"The future does not arrive stripped of history. It arrives carrying rhythm, references, elders, extended family cassette tapes, hairstyles, film scenes, family sayings, and all the beautiful things we were told did not count as knowledge. The AI skill we all need to tap into to navigate this next technological transformation to make better ethical decisions is Ancestral Intelligence"

The Journey

I had not yet reached HBCU AI Con 2026 at Huston-Tillotson University - Austin, Texas. Had not stepped onto the campus. Had not yet stood on a stage, greeted the moderators and fellow panelists, or heard the music floating through the grounds; or seen the diverse bodies from all over the country walk with purpose across the lawn, sashay with cool in the cafeteria and speak with intellect and conviction in the classrooms. Before all of that, there was the journey. And for me, the journey was not a small thing.

My conference story, like many of the attendees, does not begin in Austin. The journey begins, months, weeks and days before our feet touch the ground of the Huston Tillotson campus. Our ability to show up is a culmination of the decisions we made way ahead of the experience we hoped to have.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

My story starts on an island. It begins in Montserrat, ahead of St Patrick's Day celebrations. Nighttime howling wind in the coconut trees, salt and volcanic black sand in the air, and a body trying to remain calm while the mind predicts imminent disaster.

My entrance back into 'a different world', meant getting back on the seven-seater plane from Montserrat to Antigua. A whole twenty minutes. A short flight, some people would say.

But fear does not care about duration. Fear does not ask whether something is statistically safe or momentarily uncomfortable before anxiety starts to do its work. Fear arrives in the body first. It tightens the stomach, shortens the breath, raises the pulse, and then hands the mind a script and says: now go on, you got all the material you need, to make this into a catastrophe.

I took the invite.

What if the winds were too high? What if the rain disrupted the small plane? What if I could not get off the island in time? What if I missed the connecting flight from Antigua? What if I missed the flight back to Washington, D.C. from NY due to a terror attack? What if I landed in the U.S. and overslept because I have less than twelve hours before turning around to fly again to Austin? What if the chain of movement broke somewhere along the way and the whole thing fell apart?

And because life has a habit of layering anxiety one sheet at a time until you can barely see daylight through it, all of this was happening while the internet newsfeeds were full of escalating conflict and fear-laden speculation about war. The strikes on Iran and the wider tone of global instability did not help my nervous system. They planted another story in me: that the plane back to the U.S. was not simply a plane, but a potential weapon in a world suspended in uncertainty.

Then there was the matter of immigration. The matter of carrying a green card. The matter of being a Black woman with a British accent in a climate where I was acutely aware that before I open my mouth, you cannot hear the accent. You can only see the color of my skin.

People often tell me they love my accent. But accents only do their social work once one is allowed to speak. Before that, race enters the room first. So, there I was in Montserrat, not living in the moment enjoying reconnecting with family, breathing in the fresh air, eating fresh food and feeling the heat of the beautiful sun on my skin. I was holding two realities, carrying fear of flying, fear of delay, fear of scrutiny, fear of being misread, fear of being trapped by a story my body had already begun to believe.

And yet, at exactly the same time, I was also carrying excitement. That is the truth of being alive. We can feel pleasant and unpleasant emotions at the same time. Nothing is truly black or white.

I was on my way to an HBCU. I was on my way to a gathering of Black brilliance centered around AI, ethics, creativity, and community. I was on my way to meet a collaborator who lived just minutes from the campus and who had been working with me for months on a physical Emotional Maths tool I was deeply excited to hold in my hands. I was on my way toward something meaningful.

So, there I was holding two emotional truths at once. Fear and gratitude. Dread and anticipation. Unpleasant feeling and deep purpose.

This is what I mean when I say life is rarely one thing. Emotional intelligence is not about pretending we feel only the "right" feeling. It is about building the capacity to hold complexity without collapsing into the story of any one emotion. So, in this moment, life gave me yet another opportunity to practice what I teach.

Breathwork. Grounding. Mindfulness. Self-talk. Connecting with Nature. Interrupting the irrational thought spiral before it became a decision-making framework.

Once I was able to see what was happening, I had to calm the physiological reaction in my body first, because when the body believes it is unsafe, the mind becomes a talented liar. It starts recruiting evidence, manufacturing certainty, and mistaking imagination for intuition and turning feelings into facts that shape how we choose to understand ourselves and the world around us.

The Breath and the clarity of fresh coconut water

Somewhere in my emotional regulation process, perspective arrived.

A number of the things I had been worrying about before this journey, things I had given too much weight, too much irritation, too much precious emotional energy suddenly lost their power. Once the possibility of not making it through a journey enters your system, a lot of the nonsense is stripped away. The mind becomes clearer about what matters.

The Cost of Arrival

I made it onto the plane. I made it to Antigua. I made it back into the United States. I made it through immigration safely. Those particular fears were laid to rest. But relief does not mean the body forgets what it has carried. Once I landed, fatigue took center stage.

Sleep deprivation. Time zone changes. Different food. A different environment. The cumulative cost of vigilance. And then, to crown it all, one of the worst allergies I can remember with constant sneezing, sniffling, and the body keeping the score and saying: I need you to acknowledge what this has cost.

By the time I got to Austin, I was carrying relief and exhaustion together. And I tell that part of the story carefully because I think we need to remember this more often: we do not know what it cost someone to arrive in front of us.

We do not know what private fear they had to regulate before they shook our hand. We do not know what emotional labor it took for them to smile politely, answer a question, sit on a panel, or remain composed in conversation. We do not know how much capacity has already been spent before the interaction even begins.

This is why I know that emotional intelligence is a team sport that needs to be practiced in community. It cannot only be the responsibility of the person who is tired, overloaded, or emotionally reduced in that moment. It must also be the responsibility of those with a little more capacity to extend grace. To resist overinterpreting a facial expression, a tone, a delayed response, a piece of body language. Sometimes what looks like indifference is fatigue. Sometimes what looks like poor social-emotional behavior is simply the visible edge of an invisible battle.

So that is how I arrived in Austin. A little frayed. A lot grateful. Quiet on the outside. Moved on the inside.

The Campus

And then I stepped onto the campus.

I am Gen X. I grew up on The Cosby Show. I grew up on A Different World. Like so many of us across the Black diaspora, I carried those images inside me for years: Black students moving with confidence, beauty and intellect sharing the same room, friendship and style and scholarship existing together as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

So, to walk onto the campus at this stage of my life was no small thing. Even if fatigue had quieted my face on that first day, inwardly I felt as if I had metaphorically died and gone to heaven.

There were students in all their fullness. Natural hairstyles everywhere. Ease. Warmth. Directions given with generosity. People expressing themselves in ways that felt unforced, familiar, stylish, and free. And with every interaction, every hairstyle, every rhythm of speech, every act of welcome, I found myself remembering one of the many reasons I love African American culture.

People often say, with astonishing ignorance, that African Americans do not have culture. And yet it is African American culture that the world has continually studied, borrowed from, imitated, monetized, and folded into what is now globally recognized as Black culture. The style. The cadence. The charisma. The innovation. The humor. The emotional texture. The music. The language. The courage to make beauty under pressure and dignity out of conditions never designed for your flourishing.

To be in that environment at fifty was a once-in-a-lifetime feeling. It was not just nostalgia. It was recognition.

Recognition that African American culture has long offered the world a masterclass in how to remain creative, expressive, relational, and deeply human under extraordinary pressure. Recognition that what people dismiss with one hand, they consume with the other. Recognition that these campuses hold more than curriculum, they hold living archives of style, survival, excellence, improvisation, and communal memory.

That is part of what made HBCU AI Con feel so significant to me. It was not simply that I was standing on a campus. It was that I was standing inside a cultural inheritance. One that has shaped the world far beyond the borders of America, and certainly far beyond the imagination of those who still try to deny its depth.

The Voice That Changed the Room

The first day was a day of listening.

Listening to the room. Listening to panels. Listening for the questions underneath the questions. Listening for where the energy was alive and where something needed to be named more truthfully.

And it was during one of those sessions on the day before my own 'responsible' AI panel that something shifted in me.

I was sitting in the audience listening to a student panel when a young man asked a question. What struck me first was his voice. He had an accent that reminded me immediately of Ryan Coogler. And as soon as I heard it, something in me lit up.

Not because it sounded polished for approval, but because it sounded rooted. It carried for me an immediate association with beautiful Black family, with an award-winning unapologetic filmmaker, with cultural authenticity, with someone who sounds like where he comes from and has not edited himself to be more digestible.

And then I noticed something else: hearing that voice changed me in real time. It disrupted a bias. It heightened my awareness. It made me pay attention to how quickly perception forms and how powerfully representation can shift the emotional field.

I found myself thinking about how one authentic voice can change the game for everyone in the room. And that took me somewhere deeper. It forced me to ask: how is my perception of myself and of this other person shaping the way I see and understand the world? What decisions are being made in me in response to that perception? What am I managing socially and emotionally because of narratives I may not even fully realize I am still carrying?

Do I internalize a colonial narrative? Or do I create a transformation moment?

Do I slow down enough to explore what has just been revealed to me? Do I have the time and capacity to do that? And if I do not, what is consuming so much of my energy that I cannot stay long enough with the insight to let it become change? These questions opened a door to another question...

How can AI save me time to be more human?

How can it automate the things I once thought gave me value, but which have in truth stolen my social-emotional soul? How can it reduce the busy admin, the repeated drain, the invisible labor, so that I have more capacity to do the deeply human work of examining bias, practicing inclusion, repairing relationship, telling the truth, and staying in community through discomfort?

Because once you understand that these choices are being made every millisecond; how to interpret, how to respond, how to assess safety, how to perform identity, how to manage the emotional weather in a room you understand why so many of us are fatigued.

That fatigue is not imaginary. It is the cost of being conscious in a world structured by old narratives and new technologies. And that is why we need sustainable practices of being human. That is why emotional health matters. That is why the things that protect our emotional lives also protect our physical lives.

Good Hair, Old Problems, New Coalition

For those who know me, The Natural Hair Weekly is not just a platform from ten years ago. It is part of my story. It was born from a need to create space, commerce, representation, and cultural affirmation around natural hair; around Black beauty, around the politics and practicalities of showing up in our fullness.

So, imagine what it felt like to sit and listen to a young woman speaking about a project focused on responsible #AI and "good hair," naming the ways systems still privilege European hair textures and still reproduce harmful image hierarchies ten years later.

A problem still alive. Still relevant. Still waiting for new tools, new energy, new collaboration. What the panel revealed is that some of the old problems have not gone away. The good news is now we have a chance to meet them differently - we have transformational technology in the room. Now we have younger voices in the room. Now we have people who have lived the issue and people who are newly naming it. Now we have intergenerational possibility.

That, to me, is where hope lives. Not in pretending the problem is solved. But in realizing that the coalition to solve it has grown. There is power in being someone who has carried a question for ten years and then meeting someone with fresh energy and new framing who is carrying the same question forward. That is how movements mature. That is how commerce, culture, and justice begin to work together. That is how relationship becomes infrastructure.

And all of this was happening before I had even stepped onto my own stage.

There was another gift too. I had been met at the airport by my FeelWise collaborator Tina (Christina) Schweiger and producer of the Emotional Skill Gap Summit who handed me the prototype of the Emotional Maths box.

To receive that object, something physical and thoughtful and real in Austin, so close to the campus, felt like a small sacred wink. A reminder that ideas are meant to become tools. That emotional intelligence must become something people can practice with their hands and bodies, not just in words.

Rest as Infrastructure

By the end of that first day, the fatigue had fully caught up with me. I chose not to override it. Instead of forcing myself to keep going into the night in the name of productivity, I honored what I know about my natural rhythm. I am strongest in the early hours roughly from six in the morning to one in the afternoon. I rested. I got up early. I wrote notes. I reflected on what I had heard. I sent a note to the co-founder. And in that quiet morning, I remembered again that rest is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.

If sleep deprivation reduces our ability to process cognitively, then it also reduces our ability to manage unpleasant feelings, choose the right regulation techniques, and stay relationally wise. Rest is not separate from emotional intelligence. It supports it.

The DJ, the Ancestors, and What Carries Us

The next day, refreshed, I was backstage preparing to enter the stage for the panel when the DJ played "The Humpty Dance" by Digital Underground, one of the first albums I ever bought. I turned to a fellow panelist and laughed at the perfection of it. There we were, at an AI conference at an HBCU, and a Gen Z DJ had chosen a Digital Underground track as we got ready to talk about the future.

It was a moment of nostalgia. A reminder that the future does not arrive stripped of history. It arrives carrying rhythm, references, elders, cousins, cassette tapes, hairstyles, film scenes, family sayings, and all the beautiful things we were told did not count as knowledge. African American culture has always been a site of ancestral intelligence, not just expression. A way of knowing. A way of surviving. A way of making meaning. A way of staying human.

That was how I entered the panel. Not as someone there merely to perform expertise. An invited guest who had been included to honor the culture by sharing my truth.

The Panel

The responsible AI panel was powerful because it held multiple truths at once. Different perspectives. Real questions. A sense of safety in the room. People willing to speak honestly.

One of the ideas that stayed with me most was the suggestion by Dr. Fallon Wilson, PhD that perhaps "responsible AI" is not the strongest phrase. That perhaps public interest gets us closer to the point. Because what does "responsible" really mean if no one is accountable to the people most affected? If the language can be used to signal virtue without changing conditions?

AI is not simply a technology conversation. It is a human conversation. A cultural conversation. An emotional intelligence conversation. The deepest question for me is not only what AI can do. It is who we become while using it.

For Black communities, and especially in HBCU spaces, this matters profoundly. We need spaces where we can tell the truth without fear of judgment from the very people whose acceptance and inclusion we have often been taught to seek. We need spaces where discomfort does not automatically lead to rejection; spaces where bias can be challenged, where identity can be explored in global and cultural context, where we can collaborate authentically with allies because we are not busy performing safety for them.

This is where Emotional Maths lives for me.

Emotional Maths is my life's work. It is a way of making the science of emotional intelligence real. A way to go to the emotional gym every day. A map for building the hard abilities of emotional intelligence so that we can better see, understand, make meaning of, manage, and sustain emotional energy in relationship with ourselves, one another, and the systems we build.

It is a practice for doing your best to get to the truth. A practice for sitting with discomfort. A practice for observing dysregulation without collapsing into shame. A practice for having our identities, perceptions, and ideologies disrupted without losing our center. And it is also a practice for building futures.

Infrastructures of Belonging

As I moved through the rest of the conference, through the courtyard, through the joy, through the spirit tunnel, through the music and food and art and intergenerational conversation what became clearer and clearer to me was this:

HBCUs are not just institutions that distribute knowledge. They are infrastructures of belonging.

They are places where people can feel seen enough to think more deeply. Safe enough to tell the truth. Free enough to create from somewhere more honest. And when people feel safe, heard, and seen, deeper wisdom becomes available.

That matters now more than ever. Because if we are serious about figuring out how to use AI as ethically as we can, and serious about shaping a future worth living in then we need more than technical skill. We need emotional intelligence. We need cultural intelligence. We need psychological safety. We need Black artists, Black thinkers, Black students, Black communities not as passive consumers of technology, but as architects, critics, curators, and governors of the systems being built.

The Circle of Safety and Trust

Somewhere between Montserrat and Austin between the small plane and the spirit tunnel, between the student panel and the Digital Underground track, between The Natural Hair Weekly memory and the "good hair" AI conversation, between rest and responsibility something in me settled into deeper clarity.

In the AI age, HBCUs are the best place for us all to learn how to create space for truth without punishment. To build emotional stamina for the hard conversations. To pass the baton with more courage and faith than the generation before us. To make sure future generations inherit not only better tools, but a clearer path to freedom. To help people become more human, not less.

Thank you to the Presidents, Co-chairs, Moderators, Panelists, Students, Event organizers, Attendees

I arrived carrying fear. I arrived carrying fatigue. I arrived carrying old stories and with thanks to all the people who played a part in making the event a success I left with new possibilities and renewed hope.

The SWTWAI Journey