Last week, Dr. Na'im Akbar gave us the forensics of what was installed. This week, he names what was supposed to be there instead.

In the Introduction, Know Thy Self gives us a definition of consciousness that I had to sit with before I could keep reading.

Consciousness, translated literally, means with knowledge or knowing with others.

It is the internal manifestation of knowledge. Awareness is the distinguishing quality that differentiates between human life that is functional and life that is dysfunctional.

And if you didn’t already know, we have been living very dysfunctionally.

The Introduction also draws a distinction that the rest of the book builds on: the difference between a being (a dog) that is educated and one that is merely trained. The trained one can perform. It can execute. It can serve whoever conditioned it. But it cannot take care of itself. It cannot operate outside the terms of the one who named it and shaped it.

Now, I only had time to do the first Chapter today for very good reason, as you’ll see later. But honestly, I think for this week, this foundational framework was exactly what we needed. Chapter One is where Dr. Akbar names what a genuine education must actually do, starting with identity. He says the name is the first transmission of family, culture, history, and the spiritual qualities a community intends to cultivate in a person. Which is exactly why renaming enslaved Africans was the institution’s first act.

Sever the transmission. Install an alien identity. And now the person belongs not to themselves but to whoever named them.

I talk about my own name in this episode. What it was built from. Why my last name is what it is. What my mother was trying to protect me from when she made the decisions she made; and what those decisions cost me across four decades of trying to figure out who I actually am underneath the program I was handed.

”People can only belong to themselves if their identity is an outgrowth of their history, their culture, their reality, and their survival needs.”
Na’im Akbar, Ph.D.

The theft only makes sense once you know what was taken.

By the time I got to the end of the chapter, I was thinking about my graduate treatise, The Performance of Civility: Exiting Stage Left and sitting with a realization about where the gap between stated values and enacted behavior in American institutions actually comes from. I know that gap is not a failure of implementation. It has a founding document.

Anyway, I recorded this on the eve of my book launch and like much of my journey, the timing was not incidental.

You can learn more and get yours at our.savvywizdoom.com

Reflection Questions for the Week:

1. What was encoded into your name, your language, or your earliest education about who you were supposed to be; and how does that resonate with who you perceive yourself to be now?
2. When did you first encounter a story of resistance that felt like a transmission (rather than a lesson to keep your head down)?
3. Where in your life are you still operating inside someone else’s shared vision (at work, in how you measure success, in relationships), and what would your people’s vision actually require of that space?
5. Akbar says those who carry the cure are accused of carrying the infection. Where are you currently being called the desease for naming the problem?

You can check out the ">video version of this episode on YouTube.

Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Know Thy Self)