Skip navigation 
Previous Page
Page 6 • Cognotes 2014 Annual Conference Highlights
Ilyasah Shabazz Talks Family, Empowerment
By Talea Anderson
Central Washington University
Speaking as part of the Auditorium Speakers Series on June 29, Ilyasah Shabazz called on her audience to nurture children to be compassionate, historically conscious leaders. The daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, Ph.D., Ilyasah Shabazz has devoted herself to promoting higher education, intercultural understanding, and youth empowerment. “Each one of us has the power to make a change,” she said.
Using her parents and grandparents as examples, Shabazz described how a loving family can instill positive values in children. Shabazz noted that her grandparents, Earl and Louise Little, fostered leadership potential in her father, Malcolm X, whom Shabazz described as a compassionate man who sacrificed himself for the good of society. Although Shabazz was three years old when her father was assassinated, she recalls sitting with him and eating oatmeal cookies while he read and read. “I was in love with my father,” Shabazz said. “He was Daddy. The house came alive when he came home.”
Shabazz went on to speak about her mother and the need for society to empower women as well as children. She noted that her mother, widowed in her 20s, went on to raise six daughters and earn a Ph.D., despite being surrounded by a culture of violence. Shabazz noted that empowered women can inspire tremendous change in the world. “When you teach a woman,” she said, quoting her father, “you raise a nation.”
As part of responsible child-rearing, Shabazz urged audience members to teach accurate history. “History cannot be one-sided,” she said, describing hate crimes perpetrated against African Americans in the mid-20th century. “When we hate another, in actuality we hate ourselves.”
Shabazz has described her family's experiences in Growing Up X. In addition, she co-edited The Diary of Malcolm X (forthcoming 2015) with Herb Boyd and worked with illustrator AG Ford on Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X and with Kekla Magoon on X (forthcoming 2014). She expressed a hope that books like these can help society bring up kinder, more historically aware generations to come.
Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, worked with illustrator AG Ford on Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X. Shabazz spoke during the Auditorium Speakers Series June 29 in Las Vegas.
McGonigal
» from page 1
people often feel much less engaged. To underscore this, she quoted Brian Sutton-Smith, the dean of Play Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who has famously said, “The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression.”
McGonigal sees great potential in bringing the power of these individuals together to tackle problems in the real world and described some examples that have already taken place. Players of Foldit (where players “solve problems for science”) worked with scientists studying protein structures, and were cited in the journal Nature for their work. Another group of gamers came together and solved a molecular code problem that had stumped HIV researchers for more than a decade, and they did it in just three weeks.
McGonigal went on to describe a project of hers called “Find the Future: The Game.” Inspired by learning that 90 percent of young people have had the goal of writing a book one day, McGonigal wondered what could be done to help them reach this goal and thought, “how about collaborate on a book?” To encourage students to discover the McGonigal has higher hopes for gamers, and she said, “maybe we will see a gamer win the Nobel Prize one day.”
Azar Nafisi: Library Shelves Have No Bias
By Brad Martin
LAC Group
Azar Nafisi spoke passionately about the freedom to read on June 28, focusing on her forthcoming book, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books and the important meanings contained in literature.
Nafisi, author of the international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, and the most recent Things I've Been Silent About, began by saying how special it felt to be speaking to a group of librarians. “The important thing about libraries is that the shelves have no prejudice and no bias.”
Nafisi told of being in love with many authors, most recently James Baldwin (previously Vladimir Nabokov). “The great thing about books is that we can be so promiscuous,” she said with a grin, adding, “we can love them, leave them, and then return to them whenever we want.”
Nafisi's forthcoming The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books contains her thoughts on three American writers: Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt), and Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter). It also features an epilogue about James Baldwin.
In exploring the themes of these novels, Nafisi returned again and again to the importance of reading and to what happens when individuals and countries as a whole do not read. She noted Joseph Brod-sky's quote about the “crime” of not reading and how individuals “pay with their lives. A country pays with the loss of its history.” She also quoted Nabokov, who said, “readers were born free and ought to remain free.”
Nafisi closed by saying that she feels the United States “is going through a crisis of vision.”
