LeVar Burton
Thank you, Dr. Burton. (Congratulations on your honorary PhD. Howard is lucky to know you.) You’ve shown up in so many places in my life. Reading Rainbow, Star Trek… and later interviews about how many different apparent angles your career has presented you with. I’ve gotten everything out of order in my timeline, but every interaction I’ve had with your work has been just at the right time. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for presenting the voices of so many children with such dignity and being the voice of so many new, strange, and inspiring ideas.
Now, because of where this message is coming from (Phosphor’s fan page), I’m going to talk about the work a bit.
And hello to you, too, reader. I won’t always write these for celebrities, actors, creators, influencers. Sometimes I’ll write them for Jo from the conference. Today is exciting because we get to take a trip down memory lane and look at how Dr. LeVar Burton has met the moment.
He narrates without flattening. In Reading Rainbow, he reads with feeling but not with flourish. He lets the story lead. Even on his podcast, he resisted the temptation to overact or editorialize, maintaining fidelity to the author’s voice. That’s a rare form of restraint in storytelling, especially for someone trained as an actor.
He models code-switching as a literacy tool, not a performance. Dr. Burton adjusts register with care—able to speak fluently across children’s media, academic conversation, and pop culture spaces—without signaling superiority in any of them. This isn’t flexibility for applause; it’s access management. He translates context, not self.
He scaffolds historical pain without sensationalizing it. His public reflections on Roots, the shackles, and inherited memory are matter-of-fact, not performative. He contextualizes them as personal and pedagogical artifacts, not moral props. It’s a refusal to flatten complexity into “lessons.” That is not to say it is not emotional. Or as he said it, “I want my guests to know, while I am unquestionably their friend, I am also absolutely filled with rage."
These aren’t just admirable traits; they’re practices worth studying. Dr. Burton’s work doesn’t posture. It doesn’t overreach. It invites, it teaches, and it holds the line. For those of us trying to communicate ethically and with care across messy systems and shifting audiences, there’s a lot to learn from the way he moves.
Let the material lead… even your own. Don’t pull focus. Don’t overburden the moment with purpose. Whether you’re sharing someone else’s voice or shaping your own, practice narrative restraint. Let the work breathe. Trust that clarity doesn’t need to shout to be heard.
Translate the context, not yourself. Code-switching isn’t self-erasure; it’s precision. The test? If you leave a conversation feeling invisible or misrepresented, you weren’t adapting; you were disappearing. Good communication clarifies without camouflaging. Don’t reshape yourself to be legible. Reshape the conditions.
Say the hardest truths plainly… especially when they feel too big. In systems work, research, or product leadership, there are moments when the truth we uncover is so big—a harmful pattern, a legacy tension, a design that excludes—that we feel the urge to either soften it or over-explain it. But those moments don’t need performance. They need plain speech.
That’s what real communicators teach us: not how to say more, but how to say what matters.