Ranger Introduction: Welcome to We Will Rise: National Parks and Civil Rights. Close your eyes and imagine a National Park. Are you picturing waterfalls and mountains? Or do you think of Dr. King's childhood home, Japanese internment camps, and a school that became a battleground for racial integration? National parks aren't just wilderness. They are spaces of remembrance, founded to preserve the stories of who we are and how we came to be. National parks inspire us to do better, be better. To climb mountains, both physical and figurative. Join Park Rangers, researchers, authors, and activists as we discuss what liberty and justice for all means on our public lands.
Ashley: And to see the pride on his face too, meant so, so much. Here's someone who has really been with me from almost the start of my writing journey. And he was such an important teacher for me in school because he encouraged me so much and I felt like he really saw me. And that's so important as a teenager to feel like an adult actually acknowledges you as a human being. And then the media started coming in and that's when I really was like, wait a minute, what am I doing? What have I signed up for? But it really was what you dream about when you're a little person wanting to be a writer. You hope that people care about what you say. You hope that you can make a difference. You hope that the little person that you were has someone that they were looking for. I was looking, I think, for me as a little girl. And it's just so incredible to think sometimes we are the ones that we are looking for. I think somebody maybe has said that before. So whoever's quote that is, thank you for the quote.
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Ashley: But she's not a singer at all. And I told her, Mom, if you've been pretending this whole time and you actually are a super good singer, I'm going to be so angry. Not because I want the good singing, but I've grown so attached to this terrible singing, right? And then you just do this. But so far she's not pretending, she's not a singer and she doesn't write, like she's not a writer or anything. However, I think if someone had made her do that as a young person, she definitely would be doing it. And she's got such a good eye. I've always gone to her with my work since I was young to ask her, what does it sound like? Is it good? What should I fix? Give me some ideas. And she always is able to do it very naturally. So she never discouraged us. Neither of my parents, we were raised in a household where what we did was art. We were reading by age three, which I think is maybe unusual, I don't know, but we were reading a lot and she taught us how to write very early, made sure we knew how to do sentences and vocabulary and all of that. We watched public TV. We didn't have cable when we were little, which I didn't know was like a marker of economic standing. I had no idea. I was like, oh, well, we just have this channel. It's good. As a kid, you'd never know, right, until you meet other kids and they're like, oh, you don't have this, you don't do that. You're like, oh, well, I don't, but I'm not unhappy. But we would watch Barney, Arthur, Sesame Street and at night we'd watch Lawrence Welk, which I know is like ridiculous for little kids to look forward to. The Lawrence Welk Show, right? But we did. And during the day too, we would be able to do like, little arts and crafts. My mom would make Play-Doh from scratch, which again I thought was just like a cool thing that parents could do. I did not understand that it's because Play-Doh was expensive. Just didn't even cross my mind when I said, we've been so blessed like our parents and are just amazing, providing us with every experience we could ever need and not really letting us know that maybe our situation was different than some other people. So we would do that and paint, draw. I used to draw a lot before I knew that I wasn't good at it. I just did it because again, my parents didn't say like, oh, you suck. They were like, oh, good job, you're doing so great. Keep exploring, whatever. And so, yeah, she and my dad definitely encouraged us to just be ourselves. And I think they noticed all us kids like imagination and reading and that kind of thing. And they didn't say, you need to be more practical. Stop making believe, stop running through the backyard singing, stop reading all those books. None of that. They were very encouraging and put us in schools that fostered that as well. I think I answered the question.
Kat: Okay. Let's go for it. Let's go for it. So anyway, I have been thinking a lot about tokenism and how the successes of a few African Americans are often held up to demonstrate change when obviously for so many, the meaningful change is yet to come. And I was thinking about your situation in regards to this, and I'm wondering, too, reading the poems that you wrote, reading a little bit about your background in terms of education, if to you there's any comparison in terms of experiences being the first person of color to hold this position and then thinking back to your days in primary and secondary school where you wrote you were the only Black girl in most of your classes, is there like a connection there? And if so, how would you describe that connection?
Ashley: But if we even look at integration and integrating schools in the, I guess, 50s and 60s and beyond, honestly, we don't have to get into it. But looking at that practice, we know it didn't solve anything at all. If anything, it created new problems. Thinking about my dad who integrated a school in Bessemer when he was a kid, he said it was like going to war every day. People were just fighting them, throwing things at them, and it's like, wow, what am I even doing here? This is supposed to be, quote, unquote, better. But of course it's not better because the actual problem is not being solved. Simply putting two people in the room together doesn't erase what they've been taught, what they're expected to do when they see someone of a different race. It doesn't erase the pressure to perform hatred. I'm sure not every kid who threw something, who threw a rock at my dad, I'm sure not every one of them believed he was worthy of that rock, but they also knew that some other kids or their parents or someone made a situation where they had to do that thing. And that's not being addressed. If we're just, okay, come into our school, that's the end. If we're not changing the curriculum at all, if we're not addressing the ways in which Black children are taught differently than white children, if we're not addressing the homes that they go back to, the redlining that happens, what are we actually addressing? Nothing. And so it's necessary. That's not a step. That's I think maybe apart of it, but it's not the complete solution. And I do think people are way too eager for an easy solution to a complicated problem. Because, again, if you think about where the problem began, it wasn't as simple as a white person went to Africa and was mean to someone. It was a lot more than that. We're trying to repair just a horrible I mean, all the words you use to describe it are just terrible. Genocide, rape, pillage, trafficking, brutalizing, whatever. All of those things are so deep, it's difficult to just say, oh, here's our Black person at our office. We have diversity. It's the end. Absolutely not. And the same is true for me, even though I did not integrate a school like my dad did, just sitting in a room knowing that you're either one of, like, three or five or one, period. It's not a great feeling. You don't feel like, oh, now I've made it. You really feel like, where are my people? Does anyone see me here? Am I a check mark for them? Are people patting themselves on the back because now they have one in their school, in their classroom, whatever. And so a similar thing can happen with some of these firsts, obviously. Again, like I said in the last answer, it is a good thing to be visible as a Black person holding this position. That's fantastic. I'm very proud to do that. But I don't want anyone to confuse that with now we're done. The work is just beginning. Actually, there's a lot more to do. And for me personally, I do feel like it is the case often with these firsts that the first who is allowed to cross the border, this metaphorical border has to be held to such a ridiculously high standard. Yes, and I'm not being boastful at all, but I've been working myself to the literal bone, like, for my whole life to hold myself to an unreasonably high standard, because I know I'm not going to be able to enter any room at average like other people might be able to. That's just not true. Obviously, I'm proud of my accomplishments. I worked hard because I wanted to work hard. But I also understand there's a reason it's me, if I'm put here to be that person, to allow maybe others down the line to not almost kill themselves working, great. I'm glad that I can do that service, but I do want to make sure people understand thinking of someone as exceptional is not a compliment, making it seem like, oh, you are doing well despite your race. That's not good. There's nothing about being Black that has held me back inherently. It's not like my Black brain can't work like other people. It's the society that I'm working against, not my own Blackness. And that's sort of how I think about this whole situation. Not just with me again, just with any first that we've ever studied in school. Those people are always held to a ridiculous standard. And by the same token, those of us who are murdered very publicly are held to an interesting standard as well. When someone is murdered, and I have to say murdered and not killed because it's very important in how we use our language, all of a sudden reports of, oh, they weren't perfect, though. They one time smoked some weed. So that's why they got killed, or they weren't a very nice person. That's why they got killed. They lived in a bad neighborhood. It's ridiculous, truly, that we're still not allowed to just be human beings as Black people. That's really what I'm trying to do with the Reparations book that I just released is just assert that we are human beings, that's it. The sooner we can get to that point, we're not going to have to do all these political gymnastics to justify people's murders or to say, oh, we have our first Black, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, let's be proud of ourselves. If we just understand that Black people are human beings already, maybe we can eliminate some of these problems in the future. 2ff7e9595c
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