J.T. Snipes
Welcome to Here’s the Story, a show that brings Student Affairs to life by sharing the authentic voices and lived experiences of those who are shaping the field every day as a part of the Student Affairs NOW family, we are dedicated to serving and furthering the people who walk the walk, talk the talk, and carry the rock. All of us who find ourselves serving students in their education, in student affairs and higher education. You can find us at studentaffairsnow.com, or directly at studentaffairsnow.com/heresthestory, or on YouTube and anywhere you enjoy podcasts, we’d like to thank today’s sponsor, Huron. Huron’s education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial, health and student success. I am your host. JT Snipes, my pronouns are he? Him, His? I serve as Associate Professor and Chair of the educational leadership department at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. And y’all know I am trying my best to live as a free black man in a world that would have me live otherwise. I’m with you today from the ancestral lands of the Kickapoo and the Illinois Confederacy. The university resides on land seated in the 1819, treaty of Edwardsville, and is now home to SIUE and I am delighted to be here with my co host, Helena.

Helena Gardner
Hello. I am Helena Gardner, and my pronouns are she, her, hers. I serve as the Director of Residence, education and housing services at Michigan State University. I live my life as a mom, a sister, a daughter, a friend and a mentor. I’m with you today from the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe, three fires, Confederate of Ojibwe, Ottawa and Potawatomi peoples. The university resides on land seated in the 1819, treaty of Saganaw home to Michigan State University. JT, who do we have with us today? Who’s telling us a story today?

J.T. Snipes
Elena, I am so excited today. I want to introduce my friend Kyle Brooks, who has a wonderful story to tell, but before Kyle jumps into his story, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about who Kyle is. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Kyle Eugene Brooks PhD is a native of Detroit, Michigan, and serves as an assistant. Oh, yeah, get it in. Get it in for a second.

Helena Gardner
Yes, Detroit, okay, all day, all day.

J.T. Snipes
Kyle serves as an assistant professor of religious studies and Africana Studies at the University of San Diego. His work broadly explores the communicative conditions of religion politics and black expressive cultures. His forthcoming book Chasing Ghosts the politics of black religious leadership. Shout out to Georgetown University Press examines the recurring historical and contemporary roles of black clergymen in social movements through the conceptual lenses of haunting and hauntology.

J.T. Snipes
I would I wouldn’t. I would be lying if I said I knew exactly what that meant, but maybe you could teach us a little bit. So this book, ultimately disputes the mythology that black male charisma and rhetorical performance are the core of mechanisms of sociopolitical change. So Kyle, we are excited to have you with us.

Kyle Brooks
Thank you so much. JT, Helena, shout out to Detroit. It is great to be here, and I’m so happy that you invited me to share my story. So, so,

J.T. Snipes
so jump in, man, tell, tell us your story.

Kyle Brooks
Alright, so lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of origin stories. We hear a lot about these comic books the way that a villain or a hero gets their start, the particular journey that they take, the obstacles that they face. In storytelling, we are familiarized with a framework called the hero’s journey. And my own story, I don’t think of it as a story of heroism. I. But rather a story that centers on this core premise, a quote attributed to, I believe, the scholar, Paulo Freire, we make the road by walking. Is this idea that where we are going, where we are headed, often doesn’t have a clear or discernible path, but the path appears through our efforts, through our choices, through our decisions. And so my story is about the little choices and decisions along the way that created a path to where I am now. So where do I begin? I think, as I sit here before you as this tenure track professor, I am reminded that I had this sort of vision and imagination long before I got here, I could tell you a whole lot of details and little things that happened at the core, I will say that I am not here because of my own gifts and talents, I did have something to do with it. I worked hard for sure, and I believe that I have abilities that have enabled me to be good at what I do, but in so many ways, my origin story as a professor starts with moments of clarity and illumination, but also moments of loss. I’ll start with a moment of loss. When I was in my mid 20s, I was head over heels in love, and you could not tell me otherwise I wanted to marry this young woman. It was the first time in my life I had really felt that deep, consuming sense of passion that, yes, this is my person, and I’m trying to build a life with you. I’m trying to have kids. I’m trying to everything together, you know, ride or die from here on out, that one left.

J.T. Snipes
Oh no, and

Kyle Brooks
not so much because anyone did anything wrong or badly. But sometimes life does not play out the way you want, the relationships you desire or interested in that you’re holding out hope for. We remember that it’s not just about our desire, it’s about mutuality, and so the two of us ended up parting ways, and we can once again. That’s a whole story for another day. But the key here is that what happens in this part, in a ways, is I had to come to terms with the fact that sometimes you lose even when you did all the right things, that everything is not always in your control or in your hands. And then often the only real power we have is how we react or respond to what life presents us, what life brings. So I remember being in this moment of reflecting on, okay, what do you want to do now? The relationship you thought you had no longer available, the path you thought you were on, no longer here. So you gotta make the path by walking. And in that moment, at that juncture of my life, I decided, You know what, I would have kept working at my teaching job. I would have kept working and, you know, in the STEM field that I was in, I started in molecular and cellular biology, and I decided, man, Imma pivot Imma take a complete different path. I decided I was going to go back to school, and specifically I was going to do my masters of divinity at Yale Divinity School. So I was already living in Connecticut. I gone there to Yale for undergrad. And part of it was like, Alright, I want to take this new path, but I also don’t feel like moving nowhere. So either we either going here, or it’s or it’s a bus. So I end up applying to the program. I get accepted, and I leave my teaching position. I leave behind all the stuff I’ve been doing, and in my late 20s, I’m going back to being a student again for first time in some years, and I loved it. I was so excited to be a student again, to be in the library on a Monday night making flash cards for a language class. I was I was ecstatic, and I realized this has been the thing I was I was missing. I felt like in the in the wake of of the loss of the plans I thought I had, I was looking for a sense of purpose. I was questioning, what do you do when your worldview, your imagination, has been centered on this idea that if you do the right thing and if you play by the rules, and if you do all the stuff you’re supposed to do, things are going to work out. Sometimes they don’t, and that is not an excuse to then be pessimistic, but it is a call to think differently about the fact that our paths, our plans, are not always as neat or simple as we imagine. You. Fast Forward, while I’m in my master’s program, I have the transformative experience that leads me to want to be a professor. I took a poetry class, contemporary African American poetry with the scholar and poet Elizabeth Alexander, and she was phenomenal. We’re convening this this course together, we’ve got folks sitting around the table reading poetry. We’re talking about the poets, we’re talking about historical figures and the different poetry presses and how these things were coming together. And on the last day of the course, she invites two of the poets whose work we’ve been reading during the semester to come to our class. Wow. So the poets come and they’re, they’re sharing their poetry. They’re, you know, reading, reading the things to us that we have read in our own minds. And they’re telling stories about how they got to where they were and what they’re doing. And Professor Alexander starts telling a story about growing up as a child in Washington, DC, and learning to fall in love with poetry, because she used to have to recite poems and things as a child in her black Episcopal Church. And this is where she was introduced to Langston Hughes. And she talked about this experience of being a child, reciting these poems and in this sort of deep, connected black community. And it was like the clouds parted for me, and I realized, as she was telling this story, that’s what I want to do. I want to be a professor. I want to do what she’s doing. And so from that moment, I was grinding, I was hustling. I was like, hey, every step of this master’s program, I’m trying to position myself to be the PhD program. And then I keep at it. I finish my program well, and I get accepted to Vanderbilt University. So a move from Connecticut to Nashville to Music City, and I’m starting fresh, start new, start from scratch. And it was a beautiful time. Was a wonderful time to be there. I’m a musician myself, so I love on all these venues, hearing different artists, getting to meet other musicians, getting to play some gigs myself. So I had this really rich and beautiful life outside of grad school. And so I was having something creatively that was fueling the work and the study that I was doing. And I’m in this very deeply black city with a lot of you know, historical roots these HBCUs around, so I’m getting an experience and an education that’s so much more than just the decision of where I went to school. And so the years go by and I do my coursework, and I do my comprehensive exams, and I’m finally a doctoral candidate, and I’m like, Yes, alright, time write this dissertation. Get on to the next thing. Get your tenure track job like boom, boom, boom. December 27 2016 I’m restless for some reason, and I wake up in the middle of the night, I pick up my phone and decide, for whatever reason, to check my email, because, you know, these are the things you do when you can’t sleep. I see an email from one of my professors, the rest of my cohort, saying that my advisor has been diagnosed with cancer,

Kyle Brooks
December 27 2016 we get the word about his diagnosis. June 23 2017 he’s dead. And so I felt myself back in that earlier stage of crisis where I’m asking, what’s the what’s the point of it? What’s the purpose? Where’s the direction? Because at that point, as I’m he dies, as I’m like, beginning to write my dissertation, and I couldn’t write for like, the better part of a year, I just because something in me felt like I followed this path. I followed this pursuit because this person trusted in me, believed in me and recruited me to come here, and now I’m here and they’re gone. And I was asking myself, what’s next on the journey? How does this unfold? This isn’t what you planned for. I always imagined I was going to graduate and get a job, and I able to call my advisor, call my mentor, and we would talk about what I was doing and how I’m getting the book project, and how I’m doing all these other things right. And it was like, no. So I ultimately end up with a new advisor who was good friends, best friends, with my former advisor, and he shepherded me through the rest of the program and into completing my dissertation and defending and. And I made it to, you know, got my my gown, my tassels, all of that jazz, and walked that stage. And I have this really beautiful picture, because at the time, you know, COVID pandemic had started. And so I’ve got this really cool picture. I have to hang it up of like me, and then, like the Assistant Provost had me my degree, and everybody was at mass, and it was, like this sort of surreal moment, but I knew, Okay, I made it. And so I go from go from my program, and I start a tenure track position, moved to Columbus, Ohio, and, you know, things were cool. I’m like, Okay, you’re gainfully employed, you’re on the tenure track. You’re living, in many respects, the dream so many academics want to live. And I was unhappy. I realized at a certain point that it wasn’t enough to just check off the boxes. I needed to be in a situation, in the circumstance that actually felt right, that felt good for me, that actually gave me the room and expansiveness to create the kinds of courses I want to teach, to be able to do the kind of research I want to and to feel like ultimately, I had the intellectual and academic freedom to really spread my wings. And let me be clear, it’s not that my institution was a bad place, but I realized that that position, that situation, was suited to a person I once thought I would be, and the person I was becoming, the scholar I was becoming, the intellectual I was becoming. I realized, Wait, you don’t need a prescribed path to walk on. You need to make your path by walking. You need to find your way to a space, to a place that allows you to be an architect of the experience that you want and need. And so I find myself in this position where I’m having to wrestle with, okay, you’ve got what so many people are coveting, with so many adjuncts, with so many non tenure track with so many visiting with so many folks who are, you know, guest lecturers, etc, so many folks just want that the tenure track job, the Social Security benefits, right? And so it felt strange for me, in some ways, to be, I don’t know, disenchanted or ungrateful for what I knew a lot of people would love to have. But I’m also convinced that what is for us is for us, and at some point you gotta make principal decisions about what you really want and desire, rather than convincing yourself or coping with what you think is enough or sufficient. So I got to my my third year in this, in this, in this position, I was interviewing at other places. You know, I’m on my academic hustle, on my grind. I’m presenting that conferences, I’m networking, I’m doing all of that stuff. And I had a couple interviews, and I was coming up on my up on my pre tenure review. So it was February 2023, coming. Up on pre tenure review, and I got to turn in my materials in a couple of days, and something in me just said, you don’t need turning anything, because you’re not coming back. And I had this gut check moment where I thought to myself, you are walking away from the thing so many people have strived so hard for that you have strived so hard for quick turn. This happens, February 2023 I decide I’m not coming back same month I do a guest lecture for my current institution, us, USD, University of San Diego. Lecture goes well, well received. I end up in conversation with the department chair in religious studies, and it so turns out that at the same time that I’m evaluating my next moves and like whether I want to be where I am, the department has couple folk who are leaving, and the expertise of my scholarship fits right into the niche of the People who are leaving. So one thing leads to another, and I get an offer on the table for a visiting assistant professor position, and I decide in that moment, I would rather take the temporary visiting thing than to. Stay with a measure of security in a place that I know is not the best fit for who I’m becoming and where I’m going. Now here we are, you know, two years beyond that initial decision, and I’m now in a new tenure track position. I’m in a space where I am able to have the freedom, the creativity, to teach the courses I want, to create, the courses I can imagine, to collaborate with other scholars across the university. I’m in a situation that, in so many ways, was a path made by walking, and it seemed to say that everything is perfect, or that this is just a story about, oh, you know, just keep on going. Sometimes, there are times if I just said, you know, somebody told me, just keep on going. I might have kept on going at a place that I knew wasn’t the right fit. So there are times where, like, man, hustling harder ain’t always the answer. We can hustle hard in the wrong direction. We back back in Detroit, we call that, you know, you hustle it backwards, right? You doing a lot of work. You spinning your wheels, but not headed to where you want to be. And sometimes you don’t know exactly where, where you want to be is, or what it looks like, but it’s okay to invent, to imagine along the way. And so in the end, you know, it takes courage to say, I’m going to move in this direction where the path has not been laid, where there has not been pavement, where there have not been, you know, there’s no yellow brick road to this thing, but I’m so grateful that I went where I felt led and that I trusted that everything I needed would be where I was going. So that’s how I’m here today.

Helena Gardner
Word that’s a word.

J.T. Snipes
Wow. So we’re going to take a quick commercial break and then more of our conversation with Dr Kyle Brooks. We again want to shout out our sponsor Huron and collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo. Hearing promotes institutional resilience in higher education. For more information, please visit go.hcg.com/now

J.T. Snipes
and now more of our conversation with Dr Kyle Brooks, whoo, boy, you was a preacher,

Helena Gardner
ain’t you had to be? Because I’m just over here, just getting my life together.

Kyle Brooks
Listen, you know, in all of the roles that we take on, I believe all of us are storytellers, and importantly, we are all co authors of our lives. And if there is anything that I have garnered from this journey of mine, it is the will, the courage, the daring to bet on ourselves to trust that you are, in fact, a good author, a good storyteller, and that you can put these pieces together in a way that only you can and that can look a way that’s going to be beautiful and exciting for you. So I’m trying to be as best I can, the architect of a life I desire, and hopefully, through my telling of my story, encourage others to do the same. I don’t want people to feel powerless or helpless in the face of what life brings.

J.T. Snipes
And that’s beautiful. I wonder, do your students ever get to see this sort of storytelling? Are you encouraging them to you know, take the journey. Take those steps into unchartered territory.

Kyle Brooks
That’s a really good question. I would say that I have tried to infuse my work, my teaching, my mentorship, with elements of this, this mindset, this mentality, as best I can. I try to teach in a way that invites students into the story and rather the stories of. Of history, of figures often neglected or forgotten or sidestepped, of pathways less taken. And my hope is that you know part of what students see through my work, through my engagement. And some and some have told me as much that they appreciate the kind of passion to which, with which I apply, my storytelling, my teaching, the fact that I’m really engaged in I care about that. Oh, you’ve thought about this, you’ve reflected on it. You invite us into meaningful discussion. So I think in some ways, I try to, I’m trying to gather them into that, there is a lot, I think, to my personal story that my students don’t necessarily know, right? And there’s some element that I’ve shared in like different venues. I tell I will, I’ll say, say this, I got invited to be I was the keynote speaker for a dinner event for the Center for Diversity and Inclusion here at USD, and I told a little bit of the story of how I ended up where I am. And I actually told a piece of a story about how I ended up at Yale University. And the abridged version is this, I had an amazing, wonderful teacher in second grade by the name of Francis Sykes Curtis, a stately, well traveled, well educated, incredible black woman originally from Norwalk, Connecticut, who had moved to Detroit. And when she was teaching me in second grade at my little parochial school, she said to me, one day, Kyle, you are a bright young man. You should apply to Yale someday. Mm, and when she said that to me, I didn’t read it as you should apply to Yale someday. I heard it as you should go to Yale someday. So for me, it wasn’t a question. It was here, someone who has spoken into my life, into my existence, a path that I did not even know existed, a place I had no conception of, but because I believed her and she believed in me, I believed in what she said. So, you know, I’m a second, second grader growing up in Detroit, one of seven kids. Ain’t nobody in my family been nowhere near around, I believe much less, most of them hadn’t, you know, finished college, been to college, and at 16, I’m graduating high school, and I’m heading off

Helena Gardner
to Yale, you say that twice at 16, in case anybody missed that you said at 16,

Kyle Brooks
at 16 and and the thing about it is there, there are some things we have to do in Life before time and experience teach us to doubt. You. Uh, because as a kid, I had no idea what lay ahead of me at a place like Yale for like a young black boy, right? And there are things that if I had known beforehand, I might have had trepidation. I might have had fear. I might have had some anxiety, and it’s not to say that I didn’t have those things when I got there, because it was, you know, it was the best and the worst of things, right? But all of that to say that, man, we are set off on pathways and on journeys by those who intersect with us at a time, and we choose, in that moment, whether we really know it or not, to activate and act on that.

Helena Gardner
No, I just have this question. I can’t formulate it in my mind, because as you talk, I’m not sure it’s the question. But what keeps coming up for me is is, how do you hear but I think the question is really, how do you discern between, you know, like that affirmative statement you should apply to Yale becoming just a future statement from the things that inevitably try to creep in to tell you that wasn’t, that wasn’t the way. How do you, how do you sift through that? I mean, because I’m thinking that in the second grade, there might not be intentional sifting, but when you when you go back that that second goal at at the master’s degree, there’s some sifting that is happening. And maybe it always was the case, because I’m over here just wild and neglecting but how do you discern

Kyle Brooks
you there is, Well, I’ll tell you two, two brief pieces to answer that question. One of them comes from a late scholar and theologian by the name of Katie cannon, who’s a first black woman ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA. And she would say, You must do the work that your soul must have something within us, desires, hungers, thirsts, or something more, something particular, something specific. And there are many good things, but they are not all the thing. So it comes down, for me, in part to a deep kind of questioning about, what is it that your soul must have, what is it without which you would feel a little less a little empty, a little lacking, connected to that is what my my, my late advisor, uh, shout out to the Reverend Doctor Dale P Andrews. In the last conversation we had I was visiting him in the hospital. Was early June, I want to say maybe like june 14, 2017, we’re in Nashville. I’m at his hospital bed, and we’re just talking. And he said something to me about how, you know, a lot of people think revelation, this idea of of revealing, is like an all of a sudden epiphany, that things just become clear and suddenly, aha, I’ve got it Eureka. And he told me more often, Revelation is in the slow reflective practice after time has passed, which is to say, there are some ways in which you cannot know all the things that are to be known. And so the discernment comes with a measure of trust that no one thing, no one moment or decision is the thing, that everything hangs on. But with time, with community, with intentional retreat, we’re able to be attuned to our own senses and the things that we cannot always know in concrete. We can understand, we can feel, we can discern in a sensory way. And to me, it’s like all knowledge is not, you know, of the head of the of the factual, of the concrete. So it’s really a matter of like as an everyday practice, we’ve got to like train ourselves to be attentive to things that we know without knowing.

Kyle Brooks
Like you got to learn to trust you. Like, I think, I think we’re all intuitive, but we get socialized out of it, you know, and and intuition develops, I think, in many respects, through our practice, through our usage, through necessity. So the whole even the idea of women’s intuition, I feel like a lot of it is really a function of how have women had to function and move in this world in order to survive, in order to thrive, in order to maintain connection, community, and so the more practice you have, the more reps you get. I think it becomes a bit easier to to sense, hmm, you know what? This feels, right? Let’s, let’s move in this direction.

Helena Gardner
No. JC, I don’t, I don’t know. What else I don’t know. I ran testing water. That’s

J.T. Snipes
no. I mean, I really appreciate the point around intuition. Kyle, I’ve been trying to get my students in our research methods class to think more about the intuitive process of empirical research, right. Like, I think there’s a way that we make it something more than what it is. And I’m trying to get students to remember, like, hey, you know this. You’ve done this before, and it is not less than and that is a particular sort of knowledge to know and to have this intuition. So, man, I appreciate everything that you’re sharing, there’s so much for our listeners to reflect and chew on. How much time we got. NAT, you probably don’t have to edit this out, because I do think, I do think, man, that’s that is that is a powerful space for us to to potentially land on. Unless you have some more questions. Helena, cuz I don’t, I’m just

Helena Gardner
Yeah, because, because you know what it is. And right now you might be editing this whole after thought out you might have. I don’t know that, but. It just is. It’s because what you did, you it brought in so many things in life that just kind of are, at least for me, swirling, just swirling. So I’m thinking about I’ve been trying to get my son driving. This is so related and unrelated. I’ve been trying to get him driving. He he didn’t do so well. His first goal was about two years into this journey, and what I learned about him is he gotta be in a place of his confidence, but also gotta be in a place of my confidence to let him fly like we, you know, we vibe off each other. But one of the things that I texting him while you all told me not to listen and and this is why, like, there are just no coincidences in life. He said, Is there anything I need to work on? And then I I’m just telling him, like, you gotta pan the space. And the way he operates, he hears I must not be doing like, this is how he hears it. And so he’s like, because I’m not doing it right. And I’m like, okay, always trying to think about how we how our words leave impressions upon people, right? It just, it just does. So I’m like, Okay, how do I say this differently? And what I really wanted to say is, really what you say about his intuition. I just want you to work on your intuition, because that, that to me, is as I think about because we took some I took some days off to help him just drive around. We drive him three days. It’s been an adventure, um, of just being like, I can’t teach you how to trust yourself. I can’t I don’t know how to do that for you, but I know you can do it because you like, you roam this earth, and you’re a person, and you have to have intuition. And I’m thinking about how you say, like you gotta do it enough that you trust your own scale of what it is. And I’m just thinking in life so many parts of that, that that’s, that’s a lesson that to your point, that it doesn’t come to us plainly, right? We get more focused energy around doubt and opportunities to make mistakes that are just mistakes, but we hear them as failures. And what I just, I feel like, would you bless me with today? Is like, no, like, we can actually do a whole refine, and if you look at things through a completely different lens, like, I feel like you when, when you when you lost your mentor, you had that moment of just finding, focusing on a lens you had developed. And just like, that’s the hustle and that that that is, I think, that is Detroit. I think if you come from Detroit, you do know how to hustle hard, but you can learn how to hustle against your own to your own demise. It’s what I think the hard part is. And I just feel like you taught me something. I think I wrote notes. I got a little one life as many things, but you can’t have all that life about to go back and raise my son. That’s why you have to delete all that. Because now I’m like, because it’s this opportunity of just hearing how much time we spend in doubt, and not in trusting just our own intuition, our own way of knowing who we always was, just who we was, just period, and I’m just over here like you better invite me to do something on a Saturday. JT, because I know,

J.T. Snipes
well, Kyle, oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Hold

Kyle Brooks
on. I was just going to say, you know, we have spent more time with ourselves than anyone else has. So at some point, we have to give ourselves permission, claim the expertise in our own lives, and then to operate and move in that

J.T. Snipes
Kyle we want to thank you so much for being our guest today. You have indeed blessed us, and we appreciate you sharing your story, your journey, and we look forward to hopefully seeing you again in these streets.

Kyle Brooks
Thanks. Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

J.T. Snipes
And thanks again to our sponsors Huron, and this has been here’s the story part of the Student Affairs now, family, we are so glad you joined us to laugh, cry, learn, maybe commiserate, but always celebrate being a part of the Student Affairs experience. If you have a story you want to share with us, and believe me, we all have a story, please consider sharing us. Sharing it with us by leaving a two minute pitch via voice file at studentaffairsnow.com. Com, slash. Here’s the story. Every story is welcome and every earnest perspective is worthy. And even if you don’t feel like sharing yours, you can still find ours and others at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode has been edited by Nat Ambrosey. You. Thank you, as always, for making a sound and look as good as we do. I am JT snipes.

Helena Gardner
I am Helena Gardner, and

J.T. Snipes
this has been, here’s the story. Wonderful week. Y’all peace.