Apocalyptic Education

parenting through the apocalypse

In the Season 2 finale of Apocalyptic Education, Kenjus and Tiffani chop it up with Wendy and Larry White, Simple Ant, and Cassandra Edwards to explore what it means to parent Black children at the end of the world. Framed as a return, both to family and to the original question that closed Season 1, this episode asks: Schools…take them or leave them? This time, instead of young people, it is the parents who respond.What unfolds is a layered reflection on the afterlife of school, the grief of realizing harm done under the guise of love and survival, and the ongoing struggle to build something different. Each guest reflects honestly on their parenting journeys, through schooling, unschooling, community care, and a genuine reorientation to potential futures. They share what they wished they’d known, what they’re still learning, and how love has shaped their decisions along the way.Wendy and Larry speak to the courage it takes to do things differently, and the quiet revolution that begins inside the home. Ant shares how walking away, literally and spiritually, from dominant institutions has been part of his family’s praxis. Cassandra reflects on the pain inherent in the truth that school was never built for our children to do well, and on the gift of returning to wisdom that predates these systems.Together, this council of caregivers invites us to sit with the possibility of being together without control, without coercion, and without fear. There is humor, tenderness, contradiction, and clarity. And there is the sense that while none of us knows exactly what comes next, we are not alone in figuring it out.In this episode, we also honor and acknowledge our ancestor, Grandma Betty McGee. Thank you for your life and your love. Thank you for continuing to guide us.Stay connected: www.apocalypticeducation.orgHosts: Tiffani Marie & Kenjus WatsonGuests: Canada Taylor Parker & Cassandra EdwardsMusic By: Redtone RecordsProduction By: Jesse Strauss, Paxtone RecordsSponsored By: The Institute for Regenerative FuturesNote: All episodes this season explore themes of death, transition, and capture, with an emphasis on spiritual and ancestral grounding.Black and BIPOC Care Resources and Contacts Call BlackLineCall 1 (800) 604-5841 *This resource is divested from the policeBlackLine provides a space for peer support, counseling, witnessing and affirming then lived experiences to folxs who are most impacted by systematic oppression with an LGBTQ+ Black femme lens.Lines for Life Racial Equity Support LineCall (503)-575-3764Available Monday through Friday from 10AM-7PM PST.This line is led by people with lived experience of racism and offers support for those who are experiencing the emotional impacts of racist violence and microaggressions.BEAM-Black Emotional and Mental Wellness Collectivehttps://beam.community/wellness-tools/The BEAM toolkit has outstanding resources to support your emotional wellness journey. Explore the BEAM website for grief resources and a local directory of Black wellness practitioners.

the legacy of little nate (part 2)

Potential Activation Warning- The following episode description contains references to suicide. Please take care while reading. We include helpful resources after the description In this continuation of The Legacy of Little Nate, Kenjus and Tiffani sit with Cassandra Edwards and Canada Taylor Parker once again for the conclusion of their unflinching conversation about death, grief, and the slow, grinding violence that Black people endure long before their final breath. Canada and Cassandra move the discussion beyond sanitized narratives about suicide, confronting the reality that death is rarely a singular moment but often a drawn-out consequence of systemic abandonment, unaddressed pain, and intergenerational suffering.Cassandra, navigating the loss of her son, speaks to the ways suicide is often framed as an individual tragedy while the systems that create the conditions for despair remain unchallenged. She urges community to refuse entanglements with state institutions that attempt to dictate how we grieve, rejecting the expectation that Black mothers should quietly accept the deaths of their children while carrying the blame for their suffering. Canada expands the conversation, making clear that the violence of slow death manifests in many forms—chronic illness, addiction, economic suffocation, and the crushing weight of having to be “strong” in a society requires Black death for its own sustainability.Kenjus and Tiffani push further, questioning the ethics of fighting for Black people to stay in a world that collapses all possible sanctuaries. What does it mean to “prevent” suicide in a society that is fundamentally structured to break Black people down? How do we hold sacred space for those who desire to leave while also generating new worlds worthy of the breath of Black children and adults? The conversation does not land on easy solutions or platitudes. Instead, it sits in the discomfort of acknowledging that staying and leaving are both responses to a world that is antithetical to Black grief, peace, and restoration.In this episode, we also honor and acknowledge our ancestor, James Baldwin. Thank you for your life and your love. Thank you for continuing to guide us.Stay connected: www.apocalypticeducation.orgHosts: Tiffani Marie & Kenjus WatsonGuests: Canada Taylor Parker & Cassandra EdwardsMusic By: Redtone RecordsProduction By: Jesse Strauss, Paxtone RecordsSponsored By: The Institute for Regenerative FuturesNote: All episodes this season explore themes of death, transition, and capture, with an emphasis on spiritual and ancestral grounding.Black and BIPOC Care Resources and Contacts Call BlackLineCall 1 (800) 604-5841 *This resource is divested from the policeBlackLine provides a space for peer support, counseling, witnessing and affirming then lived experiences to folxs who are most impacted by systematic oppression with an LGBTQ+ Black femme lens.Lines for Life Racial Equity Support LineCall (503)-575-3764Available Monday through Friday from 10AM-7PM PST.This line is led by people with lived experience of racism and offers support for those who are experiencing the emotional impacts of racist violence and microaggressions.BEAM-Black Emotional and Mental Wellness Collectivehttps://beam.community/wellness-tools/The BEAM toolkit has outstanding resources to support your emotional wellness journey. Explore the BEAM website for grief resources and a local directory of Black wellness practitioners.

the legacy of little nate (part 1)

Potential Activation Warning- The following episode description contains references to suicide. Please take care while reading. We include helpful resources after the description In this initial installment of a special 2 part episode, Tiffani and Kenjus chop it up with Cassandra Edwards and Canada Taylor Parker to explore potent intersections between grief, mothering, activism, and the weight of trying to sustain life within an relentlessly anti-black world. As mothers, organizers, health practitioners and caretakers, both guests reflect on how grief is not a one time event across our communities. Instead, such disproportionate suffering is an ongoing, systemic process that Black women and femmes have often been forced to shoulder and navigate across generations. Mrs. Cassandra Edwards shares the painful story of the loss of her son, Lil Nate to suicide, which has profoundly shaped her organzing with other grieving mothers. Although Mrs. Cass accepts her role in her community, she speaks to the exhaustion and anger of being forced into activism, of bearing the responsibility of protecting and constantly having to grieve Black children in a world that constantly marks them for death, and of refusing to let systems define how Black mothers grieve. Canada Taylor Parker unpacks the ways intergenerational trauma, parenting, and grief justice intersect, and how she has worked to disrupt cycles of harm through her own intentional mothering and transformative community care.Our conversation explores the inherited burdens of ancestral pain as well as the the weight of mothering within structures that were never built for Black survival. Together, our guests confront offensive violence of systems, which are responsible for many of the conditions of our suffering, profanely attempting to dictate how Black people should grieve. They also challenge dominant narratives around suicide, making space for a deeper, historical analysis that links Black suicidality to the long arc of enslavement, colonization, racial violence, refusal, and generational memory.Listen as they hold space for an honest reckoning with loss, love, and the labor of breaking cycles, while also lifting up the legacies of those who came before us—those whose names and stories must be remembered.In this episode, we also honor and acknowledge our ancestor, James Baldwin. Thank you for your life and your love. Thank you for continuing to guide us.Stay connected: www.apocalypticeducation.orgHosts: Tiffani Marie & Kenjus WatsonGuests: Canada Taylor Parker & Cassandra EdwardsMusic By: Redtone RecordsProduction By: Jesse Strauss, Paxtone RecordsSponsored By: The Institute for Regenerative FuturesNote: All episodes this season explore themes of death, transition, and capture, with an emphasis on spiritual and ancestral grounding.Black and BIPOC Care Resources and Contacts Call BlackLineCall 1 (800) 604-5841 *This resource is divested from the policeBlackLine provides a space for peer support, counseling, witnessing and affirming then lived experiences to folxs who are most impacted by systematic oppression with an LGBTQ+ Black femme lens.Lines for Life Racial Equity Support LineCall (503)-575-3764Available Monday through Friday from 10AM-7PM PST.This line is led by people with lived experience of racism and offers support for those who are experiencing the emotional impacts of racist violence and microaggressions.BEAM-Black Emotional and Mental Wellness Collectivehttps://beam.community/wellness-tools/The BEAM toolkit has outstanding resources to support your emotional wellness journey. Explore the BEAM website for grief resources and a local directory of Black wellness practitioners.

nou tout se zanj o

In this episode, Tiffani and Kenjus chop it up with Dr. Amber McZeal—scholar, artist, and sacred activist—to explore the expansive terrain of decolonizing the psyche, ancestral memory, and the spiritual labor of refusing coloniality. From their first encounters with Amber’s transformative work to the unexpected synchronicities that led to this moment, the conversation unfolds as a meditation on relationality, refusal, and reverence.Amber traces her path from Lafayette, Louisiana, to the liberatory depths of sound healing, vibrational medicine, and depth psychology, illuminating how music, dreams, and ancestral guidance have shaped her scholarship and praxis. She breaks down the necessity of decolonial death rituals, the wisdom of pruning what no longer serves, and the role of sacred scholarship in expanding our psychic and spiritual capacities beyond colonial constraints.Together, they wrestle with the tension between holding onto inherited frameworks of harm and making space for new, liberatory ways of being. They confront the limits of racial essentialism, the traps of self-righteousness in liberation spaces, and the importance of humility in the work of decolonization. Amber reminds us that refusal is not just about negation—it is a generative, creative force that reconnects us to the wisdom of our ancestors and the possibility of new worlds.The episode closes with Amber offering a powerful song—a sacred invocation of resilience, rebirth, and the eternal cycle of creation.Listen as they delve into the necessity of spiritual and intellectual decolonization, the balance between grief and creation, and the radical work of expanding our consciousness in service of collective liberation.Stay connected: www.apocalypticeducation.orgHosts: Tiffani Marie & Kenjus WatsonMusic By: Redtone Records Production by: Jesse Strauss, Paxtone Records Sponsored By: The Institute for Regenerative FuturesNote: All episodes this season explore themes of death, transition, and capture, with an emphasis on spiritual and ancestral grounding.Black and BIPOC Care Resources and Contacts Call BlackLineCall 1 (800) 604-5841 *This resource is divested from the policeBlackLine provides a space for peer support, counseling, witnessing and affirming then lived experiences to folxs who are most impacted by systematic oppression with an LGBTQ+ Black femme lens.Lines for Life Racial Equity Support LineCall (503)-575-3764Available Monday through Friday from 10AM-7PM PST.This line is led by people with lived experience of racism and offers support for those who are experiencing the emotional impacts of racist violence and microaggressions.BEAM-Black Emotional and Mental Wellness Collectivehttps://beam.community/wellness-tools/The BEAM toolkit has outstanding resources to support your emotional wellness journey. Explore the BEAM website for grief resources and a local directory of Black wellness practitioners.

a buoy to hold on to

In this episode, Kenjus and Tiffani reflect on their journey co-writing the Apocalyptic Education paper in 2020, tracing their paths through grief, academia, and spiritual grounding. They revisit the origins of their collaboration, peeling back the layers of their initial skepticism, the tensions of intellectual competition, and the deep ancestral calling that ultimately brought them together.The conversation weaves through personal and communal grief, from Tiffani’s reflections on her Uncle Louis and the lessons he left behind, to Kenjus’ struggles with the academy as a space of extraction and violence. They explore the ways academia conditions Black scholars into cycles of harm and competition, while also recounting their defiant decision to pull their groundbreaking article from a traditional journal—choosing instead to honor its integrity and their commitments to Black life.Together, they confront the fear of death—both symbolic and literal—that undergirds our schooling systems, state violence, and resistance movements. Through storytelling, they highlight the tension between holding on and letting go, the necessity of slowness and grace in death work, and the ways that reverence for the afterlife informs how we imagine education beyond capture.Listen as they unpack what it means to write, to grieve, to teach, and to love in the face of ongoing collapse. This episode is an offering to those who are navigating grief, transition, and the spiritual labor of reimagining what it means to build and sustain beyond the ruins.In this episode, we also honor and acknowledge our ancestor, Uncle Louis. Thank you for your life and your love. Thank you for continuing to guide us.Stay connected: www.apocalypticeducation.orgHosts: Tiffani Marie & Kenjus WatsonMusic By: Redtone Records Production by: Jesse Strauss, Paxtone Records Sponsored By: The Institute for Regenerative FuturesNote: All episodes this season explore themes of death, transition, and capture, with an emphasis on spiritual and ancestral grounding.Black and BIPOC Care Resources and Contacts Call BlackLineCall 1 (800) 604-5841 *This resource is divested from the policeBlackLine provides a space for peer support, counseling, witnessing and affirming then lived experiences to folxs who are most impacted by systematic oppression with an LGBTQ+ Black femme lens.Lines for Life Racial Equity Support LineCall (503)-575-3764Available Monday through Friday from 10AM-7PM PST.This line is led by people with lived experience of racism and offers support for those who are experiencing the emotional impacts of racist violence and microaggressions.BEAM-Black Emotional and Mental Wellness Collectivehttps://beam.community/wellness-tools/The BEAM toolkit has outstanding resources to support your emotional wellness journey. Explore the BEAM website for grief resources and a local directory of Black wellness practitioners.