Speaker 1: When white people start to behave less dangerous without internalizing
Speaker 1: the true meaning behind the behavioral change, we become a
Speaker 1: wolf in sheep's clothing. Welcome to the one you feed.
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think ring true, and yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed are
Speaker 1: good wolf, Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Carlin Quinn, the founder and current director of
Speaker 1: Education for Racial Equity. She's also a coach and consultant
Speaker 1: to organizations, communities, and individuals interested in dismantling systems of
Speaker 1: oppression and co creating cultures of equity. Mutual liberation rooted
Speaker 1: in compassion, and non violence. Hi Carlin, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hi Eric, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to
Speaker 1: talk with you about your work as the founder and
Speaker 1: current director of Education for Racial Equity and all the
Speaker 1: topics that spring from there. But we'll start like we
Speaker 1: always do, with the parable. In the parable, there's a
Speaker 1: grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it
Speaker 1: for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd love to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Yeah, thank you for renaming
Speaker 1: it over and over again at the beginning and at
Speaker 1: the start, it's it's helpful to hear it. And the
Speaker 1: first time I heard this parable was probably maybe ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen years ago, and I can say that it's
Speaker 1: changed meaning and it's gained dimensionality over time. For me,
Speaker 1: it was one of the things that I realized was
Speaker 1: that there's consciously feeding things and there's unconsciously feeding things.
Speaker 1: And as I became more of a conscious adult, I
Speaker 1: realized that I was unconsciously feeding patterns of separation, patterns
Speaker 1: of fear, patterns of contraction, patterns of for lack of
Speaker 1: the better term, like a kind of fight mentality that
Speaker 1: causes more closure, more rigidity. But it wasn't an intentional thing.
Speaker 1: It was a product of my family, a product of culture,
Speaker 1: product of what I was socialized into. And I started
Speaker 1: to learn in the last few years that what I
Speaker 1: intentionally feed that there's a dual responsibility. One is what
Speaker 1: am I intentionally feeding? And the other is am I
Speaker 1: doing my work to illuminate that which I don't understand
Speaker 1: yet about myself, that which is unconscious? And so for me,
Speaker 1: this parable is always a it's a twofold path of digging,
Speaker 1: digging and digging and illuminating and then also consciously choosing
Speaker 1: a way that takes that insight and creates a new story.
Speaker 1: And I can say that one of the rules that
Speaker 1: I live by in my professional life but also in
Speaker 1: my person of life is that I'm always tracking. If
Speaker 1: I'm making a decision out of fear of scarcity, I
Speaker 1: have like a visceral tracking in my system that if
Speaker 1: I'm making a decision out of fear of scarcity, that
Speaker 1: I pause and I don't make the decision. I actually investigate.
Speaker 1: And I've found that to be a very helpful practice
Speaker 1: in life. I love that idea. There's the discernment about
Speaker 1: what it means to feed the good wolf that is
Speaker 1: ideally ongoing right what it was five or ten years ago,
Speaker 1: hopefully at least, you know, for me, it seems hopefully
Speaker 1: is different, you know, because I'm growing, I'm changing, I'm learning,
Speaker 1: I'm deepening, I'm making more of the unconscious more conscious, right,
Speaker 1: And I think your work and the work that Resma
Speaker 1: does and the work that so many people are doing,
Speaker 1: has really shown a light on an area that I know,
Speaker 1: I can say I was deeply unconscious of for a
Speaker 1: long time, which is what's happening racially. And the ability
Speaker 1: to say, well, you know, I'm not a racist, and
Speaker 1: go see I'm a good person and leave it at that.
Speaker 1: And if there's been any sort of for me thing
Speaker 1: that has been probably most coming up for me that
Speaker 1: I've realized that, boy, there are some things that need
Speaker 1: to be different. It's kind of been in that area
Speaker 1: for me, particularly over the last few years, which I
Speaker 1: think it has been for a lot of people. Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: And you know, you use the word good twice in
Speaker 1: this last section, and the good wolf or a good
Speaker 1: bad person, And I think that this is also a
Speaker 1: really easy where white people, but human beings in general,
Speaker 1: can get really caught up in what is good and
Speaker 1: what is bad, what is right and what is wrong,
Speaker 1: and even in that So when I look at this
Speaker 1: parable and I look at which wolf do I feed,
Speaker 1: there's a value underneath where I want to put my
Speaker 1: life energy. And I also try I do my best
Speaker 1: to not associate that with nous because goodness Immediately, if
Speaker 1: you have goodness, then if you're not doing that, you
Speaker 1: have badness. And when we as human beings feel bad,
Speaker 1: we tend to collapse, we tend to lose curiosity, he
Speaker 1: tends to close. And this also happens a lot as
Speaker 1: white people start to learn about internalized racism. Dr Robin
Speaker 1: d'angela talks a lot about this, that moving out of
Speaker 1: the good bad binary into more curiosity of not if,
Speaker 1: but how am I racist? Or am I being racially problematic?
Speaker 1: Or is my ignorance causing harm? There's a genuine curiosity
Speaker 1: there that keeps us open to learning as opposed to
Speaker 1: upholding an identity of goodness. Yeah. I think that's really
Speaker 1: well said. And I think that was one of the
Speaker 1: things that reading Eromex Kendy really got me, was the
Speaker 1: idea of saying, like, of course I do racist things, right,
Speaker 1: doesn't make me quote unquote a racist as a label
Speaker 1: I have to avoid. It means that I do these behaviors.
Speaker 1: And and like you said, when we can move away
Speaker 1: from a label of I'm good or I'm bad, we
Speaker 1: can actually really investigate more deeply the nature of our actions,
Speaker 1: knowing that you know, none of us are good or bad.
Speaker 1: It's not that simple. Yeah, And what I've learned is
Speaker 1: the more that I can be curious with myself. After many, many,
Speaker 1: many many years of doing this work and living living
Speaker 1: the practice of this work, which it really is a
Speaker 1: life practice, I still witness my socialization, my racist socialization
Speaker 1: by growing up in a white supremacist culture. I still
Speaker 1: know that my psyche was formed in an anti black
Speaker 1: society that is still a part of the way I
Speaker 1: see the world. Now I have enough ability now to
Speaker 1: track it as it's coming in or coming up and
Speaker 1: to go, Wow, that's not me, but that's there, and
Speaker 1: I wasn't aware of it. I would be acting from this.
Speaker 1: So there's a huge slowdown that's possible now that wasn't before.
Speaker 1: But just because we start to wake up to this
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that we've become any less socialized by the
Speaker 1: racist waters. Ye, we just become more skilled at swimming
Speaker 1: in them, causing less harm, and hopefully finding our place
Speaker 1: in our pocket where we can try to turn the
Speaker 1: tide a bit. There was a video that was posted
Speaker 1: on E. R. S Facebook page, and there's a quote
Speaker 1: from it that I wanted to say. And you said,
Speaker 1: a lot of us walking and talking about white people
Speaker 1: walk into work around racial awareness and become really submissive.
Speaker 1: And I love this phrase, eggshell walkie, and we give
Speaker 1: up our authentic personality when we're trying to be all woke.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to dive in deeper there, because when
Speaker 1: I heard that, I went, oh, my goodness, does that
Speaker 1: ever feel like my experience when I'm in conversations about
Speaker 1: this topic. I feel very submissive. I feel very like
Speaker 1: I'm walking on eggshells. I want to be very careful,
Speaker 1: and I recognize, you know, some of that is coming
Speaker 1: from a good place, But I don't know that giving
Speaker 1: up our authentic personality is ever really a useful tool.
Speaker 1: So talk about how we start to work with that
Speaker 1: in a more skillful way. Mm hmmm. I mean this
Speaker 1: is an ever unfolding answer. As I live as a
Speaker 1: white female in this world and I have more and
Speaker 1: more long term intimate relationships with bodies of culture, people
Speaker 1: of color, and yeah, it's a constant practice. So what
Speaker 1: I can share with you is that in my experience
Speaker 1: personally and also in working with a lot of white
Speaker 1: people who are not so much in the stage of
Speaker 1: fighting whether or not they are or are not socialized
Speaker 1: by racism, or are or are not racist, but people
Speaker 1: who are actually not interested. You know, in the work,
Speaker 1: I noticed that there's a early developmental trajectory where we
Speaker 1: start to realize how harmful our ignorance is. When you
Speaker 1: actually wake up to systemic racism, you start to see
Speaker 1: the world and see the inequities and see how one
Speaker 1: little life, my life is complicit with so many layers
Speaker 1: of the system, and it's shocking. Most people after they
Speaker 1: take a three day with us or they get into
Speaker 1: the work with us at e R E go through
Speaker 1: a very challenging process of what it means to not
Speaker 1: be able to fall back asleep. And in that process
Speaker 1: there's a shock of how ignorant we are or how
Speaker 1: ignorant we have been. And then there's usually kind of
Speaker 1: a dual process. There's either a process where our hearts
Speaker 1: become so engaged that we get overwhelmed emotionally and we
Speaker 1: go into grief or rage or anxiety or over fixing,
Speaker 1: like there's all these tendencies to fix, and even in
Speaker 1: that moment, we become inauthentic with the process because we
Speaker 1: can't tolerate how much we feel about how complicit and
Speaker 1: harmful our life and our people's lives have been. And
Speaker 1: the other is that we can wake up, be overwhelmed
Speaker 1: and go into apathy. In the apathy and in the numbness,
Speaker 1: we can get very intellectual and we can do certain
Speaker 1: things that might support the cause, but we don't become
Speaker 1: more emotionally engaged, relationally engaged, emotionally intelligent. So this is
Speaker 1: a common first step and stage. And then white people
Speaker 1: stay with the work, we then start to go into Okay, well,
Speaker 1: what does it actually mean to engage as a white
Speaker 1: person aware of what's happening, becoming committed to not being
Speaker 1: as harmful or not being harmful? How do I engage
Speaker 1: across race and across culture? And then we start to
Speaker 1: step in those waters and realize how like ill equipped
Speaker 1: we are actually to hold the true experience bodies of
Speaker 1: culture that's so different from our racialized experience in the world.
Speaker 1: It's almost like our ignorance and the ignorance were socialized
Speaker 1: into takes so long for us to understand and to educate.
Speaker 1: We have so much catching up to do that in
Speaker 1: that catching up process, it's impossible for us to engage
Speaker 1: authentically with people who've been living this reality their entire lives.
Speaker 1: So there's this gap. I don't know if this makes sense, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's this gap that we're asked to stay in. That
Speaker 1: is one of the biggest invitations that I have to
Speaker 1: myself and to my people, and that resume and I
Speaker 1: really work with when we're working with groups of white bodies.
Speaker 1: When you really start to engage with this work, you're
Speaker 1: talking about a three to ten year commitment of active
Speaker 1: engagement on an emotional, relational, physical, somatic level, and intellectual level.
Speaker 1: It's multifaceted and multilayered, and as we start to learn
Speaker 1: one and then not the other, it's like we're this disjointed.
Speaker 1: We're very disjointed for a while, and it can be
Speaker 1: hard to then relate authentically. So that's also a process
Speaker 1: of learning. The other thing that you talk about in
Speaker 1: that same video, you talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: parallels between early childhood trauma and I don't know if
Speaker 1: this is the phrase you use cultures of dominance. You
Speaker 1: might have used a different phrase, but that there's a
Speaker 1: relationship between early childhood trauma and these systems of dominance.
Speaker 1: Can you say more about that? Yeah, it is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite things to talk about. Well, first, in
Speaker 1: my own journey, what I started to recognize was that
Speaker 1: as I started to wake up to whiteness and white supremacy,
Speaker 1: I immediately started to compare it with patriarchy and what
Speaker 1: it was to be a woman who grew up in,
Speaker 1: you know, a culture patriarchy and then also a family
Speaker 1: that had a lot of patriarchal patterns. And I got
Speaker 1: called in on that pretty quickly, which I was very
Speaker 1: grateful for. And in most, if not all, of the
Speaker 1: cross racial, cross cultural, and and white spaces that I've
Speaker 1: been in since, it's very common that in order for
Speaker 1: white people to grasp any sort of understanding of racialized oppression,
Speaker 1: we kind of have to look for the closest thing
Speaker 1: that we can identify with. So oftentimes we'll bring forward
Speaker 1: our trauma card, whatever it was in our personal history,
Speaker 1: are familial history, lineage's ancestral history that has trauma attached
Speaker 1: to it, we will tend to first go there to
Speaker 1: access the pain of that, to somehow identify with the
Speaker 1: pain that bodies of culture experience in the world. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is really problematic because, first of all, there
Speaker 1: are no systems that equate to systemic racism and racial harm,
Speaker 1: especially in the United States in my opinion. And secondly,
Speaker 1: typically when we're contend with traumatized selves parts of ourselves
Speaker 1: that are traumatized, those parts tend to be younger, they
Speaker 1: tend to be less emotionally and relationally nuanced, they tend
Speaker 1: to be very reflexive, and they tend to kind of
Speaker 1: respond with extremes intensities. And so if we're in a
Speaker 1: cross cultural space and a white person is going into
Speaker 1: their trauma. When the purpose of the group is to
Speaker 1: speak about equity and specifically focus on racial equity, it
Speaker 1: within about two minutes can absolutely hijack a space. It
Speaker 1: can suck all the oxygen out of the room. And
Speaker 1: if it's a white woman, actually, also if it's a
Speaker 1: white male, like, there's different there's a different energy that comes.
Speaker 1: If it's a white woman, there's often a rush to soothe,
Speaker 1: and if it's a white male, it usually completely collapses.
Speaker 1: That usually completely closes the space, and there's a rush
Speaker 1: for all resources in the room to go and make
Speaker 1: sure that the white male is comfortable. What's interesting is
Speaker 1: that we are all socialized by patriarchy. No matter what
Speaker 1: our gender is, what our race, we are all socialized
Speaker 1: by patriarchy. And in a white supremacist, patriarchal culture, if
Speaker 1: the white man crumbles, there is a visceral, socialized response
Speaker 1: to make sure that he's okay, because if he's not okay,
Speaker 1: who's going to lead? Who's going to drive things forward?
Speaker 1: Because we've all been socialized to believe that supporting white
Speaker 1: men to lead is supporting our culture. These are things
Speaker 1: that I needed to really tease out over time. They're
Speaker 1: not obvious things that come to mind, but it's I
Speaker 1: started to read the phenomena in the room and go,
Speaker 1: what's happening here? When you were talking about that, what
Speaker 1: I thought about was like I thought about my mother
Speaker 1: and my father actually, and I thought about how like
Speaker 1: with my dad, it was like I needed to make
Speaker 1: sure he was okay because he was scary when he
Speaker 1: was not okay, And my mom I had to go
Speaker 1: make sure she was okay to soothe her because I
Speaker 1: was afraid in a completely different way of her not
Speaker 1: being okay. And so does that play into it also?
Speaker 1: Or is each person going to bring their own dynamic
Speaker 1: to this situation and you're sort of reporting what happens
Speaker 1: broadly speaking as a whole room. Yeah, I mean the
Speaker 1: tricky thing is is that it's multilayered, so each person
Speaker 1: brings their own family history into any interaction they have.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm speaking right now in large, sweeping statements,
Speaker 1: and I want to be careful about that because there
Speaker 1: are people that have done a lot of work around this.
Speaker 1: So I'm speaking about people in a particular phase of
Speaker 1: their healing journey and they're waking up process. So we
Speaker 1: each bring our individual kind of relationship to our parents
Speaker 1: or to our our caretakers or authority figures, regardless of
Speaker 1: their gender, into a space. And then we're also all
Speaker 1: bringing in our relationship hip to the social dynamics and
Speaker 1: the different systems and how we've been socialized by those systems.
Speaker 1: So there's many layers. It's incredibly complex to watch what
Speaker 1: white people do to maintain a certain kind of equilibrium,
Speaker 1: but also what bodies of culture and white people do.
Speaker 1: We're all also indoctrinated into white supremacy, So there's also
Speaker 1: a piece of I think you named it when you
Speaker 1: spoke about your father. There are definitely elements of fear,
Speaker 1: you know. Resuma said once as he was reflecting on
Speaker 1: history and accurate terms, he said, you know, white women's
Speaker 1: tears had the power to move a nation. And when
Speaker 1: Resuma spoke this, I felt the truth of those words
Speaker 1: in my body, and I felt the power and responsibility
Speaker 1: that I carry to heal and learn how to be
Speaker 1: regulated when I'm triggered, no matter what I'm triggered by,
Speaker 1: and if I haven't cleaned up the trauma of my
Speaker 1: family history, and I haven't cleaned up my relationship to domination,
Speaker 1: being dominated and also learning how to dominate. If I
Speaker 1: haven't done a tremendous amount of work around my triggers,
Speaker 1: I will not be in good shape when there's a
Speaker 1: cross racial situation and it gets heated. White people's white bodies,
Speaker 1: nervous systems tend to short circuit, tend to collapse, tend
Speaker 1: to go into fear and rescue and fix and in that,
Speaker 1: in that reflexive response, we lose so much of the
Speaker 1: nuance of what's actually happening to bodies of culture. So
Speaker 1: even in this conversation, the minute we start talking about
Speaker 1: white people's trauma, there's a whole universe that opens that
Speaker 1: we can dive into. And what I notice is how
Speaker 1: easy it is to start to center the white experience
Speaker 1: in focusing on white trauma, and then how white trauma
Speaker 1: is used. And then suddenly we're not even remembering that
Speaker 1: bodies of culture are in the space because we become
Speaker 1: so fixated. Does that make sense? It does. As you
Speaker 1: say that, my first reaction is that anybody when they
Speaker 1: are recalling their trauma, the world shrinks very quickly to
Speaker 1: them and their trauma. And so as you're saying all this,
Speaker 1: I can totally see to your point. How if you're
Speaker 1: in a session where the goal is to work on
Speaker 1: racial equity and you've got white trauma, then that's where
Speaker 1: all the attention goes. My question to that is, and
Speaker 1: this is what really interested me about resumes work when
Speaker 1: I first saw it, was what's the relationship with a
Speaker 1: white person healing their trauma and being able to engage
Speaker 1: in racial justice work? And again, I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: that's the phrase that you would use, but here I
Speaker 1: am being eggshell Walkee, but what's the relationship of white
Speaker 1: people healing their trauma? And I think we might be
Speaker 1: divided into different types of trauma because Resume talk about
Speaker 1: the trauma of the white body as a whole. But
Speaker 1: let's just stay with normal, developmental, run of the mill,
Speaker 1: your parents damaged you kind of trauma. How important is
Speaker 1: it to heal that either in conjunction with or before
Speaker 1: diving deeply into this kind of work or is that
Speaker 1: sort of, as you said, taking our eye off the target.
Speaker 1: So it's a both, and it is essential that white
Speaker 1: bodies learn how to tend to both our own experience,
Speaker 1: our own trauma, our own escalation, our own triggers and
Speaker 1: at the same time stay very much present to the whole.
Speaker 1: I'm a psychotherapist, I specialized in PTSD. I know a
Speaker 1: lot about complex PTSD and the traumatic reflexive response. And
Speaker 1: sometimes when I'm doing racial equity work, white people will
Speaker 1: get really upset with me because I'm not playing a
Speaker 1: therapeutic function with their trauma. I'm challenging them in a
Speaker 1: way where I'm asking them to hold both their activation
Speaker 1: and presence, humility and some equanimity as it relates to
Speaker 1: race and power in the space, and asking white people
Speaker 1: to forge both pathways simultaneously, which is what my invitation
Speaker 1: is. Is Is often an invitation into your own personal therapy
Speaker 1: and an invitation into actively engaging with equity work on
Speaker 1: a regular basis communality. Usually it's both of those things. Personally,
Speaker 1: for me, that was absolutely my journey. I would not
Speaker 1: be able to hold what I hold in a field
Speaker 1: alone or with resma in my own body and in
Speaker 1: a group had I not engaged for years in deep
Speaker 1: psychotherapy and and tending to my nervous system and my reactions.
Speaker 1: My traumatic reactions all were legitimate, But there's a muscle
Speaker 1: in having enough observing ego and this takes time. This
Speaker 1: isn't just like snap your fingers and you can do it.
Speaker 1: This takes time, and I have a lot of compassion
Speaker 1: for that. That we become aware of what is activating
Speaker 1: us and what part of us is going into a trigger,
Speaker 1: we become aware of who we become. So I often
Speaker 1: ask questions of white people that I work with, who
Speaker 1: do you become when you're stressed? Who do you become
Speaker 1: when something is taken away from you? Who do you
Speaker 1: become when you're triggered? Because there's who you become, and
Speaker 1: then if you're becoming that person in a cross racial relationship,
Speaker 1: there's going to be an extra element that you are
Speaker 1: a white body becoming that person. Oftentimes we'll say, but
Speaker 1: I'm like that with I'm like that with everyone. You know,
Speaker 1: that's just how I am, or that's just how I
Speaker 1: am when I'm triggered. What we don't have in our
Speaker 1: understanding is that there's a racial impact that runs through
Speaker 1: bodies of culture that we know nothing about. So we
Speaker 1: need to learn how to temper and yeah, be self
Speaker 1: responsible and holding both. I have so many questions from that.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm in the Buddhist mindful space a little bit,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of discussion about do you need
Speaker 1: to transform first before you do good work in the world,
Speaker 1: or like you, I've come to the conclusion it's really
Speaker 1: both right. Both those journeys ideally would be happening at
Speaker 1: the same time, which is why certain religions, despite many
Speaker 1: of their shortcomings, the one thing that they did in
Speaker 1: their best forms, tend to say is like, there is
Speaker 1: a system of caring about the world simultaneously with caring
Speaker 1: about your own spiritual development. Those two things happened together
Speaker 1: ideally in the best circumstances. I wanted to ask you
Speaker 1: a question about your program that's called Foundations and Somatic
Speaker 1: Abolitionism that you do with Resuma, and it's a two
Speaker 1: day program for a white person in that there's a
Speaker 1: first day that you go to before you can enter
Speaker 1: what I'll call the main group, which is bodies of
Speaker 1: I gotta ask you to clarify something, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to ask a question in the middle of a question.
Speaker 1: You've used a phrase in a number of times, and
Speaker 1: it's one that I don't know well, which is bodies
Speaker 1: of culture. Can you say what that is? I'm really
Speaker 1: tempted to go back to the question that the statement
Speaker 1: you just made about religions though, because there's a whole
Speaker 1: thing there as well, there's a whole piece that we
Speaker 1: could go into. Let's do bodies of culture, will go
Speaker 1: back and then we'll come back to your workshop. How
Speaker 1: about that? Okay? Great? Perfect. So the term bodies of
Speaker 1: culture was coined by Resummenticum authored My Grandmother's Hands. So
Speaker 1: you've had on the show and who's a dear friend
Speaker 1: and colleague of mine. So I'm going to do my
Speaker 1: best to define it as I know it through his definition,
Speaker 1: and I would say for more information on this, please
Speaker 1: check out Resuma's work. So bodies of culture, I think
Speaker 1: Resuma brought it into being to reclaim something of the
Speaker 1: truth of history that during the time of colonization, the
Speaker 1: strategy of white supremacy was to remove certain people from
Speaker 1: their culture, from their languages, from their rituals, from their land,
Speaker 1: and a strategy of removing them physically, so physically removing
Speaker 1: African people from their land, from their languages, from their traditions,
Speaker 1: bringing them over on ships, and the systematic erasure and
Speaker 1: punishment that was tied to them reclaiming any of or
Speaker 1: keeping alive their language or their rituals. Also, when we
Speaker 1: look at indigenous people people's on Turtle Island, the genocide,
Speaker 1: the very conscious act of the white US government Canadian
Speaker 1: governments to remove Indigenous children from their families and place
Speaker 1: them in residential schools was very specifically to interrupt culture.
Speaker 1: And so what Resume is doing with this term is
Speaker 1: to not just make it about melatonin and skin color.
Speaker 1: There's an element that looks at the shaw hierarchy. There's
Speaker 1: for sure an element of the darker your skin is
Speaker 1: in this country, the more of a type of oppression
Speaker 1: you'll experience. But then there is also there are indigenous
Speaker 1: people who might move through the world with lighter skin,
Speaker 1: and yet white supremacy has had an equal impact on
Speaker 1: their culture and on their generations backwards and forwards. And
Speaker 1: so that term is to really reclaim the culture that
Speaker 1: different peoples are tied to. So is that term replace
Speaker 1: bodies of color? Would it be safe to say it's
Speaker 1: a broader term that incorporates more elements of harm in it,
Speaker 1: and it's a more inclusive term. I wouldn't say more
Speaker 1: or less. This is actually a conversation that is ongoing,
Speaker 1: and I can say there's no right answer. I'm sure
Speaker 1: that I could receive a ton of critique on whatever
Speaker 1: answer I bring forward. People of color is a very
Speaker 1: general term, and in that generalization where talking about Black, Indigenous, Asian, Indian,
Speaker 1: we're talking about so many cultures. They have so much context,
Speaker 1: so much richness. I think that in using the term
Speaker 1: people of color, it was getting used in a way
Speaker 1: that was functioning to erase. So the purpose was to include,
Speaker 1: but it was functioning to somehow erase. Nuance then got
Speaker 1: turned into black, Indigenous and other people of color, all
Speaker 1: other people of color, which was some effort to identify
Speaker 1: the most impacted in the United States, most impacted communities.
Speaker 1: I think that each person needs to sense what actually
Speaker 1: feels true for them. I really identify with the term
Speaker 1: bodies of culture. Now, at the beginning, it took me
Speaker 1: a minute to let it really land. But when I
Speaker 1: started to really take in the meaning behind the phrase,
Speaker 1: it started to gain dimensionality, so that when I say
Speaker 1: bodies of culture, I am feeling remembering sense and I
Speaker 1: am connected to Black culture, I am connected to indigenous cultures,
Speaker 1: multiple cultures. I'm connected to the complexity that white supremacy
Speaker 1: tries to reduce but that might not be where you're
Speaker 1: at with it. So one thing I would always say
Speaker 1: to people's don't just do it because it's like the
Speaker 1: thing you're supposed to do, because then it becomes eggshell walkie, right,
Speaker 1: it becomes something that we're just trying to behave. Well,
Speaker 1: it's actually what is the substance? Where is the substance
Speaker 1: in you? If you really take in that new term
Speaker 1: and you internalize it when you speak, it doesn't have
Speaker 1: a sense of connection to it. And if that's the truth,
Speaker 1: then I would say, yeah, Eric, sounds like you get
Speaker 1: that and it feels right to say it. But if
Speaker 1: you were just doing it to get the right thing,
Speaker 1: I would say, use the terms that you feel connected to.
Speaker 1: I don't want to lose your thread about wanting to
Speaker 1: go back to religion, but I have to ask about
Speaker 1: what you just said there, which is, don't just behave
Speaker 1: your way into this. Right. However, given the nature of
Speaker 1: oftentimes the harm that we can do without even really
Speaker 1: realizing what we're doing, is there not an initial place
Speaker 1: of just at least saying I may not fully understand yet.
Speaker 1: This makes me think about impact and intent. Right, just
Speaker 1: say like, well, I didn't intend to hurt you. But
Speaker 1: I did the thing I said did hurt you. And
Speaker 1: I may not fully understand even why yet my journey,
Speaker 1: I may not even be far enough along on my
Speaker 1: journey yet. Do we still not want to try and
Speaker 1: behave in the way that people are suggesting is the
Speaker 1: less harmful way, even when we're not fully along in understanding. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is a great question. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Are we allowed to swear on the show? I swear away.
Speaker 1: It's not a big swear, But I often say when
Speaker 1: I'm working with white groups, like it all boils down
Speaker 1: to like being less of an asshole. It's like I'm
Speaker 1: learning how not to be an asshole, and white supremacist
Speaker 1: culture has really taught me how to be an asshole
Speaker 1: in ways that I don't even know. So that's a
Speaker 1: baseline in my entire life. That would be a value
Speaker 1: that I have in all my relations, right, Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think the tricky thing that I've observed is
Speaker 1: that when white people start to behave less dangerous without
Speaker 1: internalizing the true meaning behind the behavioral change, we become
Speaker 1: a wolf in sheep's clothing. And I have in that
Speaker 1: and experienced in myself I have seen and experience so
Speaker 1: much harm by white people learning how to do the
Speaker 1: thing and then getting a pass because they're acting the
Speaker 1: right way, but it's not tied to a true value
Speaker 1: and a depth of understanding and the heart our hearts.
Speaker 1: Our hearts often get really put on the shelf, and
Speaker 1: we're not emotionally engaged. So of course, don't behave like
Speaker 1: an asshole. Of course, ask what people use for their pronouns,
Speaker 1: and ask how they identify and how they like to
Speaker 1: be referred to. And these are all forms of etiquette
Speaker 1: that are actually more about decency, the human decency that
Speaker 1: we're socialized to not have to tend to. When we're
Speaker 1: in the dominant groups, we don't actually have to tend
Speaker 1: two identities that aren't in the dominant like we can
Speaker 1: just function in the dominant groups and sail along. And
Speaker 1: I think my my most recent invitation has been for
Speaker 1: white people to slow down and notice why am I
Speaker 1: doing what I'm doing? If I'm given a correction or
Speaker 1: a reorientation, or if I'm called in and I'm just
Speaker 1: fixing the act, but I'm actually not doing the inner
Speaker 1: work that's tied to the harmful act. What's happening there
Speaker 1: like that to actually ask ourselves those harder questions rather
Speaker 1: than just getting a pass and learning how to behave.
Speaker 1: So does that answer your question? Because it is a
Speaker 1: really important question, and I think a lot of white
Speaker 1: people have this question. Yeah, where I am, um stammering
Speaker 1: around is the well, I'm not even quite sure where
Speaker 1: I want to I want to take that. So let's
Speaker 1: let's let's move on because I'm not Yeah, you sure,
Speaker 1: because it seems like there's something there and we can
Speaker 1: we can take a minute. Yeah, I think what's there
Speaker 1: is is that um sense of not being sure how
Speaker 1: deeply committed to the work maybe I am? And can
Speaker 1: I just reflect to you? I mean, I have the
Speaker 1: ability to see you right now, but I also want
Speaker 1: to reflect to you the change in the tone of
Speaker 1: your voice and the change in your vibe when you
Speaker 1: just dared to drop down into a layer of transparency
Speaker 1: and vulnerability. And in doing that, this is just my experience,
Speaker 1: but in doing that, you became so much more accessible,
Speaker 1: even though what you were saying could be incredibly harmful
Speaker 1: to some people, you know, hurtful. Let's say, to hear
Speaker 1: a white man say, honestly, I don't know how committed
Speaker 1: to this. I don't know how deep I'm willing to go.
Speaker 1: And someone's going you're talking about my life and my
Speaker 1: baby's lives, you're talking about my family's lives, and you
Speaker 1: don't know how far you're willing to go, and you're
Speaker 1: sitting there and yeah, that is trustworthy. It sucks and
Speaker 1: it hurts, and it's painful, and it's ugly at times
Speaker 1: to look at. But that level of honesty and embodied
Speaker 1: truth telling, that is the place that I wish white
Speaker 1: people to be able and willing to go to, because
Speaker 1: that's where we can start to have real conversations and
Speaker 1: stay connected. I don't want to leave you when you
Speaker 1: say that. I want to lean into that moment. I
Speaker 1: want to go have a cup of coffee and actually
Speaker 1: open that as another white person in your community. Did
Speaker 1: you feel the textual change totally? Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I've had that textual change happen one other time to
Speaker 1: that level. It was also with Resma, and it was
Speaker 1: and he stopped me, like you did, said, hey, let's
Speaker 1: stay here for a second. So so let's pretend we're
Speaker 1: not pretending. Let's let's not pretend let's let's not pretend. Um,
Speaker 1: let's not pretend at all. Where do you go with that?
Speaker 1: Where do I go with that? We go into connection
Speaker 1: if we weren't on a screen right now, or if
Speaker 1: I was working with you in a session, or if
Speaker 1: you were someone in my community personally in my community.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna step back a second. So Dr Kenneth
Speaker 1: Hardy is one of my mentors and teachers, and I
Speaker 1: would say, someone who who rocked my world with holding
Speaker 1: cross racial spaces, cross cultural spaces where truth was spoken.
Speaker 1: And I would watch ken who's an older black man,
Speaker 1: he's a therapist. I would watch him speak with the
Speaker 1: most challenging, problematic white person in the room who was
Speaker 1: just left right and center, just causing harm with every
Speaker 1: word that came out of their mouth. I watched him
Speaker 1: speak not only clear truth, but I watched him hold
Speaker 1: that person's dignity and humanity at the exact same time.
Speaker 1: So my goal, my job with you, as a white
Speaker 1: body person to another white bodied person we are of
Speaker 1: the same community, would be to stay connected to my
Speaker 1: own heart and believe in in your humanity, to connect
Speaker 1: to your dignity and my own dignity, and to hold
Speaker 1: you lovingly and fiercely accountable to the impact and the
Speaker 1: reality of that statement, and to do so in a
Speaker 1: way where I'm not shaming or blaming or you know,
Speaker 1: making you feel like ship, because that's not going to
Speaker 1: do anything. And I'm also not going to protect you
Speaker 1: and lift you up because you had a moment of vulnerability,
Speaker 1: which is also the other thing that happens, like oh,
Speaker 1: the white man was vulnerable, and then suddenly it's like,
Speaker 1: we don't hold you accountable, and that doesn't work either.
Speaker 1: So it would be that combination to lean in and
Speaker 1: to stay with fierce accountability and to stay in it
Speaker 1: with you. We stay in the conversation. If we were
Speaker 1: moving into having more time, it would be to pull
Speaker 1: on that thread and to say, great, what happens in
Speaker 1: your system when you sense into what it means to
Speaker 1: go deeper, what arises for you, what images, what fears,
Speaker 1: what impulses, and often it leads to white people needing
Speaker 1: to give something up. If I do this, I won't
Speaker 1: be able to have my job. And if I don't
Speaker 1: have my job, I won't be able to put a
Speaker 1: roof over my family's heads, and I won't be able
Speaker 1: to afford my child's private school, and I won't be
Speaker 1: able to put food on the table. And oftentimes our
Speaker 1: fears are linked to our personal protection and our personal
Speaker 1: security physically or psychically, And so then it would be okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about that. Let's reality test that can we
Speaker 1: actually imagine a world where you can have and your
Speaker 1: family can have and it's not at the cost of
Speaker 1: other people not having? Do you have to have as
Speaker 1: much as you have? I'm now speaking, I don't know
Speaker 1: what your relationship to economy is, but that would be
Speaker 1: the question. Do we need to have as much security
Speaker 1: as we hoard as white people? What would it mean
Speaker 1: to give some of that up? What happens and then
Speaker 1: our bodies start to go through such a visceral response
Speaker 1: when we're actually asked to release, to let go, to
Speaker 1: to not have so much power and security. It's deep
Speaker 1: the question that comes up, and I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: very possibly a defense question. So I will let you
Speaker 1: tell me if it is, we'll give you. My best
Speaker 1: guest is when I look at injustice in the world,
Speaker 1: it seems essentially infinite, and some of its racial, some
Speaker 1: of its economic. There's so many different areas and This
Speaker 1: is something as a person I've often thought about, is
Speaker 1: I know people who are so concerned about so many
Speaker 1: causes of injustice and singularly ineffective in making any impact
Speaker 1: in any of them. And again, we have a tendency
Speaker 1: to judge where people am. But somebody might say, my
Speaker 1: thing is animal cruelty. That's where I'm all in, very important.
Speaker 1: I'm actually not giving myself. I'm not letting myself off
Speaker 1: the hook like, well, my thing is, I'm all in
Speaker 1: on X because I don't, you know, I frequently question
Speaker 1: the degree to which my morals and ethics live up
Speaker 1: to where I want them to be. But what about
Speaker 1: somebody who did say, you know, I get what's happening
Speaker 1: racial justice wise, but my thing is sex trafficking. I
Speaker 1: want to eliminate sex trafficking. And that's where I put
Speaker 1: all my energy and my attention and my resources. Talk
Speaker 1: to me about that, because that's kind of one of
Speaker 1: the things where I think it's easy to get distracted
Speaker 1: by the amount of problem and where to focus attention
Speaker 1: and energy. You've clearly chosen this as your lane. I
Speaker 1: guess what does that bring up in you? And feel
Speaker 1: free to say that's a defensive question. Let's get back
Speaker 1: on topic. But I don't think it's a great question.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's defensive. Away from the moment
Speaker 1: we were just talking about, you can decide that as
Speaker 1: you track yourself. You know, I could have a theory
Speaker 1: about that, but it's also about you to track. You're
Speaker 1: also asking a good question. So let's say this. I
Speaker 1: hope before I answer your question, I hope that after
Speaker 1: we get off this interview that you will find yourself
Speaker 1: in a moment where you can reflect on the statement
Speaker 1: that you made and go a few levels deeper into
Speaker 1: why that fear is there or why that statement is
Speaker 1: there and what's underneath it. And I'm available if you
Speaker 1: want to talk more about that. Okay. So that's what
Speaker 1: I'll say around that piece, so we don't totally drop, Okay,
Speaker 1: And the question that you're asking comes up a lot,
Speaker 1: and you know, I would say, actually, I would not
Speaker 1: say that I've picked race as racial equity as my lane.
Speaker 1: UM I speak about and I give my life to
Speaker 1: intersectional equity. I just find that as a white woman
Speaker 1: and as a therapist and as uh someone who grew
Speaker 1: up on Turtle Island that the work with structural systemic
Speaker 1: institutional racism rocks rocks me in a way that makes
Speaker 1: me available to tend to a lot of other systems
Speaker 1: of oppression. So yeah, it is my road into a
Speaker 1: rehumanization process that makes all other systems impactful to me,
Speaker 1: like I care about all of them. Actually. Now, if
Speaker 1: you were to bring sex trafficking in as the topic,
Speaker 1: or as the issue, or as the thing you wanted
Speaker 1: to give your life to, I would say, thank you.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly important. It's an atrocity that is underrepresented in
Speaker 1: our society. And I would also say, if you want
Speaker 1: to look at the statistics of the bodies that are
Speaker 1: trafficked across the world, high majority would be women of color.
Speaker 1: And when we talk about why that topic of sex
Speaker 1: trafficking is so under reported and so under featured, and
Speaker 1: so under examined and untended to by multiple countries in
Speaker 1: the world, I would offer that it's probably because women
Speaker 1: of color are the victims, predominantly majority victims of that industry,
Speaker 1: and that white supremacist culture very conveniently doesn't care so
Speaker 1: much to address industries where bodies of culture are the
Speaker 1: primary victims. So you can't get away from the racial topic.
Speaker 1: And that's why I actually don't even like to talk
Speaker 1: about racism in the context of American culture anymore, because
Speaker 1: it is global. Global white supremacy is it is so
Speaker 1: ever present it, and we tend to locate it in
Speaker 1: America because we tend to be a little bit more
Speaker 1: intense and exaggerated in all of our behaviors. But that
Speaker 1: industry is a global issue. And then if you look
Speaker 1: at the primary victims, there will be a racial component.
Speaker 1: So I would invite you into, Great, that's your topic.
Speaker 1: Here's a racial lens, here's a capitalist lens, here's a
Speaker 1: you know, and then you would be invited into again
Speaker 1: this rehumanization process that requires us to check any points
Speaker 1: where our heart goes into apathy, where we turn away
Speaker 1: from atrocity, and we nome out. If you go into
Speaker 1: any system of oppression, fully hopefully you will be going
Speaker 1: through a deep rehumanization process where then all of the
Speaker 1: other systems will land as relevant and important. To tend
Speaker 1: to naming a fear here is getting swallowed alive by it? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the fear of being swallowed alive by it.
Speaker 1: That everything that you see feel, do think about opening
Speaker 1: your heart let's talk about that. Yeah, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a movie called Last Chance for Eden by Lemon Noir.
Speaker 1: I recommend anybody watch it if you can. It's actually
Speaker 1: going to be on the E R E Resources page.
Speaker 1: There's a moment where a woman in the middle of
Speaker 1: a group process, She's a black woman, and a very
Speaker 1: simil our question is asked by a white woman, I believe,
Speaker 1: and this woman looks with tears rolling down her face
Speaker 1: and she says, welcome to the pain. Welcome to the pain.
Speaker 1: We've been here a long time and we've been waiting
Speaker 1: for you. Welcome to the pain. And when I saw
Speaker 1: that and I realized and felt what she was conveying
Speaker 1: our fear of being swallowed whole. That was my fear.
Speaker 1: I got swallowed by grief and rage. For five years.
Speaker 1: I was in grief and rage. When I started to
Speaker 1: really see what was happening in the world, I couldn't
Speaker 1: be effective. I had so much rage moving through me
Speaker 1: when I saw how much disparity there was, how much atrocity,
Speaker 1: and then the grief would be overwhelming. There is a
Speaker 1: process that I needed to open to and get support around.
Speaker 1: And it is absolutely nothing. It is not a drop
Speaker 1: in the bucket of what bodies of culture have to
Speaker 1: experience from the moment they're born, where their child is born.
Speaker 1: And so when I look at how much there's a
Speaker 1: genuine fear of being swallowed whole, I think it comes
Speaker 1: from an authentic place, and I say, Okay, let's give
Speaker 1: a few minutes to that fear, and then let's get
Speaker 1: to work. We need to actually dig in and go.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be rough, it's gonna be tough, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be hard. We need to do it together. We can't
Speaker 1: do this work as individuals. We have to do this
Speaker 1: work communally, which is why I'm so grateful for the
Speaker 1: work with Resume. Before working with Resume, I was working
Speaker 1: with groups of white people, but in a very individual way.
Speaker 1: And what we've been working with in the last few
Speaker 1: years is how do we build fields of solidarity and
Speaker 1: fields communal fields where we are holding these processes together.
Speaker 1: And when we hold things together communally, we can't really
Speaker 1: get swallowed whole. And I don't think white people really
Speaker 1: know how to of an act and be communal. We
Speaker 1: lost our ties, we lost our connection. I mean, we've
Speaker 1: lost our connection. Also, I want to say, you know,
Speaker 1: I was about ten years into the work before I
Speaker 1: found earth based practices and rituals that allowed me to
Speaker 1: anchor and allowed me to gifted me with the possibility
Speaker 1: of resource that before that, I was getting overwhelmed, you know,
Speaker 1: because my people and my people's people were cut from
Speaker 1: rituals and disconnected from Earth, the resource of Mother Earth,
Speaker 1: the relationship of Mother Earth, and in all of that,
Speaker 1: our resource becomes so limited that we think it's just
Speaker 1: up to me and my little body and my psyche
Speaker 1: and my understanding of the world to metabolize thousands of
Speaker 1: years of oppression, four years of atrocity related to race.
Speaker 1: You know, it's so crazy when we think about it.
Speaker 1: So I would say, it's a very logical thing, it's
Speaker 1: a very common thing, and then there are steps past that.
Speaker 1: So you see, like Eric, when you ask a lot
Speaker 1: of these questions, these are really common and really important
Speaker 1: questions that I think a lot of white people get
Speaker 1: stuck by. They get stuck on and then don't move forward.
Speaker 1: And in all of my responses, it's like there's an
Speaker 1: invitation into both yes, that's going to come up, and no,
Speaker 1: you don't get to use that as a ticket out.
Speaker 1: And here are five different ways that we can move forward.
Speaker 1: Pick one, and then that does kind of challenge you
Speaker 1: to then go, well, okay, you know like and and,
Speaker 1: but it's still has to come from a place in
Speaker 1: you where you are saying yes to the next step.
Speaker 1: So for people who are hearing this and are relating
Speaker 1: to what I'm saying, what's happening, what are some of
Speaker 1: these five different ways to take that next step related
Speaker 1: to feelings swallowed whole or overwhelmed to overcome well, just
Speaker 1: I mean, for lack of a better word, that there's
Speaker 1: an ambivalence about moving deeper. There's an ambivalence about, like
Speaker 1: I said earlier, how committed am I really? And so
Speaker 1: I think in general, and maybe this is a chance
Speaker 1: for you to talk about some of the work that
Speaker 1: you do at E R E. But people who say, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm already to immerse myself a little bit deeper, to
Speaker 1: go beyond just all right, I'm sending you know, fifty
Speaker 1: dollars to whatever the charity is, right, or I'm learning
Speaker 1: to use my words right, But I actually want to
Speaker 1: learn more, and not just learn more, but learn more
Speaker 1: in service of doing more the living practice. That's usually
Speaker 1: when things get easier in terms of working with white
Speaker 1: people that before that big step into okay, I want
Speaker 1: to learn how to live this as a life practice.
Speaker 1: When people get to that place, it's like great, hallellujah,
Speaker 1: let's go, you know, And there's so many things. There's
Speaker 1: so many ways to do that, and to do that well,
Speaker 1: getting folks to actually stop just writing the quick check
Speaker 1: or not even writing the check, but getting to the
Speaker 1: place where they might be ticking the boxes but not
Speaker 1: entering into the work that is usually the hardest. That
Speaker 1: is the hardest work, and that can take decades, that
Speaker 1: can take a lifetime. Do you want me to speak
Speaker 1: about the people before or the people that are really
Speaker 1: ready to live the work? Let's talk about the people before.
Speaker 1: I'm going to just add a little flavor to the question, right,
Speaker 1: because I do behavioral coaching with people. Right, So I
Speaker 1: have people who show up pay me a certain amount
Speaker 1: of money because there's a change that they profess they
Speaker 1: really want in their life. And while I think I'm well,
Speaker 1: I think I'm a pretty good coach. Right, we have
Speaker 1: a tendency as people to say I want to do X,
Speaker 1: I want to do why I care about Z, and
Speaker 1: then life just carries on, just carries on. And so
Speaker 1: maybe that's the place I'm coming for, is the person
Speaker 1: who occasionally, here's a conversation like this, something awakens in
Speaker 1: them that says it wants to go a little bit deeper,
Speaker 1: and then life sort of sweeps them out to see again.
Speaker 1: Does that make any sense? Yeah, it does. I'm really
Speaker 1: aware that we're coming out of two years of a
Speaker 1: global pandemic where I'm I'm seeing more and more people,
Speaker 1: all the people in my life and beyond, in very
Speaker 1: compromised emotionally, psychologically, stress tolerance, economically, just a level of
Speaker 1: stress that's unprecedented I've never seen in a collective before.
Speaker 1: As we're coming back into a world without masks, I
Speaker 1: get your question, and I also want to be sensitive
Speaker 1: to how much loss, how much death, and how much
Speaker 1: anxiety and tightness the world has been under and also
Speaker 1: understanding that disproportionately that has impacted people of color more
Speaker 1: than white community. And I say that because you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes life does sweep us away, so you know, life happens.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can say that in my journey, there
Speaker 1: was an intellectual understanding of what was right and what
Speaker 1: was wrong that was connected to my value system. So
Speaker 1: I would first say, what are your values? What are
Speaker 1: your values in how you want? Do? Are your values
Speaker 1: to live a life that is about you and your
Speaker 1: own taking care of you and your own. For some people,
Speaker 1: they're going to say yeah. I don't spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time convincing those people that they need to change
Speaker 1: some of their core values to become more like me.
Speaker 1: I found that that is a waste of a lot
Speaker 1: of energy. There's a middle population of people that go,
Speaker 1: I care about the world, I'm overwhelmed by life, and
Speaker 1: I need to make sure that me and my own
Speaker 1: are taken care of and I'll do what I can
Speaker 1: when I can. And I think that's the group that
Speaker 1: you're speaking about. Maybe yeah, that you get swept away
Speaker 1: by life. I think that I would say that's that's
Speaker 1: largely the group yeah people who go, yeah, I do
Speaker 1: you know, I recognize that life is about more than
Speaker 1: just taking care of me and my own. I want
Speaker 1: to contribute to a better, more equitable, fair world. I
Speaker 1: want to do that, and I find between by the
Speaker 1: time I go to work and take care of the
Speaker 1: kids and pay the bills and do all that, that
Speaker 1: all I can do is collapse on the couch and
Speaker 1: my actions are not aligning with what I think my
Speaker 1: values are. Yeah, and I feel like we're living in
Speaker 1: a time where equity practices are not just about taking
Speaker 1: a workshop and being a social justice warrior and going
Speaker 1: to the streets. You know, equity practices have become very
Speaker 1: nuanced and there are so many ways to live equity practice.
Speaker 1: So I would say something like, how are you raising
Speaker 1: your kids? What books are you reading to your children?
Speaker 1: How are you talking to your children about race? Where
Speaker 1: are you spending your money when you need to go
Speaker 1: to the grocery store, when you need to go to
Speaker 1: a bookstore. You know, these are ways that life is
Speaker 1: still happening. You still have to do life, and you're
Speaker 1: making informed choices to push the needle in any area
Speaker 1: where you have contact. So I would say to people,
Speaker 1: first of all, you need to become educated on what
Speaker 1: it means to engage with children related to racial awareness,
Speaker 1: or engage financially even if you're not a wealthy person.
Speaker 1: And then how do you share with your friends that
Speaker 1: you prefer to go to a black owned bookstore then Amazon, Well,
Speaker 1: that's going to be a great conversation. Do you dare
Speaker 1: to have that conversation at dinner. That's not going to
Speaker 1: take extra time from you. You're already having dinner with
Speaker 1: your friends. But are you choosing to have that conversation,
Speaker 1: Are you choosing to open those moments of insights or
Speaker 1: because you're exhausted and we can all use that as
Speaker 1: some form of an excuse, you know, not really getting
Speaker 1: around to looking at the books that your children are reading,
Speaker 1: which are white. Are you not talking with your teacher,
Speaker 1: your children's teachers about how they are defining gender norms
Speaker 1: or racial inequities in the classroom, those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: So I don't find that it's actually about the thing itself.
Speaker 1: I find that most people in the situation you're talking
Speaker 1: about haven't made a core decision that this is something
Speaker 1: that they want to put their life energy into. And
Speaker 1: that's a much deeper commitment. It's a deeper value system shift.
Speaker 1: And I will invite people into their heart. I will
Speaker 1: often say, you know, if you have children, just for
Speaker 1: a moment, consider if someone didn't have the time or
Speaker 1: the energy to work towards something that threatened your child's life.
Speaker 1: Every day, I invite white bodies to think about really
Speaker 1: what it would be like to live in a world
Speaker 1: where people chose white bodies chose their convenience over the
Speaker 1: life of children that are being killed. Think about that,
Speaker 1: you know, there's just there's a depth to it. It's
Speaker 1: not and it's not about a right or wrong. It's
Speaker 1: literally like when I feel into that, there's a pit
Speaker 1: in my stomach. It's like, we do we do that?
Speaker 1: Why do we do that? What's happening there? And that
Speaker 1: often brings people into very uncomfortable experiences that they want
Speaker 1: to get away from and then tend to get more
Speaker 1: busy and more excuses come. There's no easy answer for
Speaker 1: that question. So just to perceive, like the shift right,
Speaker 1: the shift that we talked about earlier, the shift that
Speaker 1: just happened in you. There is a thing that Resume
Speaker 1: speaks about around vibe, around vibe, like the vibe of
Speaker 1: white people, the kind of vibe that we send off.
Speaker 1: And in working with a lot of white folks, I
Speaker 1: realized that it's something that we don't understand. Most white
Speaker 1: people are like, what do you mean by vibe? And
Speaker 1: I noticed that bodies of culture, and specifically black bodies,
Speaker 1: read vibe before anything else, before our behavior and our words.
Speaker 1: They're reading our vibe. And one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: I could track kind of that you went off a
Speaker 1: little bit or when you dropped into more vulnerability, is
Speaker 1: there was a vibe change. And I just think that
Speaker 1: that's something that we tend to be really ignorant about
Speaker 1: what our vibe is. And you know, I know, for
Speaker 1: a really long time I was engaged in this work intellectually,
Speaker 1: and I would say there was a certain part of
Speaker 1: my value, like righteous value, that was really committed to equity,
Speaker 1: but my vibe was still running really dominant, and my
Speaker 1: vibe was still harmful. I had not learned how to
Speaker 1: drop into presence, vulnerability availability, and it was very hard
Speaker 1: for me to have and maintain relationships with bodies of
Speaker 1: culture in my life because I hadn't really learned that
Speaker 1: part yet. So I just wanted to name that because
Speaker 1: I think it's something that white people are often very
Speaker 1: confused by. So in your workshop on Somitic abolitionism, the
Speaker 1: first day is for white bodies. What's happening in that
Speaker 1: first day is some of it learning to pick up
Speaker 1: on things like vibe. I mean, what I find interesting
Speaker 1: is you mentioned you were doing this work for years
Speaker 1: before you could figure that out. Are there times where
Speaker 1: you just after that first day, like you're sort of
Speaker 1: screening certain people out where you're like, look, you're not
Speaker 1: even in the neighborhood of being able to go into
Speaker 1: across cultural space on this because the amount of work
Speaker 1: to be done is so great. Well, for sure, the
Speaker 1: foundations and somatic abolitionism that Resume and I do, they're
Speaker 1: structured in a very particular way where I would say,
Speaker 1: regardless of where white people are on their journey, there's
Speaker 1: little ability for them to be able to cause direct harm.
Speaker 1: So we've structured it in a way where white bodies
Speaker 1: are with me first, and I spend you know, six
Speaker 1: hours speaking about a lot of the things that we
Speaker 1: just talked about, trying to get the white bodies in
Speaker 1: better shape to at least be able to sit back
Speaker 1: and take in the next day. That's with Resuma and
Speaker 1: in a cross racial, cross cultural space. But in that
Speaker 1: eight hours with Resuma, he is mostly doing you know,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of presentation, and if he works with people,
Speaker 1: he tends to prioritize working with bodies of cultures. So
Speaker 1: white bodies are asked to sit back, and we also
Speaker 1: don't have the chat open all the time, because white
Speaker 1: people can cause a lot of harm in the chat,
Speaker 1: and so some people would say they feel monitored or controlled,
Speaker 1: and we're really okay with that because the evidence shows
Speaker 1: that white bodies we don't know when we're causing harm,
Speaker 1: and we would like people to receive the information. And
Speaker 1: then the next week we have retention spaces, and I'm
Speaker 1: with the white bodies and resumas with bodies of culture
Speaker 1: in retention spaces where people can bring their questions or
Speaker 1: their challenges, and then it's not in a cross cultural space.
Speaker 1: We don't actually hold mixed spaces until people are, you know,
Speaker 1: a few years into the work and have shown that they,
Speaker 1: especially white bodies, have shown that they can work with
Speaker 1: what comes up for them and not just immediately dump
Speaker 1: their dirty pain into a space as a therapist. Is
Speaker 1: the best work done as a white body to become
Speaker 1: more I'll just use the word educated, but I don't
Speaker 1: think that's the right word intuitive more ready to do
Speaker 1: the work. Is it best done in community or is
Speaker 1: some of it often usefully done one on one with
Speaker 1: like someone like you. I definitely think both. I really do.
Speaker 1: I think we have to do this work communally. We
Speaker 1: have to because the issue is too large, too many
Speaker 1: people are dying. It's too big for us to do
Speaker 1: in silos. To do as islands, we have to come
Speaker 1: together communally, and there's a struggle for a lot of
Speaker 1: white bodies and being in communal space around these topics.
Speaker 1: We trigger each other. We want to cancel each other
Speaker 1: and kick each other out and shame each other. And
Speaker 1: there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in white
Speaker 1: community when we learn how do we stay together? When
Speaker 1: we go through that process, all of that grappling communally,
Speaker 1: we are tending to our inner muscles of being able
Speaker 1: to hold more together. That is a beautiful process that
Speaker 1: is needed. And at the same time, we have to
Speaker 1: work on educating ourselves having accountability partners, which might be
Speaker 1: a friend, it might be a coach, it might be
Speaker 1: people that want to be accountability partners that aren't a
Speaker 1: coach or a friend. They just want to be your
Speaker 1: accountability partner where you're actually talking through like the more
Speaker 1: specific nuances of your experience. We're all needed on all levels. Truly,
Speaker 1: I find that the people that are just doing this
Speaker 1: work individually really struggle, actually, really really struggle with feelings
Speaker 1: of alienation and druggle with how to bring this work
Speaker 1: into their workplace or their family because they feel like
Speaker 1: they're doing it alone, they're holding it alone. It makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. So this is one of our
Speaker 1: long interviews ever. Yeah, one of our one of our
Speaker 1: longest ever was because I'm long winded. No, no, no.
Speaker 1: We could have done it for another hour and a
Speaker 1: half probably and and be just still scratching the surface.
Speaker 1: Your website is Education for Racial Equity dot com. Will
Speaker 1: have links in the show notes to that where people
Speaker 1: can find the offerings that you have. And thank you
Speaker 1: so much for your time. Thank you for the skill
Speaker 1: in which you were gentle and yet sort of hemmed
Speaker 1: off the exits which you know, I mean genuinely like
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Thank you so much, Eric for your
Speaker 1: questions and also for the invitation, and yeah, for your
Speaker 1: engagement with the work. May it continue. If what you
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