CULTURE
Apocalyptic Education helps us re-member, through repeated Sankofas, our deeper ways of being, knowing, and doing. Prior to, during, and after the ends of Black worlds, African-descended people lived according to cosmologies undergirded by principles of the Nguni Bantu philosophy of Ubuntu. Ubuntu means, “A person is a person because of other people” or “I am because we are,” and has been practiced as an organizing spiritual principle amongst Indigenous African groups for more than 3,000 years. These cultural elements of AE manifest through how we practice these memories;They are the practice of our consciouness and love for our community. Learn about how we practice an Apocalyptic Education.
The Children Could Fly Documentary: There is a commonly held perception about why black children suffer; it is a myth about their inherent state of nothingness, their ability to embody more pain than others, which rarely has anything to do with the realities that black youth endure. The Children Could Fly disavows these myths, specifically by examining one of the major institutions responsible for justifying suffering: schools. This documentary sets out to disrupt normative beliefs that, particularly for Black children, increased schooling leads to social and economic uplift, critical thinking, and a sustainable sense of purpose. It aims to center critical dialogue and visuals rooted in empirical understandings of the inextricable link between the wellness of Black children and the abolition of schooling--its historical and ongoing investments in structural, institutional, and interpersonal forms of anti- Blackness.​
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The film follows the lives of teachers & students within a unique school-based program that radically supported youth to rise above their circumstances and fly.
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If These Cells Could Talk Documentary: Filmon Haile’s life appears to be a pinnacle goal for many Black people living in the U.S. He survives the realities of black life and is admitted to the number one public institution in the nation as a Biology major. As a college student, he thrives academically, engages in various communities on campus and he is a centralized topic back at home whenever people ask his mother how she’s doing. During Filmon's senior year, he agrees to participate in a study on black men and their achievement as a way to give back to his community. The study sought to investigate how black men cared for themselves through the challenges of higher education and engaged scientific lab work as a way to measure their health. In what should have been an exciting year for Filmon, he learns, through his labs from the study that he is dying rapidly, that although education is intimately connected to life expectancy, the correlation does not protect Filmon from the realities of toxic stress, particularly for black men.
Filmon uses his diagnoses to better understand the factors (weathering, allostatic load, toxic stress, microaggressions) that compromise his health. The film centers Filmon's lab results, a narrative of his health that comes from listening to his cells, as a symbol of the invisible factors that compromise black health daily. It complicates beliefs in myopic efforts toward upward mobility as a means toward greater health and well-being for black people. Most importantly, the film tracks Filmon's means toward reversing the accelerated aging that compromises his health. It follows his regimens as well as commentary and prescriptions from leading scientists, scholars, and practitioners to heighten the urgency around the silent but deadly factors that compromise black health and the beliefs, practices, and policies needed to secure the well-being of black people.
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