Prepare to be enlightened by our conversation with the brilliant Dr. Terrence Green, associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Traverse with us as we uncover his fascinating journey from his humble beginnings in Detroit to becoming an influential academic. Discover how the systems surrounding us, from our geographical location to the resources available, can shape our opportunities and our lives.
We dive deep into the pressing concerns of our modern academic world, discussing connecting education with real life and redefining what it means to be a scholar in this day and age. Unearth how the rise of podcasting has revolutionized the dissemination of ideas, and why it's crucial to think beyond the boundaries of traditional scholarship in order to genuinely engage with our communities. We also share our thoughts on creating impactful content for racial justice and reveal some practical strategies for podcast content production.
But that's not all. We address the need for academics to control their intellectual property and monetize their content, drawing connections to Malcolm X's call for black ownership of community resources. We reflect on the books that have shaped our journeys and share insights on how emotions can guide our reading choices. Lastly, we delve into the importance of supporting black businesses and investing in education. This episode offers a wealth of knowledge, rooted in research and personal experiences, that you can't afford to miss.
Prepare to be enlightened by our conversation with the brilliant Dr. Terrence Green, associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Traverse with us as we uncover his fascinating journey from his humble beginnings in Detroit to becoming an influential academic. Discover how the systems surrounding us, from our geographical location to the resources available, can shape our opportunities and our lives.
We dive deep into the pressing concerns of our modern academic world, discussing connecting education with real life and redefining what it means to be a scholar in this day and age. Unearth how the rise of podcasting has revolutionized the dissemination of ideas, and why it's crucial to think beyond the boundaries of traditional scholarship in order to genuinely engage with our communities. We also share our thoughts on creating impactful content for racial justice and reveal some practical strategies for podcast content production.
But that's not all. We address the need for academics to control their intellectual property and monetize their content, drawing connections to Malcolm X's call for black ownership of community resources. We reflect on the books that have shaped our journeys and share insights on how emotions can guide our reading choices. Lastly, we delve into the importance of supporting black businesses and investing in education. This episode offers a wealth of knowledge, rooted in research and personal experiences, that you can't afford to miss.
Second See the recording on is. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Dr. Green :Did I get a?
Langston Clatk :bad look. Yeah, oh my gosh, beth. I didn't sleep well because I'm bad, but everything was fine.
Dr. Green :You're going to get yourself peeing on the thing with your microphone?
Langston Clatk :You still have your own. You're going to get yourself peeing on the thing with your microphone. You still have your own. You're going to get yourself peeing on the thing with your microphone. You're going to get yourself peeing on the thing with your microphone. You're going to get yourself peeing on the thing with your microphone.
Dr. Green :You're going to get yourself peeing on the thing with your microphone. You're going to get yourself peeing on the thing with your microphone.
Langston Clatk :Hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, Hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, Hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, Hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello, hello hello you, you you All right.
Langston Clatk :Thank you, brother James man, I appreciate you coming today. Rachel, thank you for being here. We're just waiting on Dr Green to show up. He's getting situated and there he is. We're going to get started shortly. Appreciate all our live guests for joining us, dr Green, the man himself for being here and for those of you who may not know so, I got my doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, and my last semester at UT was Dr Green's first semester there as an assistant professor. We're going to get into that a little bit later. We're going to wait until about 2 minutes before we officially get started.
Langston Clatk :Give people some time to figure out how to get on to the Zoom and then we'll go ahead and get started with this live conversation. So, james and Rachel, why don't y'all type in the chat where y'all are coming from, how you found out about this? Brother Marcus Johnson is on as well, who I know has tremendous love for Dr Green, and we encourage y'all as we get started. Once we get started into the conversation, we encourage you all to ask questions. You can type things in the chat, you can use the Q&A, and then we'll try to catch those rebounds right, kesto's? No, look passes as you go on to us. If you want to interject or have comments that you want to share, or just have questions, and what I may do is, if you want to speak out loud and ask your question at some point, if you raise, do the raise your hand function. I'll allow you to speak and you can speak and be heard, but know that you will be featured on the podcast recording. So just be careful what you say and, as always, if someone says something while they're ignorant, then I'll kick you off the show. But we've never had any wild stuff going or anything like that. So it's 7.04. We're going to go ahead and get started. The first thing I'm going to do is just give you all a brief overview of the show and then we'll get started with our conversation tonight. So give me two seconds, let me share my screen and here we go. I hope you all can see that we're going to backtrack a little bit. So just to give you all who are first time visitors of the show.
Langston Clatk :Entrepreneurial Appetite is a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting black businesses, and our origins actually started way back when everybody was using Facebook Live, right? Facebook Live first started like 2017, 2018. It was a brother here in San Antonio, Texas, where I live, named Mark Outing he's a good brother, right, and he got this burger joint called Mark's Oughting and he was having some trouble with his business and he posted on Facebook Live that he would like the community to come support his business. And so me and my homeboy, jason Bailey, were roommates at the time. We were trying to figure out a way to engage black professionals in our community, and so we had our first live event there, which was dinner, burgers and conversation with a local state representative, barbara Gurvin Hawkins, who just gave us some insights and some wisdom on how to engage in our community. And from there we just became a book club that met at restaurants and had conversations about the book with authors. Y'all know COVID happened. So I was like bam, we could get the authors on Zoom, we could record on Zoom and we became a podcast, and so now we are sharing with the wider audience and we do have some live conversations that we host two or three times a year, and so I'll talk a little bit more about how you all can get involved with that later on, but I want to let you all know that those of you who registered on Eventbrite, those of you who are patrons of the show that 10% of whatever you give to support the show goes to the functioning, the maintenance, the Zoom and all the bills that come with the editing. But no matter what you give to support the show, 10% of that goes to my alma mater, north Carolina A&T, to support and endowment that I started there with two of my friends and it's called the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship for students in the College of Education who are in graduate studies there. So thank you for your support, and your support is going to support not only the show but the good causes that I believe in.
Langston Clatk :Also want to make you all aware of my other podcast, the African-Americans in Sport Pod Class, which is a collaboration between myself and two of my academic brothers, alvin Logan and Brandon Krooms, who is no longer with the show but is one of the originators. And next season we'll be having me, alvin, and my academic little sister, aj Newton Keaton, who will be giving us a woman's perspective as a co-host of the African-Americans in Sport Pod Class. So you all can check out the previous episodes but also look forward to our next season, which will be launching spring 2024, for insights onto the broad experiences of African-Americans in Sport. And so now, without further ado, our conversation with Dr Terrence Green. If you all give me one second, I gotta get my Zoom back where I need it to be here.
Langston Clatk :We go, all right, with Dr Terrence Green and I'm gonna do a quick introduction. So, as you all know, in this episode of On-Train Appetite, we're featuring a conversation with Dr Terrence Green, who is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin. But what makes him really interesting is that this brother's kind of like a modern day Renaissance man, and so he is also the host of the racially just schools podcast. And, dr Green, before you know, we get started into the Q and A that I have for you and maybe some of the questions that folks in the audience have. Could you just tell us, like what's your biography, how did you become Dr Green and what's your journey to doing what you do and being who you are?
Dr. Green :Yeah well, first I'd just like to say thank you, dr Clark, for this invitation, for the work that you're doing and man honored to be here really to break bread with you. And what's up, mj, I see you in the chat. My brother, I, am a third generation Detroiter, so my family migrated from the South to Detroit during the first and second waves of the great migration to work in the automotive industry, which many of them did for 30, 40 and up to 50 years. So I'm born and bred in Detroit, proud of that, proud graduate of Detroit public schools.
Dr. Green :Interesting thing is, though I said I was gonna write a book on this my mom, we always use my aunt and my uncle's address to go to schools on the West side of town, even though we lived on the East side, and you know, even from then I remember just trying to figure out how people make decisions within context, and so, at that time, the schools on the West side they still Detroit public schools have more resources, so we use that address, and that got me even interested in like how where one lives can shape the opportunities and the resources that they have access to.
Dr. Green :But, graduated from Detroit public schools, I actually graduated with a 2.1, 2.2 GPA, had a 15 on my ACT. So my oldest brother went to the University, went to Michigan State. My middle brother went to the University of Michigan and I remember trying to go talk to the U of M rep in high school where they came to visit and my counselor. She put her arm out, she blocked me, she blocked me. I was like she literally blocked she blocked me she gave me this form, physically, psychologically.
Langston Clatk :She gave me Desmond Howard. Heisman she, heisman she.
Dr. Green :Heisman trophyed me and got all up in her feelings and so she didn't let me go see the Michigan rep, didn't let me go see the MSU rep, because I didn't have the grades and I, you know, back then I didn't know. I was like, well, my brother go there. Y'all know my brother, I ain't know what's 30,000 students there. So I actually wanted to just go work in the automotive industry and shout out to people who are grinding day in and day out and in the plants. And so that's what I wanted to do and, somewhat serendipitously, my senior year I was gonna go to the automotive plants, or I was gonna go to community college. I got detention for some reason, and so it was. We had basketball practice. So I was late going to basketball practice and I'll never forget. I was walking in the hallway and I saw these two brothers. They were talking, they were on the basketball team and I just like man, why are y'all any practice? Yet? They said we are going, we're getting stuff together, we're going to visit the school this weekend. And I was like, well bet, can I go? You know what I'm saying. So they were going to visit the school in Kentucky, kentucky State University.
Dr. Green :So one thing led to another. I find myself that weekend headed to Frankfurt, kentucky, which I had never been to before, and lo and behold, I came back and I was enrolled in a university where I had no plans to go to one. And one of the things I always like to say is that Kentucky State did something that the University of Michigan and Michigan State couldn't do and wouldn't do, and I was take a brother who had a 15 on his ACT and prepare him to be a PhD. Fast forward real quickly. I got a degree in biology, actually wanted to be an oncologist that's another story.
Dr. Green :Actually, when I graduated, taught for a few years in the community where KSU was, and as soon as I got into the classroom, they're like you need to be a principal. I'm like well, dang, can I teach two lessons? So I went back and I got a master's degree to be a principal, but I just had these larger questions around race and around space and around economics. Even so, that drove me back to a doctoral program. So I went to Wisconsin Madison for my PhD and been at UT Austin for now for 11 years.
Langston Clatk :Yeah. So now, dr Grant, I don't know if I ever shared this story with you and I don't know if MJ, who's here in the audience, knows this about me either, but your story is a lot like mine. So I went to. There are some differences.
Langston Clatk :I went to elite public schools, and so when I say elite, my public school is in a town called Princeton Junction, so the train station that stops at Princeton, right the town of Princeton, where Princeton University is, is where my school was, and my high school GPA was a 2.3.
Langston Clatk :And it was just everyone was expecting to go to college, like my classes were going to Stanford, harvard, like all of that stuff, but I didn't have the motivation like even coming from like the most elite of public schools that was better than the private schools, like that public education that I was getting couldn't do for me, but A&T did for me, as also being an HBCU grad, and so I have a personal appreciation for your experience having gone to Kentucky State in a way that it prepared you to be a faculty member, or to even think that you could be one, in the same ways that it did for me. So thank you for sharing a bit about, like, your journey to becoming a university professor. Could you tell us a story behind the Racially Just Schools podcast? Right, how did you go from being and let's not diminish the fact that you're like a prominent scholar and award-winning scholar who is doing really big things, but you've added podcasting to your repertoire and, like, how did that happen? What was the inspiration or motivation behind that?
Dr. Green :Yeah, great question. And I wanna say real quickly, when you mentioned your story, I got a 2.2. Because I wanted education and I was getting schooling Right. And so the difference, remember schooling teaches you your place in society, education teaches you to transform society. And so what I was getting was so disconnected.
Dr. Green :I remember 10th grade geometry. I raised my hand I ain't gonna name the teacher, I just call them Mr B we doing A squared plus B squared to C, squared Pythagoras theorem, and I'm just. I raised my hand. I was like what am I gonna ever use this? And he looked pensive at the board. He came back down. He said well, mr. He said Mr Green, I don't know. And once he said I don't know, I was thinking I don't know why I'm still awake in this class and I put my head down for the rest of the term and got that D. But knowing what I know now, geometry is all around me. Like you as a science teacher, like you doing science all the time, you doing math all the time, you are already a mathematician, you are already a scientist. Do you do dishes, do you shower, do you cook, do you make music? That's math, that's science. Those things are always there. But it was so disconnected and even if he would have told me, mr Green, all right, statistician, you like playing basketball, you know you like running track, he could have even got to me that way. But because he wasn't prepared and it seemed so irrelevant, I checked out from that because I wanted some educational, but he was just giving me schooling.
Dr. Green :But coming back to your, I say that to say you made me think of your story, but it also makes me think about the podcasting origin. Right, I always wanted something beyond what the script told me I was supposed to have and was supposed to do. It's almost like everybody telling you like this is the mountain you should ascend and you get to the pinnacle of that mountain and you like they lie right, because you realize that at the pinnacle of that mountain it's not fulfilling as it was portrayed to you that if you go you get tenure. Once you get tenure that's what it is you get published in this journal, you get published in that journal and that oftentimes don't necessarily mean any material. Things have changed. For black people it don't mean anything has changed in the school and even the way that the content is guarded and is gated. The question becomes who now has access to this information.
Dr. Green :So I think it was those frustrations of publishing and not feeling like it had any material impact on people's lives. I think it was the frustration of I don't care about being a full professor or in doubt chair, that's not my metrics, right. And so I started to realize that I was consuming more information through podcasts. I started realizing that I've guest spoke on some podcast and those ideas they were being spread immediately. And I started realizing that I've had some papers that have taken me four years to get published from like the idea through the whole publication. Like it has taken four years. But the beautiful part about a podcast is that I can have an idea and in four minutes I can share with the world. Right, and so the origin story for me.
Dr. Green :I think it was an amalgamation of the frustration of publishing articles and feeling like they had no material impact. It's also wanting to reach the people more directly, which for me is practitioners, and I felt like this medium was significantly better. And then the third one it was it created a space for me to be myself in the multiple dimensions of who I was, other than just my written voice. So I think all of those things come together and plus I'm like I got tenure, I don't care about all that other stuff, like who cares right, and so I think it was those things kind of making the perfect storm to make me want to venture out and do something different.
Langston Clatk :We're there, okay.
Langston Clatk :So one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is if I ever have an opportunity to talk to younger scholars we're just starting off on a tenure track who are concerned about black communities and ways to engage with them. I would tell them that your journey to being entrepreneurial in your scholarship needs to start before you get tenure, and there are so many things that you can do to add on to the traditional scholarship that post tenure could accelerate you but also increase your impact. And so for you, were there things that, like looking back now, were there things that you started doing that kind of led to you that how do I want to say this you didn't. Did you just wait until tenure happened to start thinking outside of the box of how you would engage in communities? Or were there little things you were doing along the way that started you engaging with black communities and maybe other communities in a way that bridged the gap between scholarship as this guarded material and really being something that could be widely accessible to more people? That's a great question.
Dr. Green :So, no, I didn't necessarily wait to tenure so I started actually podcasting. I started and stopped it actually before I had tenure. So one of the things I will say for me in graduate school and being a professor, just like I said, I wanted education and I ended up getting schooled and I think sometimes you come in as a mathematician, you come in as a scientist, but that gets schooled out of you. I actually feel like graduate. I feel like graduate school and being a professor actually schooled out of me the propensity to act. Before I had a PhD man, I remember I went to my principal. I was like give me all the black boys who are at like at this grade level who checked out who ain't doing so I just started this program. She was like, all right, what you wanna do with them? I was like, I don't know. So I just started a program with them, right then they would come to me every day. It was 30 of them. 29 out of the 30 graduated. They were back in those days. They were talking about a dropout factory, so they weren't expected to graduate. They all graduated. I ain't had no literature, I ain't have like no PhD. I didn't even have my master's degree. Back then All I saw was a need and I took the lead, but I felt like graduate school schooled me out of that.
Dr. Green :Graduate school made me more analytical.
Dr. Green :Graduate school made me more paralysis, analysis, and I feel like my being a professor particularly at the institution where I'm a professor, I feel like, because the coin of the round for them is publications, in particular outlets I feel like that took it out of me too.
Dr. Green :And so I think what happened with me is that I started to reach these points of feeling uneasy, discontented, to where it caused me to question in some ways, existentially, the entire apparatus of the academy. And so I would say, yeah, there definitely were things before, and I still was always working with black principals and working with black teachers on the side, mentoring here and there. So I think those seeds that I found actually more generative, those experiences, I think post tenure actually didn't make me feel freer to do different work. I think post tenure made me feel freer to question the apparatus of the institution and my role in it longer term. But, yeah, there are definitely things that I were doing before then, but I do feel like being a professor in my particular context, in my experience, and going to graduate school. It took away my propensity to action and made me a thinker instead of a thinking, a practice person who thought and also engaged in action.
Langston Clatk :So I think for me I didn't realize this in the context of the professoriate or being an academic or a scholar back in undergrad, but there was like a seed of that. That happened in undergrad for me. So our dean of the College of Ed used to have a dean's book club. Every semester there was a book that we would read Soil's a Black Folk, the World is Flat was one of them. But then one semester it was Pedagogy of the Oppress. Now, the crazy thing is I went to the discussion about Pedagogy of the Press because it was extra credit, but I didn't read the book. I didn't read the book until the summer after I graduated, and I remember going back to one of my mentors and saying like yo, this thing blew my mind, you know.
Langston Clatk :And I thought to myself like at some point, people who reached the pinnacle of education, right of schooling we should say right, like what happened, like people at the top need to do, they need to deny it.
Langston Clatk :Right, do you need to get to the top of it and say no, this is this ain't cause. You can't do it from the middle, you can't say this is like illegitimate, because then they'll just say like you're lazy or you're not doing the work. But if you actually make it to the top or the pinnacle of your education system and you say this is it's broken, it's busted, this, that and the third, you have more credibility to say that it actually is broken and so, like that, that resonates with me. What you just said resonates with me in two different ways, like reflecting back but then also thinking about where I am now and what's the real impact of the work that I'm doing. I want to shift into some of the content, right and so taking, like you, wanting to be more impactful, wanting to make you know to scholarship more accessible, or be more actionable, like what are the things that you talk about on your podcast?
Dr. Green :Yeah, so great question, and I think you remind me of Carter G and the miseducation of the Negro. He's like, essentially, you become of no productive force to your people. You know what I'm saying? Like you educated, but like you can't build anything. And so that, to me, I also feel like was a buyer's remorse, because I mean, critique is cool, yeah, but if you can only critique and can't create, if you can only deconstruct and can't reconstruct, like you become of no constructive force to your people.
Dr. Green :And so for me, it is holding the tension of being powerfully practical yet theoretically rich, right. So that's the lens that I use when I'm creating episodes, when I'm thinking about guests, when I'm setting it up. I'm thinking about how do you be powerfully practical yet theoretically rich? And I don't think those things have to be divorced, I think they could be married to one another. But I think it creates tensions, it can create contradictions, it can create all types of nuances. So that's the type of content I'm thinking about.
Dr. Green :And so, even when I'm framing the titles, I'm thinking about like how to titles right, like how to engage youth in participatory ways, or how to conduct an equity audit, or how to deal with resistance to racial justice work in your school, trying to be very practical, yes, being rooted and grounded in what we know empirically and from research, but wanting to create spaces for people to think critically but to also to go out and act.
Dr. Green :And I think one of the most rewarding stuff is being a professor in the department where you graduated from. Sent me this long email from a teacher teacher AID candidate who says you know, I used to think this way and I used to practice my work this way. But I've been listening to this Racie Just School's podcast with this guy, terrence Green, and it's helped me realize that blah blah, blah, blah blah. Now she read none of my articles, but somehow she got a hold of the podcast, which in some way she must have found practical, either conceptually, in what she's doing in day to day, but it shifted her perspective, and so I'm always trying to think about how do we preempt and create those conditions to shift people's perspectives, but to also shift their practices. So that's what I'm thinking about as I try to create content.
Langston Clatk :Yeah, who would you say is your target audience?
Dr. Green :Yeah, my target audience are practitioners who are working in schools, who are either principals or superintendents.
Dr. Green :Teachers and a lot of board members have actually been listening to the podcast and, surprisingly, more and more universities are assigning episodes as part of their syllabi, and so I'm not necessarily going for a higher ed audience, but I'm going for people who work in school. I'm going for the principal, the teacher who, grappling with something on Friday, can listen to the podcast over the weekend and begin to practice into doing something differently, like they can literally take something there, go do it, reflect on it and go back to it. But that's my primary target audience and I'm super, super locked in on even how I'm naming them. So I go to. I use this site called Headline Analyzer because I want to make sure that the title of the podcast episode has good SEO to it. So I am making sure that I purposefully named the episode something that has high search engine optimization but also will be compelling to search engines when people have a question about racial justice or about equity, or about equity audits, or about resistance or whatever it may be. So I'm very strategic about the actual titles.
Langston Clatk :That's brilliant. You just taught me something. So I'm gonna do a slight pivot, because I want to know, like can you break down the anatomy of podcasting for you? Like, what other suggestions do you have? Like, let's say, there's a scholar out there who wants to start producing content for a broader audience, what are the suggestions that you have for them to think about? Optimizing? You know, their visibility through podcasting, whether it be YouTube or Apple iTunes, whatever. You know what I mean. Like, what's the strategies?
Dr. Green :Yeah, I was saying I was going to teach a class on this, so I'm gonna drop a few things here. So first I'm gonna give you a couple of things you can go to. One thing you can go to is Google Trends. Right, so I am using the web's analytics on what people are searching for. Right, so, not all of my podcasts come from there, but I'm thinking about where's the convergence between what I feel like I have expertise, or I know someone who has expertise on, versus what people are searching for, because I want to make sure that I am producing content that is aligned with the queries that people are putting into the internet. So I go on Google Trends.
Dr. Green :I look over the trends over the last six months, nine months, three months, I'll put a topic in. All, right, this doesn't seem to be as relevant. This is seasonal. Coming back to school, this is something that you do, you know, in the semester Boom. So I'm using the data and the analytics from the web to give me ideas about the content that I need to produce. So I think it's two things. Here Is the content that you have that you want to produce, but then there's the content that people need that you have to figure out the content, to go and produce it to meet a need right, and so that's one source of ideas for content.
Dr. Green :Another source are just problems of practice that I've come across in my own work as a teacher working with teachers, working with principals in class. People come up with stuff. I mean some of my articles, like my community based equity audit article, in part came out of problems of practice that people were having in the class so I wrote an article about it. It's the Toni Morrison thing If you want to read a book that don't exist, go write it. So I think that's another source of people's problems of practice. I don't think that the third source of content is repurposing things that I've written about empirically and making them accessible to wider audiences. So sometimes I'll go and take an article that I've written or part of an article and then I will repurpose that for podcast episodes. So those are the things I'm thinking of, but everything, dr Clark, is aligned with analytics, search and also making sure that I'm using the right search terms, that people can actually find the stuff that I'm putting out. All right.
Langston Clatk :So my homeboy James is is, you know, here, live with us on the zoom James is at. We were in school together. His wife was in school with me and she just recently got her her PhD. She just got her doctorate and so you know, as you just explained, that we get socialized a certain certain type of way in that process. So what's? What's a nugget you give to somebody who's been socialized a certain way as a scholar, as someone with a doctorate to break out of that socialization and start producing things that are meaningful for the community that you want to serve?
Dr. Green :Yeah, so I think there's. So there are a couple things and I think part of my part of my socialization was reinforced. I remember, like my second year I wanted to, I wanted to go to this conference. It was a practice, it was a practitioner conference, like a housing conference in Detroit, and I remember asking, you know, trying to get approval, and the person was like, well, you can go, but it ain't gonna count. I was like I wasn't going for it to count, I was going because people in Detroit these are people that are working in housing or something like that. So I think that reinforced it was like, no, you don't go to those conferences created this type of a hierarchy. So I started to say what I did was I still went to the conference, but I also created another version of that paper to the published people and then wrote like a brief which is what they wanted in that particular context.
Dr. Green :So I think the nugget for me or I don't know if it's a nugget is is slicing it up in multiple forms for multiple audiences. But I think even before that, one has to get clear on, like, who is your audience. It took me probably four or five years to realize my audience is not other researchers which I felt like I was writing to at first. My audience for me are practitioners, and so once I know who my audience is and if I spent enough time with them, I can know what their problems of practices are. I can guarantee that the article or whatever I produce is going to be relevant because it is anchored in what they're grappling with.
Dr. Green :Versus what traditional research does is like a Hail Mary. You got these interests, you got a theoretical framework, you got a question, you got a methods, and it's like a Hail Mary and you throw it and you hope that somebody in practice or in policy may catch what you're throwing out, and oftentimes they don't even get in the air Right, but that would be my. My advice is to think about multiple ways to share and disseminate to multiple audiences that content that the Academy holds up as, like the point of the round.
Langston Clatk :So I remember seeing you post on LinkedIn that had been like a month or two ago that you had was it 10,000, 100,000 downloads I can't remember what it was, but you, you met some mark for tens of thousands, thousands, thousands of downloads, right. And then that, and then that posting you said you talked about how you know, one episode could get you 1000 downloads in the same amount of time, like in, let's say, a month, but it could take years for that to happen for one article. And we have to start to rethink. You know how we disseminate knowledge, right, it's not just about creating the knowledge, about disseminating the knowledge.
Langston Clatk :And so I imagine that you have this following, right? And so I'm deep in the podcast and, like, you need to niche down, niche down, niche down, niche down and feed that community that you want to serve, as you just said. And so what's the next iteration of the podcast? Right, you had a podcasting. Like, are there other ways you're going to serve your listeners and serve that audience beyond podcasting? Maybe building community conferences, what have you so? So what's the next iteration of that?
Dr. Green :Yeah, so great question. So right now I would say I'm still in the phase of building the audience. So, just for some context, I first became a professor in 2013. So this is technically I'm starting my 11th year and my articles have been downloaded. I was looking at it earlier. My articles have been downloaded 1200, 70 times. I mean it's been cited. I've been cited 1200, 70 times and so the podcast has 18,000 downloads and so in like a year plus.
Dr. Green :So in terms of and I've had more people, I can't tell you. I'm been keeping these emails now like people saying oh, this, this helped me with this, this gave me language for such and such, we're using. People say we're using your podcast for our professional development. You know, I'm saying like I don't remember. Nobody email me about the articles. Maybe they have, who knows? But so the next iteration for me is I am getting clearer on the content that the people want.
Dr. Green :So one of the things that I recently have done is I created an ebook. So essentially, I had an article. I took the article and I repurpose the article into a series of podcast episodes. I took the text from those podcast episodes and I turned it into a ebook, and then I created a landing page for that ebook, so it now lets me know the people who are interested in that particular piece of content. So what I'm going to do now, I'm going to take another piece of content. I'm going to repurpose it, create some type of a content whether it was a blog, whatever in exchange for their email, so I can get people to raise their hand to say, hey, I'm interested in that content. Be right.
Dr. Green :So right now, I'm creating different types of content that are behind an email wall so I can see the people who are interested in that content. And, based on the content that people are interested in, that's what I'm going to build courses around, that's what I'm going to build these academies around, that's what I'm going to build, hopefully maybe an in person type of thing around. So that's what I'm doing. I am niching down to figure out what content are people most interested in, and then what is the content that people will pay to learn about in a more intimate setting. So that's one end, and then the other end real quickly is I mean, I don't even say from the podcast I've gotten, you know, like professional development. Things have come out of that right that people, you know, want me to come to their district or want me to do some type of an evaluation, and so those are things that I hadn't thought about primarily. But those are also ways, kind of like on the back end, thinking about monetization.
Langston Clatk :So so that's it right now. I want to get into some conceptual things, because I think I think there are. There are a few things that I've seen in you over the years, and MJ knows us, because we talk about you, y'all don't notice. This is interesting. Like, like you, dr Moore, dr Harrison, dr Brown, we talk about y'all all the time.
Langston Clatk :But you know, we follow y'all on social media and we're like man, dr Greens, out here doing amazing things, like he's not just you're not just a scholar, you're not just presenting yourself in a scholarly way, in the traditional scholarly way, I should say right and so, like, what does it mean to you to be redefining what it means to be a scholar, right?
Langston Clatk :Or to have a complex identity and be okay with that as a scholar, right. So we see you pass through. And now, right, we see you, well, you've been pastoring since I've known you. So, even, like, even if you weren't like standing in front of, like Churchill on Sunday, like I've heard you preach, even it wasn't just, like you know, sunday morning, okay, so you passed in, right, I see you piloting, right, your podcasting, and I even want to throw in a you even body building a little bit, right and so, from your perspective, like talk about the need of, like, the need to like redefine what it means to be, you know, a scholar who has been trained in academics that maybe not even a scholar, scholars the wrong word, like redefining what it means to be an academic, is really. Is really what? Really what I want to talk about?
Dr. Green :Yeah, great question. So one of my mentors, she always used to tell me to become a social scientists of self and she like, we social scientists and we see patterns and this patterns and schools patterns and that, and then she always bring me back to like, what are the patterns that you see in you? So one of the patterns that I've noticed as a social scientist of myself is that I like novelty. I get dissatisfied like this, the longest job I've ever had. You know, I'm saying like I like new things and I like new challenges. I am read, I was reading this book is she calls it a multi potential life where you you think about meaning, you think about variety and you also think about ways to generate money, right. And so I knew for a long time I didn't just want to do one thing as much as I have much love for my family that worked in auto mode. I don't want to work nowhere for 30 years. I only want to be a professor for 40 years. I don't, and I can say that freely and I've had these conversations with folks at the university, so it's not like a news flash. But I think, man, unless you know some, I don't know you only get one of these, and if somebody gonna be mad about my life, it sure ain't gonna be me.
Dr. Green :My thing is like following that internal GPS and the inquiries and the longings that I have inside that may transgress the boundaries of the script that has been given to me as a professor. Now it comes with costs because you know, I'm not publishing as much as somebody else has published, I'm not at the conferences and I've been a RA in four years. You know I'm saying I'm not in the conferences like everybody else. So on some of those metrics they may falter, but it's okay because I feel alive again. I feel I want to.
Dr. Green :I've been always saying the last two years I want to do work that sets my soul on fire. The only thing that I'm finding out is that there isn't one thing that sets that fire. It's an amalgamation of things that sets that fire, and so I've been trying to be discerning of what those are and discerning of when seasons change. But I know me, of myself. I'm like. I'm like on a five year cycle. I can discern like it's time to do something else and switch it up.
Dr. Green :And so now in my life no longer in my 30s I realized I don't believe is the fourth quarter, but the show ain't the first quarter. And I am I mean, listen, man, I, I watch my grandmother take her last breath, the matriarch of our family. I mean it was a spiritually beautiful thing to believe the faith tradition I'm in, that she's now present with the Lord, but it was also. It was saddening, it was grieving, and to see someone take their very last breath, I don't know. I think it just continue to put things in perspective for me that time on this side of heaven is very finite and I don't want to go to the grave. What my music's still in me, I wanna express it and get it out.
Langston Clatk :All right. So, like, listen, scholars out there, right I say especially for the new ones, right or people thinking about getting their PhD, start to plant the seeds or set the sparks that will allow your fire to ignite as you go through the process, right, and so one of the things that we had always had and folks who listened to the podcast that had me to heard me talk about this, like I come from an academic brotherhood, right Of different folks and different people who always imagine new possibilities for what it means to be a scholar. And I think, dr Green, what you're saying applies to like any field that you get socialized into. Right, there are people need to actively think about. Right, there I say, pray about. You know what is their calling in the season that they're in, and it may not be to do what they're doing, or it may be to do what they're doing, but in a different way.
Langston Clatk :The second part of this conceptual piece I wanna talk about is redefining scholarship. Right and you kind of touched on this right Podcasting versus publishing. Right, scholars owning their content versus you writing the article and giving it away, maybe getting merit, at least in my case, sometimes we get merit, sometimes we don't, right, but you really you're not gonna get a raise for like six years unless you go in the market, right, and so I think it's powerful, the transitions and the pivots that you've gone through. So just talk a little bit more about podcasting versus publishing, but then also like the potential for scholarships to own the content that they create.
Dr. Green :That's the thing. So I had a scholar write a book on one of my articles and then citing so I like that you just play to rise my stuff. But it was. She didn't do it verbatim, so it was difficult for me to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, and so I couldn't get any recourse from my university, couldn't get any recourse from her university, couldn't get any recourse from any of these educational organizations that talk about justice and equity. And so my homies went to work and they went to the publisher. They ended up cutting her book. Well, one of the things that I learned in that, because I didn't realize that I had been signing over my articles and I ain't even own the articles. But the thing that got me is that because I couldn't get the journals, I couldn't get the journal to even come out and say anything on my behalf. When I initially went to the book publisher, they tried to put me on ICE too. But I found out the same person who owned the journal owned the book publisher, and I'm like what the heck? They got a freaking monopoly on content that they didn't produce.
Dr. Green :My homeboy, kevin Henry, who's a professor now at Wisconsin, we were in grad school together. He sometimes refers to it as a sophisticated form of sharecropping. You know what I'm saying. Like we're doing all the labor, they're extracting and monetizing and making revenue on all our stuff and then, if I'm no longer a professor, I gotta pay you or pay somebody to get access to content that I've created. So there is, I think, a need for a deep conscious raising among scholars of Brown owning and controlling our own content that we create. Because the content that we create, they're monetizing it and what we get in exchange for the monetization that they get in perpetuity not for like two or three in perpetuity are grossly unequal and inequitable. And so that's also a part of it. For me as well, it's thinking about how do I own and control the content that I create and monetize it, if I so choose, and monetize it in the ways that I wanna do it. And so I think that's super important for folks to be thinking about the monetization.
Dr. Green :And I didn't even realize this coming in as a professor. I came in because I Kentucky State and all the buildings it was like enter to learn, exit to serve. So I showed up as a teacher, I showed up as a professor to serve. But I didn't realize that some of my colleagues across the university, many of whom are white, they didn't come in with the service disposition, they came in with the monetization disposition and they making like bank off of their work.
Dr. Green :And I'm not saying I'm doing it to make bank, I'm not saying that. But I'm saying there are ways to monetize it and then if anybody's gonna monetize it, we should own and control our own stuff. That's the same thing Malcolm was saying in the bullet of the ballot in black nationalism you should own and control the resources in your neighborhood and community. And I think that is one of the biggest things that they hold over our head is that you gotta get published in XYZ Journal, your work has to go over here, has to go there, and all the while they wanna talk about settler colonialism, they wanna talk about anti-blackness, they wanna talk about exploitation. But they're exploiting us by taking our content and monetizing this and I could see if we was like rare sharing, but I wanna get a share of the revenue. You know what I'm saying.
Langston Clatk :Yeah, I got an idea I'm gonna share with you afterwards cause I don't wanna spoil it. But there needs to be like a new way that we think about scholarship. Who benefits? And the whole system really is designed right. So we publish articles meant to serve our community and it goes and gets monetized by journal articles or publishing companies.
Langston Clatk :I started to look at because listen, the podcast started off as a book club and it still has. We still do book club conversations. So I started looking at publishing houses, right, like who's on the board, who does this? Like we ain't on these boards, and so they take the black content, they own it, but then it don't even get to like us, to you, and so it's like a double whammy. You know what I mean? And it certainly don't. And you know, if you go to a black college, the context to allow you to publish doesn't even exist in the same way at most black colleges, right. So even our institutions in terms of universities, right, don't get the benefit of the stature that comes with publishing in these rigorous journals. And that's not to say that folks at black colleges don't, because they do, just the different content that allows for that. So I think it's important for us to recognize.
Langston Clatk :So I wanna give the audience some time to ask some questions. And so, mj James, if you all have some questions, get ready to ask. You can raise your hand, use the raise your hand function if you want to vocalize your question and be heard, or you can type in a chat or the Q&A and we'll get to that. But to give you all some time to do that, I'm gonna ask a question. Dr Green and I think you mentioned it right, and it's like a multiplicity of personalities or something. You said something like that from some book that you were reading. And so, because the podcast has origins as a book club, can you tell us what books you've read or are currently reading that have inspired your journey as a podcaster, as a professor, as a pastor, as a pilot, as a bodybuilder and all the things that you do?
Dr. Green :Yeah, I was trying to look up that. I got the book on Audible and I have the paper version of that book. So part of the getting in shape thing was like my gift to myself. So I turned 40 in January and that was like my gift to myself being the best shape of my life. Now I ran track at K-State for a year. You know I played basketball and ran track in high school.
Dr. Green :But to me, being in shape has shifted from when I was 20 something to being 40. For me, being in shape is being spiritually, my spirit is strong, my mind is sharp and my body is healthy, and so I'm thinking about the intersection of all of my spirit being like super strong, my mind being sharp and my body being healthy, and so that was just my gift back to myself. I just felt like I had fallen off in many ways and I'm finding now that for me, movement and physicality is actually a portal into like the psychological and the spiritual for me, like if I can get my body moving I could get my mind sharp again. And there's so many things just translate over from like playing sports and stuff like that and like the physical stuff. But in terms of books, that book that I was talking about. It is called how to Be Everything and the lady's name is Emily Wapnick I think I said last name, but the idea is a multi-potential life Folks who desire meaning variety but also want to make bread as well, and so I like variety of different things. I want to do stuff that's as a pack was meaningful and I also want to generate revenue while I'm doing it. So that has been a good book, I think. For the podcast, there's just different marketing books. So this is the one marketing book called the One Page Business Plan, which I think is just very straightforward, very practical. This is what you do. There's another book by this marketer named Donald Miller, I think is called the Brand Story. So thinking about your story and the branding, that one has been helpful in thinking about the podcast I was.
Dr. Green :I've been reading this other book lately, called the Second Mountain by David Brooks, I think is his name and his thesis, essentially, is that we get socialized into climbing these first mountains and realize that our fulfillment is actually on the second mountain. And so, as we're climbing back down, we experienced this dissonance and like who am I? What am I doing? You feel like you're in the valley because you're going through like this metamorphosis and this radical transformation, but you realize, is that second mountain? On that first mountain, you may have prestige, you may have career, you may have finances, you may have all these things, but you realize you've climbed the wrong one. So I'm reading that book, so those are the ones that come to mind in terms of, like paperback books, and I'm always listening to stuff on Audible. So that's another thing about me. This is how I do as a multi-potentialite too. I very rarely read a book from beginning to end.
Langston Clatk :Okay.
Dr. Green :I read until I am full, not until the book is finished. So I might just come and read chapter six. I read one through five, I read six, and I might not pick that book back up for another four months or six months. I'm always reading multiple books at the same time. I'm always reading something about like, black culture or blackness. I'm trying to read something about faith and spirituality. I'm trying to read something about business and leadership. I'm trying to read something about being a, you know, a good father and a good husband. So I'm always trying to read multiple books at the same time.
Dr. Green :And what I have realized? I use my internal longing and discerning for, like, what book I'm going to be reading right now? Right, so, like, if I feel like that business pool, I might pull one of those out. If I feel like one of those critical, I might pull, pull a book out, like that. And so I've.
Dr. Green :I've learned, I'm learning to discern and listen to my emotions and the range of feelings that I have as guy posts, which is one of the reasons why I love Poc. Poc is my favorite. I mean, you know, I had a ball here in high school because I wanted to be like Poc. That's how much I loved Poc.
Dr. Green :But one of the things that I admire about Poc is that and I always said I want to teach a course on Poc education and like social movements and part of the thing that I loved about Poc is that he exhibited the gamut of emotions. You know, like one day, you know he bought he down with the Panthers. Now, mind you, I learned about, you know, mussolini, I learned about Castro and Gaddafi and like all these these world leaders, many of them were dictators Machiavelli, I learned about those two Poc. I learned about a lot of political prisoners through Poc's music Right. And so I love Poc because he exhibited. He exhibited the gamut of emotions and I think the more we can lean into those emotions, they become clues of curiosity and we have to find the books that align to that interest in those emotions and those curiosity.
Langston Clatk :Yeah. So um brother Marcus has a question about piloting and he says, as it pertains to obtaining your pilot's license, what specifically drove you to flying, and are there any qualities of an academic that translates to piloting?
Dr. Green :Yeah, so what I? So? I've always had a desire to want to fly and probably from my mid 20s I just used to love being in an aircraft and I can't explain it. And so it's something that I want to do for a while. And I got married and I think my wife and I and I think we just weren't on the same page with it and I'm like playing in it. I'm like you got laws of lift, laws of thermal aerodynamics, like we just gonna be good, and so we had to work through that for a while. And then, when we finally got on the same page, I was just like let's go go for it. And I think what drew me to piloting was just the enjoyment of it. I don't know, I can't explain the enjoyment of being an aircraft. So I think that's what drew me to it.
Dr. Green :In terms of qualities, I would say um, one of the things is that you never leave without having a flight plan and you know where you're going, and so I think the same thing is true for academics. You got to know where you're going, because the thing about flying that even if you go over one degree, you can end up in a completely different location If that one degree is set and it just continues to go, you will end up in New York, although you set out to go to Vancouver, because that one degree long enough can take you off. So I think one of the things that translates is like you just got to be clear on where you're going and who you're going with on that plane. Um, I think the other thing is um. So my very first flight we came in for the landing. We had to do the landing three times and I was like uh, about that fourth time. The first three times I was like all right, this is fun. The fourth time I was like man, give me on the ground, ground, quick. Um, but it is. It is.
Dr. Green :That is the idea that there's iteration in this and there are um, like we had to keep doing it again and again and again and again, and the more we did it it was almost like a cylinder. We were doing the same thing, but it's like we were going deeper in our knowledge and making sure we were getting it right. And I think being a professor or a scholar is that there's iterations to it. But I think the trick is we have to make sure as we iterate, we're going deeper, the things that we seem like we're doing the same. We got to make sure we're going deeper in them, because that's part of flying you already iterating.
Dr. Green :And then the final thing I would say um, in terms of flying, um, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of physics have to be going for you to get the aircraft actually off the ground and up into the air. Um, I think you use a lot of fuel there and I think, being a scholar, you have to be very cognizant of the fuel that you burn. Getting your career up in the air and you want to make sure that you're not burning fuel that um hurts you physically, your family, those closest to you. You got to figure out what are the proper few sources to get you up in the air and to keep you sustained, and you got to know when it's time to come down out of the air and to get refueled again. So those are the things that I think about just off the top of the dome, um, that hopefully might translate.
Langston Clatk :That seems like part of the sermon right there.
Dr. Green :I'm a deacon.
Langston Clatk :Oh, I saw you preaching on Instagram.
Dr. Green :I mean, I'm our church has a, a plant and I'm like in the rotation, help preach until we get a full kind of pastor.
Langston Clatk :I mean like they grooming you, but that's another part of it. So, james, I appreciate y'all coming through. Dr Green, thank you for joining us and look forward to listening to more of the racely just schools podcast. Tell us where we can download it, get information about it for the guests that are here live and the guests that will listen to it. Listen to this podcast on the recording.
Dr. Green :The wwracelyjustschoolscom and you can click on podcast and all the podcasts are there. Now here's another thing on like the marketing, I drive all the traffic back to my website. One I drive all the traffic back to my website because I have the pop up there and I want to make sure that I can collect people's information. So I got to leave magnet as a video. Three, three videos in exchange for your email. So that's one. And then the other reason why I'm driving people back to the, to the website, is because I essentially got cookies so I can go back and retarget those folks based off of the pages that they've gone on when I actually want to do some paid ads and marketing. So you can go to wwwracelyjustschoolscom and you can find everything from all the podcasts and more information about myself.
Langston Clatk :All right, mj, when we do our, our, our finally do our black male scholar retreat, we're going to get Dr Green to be one of the speakers. He will be I love it Marketing. So y'all give me two seconds. I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to talk about the next episode, which we don't have this year Because we're taking a break to prepare for 2024 season. Dr Green, thank you for joining us.
Langston Clatk :I'm going to share with MJ and James just how they can support the show moving forward, look forward to editing this show and getting it out to a part of audience. Thank you for joining us. So, mj, james, give me two seconds. I'm going to share a little bit more information about the show. If y'all want to support what we're doing here at entrepreneur appetite, you can become one of the founding 55 patrons. Again, 10% of all that we do goes to support and endowment.
Langston Clatk :I started at my alma mater, north Carolina, and T the from a and T the PhD endowed scholarship. Also, we want to use this money to hire an intern or a freelancer to help with the production of the show. Actually, the most divvable part of the podcast is the post production of the show, the editing of the content, and so really what I want to do is I want to hire somebody, a young black person in school. I want to hire some college to train them on how to do all that editing because I know how to do it and then pay them so that they can make some extra money on the side. So if you're interested in supporting the show, you can become one of our patrons and, again, that gives you access to all of the live conversations, some bonus content and early access to the recordings as well. Thank you all for joining us and we will see you in 2024 as we take the next two months to prepare for next season and get everything lined up. So thank you all for joining and that