{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Ronderings","title":"Belonging, Masculinity, and Black Boy Joy: Taking L's on the Way to Elevation with Craig Aarons-Martin","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3042,"description":"Educator and community builder Craig Aarons-Martin, founder of the Black Boy Joy Summit, has spent more than two decades doing transformative work in Boston's schools, and he is candid here about the rooms he still gets shut out of and why he keeps building anyway.\n\nIn this episode of Ronderings, Ron sits down with Craig, a New Orleans native, longtime school leader, and author, to talk about belonging, masculinity, faith, and what it takes to choose purpose while carrying real weight.\nCraig traces his path from a summer school classroom in Louisiana, where a teacher named Miss Madeline handed him a math lesson at thirteen, to Dillard University, to Lesley University and the greater Boston area. He is honest about arriving in Boston over three hundred pounds, \"a hundred and seventy-five pounds of that being depression,\" working his calling while mostly closeted, convinced that showing up fully himself could cost him his license. Ron opens the conversation from his own grief, having just buried his nephew Arnold, and that honesty sets the tone for everything that follows.\nThe two get into why vulnerability is so hard for men of color, what it means when a father starts learning to emote after forty years of silence, and how Craig built the Black Boy Joy Summit as a space for boys of color to see unsung heroes rather than only celebrities and seven-figure CEOs. Craig also names the harder truth underneath his visible success: a hundred outreach emails and twenty-five sponsorship proposals that went nowhere, and a calling he refuses to abandon.\nTune in to hear why Craig believes the breakdown always comes before the breakthrough, and why taking L's might be the necessary cost of elevation. \nChapters:🌱 02:46 Craig Aarons-Martin on the journey of becoming🧭 05:08 More years in the North, but a Southerner first🤝 07:54 Why he finally said yes to brotherhood in his forties🫂 12:52 The loneliness young men of color carry behind the feed🍎 16:31 Miss Madeline, a math lesson,...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/jvG73cd3wc0Fdf0M72sv961IPvlbb4AzdtSqHEUr3iE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzM3MjYyLzE2NzE3/OTA1MTUtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}