State of the Human: Gathering

What do we gain from gathering? In this episode, we’re thinking about how coming together can change us. We’ll hear about a citizen-led clean-up movement in India, a Bay Area artist who forms an unlikely friendship with a church in Colorado, and a student who experiences the power of connection at a living museum on Stanford campus.

Transcript for Gathering (Full Episode)

Richard Neville: [00:00:00] So I remember driving out there in the morning with a thermos of coffee. As soon as we, we pulled in, there was this gravel road and trees all around us and there was a car stopped and people were out with binoculars looking, and there was just these kind of walls of forest on either side of us and birds are just moving.

They fill the sky, you know, my heart moved into my throat. 

Aparna Verma: That's Richard Neville, deputy director of the Stanford Earth Systems Program and an avid birder. At the beginning of this year, he drove down to the Merced National Wildlife Refuge in California, central Valley. He went to witness one of the most unique bird gatherings on the planet.

Richard Neville: They, they seem to me all like, almost like these gauzy sheets moving at low elevation across the sky. I hear them calling. It just is the wildest, most gorgeous sound as the first waves of geese move over me. And I heard them honking. It just took me, I was just, I felt like it was a little boy again, looking up at the geese for the very first time

Aparna Verma: every year, tens of thousands of geese like snow and Ross's geese stop midway on their migration from northern Mexico to the arctic tundra. It's the biggest gathering of these birds during the winter in the world. 

Richard Neville: When you see an individual bird, you, you focus on the bird's features. You focus on the patterns of feathers and the way that individual bird moves.

When you see a flock of birds, you see the way they interact as though they're individual molecules in a stream of water moving. They're a part of a larger hole, they're part of a tapestry.

Aparna Verma: Biologists don't yet fully understand [00:02:00] all the reasons why these snow geese come together in such huge flocks. But they do know that this phenomenon is incredibly common in the animal kingdom, wolves, elephants, and even insects like midges herd together. But why? Well, one possible reason could be that an individual in a group is less susceptible to predators than when it's alone.

It really comes down to a thing called energetics, which basically just means that information about your surroundings gets to you faster if you are in a group. 

Richard Neville: You can analyze it from a cold hearted, Darwinian evolutionary perspective about how it helps them to be more successful at looting looting predators. But it also just much more joyful experience. 

Aparna Verma: Richard had seen the birds before, individually, or moving in small groups, but seeing them all come together in these numbers was different. 

Richard Neville: The dominant feature becomes the collective. It just feels like this orchestra of birds, seeing them in relationship to one another, in relation to one another is what's so overwhelming.

We're much more powerful when we are in, in an assembly. There is a, a, a collective power that emerges.

Aparna Verma: This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode we take a common human experience like solitude or giving or lying, and we bring you stories that explore and deepen our understanding of that experience. My name is Aparna Verma, and in this episode we're looking at gathering.

Gathering is a universal [00:04:00] experience for animals and humans. When we are together, we can keep each other safe, look out for one another, survive. Like the geese that Richard observed hundreds of thousands of years ago, one early human in the wild was less likely to survive than a group of humans who hunted together and took care of each other.

Our gatherings today don't look like they used to. We can go to the grocery store to get food on our own. We can live alone in apartments without worrying about being mauled by a lion. We can physically survive on our own. And yet we still feel a deep need to be with other people. Even now in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, while most of us are self isolating at home, we're creating new ways to gather.

We've been coming together online to celebrate milestones, holidays, and even to grieve.

Our current situation has given us a new lens to understand the act of gathering. We often hear that we're stronger together or that we're more than the sum of our parts when we come together in person. If that's true, what are we gaining when we gather? How does gathering change us?

In this episode, we'll look at stories from before the pandemic. To discover what emerges. When we gather, we're looking beyond just our basic needs and survival as a species from people coming together to collect trash or to bash artwork, or to take a mic and start a movement. We'll see that gathering is more than just about survival.

It's about living.[00:06:00] 

When we gather with other people, we take cues from them, even if it's subconscious. We're constantly looking and listening to others to figure out what we should be doing. A lot of times it's for small things like deciding whether you should give someone a handshake or a hug. But there are times when taking cues from others compels us to take action.

That's what our producer Tanvi Dutta Gupta witnessed when she became a part of an anonymous group dedicated to cleaning up littered streets in India. DVI has spent much of her life moving from place to place, and lately she's been wondering, how do you take care of a place you don't fully belong to? How do you become a part of it and what do you gain in doing so?

Tanvi Dutta Gupta: A few days after my 18th birthday, I decided to ask my parents a question. It was a Sunday. We were all having lunch together at home in Singapore, and I turned to my mother and said, I am 18 now, so I'm an adult. How do I vote?

For a lot of people, registering to vote is a fairly simple act. Fill out a form, choose a party, show up to vote in person on election day. But for me and my family, it's a bit more complicated. I was born in Singapore. My family and I have lived in Singapore for the last 11 years. I graduated high school here, but my family and I, we're Indian.

And whenever I'm handed a form beneath citizenship my [00:08:00] whole life, I have printed I and DIA and Indian in neat block letters until my 18th birthday. I had just never thought about what that meant, but once I started thinking about voting, I realized I couldn't avoid one question, a question I'd kind of been running from my entire life.

How could I be an Indian citizen if I didn't live there? What responsibilities did I have? I thought voting was an easy solution, but after I asked my parents, they looked at each other across the table, sighing. My father explained that practically I could register as a voter, but I was unlikely to ever actually cast a ballot to do that, I would need to actually be in India during an election, and given the fact our family lived in Singapore, that I was about to go to college in the US and that we only went to India twice a year, that was unlikely to happen.

I haven't had a chance to vote in over a decade, my mother said. My father said the same thing. I didn't have a response. I was disappointed, sad, confused. All of a sudden, my chance to prove I had the rights of a citizen had vanished.

I want to belong to India. India means something to me. It's something about the colossal diversity of it all and the promise of the country, this messy divided failing nation to hold it. I want to be able to say that I made [00:10:00] a little bit of this better. I want to come back and live and work here eventually. I can't see myself anywhere else, but until then, how could I be a citizen? Of India at all. A few months ago, I encountered a movement called the Ugly Indian that forced me to reorient the question. Maybe I was getting it wrong. Maybe democracy, citizenship, responsibility didn't always have to look the ways I thought it did.

A couple years ago you were driving under an overpass, about half between the airport and Bangalore, a city in South India and our house there. I know this overpass well, I know this drive well. We do it more than four times a year back and forth. Every time my family visits Bangalore. Bangalore is the place I've spent the most time in India.

I don't really feel connected to this place, if I'm being honest. I know that overpass on the way from the airport better than I know the city's landmarks. But a couple years ago, even the overpass shocked me. I gasped when I saw it. I was used to the messy pillars, the piles of trash on the dirty ground in between the urine stains on the wall, the movie posters all torn up, but none of that was there. The ground was clean. There were even a few plants growing in neat lines, and the pillars were painted bright colors, blue and yellow in gorgeous geometric patterns. Oh, my [00:12:00] mother said, That must be the ugly Indian. When we reached home, I got her to tell me more about it. The ugly Indian wasn't an organization more movement or an idea.

They did anonymous citizen-led cleanups of dirty places around Bangalore. In many ways in many places, the ugly Indian had changed the city, all in unique partnership with the municipal government.

It's not much of a secret that Bangalore today is a mess. It's growing way too quickly. The growth is far more than the government can play Catch up with. 1000 new people arrive every day and strain the already collapsing infrastructure. There is no waste disposal system. There is no reliable water supply.

Zoning is a joke, so trash is everywhere, but people actually picking it up. I'd never seen that. I had to learn more. Last winter, I went to talk to a friend Kumar, who'd been a part of the ugly Indian. I wanted to ask him about the movement. The Ugly Indian was a kind of active citizenship I had never seen before.

One of the few places I do know well in Bangalore is called Church Street. My favorite bookstore is there, so I go there Every time I go to Bangalore, it's a short street, but it has some of the most popular places in the city. I take the subway there and the exit opens right onto the street onto a beautiful, colorful mural painted by local art school.

But until a few [00:14:00] years ago, beneath the mural, the street itself was not fun. It was basically a dump. I had to walk carefully just to get to the bookstore entrance, picking my way over abandoned trash heaps and construction materials, and I kind of took it for granted. Church Street was just a mess. It was always going to be that way, and you just dealt with it, but not Kumar. Kumar decided to try an experiment first. He and a few friends went and spoke to senior staff at the offices around Church Street. They asked them why the street wasn't clean. 

Kumar: No one really had thought about it. No one had tried to solve it. Everybody without exception had a good answer. It is the government's job. I can't do it. 

Tanvi Dutta Gupta: They realized something, then everyone here had the money and the power to keep the street clean.

They just weren't. And if even here with all this money and power and influence, the streets still wasn't clean. There was clearly a bigger problem. It had something to do with the attitudes of people like me, something intrinsic to India. They came up with a name for this attitude, this idea that I saw the dirtiest parts of the city and just sighed and walked on that sometimes I littered and didn't give it a second thought. They called this attitude the ugly Indian.

Kumar: The idea of the ugly Indian is to accept that we, Indians are ugly. Not in the way we look, but in the way we behave, and only we can solve it. 

Tanvi Dutta Gupta: They went back to Church Street to see what they could do. 

Kumar: So we sat for one entire night at a particular corner. This happened to be outside the Office of Times of India [00:16:00] and Wipro, which is India's second largest software company.

And, uh, we just, three of us sat in shifts and we said, let's just watch it for 24 hours before we even conclude why the problem occurs. What we saw in 24 hours shocked us. It had nothing to do with what people had alleged was the problem. We discovered through simple observation, who was dumping garbage there, why they were dumping.

We went and met them and figured out could we find an alternative for them to not do that. And within a couple of days, uh, everyone began changing their behavior towards that space because somebody was watching. And then we spent a day and spruced up the place, painted it, gave it a facelift, uh, made it look really pretty using our own hands and voila, in three days. Uh, a problem of many years was solved. 

Tanvi Dutta Gupta: They didn't know it at the time, but this became the start of something big. This idea of simply showing up, observing the problem, and then cleaning up a spot became known as a spot fix. And with that first Church Street spot fix, they realized something revelatory.

Kumar: In India, uh, you don't specifically need permission to do many things. Nobody stops you if your intent is to do something good.

Tanvi Dutta Gupta: What they realized was that if the governments stood by and let you litter, that also meant that the government should let you clean up. If you felt brazen enough to break the laws, you could be just as brazen in protecting them. You had a right to clean things up. If you could violate laws with impunity, you could also fix things with impunity.

This amazed me. It was so simple, but according to Kumar, I didn't have to wait for the formalized channels to vote to complain. This is a democracy, which means everyone has a piece of it, which means you can just start. Church Street was the [00:18:00] first spot fixed that the ugly Indian organized. They started picking places to solve and made a Facebook page they posted, asking people to join them and help clean up.

It surprised them at first that. People turned up, they took down illegal posters and bagged trash. They painted walls. They mucked out drains, and they started posting pictures of the transformations of the spots they worked on. The motto of the ugly Indian became, shut your mouth, do the work, come.

Bangaloreans, people like me marveled at the change in places formally recognized as some of the most filthy of the city. People started asking who was behind it all, but volunteers refused to name themselves to reporters or even government officials who came asking. The anonymity surprised me at first, after all, what was the point of not identifying random people?

But Kumar explained how important it was. Kumar is a pseudonym too, by the way. He asked me to use one because the principles guiding the ugly Indian lie at the core of everything it does. 

Kumar: The three tenets on which the whole movement has ended up resting is one, is, uh, stay anonymous. Uh, in India, the moment you take credit, people suspect that, uh, you may have an agenda, which could be political.

The other thing is use your own money and time. Do what you can within your means. You'll be surprised that once you start, others join in. So stay anonymous. Take nobody's money, keep your mouth shut. These are the three guidelines, and the fourth one is always work with the government. 

Tanvi Dutta Gupta: That fourth principle surprised me the most. I thought this seemed like gorilla activism, working around the government doing stuff [00:20:00] with no technical approval, but also no technical disapproval. But the ugly Indian and the government actually signed a non-financial consulting agreement to become formal partners. The agreements held for eight years now that together the ugly Indian and the government will work to help keep Bangalore clean.

Kumar: If we just think five years back, the role of the citizen was to complain and say, Mr. Government or Mrs. Government, why haven't you done what you did? Today a citizen is can say, can I help you solve it? Because the problems are so overwhelming at times, at some localities, if everyone pulls together, maybe we can solve it.

Tanvi Dutta Gupta: The ugly Indian found a way of non formalized action that meant you could do something for the government even if you weren't a part of it. Or even if you couldn't participate in one of their formalized channels, if you couldn't vote, if you weren't from there, there was still a way to be a citizen grounded in this place and its systems.

Kumar: Can you make an impact where you are? It doesn't matter which city you are in the world, but can you as a person make an impact on where you are, you know, as a citizen of, of the world? If you can make a contribution to the area you are in, uh, you have achieved something. If I could give one minute per day of my time to help my city, what could it be?

And if all of us did that, wouldn't that be great? 

Tanvi Dutta Gupta: I went for an ugly Indian organized spot fix. The day after I talked to Kumar, he told me about it after the interview had finished and early the next morning, I took a cab to the middle of the city. The spot fix ended up being easy to find. Kumar had just told me to look for the trash bags.

I found them in a big pile [00:22:00] next to some trees by the side of a bustling street. Someone saw me looking at them and asked, are you here for the ugly Indian? I nodded. They handed me a mask and gloves and told me to get to work That day. We were cleaning up all the trash people had thrown around the trees.

There were scraps of plastic in every possible color, stray slippers, food containers, fabric from everything from traditional dresses to canvas sacks. I dragged a bag over and put on gloves. I gathered great fistfuls of the trash and put them in the bag, and after a while I forgot to hold my breath.

As I pulled apart a tree root from a plastic bag, I wondered how many times had I walked past something like this? How many times had I decided this wasn't my problem, that this issue didn't belong to me too? I thought about the other kinds of ugly things I'd ignored before. Poverty, inequity, castism, racism, religious discrimination, all the problems India has in part, created, in part adopted, in part, been forced into.

I didn't know the people I worked with at the Spot Fix. Honestly, I'll probably never see them again, but for those brief moments, we cleaned, pulled out metal, worked to shift a particularly stubborn piece of trash, together. A couple people stopped during the spot fix to ask what we were doing. A policeman first to ask if we had permission. When we explained though, he smiled and said, good job. When I asked people at the spot fix how often [00:24:00] passerby stopped, they told me it happened all the time, and often at the end of conversation, the passerby is joined in. It didn't matter where they were from or who they were. They saw something useful being done and decided to help.

They decided we were all in the same place. We all lived on this land, so we had a responsibility towards it. We had a responsibility to try and make it the best place we could. That's not formalized or legally required, but that's a kind of citizenship. It's a kind of way of making the country ours. All of the country the good, the bad, and especially the ugly.

Aparna Verma: That story was produced by Tanvi Dutta Gupta. The ugly Indian is a movement of people coming together to clean up bun lore with a hope of creating a shared sense of responsibility among all of the city's residents. Sometimes though, what unites people is a cause to rally against not for. So what happens when that gathering is against you?

In our next story, producer Regina ta speaks with Enrique Shaya, an artist and professor at Stanford. He studied economics in Mexico City before moving to the Bay Area where he studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Through Art Professor Shaya has found a way to forge common ground in places he never thought possible.

In 2002, when the Boston Globe broke a story about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, Shaya had to respond in the form he knew best, art.[00:26:00] 

A year later, he created a collage mixing provocative images from comic cartoons with religious icons to protest the Catholic church's abuse scandals. The piece generated a lot of headlines, but it also testified to the power of art to spark dialogue and bring people together often in unexpected ways.

Enrique Chagoya: My father was an artist who never make a living as an artist, and I used to bother him asking him to draw things for me, like to draw any animal, and I was in awe to see how his hands were like magic, and something suddenly out of his hand came up. You know, a dog or an airplane. When he got tired of me asking him, every time he just told me, I'm gonna show you how you do it yourself.

So he will stop bugging me. So he taught me how to sketch and he taught me color theory when I was about seven years old, and that was the best thing he did for me.

He study art, but his, his job was to catch forgers in the working for the Central Bank in Mexico City. When I first went to his office, he had a Museum of Forgeries with the money bill right next to the etching plates and the tools that the artists used to make identical replicas of money bills. And he had money that had been forged from the US I mean, US dollars.

There was, uh, a at the [00:28:00] time, francs from, uh, France, money from Latin America, Moroccan money as well.

And I was with my mouth open, how skillful those artists were to make identical copies of actual money.

That experience when I, when you're 10 years old and you're exposed to the stories from your dad, the Museum of Crime in his, in his office, you're stuck with it. So I never stopped making art.

When my first teaching experience be besides start teaching in college was teaching art class at the San Francisco County Jail, and my students were amazing. They were mostly African American and, and, and in people of color from Mexico, Latin American backgrounds. And I never talked to them about what crimes they did or anything. It didn't matter to me. They were just really good artists and they, they were very kind, very, very sensitive.

The first exhibition I did at Galleria De La Raza in San Francisco was from this group of people. I decided to do an exhibition of their work, and I talked to the sheriff, uh, at the time, sheriff Hennessy, and he was open to let the, the students out of prison to come to their own, opening their own reception at the Galleria De La Raza.

And they came, they came with deputies anyway, but still they were happy to see their artwork in a gallery, in the mission. And many of these people used to live in the mission too. So, um, that made me feel so happy. For the first time I realized that, uh [00:30:00] many people have more chances to go to, to prison than to go to, to school, and most of these people didn't have any other chances. I, I was deeply touched, uh, by those students.

In 2002 I first read an, an article in the Boston Globe where there was the first big denounce of the Catholic priest that had been sexually uh, assaulting children. I was very impacted by it because I have known people, uh, people close to me, friends who had been victims of sexual abuse when they were children, and I felt like I needed to do something about it.

So I decided to make a collage. This is called the Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals, and it's in a pre-Colombian book format, and I decided to express the corruption of the spiritual by mixing images of soft porn, pornographic images in comic books that I found in the streets in Mexico, mixing those images with religious icons throughout the whole book.

And I felt it looked kind of funny, but critical about the, the abuse of children and nuns by the Catholic Church. Well, the context in which this book was exhibit made a a difference. Where did I exhibit this book and when?

When I first began to show this book, it went from many places in the Bay Area. Nobody complained, nobody say a word [00:32:00] about it, but in a small town in Colorado in 2010 in Loveland. The Loveland Museum organized an exhibition. It was an exhibition called Border Landia, and a local chapter of the Tea Party decided to protest the exhibition.

So there was a picket line suddenly with religious groups saying that my art was pornography, that that was not art. Uh, they didn't want the taxpayers pay for pornography in the museum. It made it to Fox News. In Fox News, they say, uh, Stanford professor portrays, uh, Jesus having sex.

And then I began to get hate mail, tons of hate, mail. Threats, I have to talk to the Stanford police. They, they have to flag my house.

Somebody from Montana who saw the Fox News thing was so enraged because Fox News also produced my work with fuzzy areas, like something like what's going on?

This lady from uh, Montana, eh, who's a truck driver, drove her 18 wheeler all the way from Montana to Colorado. Getting into the museum with a crowbar, destroyed the frame and destroy my book,

and it was all over the news. Again, it got really scary. I didn't want that publicity in the first place. And I guess this person didn't know it was a print. It was not even an original, it was a print. There were 39 other [00:34:00] copies that suddenly became more expensive because now they have a value, eh, right after I have another way of hate mail, more threads.

It was just a really scary experience.

And then I got a pastor, uh, an evangelical pastor who wrote to me and asked me, uh, if I could explain my work to him because his congregation wanted him to join the picket line in the museum, but he was respectful. So I re back to him and I told him what I told you. You know, this book is about protesting the pedophilia. It's not about Jesus. There is no, Jesus. There is a collage and there is no sex. There's no nothing going on. And then he wrote back to me and he told me, thank you for your thoughtful explanation. If you ever come to Loveland, it will be an honor to meet you. And he decided not to join the picket line. He got threats from his own congregation and people walk out from his congregation.

He got also at risk, and we became good friends. One day the pastor asked me, Hey, will you do a painting of Jesus for my church? And I thought, well, I don't know because I'm not religious. And I, I, I wasn't sure it would be, what can I say, acceptable, but I, I say, uh, well, if your congregation takes it from me.

I will ha be happy to do it. I mean, after all, he risked his life and he went back to his congregation, read emails, and the congregation accepted with a standing ovation. They really wanted me to do a painting of Jesus. So I did it.

I thought it would be the most beautiful painting I could do of a resurrection. I researched Mexican Baroque painting. I researched a Dutch painting. I made a blend. I did it, [00:36:00] and they loved it. I thought, well, that's the end of the story. I was happy. No, it was all over the newspapers, you know, um, the, the redemption of Chagoya, whatever.

It was just like, give me a break as if I have done anything wrong. The. Pastor invited me to go there for a reception and that's when I got scared. 'cause I, after so many. Threats. And, and also Colorado has a unfortunate, uh, recent history of having so many shootings, uh, massacres, you know, like Columbine. I mean, people kill you for less.

And I thought they're gonna have a twofer here with the pastor and me in the same place. I went, I, I was afraid, but I went and it was one of the most beautiful experiences I have in my life. The pastors were just very happy to meet me, introduced me to their families. We have a really nice reception.

They found a really nice place for my painting up in the, in the church. They made postcards of it, and until today, we're very good friends. In the other hand, the museum got so many donations from their membership that decided to open a, a studio for printmaking. And I began to get a lot of friendly letters.

No more hate mail, but a lot of very friendly letters, even from victims of, uh, sexual abuse. I began to get very touching letters. At the end, this work created a dialogue, which I did not even imagine could happen. It was a dialogue that went to the outside of the art world, into the the real world.

Art for me is a very good way to make some dialogue and create understanding and friendships where you didn't [00:38:00] even think you could have a friend. I am Enrique Chagoya. I am an artist, and I am a professor in the Department of Art and Art history at Stanford.

Aparna Verma: That story was produced by Regina Ta.

In our last story, we look at the role that gathering plays in the aftermath of a crisis.

In the summer of 2019, a noose was found on campus at Stanford University. After pressure by black students, the university's administration decided to respond to the incident by, among other things, bringing a living museum of Black American history to campus. It's called the Experience Kofa, project producer, Adesuwa Agbonile want to know what she could do to address racism on campus.

What actions could she take to prevent this from ever happening again?

So, of course, she went to experience Kofa, and through her experience, Adesuwa discovered that maybe she was asking the wrong questions.

Adesuwa Agbonile: Right now I'm in a museum. I'm not sure if museum is the right word though, because instead of paintings on a wall or artifacts behind glass, what I'm looking at are real living people and they are looking back at me. All these people are embodiments of different [00:40:00] parts of black history, like there's a blacksmith, rhythmically forging a tool from metal.

I pause for a long time in front of a trembling woman on an auction block waiting to be sold. There's a baby in her arms. I turn a corner and I'm surrounded by a forest of green and in front of me hanging from a branch is a noose. A noose is what brought me to this museum in the first place. Over the summer of 2019, 1 was found hanging in front of a residence hall on Stanford's campus.

Soon after being reported, it was taken down by the police and then nothing until finally, five days later, Stanford's president and Provost addressed the incident with a three paragraph long blog post. This response was not good enough for many, especially for black students and administrators. People wanted the university to take active steps to educate people about America's racist history and to protect black students on campus.

But what was unclear, at least to me, was how the university should do this. What is a university supposed to do after a noose is found on their campus? And I was also thinking, where do I fit into all of this? My family is from Nigeria, so none of my ancestry is connected to the history of lynching in America, but I grew up black in America.

So nooses terrify me because they're a symbol for someone's pure hatred of black people in this country, and that includes me. So how was I supposed to engage with this history [00:42:00] in the present day? What was I supposed to do to make things better. In true university fashion, stanford formed a committee to try and answer these questions for themselves.

I figured they would just host a lecture series and call it a day. They didn't do that. Instead, they brought a living museum of Black American history called the Experience Sankofa Project to Campus, and that's how I found myself in this museum. The Word museum doesn't really do it justice. The Experience Sankofa Project is the only museum I've ever been to where I feel things, physically as I walk through.

As I pass the noose, my fingernails dig into the palms of my hand. When I'm in front of a man silently playing the piano, my heart slows as if I can hear the music he's playing, and I'm not the only one who has such strong reactions to the experience. 

Venus Morris: I had that moment last night, actually, which was really deep.

Adesuwa Agbonile: This is Venus Morris. She's the actor who embodied Harriet Tubman. And she told me a story of a woman who had an even more visceral reaction than me. 

Venus Morris: Um, there was a young lady who was going through, once she got past the auction block and she got to my area, um, she didn't know I was over there, of course, 'cause I'm laying and waiting for everybody to come.

Adesuwa Agbonile: I remember this point in the museum, I heard something rustle, so I turned to see what it was, and right there in front of my face, there was a barrel of a gun. Then a second later, I registered the face behind the gun and it was Harriet. [00:44:00] But when this woman saw the gun and then Harriet, she freaked out.

She turned around to try and go back the way she came 

Venus Morris: and I'm like, she needs to go through period. Ain't no going back. It's not like this is like some, oh, let's go to the museum. No, this isn't that. This isn't that. This is a ritual. This is an experience.

Adesuwa Agbonile: It is this transcendent quality that the Experience Sankofa Project has. That's what drew the Stanford committee to invite them to campus. 

Dericka Blackman: I'm Ika Blackman. I am the assistant Vice Provost and Executive Director of the Inclusion and Diversity Education Office at Stanford. 

Adesuwa Agbonile: She was the one who originally had the idea to bring the museum to Stanford.

Dericka Blackman: There's a spiritual energy to this work. You can feel the actor's commitment to it. The people in this exhibit pray together. They invoke the ancestors together. They sage themselves. This is not like a one-off kind of thing. Some of the people who have been doing this workshop have been doing it for 20 years.

Adesuwa Agbonile: The Experience Sankofa project was created by Mizan bakah and Sizwe Abakah two artists and activists out of Oakland. When I talked to them, they harped on this point that it was a spiritual rather than intellectual experience. It was meant to transform, not just to teach. 

Speaker 10: Coming to, to Stanford was an opportunity to, to help.

There's, there's a call for institutional change and so we knew it like, okay, institutions are made by people. Let's impact the people and help give them an experience that can help transform their lives. So that then when they're making these policies and practices, that that's infused by empathy and understanding and love and kindness, and a real reflection about, um, how we really wanna support human beings being our best.

Adesuwa Agbonile: It's one thing to learn about the history of black people in a textbook. It's an entirely [00:46:00] different thing to be transformed by that history. Walking through the whole exhibit took me maybe five, seven minutes, but it felt like hours. It wrenched my body and my mind, and then I came out.

After coming out of the museum, all participants are led to a debrief room set up and facilitated by the Sankofa project staff. There were two main questions written on the walls for us to consider. The first was, how do you feel? The second was, what are you going to do about it? I thought those were really good questions.

So good that they were basically the exact same questions I asked people afterwards. 

Speaker 11: I think, um, being able to make eye contact and see, um, the humans in the space and like connect with their humanity was extremely powerful and very different than any other experience I've had. 

Adesuwa Agbonile: People kept talking about the gravity and intimacy of having to look the actors in their eyes.

There were at least 15 embodied actors in that space. That's over 30 eyes. Looking at you, forcing you to look back those eyes, they touch you in a way that a book can't to Dericka. They are what make you experience Sankofa. 

Dericka Blackman: People talked, going through this exhibit about not being able to look people in the eyes, but great art humanizes those who have been depicted as less. That's what we wanted is for people to say, oh, slavery is not an abstraction. Here is a human being. Look at him here. Look at the resilience. You just walk around the [00:48:00] corner from slavery and look at the science that's being created, the art, the literature that's being created. 

Adesuwa Agbonile: There is no distancing yourself from someone when you have to just stare at them in silence. You're forced to face them. You are human together. And you understand the other person a little bit better. Even the people on campus that seem the most distant people like Stanford's Provost, Persis Drell to most students, she exists mainly in email headers and Stanford brochures. In fact, she was the co-author of the original blog post that was published days after the noose was found.

I had never talked to her before, but after she went through the exhibit, I caught her. 

Persis Drell: I have three godchildren from Rwanda, and they've been having such a hard time with their experience, and this is gonna help me with my children. I think I need somebody to gimme a hug. Yes, I'll take it from anybody.

Adesuwa Agbonile: Before my provost was just this distant figurehead, but now she was a person. Close to tears who was asking me for a hug, and I gave her one that is the perfect ending to this story. I hug my provost and she hugs me back, and we both recognize each other's humanity because of the spiritual experience we both had.

And then she goes back to her office and finally understands racism, and then the next time something racist happens on campus, she knows exactly what to do. But something about ending it there made me very uneasy, but I couldn't put it into [00:50:00] words. Then I talked to Jeanette Smith Laws.

Jeanette Smith Laws: I probably would not have hugged her.

Adesuwa Agbonile: She's a black administrator who's worked at Stanford for over 35 years. 

Jeanette Smith Laws: And the reason I would not have hugged her is because I would have. Wanted her to understand fully that that's how we feel every day. Every day we feel that way. And for a moment, I would've wanted her to her to hold on to that hurt.

Adesuwa Agbonile: Ms. Jeanette got right to the core of what I was feeling uneasy about, which was all the pain and hurt contained in the exhibit that didn't end in the exhibit, that history of racism can't just be extinguished with a hug. 

Jeanette Smith Laws: And she actually came back. I saw her. I shared with her the fact that I probably would not have hugged her and the reasons why, but I don't think she fully understood what it was I was trying to explain to her.

We will see. 

Adesuwa Agbonile: Remember the two questions that I went around asking everyone? How do you feel and what are you going to do next? People had no problem answering the first one, but the second question, what were they gonna do next? Barely anyone answered that. The thing that Ms. Jeanette was wondering about Provost Drell was the same thing that I was wondering about everybody, most of all myself, which was, what are you actually going to do now that you've experienced the Sankofa project?

How are you actually going to change things?

Sankofa is like a Ghanaian word for go back and get it. So taken literally the Experience Sankofa project is a project in experiencing [00:52:00] what it is like to go back through history and retrieve it and to try and answer my questions. I thought it might be helpful to take a lesson from the Experience Sankofa project, go back into the past and retrieve some lessons for the future.

There was one event in the past that I became particularly fixated on because it had so many parallels to what was happening in the present. That event was Take back the Mic. On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated. Four days later in response, Stanford organized a panel discussion this was before blog posts. The discussion was entitled Stanford's Response to White Racism. All the panelists were white. It's the exact same setup as what happened at the very beginning of this story. So what comes next? In the 1968 version of this story, members of Stanford's Black Student Union halted the panel by crowding onto the stage.

Frank Omo, Satterwhite PhD candidate and BSU member took the microphone from Stanford's provost and read out a list of 10 demands. He literally took back the mic. The demands he read included the university admitting more black students, setting up ethnic community centers, and firing an administrator who was against race-based admissions.

Fast forward 50 years and nearly all of their demands have been implemented today. It's a moment I wanted to replicate. I wanted to take the mic from my provost, not just hug her and call it a day. So I reached out to the person who did the mic taking Dr. Frank Omo Satterwhite. When I got on the phone with [00:54:00] him, I thought all he would want to talk about was take back the mic.

But instead, he kept on bringing up the importance of the volunteer work that the BSU did in East Palo Alto, which is a city right next to Stanford. That was at the time, primarily black. And 

Dr. Frank Omo Satterwhite: when we came to the first BSU meeting, um, during the student orientation period, then we were challenged to volunteer our services in East Palo Alto. And it was through that involvement in the community that black Stanford students built an affinity and a connection to the East Palo Alto community. 

Adesuwa Agbonile: Dr. Satterwhite coordinated a tutoring program for high school students in East Palo Alto. I had imagined Dr. Satterwhite during this time as a leader who always knew exactly what he was doing, but he painted a very different picture.

Dr. Frank Omo Satterwhite: Looking back, looking back, it was an iterative process, not one where I kind of was conscious and said, this is what I need to do. And did it. Uh, uh, up until the, my mid to late forties, I was primarily sitting at the feet or seeking out, uh, others and, uh, I was in a learning mode. 

Adesuwa Agbonile: Most of the 10 demands, even though they were drafted by Dr. Satterwhite, weren't originally his idea, one demand was his idea, the one about firing the administrator, but the rest were crowdsourced from previous demands that had already been made to the administration by other members of the BSU and from East Palo Alto community members. 

Dr. Frank Omo Satterwhite: All the other demands came out of a collective dialogue that had actually happened over the course of the year. It was kind of like a perfect storm. 

Adesuwa Agbonile: In fact, while the story I heard was that the people who took the stage were all BSU students. In reality, a lot of those on stage were actually people who lived and worked in East Palo Alto. [00:56:00] Dr. Satterwhite painted a different picture of take back the mic than the one I had imagined.

It was a story about a community rallying together. He stressed over and over that just being in community is one of the most important tools of activism. And today, Dr. Satterwhite practices what he preaches. Half a century after take back of the mic, he's still living and organizing in East Palo Alto.

During all that time I spent talking to people about experience Sankofa, I kept on coming back to this idea of community. Both because of being inside of the museum and looking into people's eyes, but also because of being outside of the museum afterwards, after the last showing of the museum, I was getting ready to head out when Mizan, the museum's creator said, no, stay for a little.

So I followed her back into the dressing room where all of the embodied actors were all talking and laughing, and then everyone started singing and dancing. I,

they were a family filled with laughter and joy and pure light. It is very easy for me to feel alone. Especially when I'm living thousands of miles away from the family I grew up with as a black woman on a campus where I can sometimes feel like nobody understands why it's scary that a noose was found hanging in a tree.

But that night I felt that if I [00:58:00] spoke out, my pain would be taken up. If I shouted out my joy, it would become everyone's. I was part of a greater whole

At the very beginning of all this, I asked a question, what should I do? But I think that I was asking the wrong question. I wasn't thinking about we. About the ways that I'm connected to people, to communities all around me, and how being able to exist anywhere with people that creates change. While I was putting together this story, naan emailed me to say that Sankofa was getting a permanent installation in Oakland.

She asked how I was. She asked after the story, and I felt very loved, very much a part of something, and I told every single person I knew in the Bay Area about the new installation. I told them, you have to go experience this museum.

I didn't make any change, at least not any big change, but I managed to find my way into a community. I think that's a start. 

Aparna Verma: That story was produced by Adesuwa Agbonile.

You've been listening to Stay of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. This [01:00:00] episode was produced by Regina Tanvi Dutta Gupta, AADE Ag Hannah Scott, Victoria Yuan, Isabella Tilly. Patricia, we, Jenny March, and me Aparna Verma with help from Tiffany Naman and Jonah Willinhganz.

State of the Human is a podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. For the generous financial support, we like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the program in Writing and rhetoric, Stanford Arts and Bruce Braden. You can find this in every episode of Stay of the Human through our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

Thanks for listening.