COVER STORY
in Philadelphia in August of 2019. I’m pleased to report that we facilitated the 103 rd forum as a kick-off to the Grand Chapter meeting in Philadelphia for all of the guide right students who attended the Grand Chapter Meeting’s National Guide Right Conference. So, to recap the facts; we hosted 103 forums in 45 cities over three and a half years, which provided critical and potentially life- saving training to approximately 50,000 kids during that time frame. The 34 th Grand Polemarch, Reuben Shelton vowed to continue the frater- nity’s work in this arena after he was sworn into office. On the heels of the 84th Grand Chapter Meeting he charged me with conducting another 100 forums over the next four years to provide this essential training for our youth in the communities that we will serve during his administration. In response, we conducted 17 forums in the eight months following that charge, now totaling 120 forums conducted and approximately 60, 000 kids trained since the initiative’s launch. We had another six forums scheduled to occur before the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) epidemic placed the country on quarantine. But we’ll resume forums once it’s safe to travel again. We have to! The lives of our young people are at stake! We’ve also been able to expand Kappa Alpha Psi’s footprint in the social justice arena by including Learn 2 Live as a programmatic component during the Congressional Black Caucus’s Annual Legislative Conference for the past two years in Washington, D.C. Learn 2 Live has also received the, “Diversity and Social Justice Initiative Award” from the National Association of Fraternity and Sorority Advisors, a “Civil Rights Award” from NOBLE and a $25,000 corporate sponsorship award from Nationwide Insurance Company to help fund our continued efforts. We’re trying to form more partnerships and gain more fund- ing to multiply our effectiveness.
that was designed for students in the United States to Germany?
when that same question was asked to the students in Germany, maybe 10 percent of hands went up. And most of those were students who had transi- tioned from the United States as older students and had experienced those issues stateside. Don’t get me wrong! It’s great that those students have lived a life harmonious with the police. However, the challenge is that these youth will be graduating high school returning to the continental United States to attend college and or enter the work force unprepared for the reality of the climate of which we are all quite familiar when it comes to troubling policing practices. Q: So, does this signify a focus shift to conducting forums outside of the United States McMikle: No…there is not a focus shift. I anticipate that most of our remaining 80 forums will be facilitated in cities and on college campuses in the continental United States. However, conducting forums on military installa- tions on foreign soil provides an opportu- nity to widen our impact to places where the relevancy exists on a global scale. Q: I understand that the initiative is working to create formal partnerships with police departments across the country and challenging them to accept a charge? McMikle: Yes. That is on tap for the fall of 2020. We will begin asking police departments throughout the county to stand in unison with Kappa Alpha Psi and accept (in writing) our program’s “Five-Point Pledge” for accountability in operation. Point #1: Zero-Tolerance Policy - The first point of our five-point pledge is a “Zero-Tolerance Policy” on biased polic- ing, racial profiling and police brutality. We have defined bias-based policing as the collection of practices that system- atically and intentionally incorporate prejudiced judgments based on race,
McMikle: We’ve learned a lot through a series of conversations with our fraternal military personnel (stationed stateside and abroad); the military police (who patrol military installations) as well as administrators in the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA). In general, students who reside on mili- tary installations on foreign soil live in an insulated world, largely absent of the profiling and police difficulties that are experienced in the continental United States. The installation existence offers an environment with a large sense of commonality and community of which the military police are an integrated component of that military culture. It’s a very relationship driven place with thin lines of separation. Due to the nature of that sense of community structure, students are policed different. A funny inference was made by a military police officer referring to his job as more sheep herding than policing. Many of those students have grown up on military bases all of their lives, never experiencing racial profiling or negative interactions with police. Many aren’t aware or believe that negative interac- tions, racial profiling or community trust issues with law enforcement exist in the continental United States. Students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds don’t even view a routine traffic stop as a potentially dangerous situation, because it never is in the communities in which they exist. To put it in perspective, we pose the following question at the start of every Learn 2 Live forum: “How many of you have ever had a negative interaction with law enforcement or feel as though you’ve been unjustly profiled, harassed, stopped or have felt as though your civil rights were violated during an encounter?” We have seen with unfailing consistency, upwards of 80 percent of hands (of mid- dle and high school students) that raise in response throughout the one hundred plus forums held to date. Conversely,
Q: Most recently, you facilitated a forum in Germany. Why bring an initiative
THE JOURNAL ♦ SPRING 2020 | 169
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