Compassionate education can transform a child’s life. Tell Williams understands this truth on a deeply personal level. Though he is best known for his online presence of over 4 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, his biggest accomplishments are his pursuits as a teacher and therapist. “I taught for the Head Start program, which is a federally funded program that services families in need, with a lot of them living in poverty,” he explains. “I was a Head Start kid myself. We were poor. When I say we were poor, I’m talking Jiffy Cornbread for dinner, government cheese, tape on the remote kind of poor. And so being able to teach the kids that I was growing up, I think that’s where my activism started. If a kid came to school and their parents didn’t have food at home, we would call food banks. As teachers, that was our job. When I was suddenly given a classroom of millions of adults, the activist in me sees that need and fills that need.”
That following carries a significant amount of responsibility. “If you are privileged enough to have a platform, I feel like you owe it to your audience to perform that activism and to protect them and to look at what their interests are and the way that they intersect. A lot of my audience is marginalized people, and so I feel like I would be doing them a disservice if I wasn’t advocating for them. I’m a huge defender of women’s rights and reproductive rights – that’s because 90 some percent of my audience is women. If they’ve given me the platform I have now, it’d be really shitty to not use my activism as a content creator to pay them back and pay it forward.” He will never consider himself an influencer. “That investment in social issues creates a divide between me and someone selling you a t-shirt or doing a brand deal with a TV show. They don’t want to get political, especially right now, and I don’t think I could live with myself to know I could have made somewhat of a difference and instead I wanted to make $5,000 selling people a chocolate candy. It seems gross not to use my voice well.”
Empathy must be the nucleus of our connection. “If you come to me as a therapy client, the first thing I’ll tell you is that I’m not going to take notes. If I need to write something down, I’ll do it when you leave, but I’m not a PhD candidate that’s taking notes on you for a dissertation. I feel like we need to have a human interaction. We have to put the human quality back into mental health care. I don’t want you to talk about diagnostic codes and use convoluted words to make you feel better as a therapist that you are higher than I am. I don’t want that in therapy. I want you to talk to me. I’m a real fucking human and talk to me like I matter and that you see me. My issues matter. We are all more than our diagnoses.”
In our darkest times, hope and laughter will be our salvation. “Resilience is the ability to get back up when we’re knocked down. I think that resilience is showing joy and still having joy. Humor is a very important means of resistance, too. Someone said that joy is one of the greatest forms of protest. Within our communities and beyond them, we need to remember that joy is existing and joy is out there and we can still find it. I think resistance and resilience go hand in hand with that. We’ve done this before, guys. We have. If you weren’t around for the last time we did this, then look to your elders who have.” There is a kinetic inspiration to be found in the leaders of tomorrow. “I’m excited for the generation below us. I got my second bachelor’s degree later. I was 29 sitting in that classroom with a bunch of 18, 19, 20 year olds, and I remember going to a class on human sexuality and I thought, ‘They’re going to make fun of me. They’re going to be so mean.’ I was shocked with how kind the students were in all avenues and how much activism took place. I think I was openly weeping when I saw all of these college kids protesting the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts. It gave me hope that these kids are doing things that they feel so fiercely about and things that I don’t know that my generation did.” Tell will be there to continue stewarding minds and opening hearts.
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Tell Williams Leads a Classroom of Change. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Tell Williams.
