Black Excellence Oral History with Aris Winger, June 30, 2021 (Ms2024-072)

Korin Jones: Okay. My name is Korin Rex Jones, and I am interviewing Dr. Aris Winger via Zoom for the Black Excellence in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] oral history project. Today is June 30, 2021. Could you start off by stating your full name and date of birth for the record?

Aris Winger: I’m Aris Benjamin Winger II, and I was born December 1, 1977.

Korin: Thank you very much. So, let’s get a small description of what you’re doing now, what your current position is, and then a little bit about any research that you’ve done.

Aris: Yes. I am at Georgia Gwinnett College; this is my eleventh year being there. My Ph.D. is in partial differential equations in mathematics, and right now, I’m doing a lot of work in math education, so I’m doing a lot of research in math education and 00:01:00creating visibility for young people of color in the mathematics classroom. I’ve been doing a lot of professional learning for faculty members, for teachers that are in the K-12 space, and for departments and organizations about looking at mathematics as something that’s for everybody.

Korin: Having this idea of where you are now, let’s go ahead and switch that clock way, way back and find out how all this started. So, where were you born?

Aris: I was born in Washington, D.C. I was born and raised there. My first mathematical memory was being at a board doing two-digit multiplications. It was in a competition, and I was winning. It was like--what is that game 00:02:00called--it was called “King of the Hill” or whatever, right? That you’re up there, somebody else comes up to the board, you race two-digit, and you beat them and stay at the board, and I was just mowing them down. It was at that moment where, again, that felt good. And that was it, in some sense, because then it was both, at that time, an understanding of, oh, this is what I need to do to be called important in mathematics, is to do it fast. And then, fifth grade, I remember we were still--it wasn’t being at the board--but it was still do this fast. That stuck with me for a very long time. That being good at math meant to do things quickly.

Korin: What did your parents do as an occupation?

Aris: My father was a retired Navy 00:03:00seaman, and then my mother worked at the welfare office.

Korin: Seeing you and this proficiency for doing math, did they understand immediately that this was something that might turn into something bigger for you?

Aris: Yeah. I have memories of being called smart. I mean, I remember getting all As in fourth grade and my mom being proud of me. Well, let me step back. I remember getting Cs, and she was going to beat my ass, let’s be clear about that. And then, all of a sudden--that was in third grade--for some reason, in fourth grade, I got all As. I don’t know how that works out. So, I get all As in fourth grade, and then I remember her just calling up everybody just like, he got all As. And so--looking back--this is helpful actually, because that was also another moment which is like, okay, this is something 00:04:00you’re supposed to do to get good things. I have an even earlier mathematical memory, and it is my mother actually putting down two times three. And I’m saying, oh, that’s five, and she’s like, no, no, no, you’ll learn one day that this is actually six. And I’m like, wow, why is that six? I don’t understand. So, that’s probably actually my very first mathematical memory. But it’s interesting you mention my parents because they both passed away when I was much younger. By the time I was eleven, I’d lost both my parents in a two-year span from nine to eleven. And it was math that was super helpful because, as you might imagine, that was a time in which I had to shut everything else out in a lot of ways, but I could always, always go to school. I can always sit in the math space and be smart, valued, and all of this. That situation paralyzed me from 00:05:00eleven to eighteen or nineteen and so, for that time, if you go talk to anybody that I went to high school with, they would be shocked that I’m even able to talk with you now because I didn’t talk to anybody. I was just a complete loner. I was able to have conversations--I wasn’t like the person over in the corner with the black trench coat or anything--I was able to function, but it was a lot of just-to-myself space. I was numb for a very long time. So, I just threw myself into academics as a way of pushing everything out. Now, of course, the context is that this is the mid 1990s in the murder capital of the world, Washington, D.C. And so, we’re talking about my grandmother and my aunt who really just hung onto me and sheltered me. And I was definitely one of these people who was not going out after 4 p.m. any day ever between eleven 00:06:00and seventeen. I wasn’t going anywhere--for my own protection--because this is the place where young people--young Black men--were being killed over what shoes they were wearing, what coat they were wearing. I mean, it was just like the height of absolute senseless violence in this country in a lot of ways. To watch the news every day was just a nightmare. And you don’t realize it at the time that you’re watching and then the top story’s always about some other Black person being killed. Young Black men, really. And I’m still trying to really gauge the impact that had on me, but, for sure, that influenced my leaving Howard University to go to Carnegie Mellon University. I mean, it was, do I stay here in D.C. or can I actually go somewhere where there’s a different sense of reality altogether? And when I got to Pittsburgh, 00:07:00I just remember turning on the news and the top story was that someone had pranked Bob’s Big Boy and taken his head. That was the top story. And that an old lady didn’t have any heat. That was the top story. I was like, wow, I feel like I’m just in a completely different place--I might actually have some sanity here.

Korin: How did you end up at Howard? I’m especially curious what searching for college was like and what colleges you thought you could get into.

Aris: I went to a high school that was pre-engineering, and my older cousin had gone to Cardozo--and this always happens--we’re seeing this across the board, and this is work that I’m working on about who the superstar is because we take care of our superstars. 00:08:00And so, it was very clear that I was one of these superstars. So, when you ask me how I got in, somebody grabbed me and said, Oh no, no, no, you need to do this. I was going to go to this shitty high school, and someone said, No, no, no, no, no. You need to go to the pre-engineering high school. And I was like, what do you mean? [They said] just go over there. I went, and they interviewed me and were like, Well, you should be in this school. They looked at the grades. When it was time to go to college, by eleventh grade, they had this thing called dual enrollment, which was new. Well, it was the first time or the second year in the D.C. area, and they called it high skip. I went to Howard during my twelfth grade--during my senior year--I went there. Now, at this time, I’m just trying to do things as fast as possible. I’m super ambitious. I wanna be the valedictorian. I’m completely type A. 00:09:00I had taken all my classes at Howard, and I’d gotten like twenty-nine credits. And so, if I stayed there, I would be a sophomore. And I’m like, I’m not going anywhere ‘cause I could be done and all of that. It was there where I got a fundamental transformation as a mathematician. I was gonna be an actuary, which is just a different type of mathematician, but as a Ph.D. mathematician. And so, I was going to be an actuary. And I was taking a linear algebra class, and Cora Sadosky--again, I was sitting in the front row answering every question. My identity still had not changed, and it probably still hasn’t. I was doing my thing, and I got up and walked out, and she came over, and she said, yo--well, she was an Argentinian woman so she didn’t say yo--but she was like, what do you plan on doing in the future? And I said, I’m gonna be an actuary. 00:10:00And then, she said, I think you have what it takes to get a Ph.D. in mathematics. I was like, oh, okay. And this is what mentors are supposed to do. Black, white, whatever. We are supposed to take our young people, and we’re supposed to look them in the eye and say, You can do things that you may not realize. Because that’s a form of extending love to the last great bastion of love extension in this country. We have yet to fully extend love to Black people. But that’s how you do it, right? Because everything around us has been telling us for a very long time that that’s just not possible. And I didn’t need it, but because I had crossed a superstar status, she looked at me and said, You can do this. I’m like, Okay, that’s interesting. I never considered it, but I will. And then, the very next semester, James Donaldson was my analysis professor. 00:11:00Analysis is just proving all the stuff in calculus. He walked in--big Black man--he took off his jacket and he said, this is analysis, and he just started writing. No notes, nothing. It was clear he was a master of the subject, and I literally said, that’s exactly who I wanna be. And that was it. For me, that’s the microcosm. The first step is you need somebody to say, this is possible for you, and they say it to you in such an authentic way. My God…I just remember how she looked at me. You need somebody to look at you authentically. And then James Donaldson was just the personification--like a representation--of my future in a lot of ways. Signed, sealed, delivered. 00:12:00Then Cora Sadosky said, there’s this summer program at Carnegie Mellon, and you’re going. Just this overwhelming sense of care for somebody, so much so, that you just tell them what to do with their life. And because they also understand that you’re young, that you just have no idea because this is what older people are supposed to do. Older people are supposed to have a potential vision for you because they’re simply older, and they see things, and they offer that vision to you. Now, she didn’t come to me and say, here’s the actuarial path. She had a plan for me--whether I liked it or not--and she just turned out to be right. So, I went to Carnegie Mellon, and I impressed them, and I met a new person. What I’m seeing in my work, again, is that these people need to be there. Right now, this system is not set up for us to succeed. And so, what has to happen--and this happens for everybody, but particularly for marginalized 00:13:00people--is that we need these posts--these people to go in the ‘hood and say, here! Here’s the road; go see that person. And, unfortunately, it’s not even that. It’s like, go over there because they can’t come with us. And then, we go over, and we succeed, and then is just like, where do I go now? And then, hopefully, somebody else will go, no, no, no, no, you’re gonna go that way. It’s that type of thing. Whereas our counterparts, they have already an investment and a social capital, where it’s already given that somebody’s always there that looks like them to tell them what the next thing is, and that person’s often in their family already. My grandmother and aunt were not gonna tell me what the next step was in my PhD career. I had to have other people do that. 00:14:00Korin: Really, really good to hear that. I guess I’d kinda like to hear a bit more about the other Black role models that you’ve had because when I was thinking back to who I’ve seen that might have influenced me, it’s really only you.

Aris: Oh, my god, I just finished crying.

Korin: Even though math is a completely different subject.

Aris: No, I appreciate that. Being at Emory & Henry was my transition to just being Black. Now, I had already been in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was also my first time to live on my own. Looking back, I was so busy just trying to understand what it meant to wash my own clothes. It was clear I was a white man in a white city. But 00:15:00when I got to Emory & Henry, like it was clear that Southern Virginia-- I’m Black, whether I like it or not. People were making it clear that I’m Black. People were asking me where I’m really from. I’m getting all of the stuff. And then there was a need. We formed the Men of Color Alliance. We had to do that for survival. But, in terms of answering your question, I went to Howard, so here we are back again where we as a society have to decide whether authentic Black spaces can not be exclusionary. Where when we have Historically Black Colleges and Universities--of course, they served the purpose because there was nowhere else for us to go--but even today, the question is, is that the only place 00:16:00that we can go and have authentic experiences? I don’t think so, but the work required--we’ve just been hearing too much pain in the other spaces where marginalized people go and try and do their best, and whiteness just does its thing and shows up, and it’s just so hard to deal with. I’m not mentioning people. I just mention the power, the privilege, the oppressive nature of assuming that whiteness is better than anything else. At Howard, it was Black people everywhere in positions of power, experts in their field. It was completely second nature, and I grew up in D.C. My high school didn’t have any white people at all, in terms of students; I had white teachers, but both my calculus teachers were African. It was never an issue for me at all 00:17:00because of where I grew up.

Korin: So, speaking of HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities]--

Aris: Yeah.

Korin: Do you think there’s gonna be a point in the future, and by that I mean like somewhat in the near future, where those spaces aren’t gonna feel necessary?

Aris: Oh, not in my lifetime. Not in my lifetime. Absolutely not. And the reason in doing equity work in the math classroom--here’s my experience. My experience is spending weeks…I’ve been paid to spend weeks with teachers to get them to understand racial bias. I spent weeks with dozens and dozens of teachers, and right now, and maybe I’m bad at it, right now the ratio is like three to thirty. One out of ten teachers actually walk out of this thing 00:18:00after weeks and be like, you know what, I’ve got to do something different. And of course, there are levels. That one person gets completely transformed. Another three or four are just like, I gotta change my syllabus…wording. Another five are just like, well, I think I’ma read more about this. And the other ones were just there because they were being paid. Right? It’s just that. Obviously, because of George Floyd and so forth, that’s gotten better. Because of the nth death of a Black man for no reason, we now are waking up. I think that has gotten better, but we will need HBCUs for a very, very long time. Because it requires people who have the privilege of whiteness to attack it with so much aggression and abandon, but 00:19:00it’s something that benefits them so well. I mean, it’s so powerful, they don’t even realize it, right? I mean, you just cannot… And it shows up in front of me all the time and thankfully--there’s something that saved my health about being able to just call it out. I’m going to a math department this fall to do some professional learning, and it’s in Kentucky. The department was like, okay, well, getting out here to Kentucky is kinda hard; we’re just gonna get you a car, and you can just drive to Kentucky. And I’m like, no. And by the way, she--wonderful woman, incredible, nice--she could play with my kid, loves her country, family, everything. So, this is what I mean about the whiteness is not a problem 00:20:00with people. It is what it is. So, she can say, drive to Kentucky, to a Black man, and it puts my life in danger. I mean, something that is innocuous to her puts my life in danger. What does that require for her and everybody else? It requires a deep interrogation of something every single day because we have to deal with this every single day, and they get to deal with it only when we show up and scream about it. If then. Because too many of them are like, whatever; you’re making that up. I mean, that’s how powerful it is. So, I’m going to Kentucky because they have people there who are suffering, and I’m gonna go there and I’m gonna yell and scream, and, hopefully, some of them actually hear me. So, I am gonna put it on the line. I mean, my wife doesn’t want me to go, but this is the work. Trust me, when I get there, that’s the first thing I’m gonna say is that my wife didn’t want me to come here. I risked my life to come here; do you know why? 00:21:00Do you know that I had to put my life on the line to come here and understand why that is? We’ll start there with the conversation and see, hopefully, if we can open some people’s eyes. Because that’s the way to do it. Martin Luther King Jr. has done this; Malcolm X had to do this. You have to show the world our humanity. Our humanity has to come across to people. And that’s the great challenge because how is it that we can get people in North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, to see the humanity of Black people when we just, we don’t exist there in a lot of ways, and this is not--I don’t wanna essentialize Black people who live in Montana and Wyoming--but my point is that in these disparate areas, we know the interactions--authentic interactions, loving interactions--between us is what breaks this stuff. 00:22:00And our media is so powerful that we might be able to do it, if the media decided to. They’ve forced us to believe all sorts of other nonsense. Some of us still believe that the Earth is not warming somehow. If we can do that, we actually might be able to convince everyone to love Black people. It’s just that we don’t wanna do that. It’s not profitable. It’s just not profitable to uplift Black people right now.

Korin: That’s terrible, but does sound true.

Aris: I mean, only because it’s much easier to continue the four-hundred-year narrative. I mean, because it would be so shocking to--it would be jarring for people to, every day, see positive Black images all the time everywhere. Unfortunately, it would be problematic for Black people. Everybody 00:23:00has problems because this just goes against the narrative that we’ve all been programmed.

Korin: We spoke about being a superstar and also coming into your Blackness a bit later in life, and with that example of driving to Kentucky and having that be an obvious risk to your life, have you had situations where you’ve had to be reminded that you’re Black?

Aris: Today! So, this is both an internal and an external thing, right? I mean, I got a lot of people in this world who operate as a Black person, and they don’t see anything. There’s some people I know who are Black in this world who I love, and they don’t notice all sorts of things. So in a lot of ways, it may be how you operate 00:24:00in the world. I’m just on a place in a world and on a path where I am reminded every day for good or bad. I’m reminded every single day that I’m Black because I’m just hyper aware of it. It’s partly because of the work that I do. I’m supposed to be looking at inequities all the time. So, I’m super, super, super critical, and I’m still missing stuff. I’m sure that there’s stuff that I’m just like, I don’t even realize that that’s part of that, too. But because of my critical stance, I know that--I’m just aware that the mortgage I’m paying, the interest rate I’m getting, that’s all tied to me, to my skin color in this world at this point. So, that’s systemic racism, the one that we’re all used to that we’d like to hold on to too much. When we think about personal racism, 00:25:00we ignore the systemic piece. I mean, whenever I’m driving, the fact that I am nervous--when I used to drive pre-pandemic--when I would see a police car, obviously, there’s a part of me--and I mean, again, it just cannot be healthy--there’s a part of me that gets nervous and all this other stuff. And that’s just because a past interaction, where I’ve just been pulled over because of the color of my skin or the car I was driving fit some profile and stuff like this. And I’m in Georgia. I know that I only have fifteen to twenty miles to drive around my house, before I start to be concerned about where I am. And it’s in this place where I’ve actually also met some people--who I love--who say, come on out here to Dahlonega! Come on out here to wherever in Georgia. I’m like, nah, player. So, in a lot of ways, 00:26:00that’s the conversation I have to have eventually with any close white friend. If we really want to go deep, deep as friends, then I’ve needed to interrogate their whiteness eventually, and it’s the last frontier of all my white friendships in a lot of ways. Can we have the real conversation? If you look at the people at my wedding, my best men, they were both white. And that meant that we had some serious conversations about what it means to be Black and what it means to be white in this country. So you will look, and if you ask who am I closest to, then you just need to ask me, have I had a conversation about race with them. And that’s what has to happen. And that’s why I’m not optimistic about race relations because it requires those authentic--I 00:27:00have yet to see the campaign. I have yet to see the media campaign--the possibility of a media campaign--to sweep and change the national mentality about race. What would it look like? I’m big on dreaming because I think we have to have our imagination as big as possible, in order to achieve at least eighty percent of it. So, what would it look like for the president, every CEO, all the influential people to come and say that we need a reckoning on race. We’re not doing anything else. We’re gonna have a whole week to talk about race, and we’re going to fund millions of dollars to have all these workshops and conversations. What does a national reckoning on race look like? And, again, too many people profit from not doing that. Too many people are very comfortable where they are. We’re only talking about a small population of people--although that’s changing--that 00:28:00need to be having this conversation. It’s hard for us to see--to really to get that change unless--this is something that has to come from the top. And so, in the local sense, for us, we just need to keep having these conversations and try and just deal with it.

Korin: So, I know that you did eventually end up at Emory & Henry which-

Aris: I did.

Korin: is a whole scenario to itself, but how did you get there? What happened before that, and how did you find that place? How did you decide to go there?

Aris: Yeah. That’s a great question. So, Carnegie Mellon University is a R1 institution, and its prestigious, elite, arrogant, all of it. I loved my school, but it’s one of these swim or drown places. So, I left there, and I was burnt out. I mean, as I told you before, I spent 00:29:00a lot of my childhood just numb and working to push out the rest of the world. It finally caught up with me. I did a lot more social things in graduate school, which you can read exactly the way it sounds. I had a lot of fun there, as I was finishing. It was also there where I had started to develop an identity as a teacher. So, I was doing my mathematics, but I was also teaching, doing recitations, stuff like this. So, I was like, oh, I really like this. It became clear back then and still now, when you finish at your institution, you just apply everywhere. I sent out two hundred fifty--I remember sending out one hundred five--and my advisor was like, that is not enough. And back then, it was not electronic because that secretary was working hard, not just for me, but the other people who are graduating, too, sending out hundreds and hundreds 00:30:00of applications and letters and copies and all this stuff. This is just one of the two hundred and whatever. And I got offers to come visit from about six or seven. I went there. I don’t know if you remember Dean Blaney. He was in psychology and was the dean at the moment. I went and did the interview. I drove to exit--I actually had to fly to Knoxville because it was race weekend. I had no idea what that meant. I remember the secretary is like, well, you can’t fly in directly because of race weekend. And I’m like, I think I shouldn’t even go. Why am I wasting my time? I went to the campus and--today, I realize I’m a deep introvert, and I didn’t know it then, but somehow that place being in the middle of nowhere, quiet. I was like, oh, my God, I actually like this place. Because 00:31:00my graduate school experience was so social, people were shocked because their vision of me was, Aris is so social; he can hang out. My high school and my graduate school experience to external people were just like, there’s no way these two people could be the same person. There’s just no possible way. They were like, how could you go to a place that’s middle of nowhere, small, it’s only a thousand students? And I was like, no, I really liked it.

Korin: All right, so now, we have you here.

Aris: Yes.

Korin: What was that first year like, and what was it like setting up there?

Aris: That last year, I was still finishing my thesis. I was a new faculty member there still finishing my thesis, so it was still kinda busy. And I was just getting used to a new environment and teaching. I’ve taught a course 00:32:00in graduate school, but now, this is it. You’re a professional now, and you’re teaching everything. You’re only one of four faculty members. So, I’m teaching statistics. I’m teaching stuff that I never taught before. That was all really rewarding because, I mean, today I can teach almost any math class. And it was because I had to teach every math class because I was one of only four faculty members at the school at Emory & Henry. For my career, it was actually really useful to have that repertoire of teaching all sorts of classes. And then, maybe the first year was fine, but in the second year, it was when, again, my racial identity became clear, and I needed to become a role model, whether I liked it or not. And I was a representative, and in retrospect now, people, twenty years later on Facebook, it’s like, my first Black teacher was Dr. Winger. I saw that on Facebook. I’m like, what? I am the first Black person some people met. Then that’s when 00:33:00we started forming the Men of Color Alliance [MOCA] as a route for Black men, or men of color, on that campus. Because someone came to me and said that we need this group. Because I spoke at a Martin Luther King Jr. event. My identity there as a Black person really became clear at that time. So, that was almost as important as the--it may have been more important--than the actual professional development that I had as a professor, was now coming into this identity.

Korin: Speaking of the MOCA, could you describe your feelings as that group was forming? And then, very specifically, what was going through your head when you realized that the group was going to have a conversation about the confederate flag in southwest 00:34:00 Virginia?

Aris: Yeah. So, we did the Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration event. And I had nothing to do with the planning of it or anything. I just got up at the end, and I said, look, y’all, this is one of the greatest Americans of all time. When you list the top five Americans, this person has to be there. He’s number one for me for lots of reasons. I just felt compelled to let people know, and then I got emotional about it. Mwenda and some other Black students were there. I think it was just the very next day, because that’s how things work at Emory & Henry. You can find me the very next day. You don’t have to walk all the way across three miles of campus to find me. They just came in and said, we want to form this organization. And I was nervous. I was nervous because, to be Black in these spaces, 00:35:00you have to navigate and play the game right. And I was an untenured professor, and they wanna come to me and do something--let’s just be clear. They wanted to do something that honors Black spaces, Black men spaces--and that means that there’s potential trouble on this campus. That other people look at that as you’re trying to cause trouble. And they’re saying, can we find a place where we can feel loved? For too often, those two things are in conflict because some people look at it one way and some people look at it another way. And so, of course, I said yes; I had to say yes. And so, it was there. I was like, oh, my God, I just wanted to say how I felt about Martin Luther King Jr. That’s all I wanted to do, and then people were just like, well, can you be our leader here? Or at least our advisor here. 00:36:00So, we had to decide, first of all, that it was going be men of color. There’s always this other challenge to serve Black people or to serve people of color; that’s also becoming a big thing. And I struggled with it because light skin matters. It’s just that simple. The lighter your skin is, the more--when you put Black people in spaces where people are lighter than them, time and again, our thoughts, feelings, desires, goals just get put down versus the other ones. It’s just the way the country’s operated for centuries. And so, I do still think we need Black spaces exactly, but there’s also incredible advantages and experiences with people of color across the board. So, we made it men of color on the campus, and that included 00:37:00white people. So, we have white men in the Men of Color Alliance, understanding that it’s also beneficial to understand that white is also a color, and it has implications. We decided that everybody was able to join who was a male. I had no idea exactly when we decided to just go all out and be risky and to have the hard conversations. But that’s impacted also my life. I’m able to speak with you right now and not give a damn because of MOCA. There’s no doubt about that. Because I know that through those conversations about the confederate flag, about interracial marriage, about all of these things that we’ve talked about, then authentic things came out. People’s lives were changed. I was changed, when one of the students talked to me about the confederate flag. What we did was we just put up the confederate flag, and we just said, what do you see? 00:38:00And as you might imagine, we got the gamut--first of all, that room was packed. The room wasn’t big enough. And then, I remember one student saying, when I look at that, I see my grandfather defending his land. And I was like, oh, that sounds legit. I really can’t punch you in the face for that. That may have been authentic or not authentic, but what it did for me was it was like, oh, there is actually another perspective here. And that I need to think about in lieu of rage. There’s another option other than rage. So, I can have rage, but I can also have some other things when I see this thing. So that was one, and then we had a lot of other ones where we had hard conversations. And I was the moderator 00:39:00a lot of times, and that was deeply influential for my career now, where I’m doing a lot of these professional developments, and I know that it’s that level of complexity in hard conversations that we need to go in order for people to change.

Korin: Well, there’s been a lot of societal change since then. A lot of events that have transpired, presidencies that have occurred-

Aris: I was just thinking about this maybe three days ago--maybe it was two days ago--that I would not have done the MOCA today.

Korin: Exactly what I was going to ask.

Aris: Yeah. I would not have done the MOCA today for my life, because on that campus in southern Virginia--the rise of extremism--we might be dead. I mean, someone might come through to Miller Hall--the basement--with a weapon and just kill us. That is not-- they don’t even need to be a student on campus. They could be somebody from 00:40:00Wytheville who watched WEHCTV. And when I went on--go to Google; I’m still on there--and I talked about the Men of Color Alliance, that dude could’ve saw that and said, I’m going there, and I’m stopping this. That would literally have risked our lives. The power of the internet and getting stuff out there is something that has transformed our society. It has so much good to shrink the world, but it also has that consequence. That now, if they have put us on the web page for diversity’s sakes and said, here’s MOCA. We only talk about Black men issues or men of color issues. That risks our life today with the rise of extremism. Or we would’ve locked door. We would’ve been in like a vault. It would’ve been so much different. We would have checked for weapons on the way in the door; 00:41:00it would have been a metal detector.

Korin: A follow-up to that is that I, too, see the value of those conversations that we had and given that now that’s a danger, how do you recreate that in a way that doesn’t necessarily put your organization or your own life at risk?

Aris: Oh no. Let’s just be clear. There’s always risk. There’s always risk; it’s just degrees of risk. The real sad part--I’ma try to keep it together here--is at the highest level, you need all the levels of risk. That means that some of us have to be putting our lives on the line. And we’ve just seen that time and time again. And, thankfully, we do have some people out there willing to put their lives on the line for these types of things. I’m willing to put my career on the line these days in saying what I think is right, in order for us to be our best selves. So, you cannot mitigate risk. 00:42:00But when you decide to do it anyway, then, ultimately, it has to come from a place of love. I mean, you have to start off this conversation by centering the people who are suffering and who are really going through pain because we’re not doing the work. That’s where we’re starting. So, when I go to Kentucky, Sonoma, Chicago, and Michigan to have these types of talks, we just come back to say to the humanity of us all--this is what I’m gonna do, when I’m in Kentucky--in this place you have some incredible colleagues and incredible students who you care about who are suffering because of a space we have not interrogated. So, it’s that. You start with love, and you also talk about systems and not about people. I hate white supremacy. I don’t hate any white person. I hate white supremacy. I hate whiteness; I hate misogyny; 00:43:00I hate patriarchy. When you say that, look, there are these forces that we must call into question. That’s what I was saying about the person who invited me to Kentucky--again, incredible person. It has nothing to do with the person; it has to do with something else. And that we’re all there that try and fight something else. Now, what does that require? That requires that people actually acknowledge that white supremacy and white privilege and whiteness are actually things. That’s just been super frustrating for all sorts of reasons. The one that comes to mind immediately is, because we’re talking about W.E.B. Du Bois and others who have spent a hundred years writing about the existence of these things, then, whiteness and white privilege are so powerful that they can just be like, whatever; it doesn’t count. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of pages, papers, books about--that this is a thing. And that some people are just like, nah, that’s not a thing. 00:44:00Here we are with critical race theory. Which any person over sixty is just like, you mean, you’re just talking about my life? That’s what you mean? Critical race theory? You just mean going to work? That’s all we’re talking about? Now we have a name on it, and I was just telling my wife, I have a critical race theory book that I bought twenty years ago when I was in grad school, and it was in the legal sense. That’s a legal book. Because I mean, that’s where it has its origin. Because this is talking about how, legally, we can use these arguments to make things. And now, here we are where, I mean, for me, we’re just talking about sociology. This is also why I try to remain optimistic and have the big dream, but also I’m not optimistic because if we can’t say that we had soldiers come back--this is the new meme--we have soldiers come back from World War II for the G.I. Bill, but Black people couldn’t get it. 00:45:00They don’t want to say the second part. Somehow saying the second part is--we have to give that a name. We can’t say we had citizens come back from a war and to put them along in society, we gave them this bill, so they can buy homes, but we did not do that for this group. Yeah, that’s too much right now. That’s devastating; that is nothing short of devastating. That the parsing of whiteness and white supremacy is that deep that we cannot even mention that at the most basic of levels. I mean, we’re talking about high school. My daughter--who is ten--we’re deep into her education, as you might imagine, and we’re just like, when is she supposed to learn about world wars? She’s reading these books 00:46:00now where the world wars are now being mentioned. And so, we’re talking to her about this stuff, and we’re just like, well, I don’t know when this will come up. For me, it was in high school where it would come up. And of course, I don’t remember--even at a Black high school--them mentioning to me that people were excluded from the G.I. Bill, and I had a white teacher. That has something to do with it, of course. So, to answer your question, you’ve got to center it with love, and you’ve got to remove the person, I’m-bad-if-I-say-this type thing. Because there’s a sense of people being afraid that if they say the wrong thing, then--right? So, you’ve got to disarm that immediately and say, look, you can say anything. It’s more important that you say anything and stumble, and that I’m willing to forgive and not attack you because you say the wrong thing. Because on the 00:47:00other side of the stumbling--on the other side of the hard conversation--is the greatest thing ever in the history of the country. The true unity is on the other side of all those hard conversations. And that’s going to be the challenge and the tragedy of this generation. That, in addition to the climate nonsense, we will also look back and say, y’all couldn’t talk? The Star Trek: The Next Generation crew, they’re going to be like, back in the early 2000s, they just couldn’t talk. There’s a thing called white and Black, they had these social constructs, and they were just hooked on them. And we don’t have this problem during the Olympics for like fifteen minutes. Or at a football game. So, it is ironic that our most segregated hours are doing church; the most unified hours are during a football game. 00:48:00It is something about that.

Korin: So, I guess, keeping in mind the societal shifts that have occurred in this time, do you find it to be easier being in Georgia and trying and do this work than it was in southwest Virginia? And does it feel more liberating to be in a space like Georgia as opposed to southwest Virginia?

Aris: I think it just has different benefits. Today probably because I’m just older. The space I’m in is roughly a Black space. I mean, there are enough Black faces that are not just--when I visited South Carolina, there were lots of Black faces, but they were all the help. Here, you see Black faces who are entrepreneurs and business people and professors. That’s always invigorating. 00:49:00To see representation of yourself, even when you so-called made it yourself. It’s just always good. It’s just more opportunities here across the board than being in southwest Virginia. Now, of course, that may have changed. Maybe I’ll go back there, and all of a sudden, there’s a big metropolis or something, but it’s not. But because the world’s gotten so much smaller, I would still have a lot of the same opportunities there as well. In terms of doing equity work in the math classroom, it’s way better to be near the largest airport in the world. So, I can just get on a plane and go to different places in the country and have these conversations.

Korin: I also want to ask, roughly speaking, how busy have you been since the George Floyd riots?

Aris: Oh, people were calling me every fucking day. Let’s just be clear about this. 00:50:00Yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, literally the next week, I had people calling me up. A lot of the white people who--now they want to have the conversation. A lot of people retroactively saying, I’m so sorry that you had it so hard in graduate school. Graduate school wasn’t that bad. And then, it’s been like, I mean, I can’t imagine what it means to be a Black person in this space. And I wanted to be like, I was with you! You were there! Yeah, I was with you, player! So, I got a lot of white friends talking to me about how 00:51:00now they’re seeing something, and again, I struggle about these--and you’re helping me with this conversation--thin margins of when it really matters. Like for me, you might imagine that George Floyd’s death is zero difference from Black man one, two, three, four, five. People being shot in the back running. For that to be something that galvanizes people troubles me. I, literally, do not understand, and I’m not supposed to understand what the difference is. Tragedy, horror, it’s all the same. I mean, if anyone were to tell me or try to explain to me why this one was different versus the other ones, I have zero time for you to parse out why this human tragedy is different 00:52:00from the other human tragedies. I’ve seen deans say that, now we’re going to do something. I’ve had enough! This collective “I’ve had enough” is disheartening because the obvious follow-up is where were you? Why is it that the other ones were not enough? I think that’s being swept under the rug too much, frankly. I mean, because what we have to realize--the way that this works--is that seventeen years from now, we threaten to be in the same place we are. And the question is, will another tragedy have to happen periodically for us to continue to be reminded or will this time be different? It might be different. So, that’s what’s happening on the personal level, and then the professional level, of course, because of the work that I’m 00:53:00doing, I’m super busy. It was so hard to get this conversation because--I could show you my calendar. Either I’m teaching--obviously, I’m a teacher as my profession, first and foremost, no matter what’s going on--and then I’m giving talks all over the country. So, this past year, it was worse because there was no travel time, so I could just have a whole week of just giving talks just with my ass sitting right here. Talk one, talk two, talk three, and so forth. It’s because people just wanna say, I gotta do something. I gotta do something, and they don’t even know what that is. And so, they want to do the easy thing, particularly people in power, and that is, let’s go give money to somebody. Let’s just throw money at it. That doesn’t work. You can’t do this work unless you 00:54:00have some sense of courage. Courage is tied to risk in giving something up, so the litmus tests--as I tell everyone in these professional learnings--is, you’ve got to feel scared. I mean, this is to white people, Black people; this is to everybody. If you want to make change, you better feel it, you better feel a sense of, oh, I might lose something if I do this, but I must do it anyway, because it’s important enough, and I care enough about it. A lot of money’s been thrown around. I’ve heard people from United Negro College Fund who said that they’ve been able to negotiate $40 million contracts just in a few weeks because people just wanna--because of our capitalistic society. We use money to replace pain and agony all the time. When tragedy happens in the courtrooms, what happens? We just throw millions of dollars at people. George Floyd’s family got millions. That’s all 00:55:00we think we can do, right? But what I’m calling for is a deep reimagination of what justice looks like in a lot of ways. For me, George Floyd will never get justice because what justice looks like is to implement structures and policies in a general orientation in which something like this can never happen again. That’s what it looks like. The George Floyd Bill. The George Floyd Rule. The United States George Floyd Policy. That’s justice for me. But putting somebody away for twenty-two years, that does nothing. Because what is it that we’re doing? We’re continuing to say that this is an individual thing. And we still have a narrative of, oh, that person’s a problem, that person’s a problem, that person’s a problem, that person’s bad, that a person’s evil, evil, evil, evil, evil. And we’re not seeing a general 00:56:00white supremacy issue here. We’re not willing to admit that.

Korin: I think that’s a really good perspective that does not get brought up nearly enough.

Aris: Yeah, and what we’re talking about, again, is to not ask, well, why is it that it’s now? And I get that because people might believe that that’s going back, because people will be like, okay. I got it. I didn’t see it before. I see it now; let’s move forward. But there is something about taking a moment to say, let us remember that we didn’t see it. You didn’t have this feeling for these other things. You’re helping me because I might start off the next session with this. Because there’s something for us to recognize that we missed a lot of these, and we might miss them again, 00:57:00and we shouldn’t make this mistake again because there are other ones that are happening today, tomorrow, next week. The other thing, of course, is that we cannot become desensitized to it. It is true that I only have so many tears and so much rage before it becomes unhealthy. But, unfortunately, I still get--I feel good that I’m not desensitized to it, that I’m not in a place where I’m just like, oh, just another one. Let me write this email now. I still feel it. I still feel it, and I don’t want us to be like, well, that’s just the way it is.

Korin: Well, it’s been amazing. The interview time is coming to its end. Is there anything 00:58:00that you would like to say or speak on before the interview is concluded?

Aris: Yeah, two things. What I want to do for this next minute or so is really just center people of color and Black people, in particular. If you’re in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math]--or you’re trying to get your education in general--as I mentioned before in this interview, in some spaces, the world has gotten smaller, and when I went to graduate school, and when a lot of my colleagues went to graduate school, we were the only one. And what the internet has done--the internet’s the most underrated invention or space in the last few generations. Because now, the notion of being alone is over. That we can now connect with each other and create authentic spaces from thousands of miles away. I’m 00:59:00doing it now with Korin, so don’t think that you are now walking out there alone in these spaces. You can connect. There are organizations out there with people like me and Michael Young and others, in which we can support you. You can find your community, and the notion of being alone is over. And every day, you will be reminded that you’re not supposed to be there. Sometimes you’ll see it; sometimes you won’t. But keep fighting. You may decide to do something else for your own health. That’s also fine, but also know that you are not alone. And that some Google searches will help you find us, and we will support each other and let you know that. And then the other thing, of course, is I want to center the dominant culture for just two seconds and say that--first of all, let me just eliminate the people who aren’t even going to try. 01:00:00I’m not talking to you, but I’m talking to people who want to be good allies--in your work, you have to understand that your work cannot be safe. If you wanna help, but only up to a certain point of your comfort, then you and I are not on the same side because your comfort is dangerous for me. Your comfort is dangerous for your students of color. There are systems now, that you have power to change with your voice and the color of your skin, that can help out. And so, when you think about helping out, the simple question is, is this risky? If it’s not, then you can do more than that, and I don’t have time for anything else, in terms of excuses.

Korin: Awesome, and thank you very much for your time.

Aris: Of course!

Korin: I will conclude this interview. 01:01:00[End of Interview]