Allen Buansi - On his "three moms" (clip)

Kathryn Wall (KW): Were there other teachers that you remember from middle school or high school who really stand out as…?

Allen Buansi (AB): Absolutely yes, absolutely. So in high school I had a counselor, who’s still school counselor at East Chapel Hill High School, her name is Jessica Harris, and she’s just wonderful. I’m going to kind of back up a little bit here, because I remember when I was in fourth grade at that time we were living in Virginia, and my friends and I were playing some silly game. And in the course of playing that silly game we got stuck in the woods, and I managed to get out and I was trying to chase down my mom to help out my other friends. I got my mom, and at the time my mom was sitting with two other women, friends of hers, and so the three of them came out to see what was going on to help us out, help my friends out. And so, from that day on, for the remaining time that we were living in Virginia, my friends would joke around and say that Allen had three moms.

KW: Mhmm.

AB: So it would be like [singsong] “Allen had three moms!”. [Laughter] And I hated it, I was like c’mon. But then fast forward to high school, talking about taking a student under their wing, Ms. Harris did that for me. She looked out for me when it came to any kinds of opportunities for enrichment to get better as a student, to get better as a person. Yeah I can’t, words can’t describe all that she did for me. But at some point, I thought back to when I was younger, when I hated kids saying I had three moms, I was like, you know what, someone said I have two moms, that’s all right, I embrace that [laughter].

KW: That’s not so bad.

AB: That’s right. That’s right. And to this day, she’ll jokingly, lovingly, refer to me as a son. So I appreciate her for that. There’s another woman, she wasn’t a teacher in the sense of coming up through public schools, working at the school system, but she was definitely a teacher, a professor at UNC Chapel Hill. She’s someone who I grew very close with, she was very close to my mum, she was my mum’s Ph.D. advisor at UNC. Her name is Dr. Dottie Holland. She kind of rounded out the three moms here, because she also did a ton for me. She got me reading magazines, especially political magazines to stay up on political news. She would challenge me to think differently about things that I had stereotyped or things that I thought I knew a lot about. She challenged me to think differently, to learn more. She herself came from rural Tennessee, white woman, and I remember she would recall times in her life coming up through Jim Crow, Jim Crow South, what it meant for her to have her own ideas and her own beliefs challenged for the better. And so she I think really took on, importantly, making sure that I had skills and tools to think and to talk, and to not, I wouldn’t say debate people but just, be in dialogue with people who especially think differently than me. And so she’s someone who’s really featured prominently in my life as a boy and growing into a man in Chapel Hill. I call her Ms. Dottie. Ms. Dottie, Ms. Harris, and my mom. Those were the three women that really feature prominently in my life, and I wouldn’t be the man that I am without them.