[00:00:00] Natalie Graham: I think a lot about education. I think a lot about art and education but I think that for me when I think of the function of art, it’s to help us create stories. We understand the world in stories. We understand the world in narrative. Who we are as a person in a relationship to another person is a narrative that we create, and how good we are at creating a narrative that is meaningful and honest and concrete and not arbitrary, not misguided by social media thread, that is how we're going to interact with each other.

[00:00:43] Host: Orange County Grantmakers and Past Forward present, Adjust Accordingly: Placing Equity into Practice, a series of discussions about how inequity is experienced in life and work, and how industries, organizations, and people are working to move equity forward. This series was produced with support from the Orange County Community Foundation. In this episode, we connect with Natalie Graham, Chair of African American Studies at Cal State Fullerton, and director of the Institute of Black Intellectual Innovation. In our conversation, she breaks down how the institute was started in Orange County, where she noticed a vacuum of black voices and black culture in the region, but saw the potential for both to thrive. Natalie was named Poet Laureate of Orange County in 2021 and used her role to promote art and storytelling and support poetry's ability to connect one another. Her position as educator and artist go hand in hand celebrating culture, history, and art that reminds us of who we were and who we can be together.

Natalie, I'd love to start by talking about the Institute of Black Intellectual Innovation at Cal State Fullerton. This is something that you created. You're one of the co-directors of it but I'd love for you to just launch into how important this is and what exactly it is.

[00:02:11] Natalie: I'll start with– in some ways, I think the reason for being, there's two things that always feel like at the core of what we do. One is just the real legacy and present discrimination against black folks in Orange County. You have this legacy of Orange County. You have sundown towns. You have places where black folks don't have the luxury of belonging and of being part of conversations, of being considered. There really is, I think, just… one of my colleagues talks about this, has this concept she coined called ambient racism. She's speaking specifically about the City of Portland.

Very much in Orange County, you can be someone who has a great community, has a great job, has a great family situation, but still, moving through this space of Orange County, encounter these legacies of racism, of exclusion, of discrimination. The other thing that I think is true is that there's no clean, perfect place. There's no great place, when you're thinking about racism and community and oppression. I think that some places get considered more highly, maybe, than they should because of their proximity.

Like, "Oh, I would never go to Orange County, but I'd go to LA County." I'm like, "Have you heard of racial-- Do you have a very short memory of race in LA County?" I really believe that Orange County can be the county where black people thrive in Southern California. I think really, beginning with that dramatic imagination and possibility, what would that look like? I think that really going even really before in 2019 and going into 2020, before George Floyd's murder, there was a lot of I was really feeling like a vacuum of hope, like a vacuum of imagination and inspiration.

It felt like a lot of things were happening again and again and we were consistently thrust into this cycle of martyrdom, or this cycle of grief, rage, repair, rebuilding that sort of constant cycle that's gone back, goes all the way back to Emmett Till. All of the civil rights movements are the cyclical movements of grief, rage, repair, movement forward like this. I really wanted to find a way to break out of that cycle and think about, what does it mean to start from a place of imagination and hope, and possibility.

Say that we want to create spaces of joy and innovation and possibility and imagination and technology and art and research and conversation and storytelling. All of those things threaded through and merely just having a house at Cal State Fullerton for students to come through, for faculty to come through, for community members to come through and just stay a while and think about, how can we imagine that creation forward. As an event planner and someone who has coordinated events in the past a lot on campus, I think a lot about creating spaces for dialogue and community.

That's where we've started. We've done innovative arts futures conferences where we're always thinking about threading art through all of our conversations of possibility and justice in progress. What is, for instance, if we're talking about education and black children thriving and educational systems that might not really understand them or make a lot of space for them, what does that look like in a poem? Inviting a poet to talk about that and talk about her experience as a mother and as a poet.

Then have in that same panel someone who's from the educational perspective, a teacher. What does it look like? In a school, maybe in Santa Ana where you might have a deep commitment to Latinx students or students of color broadly but really don't have a lot of knowledge or interaction with black families? The ways that we're really thinking about how can we create spaces for questions, for connections, conversations, and really narrative building and rebuilding, because for me, it starts with imagination.

If we can't imagine another way, we can't move forward into that space. I think it requires a deep imagination to have that hope that then can create a different opportunity or different possibility for artists, and for researchers, and for business owners. I'm really interested in the concept of ownership. What does it mean to own a space? What does it mean to own a business? To own a house? As you know, Orange County has black culture particularly, and across the nation but it's so difficult to have a house in Orange County or have a residence that's sustainable.

When you look at the demographics, racially, there are huge disparities in black ownership versus other races and ethnicity. I want to really think about how can we have a holistic approach to space and belonging and wellness and integrate those things that might seem separate. How do you integrate health disparities? How do you integrate financial wellness and ownership? How do you integrate the arts in that conversation? It's really as much as possible trying to put these things, these pieces in conversation and build in a messy and dynamic way towards something new and different.

Leaving a lot of space for this process of innovation, which is try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, succeed. Try again. That process, leaving a lot of space and margin for us to maybe not meet the mark as well, which I think happens a lot with communities of color and black communities in particular. There is a strong pressure to always get it right the first time. A lot of times that contributes to burnout and lack of innovation and lack of dynamic change. That's when I think about all the things that pour into IBII that's really I think our vision for moving forward.

[00:09:05] Host: When you came out, did you have a general understanding of the dynamics of Orange County? I know you were drawn to the program at Cal State Fullerton, but did you get a sense of the community at large before?

[00:09:26] Natalie: Not really. I think I've been here about 10 years. I tell people, California has the best marketing of any state [laughs] in the union because I'm from the South. I'm born and raised in Florida. We're not looking good. Whoever our PR person is, they need to get on their job. I'm born and raised in Florida. I came most recently from Georgia. I was born and raised in the South and have ties to the South. It was startling to me to come to-- I was particularly raised in a smallish College town, University of Florida where you have this huge college in this small city.

The college completely identifies what the town is. In a lot of ways, when I came to Fullerton, that's the experience that I was expecting and anticipating that you have this big college, there's lots of college-like fervor circulating around the college. I didn't-- and because Cal State Fullerton, maybe other colleges throughout the state, is really a commuter school, I think it's difficult to create that same fervor. For us, a lot of it was sports. Gator basketball, gator football, all the kids K through 12 get outta school for homecoming.

You have this really strong civic pride around the school, where Fullerton doesn't operate in the community in that same way. I think that was my first curiosity. How does Fullerton as this university, which is the only Cal State in Orange County, a big Cal State, one of the biggest. How does this university want to impact the county that it's in and the city that it's in? I was really curious about that. It felt like there should be more conversation, there should be more interaction. We should feel more vital to the spaces that we're in.

I haven't encountered a lot of negative, "We don't want Cal State Fullerton," but I also was really interested in the fact that Cal State Fullerton didn't feel vital to the community around it, the city around it, the county around it. I felt like you could leverage that power, you could leverage the impact of the university to really have more impact more broadly throughout the county. Going back to your earlier question, that's actually one of the things that I was thinking about with IBII. We can do more, we have more leverage.

Then I was really surprised by how different this community was, Orange County. I guess one of the things I was really surprised by was how little interaction folks of color and white folks as well had with black people. I think that you don't think of California as a backward state. You don't think of California as a state where people don't know each other, don't get along, or have this-- the way that you think about the South. We have these narratives about place, where the South is the place where black people are under threat. The South is the place where black people need to protect themselves and they're not welcomed and don't belong. Then I come to this space and I find that it's almost more deep ignorance around black culture and black people and lack of interethnic conversations, cross-racial conversations. There's a lot of isolation within ethnic and racial groups, even in places outside of Orange County that are more purportedly less conservative or not as those things that get aligned for better or worse, true or not true with anti-blackness or racism.

I was really surprised to see the way that played out in everyday interactions. People would touch my hair and be so surprised, just a very traditional old school. Yes, these are the things that you don't do that you see in the HR training videos. How not to be… you know? The microaggressions 101! I was really surprised and it just felt like a genuine lack of interaction. That still surprises me. I feel there's not as much interaction. I think in Orange County it has to do with numbers. It has to do with percentages. Coming from a place where there's 15% black, I think it also has to do with class, right?

I was born and raised, and it's also a sort of this, as time marches on, I was born in a place with a stronger middle class, I think 30 or 40 years old ago, everywhere had a stronger middle class in the US. I think that the lack of middle-class access was a palpable moving here. I think that's something that I noticed as well. What are the ways that classes playing into these racial fishers and how can I think about my role in that community? Yes, I think that there are a lot of surprises and I'm still encountering them.

[00:14:44] Host: I had a conversation with the Superintendent of schools from Santa Ana, and he was saying, at one point, he is like, "No, we're a very diverse community." His thought was, "We are a really diverse community." Then he looked at the numbers and it was 75 or 80% Hispanic. He had to take a step back and be like, "Oh, we're not." It's predominantly white, Hispanic, Asian, and then indigenous and black is on that smaller percentage. I love that you are here and creating this place and space.

You, within one year, you were awarded the first Poet Laureate of Orange County and also named the Vice President of Community Engagement for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Orange County. I'd love to know how your role in both of those positions… First of all, I don't know how you have the time to do all of this. [laughter] Congratulations for all of this, but how important are those roles in conjunction with what you're doing at the university in this county that has what you call the ambient racism?

[00:16:14] Natalie: Yes. I'll speak to the poetry first because I think that in my mind, I love the concept of the poet laureate. I love to see youth poet laureates popping up all around. I love to see more cities and towns and states reinvigorating their poet laureate program. I'm biased, I'm a poet myself, but I think there's something special about poetry, the way that it slows us down. It takes us to an image. It doesn't require coherence. It lives in the world of fragments and ideas and moments.

I think that in a culture and time where we're increasingly expected to produce and move forward and go faster, I think I appreciate the slowness of poetry. You don't even get a whole sentence in one line. I like that even the form itself is asking us to slow down. I think that in that role, I've been really grateful to go to libraries, go to schools, talk to people, be invited to organizations, to write occasional poem for one thing or the other. I really appreciate thinking about poetry as just a vehicle for us to connect to each other to slow down a little bit and connect to each other.

Have us think a little bit less about poetry as this elite superfluous thing. I would love for us to think about poetry, just like I was thinking about the university as something that's vital and part of our toolbox of connection and possibility. I've loved that, I've enjoyed that a lot. I'll finish up that work this year. I'm excited to be able to create my last couple of poems, will be poem celebrating women musicians. I'm excited to post those and think about that series as my last love, love song, love story for both poetry and for music.

I think also I moved into a different role at Segerstrom Center. I was the vice president of community engagement for a while. I'm currently the liaison for community and culture. I work with them on particular elements of their programming and their community engagement department. It was a lot of… that role for me was learning more about what Orange County is and wants. I think that there's a lot of opportunity. I think it's also really important to be honest about the types of things that folks in institutions are really interested in seeing and creating.

That was the lesson there for me. What's my role in this creative process? What's my role as an artist, versus a curator versus an administrator? I think all of those roles are very different and play on different strengths. I think that in stepping back from Segerstrom, I want to, and I am leaning more into my role as an artist, as a writer, as a curator. Not as much as an administrator, as a cultural leader in that way. I think that that's more in alignment with my desire, but also in alignment with where institutions are right now.

I think that there was for sure a period of time from 2020 to the present where institutions were scrambling to demonstrate their progress and demonstrate their commitment to communities of color. I think that the desire to demonstrate their commitment outpaced the actual commitment. I think that's across institutions across the nation, not just an Orange County issue, it's not a Segerstrom issue. It's an issue of how this change happened and what change do institutions want and need and at what pace. I think those are the lessons that I learned in that role.

I'm happy to be able to still be in conversation and in communication with Segerstrom as they also figure those things out themselves, figure out what their brand is, what their role in the community is and continue to build that and develop that.

[00:20:47] Host: I want to talk to you as both a writer and poet and as a professor of African American studies about the role art plays in filling in the gaps left from public education. I use the examples of the show, Atlantaintroducing a lot of people to this concept of Juneteenth, or the show The Watchman introducing the history of Black Wall Street in the Tulsa massacre. Things that as Americans we should know because it's a part of our history but it's just not taught.

Art opens up this avenue and especially art in pop culture or in music that is able to tell these stories and give this little bit of education where our high school education missed or dropped the ball or just didn't exist.

[00:21:45] Natalie: Right. You… ask me again if there's things that-- because I want to talk more about each of these things that you mentioned, because I think that collectively we've lost our love of knowing. We want to know facts. We have Google, we want to know how many drops are in the ocean so we Google. We've lost our love for ideas, and for stories, and for history, and for these expansive topics, and just the curiosities. I think that in the past we're sparked in that educational process. I think when it doesn't exist outside of the system, outside of those structures, it's very difficult for it to exist inside.

I think we have to think about the outside first. We think about what sort of knowledge and experiences are vital for us as a community and as people. Then support teachers in creating those opportunities for knowledge and experience in schools because I think that we're in a crisis and have been for a while of what is the function of K through 12 education and how are we really supporting the folks who are carrying that forward. I think we don't think enough and be in conversation with just like professional adults about what happens in schools in our county. I think that we respond to particular incidents but don't think a lot about the function of learning as igniting something and opening doors and opening opportunities and possibilities. I think a lot about education, I think a lot about art and education. I don't know if I mentioned storytelling yet but I think that for me when I think of the function of art is to help us create stories. We understand the world in stories. We understand the world in narrative. Who we are as a person and a relationship to another person is a narrative that we create. How good we are at creating a narrative that is meaningful and honest and concrete and not arbitrary, not misguided by social media thread. That is how we're going to interact with each other.

Art I think is central for that. It allows us to even, like you said there are gaps, to fill in the gaps. Like how vital is it that someone knows the story of Juneteenth? It's not vital to any particular educational output. It's like why that story? When you're thinking about the US what does it reveal about who we are as a nation? Why is it important for us to hold onto? I think those are the questions that art allows us to explore because artists get obsessed with the story.

I think there are particular things, like I read this book a long time ago called Lincoln's Melancholy, and I was just obsessed with this biography, this idea of how different this social environment was for Abraham Lincoln. He was like the things that we pathologize now we might say, okay, this is like clinical depression that he's going through. We didn't talk about those things in the same way we didn't treat them or heal them or deal with them in the same way that we do now.

These things that are very easy to consider fixed and part of what is and the way things are. You rewind 100 or 200 years and you see how vastly different, and it helps us to think differently. It helps us to think about new possibilities. That's also what's embedded in history. It's embedded in the narrative of stories. How can we reconsider the things that we take for granted because we're always blind to our own times' atrocities, we're blind to the atrocities of this generation. It's like how do we use imagination to help us to see before the next generation has to tell us.

That's what I think art allows us to do, to see the atrocities of our time, to be obsessed with things, to go into things more deeply that we've considered like maybe extraneous or superfluous to our existence and bring them closer to us and say, "No, this is actually central to the way I understand the world." I think those threads are always there. It's like people talk about worldview. You don't understand your worldview because you're in it. I think it's Brene Brown who talks about racism as the water, not the shark.

This idea that we're in it, we're all in it, we're breathing it in, we ate it for breakfast and so we can't see it unless an artist is like, there was a time when, once upon a time you had this idea where we pull ourselves back a little bit and can see it a different way. I love the possibility that art can answer that for us. I think very early on as an instructor when I was still at the University of Florida as a grad student I was teaching Introduction to African American Studies. It was the first time where I really started to feel how important history was and also how recent it was in a concrete way.

I think being born and raised in the South, we had middle school named after Robert E. Lee. The best neighborhood in the city was Haile Plantation. We had all of these legacies of slavery that were really close but you don't recognize how close something is until you see the numbers and it's like, oh, my grandmother and then her mother that's just really close. I think about the way that that experience of the specifics helped make something more tangible and concrete. I think it also helps us to learn empathy. We have to be empathetic even for the villains.

Even for folks who we've cast as villains, like we cast the slave owner as a villain of history, but they were just a businessman of their day. There was nothing villainous about a slaveholder in 1800 or 1700 in the US. I think we have to be able to think broadly enough and deeply enough to say what is it about a place and a people that will allow atrocious villainy to go on for hundreds and hundreds of years. Then what same villainy are we doing today? I think that's the thing talking about the way art allows us to do that. I really am a lover of history.

I'm a lover of stories and thinking about what happened in this place 10 years ago or 100 years ago, how do you see that embedded in the environment? How do you see that embedded in the way neighborhoods people live in? People live in neighborhoods because of what happened 100 years ago not because of what happened a year ago. It's like if we don't understand that, what happened 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, it doesn't make sense. It's very easy to make judgments about today when you're short on history. I love that history allows us to fill in the gaps, as you said, and it gives us the opportunity to also change the whole thing. It allows us to think about what are the other possibilities that we haven't considered.

I love art for that. It's in this idea of creation and creativity and bringing something into being that never was before. That is just the heart and soul of art and imagination. I love that as a way out and a way forward when we're talking about what's the function of art. Why do we need art in schools? Why do we want our kids to learn music as well? We have these more concrete reasons now, we say, it supports math. If you learn music you can know math, so you have to tie everything, to justify it to some science or math. I think that there's also something really special and needful about learning how to create a new world and address the problems that we have. We have new problems, and we need new solutions and new ideas.

[00:30:18] Host: And empathy is key, to learn. To that end, how important do you see the cross-pollination of ethnic studies moving beyond what you identify as and learning the history of the different groups throughout our country?

[00:30:42] Natalie: I think it really is just a fuller knowledge of what is. I think that there's this idea of black history or history of Mexicans in America or Koreans or any particular ethnic or racial group as helpful, good, positive knowledge. It helps us to be better people. Really, it is the reality. I think all of these fields of study were created as a corrective. They were created because there's an absence in mainstream understandings of what is, how we came to this place, how we came to be, how our institutions were built.

I think of it as the way to build stronger and more honest institutions that are more enduring and sustainable. I think that that's the piece that… I think a lot of times we think about race or ethnic studies, we think of it as some good thing we're doing for folks of color. We need to do this good thing for folks of color, but really, it's like this is the best way forward for all of us as a collective to understand what exists. If we want to understand music, for instance, in the US we cannot understand it without black people. You cannot understand music without the African diaspora, black folks coming in as enslaved people, and then the music they created. You can't understand jazz without Africa. It's like all of these ways. If we want to understand-- It really is a delusion to try to understand what is happening right now or what exists in any cultural form, any cultural--

[00:32:34] Host: You look at food.

[00:32:35] Natalie: Food is another great example. Those are my two favorite areas of study because it does reveal that. We're in an ecosystem. It's like no plant is like, "I'm just a plant by myself." It's like, "No, you're only a plant with the sun and the water and the ground and the soil and the bees and all of that. I think that we get it in the natural world a lot more readily than we get it individual because America really does have this narrative again of the individual. We really think of ourselves as discrete individuals. I think that that's also something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

We cling to it because it helps us feel more powerful. Yes, I think that it just helps us to know the more we know about others who aren't like us, the more we can understand what exists, what we see in front of us, social structures, how things come together.

[00:33:27] Host: If you would like to continue the conversation, visit hss.fullerton.edu/ibii to learn more and visit Orange County Grantmakers at ocgrantmakers.org and the Orange County Community Foundation at oc-cf.org. To listen to more episodes and find books written by and recommended from our guests, visit pastforward.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.