Intersections with Phil Allen, Jr.    

Episode: 025 “To Want to Be Black: People of the Resurrection Pt. 2”

Airdate: March 29, 2021

Length: 34:25

Guests: Dr. Roslyn Satchel

Dr. Roslyn Satchel brings passion and energy like no other to conversation around race, culture, and theology. In this episode with Dr. Satchel she invites us into her story which began in Jacksonville, FL and is still being written today in Malibu, CA as a professor of communications at Pepperdine University. She shares the influences that are foundational in her life: her parents, with her father being her first educator—laying the foundation for the educator she would later become, Ms. Jones-Spaulding, her elementary school teacher that saw greatness in her and believed in her, and her experience at Howard University, one of the most prestigious Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

Dr. Satchel is a scholar, an activist, a lawyer, a minister, a professor, a mother, and author. She serves as the Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Communications at Pepperdine University. She is also a Berkman Klein Center Fellow at Harvard Law School.

In this episode, part two of a two-part conversation, shares about the purpose and hopefulness of the Black Lives Matter Movement from her involvement in BLM LA. She discusses how the movement builds upon all the Black movements that have come before it. She flows effortlessly from BLM to “stooping.” Stooping is a part of the Black community’s tradition of sitting out front on the stoop (or porch in some areas) and being the community. It is a sacred space of joy and laughter, sharing of wisdom, and love. Dr. Satchel is in lecture-mode as she teaches on topics from BLM to “stooping” to the impact of the “white gaze” upon people of color and the distortions that color codes have had on our collective understanding of identity, ethnicity, and traditions.

You can follow Dr. Satchel on Twitter @rsatchel, on Instagram @docrazzledazzle, on Facebook at Roslyn M. Satchel. Her website is www.rsatchel.com or www.whatmoviesteach.com.

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Phil Allen, Jr. is a Los Angeles-based pastor, social justice activist, filmmaker and author. Allen’s book Open Wounds explores the murder of Nate Allen—Phil Allen’s grandfather—in the Jim Crow era of South Carolina and how that traumatic event resonated through generations of his family. Open Wounds – which is based on the Allen-produced documentary of the same name – was published on February 9, 2021. Allen is a Ph.D. student studying Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA.