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In this episode of Buff Innovator Insights, we meet Dr. Reiland Rabaka, Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and inaugural Director of the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS). Dr. Rabaka describes the mix of church, poverty, family and jazz that shaped his early years; the combination of mentors and educational opportunities led him to CU Boulder; and his vision for CAAAS.

Terri Fiez

Hello, I'm your host Terri Fiez, Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder. Welcome to season two of Buff Innovator Insights. This podcast features some of the most innovative groundbreaking ideas in the world. I'll also introduce you to the people behind the innovations, from how they got started, to how they are changing the future.

Today I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Reiland Rabaka, professor of African, African-American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies. He's also the inaugural director of the newly established Center for African and African-American Studies. He earned a bachelor's degree of fine arts at University of the Arts, and then his master's and PhD at Temple University. Dr. Rabaka is the author of numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays, as well as more than a dozen books. He currently teaches topics, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Lives Matter movement and introduction to hip hop studies.

During today's podcast, Dr. Rabaka describes the mix of church, poverty, family, and jazz that shaped his early years. He also tells us about the unique combination of mentors and educational opportunities that ultimately led him to CU Boulder. Finally, he talks about the newly established Center for African and African-American Studies at CU Boulder and his vision for its future. Let's meet Dr. Reiland Rabaka.

Hi, Reiland. Thank you for joining us today.

Reiland Rabaka

Thank you so much for having me.

Terri Fiez

I'd like to just kick right off and get to at the core of you, your family is so important to you and your mother and your grandmother played an important role in your life. How would you describe them?

Reiland Rabaka

Church ladies, grew up in a very, very strict religious household and that really shaped my early years, but obviously growing up in the black church was fundamental. So that really shaped the whole way I see the world. So my world view is very couched in African-American religious culture.

Terri Fiez

Well, let's dig in a little bit more here. You grew up in the south with much of it in Texas. So I know music played a very important role in your life. How did you get started with music and what was it that drew you in?

Reiland Rabaka

Gospel music. The first form of music that I ever really started playing as a musician was really as a youth minister of music. So church music, and from there, I really got involved in jazz music. Now, part of the reason I gravitated towards jazz was because that was one of the ways that I could help my mom pay the rent. While gospel was the sacred music that I gravitated toward, jazz was the secular music. And in terms of jazz, it allowed me to be a working musician at a very young age.

So I got my first major gig as a jazz musician at age nine. That's when I got my first $100 bill. I thought it was monopoly money because I'd never seen a $100 bill and it changed my life forever because I was able to help my mom buy groceries and do different things. And so the economics of it growing up in poverty the way that I did, being able to make money playing this music that I would play for free. Yeah. So it was the beginning of my life as a professional musician. I also joke and say it was the end of my childhood because when the other kids on the block would go out and play, I was rehearsing. I was practicing getting ready for my next gig. So I feel like it was both a blessing and a curse if you will.

Terri Fiez

Music was also your ticket to a really top quality education. And you've mentioned that you had to audition at a very young age. Talk about that.

Reiland Rabaka

Yeah. It's really, really just an incredible experience to receive arts education. This is in again, the public school system in Dallas, Texas, and they have just a really renowned high school there called, it was called Arts Magnet is what people commonly call it but the proper name is Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. And from that high school, you have a lot of incredible artists like Edie Brickell, Paul Simon's wife, Edie Brickell, Roy Hargrove, jazz musician, Erykah Badu, Neo Soul musician, Norah Jones, jazz musician. There's so many people that came out of that high school that it's really, really incredible.

So I was one of those kids where after a lot of the social struggles of the 60s', they had all of these Arts Magnet, high schools set up around the country. And it was really an opportunity for somebody like myself, a very, very poor kid to get access to just, I don't know, top notch, music education, arts education, and everything. And I really feel like as a jazz musician I was swinging, so I would swing my way from the neighborhood to college. So being at that high school exposed me to so many different artistic movements and so different genres of music and everything. I feel like it was a real turning point in my young life.

Terri Fiez

What were some of your other favorite subjects in school? What else did you enjoy in terms of academic subjects?

Reiland Rabaka

English. I liked literature partly because of the Harlem Renaissance. Honestly Terri, when I grew up, I thought I could go to Harlem and hang out with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and Claude McKay and Georgia Douglas Johnson and of course, W.E.B. Du Bois. And so honestly, I liked that vibe of just having lots of different artists and intellectuals and activists all in one space, and that's something that has preoccupied me since my adolescence.

Terri Fiez

It's really fascinating. I do want to go back to one more thing. I know you've talked about being very poor growing up and growing up in the projects. What was your experience coming from your home life, going to this art school which was in many ways, very elite and you were among the elite. What was that experience like for you?

Reiland Rabaka

Well, this is really difficult and of course this is me reflecting back. So this is all hindsight, but when I think about it right now, it was both an angst feel experience. And it was also a breakthrough experience. It caused me a great deal of anxiety because obviously a lot of the kids I went to high school with had the latest cars and nice clothes and everything like that. And so you can't help but to feel tight and a bit demoralized.

On the other hand, what I realized was when it comes to art in the United States of America, a lot of the social constructions are transcended. So it wasn't necessarily about my class background, my working class background, and my underclass background. It wasn't necessarily about my race or my gender or my religious affiliation, any of that, it was really based on talent. And so it's like artists create their own unique world where we vibe with somebody, we connect with people based on their talent, based on their ability to express themselves and say something about the modern moment.

And in that context, Terri, I became one of the most popular kids in the high school and it was based on talent. So nobody really cared where I came from. It was more about where I'm going to go. So where can your talent take you? And so I was very geeky, very bookish at that time. I was probably reading about a book a week. Books was a way for me to escape, was to get away if you will, it would take me to a whole nother world. So I would read these books about all different parts of the world, but especially the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America and I really thought one day I was going to be able to go there when I grow up and everything. And my teacher started telling me, if you keep swinging like this, you're going to go on tour all over the world.

So the more they would tell me that the more I would be in the practice room. I'm in the woodshed working it out, trying to get better as a musician. And I'm literally thinking like this is going to be my ticket. So Terri, for me, I've always seen education as a tool for self transformation, but also social transformation.

Terri Fiez

Actually, your story is so inspiring. Thank you for sharing that.

Reiland Rabaka

You’re too kind.

Terri Fiez

I'd love to just continue on then from high school, which you had this very unique experience in high school, you made a decision to go to college. How did you decide where you would go and how did you navigate that process?

Reiland Rabaka

It was a very gut-wrenching, scary experience because nobody in my family has ever gone to a college or a university. And thinking about going to college was something that excited me, but it also terrified me if I can be perfectly honest with you. We had guidance counselors and every year different colleges would come to our high school and they would hold auditions. And we would create these video, these VHS tapes of us performing, and we would send them off to different colleges.

So you had two opportunities, Terri. You could either take the audition when they come to the school, but not all of them would come every year, or if you wanted to go somewhere else, you could send your VHS tape out and I must've sent out maybe 25 or 30 of these VHS tapes. And I got into most of the top schools, if not all of the top schools that I applied to, but the problem was Terri, because I grew up in abject poverty I needed scholarships. So it wasn't just getting into the colleges. How do I pull down scholarships to be able to pay for college? And that's something that when you're a 16 or 17 year old kid, you're just excited that colleges are interested in you, but you don't really know, understand about scholarships. So that's where the guidance counselors came into play as well.

Terri Fiez

So you never said where you went. So where did you go to college?

Reiland Rabaka

I went to the University of the Arts, which is one of the premier arts conservatories in the country. And I went there, one, obviously because they gave me a full scholarship. Two, they emphasize two tracks. So if you take the performing arts track or the visual arts track, you still have to take a philosophy of art track where they ground you in the specific aesthetics, which means the art theory of whatever genre that you are developing expertise in, so as a jazz musician, literally I was able to do jazz studies. So not only was I was able to perform, but I could understand the history of jazz, jazz criticism, jazz literature. I was fascinated that jazz was not merely music in the roaring in 1920s, right? They actually called it the jazz age. And so here is African-American music Terri, that becomes a metaphor for an entire epoch, an entire era in American history.

And so I began to think about that and said, wait, wow, hip hop. This thing called rap music of my generation, this also is the soundtrack of modern America, at least for young folk at the time, this is the soundtrack of modern America. And then if you look at MTV and VH1 and all of the video shows, rap was all over. And so I began to see images of black and brown folk, musicians doing it at a very, very high level. And I began to think maybe I could possibly have a career as a musician, as a music historian, as a music critic.

Terri Fiez

I would just want to probe a little bit, did you have a single experience or a mentor during your undergraduate experience that created some transformative decision, direction of where you would go from there?

Reiland Rabaka

I had a couple of them because I'm a geek. First and foremost, I would say Dr. Camille Paglia one of the leading feminists, aesthetics feminist art critics in the country at the University of the Arts. And she really, really took me under her wing and exposed me to cultural aesthetics, to feminist aesthetics, to queer aesthetics. The fact of the matter Terri, is that even if you come from an oppressed group, in America you actually can use art as a medium to express yourself. And so I really got into protest art.

So I would say Dr. Camille Paglia was a huge influence. And then I got exposed to African-American studies. So my first African-American studies classes ever, I had an undergrad and most of those professors were actually PhD students at Temple University which had the first program in African-American studies. And that had a significant impact on me because it was actually in one of those classes that I got an opportunity to revisit The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. I first read that book in junior high school, and it really just shaped so much of my experience to be perfectly honest with you.

Terri Fiez

Well, we'll come back to William Du Bois, but before we get there, next you went on to pursue a master's and then a doctorate degree. Did you know what kind of job you would hope to get after getting your PhD?

Reiland Rabaka

I think I was just hoping to get a job. If I can be candid, I was sitting up there teaching at a Philadelphia Community College. I was as a TA, obviously I studied at Temple University with Molefi Asante, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah. So there was a lot of folks who were really heavy hitters if you will, within African-American studies. And they would come through our department because again, as I said, at the time, it was one of two PhD programs in African-American studies. And it was the place to be people called it, the black Mecca where all of these artists and intellectuals and activists would come together. And it seemed to me, Terri, when I was in grad school, I'm telling you, it seemed like, it might not be the case, but it seemed like once a week there was somebody just incredible coming through to deliver a lecture, whether it was Alice Walker or Tony Morrison or Cornel West or Robin D.G. Kelley, there was always folks coming through.

And so that really peaked my interest where I began to think that, hmm, maybe I could come out of here and be a professor.

Terri Fiez

So what brought you to CU Boulder in the early 2000's?

Reiland Rabaka

Wow. When I came out of grad school, I accepted a job at California State University Long Beach, but that's a teaching heavy school Terri, so I had a 5/5 teaching load. I taught five classes in the fall semester and five classes in the spring semester. So when the University of Colorado Boulder said, "Hey, bro, we'll give you two classes a semester." I jumped at the opportunity to come to Boulder. Can you imagine here's somebody like me, Terri, that an African-American studies, most of the people that had graduated up to that time, I think I was number 63 to get the PhD in the field, most of them were at teaching schools. They were at a HBCU, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, they were at community colleges. So there were very few with PhDs in African-American studies who were at research one universities.

And what attracted me to Boulder was the fact that Manning Marable had been out here in the department of ethnic studies. Joy James had immediately preceded me in the department of ethnic studies. And so these are obviously iconic figures within my field. And once they vacated this position in African-American studies, I went after it and obviously everything worked out 15 years ago and I was able to come out here, the fact that they were not only going to give me a 2/2 teaching load, but I was also going to have a small research portfolio that would allow me to travel to Africa and the Caribbean and all throughout the south and other chocolate cities, cities with high concentrations of African Americans, it just blew my mind that the school was going to help to pay for my research. Whoa, this place called Boulder sounds like a little bit of heaven to me. Of course, I got here and I went through culture shock, but I would leave that alone, Terri.

Terri Fiez

Well, let's go to your scholarship because I think this is really fascinating. Throughout your career, you focus your scholarship on William Du Bois and I love your story of your first introduction to who he was. Can you talk about that?

Reiland Rabaka

Absolutely. Just want to shout out Mrs. Robinson is my first grade teacher. So I was in the first grade Terri, and I was precocious as I've already explained. And it was Black History Month and Mrs. Robinson handed out these cards, there was like on placards and on one side it would have an image of a Black History Month figure. And on the other side, it would have a small excerpt about their life and who they were. And I of course wanted Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker of the Aloneness Mark and Mrs. Robinson gave me a card with what I believed was a French man on it. And it was Du Bois. I thought I knew something and I got upset and I went to Mrs. Robinson's desk and said, "I don't understand. This is Black History Month and you sit up here and gave me a freshman. Everybody has got black people. How come I can't get some black people in my card."

And she said, "Reiland, you need to get somewhere and sit down. If you would read as much as you run your mouth, you really could do something. Now, go back there and read that card and don't make me call your mama." And I said, "Okay. Yes, ma'am" All you got to say is call my mama and I'm going to act right. So I went back to my desk and I read the card. And Terri, when I read the back of that card, it changed my life forever. I read about William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. I read about how he graduated with his PhD from Harvard University. I read about how he founded the NAACP. I read about how he wrote The Souls of Black Folk and help to usher the Harlem Renaissance into being. And something just clicked inside of me that I could grow up and be an intellectual, an artist, and an activist.

Terri Fiez

And you have, so tell me what classes do you teach at CU Boulder so I can come sit in on them.

Reiland Rabaka

You are so sweet. I teach a course on the Harlem Renaissance. I teach a course on the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement. I teach a course on the Black Lives Matter movement. Believe it or not, I was teaching one of the first courses on the Black Lives Matter movement in the country. And my most popular class is a class on the hip hop movement, which is called introduction to hip hop studies. And that is where really that core serves as like a feeder for our department, because a lot of students come into that class not necessarily knowing what African-American studies is and I try to hook them into the feel. And I do that by trying to emphasize that African American studies is an interdisciplinary discipline. I know I'm putting it badly, but by which I mean that we study not simply race, but also gender, class, sexuality, religious affiliation, ability/ disability.

We really want to make sure that people don't overdetermine black folk based on race, that we also want to factor in their gender, which I'm very committed to black feminism, sexuality. I'm very into black queer, black trans studies, not all black focus straight. Class, I've been telling you Terri about my underclass of working class background and everything. And so again, I am so much more than merely race or culture in that sense. I also want to factor in a lot of other areas that intersect and impact my life.

Terri Fiez

Excellent. You recently founded the Center for African and African-American Studies known as CAAAS. Why did you start the center and what do you hope to achieve?

Reiland Rabaka

I founded the center because from the time that I came to Boulder in 2005, I realized that unlike many other public universities, the University of Colorado at Boulder does not have a space dedicated to black history, black culture, and the black struggle. And this is something I have been campaigning behind the scenes for 15 years. And when the Black Lives Matter movement happened, I realized that this is our moment, this is our time. We founded this center and the center Terri, will have three programs, a research program, visual and performing arts program and a student services program. And in that sense, I can't tell you how excited I am and the students are, and black folk all throughout the Denver Metropolitan Area are to actually have a little piece of the rock, a little piece of the Rocky Mountains that is dedicated to black history, black culture, black struggle.

Terri Fiez

What do you think will be your greatest challenge to achieving the vision for the center?

Reiland Rabaka

Funding. Money. I'm talking to you, Terri. I hope you hear me, but no, with all due respect funding I think will be a real challenge. I wanted a post-doc dissertation fellowships, the whole range. And so there's a wide variety of things that go beyond the startup budget. We're going to have obviously distinguished lecture series. We have a performing arts, series, a music series, like a concert series, a film screening series called the Africana Cinema Series. And so there'll be a lot of different things that we have going on in this particular center that I believe will attract a wide variety of people that typically don't think of CU as a center for studying black history and black culture.

Terri Fiez

That's just fantastic. So as you think about the next decade or two, so I'm going to push you out there to the future. What are you optimistic about and what is your hope for the future of the work that you do and the breakthroughs that will be found?

Reiland Rabaka

Well, I think a lot of it has to do with getting to center off the ground, making sure that we are self-sustaining, whether it's through grants or donations or probably a combination of both, but making sure that we can grow and develop to our fullest potential, I don't know what our fullest potential actually is because we're just getting started. I would love to invite allies, people who are not African-American, not African people, not Caribbean people, but I would like for them to come and join with us in this important work. Long-term I want to create a center where everyone is welcome to come and study and learn about various aspects of the black experience. And so to really create a synergy where we can get together and have critical dialogue about issues that are really, really pressing for Africans, African-Americans is going to be really, really important.

Terri Fiez

I think you capsulated that extremely well. So I'll just end with one last question. What are you most proud of in your career?

Reiland Rabaka

I'd like to think that part of my legacy is how I'm also trying to share that with my students. I want my to dream really, really big but Terri, I also want to give them the tools to build. I want our generation to leave a mark not simply on this institution, but on this country. And so lastly, Terry, my legacy, I hope will be one of institutional transformation. What I mean by that is I think once the center is established, people will know that you and I, Terri, were out here. They will know that under your leadership, we helped to found this brand new center. So we are literally transforming this institution that we love so much. So I've identified some problems on the Boulder campus, but I've also come up with those solutions as a good social scientist in the Du Bois tradition. I don't just identify problems, I offer up solutions to those problems.

Terri Fiez

Well, this has been so much fun to hear your thoughts today Reiland and what a treat it is to be able to spend this time with you. Thank you so much. And I know our listeners are going to really enjoy hearing your whole background in your approach to life, which is so positive. And you are going to make that positive change you've talked about.

Reiland Rabaka

Thank you so much for this invitation and this opportunity to dialogue with you.

Terri Fiez

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Reiland Rabaka, professor of African, African American, and Caribbean studies and director of the Center for African and African-American Studies. To learn more about Dr. Rabaka or for more Buff Innovator Insights episodes, visit colorado.edu/rio/podcast. I'm your host and Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation at CU Boulder, Terri Fiez. Thanks for joining me for this episode of Buff Innovator Insights.