- [Narrator] This program was made possible by... (soft piano music) By a grant from Anne Ray Foundation and by contributions to your PBS station by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(uplifting music) (singers vocalizing) - [Man] PBS "American Portrait" - Is a platform that allows people to share their experiences.

- To tell their stories.

- Using the prompts that PBS "American Portrait" put out.

- [Woman] I was raised to believe... - [Man] I took a risk when... - [Man] What gets me out of bed in the morning... - What gets me out of bed in the morning.

- Is that I've got a purpose.

- It's the fact that we're gonna be doing something special.

- What gets me out of bed in the morning?

- Probably my mom and dad.

- Work.

- School.

- Music.

- Coffee.

- And since it helps.

- Optimism.

- My faith.

- My kids.

- Knowing that I have to be, like, the best dad that I can possibly be.

- The thought that maybe this will be the day I figure out how to make my dream come true.

- The idea that every morning there's a new problem to solve.

- So that's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

- It's your story.

- The millions of stories that make up this country.

- Just regular people like you, me.

- Everyone has different story to tell and share.

- People's videos and pictures.

- A digital tapestry.

- It's just a place to be heard and feel valued and listened to.

(speaks in foreign language) - To inspire and to encourage one another.

- Our common humanity in the American experience.

- This is who we are.

- That's what great about it is that you feel connected to a giant place because we all share little, tiny snippets about our lives.

- Most days I feel... - This project can help bring us together.

- To listen to each other.

- Sharing your own ideas, your feelings.

- Your challenges, your drive.

- What makes us the same?

What makes us different?

- We all have a story to tell.

- All around the United States.

- To reflect our true "American Portrait."

- I was raised to believe that just for existing I deserved to be tortured in hell forever.

And as a results of those beliefs I spent three years in ministry school training to become a missionary.

Over the course of studying scripture, eventually, I left those believes behind but what remained is something called religious trauma syndrome.

Which manifest itself very similarly to complex PTSD several traumas over, over and over again throughout my childhood.

An anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and really why I'm on is here is I just wanna plead with parents.

These beliefs can be really destructive.

They can completely shatter a child's phsyche.

They can cause lasting problems into adulthood and I just really want to beg and plead with parents.

Don't teach your kids this stuff.

- [Woman] I see my neighborhood.

With its character, its history, its houses.

I see the streets.

filled with cars and community I see the blue skies above Michigan summer.

I see the downtown.

I see buses that a whole city relies on.

I see construction and change.

I see art and I see emptiness, but I see home.

- [Woman] When I step outside my door on a morning I'm surrounded by a national park.

Living in one of the most beautiful places in Michigan certainly has it's perks.

Endless hiking trails and empty spaces, perfect for riding out a quarantine.

I also work in a school that serves almost 100% white students and prior to my arrival a few years ago had not been very intentional about creating curriculum that was anti-biased or anti-racist.

Rural communities are unique.

We have confederate flags that fly proudly off of pick-up trucks, Nazi swastikas scribbled in notebooks, and European heritage meetings in woods around bonfires up here.

Rural America has some work to do and as an educator, it is my duty to help my students navigate this.

Introducing a choice reading program to my kids was step one.

Providing students with a variety of diverse literature to read where they can see not only themselves in books, but also the lives outside of their bubble was critical.

We talk about difficult topics as well.

I tend to dump them into the deep end of the pool and challenge them to grapple with things like historical oppression, genderless language, toxic masculinity.

It's about giving them a safe place to explore scary ideas either through literature or writing or class discussions.

It's about leaving my classroom door open for visits during planning period and reminding our boys that it's okay to feel things.

Education is a lot more than standards or skills for me.

It's humanity and emotion.

It's feeling and challenge.

It's hope and empowerment.

- [Man] When I step outside my door this is Detroit.

We're known for abandoned houses, burned down houses, open fields, a lot of violence and reckless activity.

Look at this block, you see a lot of blight but we still got good people here.

Detroit is making a comeback.

Most people would think that that's not a city that I want to live in but I look at it, opportunity.

Opportunity for us to make a change.

Look at that house right there, it's beautiful.

We're going to make it to a point where all the houses in our city look like this again.

This is my goal.

This is the future that I believe in.

- I'm now 70 years old and as a 70 year old I like myself a lot better than I did when I was younger.

I used to think a lot that other people were judging me or finding me inadequate and that I had to change.

But now I realize that people were probably not thinking about me and the only way I felt inadequate was that I was accepting what I believe they thought.

And that I now realize that I have complete control over what I think and how I view myself and how I judge myself.

And if I had one idea to pass along to younger people it would be this: that you are in complete control of what you think of yourself and how you judge yourself.

- At this point in my life as a 23 year old and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 I find myself speaking to you from my childhood bedroom in the suburbs of Detroit, making friendship bracelets for friends to mail out, reading poetry by Mary Oliver and writing handwritten letters to friends.

This quarantine has made my life, which used to be so Cosmopolitan and big and shiny, become very small and quiet.

And in this smallness I feel as though I've gotten to become larger, I've felt I can explore my values, figure out the type of person that I want to be, the type of relationships I want to have.

At this point in my life I feel a great calming to participate professionally and personally in helping to rebuild civic life in America and also just be a family member to my parents and my nuclear family, who is right next door.

- I took a risk when I decided to move from Lebanon to the US to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a doctor.

I left behind an acceptance letter and a scholarship at the best medical schools there and came here to start from scratch because I believe I will become a better doctor this way.

But the hardest part was saying goodbye to everyone that I had ever known.

Especially to my father, who has a chronic illness yet still gets up to work everyday to make sure I have a good life.

And to my mother, who stayed behind to take care of her own widowed mom.

But I feel that the biggest risk I took was taking up a difficult challenge such as this one without them by my side to support me.

I can only hope that I'll make them proud.

- Hello my name is LeAuna, I am 18 years old And I am a Muslim revert.

I took a risk in my life when I decided I wanted to show the public, my friends and family that I was a Muslim woman.

Growing up I wasn't really taught religion because I had lesbian grandparents and at their time it was hard to be accepted then but my mom did try to help us by going to bible camps in the summer.

People will say things in your life but you cannot let that affect your overall wellbeing and who you want to be.

Even though I was receiving love from all my friend and family it's really sad to think about the other Hijabs that aren't being accepted because of their faith.

- [Woman] LeAuna Rayleigh Preston - Wearing the hijab on my graduation day meant so much to me it proved to me that you should always take your risks if it will make you happy in the end.

- I'm not gonna say America is racist I'm gonna say America has some racist institutions and they also have some racist groups and some racist people.

But from the civil war to the civil rights movement and to present day, all of America has not been racist.

You've had guys who fought in a civil war for the freedoms of his fellow Americans.

You have people during the civil rights movement who put their lives on the line for the rights of their fellow Americans even though they didn't look like them.

To present day time now you have guys right now, fighting in the streets right now for their fellow Americans and they don't all look alike, they're from all different walks of life, religions, colors, creeds and any other thing you can think of and they're all standing side by side right now, to this day.

It's right there in the writings of the forefathers.

"All men are created equal" You know, "everybody has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

You know, if we started living up to the dreams of the forefathers of this country and probably many other nations we would probably live in a better place and it would be a better world.

- When we talk about gender inequality we often have the conversation through the lens of income inequality and so a woman makes 80 cents on the dollar for the equivalent job a man has and we've really tired to attack the problem through that angle.

We have to look at racial inequality through the same framework.

The average black family in America is only worth 10 cents on the dollar for the average white family It's appalling, the average white family is worth 10 times the average black family and I think if we really focus on solving for wealth inequality in this country we'll go a long way in solving racial inequality as well.

- An anti-racist America is one in which we truly begin to take interest in, and find validity, in the pain of those for whom this country has not provided just outcomes.

And in order for that to happen we're gonna have to learn how to stop seeing others progress as a threat to our own wellbeing.

- I hope we have learned how to become more human and less materialistic.

I hope that we grow in appreciation for our fellow brothers and sisters across this globe.

I hope that we've learned to appreciate one another to the best of our abilities.

That we take family and friends serious.

And I hope that we also learn to be kind to one another that we put away the bipartisan politics and unite under the banner of humanity.

- The tradition that I carry on is cooking for my family.

It brings everybody together, so much warmth, laughter and just such a good time having everybody come together and rejoice over food.

Plus there are a bunch of family recipes that are thrown in there as well so that makes it even more better 'cause it's just like generations of the same recipe.

Whether there's a holiday or just a birthday or just a casual day of the week cooking food is a huge part of my family.

- I am a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Ojibwe I am the co-founder of woodland sky native American dance company.

We travel throughout Indian country, teaching about our culture through native dance and story telling.

And I have been very lucky to be running this group and sharing those stories.

Another thing that I do is teach native dance fitness its a program I started to help native communities combine fitness and culture and its been a very rewarding program.

Being able to share our culture daily and connect with out native youth and show them a fun way to stay in shape.

Some of the other things that I do are native art.

I do bead-work and sewing and thanks to my mom, who taught us so much about bead-work, about quality, about the importance of story telling through our art I have been very happy to carry that on and teach that to my children.

My sister has taught me how to sew so I've learned the technique of applique and now have myself become a teacher of those things, traveling and teaching at different communities so it's a great honor to teach, to travel, and also share these ways with others so - Canoeing is a big tradition in my family even from when we were pretty young I'm really proud of our little guys they've done great they started canoeing when our youngest was two and a half.

You're never more than an hour from any lake, we might be two hours from the great lake.

So we were able to continue doing that even through 2020 to go out and spend some time in nature - This has become a tradition in the United States - Put that away - Around the world.

- The political climate in Ghana is very intense violent military overthrow of the government.

I was five and a half years old when we arrived in the United States in 1987 and Detroit at the time was really a tale of two cities.

It had a lot of skylarks, gifted artists, great minds at the time but on the other side of the city you got the dark side.

You got the drug wars, the drug gangs, the shoot-outs that whole Brightmoor area was very trying especially for the immigrant family that already endured a violent military overthrow of the government I was blessed enough to have a mother and a father as positive role models, setting a tone as far as the type of path I wanted to take.

Me and my best friend enlisted in the marine corps.

Brightmoor was always one of the roughest parts of the city of Detroit and we just didn't want to become statistics.

When I came home I really wanted to find a way to help some of the youth of my old neighborhood so I started working the residential treatment centers as a residential councilor.

I realized that a lot of young people were tuning into different podcasts.

So that's when it clicked, like, okay, maybe I should come up with a youth and mentorship podcast and share with the young people throughout the city of Detroit to inform them, motivate them, inspire them, expose them to different culture, expose them to different things that they don't necessarily see enough of in their neighborhoods.

At the end of the day I really wanna provide the young people coming up now, this new generation, with a platform like Heavy Brand podcast where they can see and hear from positive role models and positive peers alike.

- Hopefully you'll never know what it's like to lose a child and I lost my son, Micheal, when he was 19.

It's been over 20 years now so he was, he was here less than how long he's been gone his name was Micheal and he died in a house fire, called 911 ut died from the smoke before they could get there and that, I was 47 at the time, and boy did that impact my life.

He was just a great kid and I had him for 19 years and he never let me take life too seriously and I'm just really glad I had him and I do believe in reincarnation and I plan to see him again.

I think our souls will reconnect I have great dreams about him, he pops in a couple of times a year and we just hang out and its all good.

- My mom and I have been forced apart since the court declared that she was incapacitated and placed in a nursing home and the visiting wasn't the challenge for a while.

Up until the Corona virus pandemic, that's when everything shut down.

Things are definitely not the same.

I'm not able to talk to my mom until this Friday, and the visiting restrictions have been very tough but thankfully I'm able to drop juice off for my mom at the nursing home.

Hey mom, - Yeah - [Richard] How are you feeling?

- Feeling okay - [Richard] All right.

You said the juice was a little too peppery.

- Don't put no paprika - [Richard] It's got turmeric and ginger.

- Okay - [Richard] I love you so much mom - Love you, baby - A days work as a teacher in an urban school district is wonderful and tough all at the same time.

I sometimes think I wouldn't do anything else and sometimes I come home and think how am I going to get up and do this all again?

I'm a teacher, I'm a mom, I'm a life coach, I'm a councilor, I'm a social worker, I'm the fan in that students string section, when they don't have anybody else.

A days work is filled with so many whirlwinds that at the end I sometimes can't even name one thing that I did other than hug a kid, support a kid, make a kid a better human being.

But at the end of the day I'm reminded of the student that picked up trash in the middle of the hall that I didn't have to tell.

The student that supported their peer when they didn't have to be prompted.

The student that had that "ah-ha!"

moment It's all worth it.

- To me work means something different everyday.

I create for a variety of reasons.

Personal enjoyment, expression, experimentation, therapy and activism as well as communicating my ideas and collaborating with others.

Not all of this may appear like work to some but creating is actually problem solving each and every single step of the way.

When asked what kind of artist I am I often laugh because there isn't a simple answer.

I create using whatever medium makes sense for each project.

I love repurposing thrifted or found objects and giving them new life Symbols and layers of meaning keep me interested in each piece.

One doesn't have to be an artist to create but when it comes to problem solving, it definitely helps to be creative.

- To me work is pride.

As a union carpenter we're the first ones in and the last ones to leave.

From pouring the concrete, to putting the roof on, to putting the doors on, to putting your hardware on everything in your kitchens, bathrooms, all of those things.

That's what that means to me.

That's something that you can be so proud to do.

You come in, you do your work, you see your results every day and you can go home.

And you can be proud of it.

You're tired from it but you're also very proud of what you've done.

I am, anyway.

That's it.

- You should be a part of PBS "American Portrait" - Because we can't paint this portrait without you - And everyone's story deserves to be heard - And I am interested in your story - I'm sure you got something to share - Whatever's on your mind, whatever your message is - Your thoughts - Your family's stories - We need to see each others faces and we need to hear each others stories - Your hopes, your triumphs - And let us know what's going on with you in your life - Look at the prompts and it's pretty easy - Don't be afraid.

I was nervous but I'm glad that I did it - Its a ripple effect.

Once you share your story others are encouraged to share their story - Plus this is something that you might be able to show your kids or your grandkids someday and say look what I was a part of - You can be an important part of this project - To join in - Go to - pbs - .org - / - americanportrait - Go to the website - That's pbs - .org - /american portrait - Go to that, check it out, join and then we all can feel like were all one.

[Upbeat Music] [Singers Vocalizing] - [Narrator] This program was made possible by... (soft piano music) By a grant from Anne Ray Foundation and by contributions to your PBS station by viewers like you.

Thank you.