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Pam King: What would it be to dream and live unencumbered? Dwight Radcliff is a pastor, community leader, and cultural theologian who wants the pages of Christian scripture to come alive to the gritty realities of justice, equity, and social transformation. Looking through the narrative vision of hip hop in the Black church, he weaves a story of personal and communal wholeness, holding everything together in all the tension of life, all to find thriving in spiritual health, in the embodied, emotional and empathetic now.
Dwight Radcliff: Hip hop culture keeps me in check. It reminds me that the church of Jesus Christ is also supposed to be a prophetic and subversive voice that this unholy matrimony of empire and. Faith that we have in the West and specifically this American church where power and faith go together, and we almost don’t even see the marginalized in the oppressed.
It’s blasphemous hip-hop reminds me that there’s a voice out there, there’s an experience that might not be my first-hand experience that I need to be aware of.
Pam King: I’m Dr. Pam King, and you’re listening to With & For a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom. To offer practical guidance towards spiritual health, wholeness and thriving on purpose.
Hip-Hop is a full-body experience where we see people being able to merge together the totality and complexity of the Black experience and to do so unashamedly. A good psychologist knows it’s only when we are honest, only when we feel our pain, when we stare our vulnerabilities in the eye and allow others to do so with us.
Only then can transformation begin and Hip-Hop does that. It allows people to stand, to sway, to dance together in their pain and be present. This is a deeply felt conversation with my colleague, Reverend Dr. Dwight Radcliff. Dwight is perhaps the only person I know with a doctorate in philosophy of the culture and theology of hip hop.
He’s the academic dean for the William Pennell Center for the Black Church Assistant Professor of Mission, theology and Culture, and Chair of the Faculty Leadership Council, all at Fuller Seminary. And on top of that, he serves as a pastor at the Message Center in Gardena, California, whereas parts of the church may condemn hip hop, he sees hip hop as a lament, a cry against oppression and marginalization.
One of Dwight’s many gifts is being present to his emotions. Dwight shares openly about his life as a Black pastor and professor, and our conversation unfolds from a very deep place with him. We discuss how there is no one size fits all to thriving and Dwight offers that thriving entails living without fear or threat of violence, without being laughed out of a dream and without having to be talked into something more reasonable.
Perhaps. Most importantly to me, I’ve come to appreciate the power of hip-hop that is necessary to shake us up and sensitize us to existing inequities, not romanticizing pain. Dwight speaks to the power of being connected to one’s emotions and to one’s suffering. He spoke about the power of purpose in his life, a sanctified calling that gives him the fuel to navigate, the obstacles he has to deal with when we feel our pain.
When we stare our vulnerabilities in the eye and allow others to do so with us, that’s when healing transformation can begin. In this conversation with Dwight Radcliff, we discuss thriving as the ability to dream and live unencumbered, and the ways the Black church embodies that thriving the grievous reality of Black double consciousness that results from systemic racism and his personal experience as a Black man today.
Mental health in the Black community, the power of sanctified purpose. How hip-hop culture in music help us understand thriving at embodied emotional and familial levels beyond the horizon of rational understanding and how the prophetic vision of hip-hop. Operates in the same tradition of justice spelled out by the gospel that Jesus taught and lived.
Dwight, I am thrilled for this conversation and I am so grateful to have you on the show. Well, thanks for having me. I wanted to bring you here because part of my vision for the Thrive Center is that it would host a very wide spectrum of human thriving. There’s different ways, faith, communities, relationships, spirituality can fit into that, and we’re complex humans and I’m really excited for you to be able to speak into that.
Dwight Radcliff: It’s a pleasure to be here with you. We’ve, I think we’ve been trying for the last couple of years to do something together, so this is great.
Pam King: In asking so many people their takes on thriving, I’m always amazed at the range of responses and really how even a scientific understanding of human flourishing is inflected by each of our personal experiences and backgrounds.
Dwight opened up right away about the meaning of thriving for him. I’m really hoping that you can help our listeners understand a bit about the Black church experience or Black experience when one thinks or feels about the meaning of thriving. So I think I’ll just start with a basic question that I ask all my guests is, is from your perspective, what is thriving?
Dwight Radcliff: Yeah. Start right out the gate with the hard stuff. Yeah. Um, I think thriving. If I’m, if I’m gonna talk from my, my embodied incarnated experience as an African American man, cisgendered, heterosexual Black man in America, I think it really has to do with this ability to, to dream and to live unencumbered. I think that there are some, within our, our nation, within our context that dreams and hopes and aspirations are encouraged.
They are unencumbered. That if, if we can just have a very honest conversation that there are white children in America that dream and their dreams are unencumbered, they can be whatever they wanna be. There’s no footnotes. There’s no caveats, there’s no lid on what they can dream as a child. And, and the reality is that we still live in, in a, in a US context where Black boys and girls still have to be taught some of the limitations and the realities of our, of our situation.
That if a young Black kid goes out, a young Black son goes out and does something, and a young white son does the same thing, that one of them might not come home. And so that ability to dream, to, to think about life unencumbered. Is at least a, a starting point for a conversation around thriving within an African-American context.
I don’t speak for, I mean, none of us, you, you, you mentioned it already, thriving is not, there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer solution. And even me in, in speaking from my context, I’m, I don’t have a monolithic view of the entire culture, but I think that there would be a lot of. Agreement around being able to dream, being able to, to think about the future unencumbered without fear of violence, without threat of violence, without, without being laughed out of a dream.
Without having to be talked into something more reasonable. I think those are some of the, probably the starting places where I would wanna begin a conversation on thriving.
Pam King: That’s really powerful and quite sobering. Yeah. And to put it correctly that the American dream is, is not available to all equitably or equally.
Dwight Radcliff: Amen.
Pam King: The realities that Dwight shares here lay bare. A core human emotional experience. Fear.
When you say unencumbered, I think very much like fully alive. Full of life. Vibrant. And I’d be curious what fully alive is for you or living life unencumbered is for you, Dwight.
Dwight Radcliff: Yeah. So there’s a thing that happens in my in, in my house, my wife and I, this August. We all, we’ll have twenty-five years of, of wonderful, wonderful, exciting marriage.
But there’s this thing that happens in, in the reality of my, my, my body. I’m a Black man. I’m married to a Black woman. When I go to the grocery store, if I leave to go to Sprouts or Trader Joe’s, if I’m on my way home from campus, my wife knows about how long it takes me to get home from campus. We’ve got the whole find my iPhone.
You know, you can, we can see where each other, where we are. But if I, if I’m in a fifteen-minute drive and it’s been 20 minutes, my wife is calling, and it’s not because she’s afraid that I’m cheating or something like that. She’s literally, she tells me all the time, I just have to check on you because you have that Black face.
And that’s a reality that I won’t say it’s monolithic or, or that the Black, Black Americans have a monopoly on it. There are other people groups here domestically and internationally that have similar issues. But, but for me, my, my ability. To walk out of the house and not be in terror for what might happen to me.
Not because I’ve done something wrong or illegal, but just simply because I look the way I look. That that’s a real thing. We, we talk about, there’s a thing that we talk about, especially with the rise of police brutality against Black bodies. We talk about this Black fear that somehow, some way because of our particular socio-historical realities, that Black equals violent, that Black equals something.
So the Black man seems to be portrayed to be more violent than others. That there’s something about me just because I’m Black, that I’m inherently seen as Black. So this is a real thing that happened to me. I’m in Sprouts, sorry for the name drops. I was in Sprouts getting. My wife had me picking up grass-fed bison steaks.
This is, of course you are bougie. I’m trying to tell you, IM trying to tell. You’re bison bougie. I’m bison bougie. Uh, now, now, now it’s, now it’s more grass-fed, ribeye. I’ve got a ribeye problem. Oh, it’s a problem. And, and the thing is, my wife has it too. So we’re, we’re gonna have to take out a second mortgage or something to just, to pay for steaks.
But I’m, I’m in Sprouts, and this is some time ago. And we were living in Orange County at the time, and an Asian American woman was pushing her basket next to me, and she grabbed her purse out of her basket, out of the top of her basket. And I’m looking at the situation, and for those of you that know me, that have seen me, I’m, I’m not six feet tall.
I’m not an impressively big guy at all. I’m kind of a short guy. I don’t think that I’m scary looking at all. But there was something about me in my basket of grass-fed bison. That was a fear for her. Inside of US Sprouts. That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about Black fear. There was one of the, one of the shooting incidents that went public, I believe it was in Oklahoma.
The helicopter officer looked down and we got the recordings and he said, that looks like a bad dude. And he’s in a helicopter. And because the guy was a Black man that was six feet something, he looks like a bad dude. So this, this whole concept of unencumbered meaning that we’ve gotta talk about Black fear in the way that I’m perceived.
There’s this w boys do double, double consciousness, right? But it’s also in the fears that I have. So it’s not just that, that people are automatically afraid of me because I, I incarnated in Black skin. But there’s the fears that I have. If, if we’re being honest that if I am in a majority Black church and a young white kid in a backpack walks in, there’s a fear.
We don’t talk about that. If, if my daughters. My, my Black daughters are home and a white neighbor threatens to call the police. There’s a fear, there’s an immediate fear. I worked in law enforcement for a number of years. My wife did as well. But still, my, my registrations are paid, my tags are current, all that stuff.
But if I get pulled over, I’m debating, do I need to go Facebook Live right now? Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. Absolutely. So that’s the other part of that fear that we don’t talk about.
Pam King: That’s a, an extremely hard reality that I, that I don’t experience as a white, middle-aged woman. I am sorry. That is such a reality.
W.E.B Du Bois introduced the concept of double consciousness first in an 18 ninety-seven article that appeared in the Atlantic, and again in his 1903 book, the Souls of Black Folk, describing it as an inward two-ness, a kind of inner double life, socially constructed by white racism. Double consciousness Du Bois writes, is fatal to self-confidence producing a quote, peculiar, wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.
It’s also interesting to see how Du Bois own thinking on this was emerging during the time when modern. Psychology was beginning to understand the science of subjectivity at Harvard Du Bois himself was a student of William James, who’s considered the father of American psychology and Du. Bois idea of double consciousness is a way the mind responds to the psychological trauma of racism.
It brings home what real, thriving and psychological integration means. Bringing things together into a unity of freedom and confidence in oneself. Dwight explains. You used a big juicy term, Duboisian double consciousness. Could you tell us, oh, did I, a bit what that means to you. You just thought you’d let that one fly.
Dwight Radcliff: I did. I did. It’s so, it’s such a common, you know, thing now, but W.B du Bois talks about double consciousness, uh, in souls of Black folk. And this double consciousness is, I’m aware of. Of how I see me, and I’m also aware of how other people see me, that there’s this sense in that I don’t get to just be me.
I’m consciously aware of how other people see me and how they see me sometimes overrides kind of how I see myself the moment I walk into a room. I understand that I’m not just seen as Dwight, Radcliff as all those hats as a professor or a father, or a husband, or a pastor or community leader. I’m seen as a Black man.
And as a Black man who serves in a predominantly white institution or at least a historically white institution, I’m also aware that there are spaces that I, that I, that I sit in and rooms that I sit in where I have to be the prophetic voice to, to raise an issue. But I’m also aware, this is coming back to that, that whole big phrase is that I have to be mindful of how many times I bring something up and how I bring it up.
Because if I bring it up too often, and if I’m offended by it too often, I just get relegated to being the angry Black man. Mm-Hmm. So I’m typecast as the angry Black man. So now I’m aware, not just of how I view myself as a scholar, as an administrator, as a professor, as somebody who deserves to be in that space as well, but I see how other people are looking at me.
I see when somebody’s body language is, the moment I begin to speak, their body language turns away. Hmm. And so I, I think again, you’re consciously aware of how you view yourself. Mm-Hmm. And how others are viewing you every time you walk into a situation.
Pam King: Our society is learning, yes, struggling, but I hope and believe really learning about what it means to communicate and acknowledge pain, trauma, and grief. The Civil rights leader, John M. Perkins, talks about a mutual giving and receiving of pain. He instructs us to ask quote, where does our pain come from?
Why are you hurting? And I give you your pain and I say that you are hurting and you give me my pain. And we say that we are hurting, listening and acknowledging the pain of others as their pain is an essential aspect, not just of empathetic relating, but of social progress and an ability to work. With and through trauma towards thriving,
Dwight Radcliff: Like to me, this is what it means to be fully present. So as a, as a Black professor, I’ve had not one, not two, not three, not four conversations with students who ask me about why do I approach a lesson a certain way, or why do I talk about maybe some of my, my personal experiences in the class? Like, what does that have to do with the class?
And my first question to them is, usually, how many Black professors have you had? I believe that part of my, my goal to help form our students is that I have to be fully present as well. Mm-Hmm. And, and my being fully present isn’t a way to monopolize the, the amount of presence that can happen in the classroom.
It’s actually to empower the next student. Or the next person to also be fully present themselves. And the more that we do that, I, I think that’s my, my take on the, on the, on the language you just gave. Right. That it gives me space to hear you. It gives me other opportunities to connect with you, and it gives me space to actually be able to hear your entire story.
Doesn’t mean that we have to be in competition about who has it worse. It means that there’s a commonality between us and our lived experience. And I would hope that, that my experience of how I’ve experienced marginalization, how I’ve experienced oppression, how I’ve experienced that, that that ostracism, I would hope that it would make me sensitive to the ways that you’ve experienced your own traumas.
Pam King: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there is some bit of revolution in the academy and pedagogy and teaching that it’s, it’s not just a transfer of information, but you know, from my vantage point, transformation. Occurs through the rubbing of lives when lives are exchanged and stories are exchanged.
Vulnerabilities are exchanged. Yeah. And as professional professors, that can be challenging. Right? About like to what extent, but I think that sharing narratives, sharing stories and experience at times explicitly and at times, just speaking from that emotionality of that is, is really vital and important.
But that has not been the traditional or conventional way No. In the academic world. Not at all. You and I were both first trained as preachers. Before we were as teachers. Absolutely. And, and there might be some commonality in our teaching styles because of that, because there is more narrative and, and self-expression, communal expression, shared and preaching.
Just a curiosity, but I wanna go back to something you said early on, going back to the Duboisian double consciousness and fear. I just, I just wanna say as a psychologist, and I’m sure you’ve heard this over and over again, but for the point of our listeners that you know, all of us to some extent, you know, deal with double identities.
Like who, who reading the room, who do they think I am, who do, who do I say I am. But the extent that you as a Black man has to do that is way more psychologically taxing. Takes up more additional hard drive for that processing that external identity or the, the multiple ones you’re tracking in a room.
Whether you walk into a faculty meeting, you’re guest speaking at Oxford, or you’re in Sprouts, you’re trained to wonder and anticipate how people are experiencing you. And that’s a lot of energy.
Dwight Radcliff: It is. And so, so given a general analogy, someone I think we all, you’re right, we, we all walk into a space and we’re kind of reading the room trying to figure out what, what have you.
I think if, if I walk you through my experience, I walk into the room and majority of the rooms are predominantly white. So there is a sense that I’m being gauged, that my words are being taken differently than someone else’s words. That I have to, or at least there’s a, there’s a, there’s a compulsion that I have to code switch that if I use language that is native to me, that is comfortable to me, there’s an assumption that I’m not as educated, that I’m, I’m not as well-versed as, as the next person.
There’s all the layers of unpacking my immediate assumed identity aside from the other stereotypes, and I don’t want to give those, even, even energy, but it is a very taxing process because I recognize that my, my life has calling on it. So I, I recognize that if I enter into space, there’s purpose and reason for me to be there.
And so how do I, how do I wade through the weeds of what I’m experiencing just to get to my calling and my, my, my, my purpose for being? And that’s again the, the one of those obstacles to my thriving that. I’ve got to cut away all the weeds just to be able to get to a space where I feel like I’m functioning in my calling.
Pam King: Our conversation naturally turned toward what it means for the Black church to thrive. And for Dwight, it starts with honest conversations. The idea that some conversations might be illegal or taboo. He points out the ways this holds us back from embracing each other and finding true freedom. We need these conversations, but where are they happening?
We are at a low point of trust in our society. The political stage, the media environment, and the increasing ability to turn our neighbors into strangers makes empathetic, honest justice-serving conversation hard to come by, but we need to remember that they can happen and are happening all over the place, and should we choose, we can be part of them.
Dwight Radcliff: There’s so many authors now that are writing on trauma and inherited trauma, and how do we unpack and prepare children to be free to dream? In the face of a society that still would rather dehumanize them. And at the same time, they are carrying genetically burdens that they did not ask for burdens that go beyond their own individual experience in life.
It’s, that is the burden that is, that is the, the, the, the mantle and, and not every demographic of people in our country have that burden. It is an unfair unequitable burden, and that’s why I’m, I’m appreciative again. We’ve talked over the last couple years about trying to do something and I’m grateful just for the space to talk about what does it mean for.
A Black community for a Black church to really begin to thrive, to be able to dream and envision what you believe God is calling for your life without also having to, to have the footnotes of, oh, who you have to fight and what you gotta deal with and what you’ve gotta in order to do it. And instead of just being, Hey, I believe God called me there, that’s where I’m marching towards.
It’s such a different space and I’m trying not to, not to break down here. So when my daughters were getting old enough to really begin to have conversations about the era, historical realities of our country, and I know that we’re erasing them from textbooks and all that stuff, but the actual lived racial realities in our, in our country, we began to take them to some museums.
And I’ll never forget that one of my daughters, her response to me was, why do we have to be Black? Like that statement? Why does that have to be our experience? Because she recognized even in her, in her youth, in her, in her, in her experience and wisdom and ignorance all at the same time, she recognized that this is not everybody else’s experience.
So why does it have to be my experience? And, and that’s coming back to the core of what it means to thrive. And one of the things that I’m lamenting right now in our society is our inability to have honest conversations, our, our inability to say, Hey, this happened, this was horrible. There are ramifications and ripple effects of that.
How do we address it, talk about it, and begin to make corrective and take corrective action so that all of our children can begin to dream and live unencumbered. And, and the fact that we can’t have that conversation in a lot of spaces is something that I’m. I’m lamenting heavily mm-Hmm. That, that, that’s almost a taboo or illegal conversation.
Pam King: That’s ridiculous. It’s tragic. But on that note, I want to ask you where you experience those conversations happening most effectively and, and earnestly, if anywhere at all?
Dwight Radcliff: I don’t want to, I don’t want this to sound like a, a, a shameless plug. No place is perfect. Every place has its flaws. But I see these conversations happening all the time at Fuller.
I do in, in my classrooms and just hearing from other students. One of my hats is I’m academic dean for one of our ethnic centers for the Pannell Center for Black Church Studies. So I’m constantly engaging students across a broad spectrum, but more specifically students of the African diaspora, our international, our African International students, and our African-American students.
And hearing about these conversations that they’re having with other students and with faculty. I see it happening there. I see it happening in, in small spaces. I see it happening in small conversations. Mm. I see it happening at dinner tables, coffee shops. I see it happening when a, a white student goes back, and I’m talking specifically of three white colleagues that I know right now, go back and challenge their families from, from the south and from the Midwest, and call them on their own BS, call them on their racial BS.
I see it when my daughters are challenging status quo and having conversations that even challenge the way I was raised, you know, and, and my wife and I are struggling with what does it mean to, to, to raise young Black women who are intelligent and beautiful and empowered to use their voice. But, but we struggle because we had parents from the South and it’s certain things you don’t do and don’t say, I see it when my Filipina colleague.
Is writing theology from a Filipina American perspective and challenging just the larger Asian American narrative. I see it when I talk to my colleagues in the Center for Asian American Theology and Ministry when we’re having conversations about Black-white binary and making space. I like it is happening, and I do have hope, but I think that when we look at larger narratives in our, in our country, I think that’s where we sometimes get discouraged.
And so our conversations, this podcast is, is never gonna get played on CNN and Fox. It’s never gonna, it’s never gonna get that. But here’s a great segue. Um, Tupac said, I might not change the world, but I’ll damn sure inspire the mind that does. And so he, he understood that his role wasn’t necessary to change the entire world, but it was to inspire people to.
To go start doing other things and having conversations that would eventually lead to wide scale change. And so I see it in, in you, Pam. I see it in, in my colleagues at Fuller that we’re having conversations that if we’re just being honest. We could name 10-12 institutions right now that can’t have this conversation right now.
Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm.
Pam King: Scientifically, we’re only just beginning to understand the way trauma actually passes down from one generation to another. Trauma actually impacts our genetic expression. So taking a longitudinal approach, not just looking at the transgressions of the moment, but understanding the impact it has within and beyond a single human lifespan.
This is essential not just for understanding thriving in racial context, but also for doing something about it intervening to imagine a different future of thriving for marginalized and historically oppressed groups. You name something that to me is a developmental psychologist. Help me. Who really understands or views the world in from a systems perspective.
Yeah. That, you know, people are shaped through their interactions, whether it’s their mother or father or their neighbors or their school or their country or the economy or whatever. Macro issues are happening. But history is also a system. And, and you brought up a very technical issue that we call Socioepigenetics.
And that is, thank you.
Dwight Radcliff: That’s what I was gonna say.
Pam King: How our, you know, the reality is that, you know, as humans, we are a ongoing, evolving, developing species that is a product of both nature and nurture. And, and it, it’s not always common knowledge that even our genetic expression that DNA that we’re born with, that many people think, oh, well, that, you know, that caused my personality.
How are genes are actually expressed, are influenced by the experiences in our mother’s womb. So you, if you have a baby in utero, and we know this, you know, an alcoholic mom that impacts how they’re physiologically born, that impacts their ability to concentrate. Yeah. And their brain. If you have a baby who’s born in a mom who is under constant threat and stress.
Yes, yes. That impacts how those genes are. Not all of them, but how some of them are expressed. Yes. So, not to mention if they’re not being, you know, the mother’s not eating or you know, that there’s sleeping, there’s lots of issues that impact us. So this idea about genetic inheritance and, and you know, the sins of the mothers and fathers, as we often say in biblical traditions being passed down to generations.
It is real.
Dwight Radcliff: Yeah. And we talk, the, the, the alcohol thing is a easy one for us to connect. We don’t connect the other piece, we don’t connect the trauma.
Pam King: We don’t connect the trauma. So whether you’re talking mental health issues and you have a, uh, Asian depressed mom, or you have, you know, a Black mom who is passing down the racism, the violence, the centuries of injustice that comes out.
And not only as you’re naming, you know, children come into a society where depending on the family, the community in which they’re raised, like it sounds like your daughters were able to not have to deal with some of the violence injustice until they kind of came of age and, and hopefully had a bit more of the cognitive and psychological capacities and maturity to deal with that.
Not, not all children have that privilege. Yeah. But there’s always that reckoning that, that this is how the world sees me or has seen me. Yeah. And I, and I, I don’t think that. Other communities understand the, that historic trauma and that impact.
Dwight Radcliff: So within the Black church, Black community, broadly in, in America, we have historically not done a good job of talking about mental health overall just as a larger subject.
And there are some colonial theological reasons for that. But the fact is that that’s, that’s a reality. And so now even, even though conversations around mental health and mental wellness are becoming more common, the understanding that that trauma can be passed down is still, still, it’s a fairly new concept period, but it’s, it’s very kind of cutting edge skeptic.
There’s some skepticism about it within the Black community, but it explains so much, it speaks to so much. And I think part of, part of the hesitance to accept something like that is. Not wanting to constantly be viewed as a victim, that Right, right. But then part of it is also just not understanding mental health.
And we could talk about the Historic mistrust of the Black community with, with medical providers just historically. So there’s a lot of things that still need to be unpacked. But what I would want viewers and, and people who are listening to this to know is that yes, trauma gets passed down into our actual DNA, whether we’re talking about the Body Keeps Score, post-Traumatic Slave Disorder, any number of books in that that are out right now, that that is a real thing.
And the longer you have historic constant trauma and stress, the more damage that gets done or more changes that we begin to see genetically again.
Pam King: So regretfully and, and I wanna emphasize, it’s not just the bodies that keep the score, but culture does too. Mm. And those. You know, trespasses, those are also inherited at the social level that get passed down, and I, I think we’re more aware of that, but I, I think some people can grow up naively regarding the pervasiveness of systemic injustice.
Yeah, absolutely. So that these children who not only are born with things going on in their body, but their, their breathing air, cultural memes, air around them. Yeah. That does not necessarily produce the confidence in the dream.
Dwight Radcliff: Yeah. Further, further obstacles to thrive. Yeah.
Pam King: Yeah. I really love the work of Barbara Holmes on Okay.
Contemplative Black practices and spirituality. One of the things I am appreciate that she emphasizes kind of the communal aspect of Black contemplative or worship, and there’s more of a sense of a collective, and you said. Something earlier, again about children’s dreams, about how we have to dream for our children.
And you were talking about the Black church, I think, and it made me realize, no, not just the Black church, church has to dream for our Black children, but we need a collective dream for Black children as a society and, and I am so happy to hear what you said about Fuller because I feel like Fuller has begun to weave a shared dream for our Black colleagues, our Black students, and, and made an effort to hold that up, but that that needs to be transmitted so that children wake up, come of age knowing that all of society dreams for them.
All children need that.
To understand Dwight, you need to see and know the impact of hip-hop culture. In his own story, he has helped me see how hip-hop culture and music help us understand thriving at an embodied level, seeing beyond the shallow complaints of vulgarity. To appreciate the depth of experience, hip-hop portrays like jazz and blues before it.
Black Americans have understood their pain and expressed it at an embodied level through dance, movement, rhythm, and improvisational poetry that does a deep integrating work. This can only be done in and beyond the horizon of our rational understanding. Hip-hop culture invites our bodies to understand often before our minds get it.
Okay, Tupac. So I, I love this quote that he may not change the world, but he hopes to inspire the mind that does the mind that does. How has, yeah. Reverend Dr. White, Radcliff hip hop
Dwight Radcliff: inspired you. Okay. So, so there’s the, there’s the open door. So try not to go too long here. We’ve only got 18 hours of podcasts, right?
Um, so Podcast marathon. Yeah. Podcast marathon. So you have to understand my journey with, with hip hop that I’m born in. I’m born in, in the seventies. Okay. I grew up with hip hop. Hmm. I don’t, I don’t mean I grew up with hip hop. No, no, no. I mean, hip hop and I grew up together, hip hop and I are about the same age, which means that I went through my adolescence when hip hop was going through its adolescence.
And then there was a period in my life where I was divorced from hip hop because. The church at the time, the more Pentecostal Holiness church at the time. That just wasn’t of God. It was, it was literally the devil is what they don’t. Yeah. It was the devil. So it wasn’t until I started coming back to school and I’m a late-life academic.
I get to Fuller and shout out to Ralph Watkins my, my mentor or my brother. And he started pushing me and I started going back and listening closer to hip-hop. And I discovered number one, what I fell in love with initially. But number two, I saw what drove me away, but I didn’t see it the same way. Hmm. So I came back to hip-hop and I, I am a hip-hop head to this day.
I think that from a church perspective, one of the reasons why we hate hip-hop and one of the reasons why we we dismiss hip-hop as demonic is because hip-hop is so full of. Vulgarity, violence, glorification of, of certain types of lifestyles, misogyny. And so there’s all this glorification of, you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll.
And so good Christian people see that and we get turned off from that. But I remember reading this piece where congress was having all of these hearings on the vulgarity and hip-hop and all that stuff. And one scholar said, you all are more concerned with their cursed words than you are with the cursed worlds they inhabit.
Absolutely. And that struck me. And, and I began to, and, and Ralph Watkins piece, the message of the remix, the gospel remix really helped me see this. And I began to see hip-hop as a lament, as a cry. Against a, a society. Oppression, marginalization,
Pam King: Hip-hop, like all good Christian theology holds all the experiences of reality together. Yes, the love and goodness of God, that which is pure and gentle, but also the darkness and ugliness in grievous injustices that threaten the human spirit. Holding it together as a unified whole is that integrating work, that work against double consciousness and against a sense of being divided inside.
Dwight Radcliff: And I began to actually do a dangerous thing. I began to reread the Bible. It’s a dangerous thing. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Alert. Alert. Do not do this at home. Read the Bible. Yeah, spoiler alert, there’s some bad stuff in there. And I began to see in my Bible. How there were prayers that the enemy’s children, the, the babies of our enemies, that their heads would be dashed against brick walls.
That, that there were children that were mauled, that there were people that were angry with God and crying out against God, and people that were crying out against their enemy and asking God to, to, to damn them and condemn them and, and usher down violent and rain down violence upon. And I began to, to say, wait a minute, this is the same thing that’s happening in, in, within hip-hop.
And, and one of the beauties of hip-hop culture, especially in its genesis, is that it begins to hold together things that we think are mutually exclusive. A yearning for God and an actual reality or actual telling of reality. That was unashamed. Historically, these were two different streams. If you read James Cone’s, the Spirituals and the Blues, these were traditionally two different.
Streams, the blues, which talked unashamedly about life and the spirituals were talked unashamedly about God. But, but within hip hop, we see people being able to merge together the totality of the Black experience and to do it unashamedly. And, and the reason why it was problematic, the more I got involved, the more I read, the more I studied was not because I had an issue with it, it was because my theology had an issue with it.
Mm-Hmm. And the more I questioned my theology, I recognized that the parts of my theology that had a problem with it were actually those parts of my theology handed down through colonialism. Hmm. A more traditional, broadly African West African spirituality holds all of the experiences of life together, and they don’t have to be separated and parceled out and, and, and, and, and sit in these nice, neat silos.
And so when I hear a song like The Message, one of the, one of the first. Hip-hop albums, first hip-hop tracks that came out. Broken glass everywhere. People pissing on the stairs, you know, they just don’t care. Broken glass everywhere. People pissing on the don’t care. When you start hearing the way Grandmaster Flash and the Furious five begin to detail a lived reality for so many people and then still hoping, don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge.
I’m trying not to lose my head. It’s like a jungle. Sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under push me because I’m close to the edge. I’m trying not to lose my head. It’s like a jungle. Sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under that there is this groaning for I need help somewhere.
And so for me in my journey, it was coming back to something that actually was more akin to the old Testament prophets and more akin to the Psalms and more akin to specifically Psalms of lament. Then what my previous theological framework would allow me to hear and would allow me to see. And so I did something, and I’ll shut up and, and let you jump in here.
There was a woman by the name of C. Dolores Tucker, who was a congresswoman, I believe, Black woman congresswoman. And she was one of those people that was leading the charge to put the explicit content lyrics on all of the, yeah. Back in the day she was kind of leading the charge against Tupac and, and you know, and all this kind of stuff.
And it wasn’t until after Tupac died that she had admitted that she had never listened to an entire song or an album. And so here she was one of the staunch critics of, of this culture, this genre, but had never sat and really listened to Tupac. And he was one of her famous, you know, dart boards. Yeah. And so I went back that when I heard that it pricked me and convicted me.
So I went back because I remember I. There was one song in particular, I wonder if Heaven got a Ghetto by Tupac. Wonder if heaven got a ghetto.
Heaven got a ghetto. And I remember the church that I was a part of and movements, I was a part of condemning this song saying, how dare you think that there’s a ghetto in heaven? Like how, how blasphemous. Mm-Hmm. And, and I felt the same way. And that was my tagline. And I preached it and I, I was on board with it and I sat down and listened to the song.
And this, this young man, I was raised a little young. Person doing bad shit, talking much shit. ’cause I never had shit.
And, and he starts going through his experience of having an absent father, having a mother that was drugged out and needing to provide for a baby sister living in, living in, in the projects, right? And so his question is, he literally says it’s in the lyrics. If I go snatch a purse because I’m trying to feed my sister, do I go to hell for that?
So he’s not asking if there’s a ghetto zip code within heaven. He’s asking, is there enough compassion in eternity, in God’s, in God’s reign, in God’s kingdom? Is there enough compassion for somebody who I’m engaging in activity that you find morally bankrupt? But I’m doing it for the, for the, for the, for the, for the sake of survival.
And then he talks about Rockefeller, and you guys don’t say anything about the illegal or immoral ways that Rockefeller amasses his fortune. And so I wonder, he said, and if I go after this money, you label me a criminal. And that’s, and if I survive or if I die. I wonder if heaven got a ghetto. Let the Lord judge the criminals.
I wonder if heaven got a ghetto,
if, and that song literally became my anthem for being able to re-hear hip hop culture. And, and I don’t want to paint it with a large brush that all hip hop is beautiful and all hip hop is, has a prophetic message and all. But, but I also then feel the same way about what we call gospel music. All of it ain’t great either, but I want us to really be able to, my challenge, my charge is that as I sat and listened, I was able to hear a lament and it, and it pricked me as a son of the Black church, as a son of the prophetic church.
What were the things that the church was not saying and was not doing? Historically we’re talking about the, the post-Civil rights generation, and we can have a longer conversation about that. But, but that genesis of hip-Hop that allowed hip-hop to become a prophetic voice in the community and allowed the church and the church’s prophetic role to diminish, what was it that we refused to talk about?
What was it that we refused to engage that allowed hip-hop culture to become the prophetic voice in our communities?
Pam King: I wanted to hear Dwight’s version of how Hip-Hop emerged in the 1970s, not just as a musical genre, but as a way of life and a practice of being 100% present and unencumbered, fully and wholly oneself, which I must say sounds like important symptoms of spiritual health holding all of reality together as a way of seeing the world Dwight reflected on how hip-hop and Christianity converge and work together to get at prophetic truth, justice, and aesthetic meaning, how beautiful are those who bring good news?
Dwight Radcliff: Historically, we’re talking. Late seventies, you can go through the beginnings of trickle-down economics. You can go to what was actually happening in the Bronx. The, the claim that the Bronx is burning was actually real. We’re talking about riots that were happening in in Chicago, riots that were happening in LA and in the sixties, riots that were happening in Harlem.
All of this is late sixties, early seventies, post-Civil rights movement, post-Civil rights acts in the late sixties. And you find that a lot of Black churches and a lot of Black families began to get a little, what we call a little piece of the pie, and began to move out of urban centers and into suburbs.
And you saw as, as Black families began and Black professionals began to move out of the C city centers and into suburbs that you also saw white flight. So we had Black flight and white flight. White people as Black and brown families were moving into their previously white neighborhoods. They began to move further out.
And so Black families began to take their money, their churches, and their experience out of the inner city. As they did that, there were fewer after school programs, there were fewer parks and recreations, fewer opportunities for our youth to engage in things. So our churches are leaving, our professionals are leaving, our dollars are leaving, and hip hop is, comes onto the scene as really almost a form of escapism, a, a party vibe to be able to get away from the, the, the pressures of society.
It’s like a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under, it’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under. And they began to say and do things through graffiti art, taking over the subway trains, and literally painting art. J. Kameron, Carter would call it poiesis.
This, making something out of nothing. Taking hot wiring. Street lights to have a party to power their sound systems taking over, you know, the, the, the community rooms to have house, to have rent parties, painting over trains to, to express beauty and pain, and holding all of these things together. Hip-hop became the place where you could be 100% present.
Unencumbered. Unencumbered, where you could be Afro-Caribbean. You could be Dominican, you could be Caribbean, you could be Black, you could be whoever you were. You could be a woman, you could be a man, you could be fully how whatever you were, perhaps you weren’t a dancer, but you were an artist. There was space for you.
Perhaps you weren’t an artist, but you could rap. There was space for you. There was, there was this, this ESIS making a haven in a ghetto. Mm-hmm. Creating a safe space where your dreams and your, your vision for thriving could be unencumbered. Amen.
Pam King: Lemme ask you this. I hear how hip-hop has changed the way you read the Bible, how you preach, you know, how you think about ministry, about tapping into people’s lived reality regardless of where your life, your family’s life has been or will lead you.
How does hip-hop change your experience of God and who Christ is?
Dwight Radcliff: So one of the things that I appreciate about hip-hop culture is it keeps me in check. Hmm. It it reminds me that the church of Jesus Christ is also supposed to be a prophetic and subversive voice that this unholy matrimony of empire and faith that we have in the West and specifically this, this European derivative American church where power and faith go together and we almost don’t even see the marginalized in the oppressed is, is blasphemous.
So hip-hop reminds me. There’s a voice out there that I need to be aware of. There’s an experience that might not be my first-hand experience. I think it’s, it’s a reminder for me that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made. It’s a reminder to me of my calling, it is this reminder that hip-hop is not a musical thing.
It’s not a genre of music. It’s not a, it’s not a way of dressing. Mm-Hmm. That most people who identify with hip-hop would tell you, I am hip-hop. That it’s part of my identity. It’s a part of how I see the world. So if it’s a part of how I see the world, then it’s one of those things that Jesus uses to help me see people and systems and things that I probably would not have seen otherwise.
It is a prophetic voice in my ear. That reminds me that, that Jesus traveled all the way to Syro-Phoenicia deliberately, that, that, that Jesus stopped the parade for the woman with the issue of blood. That, that Jesus looked at a Roman police officer, a police captain, and, and had mercy on him and his son or servant.
It’s a reminder that there are going to be people that I don’t normally, or I, I won’t see because of the way that I was raised or because of the things that are in my and, and part of my experience that will be people that I don’t see. And, and if I don’t have things like hip hop reminding me of my own place of privilege and my own blind spots, then I become Pharisee.
I, I become the, the tinkling brass. Sounding symbol. I become that nothing religiousness that is actually not worried about making sure that the captives are set free. Making sure that the blind can see, making sure that, that I can proclaim the, the acceptable and favorable year of the Lord. Like that’s what hip-hop reminds me.
And I know for, for someone listening right now who doesn’t really have an experience with hip-hop culture, and I could hear them saying, nah, my challenge to you is, is to sit and to listen and ask for help, because you might need somebody to recommend a few songs to you. But to sit and to listen and then to ask yourself, this is, this is the practice for me.
This is kind of your, your question. The practice for me is, as a preacher, I. What sermons do I need to be preaching to reach that person? Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. As, as a professor, how do I, how do I convey the mission of God? How do I talk about theology and culture in such a way that my student would be able to, to demonstrate the gospel of Jesus Christ to that person?
Because the beauty of, of hip hop culture is that it’s not always biographical, but it purports to be, as Jay-Z said, it purports to be meaning that sometimes it is somebody’s actual lived experience. Sometimes it’s the lived experience of somebody that they know. And sometimes it’s completely manufactured.
But here, but here’s the, here’s the key for us as, as Christians, as preachers, as professors, as teachers, as leaders, therapists. As therapists, when the life that that represents comes and sits in your office, books, an appointment with you, sits in your pew, walks into your classroom. What do we have to offer that life that represents the good news of Jesus Christ?
And, and my argument is that without hearing this narrative, without hearing this prophetic voice, this lament of lives created and the beauty and the likeness and image of God, we will go on about our business of, of counseling, preaching, and teaching, and never actually bring good news that sets that captive free.
Amen.
Pam King: Amen. And that’s not thrive, that is not thriving, not thriving. It’s as if you need. The rhythm and resonation. Reverberation. Yeah. Yeah. The, the stark violence, the crassness, the in-your-faceness of hip-hop to get you over the immunization of these inequities. Mm. Yeah. Because I think many of us have been able to live immune or ignorant of those inequities.
Absolutely. And so hip-hop is like sensory, engaging. It pulls you in. There’s a culture, there’s a dress, there’s a vibe, there’s a sound, there’s visual, there’s connection, there’s community, there’s opportunities to express, and that that kind of full-throttle experience is required to validate the lived experience of people and to kind of detonate within US leaders wanting to care for people to see things differently.
Dwight Radcliff: It’s, it’s, it’s very derivative of a Greco-Roman view of the world to separate. Our senses to separate our experiences. It is very global, south worldview for us to know that all of these things are together, part of our lived experience. And hip hop is one of those, one of those tools that dares to bring together all the good, bad, ugly, the joy, the pain, all of the experiences and all of the senses, the love, the hate, the highs, the lows, and bring it all together and, and say, no, this is really what life is.
It’s not the one dimensional piece, it’s not two dimension. It is all of these things. And if, and if you’re good news, and this, this is the message to the church. If your good news isn’t good news for the totality of this, you don’t really have good news. You’re irrelevant.
Pam King: And, and I, I, I think in a country where you know the pursuit of happiness, persistent positivity, I wanna say stop thriving is double-handed.
It is joy, it is lament. And I so appreciate you highlighting that thriving life is full of challenge, loss, grief, sorrow, despair, goodness, joy, exhilaration, connection, intimacy. But that the Black experience, and not that it’s monolithic, a common experience is often the systemic injustice, the biological inheritance, and that pursuing the dream is not as readily available as it’s for some and to, to dream with.
And for the Black community, for the dreams of Black children and all children.
Dwight Radcliff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amen. So I think if I boil this down, I’m leading with people to find stories that you don’t know and to listen to them and to sit in them. That’s one of the things that hip hop does for me. It allows me to sit in stories.
Some of them I know, some of them I remember. Some of them I don’t know, but it allows me to sit in stories. I do this with students and people in my community to sit with those stories, and I’m not looking to enter into heaven with a spotless garment. I’m looking to enter into with a garment that’s been stained by the stories and the experiences of my sisters and brothers.
And I feel like that continued process would help to make me a better follower of Jesus, that I’m actually carrying my sisters and brothers in places everywhere that I go.
Pam King: Amen. That’s really beautiful.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience, your wisdom, your vulnerabilities. Thank you for being a prophetic voice amongst us.
Dwight Radcliff: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Pam King: Dwight Radcliff’s cultural theology of hip-hop spells out a complex interweaving narrative vision of thriving and spiritual health. One that holds. All things together, making sense of it all through beauty and an expression of freedom. The key takeaways that I will carry with me from this conversation are the following.
Hip-hop culture holds all of reality together, validating the full range of human experience and emotion, a trait it shares with the kind of Christianity Jesus lived and taught.
The Black community and the Black church teach us an integrated thriving that calls us to unencumbered life free of fear.
Honest, empathetic conversations are difficult work, but are essential for making progress toward racial justice.
We can find transformation when we sit in stories, especially stories of grief, mourning, trauma or suffering, and allow them to work redemptively, an important component of thriving is holding life intention.
Life doesn’t always resolve, but there is beauty and relationships and meaning in those tense moments.
With & For is a production of the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary. This episode featured Dwight Radcliff this season. New episodes drop every Monday for more information. Visit our website thethrivecenter.org, where you’ll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose. I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the Thrive Center and our with and for podcast team. Jill Westbrook is our senior director and producer Lauren Kim is our operations manager. Wren Jurgensen is our social media graphic designer. Evan Rosa is our consulting producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy.
I’m your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.
Rev. Dr. Dwight Radcliff
Dwight Radcliff serves as Senior Pastor of The Message Center and Academic Dean of the Pannell Center for Black Church Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary.
Episode Summary
What would it be to dream and live unencumbered? Rev. Dr. Dwight Radcliff is a pastor, community leader, and cultural theologian who wants the pages of Christian scripture to come alive to the gritty realities of justice, equity, and social transformation. Looking through the narrative vision of hip-hop and the Black church, he weaves a story of personal and communal wholeness …. holding everything together in all the tension of life … all to find thriving and spiritual health in the embodied, emotional, and empathetic now.
Show Notes
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“It really has to do with this ability to, to dream and to live unencumbered.” — Dr. Dwight Radcliff Seeing justice, equity, and social transformation through the lens of hip-hop culture and Christian faith, Rev. Dr. Dwight Radcliff offers a vision of freedom and unencumbered life for the future of the Black community to which we can all bear witness. Raising challenging questions about the meaning of thriving in a culture dominated by fear, he speaks in a prophetic voice, interweaving the powerful, compounding effects of the language of the Gospel and the language of hip-hop. As a cultural theologian, community leader, and pastor, one of Dwight’s many gifts is presence—presence to emotion, to the realty of injustice, and to the complexities of thriving in the context of race and gender. He speaks about the power of purpose and calling in his life, pointing out the unique insight hip-hop, rap, and R&B music can offer the human experience. He calls us to be attuned to the whole reality of pain, suffering, trauma, and struggle when discussing psychological and spiritual health and thriving. And he bears witness to fear, anger, and grief—re-sensitizing us to our pain and vulnerability—speaking truth for the sake of beauty and justice.In this conversation, we discuss:
- Thriving as the ability to dream and live unencumbered, and the ways the Black church embodies that thriving
- The grievous reality of Black double-consciousness that results from systemic racism
- And his personal experience as a Black man today
- Mental health in the Black community
- The power of sanctified purpose
- How hip-hop culture and music help us understand thriving at embodied, emotional, and familial levels, beyond the horizon of rational understanding
- And how the prophetic vision of hip hop operates in the same tradition of justice spelled out by the Gospel that Jesus taught and lived.
Show Notes
- Check out Rev. Dr. Dwight Radcliff’s Hip Hop Playlist (Note: Explicit Content)
- What is it to live unencumbered?
- “Hip-hop culture keeps me in check. It reminds me that the church of Jesus Christ is also supposed to be a prophetic and subversive voice.”
- Hip-hop and the Black experience
- Introduction: Rev. Dr. Dwight A. Radcliff
- Dwight Radcliff: What is thriving?
- “I think it really has to do with this ability to dream and to live unencumbered.”
- Fear and the experience of Black men
- “The American dream is not available to all equally.”
- “What is unencumbered life for Dwight?”
- W.E.B. Du Bois and Double Consciousness
- W.E.B. Du Bois’s book, The Souls of Black Folk (Project Gutenberg)
- Double consciousness is “fatal to self-confidence,” producing “a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.”
- “I don’t get to just be me.”
- Dr. John M. Perkins
- “Where does our pain come from? Why are you hurting? And I give you your pain and I say that you are hurting; and you give me my pain and we say that we are hurting.”
- Honest, vulnerable conversations
- Trauma and inherited trauma
- “Why do we have to be Black?”
- “One of the things that I'm lamenting right now in our society is our inability to have honest conversations—our inability to say, ‘Hey, this happened, this was horrible.’ There are ramifications and ripple effects of that. How do we address it, talk about it, and begin to take corrective action so that all of our children can begin to dream and live unencumbered.”
- Where are honest conversations happening?
- “I might not change the world, but I'll damn sure inspire the mind that does.” (paraphrase of Tupac Shakur)
- Socioepigenetics: the impact of genetic inheritance for emotional trauma, depression, anxiety, and the effects of social injustice
- Mental health in the Black church and broader Black community, and the mistrust of mental health providers
- Barbara Holmes on Black contemplative practices and spirituality
- Hip-hop culture and expression of pain and suffering
- Dwight Radcliff’s journey through hip-hop
- Pentacostal Holiness church and seeing hip-hop as the devil.
- “You’re more concerned with the curse words than the cursed worlds.”
- “I began to do a dangerous thing: I began to read the Bible.”
- James Cone, The Spirituals & the Blues
- West African spirituality and “holding all things together”
- Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “The Message”
- “Don’t push me, cuz I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head”
- “It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from going under”
- 2Pac, “I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto”
- C. Dolores Tucker, a Black congresswoman and critic of 2Pac
- Hip-Hop as a way of life, unencumbered and wholly oneself
- J. Kameron Carter on poesis and creativity
- “Poesis… making a haven in a ghetto.”
- “I am hip-hop.”
- Lament and Good News
About Dwight Radcliff
Theologian and pastor Rev. Dr. Dwight A. Radcliff Jr. is Academic Dean and director of the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies and is Assistant Professor of Mission, Theology, and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. Prior to coming to Fuller, Dr. Radcliff taught at Vanguard University, Azusa Pacific University, and the Southern California School of Ministry. He has published in The Journal of Hip Hop Studies, and is a recipient of the Parish Pulpit Fellowship graduation prize and the Hooper/Keefe Preaching Award. He completed post-master’s studies at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and the University of Oxford. He currently serves as senior pastor of The Message Center in Gardena, California, where he leads with his wife, DeShun Jones-Radcliff, who serves as the church’s director of administration. He and his wife have two daughters.About the Thrive Center
- Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
- Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
- Follow us on X @thrivecenter
- Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter
About Dr. Pam King
Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.About With & For
- Host: Pam King
- Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
- Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
- Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
- Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa
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