Blackademics TV

- That is how we get a legal professional with the language skills to serve all of our neighbors.

That is how we get a profession that understands the impact of our access to justice gap.

That is how we get a profession that understands the consequences of the failures of our civil and criminal justice system, - But in an effective, holistic, efficient learning environment, the co and the extracurricular matter as well.

The social matters and even the student activism and protest matters.

- And you're constantly reminded by everyone outside of your family and your community that you are less than.

You are the problem.

This is why it's so important for Black youth to experience life outside of the United States.

(gentle music) - What if I told you to remove high school students from their chemistry labs because they may never become scientists?

What if I suggested closing down computer science camps because those students may never become programmers?

I hope that would sound absurd.

Unfortunately, I constantly hear lawyers say that investing in access and opportunity before law school is too early because those students may never become attorneys.

That mentality is exactly why lawyers make up the least diverse profession in America.

For perspective, only 11% of attorneys identify as Black or Hispanic.

We can compare that to a 32.7% share of the general population, and these facts are far greater than just bar graphs and pie charts.

This is a snapshot of who has access to legal support, who has access to legal careers that can create generational wealth, and which doors to leadership positions are opened up through the power of a law degree, and these disparities are a direct result of our refusal to invest until long after most aspiring first-gen lawyers are filtered out by financial barriers.

Our idea of investing in access is to provide special interview and scholarship opportunities to law students with the highest grades, and are these brilliant minds that would develop into fantastic attorneys?

Absolutely, but the problem is that, instead of investing in creating success stories, we are waiting and taking credit for success that happened despite our collective failures.

My name is Armin Salek.

I'm an attorney and the executive director of the Youth Justice Alliance.

We support pre-law education and we run a four-year fellowship program for aspiring first-gen lawyers.

My journey to establishing the Youth Justice Alliance started during my third year at the University of Houston Law Center.

Through a program called Street Law, I was given the opportunity to work with a high school in Houston called The High School for Law and Justice.

The students and I had deep conversations around immigration law, family law, criminal law, and more, and while there was a story of a family member's deportation, their own testimony in child custody battles, or an uncle that was missed and incarcerated but never forgotten, those students provided valuable insights based on their own lived experiences, and for most of them, their understanding of the legal profession was of law firms they cannot afford, legal aid they did not qualify for, and language barriers between their parents and effective counsel.

As much as our profession needed those perspectives, those voices, those language skills, and those lived experiences, I understood why their voices were underrepresented.

Between high school dreams and law school realities stands a very expensive LSAT course, a lack of access to mentors who have undergone that journey, and a lack of financial access to unpaid but prestigious internships.

I'm grateful for that program because it helped me fall in love with education.

It helped me get my law degree.

It helped me pass the bar exam, and within a year, I was teaching law full-time in South Austin at Akins High School, and just like those students in Houston, my new students represented everything our profession needed.

The language skills to serve their communities, yes.

The lived experiences to be passionate about serving their neighbors, yes.

A headstart on trial advocacy, critical thinking, and communication skills, yes.

Recognizing the wealth of talent, I asked my school's administrators if we could start a high school legal aid clinic.

The students would provide free legal support under my license as legal assistance.

They said yes and we were off.

Those students conducted intake, interviewed, translated, and because of those students, there are people in South Austin who have wills, green cards, citizenship, and more.

(audience applauding) In addition to that, we even worked with an outside organization to help other young people get expungements so that they could get back on track toward their education and professional goals.

(audience applauding) I was proud of our program, but what was the next step?

What would happen when they graduated from our high school clinic and mock trial team?

What would happen when they faced the sticker shock of that LSAT course?

What happened when they lost access to our community of volunteer attorneys and judges?

Recognizing that there was still a gap that existed, the Youth Justice Alliance was formed.

We provide cohorts of aspiring first-gen lawyers with the resources they need to overcome the most common barriers to law school.

The first summer after high school, they are paid to come to Austin and learn under expert practitioners during the day and enjoy recreational programming in the afternoon.

The second summer, they will shadow civil, criminal, and juvenile court judges, and learn the difference between TV law dramas and the real practice of law.

The third summer, they will work with a legal service nonprofit, paid again, reminding them of why they want that law degree and the impact they can have once they achieve that dream.

In the fourth summer, we put $1,500 toward their LSAT course and the price of those exams.

Along the way, they deepen those relationships with that cohort of like-minded peers, and the best part of our job is traveling around Texas, meeting those aspiring first-gen lawyers and letting them know that there is a program that is willing to help them.

We have a fellow from Akins High School.

We have a fellow from the High School for Law and Justice in Houston.

Del Rio High School, Del Valle High School, Lakeview Centennial in Garland, Marshall High School in San Antonio, Singley Academy in Irving, and I could go on.

Some of our fellows are survivors of violence, and among those survivors, some want to be the care and compassion that an attorney once showed them.

Others want to be the attorney that they wish was in their corner.

Many of our fellows will go on to break down language barriers for families in our communities.

As one fellow put it for us, "When I became fluent in English, I became my parents' guide to all legal information.

I recognized that some families don't have access to that support.

I want to be the reason Spanish-speaking families feel comfortable seeking the help they were afraid to ask for."

And will 100% of our fellows become lawyers?

No.

What if they become legally literate social workers or teachers?

What if they become parents with an understanding of their rights as tenants, employees, migrants, and more?

What if they learn transferable communication skills, written and oral, that translate across industry?

Or what if they learn that law is not their path before they make a life-changing personal and financial commitment to law school?

That's okay.

Actually, that's the point.

If we want to uplift missing voices, we need to invest in missing voices.

(audience applauding) So don't shut down those high school chemistry labs, don't shut down those computer science camps, and don't wait to invest in our aspiring first-gen lawyers, because it is our early, on-time investment that will be the reason why they become a change-maker for their community, why they will become a lawyer for their community.

That is how we get a legal professional with the language skills to serve all of our neighbors.

That is how we get a profession that understands the impact of our access to justice gap.

That is how we get a profession that understands the consequences of the failures of our civil and criminal justice system, and because waiting to invest in aspiring first-gen lawyers is failing our families, our students, and our profession.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) - The classroom is just one space that contributes to the holistic education of our students.

When we think of a college education, we typically think of the classes that are taken on the way to majoring in some area and receiving a degree.

Curriculum matters.

What classes does the university offer?

Academic programs matter as well.

How classes come together so that a student emerges with knowledge and skills that will help them achieve their goals, but in an effective, holistic, efficient learning environment, the co and the extracurricular matter as well.

The social matters and even the student activism and protest matters.

In a traditional university, what students experience beyond the classroom is almost as important as what happens within.

My name is Kevin Foster and I'm the undergraduate studies director for Black studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

I want to talk about how faculty and administrators can recognize, honor, and leverage the co and extracurricular as they educate students.

Now, there are some staff and administrators for whom student life is already central.

Residence life, study abroad, counseling services, dining, working with student organizations.

These are areas where staff routinely support students, but among faculty, these areas are often seen as distinct from teaching and learning, but why?

Does nothing we do in class relate to students' day-to-day lives?

If that's the case, then what's the point of teaching courses?

On the other hand, does nothing students do outside the classroom relate back to knowledge developed within?

There can be an active, ongoing relationship between life in the classroom and life beyond it.

If you ask former students about their most impactful university experiences, they are more likely to tell you about something that happened outside the classroom than within.

For many, their defining moments occurred when they stood up to things they saw as inadequate or wrong.

We have Black studies as an institutional presence, because 50-plus years ago, undergraduate students demanded it.

The reason why dorms were integrated, why confederate statues were taken down, why counseling services expanded, or even why dining hall food got better, this often had to do with students standing up, and in these moments, critically from a faculty perspective, they also learned a great deal.

Here's an example from my own life.

Years ago, I and others had been working with the Legal Defense Fund to defend higher education policies that we believed in.

My advisor knew my passions, and when word hit the newspaper that the very court case we had been working on was decided against us on appeal, he called and asked me what I was gonna do about it.

That's all, but in that moment, I perceived permission and maybe even encouragement to pursue my passion to defend Black pathways to higher education.

I took a year of incompletes, and I traveled from coast to coast, working with college students in California and with senior advisors to the president and the White House.

That extracurricular activity helped shaped who I am today as a community-engaged professor.

In fact, I need to say thank you to Dr. Edmund Gordon for your mentorship, then and over all the years that we've known each other.

You have made as much difference in my professional life as anyone alive.

(audience applauding) Fast forward to today.

Recently, students were upset about a new state law that would impact their lives.

It was predictable that they would go into action and likely that they would protest.

That's what I did 30 years ago.

So, for those in the Black studies tradition, this is another learning opportunity.

If students want to gather to discuss a contentious issue, we'll say, how do we get the space set up and how do we ensure that it's safe for all?

If students are angry, the Black studies professor will ask them to articulate what they are upset about and what specific change they want to see.

We'll expect them to conduct impeccable research and understand as much as possible about the challenge before them before they come with demands, and if they took my classes, they will likely have already read Martin Luther King's "Why We Can't Wait," "Malcolm X Speaks," and about radical Black women in the freedom struggle, and I'll ask them how those texts might inform the way they think about possible paths to their intended outcomes.

The extracurricular would, in this way, deepen their understanding of the history, the theory, and the practices that are central to the intellectual activist traditions that we had been studying in the classroom.

Unfortunately, while some faculty see opportunity when students engage the co or extracurricular, others see headaches, problems, and even crisis.

They might subsequently stonewall students, give vague answers to concrete questions, refuse to engage, or if students seek to gather, place them in a space too small for the anticipated audience and bring in police officers in anticipation of problems.

These are tactics that short-sighted administrations engage when they lose focus on students' development.

These are tactics for those who see political problems where they should see teaching and learning opportunity.

We can replace short-term tactics with long-term vision, and in so doing, serve students' growth ever more effectively.

But activism and protest is just one area of out-of-class activity.

There are countless co and extracurricular engagements that directly support student professional growth.

When a student forms an organization that helps them live into their passions, when they find internships, when they travel outside the country, when they start a small business, they engage activities that fuel their intellectual developments and can be definitive for their lives.

As faculty members, we want excellence in our students.

We want students set up for success.

We wanna brag on our students after they've graduated.

Well, if these are things we want, why would we not be proactive in supporting the spaces that turn theory into practice, words into action, knowledge into mastery?

In class, we could require students to engage outside projects that are meaningful to them, or maybe, if as faculty, we are expected to do research and to teach, we set up student research teams.

The students will learn new things about the research process and about a specific topic, and we can co-publish the findings.

In fact, I work with several student teams.

Student teams present at conferences.

They help write research briefs, and they produce this very television show.

This is our developmental, excuse me.

This is our department student outreach team.

They help spread the word about the major, the Black studies major.

They help spread the word about our programming.

They're supported by other faculty, and as an aside, they have fun while doing it, but these spaces of fun are actually spaces of learning.

Don't get me wrong.

I enjoy a good Tuesday-Thursday 8: 00 AM class as much as anyone, but the spaces where faculty can truly live into mentorship and have deeper and more lasting impact are outside the classroom.

I am a better teacher and my students learn more deeply when I am supportive of their co-curricular and extracurricular existence.

And by the way, sometimes, those students, after they graduate, go on to become colleagues.

So, to close, let me introduce you to Kendra Coleman, class of 2013 and the producer of Blackademics Television.

(audience applauding) Dr. Courtney Robinson, former doctoral student, class of 2013.

(audience applauding) Dr. Robinson is our presenter coach, and Jameson Pitts, former student, class of 2017. and our media manager.

(audience applauding) Current students working on this show include Crayton Gerst, creative director, class of 2025.

(audience applauding) Tyler Pullman, production assistant, class of 2027.

(audience applauding) From my work with these emerging and accomplished professionals, I have learned that academic work outside the classroom can be every bit as enriching as the work within.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) - When I think back to the Black Lives Matter movement and the many moments that galvanized protestors across the country, my mind goes back to this home surveillance video of this little Black boy shooting baskets in his driveway.

When he looks down the street, he sees a cop car and he immediately ducks behind the SUV, waits for the cop car to pass, and then gets up and resumes shooting baskets like nothing ever happened.

Another day in the life for a Black boy in America.

You see, growing up in this country, you come to understand that you're somewhat of a second-class citizen.

You realize early on that your history and your identity is distorted and neglected in school, and you're constantly reminded by everyone outside of your family and your community that you are less than.

You are the problem.

This is why it's so important for Black youth to experience life outside of the United States.

I came to this realization at the age of 12.

That's when I set my goal of traveling to Africa, and 10 years later, y'all, I made it happen.

I spent my last semester of college studying abroad at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa.

One of my most memorable experiences was hiking up Lion's Head Mountain.

It was only about an hour up, but, bro, it was challenging.

It was super hot, then it would get freezing cold, and there were certain parts that were so steep, they had ladders and chains built into the side of the mountain, and the last stretch just felt like you were marching up this endless stairwell into the clouds.

And when I finally made it to the top, I felt an immense sense of pride, joy, and confidence.

It finally hit me.

I had accomplished my goal.

I made it to Africa.

I was the first person in my bloodline to make it back to the soil where our ancestors were violently stolen from hundreds of years prior, and as I stared out over the Atlantic Ocean and reflected on my journey, I set a new goal.

I gotta help other Black youth travel the world so they too can liberate themselves from the constraints of what it means to be Black in white America.

Fast forward seven years.

My taxi pulls up to the base of the same mountain.

It was like seeing a long lost friend, Lion's Head, but this time, I wasn't alone.

I brought 42 students from the University of Texas to Cape Town, South Africa on a study abroad trip.

Most of them were Black.

I was so excited to be back, I raced up the mountain like a billy goat, and when I got to the top, I sat and watched each and every student peak the mountain.

I wondered, were they having the same experience that I did seven years prior?

So I walked over to one of my students and I asked her, "How are you feeling?"

She said, "The fact that little old me from South Dallas is here, and knowing that so many others will never make it here, it just makes me feel like I could do anything, like for real."

Another moment that filled my heart with joy happened about a week prior while dining at Mzansi's Restaurant in a township called Langa.

As we are listening to the sounds of a local band and dining on some fire peanut butter curry chicken, the owner, Nomonde, walked over to the microphone.

Slowly and deliberately, she scanned the room of young Black Americans and proclaimed, "You are home.

This is your home."

Seconds later, most of the room was in tears.

In that moment, they felt seen.

They felt like they belonged.

They felt fully human.

We all did.

For 10 years, I served as the director of global initiatives for the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.

When I got hired, my boss and mentor Dr. Moore said, "Devin, I want you to revolutionize study abroad, man."

I said, "You want me to do what?

Like, what does that even mean?"

But the problem was clear.

Nationally, only 10% of American college students go abroad, and of that number, only 5.5% are Black.

So, get this.

For every 1,000 American college students, only 100 go abroad, and of those, only five are Black.

So we decided to do something revolutionary.

Get this.

We designed global programs that centered Black students.

Where did Black students want to go?

Who did Black students want to go with?

What did Black students want to experience?

In 10 years, we took over 700 students abroad to dynamic cities such as Accra, Beijing, Cape Town, Dakar, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi.

Here's the kicker.

Over 65% of the students identified as Black and 90% identified as students of color.

In 2018, to really disrupt the narrative that Black students don't go abroad, we took 82 students to Cape Town, South Africa, 57 of whom were Black, the largest and most diverse program that this institution has ever seen.

In African cities, students experience a world where their Blackness is normalized in the streets, on the billboards, and in the halls of parliament.

In Beijing, we're exposed to a culture that predates European domination and colonization.

In the UAE, we're introduced to a society far more technologically and perhaps culturally advanced than our own.

Yes, each country grapples with issues of anti-Blackness.

However, our students consistently use the word "liberated" to describe how they feel when they step outside of this country.

Traveling abroad has the power to radically transform how young Black Americans see themselves, their Blackness, and their ability to transform the world into the one that they want to see.

So I need you to do me a favor.

I need you to go get a passport.

Like, not today, but yesterday.

For yourself, for your partner, for your son, for your daughter, for your niece, for your tio, for your nephew, for the little boys and girls just shooting hoops in their driveway, trying to figure out why their Blackness is considered a threat, because if we don't, this may be the only world that they will ever know.

Esteemed author Richard Wright once wrote, "I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that someday I might understand it."

Every Black child deserves to experience life outside of this country in hopes that, one day, they might be able to truly understand what it means to be both Black and American.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (upbeat flute music plays)