Welcome to “How to Act.” A limited-run mini-podcast series produced by the New Mexico Black Education Act Bureau in celebration of Black History Month. Here at H2A we treasure and showcase stories of those who have and continue to enrich the Black educational landscape in New Mexico and beyond. Because Black History isn’t my history or your history…Black History is New Mexico History … and no matter who or where you are, if you are under the sound of this Pod, this history is for you. I’m your host, Hakim Bellamy and this is “How to Act.”

Richard Antoine White and his tuba have been somewhat inseparable since the seventh grade. Not exactly the “sport” of choice you’d expect from a Black kid who spent the first four years of his life sleeping on a piece of cardboard in Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. From being taken in at age 4 by the same folks who served as foster parents as his mother–who by that time was suffering from advanced alcohol addiction–to bandleader for popular music talents like Justin Timberlake and Queen Latifah.

A high school graduate of Baltimore School for the Arts (where he as a classmate of the late Tupac Amaru Shakur), a college graduate of the Peabody Institute, America’s oldest conservatory, and an alumnus of Indiana University's prestigious Jacobs School of Music where he became the first ever African American to earn a doctorate in tuba performance, Professor White is principal tubist for the New Mexico Philharmonic when he is not a full-time tenure track professor and Associate Marching Band Director at the University of New Mexico.

Here, Mr. White unpacks his approach to teaching music and how the discipline of learning to play an instrument develops the same muscles required to excel in school, in sports, and in life.

This podcast is a partnership between the New Mexico Black Education Act Advisory Council and the New Mexico Black Education Act Bureau. Find out more about the New Mexico Black Education Act here https://web.ped.nm.gov/bureaus/student-support-services/black-education-act/