Mathew B. Holloway II and Cornelius Finley have a few things in common: they are both Black men. They both come the Southern United States. And they are both ExchangeAlumni, who attended a seminar on American Identity with other exchange program alumni in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But that’s where the similarities end...

NOTE: The description above has been edited to correct an error. Mathew grew up in a small town, while Cornelius grew up in one of the biggest cities in the U.S.!

I think, one of the crazy things I find as adults is that we tend to get landlocked in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, about ourselves, and about the world around us. I think I'm sort of taking a more childlike approach, coming with wonder, coming with curiosity and saying, "Maybe if I tell a different story, I have a different meaning, and if I have a different meaning, then I have a different sense of identity and a different relationship to my upbringing."

Mathew B. Holloway II and Cornelius Finley have a few things in common: they are both Black men. They both come from the Southern United States. And they are both ExchangeAlumni, who attended a seminar on American Identity with other exchange program alumni in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But that’s where the similarities end...

My name is Mathew Holloway. I am an alum of the Fulbright ETA program. I did my ETA in Panama in 2018. It was a great experience, and it transformed a part of my life. Currently, now, I am a graduate student at University of San Diego where I study conflict management resolution, with a particular emphasis on intercultural dynamics and relations. I'm also the founder of Conversations by Courage, which is a social practice that rewrites the story of who we are by reconstructing our sense of belonging.

My name is Cornelius Finley. I'm an alum of the Gilman Scholarship, and I recently in 2020 became a Fulbright specialist. I'm a lawyer by trade. However, I am the founder of Access Unlimited. Essentially our goal is just to revolutionize education throughout the United States. We currently have a contract with the New York City Department of Education and Dallas ISD, too, as we do turnover work. That is essentially going into schools and ensuring that those schools don't get shut down and don't fail. We have been lucky enough to turn that turnover work into becoming our own independent charter / private school organization. And so, we are opening our first school in Dallas, the Mary Finley Early College for Boys. That will lead to our second school in Atlanta, which will be the James Baldwin Early College for Boys.

Cornelius grew up in Texas in - as he calls it - “the hood.” He was sent to juvenile detention in high school and got shot twice in college.

For Mathew, it was only when he stepped outside of his small town that he had to face the internalized cultural messaging of what it meant to be a Black kid from rural Mississippi.

In Part 1 of this two-part series on American Identity, Mathew and Cornelius join us to talk about race, belonging, and why American identity is not just “black and white.”

I think what started my work, to be honest with you, is the fact that I'm a first generation high school graduate. I think education saved me, and what I mean by that if it wasn't for my undergraduate experience, and that undergraduate experience was at Morehouse, the best institution for Black men. If I wasn't at Morehouse and if I didn't attend Morehouse, then I definitely know that you guys wouldn't know me and I wouldn't know you guys,

There's a difference between people being from what we like to identify as the 'hood, and then there's one thing to have a 'hood mentality. I was deeply rooted in that. What that essentially means is that my loyalty was to my neighborhood, and my loyalty was to and committed to ensuring that my neighborhood was the best 'hood. Whatever that means, that's what I did and that's how I got down.

Education was not only my token and my ticket out, but it was also an opportunity for me to find my voice. My work is essentially the essence of what a lot of these people like to talk about now, which is equity, diversity, and inclusion. That is my work. We're very unapologetic about being revolutionary. As John Lewis said, getting in good trouble for our most vulnerable people. If you don't have education and you don't have an equitable educational system, everything else fails.

It was with the help of his great grandmother, grandmother, and an unlikely mentor that Cornelius could finally begin a new chapter in his life. But first, he had to escape the toxic masculinity surrounding him…

My junior year of high school was my first year in real school, and so my ninth and 10th grade year, I was in juvie – that's the juvenile detention center. Once you get out of juvie, you go into, in Dallas, what is called a Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program. That's JJAEP, and JJAEP - through that program, your judge or your probation officer gives you a mentor and they put you in a program that essentially hopes to rehabilitate you. Typically, it doesn't work. I think, however, because I had a great grandmama and a grandmama who didn't play, it worked for me. I had a mentor who, surprisingly so, was a right– white Republican. Ain't nothing wrong with white Republicans, but he was a white Republican, and he loved me and my grandmother unconditionally. It was a love that was new to us, especially given the fact that I was in a household of women – my grandmother, my great-grandmother – and it was a love that was new to us because we were in a community whereas we didn't receive a lot of aid and a lot of support from people who didn't look like us. Even those who did look like us, they all had a similar struggle of fighting poverty.

And so, because of that mentor and because of the Dallas Urban League, I was able to receive a new idea of what this life may entail. Even when I was at Morehouse my sophomore year, I got into some trouble, to whereas I was placed under investigation for two murders that I didn't commit, and I was shot in my arm once and I was shot in my back. I think what the transition was, was more so the exposure and more so that systems took the chance of a young man who was just trying to find his way, but was so deeply rooted and deeply stuck in the 'hood.

Nah, to be honest with you, everybody in my family, every male in my family has been shot before. Every male in my family has been to prison. All of my homeboys, I think that was a code, that you go to jail and you get shot, so it wasn't a wake-up call. It actually gave me more street cred, and what you have to understand about that mindset is that you ... It's toxic masculinity, but that's rooted in a form of, quote-unquote, ghetto-ism in the sense of, you're so deeply connected to poverty and the sense of street cred and the sense of street scholarship that your honor comes from making sure that the world ... What I mean by the world is that that community essentially knows that you are loyal and that you are committed to them.

And so, me being shot was actually like a badge of honor. I think what really woke me up is that the morning that I got shot, it was essentially like at two or three o'clock in the morning, on a Sunday. I left the investigation room. I went back home. My grandmother said, "Hey, we're about to go to church," and when we went to church, the pastor at the time, of the church that we were going to, spoke so ill about me because it was all in the paper. It was all on the news. When he did that, it's something that clicked in me, whereas it's like, "Hey, something has to change. I have to prove to these people that I can do better." In the beginning, it was more so ego that saved me versus being shot. Then, after I got out of the fact of showing other people, I then had to show myself. That goes back to the work. The work is, if we're really talking about equity, diversity, and inclusion, we have to exemplify what that is through our practice and through our actions. From those exemplifications, there should be some form of complexity that goes out and transcends and then revolutionizes whatever it is that we're trying to change. I think that's essentially what happened to me.

My idea of education was to finesse the system, like how you finesse the streets. You finesse the system, you just do it in a legal way. That's essentially how I ended up at Oxford, is that you learn the test. You take the test, you do well on the test. You do so well on the test that no one can deny you, and then you have the position, you have the tools, and you have the ability to not only perform well, but outperform those individuals who often, at times, they don't think that we can perform. When I say we, I'm talking about Black folk from the 'hood. That's how I ended up at Oxford, and that's how I ended up passing the bar…

Cornelius redefined his identity through education. For Mathew, who was a panelist at the alumni thematic seminar where the two met, it was all about redefining his story and what it means…

So I grew up in the South too, so we have a lot of connection points, and I grew up in a mostly matriarchal system as well. I grew up in rural Mississippi, a small town called Como, Mississippi, where there's one main strip where you've got your post office, a really great steakhouse, and a public library. It's a lot of connection in terms of those cultural messages around sort of family, around community, around mothership, around grandmothership.

For me, I think the origin is sort of ... What I do now, in terms of why I'm in graduate school and why I've been sort of over the last three years, really since my time with the Obama Foundation where I was working in Chicago on community development projects and I prototyped this concept, that I looked to explore a community's DNA. Even though I've been in a small town, Mississippi, since college, I went to school in New Orleans. I lived around, abroad and here in the country, and I've always been fascinated about how people create a sense of life for themselves, and what is power in one community may not be a sense of power in another community. And so, I always found myself always reconstructing my identity whenever I found myself in a new environment, which in a lot of ways allowed me to expand myself, but I never really felt rooted, in part because there was so much of culture, internalized cultural messaging of what it meant to be a Black kid from a small town in rural Mississippi…

And I inherited a lot of negative stereotypes that people had about that, and conformed myself to not be that, so much to the point where I think I lost sight of the beauty that came from my experience. And only in the last years of ... I'm 28, turning 28 next month. Only within the last three years of my life have I really been able to look back at my memory, re-story, tell a different story to myself. And I think, one of the crazy things I find as adults is that we tend to get landlocked in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, about ourselves, and about the world around us. I think I'm sort of taking a more childlike approach, coming with wonder, coming with curiosity and saying, "Maybe if I tell a different story, I have a different meaning, and if I have a different meaning, then I have a different sense of identity and a different relationship to my upbringing."

So that's been the work that I've been doing, and I think as apropos right now, because as I've begun to understand the ways in which racism, colonialism has affected and constructed all of our identities and how that we have inherited certain notions of what it means to belong, what it means to be powerful, what it means to be seen, and how in a lot of ways we've fit in and adapted to a model that may not be true to who we are. The work is really helping people, one, notice how they construct their sense of belonging, who helped them construct that, what messages did they inherit about what it means to be this, that, and the other? Then, how does that juxtapose with who they really are on the inside? Making sure that there's an alignment between who they project out in the world, the goals they seek in the world, the types of people they want to be in the world, and who they really are.

It's grounded in this theory I've been developing called restoration therapy, which is a play on the word restoring, because it's grounded in narrative therapy and other social theories that really take it into account that our identities are multidimensional.

You can't really tell the story exclusively on your own because it's a continuous, continuous streamline of moments and events that are constantly shaping and reshaping the fabric of who you are. So first acknowledging that we are environmentally constructed, and what that means, that you have to take in account the cultural and sexual and personal aspects of belonging, to really reveal the legacy and the aftermath of historical trauma and cultural trauma upon all of us. It's that we are not divorced from this history as if we read it and it's just information that happened in the past. Those notions, those belief systems, those messages follow us and they follow ... They eventually come into how we see ourselves and how we see others. In my talk, it was really giving an examination of how I've been able to really detangle the messages of what it means to be a Black kid from rural Mississippi who grew up with people who don't always use subject-verb agreement. Right? What does that mean, and how do I re-language that in a way that gives beauty to that experience and not always see it from an angle of what it lacks.

Then it becomes, whose model of culture, whose model of acceptance, whose model of belonging are you using to apply to your own sense of belonging? If that's the case, if the measurement by which you look at yourself and you define yourself is someone else's, then you're always at a deficit. You're always trying to keep up and catch up, and so helping people realize that, see the beauty in the experiences that we have, see the beauty in the messiness of your own lived experiences, and helping us find a deeper sense of purpose in that.

When my grandmother passed away in 2020, it was the start of the pandemic. I think it was an aha moment, that I never realized what a blessing it was to have grown up with my grandmother living right next door to me, which meant everybody lived next door to me. All my cousins and the whole family lived next door, and then also having my great grandmother live 10 minutes down the road, walking distance.

So just growing around them and sitting on the porch picking peas, or just sitting and playing crosswords with my grandmother, or teaching my grandmother how to read, because she was going back to school to get her GED, or thinking about memories of my grandfather and I, teaching me geography and state capitals because he was a North Korean vet, and it just dawned on me that something, I lost a part of myself that I didn't even know that I was going to lose.

And there was so much heritage and history and memory and knowledge that was connected to her, and when she passed, I saw how my family and myself, we didn't know who we were anymore. We had to go back into ourselves and look at ourselves as a family and say, "What's our story now? Who carries this story?" I think oftentimes in families, and I think this is a story, many families have been happening because of COVID, it's like, "Well, who's going to tell the story? How are we going to access that knowledge now that it's gone?" And there's a saying, an African proverb, that when an elder dies, a tree burns, or something like that. Right? And so, recognizing that... I really saw that firsthand, where my grandma knew certain recipes to make homemade wine or homemade this and that and other, and no one in the family knew because we just never bothered asking the questions about our heritage.

What does American Identity mean to these ExchangeAlumni whose ancestors were forced to come to America? Tune in to Part Two to hear more from Mathew and Cornelius, the demons and difficulties they’ve faced, and how their exchange experiences have shaped their journeys towards self-discovery and truth.