Authentically Detroit
Authentically Detroit is the leading podcast in the city for candid conversations, exchanging progressive ideas, and centering resident perspectives on current events.
Hosted by Donna Givens Davidson and Orlando P. Bailey.
Produced by Sarah Johnson and Engineered by Griffin Hutchings.
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Authentically Detroit
The Black Detroit Democracy Podcast: Empowering the Next Generation through Debate with Jerjuan Howard
The Authentically Detroit Podcast Network in collaboration with Detroit one million presents: The Black Detroit Democracy Podcast, hosted by Donna Givens Davidson and Sam Robinson!
Together, Donna and Sam illuminate the complexities of Detroit’s unique political landscape and give residents a resource for navigating civic engagement and election season.
On this episode, they are joined by author, community builder, and founder of Umoja Debate League - Jerjuan Howard - to discuss how he went from law school hopeful to shaping the minds of Detroit’s youth with the art of debate.
To learn more about Jerjuan and Umoja Debate League, click here.
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Speaker 2:To learn more about rental options at MassDetroit, contact Nicole Perry at nperry at ecn-detroitorg or 313-331-3485.
Speaker 3:Hi everyone and welcome to the Black Detroit Democracy Podcast. I'm Donna Givens-Davidson, President and CEO of the Eastside Community Network.
Speaker 4:I'm Sam Robinson, founder of Detroit. One Million.
Speaker 3:Thank you for listening in and supporting our expanded effort to build another platform of authentic voices for real people in the city of Detroit. We want you to like, rate and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms. To like, rate and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms. The purpose of this podcast is to encourage Detroit citizens to stay vigilant in the fight for justice and equality. With a special call to action for Black Detroit, we seek to build awareness of our history as a gateway to freedom, a beacon for justice and a laboratory of liberation. Sam and I are joined today by author, community builder and founder of Umoja Debate League, jerron Howard. Welcome back to the Black Detroit Democracy Project.
Speaker 5:Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be back.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's so good to see you. Jerron has been on our podcast a couple of times, right, yes, and to meetings, and so you're a friend of the organization, but I also understand that you and Sam go back. You don't want to talk about that.
Speaker 4:We do, yeah, we go back all the way to about what 2017, 18?.
Speaker 5:Yep, yep, yep. We met in 17, and the relationship, I think, really grew 18, 19, 2018, 2019. I was the president of the Black Student Union at Western Michigan and Sam, you were the head of the Western Hero, the school newspaper for Western Michigan. At the time Some stories came out and it was a good collaboration at that time that the university needed?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was. I think students at that time were really connected through organizations. I mean even our relationships that we have within the the, you know, the student organizations, not just BSU. But you know, seems like we were really connected pre all the changes that took place at Western right around 2019, right before the pandemic, our university Donna, has gone through major cosmetic facelifts since we went to the school. There's a new student center, million-dollar new apartments, student living facilities.
Speaker 4:And so, when they were planning all of these changes, we were there on the front lines trying to, you know, report on what the students were doing and you guys were advocating for students, particularly black students, really hard, and there was a few stories that came out that was just hilarious. We don't need to get into all those stories.
Speaker 3:Just give me a good one.
Speaker 4:Oh man that choir teacher that came from Salisbury University which two weeks prior had some sort of race incident that they had some administrator say some offensive language in a class and this black man in his early 50s I forget the gentleman's name, but he was staying at the Radisson downtown, I believe for a week to be a guest professor in on this choir. They were performing spirituals and the majority of the class was white. Seven black students all felt uncomfortable. Each one came to me and talked to me about it in the school newspaper and that was kind of a two-week little episode of the university just not realizing that they needed to listen to the students. And I don't know the DEI office got involved there. I remember that diversity director. I forget what her name is. I would imagine she's probably not at the university anymore.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I can't think of her name right now.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but they were thinking about how to message and they fumbled a few times.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it was just a tone-deaf response At the time that we were in the climate. Everything. It just showed they weren't listening to students.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and they weren't listening to students more than in just this, you know. Oh, absolutely it was a through line narrative of you guys have real issues that are just completely being unaddressed, affordability being the biggest one, I think.
Speaker 3:You know, I went to college many, many years ago. I started in 1981. So it's been a minute. But when I went to college, you know, you moved into a dorm and everything was decent, but nothing was nice. You know what I mean. It's like, okay, your student lounge wasn't pretty, it was just. It had decent furniture, your bathrooms were functional, but not nice.
Speaker 3:My son started at U of M in 2013. And when he started at U of M, he was living in the Alice Lloyd Dermatory, where they had granite countertops in the bathrooms. And look at the hell, is this? When did it become so pretty? And so, on the one hand, it's like, wow, I wish I'd gone to a university that looked like this, but, on the other hand, the cost between when I attended university and when he attended a university was so much greater. Something about all of that cool technology and sliding doors and being the first class. Everything means that everybody has to pay more, and, in a lot of ways, these universities are competing with Ivy League schools or private universities, and that competition squeezes out access for black kids and low income children. Did you observe?
Speaker 5:that, absolutely. That's exactly what we saw. One of our major points with BSU was retaining the retention rates of black students at Western. Students would come in one year and they would be gone the second year and the main thing was affordability. It was just too expensive and I would go even a step further with all the upgrades we've seen to campus that we funded, that man Like literally like we funded it.
Speaker 4:We paid for Western to no longer take kids. I went to Western, not Michigan State, because of affordability. Now it's like if I was going to college now out of high school, I would just go to Michigan State.
Speaker 3:That's the challenge is that it's down on the back of students and there was something about struggle bus a little bit.
Speaker 3:You know, now young people are not the idea that young people should go to college and live as if they are still at home and they're living in the same level of luxury. Now, I was just talking about it. I was just speaking to the Rotary Club and speaking of my childhood and when I went to college and most of my classmates were first generation college students at Michigan college and most of my classmates were first generation college students at Michigan, there was this upward level of mobility and people were living better, even in these very functional environments that weren't real pretty and nice, than they did at home in a lot of instances because you provided a pathway out of poverty. And right now that upper mobility has stalled and it's almost reversing, where you have generations, the second generation, doing worse than the generation that came before them. It's problematic and I think that it's important for us to really have these conversations and think through what's happening with higher education and why is it so expensive and why is it that luxury is prioritized over access?
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, I mean, a part of that answer is the amount of administrators that we worked with at the university. I mean so many folks who, just, you know what is your role and responsibilities. Why are you here that we're making upwards of 180, 200, $220,000, you know, everyone's salary is public and I think that is a part of why you have on the political right, some of these folks yelling about Doge and how we need to cut, cut, cut everything. Well, in fairness and in credit to those folks, yeah, there are some folks that are just existing for no reason and we experienced it at Western Michigan. I literally named some at Western Michigan. I literally named some of these folks. I won't just for you know to not, but I mean there are professionals at these schools on campus that are not in roles.
Speaker 3:The problem with Doge is that you take a you know a baseball bat and you just knock everything down and say, okay, we'll just restore things.
Speaker 3:There's no real science behind it and a lot of instances the programs are getting rid of other programs that provide access, the programs that provide diversity and inclusion have been eliminated and they've been seen as unnecessary, and a lot of the programs that would provide a lot of the student support services are being cut. A lot of the research programs are being cut, and so I don't want to in any way advocate or look at what's happening with Doge as being what's necessary. I think it's going to be very dangerous. I agree that there are people making more money than they should, and I also agree that a lot of times, bureaucracies become bloated. But, by the way, look at the Doge payroll. It kind of reminds me of emergency management, when Kevin Orr came to Detroit and he said, oh, people are making too much money. And then he was making something like $500 an hour and we were paying for his apartment and he was hiring contractors without bids and just cutting things unnecessarily without really thinking through what are the long-term implications of that.
Speaker 4:Remember, james Craig made $80,000 more than the previous police chief.
Speaker 3:I mean just continuous spending in ways that don't make any sense. But as you speak, since this is the Black Detroit Democracy Project, I want to translate some of this conversation to Detroit. Look at the planning department for the city of Detroit. How many employees are now employed in the planning department and how much are they making? It's almost as though the planning department is so bloated they actually have had to add floors to house all of the new staff. I would love to look at the payroll for the Duggan administration and compare that to the payroll, not for during emergency management, but for the previous elected administration. I believe we're spending more on a lot of these bureaucratic positions after emergency management was supposed to be trimming us to the bone.
Speaker 3:So I think that there is an argument that there should be transparency in how governmental units spend, whether it's a university or a city or a school district, and also there should be standards for how many positions you can just create, right?
Speaker 4:As we're looking ahead. I mean, I think about ARPA funding being non-existent. We're not getting any more new federal dollars. How many of those jobs currently within the city post-Duggan are just going to be done away with because there's not funding for it? And that's not a conversation. That is happening a lot with the current administration.
Speaker 3:They're not going to want to talk about that. People are wondering, but this buildup of planning and development is pre-ARPA. The buildup is pre-ARPA, the buildup is pre-ARPA. So the funds that you're using to hire these people, you could invest in affordable housing. You could invest in some of the other work that's done in the community. Hiring payroll, or spending money on payroll instead of on communities, is part of the problem. You could contract with organizations like mine to do some work.
Speaker 3:There are decisions that are made that we're going to spend a lot of this money internally so that we can be in control of everything that happens in the community, as opposed to sharing power and decision-making with the community. That is the one thing that one of the mayoral candidates I'm not going to get into who speaks and really emphasizes partnership with community organizations and I think that's really what we need to see more of is partnership, and in partnership that means you don't try to do all things At the university level. If people want to have their children housed in luxury places, let them rent them out privately. Let the private market do that. Why is the university creating luxury housing? That's a private endeavor, but instead we're competing. You have universities that are competing with private developers on some of that stuff, because we always knew where the rich kids lived in Ann Arbor they lived in this really cool tower and now they just live in dorms.
Speaker 5:You made a really, really good point about the next administration how I think they should view partnership. It has to be a top priority. Detroiters have already shown that we care about this city, that we want to help this city. We're going to need the next administration to allow us to do that. Like you mentioned, some of those RFPs and stuff like that should go to community organizations, because what the undertone of it is they don't is almost if we don't trust you all to do these things that need to be done. So we're going to hog all of it and we're going to take care of it ourselves internally, and I don't think that that's a recipe for success for the next administration.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 3:And so that actually leads us actually into our word on the street segment, which is where we talk about what's going on and what we're hearing Thanadar, shri Thanadar.
Speaker 3:In the Detroit News, shri Thanadar divulges receipts for reimbursements he received in congressional office at Blitz. So Shri Thanadar, according to this article, spent about half of his congressional budget advertising his you know, really on campaign expenses, even though he said that he was actually using these funds to help voters understand how to get resources from their government. You know, come on now, all we have to do is look at the content of the ads and we can see it's not a lot of education. You know, come on now, all we have to do is look at the content of the ads and we can see it's not a lot of education. So here you have an elected official, really illegally, spending about half of his budget on getting himself reelected. And of that amount, about 25 percent of that budget was spent on Sri Thanadar himself, reimbursing him for expenses he says that he incurred as part of the process. Something like $434,000 of his $1.9 million salary was spent reimbursing him.
Speaker 4:A lot less spent on staff. You're just talking about spending on employees is the opposite of this? Sri spent, I think, less on staff than I think any other congressperson. It would appear we're going to see some of these receipts from the expenditures, according to Melissa Nan-Burke, the reporter that broke this story. Melissa is an amazing reporter and this kind of story is something that is not surprising for me, who works often with Sheree in his office and hears the criticisms that his constituents have for him, which you know. Some of some of those criticisms come directly from former employees of his office. One is suing him. One is Adam Abasala, who has publicly said that he mistreated black women in his office.
Speaker 4:So we've heard these criticisms. Sheree has defended himself and brushed it off, but it is certainly another piece that the local Democrats in the 13th District the local state Democratic Party, certainly looking at this congressional district seat saying why are we not? Filling this seat? Why is Sheree in the seat?
Speaker 3:There's two issues. Voters get to choose, because this is a democracy, but voters need to have enough information. And then there's also this expectation that people in elected office follow the law, and voters should know and the law should be enforced when you see people violating basic legal restrictions. I'm not against staff. I think it's important that Congress people have staff. Constituent services is a huge part of what everybody should offer, and Rashida Jalib, as I mentioned during our last podcast, had an office here where she was just providing services to constituents. That's a good use of funds. What I'm against is unnecessary staff, people who don't have a clear role and function in helping to serve the purpose of their government, and what Shree has done is have a very small staff, making his office very unaccountable, it appears, to the electorate.
Speaker 4:And that's what he'll say he doesn't want middle managers. I think that might have been a quote in the actual story, but he'll talk to me about that. Because I have a very direct relationship with Shree, because I have a very direct relationship with Sri, I'm never really talking through his staff like I would be say Rashida or Haley Stevens or any other congressperson in Michigan, which I appreciate, and reporters and media certainly would view that as transparent.
Speaker 3:But in something like this, where we're asking for your receipts and you're not giving it to us. I mean, a middle manager is not somebody who's providing services, and so that's kind of not true. The reality is, if I need access to Sri because I have an emergency and he doesn't have a staff person to assist me, that's not a middle manager. That's a decision not to serve me and spending it instead on advertising.
Speaker 3:That's a big problem Is not the solution. It seems as though that's the kind of justification that people give. I don't want a big bureaucracy, therefore I'll keep the money myself. He could spend that $434,000 hiring people who could serve the community, opening up offices in the community where people could be served, and that would be to me a demonstration of responsibility in his role. You were going to say something, though.
Speaker 5:No, no, no, no. I was just agreeing with everything you all already said, especially that middleman piece you just kind of articulated. It's super important. He's a busy man. He needs to have someone that that's close to him but also still has the ear to the community. That that's just not negotiable.
Speaker 3:You know, at ECN, our budget, when we had you know one point. Our budget is a little bit north of that now, but we have staff. I'm listening. I don't want people coming between me and the community, but there's no way I can actually meet the needs of a community. That's the reason staff exist. We get new grants. We get new staff. Do we spend money on things like advertising and other things? Yes, but what I prioritize is spending money on people who can help people and on direct services and support to people themselves.
Speaker 3:And you're just not seeing that from some people in office, and Shreya is actually leading the way in not being accountable to the community in an appropriate way. Shreya is actually leading the way in not being accountable to the community in an appropriate way. So, yeah, I think the word on the street is, and should be, that we need him to be held accountable if he is violating the law and is certainly being suggested in some of these articles. We don't need to have somebody in Congress who has a track record of racism and or of sexism and or of, you know, misogynoir, which is, you know, the combination of them both.
Speaker 4:Those are allegations according to his former staff members.
Speaker 3:Well, and allegations aren't always true, but we shouldn't dismiss them either. Sure.
Speaker 4:He certainly has, and Sheree is, you know, not shy about dismissing. I have not actually talked to him about Melissa's story yet. I'm sure I will, but yeah, it's been an interesting I just caught up with Sheree resulted in 200 people losing their jobs last week, and so you know, he's going to. He's going to, you know, spend a lot of money again to try to get himself reelected. Are we going to see challengers like Donovan McKinney? Are we going to see?
Speaker 3:you know Adam Oli again, shrey's a billionaire. Why is he taking taxpayers' money to fund his campaign? Why doesn't he fund his campaign with his billions? You know how billions are Billions? You could spend money every day. I mean, the amount of money he spent does not touch what he says he is worth, and so it's even more egregious, when you consider his wealth, that he is choosing to put his campaign on the back of taxpayers, if in fact that's what he's doing. But it seems as though he's going to have to be a lot more transparent, and, according to the Detroit News story, he turned over those receipts, and so it's pretty irrefutable that he's spending his money in advertising and you know Well Trish, which he views as constituent services, because he says you know when I put those billboards up, that's when I get calls to my office.
Speaker 3:I understand that's a very convenient thing to say. It reminds me of what. Was it, kanye, or was it Jay-Z, who said my presence is a present? You know, at some point it's egotistical, it's narcissistic, to suggest that a picture of you is helping people. That was Kanye. It was Kanye. I thought it was Kanye. A billboard with you on it is actually a service. You know, the service is not seeing your face and remembering who you are and your phone number. The service is actually doing something for people and we have great examples of people in Congress and people in the public office who do work for other people, even when I disagree with some of their policies.
Speaker 3:This ain't it, and get what he says, disagree with it, and I think that we need to have standards, and that's one of the reasons why we have this podcast we can talk about. What do we want to see from our elected officials? How do we want them to spend their money? How transparent do they need to be?
Speaker 3:I was trying to find basic documentation on how many people work in congressional offices. Do you know how hard that is to find? Who's on your staff list? Shouldn't that be something I can easily look up so I can understand it? Your budget should be published and the fact that it's not speaks to, because we're not asking you for your personal information, we're asking you for your business information. So, anyway, you know, we have to submit 990s to the government every year documenting how we spend our money, and it would be nice if our public officials also had to document how they're spending our money. Right, yeah, all right, we're going to take a break now and when we come back we're going to talk to Jawan more specifically about his work and get his views on a number of issues related to Detroit democracy.
Speaker 2:Have you ever dreamed of being on the airwaves? Well, the Authentically Detroit Podcast Network is here to make those dreams come true. Detroit Podcast Network is here to make those dreams come true. Formerly known as the Deep Network and located inside the Stoudemire, the Authentically Detroit Podcast Network offers studio space and production staff to help get your idea off of the ground. Just visit authenticallydetcom and send a request through the contact page. Detroit One Million is a journalism project started by Sam Robinson that centers a generation of Michiganders growing up in a state without a city with one million people. Support the only independent reporter covering the 2025 Detroit mayoral race through the lens of young people. Good journalism costs. Visit DetroitOneMillioncom to support Black independent reporting.
Speaker 3:Jerron Howard is the founder and executive director of Mimosa Debate League and the owner of the soon-to-be Howard Family Bookstore. In addition to that, he is a proud product of Detroit Public Schools. Jerron is an author, veteran and community builder dedicated to uplifting Detroit through education, empowerment and revitalization, so really excited to have you here, jawan. Can you tell us about your background, where you come from and how you got into this work?
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, I got you. I'm born and raised in the city of Detroit, on the west side. I grew up in the Puritan and Schaeffer community. The house I grew up in my great-grandparents bought back in the early 1939s, the year they purchased that home. So very close-knit community.
Speaker 5:I went to two schools my entire life John R King for preschool to eighth grade and then Renaissance for high school. While I was at Renaissanceissance for high school, I wanted to become a lawyer and we didn't have the money to pay for it, so I joined the army national guard to pay for my college. To become a lawyer did that, went to western michigan, studied criminal justice for my undergrad and the plan was to go right into law school right after undergrad. But the pandemic happened in 2020. As, as a result of the pandemic happening, I pivoted and I started my first nonprofit Umoja Debate Team at the time and our mission is to use debate as a vehicle to teach Detroit youth how to articulate themselves, be confident as public speakers, be more civically engaged and then have a tool for conflict resolution. Once you know how to debate and argue, you no longer want to fight and do other things to resolve conflict.
Speaker 5:That kind of steered me down the path of okay, youth development is important, but they go home to communities, and that's where the birth of Umoja Village came about. We purchased some blighted land in my childhood neighborhood, six blocks away from my childhood home, and we transformed it. We had liquor bottles and trash. Illegal dumping was taking place. That same exact space now is a place where we grow vegetables, where kids play. There is a bunch of art surrounding it. So that's Umoja Village. And then last year, one block away from that, I purchased a commercial building which will be home to the Howard Family Bookstore, hopefully opening up in a couple of months, but we'll see about that.
Speaker 3:I'm really excited about the bookstore piece. We lost bookstores in our community. When I was a young adult, my favorite activity was just going to the bookstore and losing myself in books. I love reading. Was that a bibliophile? Is that the word for it? I have many, many books and now I have Kindle, so they're not all cluttering my house. But reading, you know, reading is so important. It is. Reading is fundamental, not only to getting a job, but actually gives you the power to learn and to access information differently.
Speaker 5:Yep, I'll even go a step further. Reading allows you to dream. It literally takes you out of whatever reality you're currently in and go somewhere else, and I think that's important. That's really important for the young people in our community to be able to do that, and the adults as well. The adults as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think when I think about my own work, the only way I am doing it is my love for writing and reading. I say writing first, but it's certainly reading that comes first. Don't listen to what they say out there, guys, about kids not wanting to read, chat, gbt and everything. We know that people are lazy and they're going to not want to do things, but when I talk to teachers, it's not just the well, our literacy rates, our third-grade reading rates You'll hear that all about the doom and gloom when it comes to kids, getting them interested in participating in literacy. The World Literacy Summit is going on right now in the UK at Oxford University. One of the gubernatorial candidates is there Chris Swanson. He's the Genesee County Sheriff and he was talking to a singer, jelly Roll. He's a country artist.
Speaker 3:I know Jelly Roll. Yeah, he did a song with Eminem.
Speaker 4:He was here for the Michigan Central opening. Actually they were talking about incarceration and just how books, physical books, the joy of for people who are incarcerated, of getting books not to compare the incarcerated to kids, but I think about kids, this narrative that we don't want to read anymore. It kind of counters the physical media comeback. People are getting CDs now. 13-year-olds want to burn CDs like we did. They want to have the iPod Touch like we did with the wheel, and so, as we see cycles of history, I do see us getting back to. Like a scholastic book fair is a huge thing that even you know, sometimes like the high school kids in the community now will go to the elementary schools to be at the scholastic book fair because it brings them that nostalgia.
Speaker 3:I'm not proud of ageism, right? I think ageism is a cancer in our society. I think this idea that young people, the problem with young people, is they don't like to read there's a whole lot of people my age who don't like to read. Okay, my nickname was Reader. When I was a little kid, I always loved reading and I read a lot. I've read a lot. I get interested in a topic and I do a deep dive in that topic so I can learn all about it, and so I have a lot of, you know, information that has been has really helped me, not only personally but also professionally. It's the reason why I'm able to teach at an Ivy League university. It's the reason why I'm able to lead and grow some of our work, because I know things, because I read them. But two things. Number one literacy is one of the most abused kinds of concepts that there is this idea that 60% of Detroiters or some large percentage of Detroiters are not literate, and there's absolutely no evidence of that. It's just a number somebody came up with.
Speaker 4:I always wonder how they got this You'll hear the. Republican candidates all use that data and they're just completely misconstruing what it means.
Speaker 3:And literacy. How do you determine if somebody knows how to read? Not based on what they're reading, but reading is determined by you. Read this book or this article or whatever, this passage of information, and you answer questions about the meaning of that, as I expect you to answer those questions. How do people make meaning of things? Based on their life experiences, their biases, their perspectives?
Speaker 3:We can look at a couple of things and see it very differently. For example, can look at a couple of things and see it very differently. For example, during the war on Iraq and you guys were what babies when this happened, right, but during this war, people said there was yellow cake, uranium in Iraq, and black people went I don't believe that. Okay, we were the only ones who never believed that there was this buildup of weapons of mass destruction. Now, it's not because we could read better than the people who believed. Now, it's not because we could read better than the people who believed it. It's because we interpret the world differently, based on our position in the world. A lot of us were like, if we thought there were weapons of mass destruction, we would not go in there. Gangbusters, obviously, we're not afraid. So this is how the Black community perceived it based on our lived experiences.
Speaker 3:There are many things that we just see differently, and so to put on the back of school children, because I used to manage charter schools and I did tutoring of young people, where they would read something and we'd have to interpret it, and so I said, let me take some of these tests and I was getting answers wrong. And let's be very clear, I can read, but I was getting answers wrong simply because I did not know how to explain things according to what the test makers had come up with. This is not science. Testing is not science. It's an art and it is a racially biased and culturally biased art form.
Speaker 4:And let's be honest, when that data, which again has problematic methodology, there's no methodology. Right, it's being deployed in a racist way against black kids always.
Speaker 3:The percentage of people who can't read. There is no data behind that, it's literally a number somebody threw out. And when people try to say, where do we get that data, it was never confirmed. Nobody has ever gone to people and said can you read? So there's that problem. In terms of school data, we know that testing is racially biased. It's always been known that testing is racially biased and it was never supposed to be used for that purpose. Iq tests are racially biased and culturally biased, and so when you understand that, then you stop giving power to those tests. Another thing that's said that prison cells are built based on third grade reading scores. It really pisses me off when I see that that if you can't read by third grade, somebody's creating a prison cell for you.
Speaker 3:Mass incarceration is not a logical, fair or rational behavior. Mass incarceration exists for other reasons and to add logic to it well, the reason we're incarcerating people is because they can't read at third grade is beyond offensive. When I was a child, people did not get incarcerated for many of the things that people get locked up for right now. A child. People did not get incarcerated for many of the things that people get locked up for right now. Mass incarceration really started in the 1960s, but it continued through the 1970s. It peaked in the 1980s 1990s, based on more junk science, that we had this growth of super predators in the community, these people who don't care about other people and don't have the capacity to love. As we talk about data, we should throw all of that out and determine for ourselves. What do these things mean? Racism is always supported by data.
Speaker 4:The data that used to be used about the brain size of black versus white people is never true, but they you see how that race science is coming back a little bit like on on, you know kind of mainstream political internet forums and chats, the this race science certainly, uh, elon and others Elon from. South Africa, you know.
Speaker 3:Yes, I mean it's, it's been, it's what they call it, the alt-right. So when trump won the first, they're called groipers.
Speaker 3:Now, right when trump won the first time. You know the alt-right was the thing and so I did deep dive into alt-right and that you know, when trump said around dei it's just common sense, that, um, that anti-dei is common sense, that somehow it's common sense to know that black people or women or, you know, disabled people are causing problems in our society. That is a belief system of white supremacy, that racial hierarchy is common sense and that fighting racial hierarchy defeats is an assault on common sense. Fighting racial hierarchy is an assault on common sense. That we should understand that there's a lot of evidence that white people are superior to black and other people of color. That is a racist ideology and you're right. It has become mainstream.
Speaker 3:And when they say things like common sense, a lot of people said you know what's the evidence? The plane crashing had to do with DEI. And Trump said it's common sense. People thought it made no sense. His response made no sense, but it's actually a dog whistle to people who think like him. When he says common sense watch how often one of those people says common sense they're really referring to a philosophy of white supremacy, white male supremacy at that. Anyway, so you have the bookstore, you have the debate league. You're doing this great work and you have also. We've been in conversations also about democracy and how to improve the political standing of people in our community. Do you have any specific thoughts and concerns about how to do that in the city of Detroit?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so a couple of different things that I do all at once. But Umoja Debate League is much more than just a debate league for Detroit youth. That's a part of it. But really it's an education component to how our local government functions. And through that education, say, you take a seventh or eighth grader who understands what the roles by the charter, what the role of a mayor is, a city council person is the roles and responsibilities. They make different decisions when they come of age, when it's time to vote, when it's time to advocate for something for their community.
Speaker 5:So there's a big education component that I believe our philosophy should be first and foremost. That I believe our philosophy should be, first and foremost, once we know what the roles and responsibilities are, we should then have our own goals, if you will, a one-year goal, a five-year goal, a 10-year goal as a community, and then we know how to use those positions as vehicles, to some extent to get us to where we think we should go, without even the position's input. First and foremost. Here's what our goals are. I know that city contracts are signed off by city council. This is how this works. Or I know the mayor appoints department heads. This is how this goes. It's an education piece that I try to approach it with first, and then there are some other steps. But I start with the youth, then we kind of make our way into the community with their parents and it's kind of just like a big thing that constantly builds upon one another. But education has to be first and foremost.
Speaker 3:I completely agree with that. I completely agree that education is a foundation for all of that, and you know, one of the primary purposes of education at one time was citizenship preparing people for citizenship. Before the Michigan mayor curriculum, there was only one class you had to take in high school by state law. Do you know what that was? Government. That was the only class you had to take. The challenge, though, to some extent, is our government classes can't keep up with the way our cities are now functioning. There's a whole lot of stuff that is not written about in textbooks. How are you connecting with some of that practice?
Speaker 4:Like you know, in no class did anybody that I know learn about emergency management. Are they even learning about local government at all? Because we certainly did not in midland michigan.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, no. Um, from my experience, the kids that we work with a lot of the topics that we bring up, um like, for example, this weekend they'll be debating if the renaissance center should be demolished or not. So through their research they have to know about the history of it, how we got to this point, all those things reading news actively being published, now Exactly.
Speaker 5:Exactly Because our point system, for our debate format, it's based upon factual research. So the more they actually research and know about it, the better off they are to win this debate. But no, they aren't learning that stuff in school right now.
Speaker 3:I mean, I don't think we ever learn some of these things.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think you're right, sam. We don't learn about local government although I think we learned a little bit when I was in high school, right, but not nearly enough and certainly things like emergency management, this idea one man, one vote oh, we're going to suspend your vote and we're going to put somebody else in charge who has all the power you know, Doge started in Detroit and Michigan and emergency management, and all these small towns and cities where people could just, you know, take power, dismantle your government and cut spending while also spending a whole lot of money in privatization.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah. So the way that we try to do it, what our foundation at Umoja is, we call it disguise learning. We call it disguise learning. We try to make the messaging very clear to them, but it's just in a different format. We understand that kids love to argue. They're very opinionated at certain ages. We try to. We use debate as just a model for, yes, you're going to debate and argue, but you're really going to learn something else that's transferable outside of this debate space. Once you walk off the stage, you still have an understanding of these things that you used to win this debate, that you just had.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's amazing. I mean I'm really excited that you have disguised learning, because you know we've done that. When I was at Vanguard, I had a staff person who said you know, learning through the back door and it's the same concept that it's not going to feel like learning because we're going to give you something else, but you're still going to learn this.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, it's a proven model. We do it in so many other areas. In sports, for example, it is a form of disguise learning. Yeah, you're trying to win the game, but you're learning team camaraderie, you're learning responsibility, you're learning accountability to something bigger than yourself. Those are all like the trickle in life lessons.
Speaker 3:Ideally, yeah, ideally that is what you're learning.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You think that you know a lot of sports teams. You're learning to. You know be obedient. You're learning to not question authority.
Speaker 4:I've seen that at Western Michigan football man.
Speaker 3:I've seen the bad lessons they can learn You're learning how to be backstabbing and all of those things, the bad lessons they can learn. Yes, you're learning how to be backstabbing and all of those things, but in an ideal situation, I mean, because if we articulated those things that you the disguise the learning behind those disguises. Maybe we'd be doing a better job of ensuring that we were actually teaching those things in sports teams.
Speaker 5:Yeah, you got to be more intentional. When we, I guess, mapped out Umoja from the very foundation of it, we wanted to teach these very specific or instill these certain specific things, and then we kind of got fun with it and creative.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. How many young people are you working with?
Speaker 5:So right now we're inside of 23 schools. We have 275 kids that are currently in our debate program.
Speaker 4:That's amazing this is like humble beginnings Like this literally started off in a classroom One, yeah, one group and it has proliferated. Easy to hear why, I guess. I mean it's just an excellent idea, thank you, something that's really, really needed, man Like. If we could have this going on in every city in the state, that would be great.
Speaker 3:If we could have it going on in every city in the state. That would be great If we could have it in every part of the city, because I really want to figure out how to work with you. I mean, it's something that I feel so strongly about that youth are change agents, not middle-aged people and certainly not old people. Old people and middle-aged people have, in most instances, learned to be more careful, learned not to shake the cart. You know, apple cart. We've been punished and we have, you know, learned how to say things, and so, you know, we have a tendency to tell young people oh, that's not realistic, well, the world's not a fair place, don't expect fairness and what. All of these things that we say, that we have internalized, are powerlessness, but young people have not.
Speaker 5:Yeah, they're not jaded. They have no idea of how things are or used to be. So that is a fresh start, which is so important for innovative ideas. Innovative ideas. I'll say this too With Umoja we let the students choose one of the topics, so it's like an Excel sheet. They submit their debates that they want to debate on and we go in and we choose one or two and we let them debate on what they and these aren't little like small LeBron versus Jordan ideas. They're talking about political stuff when we give them a chance to choose what they want to talk about. So that shows something.
Speaker 3:So do you have staff or do you spend all of your money on advertising?
Speaker 5:No, show something. So do you have staff or do you spend all of your money on advertising? No, we have a staff. So we have six folks that are pretty much full-time executive staff and then, at every single one of those sites, 23 part-time coaches. So 29, 30 of us total make up this team that runs all of this.
Speaker 3:And, based on our past conversations, I think most of the people on your team are actually young themselves.
Speaker 5:Absolutely yeah. For the executive staff, I'm 27. As the ED, our operations manager is 28. He's the oldest one on the team.
Speaker 3:Oh. Yeah.
Speaker 5:He's the oldest one on the team, our admin manager. She's 26. We have someone that's 23,. Another 26-year-old, another 27-year-old, yeah, another 26 year old, another 27 year old. Yeah, that's amazing, yeah, and it goes to show too again. These innovative ideas, um, I mean, I don't know, I wouldn't even call it mojo super duper innovative in itself but I think so, um, it is but, but you know, be humble, go on thank you, but with that it just goes to show like this if we were, this is important to retain young talent in the city of detroit.
Speaker 5:we gotta let people lead. We got to, as long as they show that they're prepared to do so, and Umoja has been an example of that.
Speaker 3:Can I tell you about something funny I did years ago. I was at Youth Development Commission and I had this idea of a session where we bring all these young people together and the saying was adults can be seen but not heard, and so we had to sit in the room and listen to young people together. And the saying was adults can be seen but not heard, and so we had to sit in the room and listen to young people discuss things. Right, it was one of the worst experiences of my life because we had not prepared the young people to have these conversations and they were nonsensical. Someone said what's gentrification? And somebody says it's when people make neighborhoods go down and I'm sitting there like I can't speak. I can't speak, I need to speak, I need to speak and there's just stuff like that.
Speaker 3:We have to treat young people's minds as if they are muscles. Going back to the sports analogy. We have to exercise them, we have to build their power. We cannot just assume you're young, therefore you can speak on behalf of the community. We have to invest in their strength so they can have that conversation. And it was disappointing to me because in the past I ran a nonprofit and we did have young people who were ready to debate. Anybody right? I was talking to one of my colleagues, alaya Harvey Quinn, over the weekend. Alaya, do you know, alaya? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:She was the program coordinator for the young people and she and Lottie Spady, I mean they were just having these dynamic conversations with young people all of the time, and so I made the assumption we could just do this with young people that we did not work with, and I realized that the importance of exactly what you're doing Part of it is also building their confidence that they can speak on these subjects isn't it Absolutely.
Speaker 5:That's the pillar Confidence to be able to speak and advocate for yourself and for others. This is something, again, that translates to other areas of life. Once you're confident enough to stand up at a podium and express and articulate ideas that you really believe in, that you've studied weeks for, that translates you don't have a problem raising your hand when you have a problem that you don't understand in math class. You're confident enough to do that. You don't have a problem with talking to somebody about an issue that's affecting you and your community. So, again, with the whole disguise learning piece, I want these skills to be transferable. I don't want them just to be good debaters, but critical thinkers, confident, the ability to articulate themselves, have conflict resolution, all of these things. That is the real goal of this debate league.
Speaker 3:That's amazing. To innovate, I would imagine.
Speaker 5:And to innovate. I want them to be able to dream and know that they can do it.
Speaker 3:I happen to believe that you got this vision somewhere, that somebody was doing that for you in your home.
Speaker 5:Yeah, so it's a combination of things how this came about. I took a debate class at Renaissance it's Pamela Norris, my 10th grade year. It changed my life. I'm still pretty chill and laid back, if you all ever see me.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 5:I'm chill, um, and I've always been like. I was really, really chill in high school, almost like too cool. My grades were good, but debate changed all of that. It kind of gave me the fire to be able to articulate myself more and have an opinion, a strong opinion, on things. So miss pamela norris planted the seed, initially um, and then the love for my people and everything that kind of has been just ingrained into me for my family and my community.
Speaker 5:My school I went to, and then in college I took it a step further Again. I always cared about my people but I never really took an active role in advocating or, you know, taking a stand. And I met Khalil Mazzi at Western Michigan. He was the president before I was and he kind of lit another fire under me, kind of had me reading some things and had me feeling convicted I have to do more, I have to do more. And so all those things personal experience when I started Umoja I would come home during breaks or whatnot and my little cousin would just be glued to their phone. The interpersonal skills, the soft skills were just not there. And so all that stuff combined like what can I do right now to help them or to help other students. That was just an example and that's how the debate league was kind of birthed. So it was a combination of things a little bit of everybody that kind of took a piece of them with me and created this.
Speaker 3:So what about your upbringing? How does it compare and contrast with Jawan's? Because you and I spent some time talking about it, but it's different. But somehow you guys both ended up with this idea of creating voice for your generation. Can you talk about that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, mine came out of also. I mean, I had a really good teacher. His name was Don Demko and he was an English teacher and he would do these stories like the entire class and it was funny because he would never announce when he would do them, but he would set the narrative to music. He had a CD and he would clearly rehearse this. He was like a theater guy and it was just real awe inspiring stories that he would tell every quarter. He would like a theater guy, you know. Yeah, um, and it was just real, like awe-inspiring stories that he would tell. Every quarter he would have a new story. That would kind of like, you know uh, you know if it was 9-11, he had a 9-11 story.
Speaker 4:If it was, you know around valentine's day.
Speaker 4:He would tell a story about how he broke. Somebody broke his heart. You know if it was, you know we're leaving at the end of the year. He would tell a story about growing up and blah, blah, blah and just this. This guy who, um, really spent a lot of time like it was just clear that that's what he liked to do was talk to kids and make kids better at writing, and he was very, um, like anal about our essays that we would write. I mean, we would have to do like a long form, like people would drop his class all the time and be moved out of his class because it would be too hard for them or whatever. We didn't have it. It wasn't like an AP or advanced class, I guess, but some people viewed his class as that and so when they would get assigned his class at the beginning, they'd be like no, I don't want to take Demko.
Speaker 3:Were you an AP student, no, They'd be. Like no, I don't want to take Demco.
Speaker 4:Were you an AP student? No Me, neither I had good grades.
Speaker 4:I had like a 3.2. Yeah, like I wasn't a bad student but you had better grades than I did. I wasn't caring in high school. In college I almost cared a little bit less because I was so consumed with news, with the Herald, and certainly around the time of the pandemic. You know my teachers. I had like three classes to complete my major and to finish. We're just like, yes, sam, we recognize that you're going to be at MLive in the fall, right after you leave here and you're doing this as a once in a generation story. Do the story. And it's funny because our I was doing PR. Our capstone project was raise the motivation of these line workers working at the Portage Pfizer facility. What happened at that Portage Pfizer facility? Like two months after we were assigned to this weird capstone project, which the communications director of Pfizer came down here. I was like what about paying the employees more? Two months later the pandemic happened and they probably got no better motivational boost than they would ever. And I just think about that like man. How weird is it that Western Michigan like you remember the news that was the first those vials of the vaccine was? That was where they came from? Yeah, was Portage Michigan was the first manufacturing site for the COVID vaccine.
Speaker 4:But how I got into being confident and and having a voice is certainly in high school as well, like I was, you know, always interested. But um, didn't know quite what I wanted to do. I probably was thought I was going to be in sports, was in sports in college to know that the values of those folks just didn't align with my own. Um, yeah, western Michigan football I didn't know you played football, I didn't play football, I was media relations in a video, I mean, I played football in high school.
Speaker 4:but barely, I was not good either. Man, they stuck me back there. I was like a little fullback in a DV. Okay, gotcha, yeah, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5:I wanted to say this though it's really interesting your story and it kind of mirrors with mine. Someone had a high expectation like a teacher that I didn't even have it myself exactly, exactly. They had a high expectation.
Speaker 4:They expected you to do great things, and you met them there and that's that is so important and it was affirmed, like it was like oh wow, sam, like this is really good and it's like important that if you're a teacher listening to this, like just say things that you're like. Oh, like you know, say tell your kids stuff because they remember it forever, like forever yeah, I think it's incredibly important.
Speaker 3:Um, I think that two things. One, a lot of times we judge the capacity of a young person based on grades and test scores and other things that don't really speak to their capacity. You know, you're not intelligent because of the school you went to. You're not intelligent because of the teachers you have. You're intelligent because you were born that way. The question is are people helping to nurture and cultivate your gifts so that you can actually express them in ways that are beneficial to you and the community that you serve? And it seems that what you're doing is you're helping to hone these skills. Do you have, like great point, average minimums for people to come into your debate league?
Speaker 5:No, so we don't have any minimums. We take any type of student students that might be straight A, students that want to become lawyers, students that might be struggling with reading in some cases. We take them all right. We want to expose them all to this program and it's free.
Speaker 3:It's completely free, and so when you take the students who are struggling to read and some of the struggling students do, you see growth in their capacity.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. And so, since our program is the practice for these schools it's twice a week after school we see some improvements in their, in their reading levels, yes, but not as much as we see in their confidence to actually want to do better. And that's the key for us because, again, we don't have them for eight hours Monday through Friday to to really hone in on the, the, the syllable sounding out words, things like that, the syllables sounding out worse, things like that, but their confidence we do see an instant increase in that and we do a pre-survey and a post-survey of the program. How confident are you to read in front of a class 1 through 10? How confident are you to speak in front of a class? We see the improvements in that too, which is really important.
Speaker 3:My father used to say I always give him credit for this. I don't give him credit for many things, but I give him credit for this. He used to say that the most important thing a school can do is teach you how to learn, not teach you the information. But if you learn how to learn, you can be whoever you want to be. If you can learn the study skills, if you can learn all of those things and I'm thinking that that's a part of what you're doing, and the other piece of what you're doing is building the confidence to learn that I can do this, I can accomplish this.
Speaker 3:How many of our young people only hear what they can't do Absolutely? And all of this is important in a city like Detroit, because we've got to be able to remake this city into a place of justice and sharing and equity somehow and we're not going to do it if we keep on thinking we need to import kids from other places in order to raise levels we have the capacity to help our young people become more effective citizens and really grow in their space.
Speaker 5:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:I'm really excited about your work and really excited about the possibility of partnering with you in some way, because everything you're doing aligns with what we're doing philosophically and of course, also you, Sam, coming here, maybe assisting our young people with a journalism workshop. Like, how can we continue to use our gifts to pour into people who, like you, have a lot of capacity and don't have necessarily the drive at any given time or even the access at any given time to really be all they can be? Yeah, so I'm excited by that.
Speaker 5:I'm happy. Let's figure out a way to make that happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, sam, any thoughts about how we can connect in the future and what this means for this year's election?
Speaker 4:Yeah Well, I think one of the things that you're going to start hearing are kids being aware that there is a citywide election.
Speaker 4:Obviously, the folks that we're talking about aren't voters, but that doesn't mean they aren't participating in the conversations that they're hearing in their kitchen, at the dinner table, wherever they are, you know, at night, whether see Roop Raj talk about it on Fox 2, on the television, local news, or even if they're, you know, interacting with Instagram and seeing the headlines appear there. I personally am interested in the idea of getting that demographic the 18 to 30-year-olds that are voting in a citywide election, because that number is very small it is, and I wonder how to increase it. I mean, I certainly am actively trying to do that, asking my friends hey, you know, did you vote in the last election? Do you know there's a citywide election? You live in Detroit, new residents that maybe have never voted, maybe don't know the candidates or know the issues or know anything about it, but are interested.
Speaker 3:The most important aspect to participation is hope. If you don't think your vote matters, you don't vote. If you don't think people care about you, you don't vote. If you don't see issues that resonate with you, you don't vote. People sometimes run on things that will not have any impact on a lived experience of people who live in our neighborhoods, and then we expect them to vote.
Speaker 3:So part of our job is to let people know the power they have and again, through the debate league, through, hopefully, through this, hopefully through some other things that we're going to do, to really express to people things don't have to be this way. It's almost as though a lot of people believe things are this way because they have to be this way. And going back to dreaming, can you dream a different kind of future? And that's the reading part, right? I love that in so many ways, because if you can't imagine being free, if you can't imagine being well off, if you cannot imagine having your needs met, then voting seems like it's for other people and we've got to bring it home. And so I think through education, through exposure, all of those things, we can make a difference.
Speaker 5:Yeah, the political system has been made digestible for the 18 to 30-year-old that you're mentioning. It's not digestible right now. Folks don't know how it relates to their everyday lives, but it does, and it does very deeply. We have to articulate that better. I keep saying the education piece, but that's how I'm doing it with my peers. When city council votes on certain resolutions the animal keeping ordinance, what does that mean for the people over here off Puritan and Schaefer?
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 5:Yeah, that means something for your community and they just voted on that. Or what does the restaurant grading ordinance mean for us in our local Coney Islands? That might be filthy. What does that mean? We don't know now. So just making it digestible and, how you said, making it relevant to their everyday lives through education, and then just point blank. This is a blank canvas. Here's what the political system can do for us. Let's talk, let's get creative. We're creative in every other area. Why not be creative when it comes to policy and how we can govern this? We can be governed, I guess.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we can be governed, but you know, the reason that we opened the show with the reading of the first article from the city charter's bill of rights is that people can understand the rights that have been inscribed in our city government official documents.
Speaker 3:People have rights they don't even know they have. They have the right to expect government to do many things, and the other thing is it points out that our government is subordinate to the people. Here In this nation, that's supposed to be of laws, not men. Our government exists by the people, for the people and of the people, and not of the elites. Now, it's usually functioning by the elites, of the elites and for the elites, but we can make it of the people, by the people and for the people if we simply work harder to get the people engaged Super important work that you're doing, working to get the youth engaged. And, of course, sam, as I always point out, has through Substack he has Detroit One Million has helped popularize information that would otherwise not be available and ask questions that people have but they aren't answered. And that's the point of this podcast as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Well, I appreciate you, Donna. Yeah, thank you for coming here today. Juwan and man, we're going to have a lot more conversations over the years, because I don't plan on leaving. Oh yeah, I'm here. I don't think you can either. I'm here, I don't think you can either.
Speaker 5:I'm here in Detroit, I'm here to stay. Well, the point you mentioned before we go, we're going to host a mayoral candidate forum, umojis, where the students ask the mayoral candidates questions. They're going to know what the responsibilities and the roles of a mayor are. They're going to know exactly what they're able to do.
Speaker 3:It won't be like my forum.
Speaker 5:No, no, no, no, no, no. It'll be again a very because we hosted school board forums before where they asked very specific questions to the school board candidates for DPSCD. So we're going to host one of those. We don't have a date yet, but once we get that date and stuff solidified we'll be sharing that with you all and maybe I'm open for collaboration if we can make something like that happen together.
Speaker 3:I think that's exciting. We that happen together. I think that's exciting. We're going to host a forum here. But you know, what would be really great is if the students ask questions in the company of adults asking questions. In other words, I don't think young people should be leading young people.
Speaker 3:I think young people should be leading communities should be leading neighborhoods If they are only talking to themselves. A lot of the older people are missing out. Martin Luther King and I always say this was 22 years old when he led the Birmingham boycott and the march on Washington. I mean the Birmingham boycott. He was 22. Think about being 22 years old. That's younger than both of you, right? That's the age I was when I first got started in my current work world. If a 22-year-old could then help lead a movement, we don't need movements led by 60-year-olds who reflect on what a 22-year-old did 40 years ago.
Speaker 5:We need movements led by 22-year-olds today to take us into the future, and that's guided by the wisdom of the 60-year-olds.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I have a lot to offer, but I shouldn't be at the forefront. This is not my city I'm inheriting. It is the city that is being inherited by the youth who you're leading through the debate league and the young people that you're talking to, sam. That's why we put this podcast together, because we think it's important that we allow our capacities to come together. We all bring different strengths to this work. I got 40 years in community work, right, read a whole lot of books, but I am not a young person and I am not and I should not be at the forefront of this. Thank you guys. Thank you so much for listening to the Black Detroit Democracy podcast. Be sure to like, rate and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms no-transcript.
