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Dear Mama,
Dear Mama What if I told you to offer grief a seat at the table? What if I told you grief has no other duties except to be with you? It has nowhere to be and is not bound by time. Grief is patient. Grief is relentless, and as Akilah S. Richards, our guest for this episode and a DBM fave, says, “Grief is not something to be fixed but something for you to learn to be more skilled at processing.” Akilah is a mother, partner, liberationist and author of Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing. She is now diving deep into grief work and in this episode we talk:
- Grief, language and the body
- Grief and generational shifts
- Grief and creative projects
- And of course grief, Black women and the political landscape
Plus Thea uses a Negro spiritual to describe Black women’s current mindset and Crystal is learning sign language and attempts to teach Thea
SYLLABUS
Church Announcements:
- Responsive Reading: Black Mama Magic Card: Card #25 “Motherhood is not the graveyard of dreams.”
- Black women are down by the riverside.
- PATREON BONUS CONTENT – Pre-Show Shenanigans
Mac & Cheese:
- Connect with Akilah: Grief Circle | Community & Support | Instagram
- Episodes mentions/relevant to this episode:
- Books mentioned in this episode:
- Key words regarding grief from the word list Thea compiled during the episode: Root word ten which means hold – tend, attend tender, tender, tendency attention
- Episode Transcript
About Akilah S. Richards
Akilah S. Richards is a mother, partner and liberationist. As founder of Raising Free People Network and author of Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work, Akilah S. Richards partners with co-conspirators to challenge and encourage social justice-minded people to explore privilege and power in their relationships with personal leadership and all relationships. These days find Akilah tapped into the wisdom she gathered from her family’s transition from schoolishness to confident autonomy. She is savoring her life’s lessons after nearly a decade of location independence, and eight years of being invited into various conversations about intergenerational community care across the U.S., Southern Africa, and Jamaica (where Akilah is from). She guides discussions about how unschooling skills and other forms of decoloniality are shaping families and other cultures of leadership, change-work, and love.
In addition to private coaching and public speaking, she facilitates trainings, small-group experiences, and consultations that help resolve the ways that unexamined experiences with bias and oppression disrupt families’ and organization’s capacity to sustain cultures of belonging.
You can find her views on Self-Directed Education, Black joy, deschooling and decoloniality for leadership and community all over the Internet. Her advocacy and organizing work has received national press including Forbes Magazine, Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), NBC TV, CBC Radio, and print publications, including The New York Times. Her book, Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work is available in select bookstores, via PM Press, local libraries, and Amazon.
Black Mama Say: How we’re making it through. We talk friendship, Cross starring Aldis Hodge and minding our business.
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