Hello, and welcome to Stepping Into Truth, the podcast where we take on the issues of race, gender and social justice. I'm your host Omkari Williams, and I'm very happy that you're here with me today. Hosting this podcast means that I have the privilege of speaking with people who are out in the world, making a difference with their day jobs, their programs, their art, their activism, and I truly love doing this work. If you would like to support me, you can do so for as little as $3 a month by becoming a member of my Patreon community. You can go to patreon.com/OmkariWilliams and sign up. There's also a link on my website OmkariWilliams.com.
My guest today Resmaa Menakem is a Master of Social Work, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and a Somatic Experiencing Professional. He is a healer, therapist, a New York Times best selling author of My Grandmother's Hands. Resmaa Menakem is a visionary justice leadership coach, organizational strategist and master trainer. To help justice leaders really realize their potential in the areas of equity and race Resmaa created Cultural Somatics which utilizes the body and resilience as mechanisms for growth. And I am so happy to have Resmaa on the podcast. Hi, Resmaa, how are you?
Not too bad sis? How are you?
I am you know, given the givens I'm doing pretty well. You know, I mean, we are..
Given the givens, exactly right.
We are living in some interesting times. And yeah, it's not that much fun. But here we are. I want to start this conversation actually talking about that, because the timing of this really feels perfect to me. As we're speaking the Derrick Chauvin jury is deliberating the case of his killing of George Floyd. And Chicago is dealing with the killing of an unarmed 13 year old boy, Adam Toledo, at the hands of the police. And I could go on and on and on. And your book deals with addressing trauma, it addresses trauma held in Black bodies, in white bodies, and police bodies. And I know that I am feeling traumatized by all that's happening right now and continues to happen. So I would love to start by talking about what you mean by the trauma that we are holding in our bodies and how that works. In all of us collectively, but also in those individual groups.
Yeah. So as we sit here, while we wait for a verdict, many of us are having not only a cognitive experience, but also an embodied experience, right? There's just holding, there's this bracing, right? And especially especially in the Black body, this sense of bracing for, for injustice. The sense of bracing for for the other shoe to drop. The sense that something untoward is going to happen because my skin is Black, that is not something that is just true for this generation. That is a long historical, energetic pressure that we all experience. And so as we sit and wait for this, we imagine what it was like to sit in wait to hear if the person that shot, Martin Luther King was going to go to jail. We imagined if the people who murdered Fred Hampton, if they were going to go to jail, if the Central Park Five, we're going to be acquitted and made innocent, right?
But like, we were constantly waiting for these things, and it goes across time. So when I'm talking about trauma, I'm talking about the weathering effects of things like that, right? That those things weather the muscular skeletal system, weather the brain architecture, weather the endrocrine system. And we walk around thinking something is fraudulent or wrong with us because we're holding this stuff like that. And it starts the weathering before we even land on the planet. So we had this notion that something is wrong in the spirit of things, in the universe of things. And so trauma really is about, I think about it as what I call HIP, Historical, Intergenerational, Persistent Institutional and then our own personal traumas come together to create this sense in our bodies. So that's what I mean.
That so accurately describes the feeling I have in my body right now, you know? There's this, this tightness in my chest and there's, you know, intellectually, I'm thinking, what happens if this jury acquits this man? And I'm terrified. I'm terrified of what would happen if that were the case. Because at that point, the question has to be asked, "What will it take?". And the answer looks like, nothing fair will address the system. So not only do I have that experience, but I've talked to white friends who are in the same position of deep fear right now, and anxiety.
And the thing that strikes me about this so much, and so profoundly is what you said about intergenerational. Because if it was just this moment, that would be one thing.
It would be one thing.
But when you look at it, and last night, I was watching the news, and I saw an interview that was done with the cousin of Emmett Till and the brother of George Floyd. And it just wrecked me to see these two people talk about something over a 55 year span,
Yes, yes.
65 year span, I correct myself here. And to see what hasn't changed, and to see the pain on both those people's faces, and to see just what that means for us as a society. And you in your book, talk about clean pain and dirty pain?
Yeah.
And that feels really important to me. So would you talk about what those are and why they matter?
Yeah, I would. But let me build up to that.
Absolutely.
Real quick. So one of the rubrics that I go by when I'm doing my work is just a rubric, or the definition of white body supremacy, right, okay. And my definition of white body supremacy is this is the white body deems itself, the supreme standard by which all bodies humanity shall be measured. Just pause on that for a minute. The white body deems itself the supreme standard by which all bodies humanity, shall be measured, structurally and philosophically. So what that means is, we live in a structural and philosophical system, by which the white body has deemed itself the standard of humaneness. And everything else is a deviance from that standard.
So any body that is housed in a different body is a deviant from the human standard, the race question. Remember, the term race was initially used to mean species. The race question in this country is a species question. Are you, am I human? Any answer in this context, through the judicial system, through the governmental system, through the educational system, through the economics. So the systems of economics and religion and education have woven within them, the notion that the white body is the supreme standard. Because the notion of the white body has been the supreme standard, the idea of racialization is a notion that white power structure created. And so the idea that the question is whether or not me and you are human, the answer has always been structurally and philosophically, No, we are not. And so that's why we say the race question is a species question.
And so when you start with that notion, when you start there, did you get some sense that we are actually working with a feral system? Right, then the idea was what I've been writing on lately is that the the policing structure in this society is a feral policing structure. Right? So when people when Black people say, or when Latinx people say, or when Indigenous people say why would they shoot little brother, Adam, and then lie about it? Why would they do that? Why would they? He's 13. Why would they do that? Right? The answer is that the policing system is feral. When it comes to Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies, there is no point in the policing structure of this society where policing and racism and white body supremacy were cleaved away from each other. They have always been connected.
Bull Connor was a representation of white supremacy and law enforcement. Right? And our history is replete with this context, right? And so when we say well, there's good apples and there's bad apples, what we what we're doing is we're shifting the question. The question is not whether or not there are good people, your goodness or niceness or individual goodness or niceness is inadequate to deal with the feralness of the structure.
Yes, yes.
Am I being clear? So the idea of clean pain and dirty pain is really about how do we get white people who are advantaged, I no longer say that white people have privilege. What I say is that white people are advantaged, but because advantaged is an operationalize something is being done something is being gamed, right? I say white advantage, not white privilege, white advantage. And the reason why I say that is that off top, if you were born in a white body, you are advantaged off top in ways even if we share the same identity, even if we're poor, even if we're trans, even if we're gay or lesbian, even if we're straight, that identity does not usurp the racialization that will occur in this society. Right?
And so for me, clean pain is really do white people have the collective will to begin to develop stamina, acuity and agility around developing a living embodied anti racist culture that does not exist within the white collective. It does not exist. Do they have the capacity? This is why the majority of white people take such umbrage when you say defund the police, is because they believe that there's only tweaks that need to happen, not defunding, dismantling and reimagining the police, right, because of what it is doing to Black and Brown and Indigenous bodies. That what Black people and Brown and Indigenous people are saying is that you have to go through this white people as a collective. You have to go through this and not doing it is dirty, and you know it.
You have a sense of it in your body. You won't confront it, you won't look at it and not confront it and look at it compounds the dirtiness in the society. When you have over 70 million people vote for a man who locked babies in cages, who groped women by the genitals, who encouraged a mass mob to go to the Capitol on January 6, and crap and pee in the halls. And then you have 70 million people who had voted for that rubric. Right? You're not dealing with individual stuff. Right? You're dealing with a structural manifestation. And so we have to begin to stop looking at what happened to little brother Adam, look at what happened to Emmett Till look at what happened to Philando Castille as episodes. We have to start getting in our minds is, I believe, is bodies of culture, that this is structural. So we must begin to think about how do we create structural ways of managing both the brutality and the viciousness and the fairness of the structure on our people.
So my question then, is, we from this perspective, as people who live in Black bodies, we see this really clearly. We are not the ones who need to make these changes. These changes have to come from within the white community because these structures support...
Yes.
them. They do not support people of color. And that to me feels like the enormous challenge here.
That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's the pall in your belly. Right. That's the weight in your belly. That is the pressure in your face. When you think about Resmaa's actually saying that white people don't have a collective understanding of race. They have no collective stamina when it comes to race. No collective agility when it comes to race and no collective acuity when comes to race. None. So you mean to tell me Resmaa, we're gonna have to wait for white folks to get, to get all that together? No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying we need to continue to do what we need to do, because we are actually human beings. And that they may get it, and they may not get it. But we cannot stop fighting for what is rightfully ours as representations of creation.
And so, brother Kendi said, there's no such thing as a non racist. Either you're fighting every day for creating a culture a living embodied anti racist culture and practices, either you're doing that. Or you're supporting the system and complicit in the system at current as it currently exists. And as as it currently exists, it is housing and jailing Black and Brown bodies at an exponential rate. It is killing Black and Brown bodies, at exponential rates. And if that is what you are aligned with, you are aligned against me. And my push towards racial justice, not racial equity, racial justice, those are two different things. And so for me, white folks have to see George Lloyd not as episode but a long line of structural destruction that they benefit from, and they need to decide whether or not they want to continue to hand that very thing down to their descendants? That this ain't about saving me. This ain't about saving Black folks. This is about saving yourselves. And the answer to that question has been right now is that white bodies as a collective, have no interest in saving themselves?
I find it really fascinating that you say that, because one of the things you talk about in your book is the myth of white fragility and how that really supports and underlies all the things you're talking about. And, and I would love for you to say more about that, because that whole white fragility thing drives me up the wall.
So I'm actually friends with Robin D'Angelo, we've been friends for a number of years, right. And when you read her book, she called the title White Fragility. But when you read it, she's actually saying something else. Right? When you read the book, she's actually saying we actually are white folks really ain't fragile, right? That it is a way that they use to move around and continue to brutalize bodies of culture. It is a move. White fragility is actually a move, it is not a defensive move it's an offensive move. Right?
So one of the things like if you just take the classic white woman and fragileness right? That a white woman's tears will move this nation, a Black woman's tears an Indigenous woman tears, a Latin woman's tears ain't gonna move a stamp. Right? A Black woman's pain doesn't move anything. Right? All the white woman got to do is say that there is something that has made her start to begin to cry, or made her feel unsafe. White bodies love conflating uncomfortable with unsafe. That's the rubric, right? And so when that happens, this country in particular will mobilize, especially if it's a body of culture that has created and this happens in jobs. This happens in education. This happens in law.
This is one of the reasons why we're holding our breath, our breaths as Black, Brown and Indigenous people, right? One of the reasons why we're doing that is because we understand the consistency by which this quote, injustice system works. It's like almost science, right? is that if something keeps happening consistently over and over and over again, at some point, you can't say it is happenstance. At some point, you can't say it's an episode. At some point, you have to say this is structural, this is embedded. This is what it is, the system is not broken. It was designed to do exactly what it what it is doing. And so for me, the idea of fragileness is a piece that is claiming the victim position in order to continue to be a perpetrator.
That's so perfectly put and completely describes what my experience of that has been. You know, when, if I get into a discussion with a white woman around race and she starts to cry, all of a sudden the discussion is no longer about race. It's all of a sudden about that she's crying and you know, and you can just chase your tail on that oneforever.
And that's the power of white body supremacy, right? Is that that is an embedded, that is an embedded offensive move that they have, that they have refused to examine. White people, as a collective have refused to examine those pieces. So when race comes up, this is why... see race has a 400 year old charge to it. It has a literal charge and pressure and heat and direction and weight to it. Right? But white bodies because Black bodies have been raced, meaning that somebody has put the moniker of race on us, right? They have not had to develop any efficacy around understanding race.
Yes,
Right? So when we go to talk about and we can go real deep with it, because we we have a subjective experience of it. Not only now, but in our mama's belly in a mama's womb in our dad's sperm, right? We have a subjective experience all the way down, that when we go to talk about it, they have not had to develop any practice, like have you ever played any sports or done any painting or play piano or anything like that? Right? Yeah. So you know, whatever you did, there was a skill that you had that you man, I need to get this skill better, right? So I got to get some reps in, I got to get some reps in. When I ain't being coached, I got to get some reps in. When I'm by myself, I got to get reps in. White bodies have gotten no reps in when it comes to race. None. Think about it. There is no agility, no cultural agility. So when we bring it up, and we say, look, this is what I've watched what happened to brother Floyd, or when I heard what happened to sister Breonna. Here's what it did to me. And here's what this they have no practice with that.
Well, they haven't had to,
They haven't had to. So that's why the fragility is a move. Right. So because when you do it, it is a collapse move, it is a collapsing move, it is a move to get from underneath it, because they know, they haven't built a living embodied anti racist culture that can actually hold the charge of it. So they make moves.
I think that across the board, we, in the United States, I'm going to limit this to the United States are very, very bad at tolerating discomfort.
Hmm hmm.
And it's why I think so many of these conversations never happen outside of very small groups of people who look like each other and are likely to agree. And it just feels like if we're going to shift this, everyone is going to have to develop more tolerance for discomfort. I mean, I think people of color already have a much higher tolerance for discomfort, because we are always navigating the white world and trying to shape shift in ways that will keep us safe. But we also I think, need to develop a higher tolerance for discomfort in just being willing to stand there in our truth and let the chips fall where they may.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
It's not gonna be easy. And God knows you and I aren't gonna live to see the end of this. But I do think that it's really important that people acknowledge that and acknowledge at the same time that you're not going to see the end of it doesn't mean you don't keep doing it.
Exactly.
Keep working towards that goal. Exactly. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about police bodies, because that right now is such a present thing, and you write about it so beautifully. So police bodies occupy a place in this dynamic that is really unique because of the authority that they have been given. So I would like to have you talk about the impacts of that not only on the police, but also on the police themselves.
Yeah, yeah. So I'm in the middle of writing two more books right now. I'm just trying to get my head around some pieces. And one of the things that I decided to do is that decided to go back through My Grandmother's Hands, and specifically look and see where I found holes. Like in some things, you can't actually know where the holes are where the things that need to be sure to strengthen that until you actually do it, right. Like, right, like, you could say, well, I'm gonna write a book and then you say, well, until I write this book, I won't actually know where the holes are at, right. So one of the holes that I wrote into My Grandmother's Hands is equating a vocation with a virtue and a equating a vocation with a body. If I had to do over again I would have said, there are no, there's no such thing as a blue body only blue shirts. Right?
Okay.
And because what happens is, is that when I equated it with a body, what I did was, was remove them out of the context by which they actually grow up in. They don't come from a different planet called Felicia. Right? They come from this structure, right. And so that's the hole that so I'm going to talk about not police bodies, but I'm going to talk about policing, and the bodies that they inhabit. So here's one of the things that happens that a lot of people don't know about police. And so I have police in my family. I have grown up around firearms, I come from a military family, my grandfather was in World War II. I've had people that fought in Vietnam, right? I come from a lot of that. So here's one of the things that I don't think a lot of people realize about police and the policing structures, the policing structure actually grinds police up into dust.
And this is not to take what Chauvin did or any other police officer what Miss Potter did to Brother Daunte just recently here. That what happens is, is that for the first five to seven years of being a rookie on the policing, you're working overnights, right? You're going to be working the graveyard shift. So in the graveyard shift, you're more likely to see the things that actually are very brutal, right? You're likely to see the domestic violence. You're likely to see the the people coming out of the bars, and you know, not at their best self. You're likely to see that right? You're, that's different than the first shift, where you may see people pushing the baby carriage and walking your kids to the bus stop, all of those different types of things.
So for the first five to seven years, that is going on, right? And what never gets accounted for is the amount of moral injury, the amount of secondary and vicarious trauma that police officers experience. And there is no infrastructure within the policing experience that teaches them or teaches somebody to come and check on the police officers, after they have seen a body being burned in a fire. Or after... the only apparatus that they have is override. That's what's taught in the bodies, right? They're taught to, okay, dust it off, put a little mud on it and keep it moving. Right? So, so the policing structure doesn't account for that.
So this is why the policing structure and the paramedic structure and the firefighter structure have a such a high rate of alcoholism, a high rate of divorce, a high rate of suicide, right? Is because there is no structure, there is nothing in the structure that's designed to attend to those pieces. So what happens is that stuff gets compounded in each individual cup, and then compounded in the structure. So if their reality and their humanity is ground, and they have to watch each other all the time, they have to protect themselves from each other all the time. What ends up happening is that by the time they come and they need to attend to my humaneness, they can't. Right. So all Chauvin had to do, all he had to do to stop any of this from happening. Now think about how simple this is. All he had to do was get up.
Yes,
There is no training on standing up. There is no training that you can go through to the police academy that says stand up. There is no section in police training that says stand up. Right. That's a human piece. That is a quality of humaneness that was in whole and in part missing in that man, right. But it was missing because it was compounded. And then it was wrapped with virtue. So here's what I mean. Many times, the reason why we can't get at things is because our limitation is wrapped inside of our virtue. So we think we're standing up for the law, we're doing the correct thing. We're protecting good people from bad people. That's what Chauvin thinks. His virtue blinds him to his limitation. Blinds him to the fact that he is part of a rabid feral system by which he is being used as an apparatus to protect the power of the white power structure from the inhuman Black mass, right. He is unwilling to investigate that. So what happens is, is that all of that crap shows up in his knee on George's neck.
Yeah, I haven't watched all of the trial because truthfully, I really just couldn't do it.
I couldn't either. I'm right there, with you.
Yeah, I, you know, I would dip in and out. And I just at some point said, No, this is not doing my mental health any good. So I had to step back. But I find it so interesting what you're saying, because it makes perfect sense to me. Because, I mean, part of the reason I couldn't watch was because I don't want to become numb to that kind of violence. But if you are a police officer, and what you're seeing night after night, after night after night, is the worst of humanity, and you're supposed to show up again the next day. And this is in no way to excuse the police.
That's right.
But it's to say we need to deal in reality. If we're asking people to do a job, whatever that job is, we need to address what the pieces of that job are, that might make it impossible for them to actually do the job they're allegedly there to do. And then of course, you have the overlap of if you don't think that people are people, if you don't think that Oh, group of people are actually human, the way you're human, right, you're gonna be completely blind about doing whatever you want. Because you're not actually engaging with another human being, although you would never treat a dog that way and get away with it. So yeah,
Let me say something about the dog thing that you said, I've done this in some of my trainings with, with bodies of culture, I don't say people of color, I say bodies of culture. Think about this. I've been in trainings and upset, yes. Now, I want everybody in here, whether you're in a black body, or brown body, and whatever body you're in, I just want you to think about this for a second. Close your eyes and imagine your dog, your beautiful dog that's been in your family for two years, three years, you love that dog. You've been through stuff with that dog, that dog matters to you, it's a family. Now, imagine 10 years later, your daughter comes up to you and said, Daddy, you didn't know about this. But I want to marry this dog. You would look at your daughter, like something is wrong with your daughter. Right? That is the ethos within this structure when it comes to Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies. Right? That your dog is a nice dog. But you wouldn't want your son or your daughter having a relationship with, right? I know that's stark, but so is what we're seeing. So here's what's gonna happen, some individual white person is going to hear that. And they can fire off an email to you want to talk to your manager, right?
(laughter) Fortunately, I don't have a manager.
(laughter) But if you did, they were talking to right? So because what they're going to do is they're going to say, white bodies love talking about how nice they are or how much they're allies, right? They love self declarations, right? And what I always say is that I want you to be nice to me. I don't want you to spit in my food. And I don't want you to saying nasty things to me. But your individual niceness is inadequate to deal with the brutality, that the system is heaping on my body every day. I'm glad you're nice to me. I'm glad you don't call me names, right? And it is inadequate if that's all you think that it's going to take to shift what is happening to people that look like me, then you're on the wrong road. The individual niceness is not isn't adequate to deal with this.
I think that's so important because I think that people feel like, well, I'm doing the right thing. Shouldn't that be good enough? And the answer is no. It's not going to be good enough because it's not just you who need to be doing the quote unquote, right thing. But your family members, the people you work with, your neighbors, and if you're not out there as Ibram Kendi says, you know, if you're not out there being actively anti racist, then you are part of the problem. And this is this is hard because people feel like, and I understand this, feel like well didn't create the system? No, you did not. But then neither did I. And yet I still suffer at the hands of this system. And that we didn't create on our own climate change, for instance, doesn't mean we don't have responsibility to address it. And I think that this is the tricky part that we're at right now. And it's going to be very interesting to see how things go in the next several months, because I do feel like we're at a tipping point. And it's going to be, it's going to be on all of us to make sure that this goes in the right way that we don't just implode and make a terrible situation even worse by having just rampant violence, rampant chaos, because people are so angry and so frustrated on both sides.
But here's what I would say. People may be angry and frustrated on both sides. But one side is catching the boat and the other side isn't.
Absolutely.
When white bodies tell me that they're allies I take something from one of the things that, that Robin says. When white people tell you that they're allies, the next question we should ask is, "How would I know if you hadn't told me"? Right? And then I added a piece to that is not only how would I know if you hadn't told me, is that if you tell me you're an ally my next question is, who are your people? Who are the people that are holding you accountable? Who the people that you're that you're raising babies with? Who are the people for the for the rest of your life, you have decided to make a living embodied anti racist culture with? That's what I want to know. I don't want to know your individual allyship your individual declaration, I want to know who you are cultivating a living embodied anti racist culture with, right. Because that will then tell me who's holding you accountable when you step out of alignment with a living embodied, anti racist culture, right? Not that you that you did some performative stuff. Not that you took pictures in front of the police shielding Black people. Yeah, but think about this when brother Floyd got murdered. I can't tell you, when I would be on Instagram or Facebook how many white folks had George Floyd's picture up there and had Breonna's picture up on their little icon. Right? Look at it now.
Right. No, I've had this conversation with people about, okay, that's what you were doing then but what are you doing now?
Now you see cats and food.
Yeah. You know, and I like cats, and I love food. But that isn't going to get it done. And people need to also understand that there is a luxury that comes with being able to shift your attention back to cats and food that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people do not have because it is literally life and death for us. I love how you're framing this as basically communal. You know, it's like, if you're gonna do this work, you cannot do it by yourself. You have to do it in community, and that that community needs to be willing to hold every single member accountable, not in a punitive way. But in a we all need to be corrected sometimes way.
That's right. I get admonished by people in my community all the time. Right. But we've developed a rhythm and a feel for the admonishment. That's not about ripping my heart.
Right,
Right. It's about, Oh, okay, yeah, I didn't get that. Yeah, I was just letting you know. Okay, cool.
Yeah, it's about correcting. Not about being you know, nobody's perfect.
Tha'ts right.
We're all gonna make mistakes. And that is across the board. I don't care what color you are, right? Mistakes are gonna be made.
Very important.
They are because it's how we learn. And I think we forget, you know, and sometimes I'll say to people look, you know, just because you made a mistake, so what? The first time you tried to walk didn't work out, but I see that you're walking fine now. So, you know, clearly you can keep going.
That's right, clearly. But it doesn't happen with a racists, that's the piece.
Nope.
You see, for white folks, there is no stamina and they won't do what they need to do in order to develop the stamina when it comes to race specifically.
I think it's there's so much guilt, and yet it's exactly like walking. It's like okay, you fell down, get up and try again. Just keep getting up and trying again,
But the guilt is a Dodge too...
Yes it is. Yes, it is. Then you can just say well, you know, I'm bad at this and you can bail. Well, how nice for you. We are unfortunately nearly out of time. And before we go, I did want to ask you to give the listeners three simple actions that they can take to move forward in this effort.
Well, first one is get the book, get My Grandmother's Hands. And you can also, I have all sorts of free ecourse that goes with the book now at resmaa.com. There's also a free app that goes with the book also that you can get there called Wyser. That's the first thing. The second thing is, let's remember, let's be more gentle and tender with each other in our community. This is a lot that we're all dealing with. It's not just individual ones of us that's dealing with this. This is a communal weight that we're all experiencing. So let's be gentle with each other, less turn towards each other and not on each other. That's the first thing. And then the last one is pause. Take some time, pause, breathe, just, you know, turn off the TV. And then this actually for the fourth one is let people hold you.
Yeah.
Let people hold you.
That's so important. Because I think so many of us try and just do this on our own and it's exhausting.
Always check on Grandmama the one who everybody goes to, the one everybody think got it together. Check on the uncle, check on the people that everybody's leaning on. Check on your strong friends, check on the strong people. Because a lot of times ain't nobody checking on them. And then when you do check on them, they go, I'm good. I'm good. Don't let that be. Don't let that be. "I'm good. I'm good". Don't ask them how they doing? Ask them, how you sleeping. Ask them how you eating. Yeah. Ask them who's been holding you, who's been checking up on you? Who's been sending you some good stuff? Right? Not how you doing? Actually ask those questions.
Yeah. Yeah, that, thank you. That is so important, because I think that's really, really true. And sometimes we let ourselves off the hook by just saying, how you doing, and then someone says, fine, and we think okay, I've done my job. No. Well, I have loved this conversation. Thank you so very, very much. And here's just a prayer that all of this works out as it should.
Yeah, hope so.
This has been such an interesting conversation, particularly at this moment in time. And no matter the outcome of the verdict in the Derrick Chauvin case, what is clear is that we all need to heal Black, white, and bodies that wear blue. And until we engage in that work, we will never have the world that we want. This isn't the whole solution. But it's a critical piece. And it's one that each of us can engage with, on our own and within our own communities. So in the interest of healing, ours and that of the larger world, I remind you that change starts with story. So keep sharing yours. Thank you so much for listening, and I will be back with another episode of Stepping Into Truth very soon.
