The post Palestinian-American Educator Shares Strategies for Talking to Kids About Gaza appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

A lot of things that come up in my work are very organic. This might be a consequence of taking this justice-oriented approach to research. Those six pillars emerged through the writing process, I think as a way to organize and actually see patterns in the ideas that I was having and in the case studies that I was engaging with.

When people imagine what environmental action looks like [or] what having a connection to nature looks like, we can do this flattening thing where connection to nature only looks like you go barefoot walking in the forest, and you hug trees, and you’re one with the land in that very obvious way. I feel like that does such a disservice to the movement and also erases much of the history of this movement, which is more dynamic and more abundant. I do love going into the forest a lot, but I also do love to be shaking my ass, and I do love working with technology. We’re not one-dimensional beings. It’s about complicating ideas of what connection to the living world, connection to each other, and connection to environmental action looks like.

How does rage connect those dots?

I think rage has become such a divisive emotion or space to be in when you speak about environmental action. A lot of my analysis of rage as a tool that can be both useful and destructive is looking back at Black feminist writing, and about how rage is used to oppress and persecute people, but also how rage can be a source of enlightenment, a source of community, a source of processing and transformation in the face of systems of oppression.

That chapter and that pillar is really trying to get us to connect to our sense of rage but to see it not as something that looks one way. Rage is not always shouting or chanting or aggressive behavior, but is a welling of emotion. It’s a fire that should fuel our action rather than turning into something toxic that we spout at each other whilst the systems of oppression watch.

I personally think that it is a helpful emotion. But it’s been racialized. That’s why newspapers use it against us… When people channel rage, they think that they’re already the aggressor, whereas it can be a really helpful, motivating, powerful emotion. There’s so much going on, it’s hard not to be angry about it.

It is undeniable that we would feel rage about the things that are happening in this world. It was also a reflection on myself as a Black woman who grew up in a very patriarchal family and who has consistently been in patriarchal spaces being in academia. I became disconnected from my rage as a source of survival in these spaces. Even if you’re not presenting your rage, you are feeling a lot of rage and understanding that it’s actually an opportunity to connect [with] people.

Is there anything that you’ve identified as a key point as to where this disconnection or disillusionment has stemmed from?

Society glorifies heroism and glorifies saviorism, makes us think that if we are not doing the biggest thing [on the] biggest scale or [having] the most global impact, it’s not worth it. We have become so disconnected from ourselves and our communities that we don’t see the work that we do on a smaller scale as valuable. The reason we’ve become so disconnected is because our systems are focused on scale [and] individualism. Like, “If I’m not the one person that stands up and solves this issue, then it’s not worth doing.” People don’t even know their neighbors. How is it that you expect to start making change on a grander scale if you aren’t committed to, or interested in, connecting with the people and the land around you? Everyone wants to get straight into being a hero or…

Being a celebrity.

Rather than going deep.

We’re obsessed with celebrity, even in well-meaning sectors like climate activism or feminism. People feel like they have to be at the highest peak… I’m sure the person at that level you want to get to is having similar worries of, “How do I keep this momentum?” And the person that hasn’t gotten there is like, “What do I do to jump ahead?” rather than working communally.

I think people often want to be able to make visible their impact, to be able to present and to evidence the things that they’ve done. And actually, the most impactful work that I do, nobody knows about. Like, my research community I work with for my PhD—I’ve been doing it for the last four years and very little of that work is public. One, for respect; two, to protect the relationships that I have with people; and three, because it just cannot necessarily be translated. Not everything is meant to be translated. These kinds of rich relationships are not necessarily meant to be translated, but that doesn’t remove the fact that the impact is happening, that the connections are being made, that the work is being done.

To be personable on an individual level, on a community level—to [connect to] a place, to ecosystems—is what [should] fuel you. At least that’s what fuels me. If we start doing much more of that, we start feeling a lot more empowered. Change is complicated on a small level, not just on a big level. So it’s important that the local is where we actually understand what the dynamics of policy change, of decision-making, of impact, of organizing looks like.

Absolutely. The localization of things is where you can get to the heart of an issue—when you become friends with people and real friends, not industry friends. Let’s get into bioacoustics!

So my PhD research is focused on an emerging field called Conservation Data Justice, which looks at the ways in which conservation technologies create opportunities to conserve ecosystems better but also present harms for the communities that live closest to or within those ecosystems. Because of advances in AI, machine learning and conservation technologies are proliferating around the world. You’ve got satellites measuring forests from above. We have drones, camera traps, acoustic recorders—and all of these technologies are collecting data about ecosystems all around the world. We know about ecosystems that are threatened, how restoration is working, how species populations are changing, [so because of this] we can actually implement actions to protect these ecosystems.

Bioacoustics [is about] how you monitor the biodiversity of sound. I focus on tropical forests and birds. The easy way that I can get people to understand is that it is basically Shazam for nature. You train machine-learning algorithms to learn the different core species, and then you use sensors that can be deployed in forests for weeks or months at a time, and you use the algorithms to analyze this data. You can ask many different ecological questions. You can focus on trying to find rare species. You can focus on mapping all the species in the forest… There are many ecological questions you can ask, but at its core, it’s trying to use the sound of species and the soundscape of forests to better understand biodiversity and to better support conservation measures for protecting biodiversity or wildlife.

I think sound is something that we all have this heart connection to. As soon as I hear birdsong in the morning, I’m like, “Okay, it’s 5:00 AM now.” Then I go back to sleep. [*laughs*]

[*laughs*] We’re intimately connected with it, but it’s also relegated in our mind. It’s something that’s constantly happening in the background. The community that I work with lives on the fringes of a beautiful forest reserve [in Ghana]. They have huge amounts of knowledge about the species in the forest, but at first they were like, “They’re just in the background.” It’s like, “No, you have insane knowledge about these species. It’s just tacit knowledge.” It’s not learned in the academic way. It’s knowing the world. I do write about this in the book, where we have these ideas that in order to be someone who’s connected to nature, you have to know all the names of plants, all the names of the birds. From an ecological perspective, I understand that part of our disconnection is not being able to know and name the world around us. But actually working with community members, I feel like it’s quite a Western idea that we have to be able to categorize and name things in order to know them.

It’s the colonial practice of Latin naming. It doesn’t correlate with embedded bodily and ancestral reading and knowing of nature that most of the world feels intimately.

But that doesn’t minimize them knowing, right? Community members know in many different ways. It’s markings, or [knowing] this particular bird tells you to go home from the farm, or [knowing] this particular bird is going to tell you that it’s going to rain soon. There are other ways of knowing beyond just naming.

That’s so beautiful. It’s overturning anthropological practices. What kind of sensors do you use in your field work and where have community members said that they’re comfortable with putting them?

I work with ones called AudioMoths just because they’re the cheapest. I knew I was leaving the sensors there, so I needed to choose the ones that were the cheapest, that only need batteries and an SD card and you are ready to go. And the cases for them, we made out of lunch boxes. [*laughs*] Everything is out of lunch boxes and sponges. At the beginning of the research, people were obviously and understandably very worried. What is this thing? Is it taking pictures? Is it alerting enforcement? Is it going to infringe on the way that we can engage the forest? Because you have to add the context. Forest reserves are already quite militaristically managed… The 1920s is when all of these reserves were created. So that’s the context as to why they were so concerned about the technology. My first field season was 12 weeks. I spent eight of those weeks not collecting a single ounce of data, which is [against] what they tell you to do in university: collect as much data as you can, as quickly as you can.

For people who want to become researchers, what ideas should they upend about the ways that we’re taught to research? What is really important to engage with when you are working with communities? What character-building should you do prior to starting something like that?

Actually, I have a published paper on this, called “Justice-oriented Design Listening.” It’s about what you just asked, but specific to design. Being the researcher or the designer, [you are] a listener first and foremost. You are not there to contribute, really. Most of the productive, interesting, and enjoyable moments of the research have come from oral storytelling. It is the core of how we are creative, is the core of how we design, of how we connect with each other.

How can we connect and move away from the binary of the activist and the observer?

One of the main messages in the book is that you don’t need to become somebody else to be an environmentalist. We all need to use the skills that we have been born with and the talents that we have been born with. Also for joy. If you’re a creative director, you might not find the most joy in trying to sort out the diplomatic issues of mining in another country. You don’t need to do that. You [need to think about your] influence. What are the things that you can see around you? It’s first becoming attuned to that. Are you even aware of the environment?

We’re not the first generation. Our ancestors went through a lot over a long, long time. If our ancestors after 50 years said, “Oh, do you know what? This isn’t worth it,” we would not be here. We would not be having this call on this phone. We need to get comfortable with the fruits of our labor coming when we’re not alive because that’s what our ancestors did for us. I think it’s also mimicking the natural world. Some things happen immediately, but some things happen over generations, and that is a wealth that we can also pass on to future generations.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Georgina Johnson.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Vaccine Education Center’s Paul Offit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and measles for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (2/26/25)

Janine Jackson: Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is colorful, which is a problem when someone is a public hazard. Because now that Kennedy is in a position of power, we need journalists to move past anecdote to ideas—ideas that are informing actions that shape not just his reputation, but all of our lives.

Our guest suggests we could begin with a core false notion that lies in back of much of Kennedy’s program.

Paul Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center, and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Offit.

Paul Offit: Thank you.

JJ: The context for our conversation is the first measles death in the US in a decade, in Texas, where we understand they have reported, and this news is fresh, some 400 cases of measles, just between January and March, while the national number for 2024 was 285. This is a tragedy, and a tragically predictable one, due to surges of misinformation around vaccines, around disease and, frankly, around science that have been at work for years, but are turning some kind of corner with the elevation of RFK Jr.

Beyond the Noise (2/11/25)

You identified a keystone belief in Kennedy’s book on Fauci that explains a lot. I would like to ask you to give us some history on that notion, where it falls in terms of the advance of science, and what the implications of such a belief can be.

PO: Sure. So in the mid-1800s, people weren’t really sure about what caused diseases. There were two camps. On the one hand, there were the miasma theory believers. So miasma is just a sort of general notion that there are environmental toxins, initially that were released from garbage rotting on the streets, that caused this bad air, or miasma— kind of a poison, toxin. And so therefore diseases weren’t contagious. You either were exposed to these toxins or you weren’t.

And then, on the other hand, people like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur were the germ theory believers, that believed that specific germs—as we now know, viruses and bacteria—can cause specific diseases, and that the prevention or treatment of those germs would save your life.

Washington Post (4/7/25)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not believe in the germ theory. I know this sounds fantastic, but if you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, on pages 285 to 288, you will see that he does not believe in the germ theory, and everything he says and does now, supports that. His modern-day miasmas are things like vaccines, glyphosate—pesticides—food additives, preservatives: Those are his modern-day miasmas.

So he is a virulent anti-vaccine activist. He thinks that vaccines are poisoning our children. He thinks no vaccine is beneficial. And so everything he says and does comports with that, even with this outbreak now in Texas, it’s spread to 20 states in jurisdictions, he doesn’t really promote the vaccine. Rather, he promotes vitamin A, because he believes that if you’re in a good nutritional state that you will not suffer serious disease. And he still says that, even though that first child death in 20 years, that occurred in West Texas, was in a perfectly healthy child.

JJ: And again, one element of the fallout of this is that he is not just saying, don’t get vaccinated, but saying cod liver oil and vitamin A. And so Texas Public Radio, for one, is reporting kids are now showing up to hospitals with toxic vitamin A levels. So his answer is instead of a vaccine… the response is sending kids to the hospital.

PO: Right. And if you’re a parent, you can see what the seduction is, because here you’re given a choice. He presents it in many ways as a binary choice. You can get a vaccine, which means you’ll be injected, or you’ll inject your child, with three weakened live viruses, or you can take a vitamin. Not surprisingly, people take vitamins, and they take more vitamins and more vitamins, as he sends just shipments of cod liver oil into the area. And so now hospitals are seeing children who have blurred vision, dizziness and liver damage caused by too much vitamin A.

CBS (3/11/25)

JJ: And also, CBS News is having to get hospital officials to contradict just straight-up false comments. The fallout is everywhere. Kennedy is saying, “Oh, the majority of the hospitalized cases in Texas were for quarantine purposes.” And so this person has to say, “Actually, no, no, we’re not hospitalizing people for quarantine. It’s because they need treatment.”

PO: The last place we should quarantine someone, by the way, with measles, is in the hospital. You don’t want measles in the hospital. It’s a highly contagious disease, the most contagious infectious disease.

Also, just one other point is when we say, for example, that the CDC currently states that there are 483 cases in 20 states or jurisdictions, that’s confirmed cases, meaning confirmed by doing antibody testing, or confirmed by PCR analysis, that is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. People who are looking at this, and looking at the doubling time of this particular outbreak throughout the United States, estimate that it’s probably at least 2,000 cases, and maybe more. And the fear is that, given the current doubling times, given that we’re going to be dealing with this virus for at least six more weeks, the fear is that there’ll be another child death or more.

APA (7/1/24)

JJ: You cited a piece in the book where Kennedy says:

Fauci says that vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.

I think the idea of resisting “dogma” is very appealing to people, because we have seen propaganda efforts, we have seen lies that are en masse, in a way. But I also think that so many folks have, for so long, trafficked in the forms of rational argument without the content, without agreed upon standards of proof, that people are just less able to recognize fallacies, to see when something is anecdotal—not untrue, but anecdotal—and that this impedes our understanding of what public health even is. Misinformation is at the center of this in so many ways.

PO: That’s a really good point. I think we haven’t done a very good job of explaining how science works. I mean, you learn as you go. The Covid pandemic is a perfect example. We were building the plane while it was in the air. There were definitely things that we said and did that were not right over time, but you learn as you go.

And that’s the way science works. I mean, the beauty of science is it’s always self-correcting. It’s introspective, and you’re willing to throw a textbook over your shoulder without a backward glance as you learn new things.

I was a resident training in pediatrics in the late 1970s, the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was taught things that were wrong. That’s OK. That didn’t mean the people, the senior pediatricians who taught me, were idiots. It just meant that we got more information over time.

And I think people, at some level, don’t accept that. When you say something that ends up being wrong, “See? You can’t trust them.” And so they throw the whole thing out, to their detriment.

New York Times (3/25/25)

JJ: I mean, yes, it points to a kind of preexisting, if not failure, weakness in media and public conversation about science that makes us poorly set up to engage this kind of thing. But I also think there’s something going on with, you know, Marion Nestle telling the New York Times that she was so excited when Trump used the words “industrial food complex.” She said, “RFK sounds just like me.”

RFK has benefited from a position of a little guy fighting Big Corporate Food, fighting Big Pharma. And I think a lot of folks identify with that. There are things, though, that you’ve talked about that complicate that depiction of him as a little guy going up against well-moneyed interests.

PO: Just the term “Big Pharma” is pejorative. Have pharmaceutical companies acted aggressively or illegally or unethically? Of course they have. I think the opioid epidemic is a perfect example of that. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong.

For example, I would argue that if pharmaceutical companies were interested in lying about a vaccine, and I’m on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, if they submitted data for licensure or authorization of a vaccine where they lied or misrepresented data or omitted data, they’re going to be found out, because once vaccines are out there, there’s things like the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There is no hiding, because we give vaccines to healthy children, and so we hold them to a high standard of safety. So there is no hiding.

And I want RFK Jr. to point to one example where “Big Pharma” has lied to us about a vaccine that’s caused us to suffer harm. Where is that example? But it’s so easy to make that case.

JJ: When it’s presented in this binary way, as though you can be for corporate medicine or corporate food, or you can be against it, and it sort of absents the idea of, “Well, let’s parse what is being said. Let’s talk about these ideas. Let’s talk about standards of proof,” news media that are more interested to present things as “controversial” shut down that more nuanced conversation.

NBC (3/20/25)

PO: Right. I think probably the most depressing email that I got over the past few weeks was from a nurse in Canada, who said that she was seeing parents of a child who was one month old, and she was giving those parents anticipatory guidance about what vaccines that child would get now a month in, it was a two-month-old. And the father said, and I quote, “I’m not anti-vaccine, but I want to wait to see which vaccines RFK Jr. recommends before I get any of them.”

Which tells you how bad this has gotten. I mean that here they want to trust, basically, a personal injury lawyer to determine which vaccines we should get, as compared to the people who sit around the table at the advisory committees at the FDA or CDC.

JJ: NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny did have a thoughtful piece about employment by anti-vaccine influencers of that horrific death of the 6-year-old in Texas, and how it’s being used to say, “No, we were actually right, because the other children didn’t die.” But there was an immunologist cited in the story who said, “It’s just harder to tell our story, because the story of ‘child does not get disease’ just doesn’t have the media pickup.”

And so it is difficult for journalists to tell a different story about public health when they are so focused on individual cases and that sort of thing. And so there is a problem there in trying to get reporters to tell public health from a different perspective, and make that as compelling as it should be.

Paul Offit: “We’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you.”

PO: No, you’re right. I think when vaccines work, what happens? Nothing.

But I’m a child of the 1950s. I had measles, and at the time I had measles, there were roughly 48,000 hospitalizations from measles, from severe pneumonia or dehydration or encephalitis, which is infection of the brain. And of those children who got encephalitis, about a quarter would end up blind or deaf, and there were about 500 deaths a year from measles, mostly in healthy children.

But again, not only have we largely eliminated measles from this country, which we did completely, really, by the year 2000, and it’s come back to some extent, because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. But we’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you. Unfortunately, I think they’re learning now.

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, there’s a reason you call your Substack Beyond the Noise. What’s the noise, and what do you hope is beyond it?

PO: The noise is just this torrent of misinformation and disinformation on the internet. I mean, most people get their information from social media, and it’s just like trying to fight against the fire hose of information. And all you can do is the best you can do.

But I think in the end, I think the great educator, sadly, is going to be these viruses or these bacteria, which, if we continue along the path that we’re doing, which is not trusting public health and not trusting that vaccines are safe and effective, and believing a lot of the misinformation online, we’re just going to see more and more of these outbreaks, especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of HHS.

MedPage Today (3/14/25)

Look at what’s happened in West Texas. You had this massive outbreak in West Texas. So he then goes on national television and says things like: The measles vaccine kills people every year. The measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness. The measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles. Natural measles can protect you against cancer. All of that is wrong.

But the mother of this 6-year-old girl, that perfectly healthy 6-year-old girl who died, said one of the reasons that she didn’t vaccinate was that she thought that the natural infection would protect against cancer, which is something RFK Jr. said that was wrong. So basically, misinformation kills, and I think that until we understand where the best information is, we’re going to continue to suffer this.

JJ: We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Paul Offit, who’s director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His Substack is called Beyond the Noise. Thank you so much, Paul Offit, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PO: Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

A New Zealand author, journalist and media educator who has covered the Asia-Pacific region since the 1970s says liberation “must come” for Kanaky/New Caledonia.

Professor David Robie sailed on board Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior until it was bombed by French secret agents in New Zealand in July 1985 and wrote the book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.

He has also been arrested at gun point in New Caledonia while on a mission reporting on the indigenous Kanak uprising in the 1980s and wrote the book Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Kanak ‘liberation must be granted’
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

The Asia Pacific Report editor told RNZ Pacific’s Lydia Lewis France was “torpedoing” any hopes of Kanaky independence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Well, I like that you’re starting with that kind of admission because I think a lot of people have a really hard time finding their rhythm for discipline. A lot of what inspired me to make this book was actual conversations I had with other artists who were searching for something that would help them. And I myself have searched for that in my practice many times, and at some point I was like, “Well, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Rhythms of the earth exist and those are what guide me in so many other areas. I wonder how they guide my creative practice?” Instead of feeling bad for needing naps in the winter I can think: I’m actually fully in sync with the planet and that’s what I’m made of, so it makes sense that I don’t have a lot of energy right now.

I think that’s what a lot of art is for me, is someone will write something and I see it and I’m like, “That’s exactly how I feel.” Now I know I’m not alone. I’m not off the mark. I’m in sync with other people who are maybe tapping into similar things and that feels like community or connection.

What’s your approach of finding a balance between pulling away from outside pressures but not completely desynchronizing from the rest of the world?

The more nuanced point of the book is this idea that we can tap into seasonal energies and utilize them whenever we can. And that’s the practice part: How do you get to know what it feels like for you to be nourished in whichever season you’re in? And it’s very specific to each person. It’s this personalized sort of relationship that you have to learn and recognize. And then once you do that and continuously get to know it and approach it, then you can turn it on whenever you need to.

So I see it more of a really applicable kind of accessible thing that you learn and then a hat you put on or something where you’re like, “Oh, I have 10 minutes right now. I’m going to practice being in stillness because that’s actually what this season really wants from me.” Even though all the other hours of the day I’m rushing around, I at least remember now that I can practice this winter sensation.

I like that approach, that it can be a practice rather than reworking your entire lifestyle. Being in the Northern Hemisphere during its winter we will be more tired and then it’s nice to not feel lazy but instead feel in sync with the environment.

Yeah, and you have a choice in it. And because you are an earthling, you are a being on planet earth, you are guided by the earth. There’s so many things that we don’t notice or name in our practice, or during our day, or during our creative output, that are really in sync with what the earth is doing. And I actually think that noticing those things and practicing that noticing can kind of uncover a lot of other things that maybe give that sense of affirmation that you belong to something larger than yourself, which I think can fuel artistry.

Then that sense of being connected to the earth can help open up a bunch of other doors of exploration, because it does kind of turn on this little cosmic sense of, “Oh, I’m part of this wider story and my artwork is, too.” And then it kind of gives you that lift of, even if you’re not creating something in the name of output, you’re kind of following the footsteps or the guidance of this bigger planetary rhythm. And I think that can be really fortifying for practice in the future.

Do you work with people who do not consider creating art their full time pursuit?

Yeah, I work and interact both with people who see art as their job and people who do not.

I am interested in the bridge between because being a full time artist myself I want to stay connected and rooted to reality. People who aren’t artists for a living, they’re my audience, they’re my community, and I don’t want to be separate from them.

I think a lot of artists who I love are full-on just in their zone creating and pulling things from their own perception all the time. And then there’s another way of being, which is being in conversation. And I really appreciate that because I love art that can almost reach anyone. And I love weird, esoteric art also, believe me, and I respect it deeply, and I think there’s a lot of space for it and we need it. But my artwork has always been rooted in this kind of understanding of accessibility and what am I trying to make accessible to my fellow humans, whether they’re artists or not. And part of that is me helping them to turn on their own artistry and observe that. How does that apply to their day-to-day life, even if they aren’t making a living off of being artists? I just think that all of that is really complex and nuanced, and I’m totally fascinated by how it works.

I relate to what you are saying. I give creative workshops for teenagers and the elderly and I like stepping out of the “professional” art scene. I learn a lot from it.

Yeah. How does it expand? That’s what I’m always interested in. Because I think that the root of everything…the universe and everything in it is constantly trying to expand, and that’s what we’re doing in our work, too. And I think turning on the light of everyone else’s artistry kind of gives space for that expansion. And also it’s like an experiment. This whole thing is just this grand experiment of being alive, this weird, chaotic experiment in the cosmos. And I’m like, what’s going to happen when this person who works their day job practices having the mindset of a poet? They’ll start observing more. I think all artistry is this big through line of self-reflection, and that’s a very healing and transformative space to be in.

So what happens when we build these toolkits and share them with each other so that each person can expand in their own way? I’m like, “That’s how the world is made.” So that’s what I’m most interested in, is I want to see all these people’s visions and ideas come into fruition in some ways, even if they’re just little ways during the day in their own private life, but that’ll affect someone around them. And I’m fascinated by that.

Photos of Jacqueline and books by Cody Sells

Since the two of us are based in the Northern Hemisphere in cold cities I thought it would be nice for you to elaborate on a winter prompt. How about journal reviewing? That spoke to me.

Yeah, I love talking about that. I work with a lot of people one-on-one who are trying to either get a book written or figure out what it looks like to have a writing practice at all. And a lot of that work starts with them saying, “I have all of these journals that I’ve written in for however many years and I don’t know what to do with them.”

A big part of my personal practice has been to develop this system with my journals that has helped me review everything I’ve written and sort out the stuff that I want to use and utilize. I created just a little very rudimentary symbol method where I kind of write these symbols next to things that I’m writing in real time because it helps me go back later and be like, “Okay, so this is a poem. I want to get this draft into the computer and edit it.” Or, “This is just an idea for something, a piece of writing, a poem, maybe an essay,” maybe it’s just one line that I like, I don’t know. And so there’s a little symbol.

And then there’s also something that I really want to flesh out and add to a longer form project. So I think doing it in the winter is a nice time to approach that type of project because maybe you have a little bit more space, or maybe there’s a little bit more silence around you, or maybe you’re a less inclined to be social so you have more space to be emotional and private with these things in your journal as you do this process of collecting for future projects or figuring out what you’ve left yourself. Because usually if you’ve been writing in a journal for a consistent amount of time, you’ve left yourself some golden nuggets, some bits of beauty that you can weave into the current moment.

So I think that that practice is crucial for every artist, no matter what your medium is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a writer or whatever you make, your journals are probably full of great subject matter, but if you don’t give yourself the time or create a system to move through it all, then it’ll just be sitting there on the shelf and you won’t know what it is. And maybe that’s what would help you move forward or get you unstuck or deliver something new into your practice. It will be you from the past, but you have to have that uninterrupted time to do it. And so to me, winter is just a nice time of year to maybe appreciate that you could say, “Hey, it’s snowing, or it’s really gray and cold out. I’m not going to go do anything anyway, so maybe I’ll sit with myself and what I’ve created for myself.”

Now I’m really in the mood to do that. You write about creating the space to navigate your core. Could you elaborate on that?

I think making any type of artwork or calling in any kind of creative selfhood or self-expression revolves a lot around knowing yourself and knowing what you really need, what you really want, what you really think about things. And I mean, another word for that is your imagination and what’s happening in your imagination. And I think of that as the core of myself, the deep down experience of what it is to be myself in the world. But I don’t think that we get the chance to just explore that in everyday moments. I think you actually have to intentionally look in there and take the time to really go into the depths of yourself. And that takes, first of all, a lot of practice and a lot of care, and there’s a lot of methodologies that can help you do that. So there’s a lot of studying. And that’s kind of part of practicing to me, is studying something.

But then I think in winter, I’m so connected to the stillness that’s happening in the planet that I’m able to access that stillness in myself a little more, and then that core conversation can kind of come out with ease. As opposed to maybe in the frantic energy of spring, I might not be able to hear myself as much because I’m excited or because I’m getting ready to communicate with other people and I’m hearing them more. So I think knowing that there’s this time of year where things get a little bit more quiet, I look forward to that as the time of year where then I can maybe have a little more introspection. But again, thinking of that as more of an energetic thing and not like a regimented prescriptive concept, but you can call on the energy of winter whenever you need to.

I get so nervous when winter is about to end. I can be quite introverted and I need a lot of solo time to recharge so spring approaching can kind of freak me out.

That’s the worst one for me. It’s hard. I really learned that when I wrote this book that, well, first of all, transitions for me in general in all of life are very hard. Like coming home from a trip or getting ready to leave for a trip. But witnessing the shift from winter to spring, I think naturally we would assume that that’s an incredibly exciting period. There’s going to be flowers everywhere. There’s going to be beauty everywhere. And for me and my little system, I’m just like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m ready. It’s so intense.” And I really think that that was probably the most surprising information I received from writing the book, was how really difficult spring is for me when it first begins. When it finally takes hold and we’re out and everything is thawed, it’s okay. But that shift from inner to outer in general, I think is really hard for me.

I can super relate to that. And what are some things that have maybe made that shift easier for you? Or is it just hard and that’s okay?

Remembering that it’s hard I think is so important. Remembering that it’s difficult, so then I’m a little bit slower and kinder to myself, and maybe I’m a little bit more in tune with my internal monologue, and I’m not as sharp with myself for having a harder time. What does it look like now for this other part of my life to be a little bit slower?” And I think that’s what my mindset turns to when I’m transitioning from winter to spring is like, take a breath, take a beat. Don’t start too soon. Really try to be in touch with the way it feels in your body to slow down. And that’s not an easy thing to do, but I think it’s something that has felt really worthwhile for me to practice.

Yeah, that’s helpful. Also, it’ll be different in every region. In Berlin there isn’t a linear trajectory of winter moving into spring. Tulips can blossom in February and April can be snowy. So, learning from your book, I think it’s important to notice nature and learn from it.

Yeah. It’s a good reminder that it’s just not simply linear.

There are little steps and you step a little bit forward and you step a little bit backward. And that’s actually how all of life works.

I do think we’re conditioned to think that everything should just be this step-by-step procedure. And when it’s not, then that means we’ve done something wrong. But the truth is we’re doing exactly what the earth is doing. And in that transition, things are really frantic and so we might feel really frantic. And instead of me being like, “Oh, I’m going to shame myself for being in this frantic state and not maybe being as dedicated to my routine,” I just instead say, “Well, that’s what the earth is up to.” There’s all these little planetary prompts in the book that are like, “You’re doing the same thing that earth is doing, and noticing that might help you feel a little bit better about it.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Grashina Gabelmann.

It’s a bit of a winding road. In high school, I started learning about poetry in general, learning that Black people could write poems and that there were poems by Black people in the world. Our teacher had us do this assignment through Poetry Out Loud. We had to choose a poem, and I found one by Nikki Giovanni. We had to recite it, and it felt so freeing to read her poem aloud, and I just kind of fell in love with it then.

After that, I wrote stuff and I never really thought I could be a poet or a writer for a very long time. I went to film school. And throughout film school, I was just writing poems the whole time. And I remember my advisor was like, “Well, did you think about getting an MFA in creative writing?” And I realized maybe I was in the wrong program.

Then I got my MFA and worked at the same time, so I wouldn’t have to take out loans, which was very difficult. But I think it was honestly then when I started thinking, “Okay, maybe I am a writer.” I still feel like that. Some days, I’m like, “Am I a writer?”

That’s so funny because you literally have written books! Of course, you are! But I get it. A lot of writers still question if they’re really writers.

I was just thinking about this the other day. When you’re an artist, you’re kind of outside of the conventions of making money, so it feels like what you do isn’t being affirmed. And you’re constantly trying to affirm it for yourself, but it’s a strange relationship. So I think that might be why I still feel this way because I don’t get to do this all the time. And it’s not making me the money I need to sustain my life.

It’s a common conundrum, this question of, “At what point in my life will I feel like I’m an artist?” Do I need to publish one book, two books? Do I need to be making this much money or that much money? I think it’s hard and you said it so well. You’re also an educator and a coach. How has teaching and coaching helped you view your own writing practice with more clarity?

One of the things I always say when I’m working with writers is that you are a writer, the only difference between you and someone published is just being published. We’re all practicing in that art form. And so that’s something I try to instill in people. Especially because we don’t often hold our work in the same regard as maybe someone who’s published a book that we look up to. The real difference is the publication and all the other stuff that comes along with that. I try to help people look at their own work with that same reverence and I’m always like, “Oh, yeah, I have to do that, too.” It’s an ongoing decision or choice you have to make about yourself. [Teaching and coaching] are reminding me of that. They’re teaching me the vision I have is worthy of time and investment.

So many of us spend all day online just comparing ourselves to what other people are doing, it makes sense that people are reaching out to you for guidance.

It’s understated how much community matters for writers, and the right community, too. In publishing, there’s obviously a lot of gatekeeping, it’s very easy to feel excluded. So, of course you’re going to be like, “Does this make sense? What am I doing?” Having a community that cultivates and uplifts you is a way to combat that.

I totally agree. How do you go about protecting your creative side from the demands and pressures of the publishing world?

That’s something I’m still learning. It’s been especially hard because I’m working on a long-form nonfiction project. And this is a project that I have with an agent, which is different. She showed it to publishing people and there was a lot of positive feedback, but then there was a lot of stuff that I was like, wow, people say some [crazy] stuff about people’s work. I was trying not to take it personally, but how do you not internalize that? And how do you feel motivated to continue with your project? So I’ve been trying to find some rituals for myself. For example, I’m really into tarot so anytime I’m about to start writing on this particular project, I pull a tarot card and it usually affirms what I’m doing. These very tangible rituals have helped protect me. Also reading stuff that I felt like I desperately needed makes me feel like, okay, maybe this book can exist in the world.

There’s this essay by Kiese Laymon, who wrote the book Heavy. In [the essay], he talks about his experience working with publishers on that. And it seems really bad what happened, all these years he worked on it and didn’t have a good relationship with the editor. It was just a mess. I think he had to republish it. When I read it, I was like, “Wow, if he had this experience with the publisher, what is it going to be like for me?” But also that’s not something I would’ve ever known unless I read that essay. It’s just very unclear what that world is like. It can be really damaging to your self-esteem.

Like you’re saying, it’s an ongoing process. I recently read this book called My Trade Is a Mystery by Carl Phillips. It’s a collection of seven essays, each one related to a different element of the writing life. I think it’s ambition, stamina, practice, audience, politics, silence, and community. Either in the ambition or stamina chapter, Phillips talks about how, often, we look to publishers and the market for some sort of sign that we are good enough. But like what you’re saying, it gives us the opposite effect, it makes us feel worse. He says to just focus on the work. The work and community. Those are the only things that ultimately can keep us going because those are the things that have the most depth and the most life. Also, he’s a Black, queer man and he also talks about how community based only on identity can sometimes feel empty, which was really interesting.

That feels very true! Even in some communities where it’s like, for example, “this is for Black poets,” even that can sometimes feel like, I don’t have a space there, or I don’t know the right people. It’s hard.

There’s this idea, in the online world at least, that when you find your people you’ll just immediately feel right at home and you’ll feel so reified and so affirmed. But that hasn’t really been my experience. I do meet amazing people here and there but I don’t know, community can feel so amorphous. What has your experience been like?

I feel like that is really spot on. I have definitely experienced what you’re saying. I remember taking a workshop with this writer, a Black writer, but I just didn’t feel held in that space. It has surprised me, the spaces where I have felt held even when maybe the people do not even have the same identity as me. It’s something I’ve talked to a couple of my friends about, trying to understand. But there are different types of relationships too. I feel like some of them are transactional kinds of relationships, and some of them are actually friendships. You don’t want to enter a space in which you’re forcing either thing, but you also want to feel good.

Exactly.

Publishing sometimes does rely on relationships and who you know so that complicates things.

It can feel very…sore. I think that’s why Carl Phillips’s book really spoke to me. Even when he speaks about trying to find community, he brings up something that I found to be really meaningful. He says, “We tend to think of a writing community as a community of writers, but I find I still prefer the community not [of] writers, but what they’ve written.” And I was like, woah!

That’s a little mind-blowing.

Despite how hard it is to build community, why does it still feel like a worthwhile thing for you to pursue?

I’m going to share an example first. I have a friend who happens to be a poet and writer. We became friends first before I knew she was a writer. We were doing an event about Phyllis Wheatley, and we were celebrating these letters that were uncovered between Phyllis Wheatley and Obour Tanner, who were both enslaved Black women in New England, and how they were just connecting to each other via these letters, affirming each other’s existence. And I remember she said something like, “This is our friendship. We’re sharing these letters, and sometimes you may not hear from me or I may not hear from you. But we have this line that connects us in this way that we see each other and we are looking out for each other.”

And that’s what I think community means to me, a real care and almost a protection of another person, and wanting to see what’s best for them, wanting them to shine. I think that requires some real fundamental trust with another person, that comes with just building a relationship. But I think the people that I’m in community with, oftentimes I feel like I became their friends before writing was even involved. Or the other times, when there’s writing involved, I feel like they’ve just been open and receptive to connecting just to connect. And when I can sense that somebody really cares about me, not to get something out of our relationship, but just genuinely cares, as a human being, that’s always worthwhile.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lore Yessuff.

Abdusemet Rozi, 57, hailed from Suntagh village in Atush, also called Artux, capital of the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang. He was jailed for a second time in 2022, is said to have fallen ill while in prison, and died on Aug. 31, according to the sources, although it is unknown why he was imprisoned or to which ailment he succumbed.

The authorities who took his body to a cemetery summoned seven or eight members of Rozi’s family to the Suntagh village party committee and informed them of his death, a village police officer told Radio Free Asia. Also in attendance were the local Chinese Communist Party secretary, village head, officials from the Public Security Bureau, and state security personnel. 

The police officer, who did not provide information about the reason for Rozi’s arrest and sentencing, said authorities asked his relatives if they had any complaints about the man's death — an apparent intimidation tactic so that Rozi's family would not raise questions about his cause of death or the possibility of torture.

The police officer said Rozi served his more recent sentence at Ulughchat Prison in Atush and died at the prison hospital at the end of August.

“I was there when Abdusemet Rozi’s body was transferred from the prison,” the police officer said.

At the time, authorities told Rozi's family that he died of an illness and had not been tortured. 

“They told them about his health problems and that after a check-up, he had a heart problem,” he said. “He was taken to the hospital in the morning because he wasn’t feeling well. The hospital treatment didn’t work, and he passed away.”

Authorities told Rozi’s family that if they had any doubts or complaints, an autopsy would be done; but if not, they would only be shown his face, to which they agreed, said the police officer.

An intellectual

But Abduweli Ayup founder of Norway-based Uyghur Hjelp, or Uyghuryar, which maintains a database of Uyghurs detained in Xinjiang, said Rozi became ill in jail and died because of physical and mental torture.

Rozi was one of the top Uyghur researchers whose name appeared on a list of arrested Uyghur intellectuals compiled by Ayup.

From 2005 to 2010, Rozi researched and wrote a book titled Izchilar, or The Followers, about students of the famous Uyghur educator Memtili Tewpiq, he said. 

“Abdusemet Rozi is one of the intellectuals from Atush who had strong organizational skills,” Ayup said. “He gave speeches on new textbook reform to the teachers.”

In 2019, authorities sentenced Rozi to 20 years in prison, released him in 2021 for health reasons, and rearrested him in September 2022, Ayup said. He remained in prison until his death, he said.

The reason for Rozi's first arrest is unknown, though it occurred at a time when authorities in Xinjiang were conducting mass arrests of Uyghurs, including educators and intellectuals, and detaining them in “re-education” camps or prisons.

Authorities may have arrested Rozi because of his research topics and social activities, Ayup said, citing the scholar’s article on teaching in the Uyghur language, which he presented at an educational conference.

Rozi graduated from Kashgar Pedagogical Institute in 1987 and started working as a teacher at Atush 4th Middle School. 

In 1998, he became a researcher and teacher at the Kizilsu branch of Xinjiang Television and Radio University, where he worked until his first arrest in 2017, Ayup said.

Rozi entered the literary arena in Xinjiang with a poem he published in a Kizilsu newspaper during his college days before he began teaching and working as a researcher, he said.

“He was doing research on teacher and student relations, as well as on the future and the current situation of radio and television education,” Ayup said.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

Tens of thousands of ni-Vanuatu children could be experiencing “stress and trauma” after the double cyclones that tore through the island nation last week, says an educator.

With widespread damages to infrastructure, many children have lost their homes, had their schools damaged, and neighbourhoods hit hard by tropical cyclones Judy and Kevin.

Port Vila International School teacher Cassidy Jackson-Caroll told RNZ Pacific it was important to prioritise school-aged children’s wellbeing during these times.

• READ MORE: Back-to-back cyclones in Vanuatu – stories of survival in ‘tough go’
• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Lydia Lewis reporting
• Tropical Cyclone Kevin lashes Port Vila with destructive winds and heavy rain
• Vanuatu residents ‘exhausted’ after two wild cyclones in three days
• PM Kalsakau in cyclone-ravaged Vanuatu declares emergency as new storm bears down
• Other Vanuatu storm reports

Jackson-Caroll said that requires all stakeholders to move quickly and restore a sense of normalcy and enable children to return to school.

“It is quite important [for schools to open],” she said, while noting the large-scale devastation caused by the twin cyclones.

“One thing I thought is the kids want to see their friends. They have spent a lot of time time at home tucked up with their families, which is very important [during cyclones]. But they also need a little relief to see that their friends are okay.”

She said no electricity and no running water is an issue across the country which means schools remain affected.

But she is hoping the situation will improve by next week and those children who can return to school will be able do so.

“I think it is important even if it is half days or two or three days a week for some kids that is enough because some are going to be traumatiSed,” she said, adding Port Vila International School will have a “soft opening” on Wednesday.

“Sometimes they might just need to see their friends and go and play some soccer or just have a hug. They just need to laugh away from the anxiety and stress and trauma that they might have at home,” she added.

Schools, health centres ‘damaged’
UNICEF estimates up to 58,000 children have been impacted and those in the worst affected provinces of Tafea and Shefa needing urgent assistance.

The UN agency’s Pacific representative Jonathan Veitch said “with power still out in many places, and boats and planes grounded or damaged, we still don’t have enough information on the impact of children in the outer islands of Tafea.”

“We know that schools and health centres have been damaged throughout the country.”

“UNICEF Pacific, in partnership with the government, has begun to support the children and families most affected,” he added.

Preliminary reports indicate that almost the entire population has been affected.

World Vision Vanuatu country director Kendra Derouseau said they are expecting similar destruction to Tafea province that occured following Cyclone Pam in 2015.

“We know that most homes will be partly or completely destroyed,” Derouseau said.

Food sources scarce
“The vast majority of the population in Tafea are subsistence agricultural farmers so food sources will be scarce and water sources will be contaminated.”

She confirmed that there were about 2000 people still in evacuation centres on Efate.

“People tend to sleep in the evacuation centres, leave vulnerable individuals and a carer in the centres during the day, and then go back to their homes to try and build and repair and then come back to sleep at night.”

But Derouseau said the number of people in evacuation centres were decreasing as people felt safe to go back to their home.

Meanwhile, New Zealand has sent relief supplies including water containers, kits for temporary shelters, and family hygiene kits and an initial financial contribution of NZ$150,000.

Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the government was working closely with Vanuatu to support this response, together with France and Australia.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Tens of thousands of ni-Vanuatu children could be experiencing “stress and trauma” after the double cyclones that tore through the island nation last week, says an educator.

With widespread damages to infrastructure, many children have lost their homes, had their schools damaged, and neighbourhoods hit hard by tropical cyclones Judy and Kevin.

Port Vila International School teacher Cassidy Jackson-Caroll told RNZ Pacific it was important to prioritise school-aged children’s wellbeing during these times.

• READ MORE: Back-to-back cyclones in Vanuatu – stories of survival in ‘tough go’
• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Lydia Lewis reporting
• Tropical Cyclone Kevin lashes Port Vila with destructive winds and heavy rain
• Vanuatu residents ‘exhausted’ after two wild cyclones in three days
• PM Kalsakau in cyclone-ravaged Vanuatu declares emergency as new storm bears down
• Other Vanuatu storm reports

Jackson-Caroll said that requires all stakeholders to move quickly and restore a sense of normalcy and enable children to return to school.

“It is quite important [for schools to open],” she said, while noting the large-scale devastation caused by the twin cyclones.

“One thing I thought is the kids want to see their friends. They have spent a lot of time time at home tucked up with their families, which is very important [during cyclones]. But they also need a little relief to see that their friends are okay.”

She said no electricity and no running water is an issue across the country which means schools remain affected.

But she is hoping the situation will improve by next week and those children who can return to school will be able do so.

“I think it is important even if it is half days or two or three days a week for some kids that is enough because some are going to be traumatiSed,” she said, adding Port Vila International School will have a “soft opening” on Wednesday.

“Sometimes they might just need to see their friends and go and play some soccer or just have a hug. They just need to laugh away from the anxiety and stress and trauma that they might have at home,” she added.

Schools, health centres ‘damaged’
UNICEF estimates up to 58,000 children have been impacted and those in the worst affected provinces of Tafea and Shefa needing urgent assistance.

The UN agency’s Pacific representative Jonathan Veitch said “with power still out in many places, and boats and planes grounded or damaged, we still don’t have enough information on the impact of children in the outer islands of Tafea.”

“We know that schools and health centres have been damaged throughout the country.”

“UNICEF Pacific, in partnership with the government, has begun to support the children and families most affected,” he added.

Preliminary reports indicate that almost the entire population has been affected.

World Vision Vanuatu country director Kendra Derouseau said they are expecting similar destruction to Tafea province that occured following Cyclone Pam in 2015.

“We know that most homes will be partly or completely destroyed,” Derouseau said.

Food sources scarce
“The vast majority of the population in Tafea are subsistence agricultural farmers so food sources will be scarce and water sources will be contaminated.”

She confirmed that there were about 2000 people still in evacuation centres on Efate.

“People tend to sleep in the evacuation centres, leave vulnerable individuals and a carer in the centres during the day, and then go back to their homes to try and build and repair and then come back to sleep at night.”

But Derouseau said the number of people in evacuation centres were decreasing as people felt safe to go back to their home.

Meanwhile, New Zealand has sent relief supplies including water containers, kits for temporary shelters, and family hygiene kits and an initial financial contribution of NZ$150,000.

Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the government was working closely with Vanuatu to support this response, together with France and Australia.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The images are the reasons that I’m continuing this process, this journey. It always motivates me when I see the result. Our program lasts about four weeks. In the beginning, the children are very shy, they don’t participate. By the end, they start speaking about themselves, expressing themselves. You see the improvement in their photography. So, it’s always a source of inspiration for me.

I remember one child tried to capture a photo from an animal’s perspective. He laid down and tried to capture his friend, trying to see the world from the eyes of other creatures, animals. They are capturing the true moments of human lives and they see so differently. They see the world from different levels. It’s a very innocent perspective because it’s without editing—it is a free moment without any pressure. When they see any moment that inspires them, they capture it. Their work is about the celebration of childhood; about seeing the world through the eyes of children, not as adults.

When I teach them photography composition, I don’t tell them what they should do. I tell them that photography doesn’t have rules—that when you shoot, you just have to feel it. I try to make sure not to pressure them. [Even though] it’s analog photography, and it’s a limited [medium], I tell them, “You have just to feel it, you can shoot whatever you want.”

One of the main purposes of this project is to make children participate in the entire photographic process. When we make photo books or exhibitions, the work is all selected and titled by the children. I don’t want any adults to select what any child wants to shoot. [Our program] gives them this space to let them speak for themselves. Their work shows true moments of what it means to be a child, or a refugee, or a person in need. We usually see in the media a different perspective.

I see in some pictures that your students really love shadows, figures in the landscape. In a lot of the photos, I’ve noticed that the students like to make hearts with their hands.

It’s something they like to do. They show the heart to each other, and it’s especially inspiring when the heart is made by kids from different backgrounds. Because now they are together and this heart represents moving past all the hate speech, or anti-refugee situations. You see hope in these hands that form the heart [shape].

Sultan, 14 years old, Nusaybin, Turkey

You’ve previously spoken about how photography unites people when we’re lost for words. It’s also a way for young people to build and understand their own perspectives and positions in the world through their vision.

One of the reasons I chose to use photography is to bring together children from different communities and backgrounds. We see here that people are actually speaking the same languages, but they never get the chance to communicate with each other. That’s why we use photography, because it’s a universal language.

When the children go outside to shoot, I try to put one Turkish child and one Syrian child beside each other to help each other, because I want them to get integrated, and use an alternative way of communication—photography—to bring them together. For example, in the last workshop, there were two children who were neighbors, but they never communicated with each other. It was their first time meeting each other in this class, where they learned new things about each other. They became best friends!

What does a typical workshop look like?

The first week is about letting children get to know each other, playing introducing games. After children start to get warm and socialize, they write their own rules and agreements [for the duration of the workshop], because we will spend one or two months together. Here, it’s very difficult to be a child. Most of the children are forced to grow up fast. So I fuse photography composition lessons with awareness workshops about child rights—[topics like] bullying, child marriage, child labor, that gender is not a barrier.

Then I show them all different types of cameras—digital cameras, analog cameras, pinhole cameras. I explain to them why I selected analog photography—because you have to start from zero if you want to learn photography. I also show all different types of photos from all around the world…for example, Vivian Maier. They usually always see male photographers, I’m also trying to connect [her work] with gender [issues]. I show them some local photographers like Erdem Varol.

Then I give them a very simple compact camera. They take it home for a week or two. After they finish shooting photos, they come back to the workshop. I show them how to develop their film and how to print inside the darkroom. You put negatives inside the enlarger and you put the photo paper down. The first time they see the image show up on [the photo paper] and in the chemicals, it’s like magic for them. They start yelling, Oh my god, oh my god, how could this happen? But, with time, they start to understand, it starts to make sense. They start doing the entire process all by themselves. I’m just watching them go, standing beside them.

Alican, 10 years old

When you first came to photography, did you see it as magic, too?

I started photography when the Syrian War started. I was about 20 years old, so it’s been eight or nine years. I’m also a refugee from Kobanî, Syria, a town on the Syrian-Turkish border. For me, photography was a natural way of communication. After the war started, I came to Turkey as a refugee. In the beginning, I couldn’t speak Turkish, so I used photography to express myself. Then I started working with some NGOs as a photographer and one day, I got the chance to meet Sirkhane and I started working as a volunteer… it inspired me to see [the children] use art as a language. This is how the story started.

You have your own artistic practice while devoting your energy and time to developing the artistic processes of these young students. How do you make time and energy for your own work?

Right now, I’m a little bit away from my own work, and I’m okay with that. For me, it feels like I’m continuing photography by educating children in art, so that they can continue [their own] photography. It’s been almost one year since I’ve worked on my other projects, but I feel very comfortable because I’m still inspired every day. I consider my work with Sirkhane as part of my artistic process. What motivates me to continue my own photography are the photos taken by children. In their photos, they are analyzing the world from their own perspective—from out there, from up, from down, from behind. They give me new ideas, too.

Do you have advice for people who are looking to educate young artists?

The most important thing is not to set the rules. Let children be involved in all parts of the educational process because they will shape it. They really will.

In Los Angeles, I work with a photography non-profit for girls ages 13 to 18. When I spend time with my students, they’re expecting me to teach them things, but I often feel like I am the one learning everything by seeing the world through their eyes.

I tell [my students], “You don’t have to call me ‘Teacher.’ You can say my name because we are the same.” It doesn’t matter if I’m an adult or a child because we are the same. Maybe we look different. But I want to show them I am a friend. I’m always learning new things from my students. One eight-year-old girl named Dua really inspired me. She fused negative printing and photograms together. That was really amazing to see. Do you know anything about photograms?

Is it almost like a cyanotype, no?

It’s a way of printing in the darkroom where you put materials directly on the paper. Dua brought her negatives, and she printed them in the darkroom. While she was printing, she put her hands right on the paper. It was really amazing to see the kids already thinking of alternative ways of printing.

Dua, 8 years old

I’m sure you and your program have completely shifted the way that people in the community see photography too and maybe even its political power.

At first, sometimes parents don’t believe in the program. They think, Oh, just let us send our children there so we can spend time on our own. We sometimes invite families to watch us for one day; to see how we are taking children very seriously. When they see their child starting to speak inside the workshops, they start to believe in us. When the children print photos inside the darkroom, they go home and show them to their parents, who sometimes call me and thank me for the result, and about the development improvement of their child.

You frequently collaborate with publishers and exhibition spaces. How does it feel knowing that your students’ work is being seen by so many people?

As refugees, we cannot go out, but all around the world—in the media, or in galleries—they are showing our world. They are representing our project. It’s a very important moment for me and for the children to see their work in different places outside of Turkey.

What are your dreams for Sirkhane’s future?

Elif, 10 years old, ‘I wanted to take a selfie in a different way. I wanted it to be something that belongs to me.’

A few months ago, I had one interview with a child about what he thought about Sirkhane. He told me, “When I grow up, I want to do your work because it’s really made more people happy.” Now, some of my first students are adults that are continuing their education in photography. My plan for the future is to also let them get involved with this educational process. I want to let older participants teach new children, so that it’ll be a tree of communication.

Also, because we are a non-profit project, we are in need of materials, second-hand cameras, and film. Turkey is under an economic crisis, so materials are expensive. I hope to make [our work] more sustainable because now, film photography is super expensive. I am trying to find ways for us at Sirkhane Darkroom to create our own black-and-white film stock. Now, I’m making studies—having some connections with museums—that are supporting me with this big goal.

How do you manage running the entire program on your own?

Sometimes we have our finance and logistics team supporting me. But preparing for the workshop, I do this by myself. Sometimes, I welcome volunteers to be part of this project, especially artists because I want the children to learn new things—different perspectives from different people, not just me. But I love my work. I’ve been working all seven days. My colleagues and friends say, “Serbest, please don’t work too hard,” but I love my job—I wake up very early [for it]. Work hours begin at 8:30, but I come in at 7.

I know that feeling… where it doesn’t feel like work at a certain point, but life, free time, passion. That’s how you know you really love what you do.

It’s a chosen job for me. It’s a perfect job for me.

Shirin, 16 years old, from Kobanî, Syria

Aya, 11 years old, from Qamishli, Syria

Jiyan, 14 years old

Melik, 13 years old

Eylem, 13 years old, from Mardin turkey

Ahmed, 10 years old, from Al-Hasakah, Syria

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Alex Westfall.

My first teaching job here ever was in 1992 at Chautauqua Institution. I taught teenagers and pre-college students how to draw and paint. I was here for the summer, and the director then was Don Kimes, who gave me this opportunity. He was the predecessor whom I replaced here as artistic director.

How did the artistic director role actually start?

The School has been around since 1909. The Institution’s been around since 1874, and the School of Art has always had an artistic director. So over the years, they’ve had different people come in and direct this program, where their individual visions form what the school is about.

It sounds almost like a legacy, or ongoing conversation, where artists are placed at or near the top of decision making power.

Well, yes. There have been different artistic directors who wear multiple hats, but I do think The Chautauqua Institution is very aware that in order to direct a program such as this, their artistic directors have to be intimately connected to the field they’re involved in.

Why do you think they need to be so intimately connected?

Because Chautauqua Institution is based on lifelong learning and bringing people in who can extend culture once they leave. For example, the residency is eight weeks, and each week, a visiting lecturer comes to Chautauqua who shares their knowledge to around 40 artists from all different places, ages, and cultures. The artists will carry that with them when they leave us and move back out into the world.

That’s why I believe that we have to live in the here and now. While we carry history with us, and while we have to acknowledge the past in order to move forward, Chautauqua Visual Arts can be a brave space to incubate that culture.

Chautauqua Visual Arts Dinner

What does it mean to you to be an artistic director of a residency?

Well, I wear multiple hats, but I think the hat that I wear the most is as an artist. What that means today is variable, but for me, an artist is far more than just a maker. We do a lot more before we even start to make something. It’s the way we think, the way we talk, we observe, we direct. That’s why I took this position: to create and hold space for others, especially people’s voices who haven’t been amplified in order to address and attempt to correct historic exclusion. Chautauqua seemed to be in the right time, and certainly the right place, to do this, as the Institution and School have been embedded in progressive history for over one hundred years.

I’m curious if you consider being an artistic director of a residency part of your practice as an artist.

Absolutely. I think everything that I do is intertwined. There’s a tremendous amount of creativity in administrative work. Especially for me as a white person, I want to share my privilege by making and holding space for others. I want to create a brave space, not just a safe space. I try to do that in anything I do: in my sculpture, in the books I edit, with the hope of creating opportunities and relationships for others. Being an artist in any position, I think, yields creativity, innovation, humanity, empathy, and consideration of others.

It makes me think about recent conversations with a friend of mine who only produces one, maybe two paintings a year. Because of that small volume, and because her day job is outside the arts, she has a hard time calling herself an artist. But my argument back to her was, no, you are an artist, because it isn’t just isn’t about the number of paintings you make, it’s about how you live. It sounds like you’ve arrived in a similar space.

Definitely. Being an artist is more about how we think, how we live, and what we say. When I worked for Alyson Pou at Creative Capital, she always would tell me that when an artist comes into a conversation or walks in the room, they often have a lot more to say without even saying it. Artists have so much to give because they carry the knowledge and experiences from others with them. We start things from nothing. We have a lot of bravery. We don’t need preparation, we just do it. And we bounce back from failure.

Do you think if an artist failed at making something, they would stop being who they are? No! They keep going. Most artists do their work because it is just who they are and part of their truth.

I’m curious about your day-to-day work, especially during the off season.

Part of my job, and part of my values, is to be able to present this program to as many people who aren’t from places we historically think as central to where artists live, like New York or Los Angeles or other big cities. I reach out to academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and individuals in different nooks and crannies, say hello, and share what we have to offer, like our information sessions.

I develop relationships with people and communicate constantly with our faculty and all 64 of our partners. And I work to ensure they continue beyond my years here, because I believe a relationship should never end—unless something terrible happens to us. A relationship is a seed to grow.

We then go through a tremendously intense admissions process, where myself and the lead faculty decide who gets into this program. Everyone who isn’t accepted receives feedback directly from me. To this day, I’m still giving feedback to hundreds of artists, because we had the highest number of applications this year, and every year it increases.

The program that I run here is certainly not just about me. I am the Director, but the lead faculty at the Chautauqua School of Art play as large a role. It’s a team-led situation. I oversee the difficulties and the structure and often play devil’s advocate. But I sometimes feel like It’s playing bumper cars. But that makes me happy. I’ve always loved bumper cars since I was a child.

Suffrage Rugs, 2020, courtesy Seth Foley and Melissa Cowper-Smith

I can then imagine that the work during the residency requires a lot of day-of logistics, like helping guest lecturers find the site and making sure the artists know where to go. But it also sounds like it requires ensuring they come together to inspire each other and grow so they can take their new knowledge through to the rest of their life.

Running a residency is really about the maximum of the minutiae and everything in between. The key to this program is how hybrid it is. The School of Art is an intergenerational residency program with all different walks of life and ages and cultures which results in a lot of dynamism. Over time, the lead faculty and those we accept in the program begin to mirror all of our values.

The Chautauqua Institute was always about sharing resources and having a place for discourse. There are a lot of metaphorical fireworks. It’s wonderful. But sometimes it’s not wonderful. The ups and downs require being in touch with different humans at different times, and that takes vast amounts of energy, time, and attention. But not only are we willing to spend that time and attention with the residents, we love it.

Does the geographic location of Chautauqua have an impact on your work? I’m thinking not only along the lines of the town being the homelands of the Erie and Haudenosaunee, but also the importance of the town in early rail lines and the town developing the pop-up education and entertainment centers called Chautauquas. Do these histories flow into your present work?

I love that I’m in a place with different dynamics and elasticity. We are on the Seneca-Iroquois Nation’s land. Chautauqua is also the second poorest county in New York State in which resides this gated, very wealthy community. We’re two hours away from Cleveland, two hours from Pittsburgh, an hour and 40 minutes from Buffalo, and under four hours from Toronto. And still to this day, we haven’t been as diverse as I would like to see.

That’s why we try to have people from different geographic, economic, and racial contexts come. It yields so much growth. I even see it in my own work, like my books, my installations, even my little drawings. I think about what making space really means for another person. How do we walk into each other’s spaces? What do we need to be able to be there?

Artists have a tendency to buy into the art world system which, over the years, has yielded pretty exclusionary spaces. White walls make a lot of people feel unwelcome. Our residency tries to embrace the opposite. We’re situated in a place with all this richness of conflict and exchange. It’s an opportunity to think beyond one art world.

I’m curious if your work ever engages with Chautauqua’s city workers, like elected officials.

The Chautauqua Institution definitely does. When I first became Artistic Director in 2018, I first reached out to the Seneca-Iroquois Nation and the director of the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, Joe Stahlman. I work with him a lot. He’s on my board of the Friends of CVA. We also reach out to a lot of local communities. I don’t work with a lot of city officials. I work with people who are on the ground. Chautauqua Visual Arts develops relationships with a lot of local organizations. We bring in people that do home repairs and housekeeping, and sometimes bring them into the residency. They come to our parties and our conversations.

Chautauqua Visual Arts

Why do you think these neighbors, the Chautauquans and the local organizations, buy into the work you do and join you every year?

Chautauquans have been coming here generation after generation. Many of them have houses in town that have been passed on from family to family, and they return out of tradition. There’s just so many spectacular people who come here, share knowledge, and promote conversation. Our program becomes an incubator. It’s a space of constant conversation.

There are also lots of porches in Chautauqua. So, let’s say, after someone comes and gives a talk, everyone goes to their porches and talks about it for days. The community here and the community that comes in have an intellectual appetite. They want to eat it and they want to drink it and they want to soak it in and they want to be present within that energy. That’s why so many come back.

Why should artists be in decision making capacities or advisory boards for residencies?

Why wouldn’t they be? Artists have been underrated for so many years. There’s been this exclusive perception of artists, where we’re lazy, or we don’t pay our rent. That’s totally wrong. I think we look at the world in different ways, and we’re risk takers. So if you think about what we do in our studios, or how we make or talk about or observe or read things or bounce into ideas without even preparation, because we have that trust in our own community, it shows that we can lead with empathy and compassion. And that’s what I attempt to do as an artistic director.

Why do we have artist residencies in the first place?

Artist residencies give respite and opportunities for community building when it’s nearly impossible to do so in other locations. So for example, if you move to New York City for the summer, a city of more than 8 million people, you might feel like you’re a part of a community. But there’s a whole lot of other people there. It’s hard to actually meet your community in a short period of time.

But if you were accepted to the Chautauqua School of Art residency program, myself and the faculty members have already decided on who else is coming. There are a lot of threads between each of us already. At Chautauqua Visual Arts, they don’t have to “make anything.” They can think, they can just be. So each year we’ve done this, the cohorts stay together and lean on one another for years. They share their work and grow with one another. They create opportunities for one another. And that’s what we hope for every summer. I think most residency programs provide experiences like that, let alone the opportunity to work and grow however the artist wishes.

Windows, 2015 to 2017, courtesy Christopher Gallo

Could someone else in a small town do something similar to Chautauqua Visual Arts? Do they need a legacy of local people wanting to invest time and energy into the program, or is there a way to fast track some of the work?

It happens all the time. For example, there’s a town outside of Duluth in Minnesota, where Annie Dugan started a residency. She realized her small rural community didn’t have a place for local artists to come together. She has a farm and loves artists, so she started one for them. There’s another artist, Susan Ingraham Forks, who also created a space where she wanted to get her community together. She started with a dinner, and that dinner became Open Studio Fridays and Gallery Fridays once a month, which roams from one city to another.

Starting a residency is all about defining the space, the place, and the needs of the community. If you can generate the energy to sustain it, like any art project, I definitely think it can happen again. Why not?

There’s something I find interesting about your work as an artist where you’re building platforms and then stepping aside, up, or down from the spotlight. Why should artists be passing their platforms and the mic to others?

Well, first they have to hold the mic. Artists have to be strong enough to hold the mic. They have to acknowledge they’re holding the mic so that they don’t disappear from the community. But it’s not just artists that do this. Passing the mic around is something I think works across humanity. It’s a part of being human. I don’t see it as an artist’s responsibility. I don’t even see it as a responsibility. I just see it as a natural form. It’s like a conversation.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Daniel Sharp.

Absolutely. I discovered that very young. I knew that music had an effect on me that I didn’t have words to express. Just getting obsessed with sound and, I’m dating myself, wanting to rewind the cassette over and over again. I always gravitated to things like that. I’ve always been an imaginative, adventurous child and music always allowed me to explore that.

My earliest music memories are going to see Amadeus. My father took me. That came out 1984 so I’m four or five years old, but I remember going to that movie theater, hearing all those violins and strings, and it doing something to me. Music and movies. Those are big things in my family. We watched a lot of films together and the two go together perfectly. Music is what drives the film. How do you know when to cry? Because you heard the violins. How do you know when something is looming? You hear some ominous, low vibrational tone. And those are very intentional in movies for that reason.

I think it started with music having a tangible effect on me personally and then I’m like, “Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I did that?” I was always curious about the process of making sounds and playing instruments. I got very curious, very young. I wanted to see what it was like myself and to see if I could have the same effect, not necessarily for an audience, but just to see if I could do it. And, of course, the obsession and hunger becomes even more until you’re like, “Okay, this is what I want to do all the time.

It starts with the appreciation of the power of sound as an individual, but the next step is often sharing communally. When did you start sharing with the public and was there an early moment that you remember having an impact on others through performance?

I think it started with my observation of some of my favorite artists. For instance, Michael Jackson was a favorite because he was a child performer, and also Mozart was a child performer and I would go to the movies and see Annie. She was a child performer. And I’d be like, “I’m a child, they’re doing it. Ooh, I want to know what that’s like.” So they’re having an effect on me and I definitely wanted to know what it felt like to be on the other side, having an effect on others. So looking at all those musicals, absorbing all those films and all the culture of being a little kid in the eighties, ET, all this Hollywood stuff. You get caught up in the fantasy and so there’s me listening to it, but then there’s me wanting to be in it, too. What would that be like? Because if these performers have an effect on me, I want to know what that’s like as well.

Probably my earliest ensemble that I can remember putting together was me and my brother. He had a fire truck and I remember taking the little ladder and strumming it like a guitar. And I gave him two sticks. I’m like, “You play the fire truck, like a drum.” And we had songs. When we were done, I was like, “Okay, we’re ready to go on tour. Let’s go right now.” I was like, “Mom and Dad, I want to show you guys this song.” I really thought I was a professional musician at that point. I was like, “I did that. I wrote some songs, we got a hit, let’s go.” And so I performed it. Of course they were like, “Oh, that’s great,” and everything. But I was just like, “Aren’t I supposed to be on tour?” I was kind of disappointed like, “Wait a minute. I did that thing that Michael Jackson did, and I’m just going to my room afterwards.” I pondered it.

And that’s when you start having those tests and trials of being a musician—if this is something that you want. Like, when you have worked on something and you have this idea you’ve succeeded, but you’re not where you thought you should be.

I had inklings of doubt if I was capable to be a musician. Those seeds of doubt would be reinforced by certain situations where I would put my all into something and present it to people and I was either ignored, pushed away, made to feel like I was different, made to feel like my sound wasn’t good, that my voice wasn’t good, that I didn’t really know how to play the clarinet.

And then imposter syndrome, being a Black woman artist, there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t know would be attached to music that has nothing to do with music. As I grew up and came into the reality that people have a lot of particular ideas about women and particularly Black women, all the racism, you grow up and all these little inklings of doubt make you really question what music is.

So I think it’s definitely a journey with this sound, and those types of trials are necessary as well. I think a lot of the trials I face as a Black woman, musician, composer, artist, interdisciplinary artist, is trying to really understand my place in all of this and trying to find my space of what it is for Angel to do music. I have a lot of heroes and heroines and people who I look up to, but it’s like, what am I trying to do? And that’s where experimentation and abstraction come into play.

Does it help to tap back into the wonder that you experienced as a child playing the firetruck?

Yes.

Tapping back into that source of pure joy of experimentation to help calm an anxiety or to get beyond it?

Well, “tap,” it’s not a thing that’s like—I think the question you asked is very white because you guys look at things like there’s a separation between things. There is no, “I’m tapping back in.” What you’re talking about is spirit. You know what I mean? It’s a continual flow.

Yeah.

I’m particularly interested in how we talk about music. Talking about music in a sense, like it’s something that I tap into and tap out to. Those ideas are very foreign. It’s continual. I’m in music right now. And if you look at African Indigenous people’s music, music is a part of everyday life. You got cooking songs, protest songs, even the great scholar, Eileen Southern, her great textbook that everybody who studies black music should have, called The Music of Black Americans, she has accounts in there from people who said that there were ancient Indigenous tribes where you had to sing your case in court.

You had to sing your case in court. Everyone did not talk, we sang, we embodied it. So it’s not an on/off switch, which sometimes I find in conflict with being a Black artist working in a white world. It’s a culture adjustment that I don’t think that a lot of white people understand is there, but it’s there.

I appreciate the broadening of perception and understanding. You have such a defined mission and message and I imagine it’s transforming all the time. What you are bringing through your music has a potency to it. When you are stepping on stage in front of an audience is there a centering space you come back to before sharing or is it continuing the flow?

Yeah. Flow is the word. It’s going with the flow. Everything is flowing in the universe, so you just flow with it. There is no on/off switch. I am this way, how you see me now. I am this way in every setting that I’m in. I’m never switching things up. This is my continual flow. I could just be working at Subway and do music for fun, and I would be very happy and content. This is just what I’m supposed to be doing.

I always reference The Oracle [character from the film The Matrix]. That’s what I called the first album, because the mission of an oracle is a little different than the mission of a prophet. A prophet’s going to just tell you whatever. A prophet don’t care whether you get it or not. But the mission of The Oracle is, “Look, y’all can do whatever y’all want. And I’m going to find some way I’m going to be content by myself. But if you do come to me, if you come and you seeking me out, there’s some insight that you might need or something. And for whatever reason you think I got the insight, hindsight, foresight to shed some light on your situation.” If you do come to me, you come to my sound, you come to my music, you come to an experience of meeting me. That’s probably what’s going to happen. And so it’s a greater thing than the compartmentalized way that unfortunately the world has not been taking good care of music. They just haven’t and I don’t like that.

Take care of the music and it’ll take care of you, right?

Mm-hmm.

The Oracle has a sense of wisdom and tranquility, but life is not always tranquil. Are there things that you access to help re-energize and move back on course when you’re facing a challenge in life?

Yes. I have a lot of disciplines and a lot of practices that I do to keep myself happy. You never know what’s going to happen in life. But I guess my viewpoint is when something is hard, it just means I haven’t done it enough. Let’s say you wanted to pick up a new instrument. You might be really whack at first. Because you don’t know the scales, you don’t know how it works. And so you start practicing and then you start knowing your way around. And then you start producing sounds. And then you say, “Hey, I want to know more.” And the more you do it—you spend time habitually with practice, practice, practice—all of a sudden you’re not even thinking about it. It’s just like walking. You’re not thinking about walking anymore because you’ve done it so much.

It’s the same way that I look about any situation that is new to me. I may not be good at that point. And so what does that mean? I have to do that thing more often. I have to change my habits because everything is real easy. It’s easy in a sense if you understand that everything is a habit.

Racism is a bad habit. We’re going to have to get out of that habit. And that’s going to mean me bringing up issues that maybe you didn’t think about before. So I have to get y’all in the habit of being a little bit more uncomfortable sometimes. White people. Y’all going to have to be uncomfortable sometimes because 90% of the time, black people are uncomfortable in your settings. So sometimes with the work that I do, it’s important that we get to a place of uncomfortability so that we can be unified in that first. Let’s be unified in us being uncomfortable together. I bring up these issues and I feel people’s tension and I’m like, “Hold on. You feel that way because it’s ingrained in our system. It’s passed on to you, whether you like it or not.” And so it’s new to you. But if we get into the habit then it’s not going to feel like that over and over again. It’s going to be like, “Oh, okay. Now I see. Now we can work together. Oh, I didn’t know that.”

It’s a great discipline for everyone to be more open and aware in general. Was there somebody in your life that helped infuse that in you, to be on point to share that insight, whether through music or otherwise?

Definitely my family. I grew up in a family of people of faith. They were unmovable in their faith and they still are unmovable in their faith. They have a lot of integrity. Children don’t do what you tell them to do. We all know that. They do what you do. And so I grew up in a family where people put faith first, they put their morals and their values at the top of the list. It was about us being good people. That’s the most important thing in my family. So growing up in a family like that, of people who stood their ground, no matter how many people would come at them, I saw this countless times in my family, standing up for what you believe in. Justice is very important. Equality is very, very important. These are things that I saw people in my family do.

So I think it’s only a natural progression that those things would be passed on to me, would be important to me. We don’t have to be the richest. Nah, my family ain’t never been like that either. Humility was always the best thing. Do people make mistakes and mess up? Absolutely. But there’s an uncomfortableness in that. People in my family, if they did wrong, they just didn’t feel right in it like, “Oh, I ain’t trying to live like this. Ugh.” I’m the same way. When I make mistakes or I’m doing something that doesn’t feel right, it feels better to be kind and to be loving. Now loving doesn’t always mean nice. Loving means I’m telling you the truth. Loving means sometimes you have to cut some people off. Love looks like so many different things.

This family influence seems to have really helped foster your growth. Did this way of being and living and loving—hard love and easy love and all the rest of it, infuse in you the importance of being a mentor?

Most definitely. Black artists can’t just be artists. You can’t have a gift and just go out. No, no, no. Mm-mm. Because of where we’ve been placed in this system, we have to have a whole different agenda. My whole career, if you want to call it, is in three settings—business, the actual creative part of me composing and making music, and education. And I say this for Black artists, specifically. Any other race, y’all can have your own plan, but for us, because of how we’ve been in this country of just economic turmoil and so much bull, we going to have to play this game a little different. You just can’t just be an artist. Your business is going to have to be on point. Meaning every part of the business. And it’s a lot easier for us to have business on point than our forefathers, because they made it extra hard for them.

So many black artists in the past have been exploited and are still being exploited. And I even get exploited quite a lot. So business got to be on point, business is just like you practicing your horn. Spending a day on your emails is like you just went and practiced your scales. We have to get to that point. And then education, our music has to have some type of educational component. Just has to. Mentorship, whatever gifts you have, you have to give it back to the community.

One of my goals, as I’m thinking ahead, is what does Angel look like at 50? 60? 80? 100? 200? I’m thinking that far in advance and you know, it’s definitely looking like a school. I come from educators. My mother and my father are both educators. My dad’s a minister. My grandmother was an educator. That was their passion. So I realized that if I want the most blessings for my life, I’m going to have to have a very strong educational component. Working on that is the same energy as me here playing my instrument, performing.

And then, of course, the creative part. That’s the part that we all already want to jump into. But until we don’t live in a world with white supremacy, I’m not going to be able to just be creative all the time. We’re just not at that place as a world. And we need to stop acting like we are. It’s not safe for Black people to perform. I’m going to tell you that right now. If only you knew. Especially in the jazz world, where less and less people look like me playing Black music and treating Black people a certain way. To go back to what you were saying about keeping that wonder, stay in that child, it is challenging.

Going to Europe, I was starting to get cynical. I was starting to be like, “You know what? I’m not messing with y’all, Paris. I ain’t messing with y’all, Berlin.” That’s why the live album was that. I was like, “I’m not impressed with Europe now.” And sometimes I was like, “I don’t even know if I want to deal with them.” Some of these festivals, the things that I’ve been through behind the scenes are just, ugh. Actually, you know what, I’m not going through anything. I’m just thinking about Nina Simone and all these other women before me. They were going through stuff. But the stuff that I be going through is still there.

To keep that alive, I have to keep that sense of, “Okay, I didn’t want to let go of that wonder.” “Okay, let me go to another country and experience it.” So with our last tour I did with the Brotherhood I was like, “You know what, I’m going to go to Europe with the mindset like, ‘Hey, I’m in Paris.’” Like that old school feeling that we used to have. And you know what? I had a good time. So it’s both. It’s a lot of self discipline. It’s a lot of learning new habits. Doing things that bring me to a place of peace, ultimately, and taking care of myself. Even on this Brotherhood tour they lost all our luggage. I had no instruments and because my band is in such a state of love and we were just so happy to be with each other, not one person complained. We were in the flow.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mark Frosty McNeill.

Ablet Abdureshid Berqi is serving time in Tumshuq Prison, a detention facility located in Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a state-owned economic and paramilitary organization in northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). 

Since its founding in 1954, the XPCC, which is also known as Bingtuan, has built and administered several urban centers in Xinjiang, mainly to resettle Han Chinese from other parts of the country as part of a campaign of Sinicization. The Bingtuan also operates prisons and publicly traded companies. 

An RFA investigation confirmed that Berqi, which is a pseudonym, was arrested two years ago amid a purge of Uyghur intellectuals, educators and cultural leaders — one of a set of Chinese government policies that have been determined by the United States and the parliaments of some Western countries as constituting genocide.

The abuses also include forced labor at factories and farms, forced birth control and the detention of up to 1.8 million Uyghurs in a network of internment camps.

A Chinese official at the Xinjiang Education Institute, a university for teacher education in the XUAR’s capital Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) where Berqi worked, told RFA that he was not authorized to disclose information about Berqi and suggested the reporter contact the school administration office. 

“I don’t know this person,” the official said. “I haven’t heard of this person. We have more than 1,000 employees at the school. Let me give you a phone number. You ask the school administration office.”

Other officials at the institute refused to provide information about Berqi, however.

Later, officials at the directorate of school education told RFA that the institute did not employ an instructor named Berqi.

RFA also contacted a police officer in the poet’s hometown of Sampul village in southern Xinjiang’s Hotan (Hetian) prefecture, who confirmed that he was serving a 13-year term in Tumshuq Prison.

“He is in prison now,” the police officer said. “The reasons were threats to social stability and going abroad. He was detained in 2017, and after three months he was sentenced to prison for 13 years and is now serving his term in Tumshuq Prison.”

The officer also pointed to “mistakes he made while teaching at school,” including articles Berqi wrote and lectures he gave.

Berqi’s parents live in the village’s Aydingkol hamlet, the officer said. 

A top target

In an article published in the 2000s, Berqi said he used a pseudonym because his real name was the same as the XUAR chairman, Ablet Abdureshid, which led to a number of misunderstandings, particularly after the poet’s writings were published in newspapers and magazines. 

He also said the pseudonym, which means “flourishing” in the Uyghur language, reflected the greater success he hoped to achieve in his creative career.

Berqi wrote his doctoral dissertation on Abduhalik Uyghur, a prominent Uyghur revolutionary poet in the early 20th century who was killed by Sheng Shicai, a Chinese militarist who ruled Xinjiang from 1933 to 1944. 

Berqi also studied at Haifa University in Israel between 2014 and 2016, said Nimrod Baranovitch, a lecturer in Chinese culture and society at the university, who met the poet in Urumqi a decade earlier and later applied for a postdoctoral fellowship for him.

“[W]e kept in contact for many years, and then we decided we should try to bring him over to study and research here,” Baranovitch told RFA. “We had tried that once in the past, but it didn’t work. And then we tried it again, and it worked.”

Two years ago, authorities charged Berqi with “separatism” and sentenced him to 13 years in prison because of articles he wrote on economic awareness and development in the XUAR, which were published in the CCP-controlled Xinjiang Civilization magazine, according to information from an RFA listener.

The last official mention of his name was on Jan. 5, 2017, in a notice issued by the Xinjiang Education Institute’s publicity department. It said that the research topics officially approved by the Chinese government included a project by Berqi relating to the stability of Xinjiang.

At the end of 2017, Berqi’s name was on a list of Uyghur intellectuals who had been imprisoned, but due to the Chinese government's tight control over information, it was only five years later, in July 2022, RFA learned about his sentencing.

Husenjan, one of the Berqi’s colleagues who now resides abroad, said he received was told by sources in Urumqi that Berqi had been sentenced to prison but did not know the length of his term.

“I recently received official news that he was, in fact, detained, but I wasn’t able to get information on whether or how long he was sentenced to prison,” he said.

As a writer and intellectual, Berqi would have been a top target for authorities amid the ongoing repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Husenjan said.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

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Two Georgia school board candidates who criticized the hiring of a Black educator focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives lost their runoff elections this week. Meanwhile, a person who helped organize the effort to push educator Cecelia Lewis out of her job is narrowly losing her bid for a seat in the state House of Representatives.

The three were described in a ProPublica story last week that detailed how Lewis was attacked in both Cherokee County and neighboring Cobb County by white parents making baseless claims that she was bringing critical race theory to both school districts. (CRT maintains that racial bias is embedded in America’s laws and institutions and has caused disproportionate harm to people of color; it’s rarely if ever taught in K-12 public school systems.)

State House candidate Noelle Kahaian, a paralegal and conservative nonprofit leader, is trailing her opponent by 23 votes. The state has until July 1 to certify results, and candidates who come within half a percentage point of their opponent can request a recount.

The two Cherokee County school board candidates, Sean Kaufman and Ray Lynch, were defeated by wide margins on Tuesday. They were part of a four-candidate slate attempting to gain a majority for a more conservative school board. That collective effort, dubbed 4CanDoMore, was endorsed by the 1776 Project PAC, a new super PAC that touted victories of far-right school board candidates it had backed in multiple states. The two other 4CanDoMore candidates, Michael “Cam” Waters and Chris Gregory, had lost to incumbents in the May 24 primary.

In a statement to ProPublica, Cherokee County School District Chief Communications Officer Barbara Jacoby said that the group of people who targeted Lewis “do not speak for our community, as was illustrated when their candidates failed in their recent attempt to win a majority on the School Board. We do not support hate, and we are deeply sorry for how Ms. Lewis and her family were treated by these members of our community.”

Kaufman, Lynch and Kahaian did not respond to requests for comments. In a public statement to his Facebook page, Kaufman congratulated his opponent, Erin Ragsdale. “I truly believe that Cherokee County had some incredible candidates — and we really could not lose,” he wrote. “I wish her the very best and give her my full support in the November election.”

Lewis, an accomplished middle school principal from Maryland, was hired in the spring of 2021 as the Cherokee County School District’s first-ever administrator devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Community members targeted Lewis soon after her hire was announced. Kahaian, the state House candidate, was a presenter in a meeting during which plans to push Lewis out of her job were hatched. Parents went on to attack Lewis’ credentials and wrongfully accuse her of promoting critical race theory.

Lewis quit the job before she even started, following a chaotic school board meeting during which board members and students were evacuated and escorted to safety amid threatening outbursts from attendees.

Months later, parents using a private Facebook group began complaining that Lewis had a new job in neighboring Cobb County. (People with access to the group shared screenshots of posts with ProPublica.) She’d been hired as that district’s social studies supervisor. She lasted just two months there, resigning from the position after the district received an onslaught of erroneous complaints about her supposed intentions to indoctrinate children through CRT.

After ProPublica published its story about the community’s campaign against Lewis, one woman wrote in the parents’ private Facebook group: “Looks like we should prepare for antifa here in Cherokee County. I’m genuinely concerned for those names listed in that piece.”

Community members who disagree with those who targeted Lewis have been hesitant to speak up, according to Mandy Marger, a mother of two whose family moved to Cherokee County a decade ago.

Marger said she was encouraged by the outcome of the runoffs.

“The idea that groups who had such extreme views thought that they could grab a hold of our community was frightening,” Marger said. “They made it very clear that those of us who did not align with them were going to have to stand up, and I’m really, really proud of our community — especially today — that we did.”

Jacoby said in her statement that Lewis’ departure was the district’s loss.

“No one wants their community to be the place where a story like this unfolds, but it is important for us all to understand what happened and reflect on what we can do to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” Jacoby said. “It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of misinformation and what can happen when you judge others based on falsehoods spread on social media or by people with political agendas.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Carr.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This story was co-published by ProPublica and FRONTLINE as part of an ongoing collaboration.

Cecelia Lewis did not want to share her story.

In fact, she just wanted all of this to go away.

Late last year, I was on the phone with a former colleague, talking about the local coverage of campaigns against critical race theory across metro Atlanta. CRT maintains that racial bias is embedded in America’s laws and institutions and has caused disproportionate harm to people of color; it’s rarely taught in K-12 public school systems but has still become a lightning rod in districts around the country — and a catalyst for conservative political candidates seeking to fire up their base.

He mentioned that a woman had quit her job in the Cherokee County School District before she had started and wondered what had happened to her.

We talked about a lengthy statement she’d written for the Cherokee Tribune & Ledger-News, explaining her decision to resign. The letter was published a week and a half after an ugly scene at a school board meeting during which parents railed against the hiring of Lewis (a Maryland middle school principal), as well as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives (which Lewis had been brought on to helm) and CRT (a formerly arcane, currently politicized concept that Lewis hadn’t even heard of). I later learned people who had gathered outside the building where the meeting was held were beating on windows. School police and other law enforcement officers escorted board members to their homes, where some received ongoing security.

In that letter, Lewis, who had quit the morning after the meeting, explained the DEI plan she would have implemented in Cherokee and how it would benefit all children. And she mentioned she’d been threatened by people who have no idea who she is and what she stands for.

Seemed like something worth deeper reporting.

A comment posted at the bottom of a Cobb County Courier article caught my eye: A reader, who didn’t reveal their identity, warned that Lewis was heading to Cherokee’s neighboring Cobb County School District.

Sure enough, Lewis’ LinkedIn profile showed that she’d worked in Cobb County for a mere two months following her resignation in Cherokee. She had been overseeing social studies for that district. No one had reported on what happened to her in Cobb.

At the same time, I’d been filing open records requests to the Cobb County School District related to COVID-19. I noticed a cache of emails that showed how the then-school board chairman was receiving guidance from a local attorney about conservatives’ definition of CRT, its supposed dangers to children and how the concept was infiltrating corporations and schools.

The school board — like many others across the country in 2021 — had taken a vote against CRT. The vote was the same month that Lewis started working there.

I wanted to know exactly what happened to Lewis in both districts and how it went down. I also wanted to know who was behind the how.

I started contacting Lewis via LinkedIn in December, shortly after talking to my former colleague and trying to connect the dots between what little I knew about her brief time in Georgia. She didn’t write back. But I had some hope that I’d hear from her because I received alerts that she was at least looking at my LinkedIn profile.

She’s considering it, I thought.

Earlier this year, I found her email address and followed up. Still no answer.

I continued filing records requests in the two school districts and, through emails I received from those requests, learned more about the players behind the campaign to run her out. In both Cobb and Cherokee, people had sent similarly worded complaints to the districts, demanding to get rid of Lewis.

Then I found people who were upset about what happened to Lewis. One of them knew a good bit more about what led up to that ugly school board meeting in Cherokee.

That person had a recording of an organizing meeting days prior in a golf course clubhouse. There was also a private Facebook group filled with hysterical posts about Lewis, including some that announced false Lewis “sightings” around the county.

Two of the presenters at the clubhouse meeting are leaders of groups that encourage the public to anonymously report educators for perceived transgressions relating to curriculums, inappropriate books or lessons, or guest speakers — or to just submit any anonymous tip.

Beyond giving me details about the efforts to oust Lewis, the recording and posts provided insight into local and national conservative networks involved in strategies to overthrow school boards, vilify Parent Teacher Associations and pass state legislation to ban a slew of concepts from curriculums. At the clubhouse meeting, the crowd watched a video from Prager University that outlined how white people are being made out to be racists no matter what they say or do — because, well, CRT. They also listened to a controversial recording of a Manhattan high school principal caught on tape talking about the demonization of white children. The group was being coached on how to speak at school board meetings in a way that could land them an appearance on Fox News.

This all struck me as highly coordinated.

By March, I decided to see if meeting me might change Lewis’ mind about talking. I knew she had moved back to Maryland, so I traveled there to do some old-fashioned door-knocking, meet some folks who knew Lewis and get a direct, handwritten message to her (my ProPublica business cards hadn’t been printed yet!).

While I was sitting in my hotel room, she called.

She still didn’t want to go on the record, but we talked for hours that day and hours the next. I told her why I wanted to tell her story, and she began to piece it together for me. I learned that she hadn’t even initially applied for that DEI position. Cherokee’s district leadership encouraged her to do it after she interviewed for a job as a coach for teachers. But Lewis still would not go on the record, and she wasn’t too interested in meeting me. She had concerns. Safety and privacy concerns.

My ears perked up when, during our initial call, she mentioned an upcoming school board meeting in her own district. I decided to go sit in the back, to get a feel for the area. I heard some of the same anti-CRT lines in Maryland that I’d heard in Georgia. This time it tied back to the district’s hiring of its first Black superintendent.

Again, the language suggested there was coordination. People don’t learn these things on their own. They’re coached in the ways I’d heard in that recording of the Cherokee County clubhouse meeting.

I left Maryland without an interview I could use in my story. But I kept reporting.

I got more emails from the Georgia districts. I spoke to school employees in Cherokee and Cobb counties; they defended Lewis and felt sorry these things happened to her. Most of them said they thought of her often. One, who was disappointed I’d tried to visit Lewis, thinking it was a step too far, was especially protective of her. She didn’t want me to cause her further harm, and I had no interest in doing that.

I also attended a Cherokee County School Board meeting, standing in a long line waiting to get through the metal detectors that had been installed because of the uproar over Lewis and CRT a year earlier. In that line, women were passing around what they called evidence of lewd material in school library books. There was an informal circle of people forming around me. Some knew one another. Some were introducing themselves, knowing they shared a common goal in book banning. One woman declared that a parent leader was a “Marjorie,” as in a follower of controversial Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is not afraid to say anything, anywhere. Another raised her hand and proudly said, “I’m a Marjorie, too.”

Everyone in my immediate vicinity was passing around material provided by a blond woman: laminated pages of books she felt should be banned from school libraries. Well, almost everyone. No one handed them to me. Nor did anyone hand them to the Black mother standing behind me with her high school daughter.

As I continued reporting in the weeks to come, it became apparent that none of the blowback Cecelia Lewis faced in Georgia was actually about Cecelia Lewis. She happened to land in the wrong job in the wrong state at the wrong time. And yes, based on the details you’ll find in the story I ultimately wrote, the wrong skin color.

(In response to a detailed list of questions covering all aspects of Lewis’ experience in the Cherokee County School District, its chief communications officer responded that “we have no further comments to add.” In response to similar questions to the Cobb County School District and its school board, a spokesperson responded: “Cecelia Lewis was employed by the Cobb County School District during the summer of 2021, voluntarily submitted her letter of resignation in early fall of 2021, and like every Team member, her contributions and work for students was greatly appreciated.”)

In late April, Lewis agreed to take another call from me, this time via Zoom, where we could actually see each other for the first time. By then, we were inching toward the year anniversary of her resignation from Cherokee County. When I told her what I’d learned through records and interviews — and how my colleague, ProPublica research reporter Mollie Simon, found examples of educators across the country who faced similar backlash — she said she’d consult her family, her district and her pastor and pray on making a decision as to whether she’d talk to me on the record.

A few days later, my phone lit up with a call from her. She wanted to share her experience — so that it may help people understand the extraordinary challenges so many educators are facing.

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Carr.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This story and accompanying videos were co-published by ProPublica and FRONTLINE as part of an ongoing collaboration.

In April of 2021, Cecelia Lewis had just returned to Maryland from a house-hunting trip in Georgia when she received the first red flag about her new job.

The trip itself had gone well. Lewis and her husband had settled on a rental home in Woodstock, a small city with a charming downtown and a regular presence on best places to live lists. It was a short drive to her soon-to-be office at the Cherokee County School District and less than a half hour to her husband’s new corporate assignment. While the north Georgia county was new to the couple, the Atlanta area was not. They’d visited several times in recent years to see their son, who attended Georgia Tech.

This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes an upcoming documentary.

Lewis, a middle school principal, initially applied for a position that would bring her closer to the classroom as a coach for teachers. But district leaders were so impressed by her interview that they encouraged her to apply instead for a new opening they’d created: their first administrator focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

DEI-focused positions were becoming more common in districts across the country, following the 2020 protests over the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. The purpose of such jobs typically is to provide a more direct path for addressing disparities stemming from race, economics, disabilities and other factors.

At first, the scope of the role gave Lewis pause. In her current district, these responsibilities were split among several people, and she’d never held a position dedicated to anything as specific as that before. But she had served on the District Equity Leadership Team in her Maryland county and felt prepared for this new challenge. She believed the job would allow her, as she put it, to analyze the district’s “systemic and instructional practices” in order to better support “the whole child.”

“We’re so excited to add Cecelia to the CCSD family,” Superintendent Brian Hightower said in the district’s March 2021 announcement about all of its new hires. (The announcement noted that the creation of the DEI administrator role “stems from input from parents, employees and students of color who are serving on Dr. Hightower’s ad hoc committees formed this school year to focus on the topic.”) Hightower acknowledged “both her impressive credentials and enthusiasm for the role” and pointed out that, “In four days, she had a DEI action plan for us.”

During her early visits, Lewis found Cherokee County to be a welcoming place. It reminded her of her community in southern Maryland, where everyone knew one another. But leaving the place where she’d been raised — and where, aside from her undergrad years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she’d spent most of her adult life — wasn’t going to be easy. Before her last day as principal of her middle school, her staff created a legacy wall in her honor, plastering a phrase above student lockers that Lewis would say to end the morning messages each day: “If no one’s told you they care about you today, know that I do ... and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it!”

Cecelia Lewis initially was reluctant to talk about her experience in Georgia. For several months, she did not respond to requests for an interview. Lewis then declined to comment in March, citing safety and privacy concerns. After multiple additional requests, Lewis agreed to an interview, her first regarding what happened to her in Georgia, seeing it as a way for her experience to help people understand what educators are facing in these times.

Lewis was beginning to prepare for her move South, spending as much time with friends and family as possible, when she got a strange call from an official in her new school district. The person on the line — Lewis won’t say who — asked if she had ever heard of CRT.

Lewis responded, “Yes — culturally responsive teaching.” She was thinking of the philosophy that connects a child’s cultural background to what they learn in school. For Lewis, who’d studied Japanese and Russian in college and more recently traveled to Ghana with the Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad program for teachers, language and culture were essential to understanding anyone’s experience.

At that point, she wasn’t even familiar with the other CRT, critical race theory, which maintains that racial bias is embedded in America’s laws and institutions and has caused disproportionate harm to people of color. In a speech the previous fall, then-President Donald Trump condemned CRT as “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison.”

The caller then told Lewis that a group of people in a wealthy neighborhood in the northern part of the county were upset about what they believed were her intentions to bring CRT to Cherokee County. But don’t worry, the district official said; we just want to keep you updated.

The following month, inside a gabled white clubhouse overlooking the hills of a Cherokee County golf course, dozens of parents from across the county had assembled on a Sunday afternoon for a lesson in an emerging form of warfare. School board meetings would be their battlefield. Their enemy was CRT.

One of several presenters at the meeting was Rhonda Thomas, a frequent guest on conservative podcasts and the founder of the Atlanta-based Truth in Education, a national nonprofit that aims to educate parents and teachers about “radical ideologies being taught in schools.” “So what is critical race theory?” Thomas asked the crowd. “It teaches kids that whites are inherently racist and oppressive, perhaps unconsciously,” and that “all whites are responsible for all historical actions” and “should feel guilty.”

She added: “I cannot be asked for repentance for something my grandparents did or my ancestors did, right?”

Thomas stressed that parents should form their own nonprofit groups and cut ties with their schools’ Parent Teacher Associations. “The PTA supports everything we’re against,” she told them.

Another presenter, a local paralegal named Noelle Kahaian, leads the nonprofit Protect Student Health Georgia, which aims to “educate on harmful indoctrination” including “comprehensive sexuality education” and “gender ideology.”

Kahaian emphasized how to grab attention during upcoming school board meetings. Identify the best speakers in the group, she told them, adding: “It’s OK to be emotional.” Be sure to capture video of them addressing the board — or even consider hiring a professional videographer.

“It’s good in case Tucker Carlson wants to put you on air,” Kahaian said. “It really helps.”

Presenter Noelle Kahaian talks to the crowd about the “tsunami strategy.”

She then briefed them on how to file grievances about school board members’ teaching licenses and on their right to request school board members’ cellphone records.

And she advised them on the benefit of collaborating with “outside forces” to file open records requests to school systems for employee emails and curriculum plans that could provide evidence of inappropriate material being taught in classrooms. Doing so would allow those outsiders to “take some of the heat.”

But there was one agenda item that would inspire the crowd to take more urgent action than any other: They had to figure out what to do about the Cherokee County School District’s decision to hire a woman named Cecelia Lewis.

“And when I got a text message from somebody saying that this person was hired, I immediately was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, where are my people?’” said another speaker, Mandy Heda, a Cherokee County GOP precinct chair who introduced herself as a parent of four students in the district.

Thomas, Kahaian and Heda did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to a list of questions detailing the points they raised at the clubhouse meeting and elsewhere.

After asking the crowd to look at the Maryland district where Lewis was coming from, Heda wondered how Lewis could “leave that at the border” (she didn’t elaborate on what “that” was) and how the longtime educator could come “to Cherokee County and not want to change us.” (Like Cherokee, the district where Lewis was a principal serves a majority-white county that voted for Trump in 2020 — though Heda and others in the clubhouse seemed unaware of this.)

A man interjected, saying he’d contacted the Cherokee County School District to find out “how they arrived at the choice to hire” Lewis. Hadn’t there been any local candidates, he asked.

Presenter Mandy Heda criticizes the district's decision to hire Cecelia Lewis.

“You cannot tell me, you know, that you can’t find somebody else qualified,” Heda responded. “And if you’re looking for her to be Black, that’s fine. But that’s not what this is about. This is not about the color of her skin. It’s what she’s going to bring into our district and what she’s going to teach our children.”

Another person in the crowd later asked if the arrival of Lewis was a done deal. Several confirmed that it was.

“We don’t have to accept it, right?” another man asked, the crowd’s energy rising in response with a collective yes. “We can change that, right?”

“In some way, shape or form,” another woman vowed.

The May 2021 clubhouse meeting, a recording of which was provided to ProPublica by a parent who attended, provides a window into the ways in which conservative groups quickly and efficiently train communities to take on school districts in the name of concepts that aren’t even being taught in classrooms.

National groups, often through their local chapters, have provided video lessons and toolkits to parents across the country on how to effectively spread their messaging about so-called school indoctrination. Parents Defending Education has created “indoctrination maps” tracking everything from a district celebrating “Black Lives Matter week” to one that allows students to watch CNN Student News, while the Atlanta-based Education Veritas and Kahaian’s Protect Student Health Georgia provide portals for anonymously reporting educators supposedly sympathetic to CRT, DEI and other so-called controversial learning concepts.

In the wake of 2020’s summer of racial reckoning, as the work of anti-racist authors shot to the top of bestseller lists and corporations expressed renewed commitments to diversity initiatives, conservatives mounted a counteroffensive against what they viewed as an anti-white, anti-American, “woke” liberal agenda. And with that effort came a renewed vilification of CRT, a four-decade-old theory that, contrary to its opponents’ accusations, is rarely if ever taught in K-12 public school systems (it typically is taught in graduate-level college and law school courses). That effort quickly snowballed into complaints about what used to be basic history lessons involving race and slavery, which organized groups began conflating with CRT and campaigning for their removal from curriculums.

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Nearly 900 school districts across the country have been targeted by anti-CRT efforts from September 2020 to August 2021, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego, found. Teachers and district equity officers surveyed and interviewed for the report “often described feeling attacked and at risk for discussing issues of race or racism at all, or promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion in any way. Equity officers told us that at times they feared for their personal safety.”

The report also stated: “Only one equity officer described a year free of anti ‘CRT’ conflict.”

“It makes me very sad for my colleagues,” said Cicely Bingener, one of the UCLA researchers and a longtime elementary school educator.

Using local media coverage and lawsuits, ProPublica has identified at least 14 public school employees across the country, six of them Black, who were chased out in part by anti-CRT efforts in 2021. Some of the educators resigned or did not have their contracts renewed, while others were fired by school boards where elections had ushered in more politically extreme members.

Since January 2021, legislatures in more than 40 states have proposed or passed bills and resolutions that would restrict teaching CRT or would limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. Four days after the meeting in the golf course clubhouse, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp released a statement solidifying his stance against CRT and asking the state Board of Education to do the same. “I urge you to take immediate steps to ensure that Critical Race Theory and its dangerous ideology do not take root in our state standards or curriculum,” it read.

On June 3, 2021, the Board of Education did just that, joining Utah’s as the first such groups to pass resolutions of that kind. Georgia’s declared that “the United States of America is not a racist country, and that the state of Georgia is not a racist state.”

In predominantly white Cherokee County, 40 miles north of downtown Atlanta, the fight over CRT has led some residents to question whether they still recognize the community they thought they knew.

“These are our neighbors,” said Leanne Etienne, a Black mother of two Cherokee County students, one of whom served on the superintendent’s ad hoc committee that led to the creation of the DEI position. “These are people who are the parents of the children my kids go to school with. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling. You don’t know who to trust. You don’t feel safe.”

After that April call from the school district official, Lewis was confused but remained optimistic. She read up on CRT and determined it had nothing to do with her role. Then came more calls.

In one, a district official asked Lewis if she has social media accounts. “Only a LinkedIn,” she replied. (Lewis barely has a digital footprint. She has never posted anything on social media nor made any professional statements in regard to CRT or any other controversial topic.) The official explained that some of the people upset about her hiring were complaining that a Twitter user with her name was posting Marxist ideology.

Around that same time, according to Lewis, several emails and handwritten letters were showing up at her school in Maryland, calling her a Black Yankee and saying her liberal thinking is unwanted. She saved only one, with typewriting on the envelope. The return address was just “A Cherokee County Citizen.”

“They ultimately just said, you know, ‘We don’t want you here, and we don’t want you to push us to find out what will happen if you come here,’” Lewis said.

On May 18, 2021, two days after the meeting at the clubhouse, Cherokee County’s schools communications chief and its school board members received the first of approximately 100 form letters that would flood their inboxes over a 48-hour period, demanding that Lewis be fired.

Another parent wrote to a school board member, citing Cherokee County’s recent census statistics: “Did you know that 77.8% of the population is considered ‘whtie [sic] alone’ 7.7% are black and 11.1% hispanic? Are we now in a county that is going to cater to a handful of people?”

Lewis said she was willing and eager, once she arrived in Georgia, to speak to concerned parents. “I just felt as if there was a misunderstanding,” she said, “and as soon as I [would] have an opportunity to get there and really speak on my own behalf, then it was going to be OK.”

She also felt comforted by the fact that school district officials were regularly checking in with her, offering reassurances that they were monitoring the situation and that everything would be OK “once they get to know you.”

Lewis tends not to talk about racism in terms of her professional life. She said that, until she got the Black Yankee email, she had not experienced racial prejudice and was accustomed to learning and working in majority-white spaces. She also recalled being surprised when someone from the district pointed out that a hiring like hers was rare, in that there were not many minority leaders working in the district.

“I did not think that in 2021 that that was really a thing,” Lewis said, noting the district’s proximity to Atlanta, with its high concentration of Black leadership and affluence. “And that was probably just ignorance on my end. And I mean that in the purest form of ignorance, of just not knowing. I didn’t know.”

On May 20, 2021, one of Lewis’ soon-to-be colleagues called to say that the people upset about her hiring were claiming to have spotted her around Cherokee County and were sharing with one another her supposed locations. Lewis, however, was still in Maryland.

That same day — following an increase in social media posts, emails and phone calls complaining about Lewis and CRT — the district installed metal detectors and assigned extra security at the county building where school board meetings are held.

Lewis soon received yet another call. Someone from district leadership asked if she was planning to watch the board meeting that night. She replied that it hadn’t been on her radar.

“You should watch it,” they said.

Well before the Cherokee County School Board meeting’s 7 p.m. start time, people hoping to get inside were being turned away. The room and the overspill viewing area in the lobby were at capacity. Those who were denied entry gathered outside near the parking lot, where they could peek through windows and glimpse the large screens mounted in the boardroom. Others hung around outside, planning to watch the livestream of the meeting on their phones.

At home in Maryland, Lewis and her husband sat in their bedroom, the laptop propped up between them.

Inside, just before the meeting started, mothers in black T-shirts printed with the words “I don’t co-parent with the government” smiled and posed for pictures. A husky man with a deep voice formed the beginning of the large prayer circle that inched toward the dais where district officials, student delegates and Cherokee County’s seven school board members were seated.

The first order of business was introduced by Mike Chapman, a Republican board member who’d held his seat for more than two decades: a resolution against teaching CRT and the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series that “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” (Conservatives have railed against it as racially divisive and have often lumped it together with CRT in an attempt to ban both from schools across the country.)

What came next caught Lewis off guard.

Hightower, the superintendent, read from a statement: “While I had initially entertained and publicly spoken to the development of a diversity, equity and inclusivity, DEI plan, I recognize that our intentions have become widely misunderstood in the community and it created division.

“To that end, I have concluded that there will be no separate DEI plan.”

To Lewis, it was as if the “foundations of everything that I was asked to do have just shifted, and I was not a part of the conversation.”

State Rep. Brad Thomas, a Republican, spoke next. He assured the board that, as the father of a Cherokee County student, he’d done his research after fielding complaints about Lewis’ hiring.

He said he now had a plan of his own in the works: He would be drafting legislation to ensure that teaching CRT and the 1619 Project would be illegal statewide. “We’ve pulled language from Tennessee’s bill. We’ve pulled language from Texas’ bill. We’ve pulled language from Oklahoma’s bill. We’ve pulled language from Idaho’s bill,” he said. “And I’ve put some of my own language in there.”

Heda, the Cherokee County GOP precinct officer who’d spoken at the clubhouse meeting four days earlier, also addressed the board. She claimed that the definition of DEI had changed over time and now represents the views held by people with “the same woke political understanding of power dynamics and social positions.”

“We cannot fix racism with institutionalized racism,” she said.

A neighbor of Heda’s approached the lectern next. The woman, who is Black, spoke in favor of the decision to hire Lewis. It was the first time she was mentioned by name.

According to one observer, that’s when the crowd gathered outside began beating against the building’s windows.

“No, no, no!” they screamed in unison, the sound reverberating through the lobby as their fists pounded the glass.

A subsequent speaker, a parent named Lauri Raney, was rewarded with applause when she asked the board, “My question to you is, if you vote to do away with the DEI program, does that mean the new DEI officer has her offer rescinded? Because why do we need to pay $115,000 for somebody who doesn’t have a job to do anymore?”

At that moment, Lewis recalled, her husband said: “That’s it. We’re not doing this. You are not going there.” He left the bedroom in disgust.

Not long after, a volunteer from the campaign of Vernon Jones, a Black Republican who at the time was running for governor (Jones later switched to a run for Congress), read a statement to the school board from the candidate. “Embracing the teaching of critical race theory is a slap in the face of Dr. King’s teachings,” said the volunteer, Stan Fitzgerald. “Taxpayer-funded anti-white racism is still exactly that — racism.”

Upon hearing that, Lewis thought about how Martin Luther King Jr. promoted humanity and love, and she was devastated to hear his words used by strangers to attack her. Everything she had just witnessed felt contrary to his ideals.

Breaking down in tears, Lewis closed her laptop. She could no longer watch.

“That cut me so deeply,” she said. “It hit the core of who I am as a being.”

Lewis missed the part when Miranda Wicker, another parent and member of the county’s Democratic Party, addressed the board. “Those who want this ban are spouting talking points fed to them by an outside special interest group with a deeply political agenda to keep people riled up against an invisible other,” said Wicker, who was interrupted by loud shouts.

“Stop the disrespect!” school board Chair Kyla Cromer yelled at the crowd after banging her gavel. “Stop! Stop!”

Cromer threatened to adjourn the meeting early but ultimately allowed it to continue.

The board voted 4-1 with two abstentions to pass the anti-CRT and anti-1619 Project resolution. But the crowd was still worked up. Cromer moved to take a break. The livestream of the meeting was paused. But the yelling continued. And things spiraled out of control, to the point that Cromer abruptly adjourned the meeting.

One man in the crowd screamed: “I’m furious!”

Another declared: “We’re going to hunt you down!”

The school district’s chief communications officer, Barbara Jacoby, would later say that’s when the students attending the meeting started crying.

“They had to be rushed out of the room,” Jacoby recalled. She went with them and the school board members as security guards ushered the group to a conference room behind the dais. “And then we had to be walked to our cars,” she said. “We had to be followed out of the parking lot onto the highway by police officers.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, the school board provided a statement describing how some members requested school police escorts to their homes, where city and county agencies conducted extra patrols. In response to the other questions, including ones about anti-CRT letters the board received, Jacoby responded on its behalf, stating “the information you note below is correct.” Cromer and Hightower declined to comment.

Jacoby said the scene felt unreal. “It’s certainly not anything anyone who comes to work for a school district expects would ever be part of their job.”

Lewis’ phone kept ringing that night. People from the district were telling her that this is not who they are, that they’re embarrassed by the actions of their neighbors and church members, that they’re sorry she had to witness this.

In a phone call the next morning, Hightower apologized to Lewis. He said he still wanted her to come to Cherokee. Another administrator asked if she would consider a different position.

But by then she’d made up her mind. She told Hightower: It’s just not going to work.

“I can’t say I blame her,” Cherokee County School District chief of staff Mike McGowan said in an interview with ProPublica. “There was so much misinformation about who she was, what she stood for and what was going on politically.”

In response to a detailed list of questions to the district covering all aspects of Lewis’ experience in Cherokee County, Jacoby responded that “we have no further comments to add.”

The following morning, before it was publicly known that Lewis had quit the job she’d never started, a former Cherokee County student who’d attended the school board meeting appeared on “Fox & Friends” and warned that the board was still pursuing CRT under the guise of other concepts. “I think that they’re relying on wordplay to try to confuse Cherokee County representatives or constituents that aren’t necessarily completely involved because they’re busy with their day-to-day life,” the guest, Bailey Katzenstein, said. She claimed that CRT initiatives would be carried out by “someone from Maryland” in the form of programs “synonymous” with CRT: DEI and SEL (or social emotional learning). SEL is a decades-old child development concept that emphasizes building self-awareness, teaching kids how to better communicate, fostering relationships and making responsible decisions, according to scholars and researchers.

“I don’t think it’s acceptable,” Katzenstein said of the school board not banning DEI and SEL along with CRT. “They’re hiding behind closed doors, and I think it’s completely full of cowardice.”

The Fox host, ending the segment, said: “If you thought this was an elite, New York City school problem, Bailey Katzenstein just told you the exact opposite. This is spreading. It’s going all over the country, and it’s having real impacts.”

The next day, Cherokee County parents used their private Facebook group to continue to report Lewis “sightings.” (People with access to the group shared screenshots of posts with ProPublica.)

“My husband swears he saw Ms. Lewis at Ace yesterday afternoon!” one woman wrote, adding, “He saw the Maryland plates and the driver looked just like her.”

But Lewis was still in Maryland. She hadn’t returned to Georgia since the house-hunting trip.

In a statement quoted in the Cherokee Tribune & Ledger-News a week and a half later, Lewis wrote: “I wholeheartedly fell in love with Cherokee County when I came to visit and accepted the position, but somehow, I got caught in the crossfire of lies, misinformation, and accusations which have zero basis.”

When Lewis and her husband actually relocated to Georgia later that summer, the Cherokee parents’ private Facebook group lit up.

“Guess where Cecelia Lewis is possibly landing now?” another woman wrote.

They’d figured out her next move.

Five days after Lewis quit her would-be job in Cherokee County, the district’s human resources director forwarded a copy of her resume to the chief academic officer at his former school district, one county over. “Great catching Up!” he wrote. “Talk soon.”

Officials in the Cobb County School District, the second-largest in the state, called Lewis soon after. They wanted to talk to her about an opening they had for a supervisor of social studies, a job title she’d held in another school district earlier in her career.

Lewis did not know it, but the position already had been subjected to scrutiny.

In the summer of 2020, in wake of Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police, the Cobb County School District began to more tightly manage the way racial issues are handled in social studies teacher training and more closely vet the materials trainers and educators could use.

According to records obtained by ProPublica, the previous, longtime social studies supervisor had been reprimanded for hosting a district-approved speaker from the state Department of Education. A teacher had complained about the speaker’s presentation, titled “All are Welcome.”

The social studies supervisor’s boss wrote in the letter that most of the presentation was appropriate. There were just a few issues.

The boss wasn’t happy with the “sensitive content and images” and “probing questions” in the presentation. One slide included a photo of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin atop Floyd, his knee pinned to Floyd’s neck, along with two questions that challenged educators in how they approach lessons about such controversies: “What can we share with our black students to help them cope with the bottom?” “What did the man on top miss out on learning that could have made him a better person?”

Additionally, the director’s letter reminded the social studies supervisor that there already had been discussions about references to the 1619 Project, about vetting all presentations, about monitoring social media posts for the “message they send to the greater Cobb County community” and about ensuring that outside organizations the social studies supervisor might partner with would present controversial issues in a manner acceptable to the school district.

In 2021, the social studies supervisor retired. Lewis — who holds a master’s degree in teaching the subject — applied to replace her.

In June, at around the same time that Lewis got the call from Cobb County to come in for an interview, Cobb’s seven-member school board passed its own anti-CRT and anti-1619 Project resolution. Three members — all of them Black Democrats — abstained, noting this was not the first time they were blindsided by the addition of a problematic, last-minute agenda item.

Once a Republican stronghold represented by Newt Gingrich in Congress, Cobb County flipped to blue in 2018 and has remained that way since. By 2020 the county elected its first Black sheriff and county commission chair. Though the school district’s population is 30% Black and 24% Hispanic, the school board majority remains white and conservative.

By mid-July, another metropolitan Atlanta school district was courting Lewis. But by then she was living in Cobb County and decided to follow-up with the district there. It had been weeks since she’d gone through multiple rounds of rigorous interviews, during which Cobb officials complimented her on her credentials, saying she’d be an asset in multiple leadership roles, according to Lewis.

Lewis recalled that a district official finally called her back toward the end of July to apologize for the delayed response and explained that the superintendent had been involved in vetting her hiring, something that typically doesn’t happen for a person who applies for a supervisor role.

The district offered Lewis the job on that call, and she accepted. She was asked to report to work the next day, July 20.

By the end of the week — right around the time when the Cherokee County parent circulated the tip in the private Facebook group that Lewis might now be heading to Cobb — Lewis got a call from a school district leader. It was someone above her boss, Lewis said. According to Lewis, the person requested an immediate, off-site meeting.

It was already after 6 p.m. Lewis had just settled in for a manicure and pedicure. She left her appointment and headed to a nearby Panera Bread, where she and the district official took a seat near the back of the restaurant.

The person explained that complaints about her were “percolating” out of Cherokee into Cobb, according to Lewis, who also remembered the person telling her to be careful; she’s an at-will employee (meaning she can be fired at any time for any reason without notice) and the person might not be able to help her. Lewis also recalled the person telling her that she shouldn’t have to endure in Cobb what she went through in Cherokee.

Lewis was stunned. “I did nothing but showed up to work, signed a contract, agreed to do what I was asked to do in the job description,” she told ProPublica. “And yet again, I’m getting attacked.”

Around the same time, Cobb’s four Republican school board members, its superintendent and another district official, John Floresta, were fielding complaints about the decision to hire Lewis.

“I am appalled that anyone would advocate for the racist, sexist, and Marxist ideology that is Critical Race Theory,” one woman wrote to the group in an email, which ProPublica obtained through an open records request. Her name was redacted. She went on to say, among other things: “I insist that you pass real policy reforms that forbid indoctrinating children with CRT in classrooms,” “Anyone found pushing CRT on CCSD time should be immediately terminated,” and “Make no mistake: press releases and toothless resolutions just won’t cut it.”

“I agree with you 100%,” Cobb County school board member Randy Scamihorn responded. “Thankfully, the majority of the Board did vote on June 10th to ban CRT and 1619 Project from our schools in Cobb County. We then directed Superintendent Ragsdale to implement the enforcement of this decision, which he readily agreed to do.”

“I’m glad to hear you feel that way, but it certainly seems we need to remain vigilant,” the woman replied. “Why has Cecelia Lewis been hired by Cobb? She was hired by Cherokee schools for CRT and was run off because the parents put up such a fight. Now Cobb has quietly hired her. This isn’t a good move for the optics that Cobb has supposedly banned CRT.”

There is no record of an email reply from Scamihorn.

In response to ProPublica’s request for comment on the email exchange, a spokesperson for the district responded on behalf of Scamihorn: “Your assertion that Mr. Scamihorn ‘agreed 100%’ that ‘anyone pushing CRT on CCSD time should be immediately terminated’ is grossly inaccurate and not consistent with the email you are referencing. The Cobb Board did pass a resolution which directs the District to focus on keeping schools, schools, not on political distractions.” When asked to elaborate on what was inaccurate or inconsistent, the spokesperson did not respond.

Floresta responded to a different email complaining about CRT, assuring the sender that it was not allowed to be taught per district policy. The sender then pointed to the hiring in Cobb of “Cecelia Lewis, a well known advocate for CRT and DEI agents who actually resigned from Cherokee County recently because of the push back from the parents.”

“How in the heck did Dr. Cecelia Lewis get hired on?” the email continued. “It is ASTOUNDING to think that anyone would think this was a good idea. We need answers on this, immediately, and an explanation of her role within the County. To list her under Social Studies does not fool any of us.”

On Lewis’ fourth day on the job, she got a message from one of the district secretaries.

“I received a call from a parent wanting to know if you were the same person hired in Cherokee County. I just told her that someone would give her a call back to address her questions.”

Lewis’ boss soon told her to direct all such messages to her office. She also told Lewis to hold off on responding to any emails regarding her hiring, after Lewis replied to a positive note that came in from a supportive parent.

The following week, Lewis was supposed to introduce herself to all the social studies teachers at a districtwide training meeting. She said she’d been asked, before the Panera meeting, to prepare a presentation and share the social studies program vision.

She said she was then asked to shorten the presentation to a simple series of slides. Then, to one slide.

Finally, she learned she wouldn’t even be acknowledged at the meeting as the new supervisor of social studies.

“When the day came, I was told that I had to sit in the back and flip the slides for the presenter,” Lewis recalled. “I was not introduced at all.”

Lewis said she did receive warm welcomes when she individually introduced herself to teachers, some of whom said they’d heard she’d arrived and wondered when they’d meet her.

Not long after the meeting, she recalled, other aspects of her job began to change. Her emails to social studies teachers would need to be vetted before she could hit send (not a single one was approved). And she’d now be on a special project, reviewing thousands of resources that had already been approved and adopted by the district.

“It was pretty much them tucking me away,” Lewis said. “Every meeting was canceled. Every professional learning opportunity that I was supposed to lead with my team, I couldn’t do. Every department meeting with different schools, I was told I can’t go.”

According to Lewis, the only direct communication she was allowed to have without vetting was with other supervisors.

“They were wasting their money,” she said. “I’m just sitting here in this room every day, looking through resources that have already been approved, which makes no sense, and not given much direction as to what I’m looking for — just making sure they’re aligned to standards, which obviously they were.”

At the end of August, Lewis requested a meeting with her supervisor and the district’s chief academic officer. She told them that she would be submitting her two-week notice.

The next day, she got one last email from district leadership.

“As we discussed, it is never our intention, as an organization, for an employee to feel anything other [than] the support and collegiality associated with a positive and professional work environment,” the email said. “Please know your concerns and feedback, as an individual and employee, were heard and valued.”

ProPublica submitted to the Cobb County School District and its school board a list of detailed questions about the hiring of Lewis, the community blowback and the changes to her job. A school district spokesperson responded: “Cecelia Lewis was employed by the Cobb County School District during the summer of 2021, voluntarily submitted her letter of resignation in early fall of 2021, and like every Team member, her contributions and work for students was greatly appreciated.”

Lewis’ departure from not one but two school districts didn’t put an end to the efforts of anti-CRT groups. In fact, the groups used Lewis’ retreat as a rallying call.

In August 2021, Educate Cherokee — a group with a now-defunct website that identifies itself on Facebook as a local chapter of the national conservative nonprofit No Left Turn in Education — announced that it would be holding an event. According to an online notice about the event, it would be led by Heda, who had spoken at the clubhouse and the school board meetings, and Raney, who at the school board meeting had called out Lewis’ salary. In the notice, the group claimed the elimination of “a new DEI administrative position” as one of its accomplishments. “Bring your ideas, energy, and enthusiasm,” the meeting notice said. “We need to convert all of it into an effective election effort to eliminate CRT by replacing all of the current school board members up for re-election with new conservatives committed to our cause.”

In the months to come, four school board candidates — Michael “Cam” Waters, Ray Lynch, Sean Kaufman and Chris Gregory — established themselves as part of a collective effort to gain a majority on the board, in part by ousting board members who’d come under attack following Lewis’ hiring.

The candidates dubbed themselves 4CanDoMore and launched a website, the top of which states: “In May of 2021, Cherokee County was taken by surprise when it was announced that our ‘conservative’ board voted to bring in Cecelia Lewis, as Administrator on Special Assignment, Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). However, her history was riddled with Critical Race Theory (CRT) ideologies in her previous school district. Why would the current board vote 7-0 to bring in someone to implement programs not in alignment with the family values of our community?”

In March of 2022, the 4CanDoMore candidates got a boost. The 1776 Project PAC, founded last year by author and OANN political correspondent Ryan Girdusky, had been singling out open school board seats across the country and supporting candidates who ran on platforms to ban CRT and the 1619 Project. (The super PAC’s name is a nod to an advisory committee launched in 2020 by Trump partly in response to the 1619 Project. Trump’s 1776 Commission sought to support a “patriotic education” in schools and oppose lessons that teach students to “hate their own country.”)

In 2021, the 1776 Project PAC backed 69 school board candidates in eight states. Fifty-five won their seats, its website claims, including all 15 candidates the PAC endorsed in Texas.

The 4CanDoMore candidates were the 1776 Project PAC’s first endorsements of 2022.

Girdusky did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the decision to zero in on Cherokee County candidates.

In May, two of the 4CanDoMore candidates lost their primary bids to incumbents. The other two, Kaufman and Lynch, advanced to a June runoff. Another familiar face in the anti-Lewis effort also made it to the runoff: Kahaian, the paralegal who’d told parents in the clubhouse how to prepare for an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. She’s running for a seat in Georgia’s House of Representatives.

Even before any potential shake-up on the school board, some changes have already arrived in the Cherokee County School District. Among them is a ban on the word “equity” from any district initiative.

“We had to stop using the word because the word was redefined by people,” said Jacoby, the Cherokee County Schools communications director. “And so we had to take the word out of the equation, and say, OK, fine, ‘access.’ There’s no way around that access is important.”

After moving back home to Maryland, Lewis continues to work in education, although her role doesn’t primarily focus on DEI. “I may not have the specific acronym tied to my official title, but I am committed to celebrating diversity and promoting equity and inclusion,” Lewis said.

She also noted that, even in the face of increasing attacks, educators should not lose sight of their value and the difference they can make in children’s lives. “No one can take that away from us.”

Today, the metal detectors remain installed at the entrance to the building where Cherokee County School Board meetings are held. A staff member is permanently assigned the task of evacuating students in attendance, should the need ever arise. And an increased number of security officers are strategically placed throughout the meeting room and beyond.

Standing in line outside the building before a recent school board meeting, mothers identified themselves to each other as “a Marjorie” — meaning a proponent of the speaking style of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, known for her provocative and unfiltered claims.

A little while later, once the meeting was underway, a man who described himself as a school bus driver and a grandfather stepped to the microphone during the public comment period.

“This is not California or New York. This is Cherokee County, Georgia. We can choose what and how our students learn on a local level,” said the man.

“I was raised in a different era, in the ’50s and ’60s, where we were equipped to survive and succeed.”

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Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Carr.

I think about the internet now as a space that was already colonized and under surveillance. The internet is a mechanism of control. This is related to its history of how it started and it’s the way it’s being used now. It’s also a place where Black and brown womxn’s labor goes unseen. We can take Instagram as an example, where if you were an activist or simply speaking out against injustice, your account would get shadowbanned. The algorithm is predetermining what is good and what the platform wants you to see. We see this played out in the work of Ruha Benjamin and Safiya Umoja Noble, who has written Algorithms of Oppression, as well as Lisa Nakamura’s work.

If I choose to have Instagram as a platform where my work lives, then those are the parameters which I’m entering into. I’ve seen a lot of folks get on Signal, and a friend of mine pointed out that while it is a secure encryption application, Signal runs on the data servers of AWS, Amazon Web Services. So when we think about the idea of “secure,” it’s always being mitigated by which servers are hosting our information and how much control and lack of control we have over those things. It’s always about seeking out better spaces and demanding them. That’s the only way the internet is going to change, if we demand it. Those are the concerns I keep in mind when I’m creating digital spaces.

You worked at an Amazon fulfillment center in between grad programs as part research and part necessity. You’ve written and made artwork about the experience, using humor as a tool of critique toward the exploitative working conditions, the corporation’s obsession with worker productivity, and your undervalued labor. How do you think about humor?

My work uses humor or sarcasm as a critical practice against systems of control and domination because I think that humor is a really powerful way to take what is normal or what is normalized and shift the focus to the structures that make it normal. The reality of working at a warehouse where you’re grossly underpaid and everyone is worked to the bone in this way is beyond absurd. When I use humor I’m thinking about, “Wow, this reality is so messed up. How can I point at the fact that this reality was constructed to be messed up, constructed to be absurd?” For me, humor is a critical edge to point at the specific structure that’s normalizing these conditions. Poverty should not be normalized, abuse should not be normalized. I’m not gesturing at utopia or anything, but there are structural things that we can do in society that don’t reproduce poverty, that don’t reproduce abuse, that don’t reproduce capitalist modes of living that reproduce hurt.

Thinking about the obsession with productivity embedded within the capitalist model, I feel I’m constantly critiquing and reframing what productive means for me in my art making. How do you think about productivity in your art and academic work?

As artists, as people who, again, produce art, or academics who produce critical thinking, we’re constantly being asked to make a new project, write a new paragraph, constantly produce. While a bit of that is part of the industry, I think it’s also about stepping away from the idea of productivity and reframing what that is because I think not working is productive. I think not doing things is productive. It takes so much mental, emotional, intellectual labor to keep making things. When we realize that there’s a layered type of labor that is occurring to create what we do, I think there’s lots of exhaustion in that and burnout in that.

When I find myself doing a lot of things because I have to, I hold myself really strictly to a time where I’m not doing anything. If I’m doing this stuff this week, next week is about not doing anything. Next week is about me doing my hobbies or hanging out just to relax or reconnect with my body. It’s really important for me to reframe what productivity is. How do we center the limits of our body, the limits of our mind? There’s a limit to how much we can hold, whether it’s work, mental health stuff, pain, or whatever. Knowing those limits is really helpful. I can’t take care of my body if I’m pouring all of myself into my work. Having pre-existing conditions, connections with my friends—if i pour myself into my work completely, I can’t maintain those.

So I step away, recenter, and reframe what this is going to be. You know, productivity at times doesn’t feel like the right word either. It feels like work. I’m like, “This is work. How do I center myself in this work? Do I need to work slower? Do I need someone to help me? Do I need a break? Should I get up from this work area and go for a walk?” It’s helpful to interrupt this workaholic mindset that’s, again, so normalized as part of the industry and the larger American mindset.

I’ve worked for Subway, Ikea, Long John Silvers—those are my adolescent jobs. I’ve worked as a work-study in undergrad, and I watched my mother work in industries of care when I was young and I was raising my siblings. Growing up poor and working class, the idea of work was ingrained as being “we’re working class but also immigrants…you have to work to live” and “you can never work enough.” Working all the time is something that was normalized growing up and even more so now. Because of the environment I grew up in and the way that I’ve normalized this idea of working all the time, I need to really assess what work means to me right now and really practice healthy mindfulness. If I can’t get this big vision or whatever done by the deadline, maybe I need to reframe whatever this project is. Maybe it shouldn’t be about stressing myself out. When it comes to moments like this, I have to put my health first, before anything else, because the way that work is designed is for us to lose ourselves in it.

You’ve said that in your performance, your body acts as a site of resistance against the mechanisms that makes your labor invisible.

Women generally make up a lot of the caregiving industry—customer service, nurses, the cleaning sector, all of the above. Predominantly, womxn of color work in these industries for white or white-adjacent clientele. Instead of being paid adequately, their labor is taken for granted and they’re underpaid because these jobs in themselves are like, “Oh, this is menial labor work or this takes not much of your brain,” or whatever—that’s the kind of bias against womxn of color in these spaces. I think about caregiving and caregiving industries that don’t account for all the emotional and intellectual labor that is required of working in these industries. Instead of seriously protecting workers in the caregiving industry and especially protecting the rights of workers in these industries, a lot more money is paid to predominantly white and male tech and engineering industries.

The current regime with capitalism prizes innovation and new technology and new AI over these other caregiving industries, so there’s already a bias as to how people are being paid and how much. Even within these tech and engineering industries, womxn were the earliest workers in these spaces. A lot of this history goes unaccounted for.

The work of raising children, cleaning, and customer service are feminized and don’t receive protection and care. These jobs should be highly paid and workers highly protected. We see this in regards to so-called essential workers right now, where essential is just a polite word for disposable. This reminds me that Black and brown womxn’s labor has been pretty much disposable for a really long time, linked to histories of Transatlantic slave trade as well as the Indian Ocean slave trade. That’s why in my work and my videos, when I do use my body it’s to make all of this labor visible. So much of it historically has been under-recognized and also, in the most contemporary sense, not seen.

What is your process around researching and writing about a topic and making artwork about a topic? Does it happen at the same time, or does one usually precede the other?

It depends on what I’m doing. I worked [at an Amazon fulfillment center] in-between grad programs and I knew I was going to do something [with that experience], but I didn’t know what because I was currently living the experience and I couldn’t have distance from it until it was over with. I think maybe after a year or six months, I ended up writing a lot about my time, and from that writing and journaling, I developed a script, then it turned into a video.

While I do write articles and things of that nature, I do a lot of not “academic” writing, in the sense that I write scripts or poetry to describe a lot of the work that I end up making. I think about the ways in which academia is also inaccessible, because of the exorbitant fees and the impending debt, and the student debt crisis that’s been happening. It can be a place of learning and growth as it has been for me, especially in my undergrad years, but also is a space that’s not been accessible to all. I think about, “Well, what does it mean to share information? How can I share information that’s related to my work and doesn’t solely exist in the gallery space or the academic space?” My work is made with community in mind.

With the Amazonification dissertation, I am thinking about people I worked with, connecting with labor organizers in both the US and Canada. With the work I’m doing around the Indian Ocean, I’m connecting with other artists and scholars in these spaces and thinking about my connection to our ancestors. When it comes to approaching these laws or ideas, I know I’m not going to get there in a day, in a week. It’ll take many years time and so, for me, [creating] a reading list, and letting these projects kind of flow and not pre-determining their outcome becomes a more accessible way to share my research along the way, as a public-facing element but also a way for me to chart the growth of the work and where the past is leading me. Reading something, learning something around conversation informs the work so it’s not purely coming from an academic space. It’s coming from a space where I’m engaging with people, engaging with community.

When I switch modes, subjects, and themes, it also activates a slightly different part of my brain and a different side of my interests. I think it’s helpful because you can train your senses to think about different ways in which the project exists. It just depends on what I’m working and what idea makes sense. I go by intuition. It’s not purely a research-based or mathematics sort of thing.

What experiences have influenced the music you make?

As someone who started out in video, I have to constantly think, “What’s the background music going to be like? What’s the score going to be? How is the audio going to affect my video?” I’ve been doing musical things for a while, not realizing that that’s what I was doing. In the past few years, I was like, “Oh, I’m actually a musician.” My earlier mixes were more linked to the queer club culture that I grew up in in Chicago, and that’s an important part of the root.

Over the past few years, I’ve turned towards Sufism and mysticism in my work, calling up and thinking about music as a way to connect to ancestors and other spiritual realms. I’ve found that a lot of my work has this sort of haunting theme and I was like, “Hmm, why do I end up going towards this specific sort of route?” I did some research on Sufi music and the idea of connecting to the past through music and realized, “Oh, haunting is not the right word. It’s more like a longing for spirituality. It’s a longing that can sound this way, can sound haunting but it isn’t and it’s drawing on the past to think about the future.” In the past year or so I’ve gotten more interested in that. A lot of my musical ideas come from intuition and it’s really an exciting space to be in. Most recently, I released a mix for Sparkle Nation where through thinking about the Arabic scale, which is called the maqam, I linked music found in South Asia, qawwali, which is Sufi spiritual music, with taarab, which is a music genre in the Swahili Coast of East Africa. I’m also thinking about music in a way that connects beyond borders and also links back to my family’s history in the Indian Ocean region. That’s where my music practice is going.

What has making your work taught you about yourself?

It’s taught me that I can do a lot and I’m always learning. I’m never going to be in that place of having all the knowledge. I’m always going to be learning and growing and it’s going to happen with community and in relation to everyone else. I think that’s the healthiest place to be, mentally and spiritually, and that’s where I draw my intellectual or artistic strength from.

What questions are on your mind right now?

I’ve been paying attention to a lot of the abolition work that was founded by scholars like Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and many other important people. I am fiercely hoping for change and being a part of that and pushing that forward. A lot of my questions are about thinking about the future right now. I feel like we’re on a precipice. A lot of my energy is thinking about that and how to be part of systems that don’t reproduce harm. I’m an educator, too, so it’s also considering that I’m going to be teaching students behind the screen, so how do I help connect students more to their values and their environment in a screen-based learning environment? A lot of my questions are about the current status of life because we are going through a big paradigm shift and it’s hard to predict or anticipate what the larger ramifications are going to be.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Annie Bielski.

Adil Tursun, a chemistry teacher and faculty director at Kashgar Kona Sheher (in Chinese, Shufu) County No. 1 High School was arrested in 2016 and sentenced in 2018 to seven years in Xinshou Prison in Shanghai after already having served two years of detention, said Abduweli Ayup, a former student who is now a Uyghur activist and linguist based in Norway.

Abduweil, who also documents missing and imprisoned Uyghurs in Xinjiang, said he found out about Adil’s imprisonment on a leaked Chinese government list of some 10,000 “suspected terrorists” published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in April 2021. More than 7,600 of the people included on the document were ethnic Uyghurs, while the rest were mostly Kazakh and Kyrgyz, fellow Turkic Muslims.

Though Adil, now in his early 50s, previously had been recognized as one of the “nation’s outstanding teachers” by the Chinese government, he was arrested by authorities for the “crime” of speaking in the Uyghur language to his students when they did not his instruction in Chinese, Abduweli said.

“Adil Tursun was a very professional and responsible teacher,” Abduweli said.

“He was a very skilled and famous teacher. He was a member of textbook writing groups,” he added.

Adil, who was from Bulaqsu village in Kona Sheher’s Toqquzaq township and graduated from Hotan Pedagogical College, did not hide his dissatisfaction with the Chinese government policy of abolishing the Uyghur language in schools in order to implement what they call a “bilingual education” policy.

In the early 2000s, Xinjiang education officials introduced the bilingual education policy, requiring Mandarin to be used as the primary language of instruction in schools, with the Uyghur language and literature taught as subjects. The policy was slowly implemented and mainly in urban ethnic minority schools that employed educators who were fluent in Mandarin.

Authorities said the measure would improve standard Mandarin language skills among ethnic minority students so they would be more competitive in the workplace, while Uyghurs saw it as forced cultural assimilation aimed at diluting their Turkic heritage.

Two decades after the policy took effect, not only instruction in the Uyghur language but also the use of standard Uyghur-language textbooks have been banned in nearly all schools, including kindergartens and in rural schoolhouses, though some students still cannot understand instruction or materials in Mandarin.

When RFA called Kona Sheher county police to find out about Adil’s sentence, they declined to answer questions but did not deny that the teacher had been jailed.

A police officer in Kashgar prefecture, where the county is located, however, said Adil had been arrested because of “a previous mistake,” and that the mistake was “speaking in the Uyghur language to his students.”

The officer also said that Adil had been arrested two years before he was sentenced in 2018, but he did not provide additional information.

“After his mistake was investigated, he was arrested. It was a previous mistake of his — to speak in Uyghur to his students while bilingual education was being implemented,” said the officer.

Local police had detained Adil once before in 2015 after his transgression of teaching chemistry lessons in the Uyghur language first came to the attention of Chinese education authorities in Kona Sheher county, according to Abduweli. Police investigated him for the same reason in 2016, but this time, they arrested him.

“He was handed over to the national security branch of the police department and was sentenced to prison two years after his arrest,” the officer said.

RFA previously reported on large-scale arrests of Uyghurs in Kona Sheher county that began prior to 2017, with many people being detained and sentenced to prison, amid a wider crackdown on the minority group in Xinjiang.

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur.