“Music is memory to me,” Dr. Gilman Whiting said. Whiting is a 2021 Palmarium Award recipient and director of graduate studies in the Department of African American & Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt. He is responsible for developing the internationally renowned Scholarly Identity Model which is a psycho-social model that helps develop children in the educational sphere in a more robust fashion. Whiting and I discuss affirmative action, music as understanding the past and leadership.