I’m talking the talk and walking the walk this week by channeling an episode on channeling. I explore two questions that have become central to how I think about channeling, knowledge, and purpose: What do I desire to know more about? And what desires to be known through me?

Along the way, I discuss my experience as an academic advisor and helping students identify their intellectual passions, intuition as method, and moments when research reaches back.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser: Wanna Channel?

00:32 Finding Grounding in the Flow

02:28 What Is Channeling? 2 Questions

11:37 What Is Your Medium

15:49 Intuition as Method

19:46 How to Vonnect with Me

REFERENCE

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Duke University Press, 2007.

Episode 1: Where Do You Know From?

Episode 4: Listener Question: How to Make a Writing Practice (or Any Practice) Spiritual

This week, I’m thinking about self-determination: one of the most important concepts in Black political, intellectual, and spiritual life!

Starting from a moment of personal reflection on feeling caught in an ebb rather than a flow, I explore what it means to determine the potentiality of your own being according to your own sense of things. Moving between Black intellectual history and my own life, I trace how self-determination has taken different forms across Black thought, from struggles for community control over schools to Black nationalist visions of independent nations.

Thinking with the histories of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Republic of New Afrika, and Black Power era organizing, I reflect on why self-determination has never meant just one thing and why every attempt to live a self-determined life is necessarily messy, unfinished, and full of trial and error.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser

00:27 Grounding in the Ebb and Flow of Life

04:07 - What is Self-Determination?

07:01 - Two Different Takes on Self-Determination in 1968: The Republic of New Afrika and Ocean Hill-Brownsville

19:01 - Self-Determination as a Lived Practice

30:05 - Self-Determination as Trial and Error

References:

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

For a good read on the religion of Black Power, I would recommend: Corbman, Marjorie. Divine Rage: The Religious and Political Dimensions of Black Power. New York: NYU Press, 2025.

For more on Ocean Hill-Brownsville, I recommend listening to School Colors, a podcast about race, education, and the struggle for community control in Brooklyn during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis:

https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/brooklyn

This week, I’m reflecting on graduation, wanting to be a good ancestor, and a question that has been sitting heavily with me lately: How do you cope when ancestors disappoint us?

Starting from my own experience walking across the graduation stage and thinking about the intellectual ancestors who made my work possible, I move into a conversation about what happens when the people who shaped us also disappoint us. What do we do when an ancestor says something isolating, harmful, or contradictory to the liberatory futures we hoped to find when we went looking for and thinking with them? How do we sit with disappointment without reducing entire movements to individual lifetimes or demanding ideological perfection from people who were also trying to survive?

Chapters:

00:00 Teaser: Ancestral Disappointment

00:15 Grounding in Graduation & Feeling Different

05:39 How to Not Be Pissed Off at Your Ancestors

15:04: Coping with Ancestral Disappointment: Two Frameworks

References Mentioned:

Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Onaci, Edward. Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Sorett, Josef. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

For my note on the myth of charismatic leaders making and breaking religious movements, see: Richardson, James T. 2021. “The Myth of the Omnipotent Leader: The Social Construction of a Misleading Account of Leadership in New Religious Movements.” Nova Religio 24 (4), 11–25.