Ratchet Roundtable

With Tez Files: Mothers, Mending, and Megan Thee Stallion

• Dr. Kia DH • Season 1 • Episode 2

Share episode

In this episode, Aaron and Dr. Kia talk to Dr. Tez Files about thriving through twerking in traffic, mothering, Megan Thee Stallion, and letting shit go, among other things. This conversation had us hyped. Let us know how it resonates!

Read this episode's transcript here.

Learn more about Dr. Files on the U. Pittsburgh School of Education website: https://www.education.pitt.edu/faculty/directory/martez-files/

Learn more about Dr. Kia:

Learn more about Aaron:

Explore the Bridge to Thriving Framework: https://drkiadh.com/thriving-framework

Subscribe to the Ratcheteer newsletter: https://drkiadh.substack.com/

Dr. Tez Files:

So like sometimes people will say, you know, "Your friends are so, you know, queer, so femme, so loud, so boisterous."

Dr. Kia DH:

Oh no. Oh no!

Aaron Grayson:

Oh no, right. Hi, I'm Aaron.

Dr. Kia DH:

And I'm Dr. Kia and this is the Ratchet Roundtable Podcast.

Aaron Grayson:

Where we explore the defiant, irreverent, unapologetic ways that everyday folks get free

Dr. Kia DH:

and thrive.

Aaron Grayson:

On today's episode, we're talking to Dr. Tez Files, professor of Black studies in teacher education, student of Black feminisms and Black mothering, community activist, mental health advocate and lover of the culture and of the people.

Dr. Kia DH:

His many fancy accomplishments notwithstanding, Tez is fundamentally a provocateur and instigator and an all around starter of thoughtful ass shit. We are very excited to speak with him today. Here's our conversation. Okay, hello Martez.

Dr. Tez Files:

Hello.

Dr. Kia DH:

First of all, do you prefer to be called Martez or Tez?

Dr. Tez Files:

Tez.

Dr. Kia DH:

Or Dr. Files?

Dr. Tez Files:

Tez.

Dr. Kia DH:

Tez.

Aaron Grayson:

Tez.

Dr. Kia DH:

Who's in the room? Okay, so let's start with... So I gotta be honest, I don't remember exactly how we met and I feel like it started on Facebook?

Dr. Tez Files:

I think so for sure. For sure.

Dr. Kia DH:

What do you remember?

Dr. Tez Files:

I think either I saw your work and I told you it was amazing, or you saw my work and you told me it was amazing. Either way, I was floored by you. I thought you were so brilliant. And you are. And I remember reaching out to you throughout so many points. You celebrating me, me celebrating you. And then I remember I was writing my dissertation and I reached out to you and I said,"Would you look at the methods section for my dissertation? Like I'm stressed about it so bad." And you looked at it and you read it, and you gave me such wonderful feedback and you told me, "Your methods section is brilliant. It's stunning. I loved it." And that just meant so much coming from you, from someone who I respected and thought was incredible. So that's what I remember. So, yeah. So all that to say. Can I cuss on here, or no?

Dr. Kia DH:

Yes, it's Ratchet Roundtable.

Dr. Tez Files:

Okay, yeah.

Dr. Kia DH:

[laughter]

Dr. Tez Files:

You are the shit I have always known. Yes.

Dr. Kia DH:

Wow.

Aaron Grayson:

Period.

Dr. Kia DH:

Thank you. Y'all gonna make me cry for real, like I'm already tearing up. I just I. Thank you. I remembered being so excited by and impressed by how you approached critically engaging the work around gender, around anti-Blackness, around what's possible. I remember thinking wow, you know this cat really does the work, right? I was looking at your activism and your work with kids in particular. And this is it. Like for me, people who do powerful work with kids are my favorite people on the planet. You know, because if you see, if you go and you look at pictures of Tez with the kids, you can just feel the love and feel the power and just feel the healing and the joy that's happening. So I just remember being like, "Who's this? Who is this?" And then also, you were a scholar and bringing some really important, fresh, deep engagements into the work. So I was really honored when you reached out and invited me into your dissertation process. Well I'm just delighted to be in community with y'all and I think that's part of what I want to just name about the energy of this. This is, we were talking about this earlier, Aaron and I, like this is a lot of podcasts are like vehicles for your career, right? Come on and talk about your work and blah, blah, blah, and this can be that. But our goal is really to be in a liberatory conversation tied to who you are as a person and that'who' showing up in the world, whether it's in your work or in your activism or in your, I mean, you're just general life. You know? How you get down. Like where you be. All these things. And so this is a podcast about giving people a sense of what's possible for the world—what's already been built that they might not know about—so that we can move into this new world we're building. So yeah with that grounding us, we gave you a lot of questions. What did you think about the various questions?

Dr. Tez Files:

I thought the questions were so smart, so rigorous. And I also appreciate the, "Who are you entering with?" question. For me like the opening question really made me think about something that I often tell my students like, you know, "Who are you, but whose are you? Like who do you belong to? Who do you represent? Who do you stand for? Whose interest do you stand for?" So it made me think about those things. I thought a lot about my grandmother and that was so, um, it was a journey. It was an emotional journey for me because I thought about, you know, how she would be responding to the sociopolitical moment right now. How she would be dealing... Like, my grandmother was a lover of gospel music, and I was... the other day, I was listening to a few gospel songs and I haven't listened to gospel in a long time... but there are some few like, you know, 'I Won't Complain' or 'Better Days...'

Aaron Grayson:

Mmm.

Dr. Tez Files:

Those songs that I know would have helped my grandmother get over. And so I thought about that as I was reading the questions and thinking through them. And even ratchetness for liberation. Super important. Super important.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yes. Well, thank you for that reflection. I, you know, the the song that I think the song I always keep coming back to is 'I Shall Not Be Moved.' You know, just like a tree, you know, by the water, just...

Dr. Tez Files:

Yes.

Aaron Grayson:

Mhmm.

Dr. Kia DH:

Soaking up the that nurturing water, that moisture. Just steady, rooted. That is a song that honestly just gets me through and is constantly on my mind these days. Because there are so many stressors. There's so much going on. Word. Well, so thank you for bringing your grandmother into the room, into the space and that lineage. When you think about... when we told you like this was called'Ratchet Roundtable,' we're talking about ratchetness as liberation, was there anything that came up for you? A story, a moment, an experience?

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah I think about, like I grew up in the hood, right? So I'm from the hood. And I feel like one of the things that's really important for me is recognizing that my folks have always understood that no matter what the people in power were doing, we were always going to do whatever the fuck we wanted to do. And I feel like that for me was really important as I was developing because I think about how even as governance or government continues to fail us, my folks have always known that we were ungovernable and that you were never going to lock us into anything. You were never going to hold us captive. You were never going to make us feel like we couldn't escape. And you know, I grew up around people who would literally burn it down at the sight of oppression. People who refuse the kind of oppression. I think often about, and this is starting the conversation heavy. But I think after you know 2020, this pandemic era, where a lot of folks write about us as experiencing a dual pandemic, which is a pandemic of racial uprising while at the same time dealing with a public health catastrophe. And a lot of folks were in a space where they had to bear witness to the kind of suffering that Black folks were experiencing. So a kind of, you know, biophysical suffering because we were, you know, no access to health care, no access to hospitals, no money, no insurance, etc. But a lot of Black folks were also bearing witness to the kind of racial injustice and kind of forced to pay attention to it and were struggling. And I thought about how when the Breonna Taylor situation or the George Floyd situation reaches a tipping point. I remember folks calling me saying, "We need to tear some shit up." Like it is time to tear some some shit up. And I remember the days and days of protest that I was engaged in And that, you know, that's what comes up for me when I think during that time. And I remember being alongside people who were about the power of folks who have a ratchet politics, an highly sophisticated in strategy, highly studied, well read, and the only thing they knew to do at that moment was to disrupt the power, the power structure as is. And that for me was one of the greatest examples. It's like when you don't know what to do just from, you know, people are, you know,"What do we do next? What do we do next?" Anything but this. Whatever this is. Anything but whatever this is, is what we do next. ungovernable politics, a wild, rebellious spirit that can't be contained, right? That whiteness don't know what to do with. Capitalism doesn't know what to do with it. Heteropatriarchy doesn't know what to do with it. It is uncontained, uncontrollable, ungovernable. And it's a power to that. It's just a power to that.

Aaron Grayson:

Mmm. I appreciate that for real.

Dr. Kia DH:

Covered in goosebumps. Go ahead.

Aaron Grayson:

No, no, I appreciate that you bring that up. Because I think about that energy that people had in 2020, and I'm fast, I'm thinking about as fast forwarding five years and seeing all that we've seen, you know, people being out in the streets, witnessing a genocide from their phones, right? You know and how we are, you know, seeing powers that we didn't see from the 30s in another country come back to this one and seeing people feel senses of hopelessness, despair, etc. And I guess my question is, considering all of that and where we are right now, what does it mean to you now in terms of that ratchet politic to fight back when we feel so tired? You know how do you I guess, effectively how do you kind of keep yourself restored on the day-to-day when you're working with your students, when you're just going about your daily life thinking about like I'm still here to fuck shit up, right?

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah, yeah. I appreciate, I appreciate the question and I appreciate the kind of intellectual framework that the question is derived from. The idea that... I have a mentor, Dr. Perry. She's a provost at Miles College. This is an HBCU in Alabama. And, you know, she often used to talk to me when I was doing my activism in 2018, and 2019, and 2020, and she would always say, you know"Tez, we come from a people who have a stick-to-it-ness about them. Like we come from a people with a stick-to-it-ness, a people who... who have experienced great suffering, tragedy, catastrophe, pain and suffering and who still refuse to lay down and die. Who refuse to be on their knees. Who refuse to kowtow to violent superpowers," right? And for me when I think about the kind of suffering campaign that we live under, the kind of death machines that we are always navigating, it's important for me... You know, there were some folks who were doing a lot of work around like rest and recovery for a long time and I feel like ended up becoming like a kind of um...

Aaron Grayson:

Mhmm, go ahead

Dr. Tez Files:

Kind of, it got it got real therapeutic, real capitalist, real materialistic, in ways that I felt like were not restorative to us, right? So it's the and bell hooks writes about this, right? Bell hooks says that at the height of the crack epidemic, Black folks were addicted to drugs, but white folks became addicted to shopping. So they became a kind of corporatist, capitalist, consumerist class where their addiction became what they could buy, what they could spend their money on.

Aaron Grayson:

Mhmm.

Dr. Tez Files:

And that becomes their drug of choice. Their way of like, you know, taking an opioid to not deal with whatever it is we have to confront and deal with. And I feel like rest is essential for us because we are caught up in a system of violence and because we are caught up in, you know, unrelenting terror campaigns that are not going away anytime soon. And so we do have to eat well, sleep well, take care of ourselves, find our people, be with people who love and care about us. But we're doing that so that we can survive these systems, not so that we can participate in capitalism or be capitalism's greatest... greatest consumer. Um, we do it because we know that we have to survive this thing and the next thing and the next thing and whatever else is coming.

Dr. Kia DH:

Related to that because I think that there's this, you know, my 'Thriving Framework' and my research is grounded in talking to young, Black, LGBTQ and same-gender loving, fundamentally activist-minded people, right? And the survival dimension is real. We can't move beyond it. And it was interesting to me in my conversations with them, this is where sort of the formal sort of research kicked off was finding out that nobody had ever asked them, to a person,"Nobody's ever asked me what my thriving would look like." So it was always like, yes, I'm really I'm studied in survival. I have these strategies, these networks, these practices, you know, etc, etc, and but not thriving. And so I am really curious about teasing out that difference because I think we're in a moment also of world-making.

Aaron Grayson:

Mhmm.

Dr. Kia DH:

I think we're in a moment of taking the wisdom that does exist tied to our joy, our abundance. And by abundance, I don't mean money. I mean abundant spirit, abundant possibility, dreaming, expansiveness, you know, just like you said, refuse, refuse, refuse. Throwing off all of these constraints on who we're supposed to be able to be, which was all manufactured in the first place. So I'm curious about your thriving. And sometimes that'll or like your your dream of your vision of beyond survival. And one of the entry points that I'll sometimes ask people about is, you know, what are the conditions under which you feel like you can simply be? Where you just get to exist in your fullness? You just[exhale].

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah, I feel like for me, um, that thriving happens, um, in spurts and in moments with people who I know genuinely care about me. And I think I'm most at a position where I can truly thrive when I'm around people who have taken time to learn themselves, to learn our community, to learn what they need and communicate those needs to me. And I most often felt that I could be my full and complete self in spaces with folks who are also their full and complete selves. So like sometimes people will say, you know, your friends are so, you know, queer, so femme, so loud, so boisterous.

Dr. Kia DH:

Oh no. Oh no!

Aaron Grayson:

Oh no, right.

Dr. Tez Files:

I love, you know, I like being with. I like being around people that y'all hate, like people that y'all can't stand, people who make like. There is nothing that makes me happier than being around people who make y'all sick. Like, I love being around butch queens, femmes, high femme energy. I love being around like people who refuse your systems. I love being around folks who laugh loud as hell, and it is a kind of "Oh my god, like, we shouldn't be this loud here."

Dr. Kia DH:

Hehe.

Dr. Tez Files:

Because it is something about them that is working outside of whatever normative white system that has been laid before them as a standard of order. They function outside of whatever this order is, and that's when I'm most able to thrive. I thrive when I'm around people who are not invested in this shit, who are refusing it in every way. And so for me, I want to create things that look like that, right? And that's to say that I've heard people say that like, you know, we're reimagining or we're imagining otherwise. Like all of these things. But when I hear what they're imagining otherwise or what they're reimagining, it often looks like what we currently have. Or it looks like blackenizing or browning up whatever white thing has already been laid before us. And it never feels, it never feels counter to what we have experienced before. It always ends up reifying capital, reifying a heteropatriarchal, patriarchal order. Reifying jealousy and manipulation and poor communication, emotional immaturity, all of that shit. In order to thrive, we have to let that shit go. We gotta let that shit go.

Dr. Kia DH:

I love that description of people sort of defiantly, unapologetically embodying what is true and real for them. The joy, the loudness, the whatever right? The selfness.

Dr. Tez Files:

Yes

Dr. Kia DH:

Just that is, to me, that's liberation praxis. Be your true self. Hold that space, refuse, defy, that's it. Your crew sounds cool. Sorry. Go ahead.

Dr. Tez Files:

My friends are the shit. They are so stylish, so smart, so beautiful and don't give a fuck. And it is powerful to be in those spaces. But I what I appreciate about it is they're that, even if nobody asks for it like even they're unwelcome there, right? And that's the power for me. That's a power.

Dr. Kia DH:

Goosebumps again.

Aaron Grayson:

Yes.

Dr. Kia DH:

Okay, question. What about, well, oh no wait, Aaron did you... did you have something?

Aaron Grayson:

I think we're on the same page. I mean, it was... My question, and tell me, tell me if you had a different one, but you know, this is, this is part of the the contemplations. Considering the community that you surround yourself with, what is the most ratchet thing somebody has done to you, with you, something that you've seen, that bring that brings you closer to freedom and liberation and joy and simply being?

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah, I. So without, without criminalizing the crew.

Aaron Grayson:

For sure. We listen and we don't judge. No names.

Dr. Kia DH:

No cops.

Aaron Grayson:

Right.

Dr. Tez Files:

Okay, so what I will say is this. I hang around, I hang around people who are...

Aaron Grayson:

I'm loving this setup.

Dr. Tez Files:

So, so we've done, we've done all manner shit. So like for instance, I hang around people who will stop traffic. Will stop fucking traffic to twerk to our favorite fucking song. Or we'll, we'll...

Aaron Grayson:

I know that's right.

Dr. Tez Files:

We'll fucking be in the middle of the mall like laughing loud, taking pictures, making videos, and I don't know if it is getting us closer to liberation but I know it makes us feel it makes us feel good. And I think...

Aaron Grayson:

Period.

Dr. Tez Files:

That that moment of feel good is sometimes enough for me, right? Sometimes it just feels good to be with people and like we are like "Fuck that the light is green or red or fuck that, you know, there are thousands of people watching us right now. We just finna do what we want to do." And I think there's, there's a space to organize there too. Because if you can organize from that space of you know, Toni Morrison talks about this with the white gaze where she says she's, if you saw her documentary, 'The Pieces I Am,' she's describing. Toni Morrison has a brilliant documentary that was released the year she died, called 'The Pieces I Am.' You actually can watch it on YouTube Premium or Netflix. It was on Netflix, it might be gone. But she has this moment where she's talking about... when she's write, she wants to write 'The Bluest Eye.''The Bluest Eye's' her first novel. She writes it at 33. And she says she wanted to write a novel where Black girls weren't topsy. Where they weren't reduced to ancillary side characters. She wanted to write a book that focused on Black girls, but she wanted to think about how Black children, Black girls in particular, come to hate themselves. And she wanted to do that outside of the white gaze like this, this always watching, always leering, always in your face, white consciousness, or white sensibility that has you making choices. And she says, "I wrote that book without the little explanations that you would give to white people when you write." So this kind of...

Aaron Grayson:

Mmm.

Dr. Tez Files:

You know, you're explaining, you know, "My grandmother was making collard greens and black eyed peas because it was New Year's." And then, you know, for white because white people never heard of it. And then you would, you would have to put a little aside, you know, "This is a standard tradition...[inaudible]." And she's saying, "I wanted to write a novel where I didn't have those little explanations for white people, where my characters exist in a world when there were no white people. Where you know, where they were living their lives as complicated or as ugly as those lives were not encumbered by what white folks thought about them." So for me, I feel like I am surrounded by people who live like that, who don't give a damn what power or money or white interests think about them. And I think that's the liberatory force that I surround myself with.

Dr. Kia DH:

I'm just basking in that, you know, stopping traffic to twerk to your favorite song. And I'm actually thinking about public art, you know, so...

Aaron Grayson:

Mmm!

Dr. Tez Files:

Love it.

Aaron Grayson:

Get into it!

Dr. Kia DH:

You know, just just, I do think claiming unapolo... joy, unapologetic joy is a part of a I think it's defiance and resistance, but I think it's also modeling, right? It's modeling like, you know what? Because we know that the the lineage of white, cisheteropatriarchal, you know, imperialist, capitalist... shout out to bell hooks, right? Like we know that lineage was all about creating, manufacturing conditions of you know otherness, less-ness. You know inhumaneness. You know stealing joy, stealing purpose, stealing time, stealing everything, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy. Greedy!

Dr. Tez Files:

Yes.

Dr. Kia DH:

Spiritually bereft. And everything you described about your

Dr. Tez Files:

You're giving me goosebumps now, doc. Slow down. You ain't gotta eat up like that, now.

Dr. Kia DH:

Thanks. I just had something to say.

Dr. Tez Files:

And say it you did.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yeah no, I mean, but that's what it is. I mean, if you, if you distill it down to its to its kernel, it's, uh, their sense of lack manifested in social structure, manifested in policy, manifested in interpersonal rules, and all of these things that you describe that your friends do, all of that is simply, "No." It's no.

Aaron Grayson:

It's reclamation, baby.

Dr. Kia DH:

It's reclamation. It is and it's it's not even like it's on some of it feels to me like it's not even like we need to reclaim it because it's already ours. It's inherent. We are divine. We are. We exist. We are. What, it doesn't matter. And that, that was what I was thinking about when you talked also about the elimination of the white gaze. Let me just decenter you, because you you're not even really a part of this. Go work on yourself.

Dr. Tez Files:

Yes. Go work on yourself.

Dr. Kia DH:

Go work on yourself. Gather yourself. In the meantime, I'm going to have this joy. And I was thinking about this sort of public... the ways that, you know, we can have joy in our safe spaces, in our living rooms, at our card tables, etcetera. We can create these enclaves. And sometimes we have to—back to that, back to that recognition of the piece of this that is survival, right? And I'm thinking now also about working with young people. And when somebody stops traffic to get out of their car and be in the music in that moment and share that with the world. It gives everybody else permission to be joyful.

Aaron Grayson:

Yup.

Dr. Kia DH:

I can't tell you the number of times I'm driving down the street and I've got my music, and I mean, my speakers in my car are so good. I like to drive in my car because that's where the speakers are. And then I'll see other people see me in my music. Because, you know, I dance. I just, I'm in my music. And then I watch them go look for a song on their you know, like I watch them go look for music. Go get your music. Go be in your moment. Get free. So and that, that just took me also to this sort of, the question of public displays of joy, public displays of ratchet refusal and art. Public art and how important that is and of course, that's also something that gets like, you know, constrained and puni... you know, punished.

Dr. Tez Files:

Absolutely.

Dr. Kia DH:

But I'm curious is there any art or artist or, you know, other sort of public manifestation that you think of that maybe the world could know about, that's, you know, inspiring, I don't know.

Dr. Tez Files:

So I love. So one of my secret loves is, like Black women rappers.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yes.

Dr. Tez Files:

I have such and people get mad at me because like everybody wants me to be like oh you know, I love insert some little hype. And I do love some like, you know, black men rappers. Like I love Lil Baby and other folks, but there are some

Dr. Kia DH:

He is ratchet as fuck.

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah.

Aaron Grayson:

Hehehe.

Dr. Tez Files:

Black women rappers, though. So there are two in particular, three in particular who I always think about for me. And it is there's a rapper named Monaleo who I love. Y'all need to follow Monaleo. Okay? Monaleo is the shit. She will make you want to like just fuck something up. She is... She does not play. And there is another rapper from Alabama where I'm from, Mobile, named Flo Milli. Flo Milli.

Aaron Grayson:

Yes, come on!

Dr. Tez Files:

Flo Milli is the shit. Megan Thee Stallion for me.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yes.

Dr. Tez Files:

And the reason why I love Megan. So I just watched the Megan documentary, like a few months ago or two months ago.

Aaron Grayson:

Still need to see that.

Dr. Tez Files:

The Megan documentary's on Amazon Prime. It's such a powerful documentary because her mom is... her mother is such a central figure in her life and then she loses her mother. And she shows that like... and it... but, but she shows how central her mother is to her. So her mother is working with her on her breathing. Her mother is playing the piano on some of her songs. Her mother is filming all of her twerk videos, filming all of her freestyle raps. Her mother is a rapper who was never signed, but was a local artist who was like one of the hardest battle rappers in her city. And so she is...

Aaron Grayson:

I didn't know that.

Dr. Tez Files:

She is learning from her mama's so pretty and just thick and just gorgeous. And Megan sees her growing up like seeing her mother rap and in the books. And there's this moment, though, where Megan is like breaking down in front of the world. Where she's surrounded by people who she shouldn't be surrounded by, right, people who are not good for her. Her mother. Her mother just died. Her father had died years before. She is alone in this moment, surrounded by people that she shouldn't be around and she's trying to fill the void with like alcohol and sex. And it becomes disasterous for her.

Dr. Kia DH:

I've been there.

Dr. Tez Files:

Her and she describes it. And then she describes going on this long healing journey where she tries these mixed modes of healing where she's like doing ayahuasca and like yoga and out in the wilderness and silent retreats and just like all of this stuff. And she comes back and she says,"I'm still not ready to return to stage. I'm still not ready to return to music. I still have so much anxiety, so much weight." And she takes a moment, works through those feelings, and then decides to give a show dedicated to her mother. And it was so powerful for me. And then she pops back out with her MEGAN era, right? Which is just super, super important for me. But those examples for me of like, because like Megan doesn't care that you are tired of seeing her twerk, she finna shake her ass anyway.

Aaron Grayson:

Yup.

Dr. Tez Files:

You know y'all around here calling Megan, oh,"One flow hoe. She's a one flow..." da da da. And Megan's like "My flow is dynamic. It has won me GRAMMYs. It has won, got me. You know, in Paris, it's gotten me everywhere I wanted to go." And that for me is such an important model of what is possible when we don't care, when we step into our power and create what you are supposed to create. Use your gifts no matter who is coming up against you. And for me, that's just a powerful exemplar.

Aaron Grayson:

Yeah, I appreciate that you said that. I'm I'm reminded of, I still need to see the documentary, but I am reminded of the I think it was, she was on the, she was on one of the tonight shows and she was performing. It was a performance where she had her like backup dancers that were all in the kind of like Miss America, kind of the sash situation. She starts talking about, there's a moment where she's rapping, and then she starts, you can, you can hear her voice start cracking. I think she's talking about her mom and, you know, she's in, but she's still going through it. And she finishes her performance, and I don't know, I think about that on... on, on a number of different levels. Like thinking about the, you know, my my own grandmother who passed away last year, my mom's mom

Dr. Tez Files:

I'm sorry.

Aaron Grayson:

thinking about, I appreciate that, you know. I think about, you know, my mom and how she has provided an example for moving... You, you, you move through it, right? You acknowledge it. You, you acknowledge it, you sit with it, and then you move through it. And hearing you talk about this documentary is bringing up a little bit of that for me which we have a lineage of. You know, the the culture has to the lineage of that.

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah, I appreciate you centralizing mothering here too. You know, I come to mothering as a site of inquiry, because I have a strained relationship with my deceased mother. She died in 2004 and we were not close. And she died before we could ever really restore our relationship in any meaningful ways. But I started to study for years, I started to study because I wanted to understand what it was that she was dealing with. I wanted to know what like it was. I didn't, I didn't have a read of like capitalism and patriarchy and all the things that she would have been living under. For me, when you're a mother, you're just supposed to sacrifice yourself to the perpetual needs of your children. If you don't sacrifice yourself to the perpetual needs of your children, you are less than a mother. And once I learned about like the kind of societal oppression, the social targeting that Black mothers in particular suffer under, I was able to forgive myself and soon forgive my mother. And you know I was reading people. There's a scholar, a classic scholar, her name is Stanlie M. James. And she has this, this article in this book. It's called'Mothering, a Possible Link to Social Transformation.' And I read it, and I was like, oh wow, like, there is a lot that can happen with mothering. And I wanted to read more. And then I read this book called'Revolutionary Mothering' by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, she edits it, and

Aaron Grayson:

That's my girl! Listen.

Dr. Tez Files:

In it there's a chapter from a scholar, Cynthia Oka, and Cynthia Oka's definition of mothering is one that I keep with me. She says that "mothering is the opposite of exploitation." And for me, that

Aaron Grayson:

Wait, hold on, run that back again, because I feel like we need to... we need to sit in that one for a second, please.

Dr. Tez Files:

So, I, mothering works for me because that definition helps me think about what it is I'm trying to do in community. But she says mothering is the opposite of exploitation. So for instance, if exploitation is taking everything you can from a body and giving nothing to it in return, mothering is, in turn, the giving of everything to bodies and often receiving nothing in return. And that framework, is it's not innate. It's something that has to be learned and studied and grappled with. You're not naturally, in fact, we're naturally selfish. We're naturally, you know, self preservationists, we're natural... We're naturally thinking about what we need and not what the collective needs, right? You have to study and read to centralize the collective need in your work, right? You have to build a praxis for that, right? Because some people think that just because you're Black or just because you're Native or just because you come from a communal people that that just makes you communal, inherently or by proxy. But truly, you might be born into that but to adopt those values, you have to learn and you have to apply them, and sometimes you have to mess that up right where you are sometimes not your best self in community. Or sometimes you drop the ball, or sometimes you hurt people, right? I, this is when I started doing LGBTQ organizing, for instance, you know, as a cis person, as a person who primarily dates, you know, women and femmes. It was, it was hard for me at first to reckon with when I was supposed to step up and when I was supposed to step back or when I was supposed to allow space for those more marginalized, more silenced than myself to step up. Or when it was my job to, um, intervene on the violence that they were experiencing. And sometimes I got that wrong. And I stayed in those communities anyway, even when I got it wrong, even when I messed up, even when I knew that I was going to be called out for something, um, I appreciated the calling out. Well, really the calling in, because I was never kicked out of community. But I appreciated the calling in because it gave me an opportunity to learn, to grow, to reflect and to try to be better in the space the next time. And that was a powerful lesson for me. Only possible through staying in community with people and... who were willing to love me through it. Folks with mothering praxes.

Aaron Grayson:

Yeah, right I was about to say, folks mothering you through it

Dr. Tez Files:

Yes.

Aaron Grayson:

In a way, right?

Dr. Tez Files:

Absolutely for sure.

Dr. Kia DH:

It's interesting because I was having all of these responses to what you were sharing, Tez. Like in my experience as a person with a uterus who has bled, who could you know become pregnant, who could you know bring life into the world, and who was raised and read as as girl and then woman, I was thinking deeply about the the... what you said about being inherently self-preserving, and holding that up next to the ways that I see girls, women and femmes, people who sort of are inside of this identity of

Dr. Tez Files:

Yes.

Dr. Kia DH:

Nurturer

Dr. Tez Files:

Yes.

Dr. Kia DH:

Not necessarily being self-preserving. And I was, you know, this constellation of all the ways we get socialized to put ourselves last, second or last, right? To put ourselves at the end of the hierarchy of needs. And the ways that that can show up, reasonably... I was thinking about how defiance shows up in that construct when that's the construct you've been told you're supposed to adopt. And how that can show up as resentment, pettiness, it can show up as refusal. It can show up as, you know, passive aggressive behavior, because direct and aggressive behavior would be dangerous. I mean, I was just thinking very much about how you you risk your life. You risk your physical security when you defy that sort of norming, that expectation. And I was thinking about, I don't think that we are as humans solely inherently selfish.

Dr. Tez Files:

Hmm.

Dr. Kia DH:

Because I look at kids and I look at how kids operate and they are also inherently generous. Granted the whole like, "No, that's mine." Like, do not try to take a goldfish from my nephew. Do not try to take his crackers. He will look at you like, "Girl, I know we already had this conversation. You cannot have my cracker..." You know, like, no those are not for you. Those are my that I that I got for him. Okay, like the crackers that I bought. The crackers that I went to the cabinet and poured into the bowl, are not for me, apparently. But anyway.

Dr. Tez Files:

Love that.

Dr. Kia DH:

But if at any time this same child perceives that a person is in distress, his immediate, initial response is to comfort.

Dr. Tez Files:

Mmm.

Dr. Kia DH:

And because the way we've raised him is that his feelings are honored, if at any time he feels sad, he knows he can cry about it. And there's just this way of I think, I think we're, we're complicated in that way. And I think about one of the one of the philosophical underpinnings of my work is the Blackfoot or Siksika engagement with sort of community construction, right? And this is the you'll you'll hear about them often in conversation about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the time he spent, you know, in community and so on so forth. Cindy Blackstock came back and tried to encapsulate the Siksika framework, even though they have never done that. They were never like this is our hierarchy. This is our model of, you know, society, but at the base is self-actualization as fuel for community actualization, which is fuel for cultural perpetuity, which is to say, when we are able to be who we are—I'm thinking back to what you said about purpose, finding and Megan Thee Stallion being in her purpose, unapologetically—

Aaron Grayson:

Mmhmm.

Dr. Kia DH:

The Siksika frame as described in the research is fundamentally, and this isn't just unique to this one culture, but this I... the ethic is we arrive self-actualized. We arrive complete. We arrive as who we are. The community's responsibility is to nurture the authentic expression of that divinity out of us so that we can be in the world, right? And then our responsibility is to make sure that we are attending to our needs, that we're being in our authenticity, being in our power, being in our integrity, so that we then are a part of a community that can actualize. And so it's reciprocal. It's more Ubuntu. And

Aaron Grayson:

Mmhmm.

Dr. Kia DH:

So I'm just thinking about nurturance and mothering and mothering as the not so much the, you're... I'm the person whose body made your body possible, even though that is, in its own way, profound and magical, and miraculous, but more in the sense of, I am committed to nurturing your self-actualization into existence as a practice. And I was thinking about how you said you have to study and study and study. And I'm wondering about the relationship between that and simply experiencing what that feels like in my own... like Megan, I have had moments of, you know, trying to fill a void with self destructive things. And in my life, was very lucky to meet people who were like, "Hey, Sis, I'm just gonna wrap all this love around you." Like you said, in those communities where you're like, "I fucked up!" and they're like, "It's all right, we got you." You know, every pobody's nerfect, you know, like that kind of... And I've been really lucky to be in community with people who were there already so that they could model to me. Anyway, I'm not really posing a question. I'm honestly just sort of synthesizing out loud and wondering about what this offers to us as we world build.

Dr. Tez Files:

Yes, yes, right? And, you know, and I appreciate you know, Patty Hill Collins too, who reminds us that other mothers are anyone who is invested in the collective care of the community's children. So it is uncles, it is cousins, it is big mamas, it is best friends, it's titis, it's, you know, all of those folks are invested in the kind of to your point, the self-actualization of the community's youth, and they are interested in the community's well being, its vitality. It understands that that investment in the community's youth is an investment in its thriving, its vitality, its health, its overall well being. And for me, there's a lot of work that that can be done there. And it's, you know, and it's not to say, and I think you helped me think about how there are some things that are experiential, right, some things that must be experienced. In juxtaposition to my point about we have to study, but I also think that sometimes study is what you do in communities when you learn from those models that you have for you. I think you study them, right? Not just books or articles or videos or TikTok videos—the educational Tiktok videos—but like you study your models. You study the people who you admire. You know my mentor who I talked about earlier, Dr. Perry, she often... So, for instance, I was applying for when I was graduating from my PhD, I told I want a tenure track job. And she was like,"Well, baby, you only got two publications. We need to grind, we need, we need to get your publications out like we need to... So so you and I are going to spend every Friday finishing a manuscript.""And we're gonna get them under review. We need

Dr. Kia DH:

[laughter] Mhmm. them under review." And like spending that time, because she had a knowledge about what the job I was going into required. But she didn't send me off into the world and was like, "Go get some articles published." She was saying, "I'm going to sit with you. I'm going to co-author with you. I'm going to write with you. I'm going to add you on my papers. I'm going to let you finish sections of papers, because I know that I need to invest in your future in this way," right? And by the end of my doctoral journey, I was offered a tenure track job, right, at a university. And I did graduate from my PhD program with seven, eight, or nine publications. But the the work of that was her recognizing what it is I said I wanted to do. She wasn't making me into who she wanted me to be. She was helping me fulfill whatever goal it was. I like, even now, you know, I tell her often, like, "Doc, I'm trying to leave the academy. I'm sick of this shit. Like they got me fucked up in the academy. I gotta get up out of here, like they really got me fucked up." Um, and I'll be, "I gotta get up out of here." She'd be like,"Well, you got to figure out what's next. So get with me, and let's think about, you know what you what do you want to do? Do you want to run a center? Do you want to open a school? Do you want to start a business? What you trying to do?" In the same way that she did for me when I told her I wanted to follow in her footsteps and get a tenure track job. So I think that for me is something that we can learn from. That's something we can work with, right?

Aaron Grayson:

Yeah.

Dr. Tez Files:

So I appreciate that.

Aaron Grayson:

I love that you said one of the things that was coming up for me when you were talking about these articles, you heard me go, Mmm, and I was about to say, "Won't she do it," you know, you know. Thinking about, you know, thinking about the role of, I mean, you know, I'm even thinking about the, you know, the relationship between me and Kia has changed over time where it was very much auntie-nephew, right? And thinking about, you know, it was that, before it was it was bestie-bestie, right? And also how I thought about the ways that I'm thinking, firstly about how we were defining mothering as and how you define mothering as the as the opposite of exploitation, right? And also, the thing that was that I kept thinking about is how Black women, in particular, who take that role of of mother in any kind of way are often pouring out so much with with little social expectation of being, you know

Dr. Tez Files:

Given anything

Aaron Grayson:

Pour... yeah, pouring back into the cup, right? Which, you know, is something that I've grown increasingly curious about within myself as a cisgender man. How... and you know, me and Kia have talked about this too, particularly in this time where men are being radicalized into or out of community. Radicalized into

Dr. Tez Files:

Manos...

Aaron Grayson:

You know, manosphere, masculine energy, all this, right? How do we reclaim our, really, our birthright to mother others, right? Including Black women. You know, thinking about that, it's a question I've I've asked myself, but I'm also posing it to you. How...

Dr. Kia DH:

Yeah, cause we're tired.

Aaron Grayson:

I picked up that much. I picked up that much. And I'm, you know, how you know, what does that look like, I guess, in terms of your your personal... What am I trying to say? What does mothering look like to you in terms of giving back to you, know, some of these mentors and and people that have have invested in you? What does that look like from, from your perspective, in terms of mothering?

Dr. Tez Files:

I mean, so I was raised... My older sister took care of me when I was coming of age and she protected me and fought for me and taught me lessons and gave me places to stay when I didn't have places to stay. But she had my first nephew in 2010 but she gave birth to a second child. She said, "Chanson doesn't want to stay with me anymore. I'm hurt by it, but I'm going to respect his wishes." And she said, "You know, I don't know what to do." I said, "I'll take him. He can come stay with me." And and I remember this moment where she was overwhelmed by the emotion of the offer, and I told her,"No, I'm serious." And in January, this was like November when she told me this, and in January, January first, I went and got him and he came to live with me in Pittsburgh. And I enrolled him in school and now I'm raising him after having already, you know, my children are already raised and I don't have to, like, all I have to do is send them a little money every blue moon if they get broke or if they get a ticket or some shit. So now I have a 14 year old, and I have to care about did he do his homework and, um, make sure he eats every day, and that he brushes his teeth and take his bath, etc. But it's me understanding that someone who poured into me was deserving of reprieve and a person that she loved was deserving of a kind of autonomy. He did get to decide who he wanted to live with, if he if he couldn't handle that or he didn't want to be there, he shouldn't be forced to be and she also shouldn't suffer. And so what is it someone who cares about her to relieve some of her suffering? And so that for me is what it looks like when you are committed. You know, I raised a lot of boys. I've mentored a lot of boys. And straight Black boys like cishet, Black... I raised cishet Black boys but they grew up, they grew up around queer and trans people.

Aaron Grayson:

Mmm.

Dr. Tez Files:

They... my boys grew up around queer and trans people. They grew up around queer and trans mentors. They grew up in communities with queer and trans people. My boys know how to be in, although they are cishet, know how to be in space with queer and trans people without sexualizing them, without being violent to them, without being disrespectful to them, erasing who they are. And that shit took a kind of mothering ethic. It took a kind of care practice. But it also took me being in a lot of ways no nonsense that I had learned from the folks who had mothered to me. Like, No, you not gonna be violent. No, you not finna, no, you're not finna put the work on this woman. No, every femme is not gonna set the table. Everybody they not washing dishes. They not finna cook and wash dishes. They not finna cook, wash dishes, and take out the trash. They not finna be subject to your, you know, heterosexist jokes

Aaron Grayson:

Mmhmm.

Dr. Tez Files:

Right? You know, they not going to present themselves in ways that are appeasing to you. All of that, for me, is what it looks like to mother against the violence. To mother against the system that tells young, straight Black boys that they are at war with girls. That there is only a finite amount of sociopolitical attention that could be paid to a demographic of people and that they are the ones who should have it because they are patriarchy's greatest victims, because they are whatever. And that they should be at war with their women, because the women are loose and they're wild and they're uncivilized and they don't obey you. And that you know your woman is to... you know you should have dominion over her, whatever.

Aaron Grayson:

She should submit to you.

Dr. Tez Files:

Right? And so.

Aaron Grayson:

Right, no.

Dr. Tez Files:

The work of being, you know, a Black man who mothers is to eviscerate those ideas in the in the psyche of your children so that they treat people well, and by proxy, other people treat them well. You know, and I think there's a lot of work to be done there, for sure.

Dr. Kia DH:

It's Ubuntu, again, mutually constituting. Mutually reciprocating.

Dr. Tez Files:

Absolutely.

Dr. Kia DH:

That's really beautiful.

Aaron Grayson:

Mmhmm.

Dr. Kia DH:

I actually really love that you brought up the dimension of relationship that's about sort of rendering Black women ratchet in the negative sense, as a way to dehumanize us. And that's actually at the heart of the sort of the ethic of why we decided to do 'Ratchet Roundtable' and this like reclaiming of ratchet as a way to exert power. And I think this does bring us right back to your friends. Like it brings us right back to your friends.

Dr. Tez Files:

Ahh.

Dr. Kia DH:

Ahh.

Aaron Grayson:

[laughter]

Dr. Kia DH:

Yeah, it does. I think this is so powerful and beautiful and beautiful.

Dr. Tez Files:

Thank you both for creating a venue like this and for facilitating conversations that look like this. Too much of podcast culture has become, I hate Black men, I hate Black women. I hate da da da. I hate gay people. I hate, whoever. Without a reckoning with what this world is, a glimpse of what it could be, what needs to end in order for those worlds to come in to be, right?

Dr. Kia DH:

Yeah, let go, let it go. Let it go.

Dr. Tez Files:

Let that shit go.

Dr. Kia DH:

Let it go. And I think, I think that's it, it's, so much nicer on the other side of the gauntlet of really facing yourself and facing... I think so much of so much of what we have to pay attention to is systemic, institutional, right? We did not make the world we were born into. We inherited all this bullshit, and we've done our best to figure out how to survive. And if we want to be free, then we also have to... It's like people talk about killing the cop inside of you. Like we have to look at the the beliefs and the practices and the stories that we have internalized. And there is a kind of, I really do think about apocalypse in this context. Because there's this way that we have to go deep and go dark and go quiet and go into hell and go into death and be ready to sort of traverse that so that we can come back to ourselves, right? There's this this self that you become out of survival which is completely understandable and then you realize you're in your own way, right? And it's so much nicer on the other side of... It's not a one time journey, just like thriving is not a destination where you're like,"Oh good, I'm thriving...

Aaron Grayson:

I'm thriving.

Dr. Kia DH:

And now everything's wonderful all the time, and there's no pain." But like those journeys through um, it's like leave it's letting yourself go and reclaiming yourself in like a like, in a deepening spiral to the core. It's so much nicer on the other side of that, because on the other side of that are your friends who get out of the car and twerk in the traffic. On the other side of that are, you know, those moments of knowing.

Dr. Tez Files:

And they do it in spite of what they know this world is, right? So, for instance, we know what this world so... This is one of the things that... a conversation I recently had with some of my friends who are doing joy work. You know, it's not a uncritical joy, right? It's not a "I don't know what this world is" joy. It's not a, on the plantation, for instance, this is a read on the plantation, for instance, there might have been moments to steal joy and be critical that you are still on a plantation. And there are some ways that folks will portray that and say, white folks in particular, used to say, "Look how happy my slaves are. They're singing songs, they're dancing." They're making a kind of happy, darky.

Aaron Grayson:

Mmm.

Dr. Tez Files:

That is, that is not what we promote here. We promote a kind of critical engagement with this world that forces you to resist the violent social order. Right? When you steal joy, you steal joy in spite of the violent social order. When you when you take when you take back your time, take back your space, take back your energy, take back your heart force, your love, force all of those things it is to, it is to damn the world as it is, not to elevate.

Dr. Kia DH:

Shame the devil.

Dr. Tez Files:

Right? And so I just, I appreciate people who are who have a kind of surgical precision in understanding that. That are, to your point about how that that suffering and that survival has made us into someone, but made us into someone who might get in our own way, because we're always in survival mode, right? But we do have to move beyond. And moving beyond means letting go some of those things, to Toni Morrison's point, that weigh you down. Giving up shit that weighs you down.

Dr. Kia DH:

And I think moving beyond requires moving through, and that has to happen in community. That is we are on our journey together. We can't do it in isolation. We do it through love, love, love, love, love, love. It's always the answer. And sometimes love is, you know, accountability. Sometimes love is the call out, sometimes it's the call in, sometimes it's the loss that teaches us a lesson. But it's always, it's always going to be love.

Aaron Grayson:

Yeah, I'm thinking about this is this is making me think about what. I mean all, all of this, all this is making me think about what is, what is possible when we see so much beamed to our phones and to social media about about what we're losing. You know, I guess my question to you is, what, what are, what are you excited about? What are you, what are you excited about in terms of what you're building that you see as possible?

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah. I mean, I am excited that right now I am doing work with students who are engaged in activism. Students who are resisting genocide in Gaza. Students who are calling out virulent anti-Blackness as they see it manifesting in all the ways that it manifests. I am also very excited about the creatives who are making, designing, building everything that we knew could be built for us. I'm excited about good music, people who are cooking good food.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yes, please.

Dr. Tez Files:

I have, you know, and I've been surrounded too. I have a friend, Preston Anderson, who is studying like chaos pedagogies, or like pedagogies of imprisoned children, and like

Aaron Grayson:

Me and Kia both looking like, wait, chaos pedagogy?

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah, like he's doing work with

Aaron Grayson:

Please say more, yeah.

Dr. Tez Files:

Yeah he's doing work with imprisoned children. And he has worked with them for a while. And he is fascinated by how even when they are angry with each other, they come together to resist their imprisonment and their containment. How they make sense of their en... their their enclosure, their imprisonment, their contain... How they make sense of it. But they are always at war with it. They are always struggling to break down the walls, break down the system, and they never take a day off from doing that. They never take a day off from breaking down the walls of the jail. And he often talks about how the people who run the jail are terrorized by it. But how it it excites him, because he sees in them a kind of fearless resistance to their control, right? And how there is something to learn from the chaos of it all. The resistance of it all. The never ending liberatory...

Aaron Grayson:

The refusal.

Dr. Tez Files:

The refusal, right. And I'm excited by thinking with him, studying with him, and doing work with him, but also by people who are doing that in on multiple ways, on multiple fronts, right? With our air, with our food, with our land.

Aaron Grayson:

Yeah.

Dr. Tez Files:

Community and classrooms and, you know, in churches and mosques and, you know, wherever we are.

Aaron Grayson:

Yup.

Dr. Tez Files:

That work is important, so that's what's exciting me right now.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yes, yes, that's exciting me too. I can't wait to check out Preston's work. Refusal is at the heart of my thriving framework. Defiance is at the heart of it, and that's why.

Dr. Tez Files:

It has to be.

Dr. Kia DH:

It has to be and those babies deserve to thrive, they shouldn't be incarcerated. We know that. So what drives the work? I really appreciate you giving us so much time today and I hope that you'll come and be in another conversation. I'm opening a community, a digital community, and it would be so nice if you would come and

Dr. Tez Files:

Invite me. You know I'm coming. I'll show up for you. Of course.

Dr. Kia DH:

Thank you.

Dr. Tez Files:

Of course.

Dr. Kia DH:

Okay, well, so it's only it's not, it's not, it's uh, see you later, not goodbye.

Dr. Tez Files:

I want to ask y'all one more though.

Dr. Kia DH:

It's okay, come on.

Aaron Grayson:

Go for it.

Dr. Tez Files:

What song do you have on repeat that you cannot cut off right now? What, what are you playing over and over and over and over and over again and you can't cut.

Dr. Kia DH:

'Nissan Altima,' Doechii.

Dr. Tez Files:

'Nissan Altima' by Doechii, when I tell you that shit goes so hard.

Aaron Grayson:

Let's go.

Dr. Tez Files:

It's, it's too good. It's too good. It's too good.

Dr. Kia DH:

Oh. And there's also a version of 'Pink + White' that I have but it's sped up, that I can't stop listening to. Let me find out who let me when Aaron

Aaron Grayson:

I know what you're talking about.

Dr. Kia DH:

It's I can't I mean, I love that song, but I can't stop listening to this. Yeah, okay.

Aaron Grayson:

Okay, let me see I'm looking through, I'm looking through my playlist right now. I listen to all types of stuff.

Dr. Kia DH:

Tez, are you on Apple Music?

Dr. Tez Files:

No, I'm not, but you can send me. I have a I have an iPad.

Dr. Kia DH:

Okay, okay.

Dr. Tez Files:

Thing, and I'll be able to, I'll have it on my iPad.

Dr. Kia DH:

I'm going to send you a playlist.

Dr. Tez Files:

Please.

Aaron Grayson:

The playlist that you sent me, Kia, that was.

Dr. Tez Files:

Y'all gotta have a playlist for the podcast. Like, it has to be a ratchet playlist.

Aaron Grayson:

Okay.

Dr. Kia DH:

This is, yes.

Aaron Grayson:

Yep, yep.

Dr. Kia DH:

This is why we asked the question.

Aaron Grayson:

Truly, I've got, I've got two. There's one that I keep coming back to, which is'Waves' by Miguel. Miguel is one of my favorite artists. So that and, you know, I'd be, I'd be liking my pop. I'd be like my, my pop sugar cubes. There's a, there's an artist from the UK. Her name is Griff. I think she's Black and Asian. She has a song called 'Last Night's Mascara,' which I, last month that was on repeat.

Dr. Kia DH:

Oh, yes.

Aaron Grayson:

Man, yeah. That's a that's one of my favorites. Absolutely.

Dr. Tez Files:

I love it. So I have been playing 'Big in Texas,' Megan Thee Stallion, over and over. Love 'Big in Texas.' But I've also been listening to '30 for 30' by SZA featuring Kendrick Lamar.

Aaron Grayson:

Going on the playlist.

Dr. Tez Files:

Like that, '30 for 30' is so good. Like SZA eats everything she do. I love. Chef's kiss.

Dr. Kia DH:

Truly, truly, truly.

Aaron Grayson:

We still gotta see 'One of Them Days.'

Dr. Kia DH:

I haven't heard that. Oh, yes, oh.

Aaron Grayson:

I haven't seen it yet. I need to see it.

Dr. Tez Files:

That's blasphemous. You haven't really see 'One of Them Days'?

Aaron Grayson:

'One of Them Days'

Dr. Tez Files:

Aren't y'all in California too? Aren't y'all in California?

Aaron Grayson:

I know. No, I'm messing up. I'm messing up, for sure, I gotta get on it.

Dr. Tez Files:

Oh, my God. So, yes, that film was stunning. They filmed it in 20 days. It was stunning, brilliant, excellent, writing. Funny. At first, I was telling folks it's kind of like 'Friday,' but it was making people mad, and it was getting their expectations too high up. So I was started saying, Well, it's kind of like'How High,' or it's kind of like. I had to lower the so that people wouldn't be

Aaron Grayson:

But it, but it was meeting the expectations. They came back, and probably was like.

Dr. Tez Files:

It was so funny. So, yeah, you're gonna love it.

Dr. Kia DH:

Okay, we gon watch it. I have not had good work life balance recently, but it's for a good reason. It's because we've been launching this podcast. It's because I'm building that community. It's because I'm trying to be in my purpose and

Dr. Tez Files:

So excited.

Aaron Grayson:

Sho nuff.

Dr. Kia DH:

We're getting there. I'm so happy that you were our first guest on this podcast.

Aaron Grayson:

For real, for real.

Dr. Tez Files:

Like, I'm blown away. Like I'm like honored. Like, super honored. And this podcast is about to take off. It's going to the stars and beyond. It is brilliant. You both are brilliant and amazing, and I'm so honored that you had me. Thank y'all so much.

Dr. Kia DH:

Thank you.

Aaron Grayson:

Appreciate you. Thank you for being here for real. It's been a pleasure.

Dr. Kia DH:

This was such a fun and inspiring episode. Tez invoked Megan Thee Stallion, mothering, other mothering, twerking in traffic, and just so much about pleasure and relief and the incredible power of community existing abundantly and simply put, thriving.

Aaron Grayson:

Yes, I think I would characterize Dr. Tez's approach to life and work as inherently disruptive.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yeah.

Aaron Grayson:

If you will, essentially ratchet. He invited us, I think, to grapple with still being on a plantation of sorts, having to acknowledge the violent social order while still resisting it. And in doing so, stealing back our joy, time, space, energy, our love force. There's so much here. There's so much here.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yeah, he really took us to school. But it was like the best field trip ever. Or, like, not school, but just being at your friend's house chilling on a Saturday. There was just really a lot going on.

Aaron Grayson:

Yes, yes, it's giving Ms. Frizzle. It's wonderful, to be clear. I agree. I absolutely agree. Anyways, there's so much to love about our conversation, so let us know what you notice, and you can comment on YouTube.

Dr. Kia DH:

Yes, this has been Ratchet Roundtable with Aaron and Dr Kia. Stay loud, stay free.

Head Shot

Aaron Grayson

Host
Head Shot

Dr. Kia DH

Host