In Black America; Dr. Charles Corprew

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. We get a bad rep. TV and media shows one title, black masculinity, one thought of African American masculinity. And typically, you know, it is so perpetrated that we're hyper masculine, that we're stoic, that we're violent, that we are anti feminine, that we are sea women as our Nate and sexual objects, that we lack, that emotion that we want to be dominant. And what I want to show particularly in my research and with my radio show is that we are not a monolith, that masculinity is very diverse within African American men, actually diverse within men. Dr. Charles S. Corpiew III, founder and president of W.I. Revolution Consulting. Corpiew is a transformational consultant, speaker and leader. He dares to ask individuals and organizations, what's your revolution?

With his engaging speech and dynamic methods of building relationships with stakeholders coupled with experience as a scholar, activist. He has become sought after for his ability to provide innovative solutions, that aid individuals and organizations to reform the world. Prior to starting his consultancy, he was a passionate educator, spending 18 years in teaching at the secondary and post-secondary levels. As a professor at Loyola University, New Orleans, he devoted his time teaching and researching the development of adolescents and emerging adults in diverse contexts, in particular African American males. I'm John L. Hanson Jr., and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, Dr. Charles S. Corpiew III, founder and president of W.I. Revolution Consulting, In Black America. If you don't see it in your purview, if you don't see men getting up, getting dressed and going to work.

If you don't have a mental or someone in that space to give you a model, you're going to go look for other models. So I think it's up to one piece is our responsibility as men, as we come up to be able to give back. We have to be able to look back and reach back for our young men and say, look, I may have made mistakes in my life, but I've been able to move up. I've been able to overcome them. Mentorship is one of the big pieces of success. And the research out there shows that for young African American men who have sustainable mentors, not one, two, but sustainable mentors who are there, who show them these various avenues and aspects of masculinity, they have more successful outcome. Dr. Charles S. Corpiew III is a former professor of psychological science at Loyola University, New Orleans, where he spent much of his time teaching and research and development in the verse context. He investigated factors related to resilience and vulnerability in African American men and boys.

Corpiew research the relationship between the multi-dimensional aspects of hyper-mexalinity and his influence on the host of outcomes retained to men and women. His effort in these areas gained national attention, affording him opportunities to lecture nationally and internationally on the aforementioned topics. Born and raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia Corpiew received his Ph.D. in psychological science from Tulane University in 2011. His masters of arts degree and teaching from North Fork State University and the youngest batch of arts degree in history from Jane Madison University. In Black America spoke with Dr. Charles S. Corpiew III. I was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The two wonderful and beautiful parents, Charles and Bertha Corpiew. I'm a proud graduate of Bremen High School in class 1989. We are the largest graduate in class in Virginia State history. I'm also a graduate of Jane Madison University.

Wonderful dukes went on to teach for 10 years. I've been an educator all my life, Mr. Hanson, and Professor Loyola University. And burned on by the obstacles and trials and joys of African American men to begin my consulting from a couple of years ago. Which speaks to revolutionized not only in my life, but the lives of the people that I come in contact with. So everybody has the ability to thrive. So what made you select Jane Madison for your undergraduate? An interesting question. I probably want to say, Don, that it was green one extended. Many of my friends from green one were going up to James Madison. My best friend was there. He was a year older than me. And my high school experience was such a wonderful experience for me. I got to see diversity and equity back in the 1980s. And I wanted to keep that going. I had some wonderful, wonderful friends, beautiful relationships. And I wanted to go to James Madison basically to stay along with my friends. It was actually at that time a pretty diverse school.

So I enjoyed myself. I got to meet a lot of different people from a lot of different areas across the country. But particularly Virginia, being in the mountains of Virginia, I had never left Virginia Beach. And so it was a different experience, but a great experience. And I learned a lot. I'm kind of degree in history from James Madison. And from there you went to Norfolk State. So I was back closer to home. That was. That's right. My father and mother are both educators. My father was a principal for 33 years. My mother was a reading specialist for over 30 years. So being an educator was the family business. And so after I left, Jan, you went to work in a call center because I said I don't want to be an educator. I don't want to do what my mother and father did. But I began mentoring at my church, first Baptist Beach Street. And I actually loved doing the tutoring. And went back to Norfolk State and got a master's degree in education. And then began my teaching career in 1997. So what led you to psychological science at Tulane?

That's an interesting question, having a degree in history, having a degree in education. It really was my experiences with the young brothers who were in my class. Fortunately, I was able to go back to Greenland High School in 2001 and to teach history and psychology. And I actually fell into the psychology when I was at Greenland. They needed somebody to teach the course and because of the classes that I had taken at James Madison, I had the credentials to do it. And so many of the young brothers in school began to take my class. I was teaching a regular psych class and an A.T. psych class. And I began to learn more about their experience. And so in my last year teaching at Greenland High School, I developed a program called The Academy. The Academy was a group of young boys who ran the gamut. They were exceptionally academically or they were doing poorly.

And I wanted them to get together to basically work with their social and academic development. And it was tough at first. They didn't like each other. Many of them had beef towards each other. But by the end of the school year, they were together. They loved each other, they could hug each other, they could tell each other what was going on in their lives. And I remember watching Malcolm X one day. And at the end of Malcolm X, I asked myself, well, who's your Malcolm X? And they said, you are Mr. Cooper, you are a Malcolm X. And you're the one who leads us. And it really began to make me think about how I could take the work even further. So I began looking at doctoral school and actually reached out to my mentor, my graduate school mentor, Dr. Michael Cunningham, at Tulane. And we talked about what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn about academic achievement in African-American males. But I also wanted to know about the provato, you know, the hyper-masculine as we call it now. And how that impacted our young brothers from being the best that they could be.

So that's how I got there. And what was some of the pitfalls if I can phrase it that way when you were teaching at that secondary level? Some of the pitfalls for the young brothers that I was teaching or for myself. Both. That's interesting. So many of the young brothers that I worked with came from single-parent households, low income neighborhoods, had exposure to violence, traumatic violence. One of the young boys who was in the academy with us brought up a machete to school because he had gotten afraid because of one of the rival neighborhood gangs that said that they were going to come after him. So these were some of the experiences that they had. They weren't doing well in school, low teacher support because they were young and black and male. They weren't getting the support they needed. It was funny how the brothers and my class could get A's and B's with me, but we're failing with other teachers. And the teachers would actually come to me and say, why is this young man doing so well in your class and not doing well in mine?

And so it began to have these conversations. And there were things that I could do with my young brothers that they couldn't do. There were things that I could say to them to motivate them that they couldn't say because they just didn't have the cultural competency around that to motivate, to bring them in, to provide that mentorship and motivation. For me, I can't say that there were many pitfalls at the secondary level. I was at home. I was teaching at the school where I went. The students beloved me and I loved them. So it was, it's funny because I would tell people my friend that I felt like a rock star at my high school because I could walk down the hall. What's up, Mr. Kool? What's up, Mr. Kool? I could get a high five. It was probably one of the greatest times of my life. You know, both being a student there and then being a teacher. I think I experienced the pitfalls as an educator more so when I was a professor and dealing with dealing with the politics of being at a university. But when I was teaching at Greenland High School, it was one of the best times of my life.

When you talk about some of the pitfalls, it was there a lack of additional African American male teachers at your high school. Or it was just the conditions in which the young men were growing up under. Well, it was both. So we did not have a tremendous amount of African American male teachers at the high school. And that is, you know, what you see across the landscape with African American males in the educational system at large. But even though we probably had five or six African American male teachers at the school when I was teaching at Greenland. And we worked together. We worked in concert to ensure that our young brothers got what they needed during that period of time. And so it was, like I said, I never, I never took a day off because I wanted to be a part of their lives. And I never missed the day of school when I was a student because of the culture. And I tried to actually rebuild that same culture when I was a teacher there. So we tried to make sure, even though we were a small cadre of men, African American men, at our high school.

Three of us were graduates of the high school. So we worked to ensure that our young brothers saw us in suits every day. That they could come into our classrooms if they were having trouble in other classrooms. That we could, we would go to their games. We would be a part of their lives. The academy was a wonderful experience for me because I got to understand more of their experiences. And then that came out of my research, you know, with my master's research, with my dissertation research, with the publications that I did after I left Tulane, you know, really trying to illuminate that when you have positive supports, when you have good mentorship, even though there may be pitfalls, you can still overcome. You can still be resilient. If you're just joining us, I'm Johnny Johansson Jr., and you're listening to In Black America from KUT Radio. And we're speaking with Dr. Charles Corpiew, the third founder and president of WI Revolution Consultant. Dr. Charles, what led you to found WI Revolution Consulting?

Again, being a long time educator, knowing what our young brothers need. And so a lot of the research I had been doing was around providing pathways, resilient pathways for African-American males to be successful in education. And the purpose of WI Revolution, actually, John, let me go back for one second if you don't mind. Let me go ahead. Let me go ahead. The premise of WI Revolution. I don't know if you know the columnist John, Tom Friedman from the New York Times. He was my graduation speaker at Tulane in 2011. And what he did was weave the Arab Spring into what was going on in America at the time. We were still going through the recession, we were still flounding a little bit. President Obama was trying his best to bring us back from the brink of collapse. And what Tom said during that period of time was, you know, what was going on in the Arab Spring, you know, that was Revolution. That it wasn't these bloody riots in the street, but it was people coming together finding a pathway.

That they were not only revolutionizing themselves, but they were also revolutionizing their country. They were taking, they were democratizing their country. And so that stuck with me, John. It made me think about how I could really think about my flaws, my ills, what troubled me and how I could change my life. But then how I could also be a beacon of light for someone else. And that's like that, that steers me every day. And so as a professor, I said, what else can I do? How can I go into schools? How can I go into nonprofits? How can I go into floor profits? How can I work with state and local governments and help communities? And hopefully on the periphery, at least on the periphery, John, that African-American males are being impacted. And so what's the revolution consulting is about going in and saying, what's your revolution? How are you shifting the landscape of your communities or the people or the in-users that you serve so they can find the ways to thrive like you do? Because everyone has the ability to do that if they're given the right tool, because that's what equity is.

And that's what I promote. I want each person, each organization, to have the ability to impact greatly who they're trying to serve. And that's what I do every day with my consultant. And that's what I do every time I get a chance to be like you, John, on the radio with my What's Your Revolution show. You know, with that's about how can men find the healthiest version of themselves? That's my revolution, because it is an opportunity for me to talk with men and the people who love them about our journey toward finding the best, our best self. What is systems thinking framework? You know, if we think about that, John, is that we don't work in a linear facet. They're not one-to-one relationships. You think about putting on our radio shows. There are so many things that go into making it successful. Your producer, your engineer, the radio waves, the airwaves, all the people listening, everything that has to go into them. But if something breaks down, you know, one thing in the system breaks down, the whole system. But if we're going to make change in the system, we have to think about how all those interrelationships work together to impact the specific outcome.

And so if I'm thinking about African American males, I'm thinking about food, I'm thinking about education, I'm thinking about transportation, I'm thinking about health, I'm thinking about exposure to community and violence. I'm thinking about relationships with teachers and administrators, I'm thinking about what mothers and fathers have, jobs, I'm thinking about all of those things when I try to address a problem with an organization. And by looking at that from a system thinking perspective, I can find levers or leverage points that we can work through. So if I'm trying to change the academic outcomes for African American males, and I see that discipline is a disproportionate, disproportionate, disproportionate rate of them against their peers, I'm going to look at what's their relationship with teachers. What are the discipline guidelines that are going on within an organization, within a school, within a school division? What type of trainings or professional developments are the teachers and administrators receiving so they can understand that bias may play out and how their disciplining are young and.

So that's system thinking, when you look at the overall system and look at the interconnected of the relationships, and then so even narrative that you can find certain leverage points that you can pull to impact the entire system. And it works greatly because a lot of times we just think about, well, if we're going to look at discipline disparities, I just want to look at what teachers and students are doing, how are teachers impacting their students, where there's a lot more that goes on into that. And during the research, I found a lot of information that you had researched upon had to do with masculinity. Why is that important and one of the different styles of masculinity that you tried to bring to the fore? I think it's important because we get a bad rep. TV and media shows one style of black masculinity, one thought of African American masculinity. And typically, you know, it is so perpetrated that we're hyper masculine, that we're stoic, that we're violent, that we are anti feminine, that we are see women as our Nate and sexual objects, that we lack that emotion that we want to be dominant. And what I want to show, particularly in my research and with my radio show is that we are not a monolith that masculinity is very diverse within African American men and actually diverse within men and ensuring that we show the world that black men are not this creation that the media has portrayed of us.

We get to see fathers, we get to see sons, we get to see mentors, we get to see uncles, we get to see teachers, we get to see presidents of the United States who walk with a level of confidence and character that we need to ascend to, that we need to believe in. So I want to portray that and the one great thing about my show, John, is that I bring men and women to talk about these experiences of men, how they struggle, how we struggle, you know, how we face these things, how we cope, how we should cope effectively, particularly when we've coped ineffectively. And so I want to be able to show that because they are these various styles of masculinity, there are these various styles of sexual orientation that are that intersect with our masculinity and to have an equitable conversation about what it means for us to be black and male in America and to be black and male in a global society. So I want to illuminate that as much as I can.

When young men are growing up, television is probably their main focal point. So when we talk about masculinity, if they don't see it, they don't understand what it is. So how can we go about as a society to let these young men know that there's a different masculinity that isn't associated with what's shown on television or in the movie. That's a great question. One of the things is that we have to actually as men like ourselves, John, show our young men that are coming up that they're a variety of masculinity. And that's one of my guests that the other day, if you don't see it in your purview, if you don't see men getting up, getting dressed and going to work, if you don't have a mental or someone in that space to give you a model, you're going to go look for other models. So I think it's up to one piece is our responsibility as men as, you know, as we, as we come up to be able to give back on the models of my fraternity, you know, a mega sci-fi fraternity in corporate is lifting as we climb. We have to be able to look back and reach back for our young men and say, look, I may have made mistakes in my life.

But I've been able to move up. I've been able to overcome them. Mentorship is one of the big pieces of success. And the research out there shows that for young African American men who have sustainable mentors, not one, two, but sustainable mentors who are there, who show them these various avenues and aspects of masculinity, they have more successful outcome. But let's take it from a more innovative perspective, John. Social media is permeates every piece of our lives now. And so how do we use hashtags on Twitter, on Snapchat, on Instagram, you know, to highlight positive images of black masculinity. You know, the other day I posted one of my one of my former students who's actually a hip-hop artist now, but he does conscious positive rap. And so I was able to highlight his story on my Instagram page, a wonderful picture of him gave a little short cast on what he's doing and why he put people on my page got to see that. We need to be able to use these innovative ways to show more positive aspects of black masculinity, of black seminary that told us as fathers, as mentors, as as regular people, as one of my guests of the other day, just to show us that we are actually ordinary people.

We're not extraordinary. It was interesting how he counts that John is that we're not super athletes or we're not super criminal that we're just ordinary people. And that was a very interesting way because we think about that ordinary, I don't want to be ordinary, but the way to be couch that was such an interesting perspective because of how media portrays us that we are super criminal or we're super athlete. No, we're just ordinary people just trying to live and that has to be shown on a consistent basis. I can remember when I was, you know, I grew up in the 60s, so the neighborhood in which I grew up in was kind of condensed. We had teachers, doctors, lawyers, faculty workers, my father on the barbershop, so he had professionals that had their own businesses. So we're on clay on two ourselves. Now we're spread out. We have a different group of African-Americans living in the suburbs and basically those are in the inner city.

Don't have the opportunities in which we had back in the 50s and 60s. How was that affecting our young men as they matriculate to adulthood? Well, you think about what's happening in our urban areas, the lack of funding or the proposed lack of funding for our educational systems. We also have a teaching force particularly that's in these areas that is typically 80% white and female. And even though I applaud a number of the organizations and systems around the country for doing great work in educating their teachers around cultural competency, it is still an ongoing daily process that has to be internalized by the people that educate our children. It is not a one-off professional development, John, that is going to change the attitudes and behaviors of the people who educate our children. It is a revolution that has to happen within their hearts and minds to say, you know what, I'm going to go in and understand not only my bias, but my behavior towards the students that need me the most.

One of the greatest things that I experienced that I had at teaching at Green Run was that by the time that I got back, we weren't as diverse of a school as we were when I was there. We were, in essence, a predominantly black high school now, but I work with teachers of all races who believed in our students, who wanted to work, who gave themselves, you know, 24 hours a day to be achievement of our students. One of my good friends, Chris Jacobs, you know, is a white man and we actually went to school at Green Run together. I remember one day that was a young brother who just packed it up in his class and he could have referred him. He should have referred him. But what he did that day still stands out to me is that, you know, he said, I'm going to take this kid to lunch. You know, we've had it out. He's cursing me out of my classroom. I could have him suspended, but I'm going to take him to lunch so I can understand why that outburst happened. And I remember watching because I sat up in the car and ate lunch and they developed a relationship. Relationships are key in any aspect of our lives.

If, in our urban areas, our teachers remember that relationships are the key because many of our kids don't see these positive relationships. They don't see it at home. They might not see it in their communities. But the establishment of relationships and people that they look up to, because adolescents are looking for people that they can be. They're looking for models. And they're out there. They're out there. They're going to find them if they're not there. So teachers and educators, as well as politicians have to think about policies, equitable policies that are going to impact in New Orleans. You have to think about, yes, New Orleans is gentrifying when we're bringing in more revenue, but our transportation system, John is lacking because we pushed our workforce out of New Orleans. And there's no viable way of getting people back in. You know, with New Orleans being that it's tourism industry is one of the most vital financial revenues of the city. Right. You need people to come work. But if you're pushing them out and not having viable ways of bringing them back in, as well as not having affordable housing, you're losing.

And uptick and crime and murder in our city. And people's not thinking if we go back to a system thinking perspective, the wrong levers of being pulled John. That's how I think we have to think about this from a systems perspective. What are all those forces that are in play right now that are impacting the development of our young children in a negative way? Tell us about being a reception of the WK Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Fellowship. I'm going to look back in my life and ask myself, you know, hopefully with a lot of children around me, you know, with a beautiful partner, you know, all of me. And I'm going to look back and I'm going to ask myself, what were the watershed moments of my life? And I'm going to say being a WK Kellogg fellow, I would not be doing what I'm doing now. I would not have left academia to start what's your revolution consulting. I would not be working with organizations trying to revolutionize the outcomes for African-American males if I had not been a part of 120 people from across the country. And if the Kellogg Foundation had not given me the opportunity to go out and seek leadership development, to talk with some of the greatest minds in the country, to be led by some of the greatest minds in the country.

To just sit and talk sometimes about social justice issues, to talk about the impact of African-American males around the world, what's impacting them? Dr. Charles S. Corp. III founded and president of W.I. Revolution Consulting. If you have questions, comments or suggestions ask your future in Black America programs. Email us at in Black America at kut.org. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. Remember to like us on Facebook and to follow us on Twitter. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. You're going to get previous programs online at kut.org. Until we have the opportunity again for Texas co-produced today with Alvarez, I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

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