I’m the last of my mother’s 5 kids, she had me at 40 years old, and she named me Atnreakn…..Siahyonkron….Babatunde….Alleyne. Atnreakn is an ancient Egyptian name derived from Akhenaten—the first pharaoh to institute monotheism. Siahyonkron was taken from my godfather Siahyonkron Nyanseor– a political activist, journalist, and leader in the Liberian diaspora. My mother is super deep.
It’s even more interesting when you find out that my three oldest siblings’ (each around 20 years older than I am) names are Angie, Terrie, and Tony. I jest but, for my mother, there was something empowering about studying Egyptology, exploring the richness of African culture, and seeking truth at a time where many tried to assert the inferiority of people of African-descent. My mother would not accept that.
So when you grow up with such a mother and with civil rights movement leaders likely Stokley Carmichael visiting your home, there’s something a bit normal about pushing back against the status quo.
It takes a strong will to depart from the status quo and when I graduated from middle school my mother showed how strong-willed she really was. She finally decided to act upon her desire to send me and my sister to school in Africa and shipped me to a boarding school in Ghana at the ripe age of 13. Somehow the fact that I had never left the country before didn’t change her mind. Nor did my grandmother and my older siblings’ anger dampen her resolve. In December 1998, like it or not, I was on a 13-hour flight from John F Kennedy Airport in NY to Kotoka International Airport in Ghana with a large bag of Skittles to comfort me. My mother felt it was the right decision and stuck with it.
Although my high school in Ghana was a school that prepared African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah it was no pampered experience. Freshmen woke up at 4:45am during the week, I had to learn to wash clothes by hand, scrub floors, and cut grass with a cutlass. One semester students had to uproot a tree at the school farm for every failing grade on their report card. That was my last semester with a failing grade…. EVER. It was a challenging experience –culturally and academically– but I returned home to the U.S. three years later after completing high school victoriously. I survived the military-style boarding house, excelled academically, grew as a leader, and returned with a love for learning that sustained me through many years of post-secondary education.
I would be remiss if I did not mention my father’s impact on me. My father died of pancreatic cancer when I was 6 but one of the phrases he always said has stuck with me. With his cool Trinidadian accent, he would say: “All who can’t hear must feel.”
This phrase might sound familiar to folks with Caribbean roots. But what did it really mean?
At times it meant a spanking was on the horizon. At other times it was a final opportunity to demonstrate I could be guided by reason and intellect instead of my distaste for the feeling of a hand on my rear end. Ultimately, it was an aphorism with a message applicable to all ages: If you don’t listen you will suffer consequences.
As a society, we see kids’ ability to move from feeling to thinking/reflecting/calculating the implications of their actions as a sign of maturity and growth. We don’t want them to act upon their impulses or emotions. My father’s phrase spared me many a mishap but what if his adage is actually incomplete? What if the inverse is actually true: all who can’t feel, must hear? What if we spend so much time training our kids or ourselves to follow instructions, to calculate consequences, and fear repercussions that we lose the ability to feel?
This has played out numerous times in my life. For example, the success of TeenSHARP – a college prep organization I co-founded with my Tatiana in 2009- has been very much an act of “feeling”—a deep sense of what Dr. King called the “fierce urgency of now”– and “not hearing” –the reasons why certain things couldn’t be done, the folks who told us the timing wasn’t right, and the concerns about all the things that could go wrong.
Case in point: In 2014, we decided to expand TeenSHARP to Delaware (we were only in Camden, NJ at the time) even though we barely had any funding for our New Jersey site, had no full-time staff, and were the primary instructors for Saturday classes. We would need to be able to run our program concurrently every Saturday in Delaware and New Jersey. Lest I forget….we were also expecting a baby in February of 2015!
Normal logic would insist that this was the worst possible time to expand our organization’s footprint. But with a $20,000 grant from Barclays bank and an AmeriCorps grant to fund our first full-time staff, we launched our first cohort of TeenSHARP-Delaware in January 2016 with 25 students. Today, TeenSHARP’s Delaware site serves close to 400 students each year and receives support from several corporations, foundations, and public sector partners.
At a very young age, we are taught to color within the lines. Our schools teach us to walk in single file and they teach us to arrive at truth through the scientific method. Like factories, they use bells to teach us order and appropriate timing.
But we need to challenge students and ourselves to hone the skill of feeling and believing. We need to develop an ability to recognize and respond to inspiration. The type of leadership needed in the real world is one that is purpose-driven, passionate, and defiant. There’s a need for the type of leaders who are deaf to doubters. Leaders who feel, who care, who love, and who serve contagiously.
The late, great Maya Angelou once said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Perhaps this piece made you think. But I sure hope it made you feel.
