“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth,”

–African proverb

Sia Henry is an attorney, a racial justice activist, and abolitionist who has spent a decade engaging in criminal legal system reform work. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Duke University. She is also an advocate for bringing the healing potential of psychedelics to communities of color.

Sia serves on the Board of Directors for Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project) at San Quentin State Prison. That is the country’s first, tuition-free and independently accredited college situated inside a prison. She also founded the Hood Exchange to introduce formerly incarcerated Black individuals to international travel throughout the African diaspora.
In addition, Sia currently works with MAPS (the Multi-disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) with the goal of ensuring Black, indigenous, and other communities of color have meaningful access to transformative healing opportunities.

My recent conversation with Dr. David Ragland, writer, scholar and activist, couldn't be more timely in the midst of the current relentless roll-back, under the Trump Administration, of policies and programs that were aimed at racial healing. David is a co-founder, along with Congresswoman Cori Bush, of the Truth Telling Project, where he serves as director for Culture, Organizing and Reparations. He is a passionate advocate for the healing of America through programs that expose and acknowledge the history and present experiences of racism, promote reparations for the injustices, and educate so as there will be no repeat of the abuses.

David was moved to create the Truth Telling Project after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, where he witnessed the exclusion of the voices of the victims from public discourse. Yet, while far from a fan of Trump, David sees the problems we face in America as bi-partisan and present throughout the history of our country, with police abuse and mass incarceration being essentially an extension of slavery.

I think most people are very naive about the idea of reparations, seeing it merely as giving money to Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. David sheds light for us around reparations as a multi-dimensional, educational, healing and spiritual initiative, as well as having grounded economic aspects.

In our conversation, David talks about the influence of his family on his own development. His father was a sharecropper who had to escape from Tennessee under the threat of forced labor. His mother’s lineage includes ancestors from Cameroon who had a warrior tradition that resisted colonization. He describes his mother as a continuing inspiration, among other things having maintained a garden in Missouri that supplied food for her own family and other folks in the community . Now, in addition to his work with the Truth Telling Project, David is a founder and member of a the Kibilio community in Massachusetts, a Queer, Black-Led Intentional community focused on healing, reparations and regenerative farming.

I hope you get as much from hearing David as I did in my conversation with him. If you find it of value, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and check out some of the other podcasts. And please take some time to explore the Truth Telling Project and David’s work through the links below.

Watch our conversation on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/daHgj8h7c88

The Truth Telling Project: https://thetruthtellingproject.org/

Kibilio (Refuge) Community and Farm: https://kibilio.org

www.It was my pleasure to have a conversation with my friend, Khalil Bendib: artist, sculptor, author, political cartoonist and radio host.

Khalil and I met as participants in a dialogue group in Berkeley that included, Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians and I learned to deeply respect his candor, sense of humor and intelligent take on the nuanced reality in which we live.

Khalil Bendib is an Algerian, born in Paris during the Algerian Revolution. In our conversation he shared his feeling that he carries the trauma of the Algerian people from his time in the womb forward. He describes his parents’ escape from almost certain execution by the French forces as the first imprint of his understanding and empathy for all oppressed people.

For more information about Khalil’s work, see
Links:

Political cartoons: keybey.com

Sculpture and other art work. http://studiobendib.com/inside.html

Voices of the Middle East & North Africa radio show: https://kpfa.org/program/voices-of-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/