Society makes it hard for Black people to imagine liberation or freedom outside of our experience in White America. Because so much of our existence is a product of resistance and survival, even our creative spaces consciously and subconsciously speak to a relationship with oppression or designing solutions to issues Black people didn’t create. But if we could imagine a “state of nature” outside of racism or white supremacy—one that does not limit our fullness to narrow, exoticized, or romanticized tropes of our African origins or American journey, but rather pays homage to and embodies them—what might that look like? And how might we reverse-engineer back (or forward) into a fresh and compelling vision for ourselves? From Chains to Links sits with the brilliant Intelligent Mischief team—Aisha Shillingford, Artistic Director, and Terry Marshall, Founder & Executive Creative Director—who share how imagining whole, well-Black-beings is a crucial part of visioning and world-building.
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Welcome back to another episode of the show. I am Kelly Burton, your host. I’m here with my co-host, Ife Ike.
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How are you doing?
I’m doing well.
I’ll kick it to you to introduce our amazing guests.
We are joined by the amazing team of Intelligent Mischief, a creative studio that focuses on all things not just Afrofuturism, but normalizing innovation as part of the way of being. Aisha and Terry have been stalked by me for the last couple of years. They have really evolved my way of thinking about what’s possible and also the many ways that Blackness gets to claim innovation as who we are.
Aisha and Terry, we’re so honored to have you both here. We would love for you all to always feel free to tell us more about what you all do and how you all do it. We’ll kick it off to you. Kelly, I know you have a favorite question you’d like to start off with as they introduce themselves.
Origin Story
I’m nosy. That’s what my husband tells me. I like curious, but he says I’m nosy. I want to know a little bit about your origin story. Who are your people? Where are your people from?
Thank you for having us here and inviting us to this amazing place with amazing people. I’m Terry Marshall. I’m the Founder and Executive Creative Director of Intelligent Mischief. My people or all of my family from both sides are from Barbados. They immigrated to the US in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I’ll be succinct with this. It’s a complex weave of histories.
Feel free to go.
I’m here for it.
I was born in Boston. My family had lived in New York for ten years before I was born. They had moved to Boston, according to my mother and everyone else I talked to, because my father was following his best friend. He was like, “New York is played out. Boston is fresh green.” A large part of my mother’s side of the family and my father’s side of the family are all still living in New York.
We have family in Barbados, Boston, and New York. I went to Barbados every summer with my mother up until I was fifteen, and then I became foolish and was like, “I want to hang out with my friends in the streets.” New York is only four hours away from Boston, so we would go to New York every other month sometimes. I feel like I’ve grown up in all those places.
To go a little further back, what I found out is my grandmother on my father’s side is from Panama. My grandfather helped build the Panama Canal. That’s how he met my grandmother and moved to Barbados, but he came from Ghana. Apparently, my grandmother’s father was also Nigerian. I still don’t know all the stories of how they all ended up, but they ended up in Panama, helped build the Canal, and came to Barbados. Those are the multiple lineages I’ve found out.
That’s powerful. I love it. Aisha?
I’m originally from Trinidad and Tobago. I was born there and came to the States when I was nineteen to go to college. My mom is from Trinidad. My father’s from Dominica, another small island in the Caribbean. That’s it for me. My mom, my brother, and myself migrated in the late ‘90s.
You came to New York?
We came to Boston.
Is that where you met?
That is where we met.
My husband was born in Dominica. He’s from Saint Croix. It’s that island love throughout. A big part of this conversation that we are trying to unearth is what is the evolution of Blackness and what is the evolution of the Black community. I’m curious. When did you first know that you were Black? The question is really about Black in America given that you weren’t born in the United States. Terry, were you born in the United States?
Yeah.
I’m curious about your respective experiences. When did you know you were Black and/or Black in America, which is a bit of a nuance?
In Trinidad, people see themselves as Black, those who are Black. I realized that we saw ourselves slightly differently when I came to college. It was my first time being in a place I wasn’t majority Black or people of color. I was in the classroom and I remember learning to realize that I was the only Black person sometimes or saying something in class and realizing the reaction would be surprise or it was a mediated reaction based on my identity.
It was slowly at about nineteen learning, “I’m not expected to know this or be here, or speak like this.” This is in 1999. I was learning to walk in a room, look around, and count the number of Black people because that would mean it was a safe room, that I would be somewhat understood, or some degree of my experience would be reflected.
You needed to reach a critical mass of Black people in this space.
I needed that to know, “Would my perspective be echoed? Would it seem completely foreign?” It was interesting because I was coming from overseas but I knew that there was a baseline Black experience that could be shared, an understanding of history and the implications of that history on what we’re doing there at that point in time. I walk into a room, look around, and be like, “This Spanish class has no Black people. It’s going to be wild.”
I love what you said, a baseline of the Black experience. I want to circle back down that road. That is the essence of what we’re trying to really unpack as part of this show. Terry, how about you? When did you first know?
Someone asked me this before and I was like, “I feel like I always knew I was Black.” It’s probably a large part because of my family and my mother. My mother tells some stories. My mother immigrated here first. She was a domestic worker. She was living with a White family in Manhattan. She tells a story about learning about racism in America. She and my father went to buy a car and got cheated on. My mother then went back and cussed out the guy. She was like, “This is how you have to operate in this country,” or something.
I remember growing up in my house, we knew we were Black. You knew there was a difference. You knew mostly those with wealth were probably White. I always had a knowing about that, but I feel like it must have come from my family and my mother saying things around the house. From 1st to 8th grade, I went to a largely Black Muslim school that was also Afrocentric and stuff too, so I was indoctrinated. In my young times, I was keenly aware. In a lot of ways, I was like the character in Good Times, Michael.
Michael was my favorite character. I know people would say Penny. Thelma was also really cool, but Michael would make peanut butter jelly sandwiches and talk about the final call. He was so serious all the time.
I resonate with Mike. He’s the family nerd. I’m very much the family nerd.
That’s probably why I identified with him too in that way.
This episode is called Before We Were Black. It has this concept of humanness and personhood. I squint a little bit because I’m like, “Is that even possible? Who am I before I am Black?” Both of you raised different experiences around Blackness and the knowing of it, but also, there are a few storylines of struggle, difference, or what have you that are also part of the pride and the safety of being Black.
Baseline Black Experience
Before we get to Before We Were Black, I want to get your take on what you also find to be quintessentially Black or undeniably Black no matter what with the norms, the values, and the customs. I want to put that out there because as we talk about innovation, we also, at times, sometimes don’t link the way our innovations are linked. We know it’s not an exhaustive list, but if you were to think of that Blackness card, what is quintessentially Black?
I love Aisha’s articulation of it. Intergenerational experience is tough, but I love the way you articulate in terms of a baseline Black experience. How would you describe a baseline Black experience?
It’s tough. Do you know those things on social media where they’re like, “If you get 10 out of these 20 things, then you’re really Black? I’m always going to fail in those things because I didn’t live here until I was nineteen. It usually is something related to US popular culture. What I really love is discovering those things that are almost subconscious, like we don’t even know where they came from. It would be that they do the same thing on the continent, the same thing in the Caribbean, and the same thing here.
I don’t know what the points of connection have been between the 1600s and 2024. There’s this co-evolution, like language. You realize Patois is very similar to African-American vernacular in the construction of sentences. That’s generational. We might not perceive it as the same language, but the construction of those sentences, we all get it. We were talking with a friend about running when laughing. That happens everywhere.
Physically run?
Yeah. You laugh and run away kind of thing.
We do that.
We made a dance video too that was a collage and was put together. There was a traditional circle dance maybe within the Dogon and then break dancing. You could see the similarities, and then you realize they’re not similarities because even similarities is assuming, “We are separate cultures that have something in common.” It’s almost like the evolution, continuation, and adaptation of certain things.
You get an A-plus. Can we give you a gold star? That was beautiful. Terry, what do you think about the baseline of Black experience?
Riffing off that, the thing that came to my mind was the “Ptch.” People don’t talk about it enough.
We all know it. The way you did it and that pause where we all stop, there’s something about that.
You cannot make that sound to your mother.
That’s right if you want to keep your teeth.
They’re like, “Go and do this.” You’re like, “Ptch.” They’re like, “What did you do?” You’re like, “Nothing at all.” I had seen a video or read something one time. People who have a genealogy from West Africa through the Caribbean through South America into the American South call it suck-teeth, cut-eye. It is the same motion when you go, “Ptch,” where you move your eyes to the side. They trace it. Everyone has that same exact motion. I know Caribbean folk, we call it steups. We’re like, “Are you steups-ing your mouth? You’re going to steups your mouth to me?”
Generational Implications
That’s the first I’ve heard about that. Not the “Ptch” because you know I know that, but having a name. That’s a fact. I want to get into your work. I will bring up this. What part of this is generational? When I think about this generation of Black youth who are coming up, they have a very different experience. I think of all my friends who have tweens. A, “Ptch,” would not result in them knocking their kids’ teeth out. It’s a different thing because we have different sensibilities about how we discipline our children. Also, our kids have different life experiences that don’t mirror ours. I appreciate the language around evolution, but I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about the generational implications of this conversation.
Have we lost some of this baseline? Are we losing some of this baseline?
Yeah. It’s interesting. I was watching a video. Okay. I watch a lot of Instagram, especially. In this video, this little girl wanted to leave the house wearing a wig and the wig was not in a good condition.
I have seen this where she’s begging.
The dad is giving her all these reasons. I watched it. I looked in the comments to see whether people resonated with me. I had this feeling of like, “Let her have the joy of leaving the house wearing the wig.” I feel like that speaks to some of the undercurrents of that change. I cringed when he said, “It doesn’t look good,” because what I feel like he was saying is, “We have to present ourselves a certain way to be respected, accepted, and so on.”
That was the stance for a lot of us growing up. It was respectability. We had to show up with self-dignity. I wonder how much of that was non-freedom that in order to win the approval and acceptance of the dominant society and culture, we couldn’t be. We couldn’t have an idea of wearing a really ratty wig and walking out of the house. You had to look really put together and your hair had to be neat.
That may not be quite the toleration of disrespect for parents, but some of it feels like that where there’s another wave of freedom. To be honest, it might also be finally a wave where the idea of decolonizing is coming into the definition of liberation, especially for Black people. We don’t have to please anybody or be accepted. There’s a way that we can be completely free and not be encumbered by that assumption.
Generation X Black people are very much bound in that way. I know. I struggle with it myself. It’s hard to untether what is what.
Intelligent Mischief
That leads me to how you both are amazing, beautiful adults. You have called your organization Intelligent Mischief. The first time I heard of that, who’s that little boy rap who was like a grown person? Little Vicious. Do you remember? When I hear mischief, that’s what I’m thinking in my mind. It’s like Little Roscoe walking around. When I hear intelligent mischief, I’m like, “What?” When you were talking about respectability and the untethering and you mashed these two concepts, I’ve grown to think, especially in these years of the movement, it makes sense, but I don’t know if it always felt comfortable to talk about intelligence and mischief in the same space.
As you all have thought about not only just the name but the being of what that is even in this conversation, why did you all innovate that? What is the point of that? You continue to innovate. Is it for yourself? Is it for the community? I want to know the relationship between both of those words, intelligent and mischief because both of them can have positive but also somewhat negative even when I think of intelligence and what that is as a standard for Blackness to be able to move forward. I want to get your thoughts as to what you want people to take away from that when they hear it.
We are embodying it, and there’s an evolution of that. That evolves every day. How do you embody intelligent mischief? We’re always questioning ourselves around that. We’re like, “Is this intelligent mischief? What does that mean? Are we achieving that?” We both do, but I come out of nonprofit grassroots organizing history. Nothing glamorous. I was always incorporating what I would call intelligent mischief into the traditional organizing work that I did and I would find myself at odds with a lot of folks in that field.
When I was creating Intelligent Mischief, it was something I came across that the name really captured what I wanted to create. For the first year of Intelligent Mischief, I didn’t tell people who I worked with professionally. I was involved in a lot of networks nationally, helping do direct action trainings, do popular education training around certain issues that people were doing campaigns around, and so on and so forth. A lot of those people I worked with, I didn’t tell them the existence of Intelligent Mischief. I was like, “They’re going to think this is weird. They’re going to be like, “This is too confusing. It’s too much of a hybrid of things.”
We wanted to do stuff that was art. We wanted to do things that involved the design. We wanted to do things that involve social justice and social impact. Usually, you find somebody who is an artist. Maybe they work in entertainment or they teach children something. Maybe you find someone who does social justice and organizing. Maybe they got a job at a nonprofit or maybe they don’t. Maybe they work at their regular jobs and take the time off to go do that. These are usually separate silos.
I was creating something that needed all this crossover. To me, that wasn’t confusing. To me, that was natural. I saw the pieces naturally. The word intelligent mischief really fits. I was like, “This fits what I’m trying to create.” Oftentimes, I feel like I can’t describe or have a hard time describing what I create, and this captured it.
English can suck as a language. It’s not always accessible to communicate. I blame my parents because English wasn’t their first language. When I can’t reach for the words, I’m like, “I didn’t really speak English when I was a child.” I find that the more we create different spaces, the language or the concept for it is hard to grasp. It’s hard to explain. You can find synonyms, but intelligent mischief makes sense without explanation. That could also maybe be quintessentially Black. We get it When you take that pause and maybe when the dominant parts of us kick in, then it’s like, “Why?” It’s the questioning of it. Does that make sense?
That makes so much sense. I got goosebumps. I’ve been thinking about how even if we evolve our understanding of what it is or how it is in the world, for us, it’s trickster energy because that’s the way we assess it. Intelligent Mischief was like, “Are we being trickster enough?” The trickster is intentionally subverting. Often, the way we’ve had to move is with that trickster energy with a certain level of opacity and pretending to go along with certain things but having another plan or another idea. It’s pretending to be submissive or thinking ancestrally. One of the trickster archetypes is Papa Lega. I was thinking about it and how his role is to sit at the crossroads. It’s like in the middle between these two things.
Can you say more about the story?
I don’t know too much about it, but Papa Legba, in Haitian Voodoo, is the representation of Esu Elegbara from Ifa or from Yoruba tradition. It’s the person who bridges worlds. Papa Legba, his representation is standing over the crossroads. He’s supposed to be bridging between the afterlife and this life. He’s bridging between things that are apparently contradictory, but he’s also the trickster. We learned that in the last couple of years. Things are becoming clear. Maybe the name is something that came and then revealed itself afterward.
With the name, I’m like, “I want to play.” I think of the mischief of a child. Energetically, it pulls me in. I want to be a part of it.
You mentioned collages. Even the way you describe Papa Legba, and I’m not saying it is the centering of your work, but there are so many things that are interconnected in your work. You can see it in the designs. You can see it in your training and workshops. There’s this one collage that I really have been sitting with. We were joking about it before we started. You did it around MLK’s birthday.
There’s that infamous picture of MLK where he’s looking to the side and his hand is up. He’s like, “Are you going to throw my quotes out there when all of you don’t really care about me?” We all put our own spin on that picture. For the longest time, if I can be honest, I have been tired of hearing I Have A Dream. Every year, I cringe at it. I’m like, “I’m tired of this.” There are a lot of Black people who even would consider it an evolution of wokeness or whatever. They’re like, “We don’t want to Whitewash.”
Dreaming And Innovation
It may not have been the first time you presented it, but you presented this collage that had all these different imagery. Between the words and the imagery, you pose to the public, “Are we dreaming enough?” I paused. I didn’t feel condemned, but I felt convicted. I was like, “What am I doing this day? What should I be doing now? It is his birthday, so I am not going to work. That’s for the White people. They work on this day. They need to stop taking off on this day.” That’s a separate conversation. I was like, “Am I setting an intention around dreaming? Is there a way that this day could be different for us that is not about the output?” That is what it has turned into, a day of service and doing.
This is an innovation space. I wanted to ask you all, are we dreaming enough? Related to that, are we dreaming big enough? It relates to not just Blackness but the innovations that we have. In this lifetime, are we dreaming big enough? This is somewhat subjective. Don’t worry. The audience won’t get you afterward. Feel free to share how you really feel.
I don’t think we’re dreaming big enough. What do I mean by that though? The reason I juxtaposed that question with him is the scale of the dream, the distance, and even what some might say is delusion. If the systems of White supremacy are still intact, if our dreams are not dangerous in light of that, then I don’t think it’s enough. For me, it’s going to have to sound like, “What are you talking about? I can’t even see that,” for it to be big enough or to be the equivalent of North Star.
When we first started using that phrase, it was in relationship to BMike’s, “We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.” It was thinking about how the scale of their dream at any given generation was so impossible. The thing they were imagining was so impossible that even falling short of that dream has resulted in our relative freedom compared to them. I was like, “Are we doing the same thing for future generations? Are we dreaming so boldly that even if that dream falls short, the conditions for our descendants are so much better than our conditions?”
To the point, Ife, that you made about the visceral feeling you have around I Have A Dream, I have that same feeling when I see everybody with, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” I’m like, “Are you though?” Sometimes, if they could peek up, look down, and see, they’d be like, “I got beat down for that. I bled for this.” I put a pin in that.
What we lose from the King’s speech is the backstory. That’s not what he was going to say, but Mahalia Jackson saw the audience and they were flat. She was like, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” He improvised in the moment. That was from a sermon that he would use on a stomp. At that moment, the I Have A Dream speech was an innovation in action. It’s the spirit moving, showing up, and saying, “We are going to pivot.” That’s why that speech lives in infamy. It’s not because he read what was on the page but because he allowed the spirit to move.
Aisha, to your point of dreaming big, I was raised that faith is such that you can’t see it. It’s the substance of things unseen. The evidence of things is not seen. Those are the kinds of dreams that I’m trying to latch onto, the kind that requires some faith that it’s not enough for my brainy self. One thing about Kelly that folks know me well is I have a lot of self-esteem. When I go into opportunities, it’s a whole lot of stuff. I’m like, “I can handle that.”
I want to walk into a dream where no matter how much of my braininess that I bring to this, it’s still insufficient. It’s going to require more. It’s going to require divine. When I think about our work at BIA, that’s why I love it so much. We were talking about how you are connected to BIA through Melinda. Through our network, much of this is divine. That’s why it keeps falling to us to go big. While we got this divine win to our back, we’re like, “Let’s go.”
It’s the fullness of divinity. You all mentioned Papa Legba. When we think about the traditional spirituality that we’re connected to, I wonder if part of the reason why we’re not able to dream in fullness is because there has been so much that has been labeled as taboo or demonic. Depending on who you speak to, Papa Legba is the equivalent of the devil, the shepherd of the devil, or however you look at it. He is not necessarily described as the bridge to different universes or the pathway or the portal.
Even the concepts, when I was younger, there was something that my parents used to say, which is, “Our creator created us with the ability to create. Everything doesn’t require a miracle.” In many ways, we’ve been raised at times that, especially, you know, We talked in another episode about scarcity, that sometimes, our response to our problems is more so, “We need a miracle,” when maybe we need some mischief. Maybe we need to trick the situation. There are these institutions that do make it hard for us and remind us of where we’re at.
There is a lot about this faith and dreaming and if we’re doing it big enough. The flip side is also recognizing the bigness of what we already have. Sometimes, we’re waiting for the next generation, or some of us feel like we want to be a good ancestor in training. The way it looks to those around us, at least this is my experience, is that I’m told by people around me, “You think too big,” or, “That’s too big,” or what have you.
When I think about how many other people may be told that as we’re thinking of this conversation, I’m like, “What is a dream? How are we defining a dream? How are we defining faith? How are we defining a miracle? If it’s not too big, then what are we aspiring to be?” I can be regular Ife all day long, and I probably could live a quality life in the present, but then that doesn’t necessarily call into the future. I want to participate in the future a little bit too. I’m wondering then how we hack that if you feel like we’re not dreaming big enough.
We have more tools than we did even as kids. Is it an innovation as in more connection or connectivity to technology? Is it a different relationship with technology? Is it seeing ourselves as technology? How do you feel like we can bridge the gap between who we are and, in many ways, what has been imposed on us because we’re Black versus the Blackness that we both are and can become? What are some thoughts around technologies or innovations that maybe we’re already doing or that we need to do more of or we need to create?
To begin, if folks are telling you that you dream too big, if you take a look, those folks operate small. Everything big is too big for them. I and Aisha talked about this. As I was talking about earlier in the creation of Intelligence Mischief in the field that I was operating in, I was told that a lot of times too. They were like, “You have this really big idea. The idea is too big.” A few years ago, I started realizing, “My ideas weren’t too big. I was operating in a field that was too small for the idea I had. Thank you for letting me know. I need to now find the scale I need to work at or find the people who are willing to work at that scale.”
What needs to be hacked is imagination. That’s the work that we do and what we’re trying to do. We have more tools. With the Civil Rights Movement, they talked famously about how people would stay up all night to print out flyers to get people to come out. They would get hundreds and thousands of people to come out to a rally or protest around a cause and issue. We have something where you click on the app and people show up.
You have all these immense tools. You have all these things. We have all the resources materially possible to solve the world’s problems, let alone issues for Black people in particular. What’s missing is the political will and the political and social imagination to fix those problems and to have the belief that we can fix those problems. We need to hack these people’s imaginations. With the tools that we have, how can we hack them to serve a different purpose?
I’m going to play a little bit of a Legba advocate for a second. When we’re building and constantly getting fought against, and I’m talking to actual builders, not people that are still thinking about it or what have you, what then also needs to be created to protect us while we’re doing this or to make sure that our gains aren’t constantly being chopped down?
There’s a little bit of a deflated feeling for builders. It feels like the system’s coming around on all fronts. Even if we want to take it in the tech and innovation space, there are amazing ideas. If a Black fem person pitches their idea, it’s like, “Can you please come back to us with KPIs?” Two White bros from Silicon Valley could show a Canva deck. They don’t even necessarily have to show an MVP or whatever. It’s like, “This is so amazing. You’re helping the Black and Brown babies. You also are for diversity and inclusion.”
I feel like whether it’s on this professional innovation level or the social level, it feels like folks are also trying to build up, but it feels like the vertical part of our building is being hindered. That may feel like what I’m experiencing in my space, but I wonder if there are tools and/or people that are positioned to do that work while people are trying to build forward. I don’t know.
I’m curious about that as well. Sometimes, when that happens, I don’t have a knee-jerk reaction, but something like, “What exists outside of that?” That system is going to always try to do that or is designed to do that. For various reasons, we put some faith in those systems to operate more equitably or more fairly. They said they’re practicing inclusion, so why does it feel like it’s still working against us?
To tie back to the imagination, if there were another alternative, what would it look like and where would those resources come from? What is the barrier to the alternative? We rhetorically know the alternative. We say, “If we pooled all of our resources into a fund at a certain scale, it could resource some of our projects and our ideas.” The barrier is typically the belief. It’s like, “Am I going to put my money in a Black bank or in a Black fund?”
I would’ve said the barrier was the capital, and then you challenged me. You were like, “The barrier is the belief.” I was about to be like, “It’s the belief.”
What I appreciate about your comment is you referenced our own collective wealth. That’s something that we don’t really bring into the conversation. Black folks present $1 trillion in spending power. If we had that belief, that imagination, the institutional infrastructure, and trust that would allow people to know if they deposit their money into a thing, they’re going to get a thing, that very much feels like the real that we need to manifest in order to make that happen.
I know we’re approaching time. I want to learn more about your work and future because it’s so sexy, but it’s bigger than sexy. I’m here for the future, but there’s so much I need to learn and understand. To close it up and wrap it up a bit, I want to know what you are on your soapbox about that thing that is a fire under your tail where you want to rail from the rooftops. What is it? I need to know.
I’ll start. For me, it’s been a utopia. Part of the reason is we get so much pushback around utopia. It’s used as a slur. If you imagine a society that loves and affirms Black people, I’ve heard people say to us, “That’s eutopic thinking. It’s never going to be perfect. There are going to be issues.” I’m like, “Calm down. It’s not that I think we can create a utopia. I understand humans. I’ve been around for some decades. I get it.” It brings me a lot of pain that humans have within us the ability to create harm unnecessarily. I feel like other creatures don’t necessarily do it unnecessarily.
We use utopia as a tool. It helps us imagine. It’s a way to temporarily remove some of the barriers, especially barriers that are due to oppression versus being human. It has been an act of really rallying self-confidence. We’re like, “We believe in using utopia. We are going to say the word utopia.” We’re not going to get accused of utopic fantastical thinking as a bad thing. That’s not a bad thing. We should use it to help us develop our strategy, especially long-term strategy. That has been digging in my heels around, “I’m still going to use utopia as a tool.”
I’m here for it. Terry, how about you?
Ditto around utopia and fighting for it. Within that, top of my head, I have to say the fight for and convincing Black men to embrace a new sense of masculinity that turns away from the manosphere attraction that I see happening. It keeps coming up in my social media atmosphere.
Unpack manosphere.
It is a largely online social movement that is driven by misogyny and men which is, to me, an extreme hatred of women. They’re convincing men, “This is the true path to liberation,” and that they’re being oppressed by women.
Black women in particular.
I’ll spend time watching these things but out of frustration, and I figure out ways of combating arguments and things like that. Aisha is walking through the living room and I’m like, “Andrew Tate.” She’s like, “Oh God.” I’m like, “It’s research purposes.” I grew up being a hip-hop head. It has so infiltrated hip-hop that I realize I’m watching hip-hop, and then all of a sudden, it is a manosphere. I’m like, “What happened? What’s happening here?” It is not like my younger generation solved misogyny. That’s not true, but stuff I’m seeing, I’m like, “What is going on? What are younger dudes hearing and getting? We got to really clean this up.”
Even the ones that were really conscious. When I was younger, I was listening to the conscious neo-soul rappers. You’d be vibing. Now, I’ll hear the F word that’s used to be a derogatory term, especially to those who are cis male or LGBTQ folk. It is used very flippantly. I’m like, “This was supposed to be a song about walking through the park and being free with nature. Why does that word fit in?”
It’s a choice. It’s one of those things that catches you even in the spaces when you’re trying to edit that. It’s around us. Sometimes, I think about how even as fem folk, we also adopt some of the manosphere as well and the ways we treat each other. That’s a big space. The final question is, who is your favorite Black innovator? It can be real or fictional or dead or alive.
I’m going to go with Shuri.
Who? I’m lost.
She’s the new Black Panther.
You saw how I saw that? I was like, “Black Panther.” Have you seen Black Panther too yet?
Yeah.
She’s in it. She’s the sister.
She’s an inventor and scientist.
She’s a warrior.
I love that.
How about you, Terry?
I’ll go with the social scientist W. E. B. Du Bois.
He is so foundational to the understanding of ourselves.
Kelly, I don’t think I’ve asked you that question. Who is yours?
What is coming to mind is Pauli Murray who is a Civil Rights icon who has been lost to history. She wrote the legislative Bible that served as a foundation for the Brown v. Board of Education and so many other stuff. She was Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks. She is an Episcopal minister. It’s the evolution, the freedom with which she lived her life and brilliance, and how she was always ahead of the time in every iteration of her journey. It’s a beautiful story. Shout out to Pauli Murray.
Closing
We thank you. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having us.
I’m so grateful.
Aisha and Terry, where can folks find you? Where do you want to be reached?
They can find us on Instagram, @IntelligentMischief. Thank you.
Thank you for joining us for another episode of the show. We will see you next time.
Important Links
About Aisha Shillingford
Aisha Shillingford (she/her), is the Artistic Director of Intelligent Mischief, a multi-disciplinary creative studio, unleashing the power of Black radical imagination to shape the future. She is an anti-disciplinary artist, world builder, designer and cultural strategist originally from Trinidad & Tobago. She is an alumna of Laundromat Project’s Creative Change Fellowship, a member of the New Museum Incubator, and an inaugural Fellow at the Race Forward Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy. Her written work has been published in Black Discourse and Grantmakers In the Arts. Her collage work has been commissioned by the Movement for Black Lives, Root Rise Pollinate and Creative WildFire and licensed by Nonprofit Quarterly and the Center for Third World Organizing.
Aisha has a BA in Environmental Analysis & Policy, an MSW in Social Innovation, and an MBA in Social Entrepreneurship. She has studied Graphic Design, Futures Design, Design Fictions, Design Thinking and Street Wear Design. She has been a Lead Community Organizer at the Muslim American Society Boston Chapter, and at Close To Home DV Prevention Agency, Director of Racial & Economic Justice at the New Economy Coalition, Senior Associate at Interaction Institute for Social Change and Deputy Director of Innovation Strategy at Movement Strategy Center. She loves sewing, cooking, and riding bikes. Her collage, text-based work, installation and experiential design work conjures Black utopias, imagination, climate hope, solidarity economics, marronage and dreamspace. She draws on themes of fugitivity, opacity and afrosurrealism in her work.
About Terry Marshall
Terry Marshall (he/him) is the Founder & Executive Creative Director, an artist, writer, cultural innovator, creative strategist, and cultural studies scholar based in Brooklyn, with roots in Barbados and Boston. With over 25 years of experience as a labor and cultural organizer, Terry previously founded the Hip Hop Media Lab and Streets is Watching.
His work explores the intersection of social movement history and theory, transformative experience design, social scenes, and the impact of parties and festivals on social and cultural change. Through his role at the Intelligent Mischief creative studio, Terry develops innovative cultural projects that aim to shift culture. As a third-culture creative, his projects amplify unique perspectives and integrate visionary ideas.
Terry’s work also involves infusing creativity and design into social justice organizing through visioning workshops, festivals, and speaking engagements. He also contributed to the design team of the Constellations Fund. Terry is an avid movie and comic enthusiast and a #WalkingDead superfan.
