, Marley and Sage, had a consistent level of pushback when attending conventional school and at one point, Akilah and her partner Chris started to listen to what their children were saying.
While the girls were accelerating academically, they were shrinking emotionally.
They had stopped asking questions, which is a very “schoolish” thing.
Akilah and Chris wanted their children to have agency and autonomy and the journey has revealed a tremendous tie into the work of liberation.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
This began a process of “mad question asking.”
The way of the world is schooling - is our job as parents to acclimate our children to that?
The idea of unschooling is to help your child create a trustful relationship to learning.
The American Dream seems deeply entrenched in this idea of conventional education as the only way.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
When they left conventional education they discovered that there were many rewards - many freedoms with travel and finances that they had not previously recognized or been able to take advantage of.
A lot of what we see as educational issues are really issues of human relationships.
Unschooling creates an environment to question and unlearn.
Questions are the path.
Mad question asking brings us inward into the feminine - how do you want to feel?
In our school system, children are rewarded when they comply.
Parents worry about socialization, but socialization happens everywhere but school.
All people are indoctrinated into the “system,” but when you walk around in a Black body there is another level of suppression of your personhood which is why creating safe environments for BIPOC children to learn and develop confident autonomy is so important.
Unschooling isn’t just for rich people.
The pandemic is offering us opportunities and parents are noticing a positive shift in their children.
Covid is an opportunity to create a new normal in many ways including our relationship to education.
Liberation comes with responsibility and accountability.
It is time to decolonize our ideas of learning

“The resistance is the roadmap, not a route to something else.”

Support The Revelation Project

Links:

“We can’t keep using tools of oppression and raise free people.” -Akilah Richards

Unschooling is a life design choice but it’s also deeply linked to liberation and the idea of raising free people.
Akilah’s children, Marley and Sage, had a consistent level of pushback when attending conventional school and at one point, Akilah and her partner Chris started to listen to what their children were saying.
While the girls were accelerating academically, they were shrinking emotionally.
They had stopped asking questions, which is a very “schoolish” thing.
Akilah and Chris wanted their children to have agency and autonomy and the journey has revealed a tremendous tie into the work of liberation.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
This began a process of “mad question asking.”
The way of the world is schooling - is our job as parents to acclimate our children to that?
The idea of unschooling is to help your child create a trustful relationship to learning.
The American Dream seems deeply entrenched in this idea of conventional education as the only way.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
When they left conventional education they discovered that there were many rewards - many freedoms with travel and finances that they had not previously recognized or been able to take advantage of.
A lot of what we see as educational issues are really issues of human relationships.
Unschooling creates an environment to question and unlearn.
Questions are the path.
Mad question asking brings us inward into the feminine - how do you want to feel?
In our school system, children are rewarded when they comply.
Parents worry about socialization, but socialization happens everywhere but school.
All people are indoctrinated into the “system,” but when you walk around in a Black body there is another level of suppression of your personhood which is why creating safe environments for BIPOC children to learn and develop confident autonomy is so important.
Unschooling isn’t just for rich people.
The pandemic is offering us opportunities and parents are noticing a positive shift in their children.
Covid is an opportunity to create a new normal in many ways including our relationship to education.
Liberation comes with responsibility and accountability.
It is time to decolonize our ideas of learning

“The resistance is the roadmap, not a route to something else.”

Support The Revelation Project

Links:

Previous Episode

Episode 33: Jenna Arnold: Raising Our Hands

Jenna Arnold was first mentioned to me by a dear friend over ten years ago. She called me one night soon after meeting Jenna in New York City. “This woman is a force of nature and you HAVE to meet her!" I recall her saying.

Fast forward, and while I have been following her on social media for several years, I recently noticed that she was publishing an important book about race. I asked for a copy, devoured it, and felt deeply excited about its content. I loved it because Jenna doesn’t try to simplify or dumb down what’s happening in the world and why. In it, she calls out middle-class white women to recognize where we unconsciously keep the systems of oppression in place and why. She further argues that if we were to awaken to our power and our willingness to be with difficult truths, we could quite literally change the future for all human beings. Jenna asserts that white women benefit from the very systems that oppress us, and we use our voting power to keep these systems in place because we won’t face where we have been complicit in the oppression of ourselves and others, and where our inaction has determined the current trajectory of this country. This is such an important book, and a powerful conversation- please listen in- I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Jenna Arnold is the author of Raising Our Hands, an educator, social entrepreneur, activist, and mother who lives in New York City with her husband and two children. Jenna was one of the National Organizers of the Women’s March in 2017 and Oprah named her as one of her “100 Awakened Leaders who are using their voice and talent to elevate humanity." For her work as the co-founder of ORGANIZE—an organization focused on ending the waitlist for organ transplants in the US, Jenna was named one of Inc Magazine's "20 Most Disruptive Innovators" and the New York Times called it one of "the biggest ideas in social change." Jenna created the hit TV show on MTV, 'Exiled!' which took spoiled American teenagers to live with indigenous cultures around the world, and while at the United Nations, Jenna created multi-platform programming for MTV and Showtime with A-list celebrities like Jay-Z and Angelina Jolie. Jenna sits on the board of the Sesame Workshop Leadership Council and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her first book, Raising Our Hands, is about how white women can stop avoiding hard conversations, start accepting responsibility, and find their place on the new frontlines (published June 2020).

Jenna Arnold's grandmother was one of 90 who contracted COVID-19 in her nursing home and is only one of two who survived.
Mindset is so powerful and important when it comes to what we are facing in the world at the moment.
All oars in the water - we all need to put our oars in, and row in the same direction.
The title of Raising Our Hands was so difficult to get to, and yet, so obvious. It symbolizes the way Jenna wants white women to remember that we all need to raise our hands and be counted when it comes to being antiracist and volunteering ourselves for hard conversations, truths, and paradoxes. "I’m guilty, but I’m also willing to learn." That the constant contradictions of who we are, the raising our hand emoji is a great way for us to relate to all the ways in which we need to make ourselves available to be with the truth of what is, in all of it’s complexity.
We need to learn how to allow paradoxes to stand together and hold “the sacred AND."
There is a genocide in this country that we do not talk about.
Abraham Lincoln is the victor and therefore he got to tell the story however he wanted. We have to be careful throughout history of who gets to tell the story.
When marginalized people are systematically abused, ignored, enslaved, and destroyed, they don’t get to tell a story anyone is willing to hear because it’s not a story of “victory,” yet these are the voices that need to be centered when it comes to telling history.
Middle class and above American white women need to sit down and be quiet AND stand up and roar.
Middle class white American women have to say, "I’m willing to show up and be messy and imperfect."
We spend more money on our prisons than our schools.
The data related to the demographics of white women was not adding up to the psychology of American white women in the voting booths.
Jenna formed listening circles of women around the country and for four years she asked them questions to have conversations that would give her insight into this paradox that had white women voting for someone that wasn’t aligned with their values.
Our systems are broken, not our humanity.
There are 480 sources in the book Raising Our Hands - the information Jenna included is well researched.
There are billions of dollars lost in wages to the gender pay gap.
There ...

Next Episode

Episode 35: Alyssa Neill: Nourishment From the Inside Out

Alyssa describes herself as a walking paradox so I found myself feeling right at home in our very progressive discussion with a surprise “ending." It also happened to be National Orgasm Day, so, there’s that. You're welcome.

Alyssa Neill is a holistic Registered Dietitian, Certified Life Coach, in-training Quantum Alignment Human Design Analyst, and a Nourishment Evangelist, who deeply enjoys exploring all the avenues of nourishment, including & especially (!) those that are culturally taboo.

She works with clients one on one in her private practice and hosts groups, intensives, and retreats. Alyssa loves nothing more than creation, expression, learning, and connecting. She climbs, dances, hikes, and adores being anywhere outside.

Alyssa is a Human Design G-Center Authority Projector, a Cancer Sun, Pisces Moon, and Capricorn Rising. While she appreciates all of these ways to define who she might be in relation to you, she also loathes when people try to define her.

This episode covers:

Reclaiming How We Nourish.
Nourishment guided by the body's wisdom.
Stripping away the externalized authority and conditioning (e.g. "you should look like this," "you must eat less," "be smaller here," "bigger here," "bad foods," "be neat," "chew quieter," "don't fart," "that's inappropriate," "masturbation is a sin," "not ladylike," etc.) and reacquainting ourselves with our Selves and our Senses.
Nourishment guided by our Individualized Inner Authority & Senses (via sensation).
Less socially acceptable modalities/avenues of nourishment: creative expression, sexuality, sensuality, being int the body, intimacy, etc.
Why? Well, great damn question. Our life-soul trajectories are often so externalized. We don't trust ourselves because we have been taught not to.
We have been taught to live within the very specific, often very comfortable structure of existence, and while it has worked well for some, for many of us it a) causes dis-ease if we try to ignore our soul-purpose by overriding internal signaling b) leads us to numbing out c) puts our power outside of ourselves (i.e. consumerism, judgment culture, shame-guilt as drivers), which in turn paralyzes us d) causes massive amounts of confusion, pressure, and tension

Shownotes:

Alyssa was the one who would bring up uncomfortable conversations at the dinner table.
She didn’t realize that she was pushing the envelope.
Stories that reveal Alyssa’s humanity.
Alyssa’s work in the world is to meet Women where they are and begin the conversation about nourishment, and all avenues of nourishment including menstruation, food, emotional health, sexual health, allowing sensation and pleasure.
Norms don’t resonate with Alyssa.
Western society has conditioned us to be separate from our nourishment.
Alyssa remembers being an adolescent and becoming very self-conscious due to development at an early age.
We’ve been conditioned to think of sex as predatory vs. a natural part of coming into our sexual essence.
An experience with disordered eating became a catalyst for Alyssa to recognize her disconnection from her body and her radiance.
Disorder creates disease - because it makes us separate from the truth of who we are.
Sensation (sensuality) is a huge part of nourishment.
Our bodies are super organisms working synergistically - even our microbiome responds to what we are feeling.
When we are in our senses we are not overthinking.
Alyssa works with clients to help them reframe the narratives they might have around food, body, and everything.
When we are caring for ourselves we glow with radiance.