Corbin Laedlein

Corbin Laedlein was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His mother is also a native of Brooklyn and his father grew up in southern New Jersey. Laedlein was raised in Red Hook and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City and Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. While at Rutgers, he co-founded Fusion: The Rutgers Union of Mixed People, an organization for mixed-race students to talk about identity, racism, relationships, and other social issues. After graduation, Laedlein went on to work for Added Value, a non-profit in Red Hook that aims to develop new leaders through urban agriculture.

"At some point in high school, I started to feel some real internalized racism because there was this feeling, like, textbooks are only talking about people who look like my dad. You open a textbook and it shows no contributions to human history of people from who descended from Africa or indigenous people from the Americas..."