Malaika Mutere, a Temple University Ph.D. graduate, teaches African American Studies at the Irvine and Riverside campuses of the University of California. She is a scholar of African Aesthetics whose ancestral Nile Valley source codes have informed and supported her journey from Kenya to America through Black popular music. Her writings - including a novel entitled ‘Bantu Waltz,’ a blog, and several scholarly articles - excavate her personal and communal truth [Ubuntu], and acknowledge Ma’at as the culturally-centered philosophy and manifestation of checks-and-balances that are necessary in our collective human spaces.