My research methodology

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]People keep asking me two questions. How do I find these stories? And how do I write them the way that I write them? So today I actually want to answer both of those questions. So everything that I post is written out before I record it.

[00:00:12]Like literally every single thing.

[00:00:15]Sometimes I add lib, but I try not to because I have ADHD and if I try to talk off the cuff, we're going on a journey.

[00:00:22]A long one actually. That'll eventually loop back to the original point eventually. So, I write everything down first. And that brings me to the next thing people ask because writing has been a long part of my life before I started doing any of this. I've been I really don't know if you call it a writer, but I've been writing forever. I used to write short fiction stories long before I ever made a single post. And what fiction teaches you over the years is how to hold somebody's attention, right? You learn what captivates a reader and what makes them put the book down. You learn how to start a sentence so you don't lose somebody's attention.

[00:00:58]How to end a line that maybe ends in suspense. When to slow down, when to pick up, when to land the point. You learn all of that. So, that's not a skill that I picked up for social media.

[00:01:09]It's a skill I've been building my whole life. Sitting with words, putting them next to each other, and paying attention to what they do, how those words marry one another. Keep in mind that I grew up in the era before social media. I didn't have a cell phone until I graduated high school. like we had dialup like yeah I'm aging myself but yeah so moving on from all of that people also ask where my research instincts come from and I want to be honest about that too so I guess I'll start with my degrees I have an associates in finance a bachelor's in psychology and I earned two MBAs separately the second one is just with a concentration in project management but each of those degrees gave me something Right? Finance taught me to follow the money. When somebody tells you a story about why something happened, finance teaches you to ask who's profiting from it. Critical thinking, you know, psychology gave me the introductory tools to read human behavior. I used to always say I wanted to know why people did the things that they do. And I think this helped me. It helped me to learn patterns to understand why people repeat the same harmful systems like over and over and over again. and why people use fear, shame, and identity as political tools. Now, my first MBA taught me how to think in systems. Right? When I look at a single event, a law, a court case, a moment in history, my brain automatically asks, "What is this connected to? What set it up and what it set up next?" Because nothing in this country happens in isolation. Nothing.

[00:02:41]And once you start seeing the systems underneath the events, you stop being surprised by what comes next because you can already see what built it. Now, moving on from that, my second MBA with project management, it taught me how to take a complicated thing and break it into sequence. First this, then this, then this, so another person can actually follow it. To kind of put it in layman's terms, I guess. And that's most of what I'm doing when I write a script.

[00:03:08]I'm not just telling you what happened.

[00:03:09]I'm sequencing it so you can feel why it happened the way that it did. Two separate degrees, two separate sets of tools. See, and I tell you all that because the skills I used to make these scripts came from somewhere. They were built. I was not born like this.

[00:03:26]Although my parents nurtured my curiosity growing up, so that 150 million% help. So now I'm going to walk you through the method, right? The thesis is this. Black history is not a list of disconnected exceptional people.

[00:03:43]It's a network. Think like degrees of separation. You know, every revolutionary that you've ever heard of was three, four, or five steps away from another. They studied together. They taught each other. They went to the same schools. They were in the same organizations. They shaped the same court cases. They walked the same picket lines. The reason most people only know the same five names is that this country has told our history one isolated icon at a time on purpose, of course. And once you understand that they're linked, you can literally find anybody. So when I said think degrees of separation, think about it like this, okay? You start with Paulie Murray, a black queer, non-binary legal scholar from the 1940s.

[00:04:24]You read about Paulie Murray and you find that their writing shaped the legal strategy of Brown v. Board. That's one degree, right? You pull that thread and look at Brown v. Board and you find the lawyer who actually built the legal strategy was Charles Hamilton Houston.

[00:04:39]Okay, that's two degrees. You read about Houston and learn that he taught Thood Marshall at Howard Law School. Three degrees. Are you still with me? You read about Howard and find out that some of his earliest faculty came from a black high school in Washington DC called Dunar. Four degrees. You read about Dunar and you find out that Carter G.

[00:04:59]Woodson taught there. That's the man who created Black History Week, which turned into Black History Month. 5 degrees.

[00:05:06]Another teacher at Dumbar is Mary Church Terrell, a co-founder of the NAACP. 6°.

[00:05:12]You pull Mary Church Terrell and you find that the NAACP was founded after the Springfield Race Riot of 1908. One of the earliest organizers in that movement was IdaB. Wells, seven. You read Ida B. Wells and find out that her life's work was documenting lynchings.

[00:05:29]Eight, you read the name she investigated and you find Laura Nelson.

[00:05:34]Nine, you see how I started with Paulie Murray and end it with Laura Nelson?

[00:05:39]Nine names, five generations, and I never close the window. That's the whole method, y'all. So, now we get to where I actually find all of this stuff. So, I'm going to give you some real starting points. The only reason why I will be on a Wikipedia page is to get the footnotes and citations from the bottom. Wikipedia for me is a starting point. I is not a source. I don't use it as a source. But the citations at the bottom, those are gold. Real academic books, court cases, primary documents, original interviews, almost every book on black history list 50 other books at the back. And each of those stories list 50 more. You get me?

[00:06:18]I use the Library of Congress digital collection a lot actually. And also the National Archives. I can't forget them.

[00:06:25]Absolutely use the National Archives.

[00:06:27]I'm often on the Equal Justice Initiative's website, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture. They have an enormous digital archive if you didn't know. H.B.CU Library Archives. They have collections that you just can't get anywhere else. I read declassified FBI files on the FBI vault. I read court cases. mostly on court listener and I search historical black newspapers through Chronicling America on the Library of Congress's website. When I want academic studies, I use Google Scholar or JSTOR JS T. That's also a brilliant resource. Now, when I find a study, I cross-check the numbers in the data against two other studies before I trust it. That's the entire research stack. Now, here's the part it took me years to understand. The research is not about access. Okay? It's about not stopping. Most people read one article and close the tab. I don't do that. I do not close the tab. I open every name. I follow every link. I read the footnote.

[00:07:32]I find the book the footnote came from.

[00:07:34]I check the chapter against three other sources. And if something nags me, I'm not going to be the one to tell y'all about it. I don't record it. If something doesn't hold up, I kill the script. There is no shortcut. There's just persistence, I guess. So, when people ask me how I find these names, why I write the way that I write, how I keep coming back with revolutionaries that no one told us about, the honest answer is this. I have training, finance, psychology, the double MBAs, and a lifetime of writing. Now, those stories are just for me, so don't go looking for them anywhere. They're not out there. But all that training sharpened how I do this work. The sources I use aren't behind a payw wall.

[00:08:18]Most of them anyway. I think ones like the New York Times and whatever else, but the majority of the sources that I use are not behind a payw wall. The libraries are free. The archives are free. The links are right there. The only difference between what I find and what most people find is that I'm unwilling to stop when the article ends.

[00:08:37]That's it. That's the whole secret if you want to call it that. Anyway, hope this helped.