Sonia Roberts on Spirituality and Anti-Racism

feed dot net slash join. I think for everybody, black, white, whatever, it's really powerful to take any pain or suffering that you've been through and take that suffering and transform it into something beautiful. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us,

our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. M

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sonya Roberts, and educator, writer, creator, and activist. Sonya writes about racism, spirituality, parenting, and much more in her Spiritually Speaking blog. Her first book is White Ally, a Guide to Cultivating a deeply spiritual Anti Racism Practice. Hi, Sony, Welcome to the show. Thank you, thanks for having me.

It's a real pleasure to have you on. We're going to discuss your book, White Ally, a Guide to Cultivating a deeply spiritual Anti Racism Practice in just a moment. But before that, we'll start, like we always do, with a parable There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside

of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandmother and she says, mother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. I've heard this parable before, told a little bit differently. So when I sat down to think about it and reflect on it, what came up for me was James Baldwin quote. I'm going to paraphrase it or do my best to say it right, but to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all the time. And these words are so true, you know, even today, these words are just ringing, so true for me personally and in the work that I do.

So the work that I do, like my own personal work, and what I shared in my book is how important it is to feel all of your emotions, even the good and even those that we might label as bad or negative. And actually the anger and the rage that sometimes surface in our life are often surface. They have a lot of power to create change, interchange, outer change, and um, of course, it takes a lot of processing these feelings and doing a lot of healing around it.

And recently, you know, all of this things have been going on in the world and I and I had a week of just a lot of anger, a lot of rage, and a lot of adrenaline. And I sat with those feelings and after that week went by, it was a week of feeling that what came out for me, for me was a lot of pain, an intense amount of pain and you know, sadness. And I cried, like the whole day, I was crying. Everything was making me cry.

And so I mean, I think that's the process of our emotions, is that when we sit with them a lot of times something else is underneath it. And then if we're deeply listening, they really can guide us and you know, give us information about what's happening in our lives and how to use those those emotions to you know, actively do something whatever you're called to do, perhaps um

to create change. And I was in this really dark state and a friend of mine reached out to me, or I reached out to her and she reminded me to connect or reconnect to black joy, and I think that's part of feeding the wolf is for me remembering to reconnect to joy, to reconnect to laughter. I love comedy, and to reconnect to love, and so really like processing those those hard, intense emotions, but being able to then you know, balance it with moving back into a joyous place.

Um because it's it's really unhealthy obviously to stay in the rage part of it, or to live try and

live in that space is not healthy. That makes a lot of sense, and I think that's part of you know, the underlying theme of what I really wanted to talk with you about is I found your work really interesting because you're bringing together these transformational yoga ideas that are really about doing a lot of work on the inside, but you're marrying it very much to the work that we need to do on the outside out into the world.

And I'm always interested in, particularly for people of color, how processing the anger and the hurt and all that, how that gets balanced with doing inner work on yourself and how you navigate and negotiate that, because it does seem like it's got to be a challenge in that regard. Oh absolutely. I mean what I think about is how much my ancestors have endured to still be alive. And so I think that Black people have an incredible way of overcoming a lot of pain and suffering and channeling

that into creating, you know, the best life possible. There is a lot of joy in our culture. There is a lot of laughter and um, a lot of like music. There's a ton of artists and inventors. So I think for everybody, black, white, whatever, it's really powerful to take any pain or suffering that you've been through and take that suffering and transform it into something beautiful, which might sound a little cheesy, but it really is the process

of transformation. The yamas are really guidelines that help you relate to people outside of yourself, and the nie yamas are more of the guidelines that are more of the internal work, their guidelines that aren't always talked about in the yoga world. So these simple principles are actually really powerful, simple but powerful. I agree, And if you'd be willing to, I'd like to touch in on your first experience of maybe not your first, but your first really strong experience

of facing racism. You describe being seven years old. Would you be willing to tell that story. I will, I'll tell the story. But I do want to say that I made a choice to tell my stories and some of my stories in my book, and I'll share this story, but they're they're really painful to share. Even now, it's painful to share it. And I don't necessarily think that black people sharing their stories of racism is beneficial. And the reason that I say that is because the word

gas lighting gets used all the time. But there's a lot of minimization when you do share your stories. There's a lot of doubt about the existence of racism. So I've had a lot of experiences where I shared my story even with family, like close family members, and they minimize my story and my pain. And I think of it similar to you know, any time that you share something that happened to you that's painful and someone minimizes it,

it's like a re traumatization type thing. And so I just want to caution people that I don't think that's necessarily a beneficial thing to hear the story, but some people might think it is. I don't know. That's just my opinion, and I'm going to give you the opportunity to tell it or not tell it again, because I think this is a useful point that I think i'd like to discuss because from my perspective, what I see is that those sort of stories help educate people who

may be going, look, this isn't still happening. This still isn't that bad, right, And so from my perspective, that's where I think they're useful. But I also totally recognize, and when you say it, I recognize it even more that I'm sort of asking you to do that hard work, right, and it is just like I said, it's just painful

in general. But I think you're talking about the story about when I was walking home, and so in my book, I write about being the seven or I probably was around seven years old walking home and right in front of my house, the paper boy who lived up the street wrote his bike by, and he said the N word to me. He just called me the N word. And at the time that he did that, I was obviously the first time anybody called me that name. I didn't know what it meant, and I was just in shock.

I just you know, I just froze standing there and I couldn't move and I couldn't talk. Or say anything. And so, you know, after standing there, just in shock, I ran into the house and I told my dad, you know, what had happened. And then my dad went to the paper boy's house, and you know, I tried to have a conversation with the parents about what had happened to me, and my dad was very very upset. Obviously he's very angry, and they said that their son

would never say that. That was what they told him. And so I just know that after that, my dad canceled the newspaper. I mean, it was like the only thing that he had in his power to do. But just I think for me, just that my father, you know, stood up for me and spoke up and went to their house. I mean, even him just going to their

house was a big deal. Like I also wrote in my book that the neighbor across the street had talked about wanting to hang my father when we moved into that house, or you know, saying something about he's the N word and I would hang him by that tree. And so it wasn't like a safe neighborhood to be in. I don't know what neighborhood is safe, honestly, but it was a big deal for him to do that, and it meant a lot, I think as far as empowering seeing the power that he had or the bravery that

he had. And in the book, the part that I found so powerful was you really did a nice job of describing what that did to you. And and I think from my perspective, what that did was make it really difficult. I hope I wouldn't be the person that would do this to minimize it, because it suddenly was like, well, my goodness, look at the impact that that had in your world view on what that did do you inside

was just so powerful and so yeah, it's just it's heartbreaking. Yeah, And just now talking to you, I realized that the thing that happens often, I think, especially with children, is that adults will say, oh, they're just a child, because I remember people said that to me, like to minimize it. They would say, oh, it's just a kid being a kid, you know, kind of like a boy being a boy.

And that attitude is so awful, and I think that's why, you know, sexism is perpetuated, racism is perpetuating because they are just children. But we have to talk to our children, we have to educate our children. We have to teach you know, ourselves and others how to be in the world and the way that's not harmful. You know. We

want to lift people up, not put them down. The other thing that you wrote in your book, that again was one of those things that just every once in a while you hear something, I hear something, and I go just reminds us how present and recent so much of this stuff is, like so much of it's still present. But that your parents were married eight years after interracial marriage was legalized, Like your parents who had you eight years before that, they wouldn't have legally been allowed to

get married, Like that's yesterday. Mind boggling. Right, It's like it was against the law for them to be together. And that, to me is another one of those things I love. This is going to sound really messed up, and I don't mean it that way. I love those things because I think they're really good refutations to people who go, all that stuff happened so long ago, why are we still talking about I'm like, no, it did not.

I mean a a lot of it's still happening. But even if you want to point to like legal yeah, we talk about systematic racism and some of it you might have to look a little bit for but not that, right, Like, there's not a lot of dots to connect when you see some of that stuff. Yeah, there's a ton of microaggressions, but to actually be able to have examples of you know, legislatures is more. It's more powerful to look at that, I mean, more powerful in the way that you can

connect the dots directly to systemic racism. Absolutely, yep, yep. So you say that yoga principles and meditation or transformative

practices that can be instrumental and facilitating social change. So I'd just like to talk about that idea a little bit more because it's an idea that I spend a lot of time thinking about, which is the balance of sort of inner life and outer life or contemplation and action, you know, because I think if we're not careful a lot of this work of meditation, yoga, inner work, this sort of stuff, if we're not careful, it just can

become another form of narcissism. Right. It's a it's a how do I feel it's all about my work, my journey, and not that that's not important, but we've got to be careful that we don't get stuck there. And if we look over history, you know, some of the people we admire most as change makers are people who found a way to really facilitate their inner their outer lives. Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela. They had robust and deep inner practices and they had a transformative impact.

So for you, help me connect those dots. Tell me about for you, how yoga and meditation are practices that help you facilitate social change, and how you see those practices can help other people to facilitate social change. Yeah, So first I just want to agree with you that the yoga and the meditation is a deeply personal and inner practice. And I think of spirituality that way to

the work is very individual. And I think that to really transform yourself you need to be in relationship with people. I mean, you can look at it like you can do a lot of self work on yourself, which I have right, and then you feel good about where you are and how you've healed a lot of your traumas. And then you get into a partnership or a marriage and boom, right away all this stuff you thought was healed or transformed, it's triggered and it comes up again.

So it's so important to be not not just with the intimate partner, but just even with parenting your children. Stuff can come up like that stuff can come up with your parents again as an adult, and I just think relationship can really reflect back to you where you need to do the work. But again, it's like you

really have to be open to it. And I think sometimes people get stuck in this inner world where I'm good, I'm good on my mat, I'm good on my cushion, and you know, they're not open to exploring, like, how do I now take these principles and these practices into my everyday life and into my relationships and continue to

grow and to reach my full potential. And for me, I think the social justice and the activism is something that I really felt at a young age, just by being introduced to different writers and reading about slavery, reading about black intellectuals and activists, and I just knew right away that I wanted to be a part of like creating. I saw that there was a suffering in the world, and I wanted to do something to create change. And I think that going back to those individual practices that

it kind of puts the veil on people. It blinds people some of these practices, and so I think people unfortunately use it as like spiritual bypassing is a good example where you're not being fully honest about what's happening in the world. You're not being fully honest about your feelings. And so one of the things that I think, obviously is that really looking at these simple principles and practicing them and applying them in real life can help to

create an anti racism practice. It can help create a connection to community, um like real, true authentic community where you're involved in lifting up a people and people that are marginalized or people that are suffering in some way. Yeah, when you said that, it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes that ram Das says, which is, if you think you're enlightened, go home and visit your parents. Right. Yeah, thanks,

like totally. And I've had plenty of times where I, like, a relationship ends and I'm like, I've got a lot of work to do it myself, and I do you know, I think I've done all the work, and then I get in a new relationship and I'm like, no, it's still there, there's more to do some of that work. It takes interaction with others, absolutely, and it's a lifelong journey.

There's never a finish line. H certain yoga practices and you know, meditation practices, spiritual practices point towards an underlying unity in the world, an underlying perfection, or the perfection might be within us, or we're all good inside, you know, And so there's there's that part of the practice. But then we look out into the world and we go, my goodness, that's not what I'm seeing out there. And sometimes I find those two views hard to hold at

the same time or hard to reconcile. And I'm just curious if you've had some of that as you've gone through your deeper yoga practices relating to what you see outside your door. Yeah. Absolutely. I actually think that I'm still exploring more how spirituality, the spiritual practices or yoga principles, and how anti racism, how they connect and how they don't actually connect, right, and like how these practices that we're doing to make oursel else make us more towards

how we were born. I feel like we're all trying to get back to like you're born this like pure being and over time socialization and you know, trauma, all these things happen to you, and so you're basically trying to like peel back all that stuff to go back to your pure estate. And um, I think there's overlap, but I also think there's conflict in it as well, and I'm still trying to figure that out, to be honest,

I'm sure trying to juggle it. And like you said, like, how do you hold these two truths at the same time? And can you? And I think you can. I definitely think you can. I don't know. Maybe it's the pathway of like wanting to achieve and wanting to reach perfection that's not real, and so I think that if you're looking at the world like that, that's not going to be real as well. Like we're actually practicing more of letting go in our own personalised instead of trying to

attain more, buy more, be more, get more. And I think if we do that in our personal life, then what happens in the world is we're able to give more, like we need to give ourselves less in a way, which is opposite of what some spiritual practices are teaching us. Right as I give give more outward into the world and less about me, me, me, It's more about like, what's happening? How can I be a servant? Even yeah,

I could not agree with you more. One of my least favorite spiritual phrases that seems to have gotten popular over the last years is let go of anything that doesn't serve you. And while I understand what's being said in that, I think it orients us towards this idea that the world is there to serve us, and I tend to try and flip that orientation and go, no,

I'm here to serve the world. And I think that, you know, one of the criticisms of yoga and certainly of the mindfulness world, which I'm a little bit more immersed in than I am the yoga world. But a lot of the criticism of the westernization of those two is that we've lost the ethical components of those traditions. And that's really what you are bringing back in your book.

You really bring back the ethical components that underlie yoga. Yeah, I mean, it makes me sad that the reason why I stopped teaching yoga is because yoga became commodified and it's a brand and a business to sell people make doing yoga poses, which I love doing yoga poses, and I love yoga asana and I love teaching it. But isn't the driving force of it is can you get the nicest pair of yoga pans and look really good

in them doing your yoga practice? Very superficial? I mean, I feel like it didn't used to be like that. When I first took my teacher training, my very first one, most twenty years ago, the question would be who did you study with? And whoever you studied with would be a direct link to a lineage. If it wasn't someone directly from India, it was somebody who had went to India and study with I Anger or whomever. And now

it's like where did you study? Because there's a bunch of yoga studios and you can go get a yoga certification in a weekend or two hours, and it's kind of been watered down and diluted, and it's staturated with yogas. And there are people, don't get me wrong. I know there's a lot of people, maybe not a lot, but a handful of people that talk about yoga philosophy and the yoga principles, but we somehow. I think the commodification of yoga and pushing yoga for profit really lost some

of the authenticity of it. That makes sense, Yeah, it's pretty easy to see that. And and I think the mindfulness world hasn't gone to the extent that yoga has, but the danger is there. The danger still exists. It may not be about how I look. Maybe the yoga has been able to make it even more superficial, but in the mindfulness world, it can very much become all about how do I feel? I feel? And there's more to my mind a robust spiritual practice than how I feel.

That's part of it. Working with my thoughts and emotions skillfully is certainly part of it, but there's more to it. And that's what I liked about your book. So you have a line in your book that I want to explore because your book is really written for it's called white ally, it's written for white people, for how we can be better allies. And so I want to explore

that now. And there's something you said that I think is really powerful, and it is that you can have all the right beliefs about social equality and still practice oppression. Tell me a little bit more about that. The thing about systemic racism and oppression in general and white supremacy is that is so pervasive and it's very insidious. So some people might know, but it's very likely that you don't even know. You are perpetuating a lot of these

biases in your life. So you may not, like howardly hate black people, but you have somehow began to believe some of these anti black sentiments. And so I know that's hard for some people to understand, but I look at my own life being having a black father and a non black mother, and I had to undo and unlearned a lot of negative things that I had learned about black people. And I'm black, and so if I had to do that, I know that white people have

to do that too. You know, my mom will probably hate me saying this, But even my mother, who is the most loving for giving in a person, I know, she married a black man and she had three black children, but she still I still talk to her about these things and explained to her, you know, okay, well that is still like, you know, a biased thing to say, or what you're saying actually will perpetuate racism or or you know, she's so loving that, and this is what happens.

Sometimes people are so loving and maybe naive that they just want to lead love, you know, like I just love everybody, and it's like, but it doesn't work like that, because people are really being hurt. And if we don't acknowledge it and sit down and look at it and figure out how to be different in the world, we

continue to perpetuate it. It does. And I think that one of the things that I've really been waking up to is this idea that being called out on your racism is not a bad thing, right, And I think there's this sense you say it so well, you say we have to let go of the notion that bad people are racist and good people are not, because we think that if we're told that we did something that's racist, that that makes us a racist, and thus we are a bad person, and if we feel that we have

to defend against it. If the chain of events in my mind is if I did something racist, then I'm a bad person. I can't allow that. Right if I can unhook all that and I can go, oh, good people can make mistakes, good people can see the world wrong. I love that idea of a hooking those things. And Ebramex Kendy talks about this very well. Being a racist, you know, it's sort of like a name tag you can peel on and off. Sometimes you are, sometimes you're not.

And if we can take that approach, and I thought you did just such a nice job of talking about that in your book when you say most people want to be considered good moral people, which becomes the biggest obstacle to identifying your biases. Yeah, absolutely, it doesn't make you a bad person. But what I do want to say is when you are called out or when you do recognize that you have racial bias, it will make

you uncomfortable. And that's why this work is uncomfortable. That's painful, and and like even for myself when I started to recognize the things that I had started to believe about my own self, it's very painful. It's very painful, it's uncomfortable.

But I think it's when we're in the most uncomfortable places, the most painful places, oftentimes it's such a gift because you know, even now, like in this pandemic, it's uncomfortable, but it's a gift in a way because we have this opportunity to think about things differently, to live our lives differently, to start making different choices, to reflect, to reevaluate how we are in the world, how we want to be in the world. I think it's very important to let go of the good bad scenario. It's not

beneficial at all, and it doesn't mean anything really. Yeah. Yeah, as I've begun to see that layer of it, I've seen just how prevalent that mindset is, which is essentially, I'm a good person, thus I can't be racist in any way. You know. I've started to see how prevalent that can be in me, you know, as I read your book, and I read other books, like one of

them is talking with your kids about race. Luckily, my son is twenty two and he has been involved in social justice stuff for years, deeply and passionately, and he turned out fine. I didn't ruin him. But if to the extent that I discussed race with him, I probably would have discussed that all people are equal, you know, I would have given that we're all the same, right, which is true. Yeah, well that's what we want to be true exactly, which at a deeper level is true.

But on a societal level is absolutely not true, right, And so to proceed as I think a lot of white people do towards this color blindness, which seems like a good thing, is ultimately not because it denies the very real reality that sits right in our midst And so, you know, in order to transform racism, and this is something else you talk about so eloquently, in order to transform racism, we have to actually see it, we have to actually find it. And color blindness is a way

of trying to see past it. And that's just not the reality that we all live in. And so you know, like I said, I think my son found it himself. Maybe by taking him to some of the political events I did at least oriented him in that direction. But I missed the ball on that one because I didn't say there's these big systematic problems. I probably said we should treat everybody the same. And the reality now is we shouldn't treat everybody the same because we haven't been

treating everybody the same up till now. We can't just suddenly go, well now we will. Yeah, I mean I think that with white people realizing that racism exists, and how you talk to your children, the thing that's really missing is in our education system. We don't talk about the realities of racism. We don't talk about the reality of the history of it. Um a lot of stuff is left out of history, and so people are growing up and not getting the full story, the full understanding.

And that's how you also perpetuate racism, right because people grow up thinking, oh, everything's fine, everybody's equal, and it's not true, and we we have to really work to try our best to make things more equal and more fair. And with black and brown people, you have to look at who you are as a race, what your nationality is, what your ethnicity is, and navigate that in a white society, and for white people they never have to do that.

Hopefully now they will, they're waking up to it. But I think it would make a huge difference if white parents talk to their white children. And but before even that, it's like, as a white person, are you reflecting on what it means to be white? Like what does that mean? And how did you learn to be white? White is like it's not even real, It's just an illusion. It's a social construct that was created, and so it's like wrapped up in your identity. But it means absolutely nothing.

But it means you're you know, as far as skin color being a hierarchy, you're at the top of the hierarchy. But it has no meaning. Really, it's just a made up concept. Yeah, And I think one of my early wake ups was that the fact that I didn't have to think about what color I was was a tremendous privilege that I could simply opped out of the whole thought process and discussion that was part of what the privilege of being white was. I just didn't have to

engage in it in any way, you know. So it's it's a process of learning a lot about these different things. You talk in the book about the importance of gratitude, and I was reflecting on as a white person how to be grateful and recognize privilege at the same time, because I'm not like, like, I'm grateful I'm white, you know, but but there's there you might be. I mean, it would be wise to be I mean, to be honest.

I mean it's like, well, yeah, because I think that's the other place that we can swing to as white people, is feeling bad about everything, and how do we balance gratitude, which is a spiritual practice, which makes us more able to give to other people, makes us more generous, you know, balancing that with the reality of the fact, like, well, okay, I've got a lot of privilege. I just as I was reading your book those two sort of ideas talking about ideas that are sort of hard to hold at

the same time, that one kind of came up for me. Yeah, I mean, I think that you don't have to feel bad about being white. I think there's been people that have talked about this and they explained it, like, there are white people who are attached to being the superior white person, right, and there are white people that just happened to be white. It doesn't mean that they actually operate in the world or live in the world where they,

you know, feel superior to others. They're aware of it, and they and they live their life as fair and equitable as they can. So I don't think you should feel bad for being white. You should feel bad if you're a racist white person, but not just for being white. And I think gratitude is tricky. I think that I look at it as I have privileges as well, So it's not just white privilege, you know, I have the privilege of I think having a non black mother in

a way was a privilege. It opened like we got the house that they wanted to rent because my mother went to rent it without my father, and you know, people treated us a little bit differently if we were with my mother who's not black. So I think in a way it is a privilege. In a way it's not, but in a way it is. And I think that you know, having an education is a privilege for me. I went to UC Berkeley and I got a degree there. That's a privilege. So we all have different privileges. And

I think around being grateful. I can be grateful for all the things that I have and still practice my gratitude without feeling guilty about it. But I think what's important for me as a light skinned person I wrote this in my book, as a light skinned cis gendered, able bodied person, those are all the places where I have privilege, and I feel it's important for me at that intersection to be an ally for for people that

that don't have that privilege. Right, as a light skinned person, I have more advantages than a dark skinned woman would and so I need to maybe you know, speak up for not speak up for that's a bad word the way to say it, But like you know, people are saying past the mic for somebody, or amplify someone else's voice is a better way to say it, or step out of the way and give someone else an opportunity.

Those are the ways that I can be of services like advocate for the people that are marginalized in the places that I have privileged. And that's how I look at it. And I think having gratitude for the life that you have doesn't make you a bad person. One other point that you made in the book that I thought was really really useful that I wanted to make sure that that I got out there before we run out of time, was this idea of intent versus impact. A lot of times what we'll do as white peoples.

So that wasn't my intention. That wasn't my intention, you know, And you really talk about, well, if we're gonna make progress, we have to look at what the impact of what we do is, not what our intention is. And I think this is true in general. Right, I think that this principle applies beyond just race relations, but I think it's it's really important here because it's presumptuous for me to assume how something I did lands on you. Yeah,

you're right. It has applied to more things because I tell my kids all the time that even though you're sorry, you still did what you did, so you have to pay the consequences of that. I think that with the intent versus impact, as as far as you know, race matters, and and calling out people for or not even calling out, just talking to people, like telling them directly about a racial experience, our racial bias that you you experienced from them. People want to hang onto like why didn't mean to

do that? And what happens is you end up causing more harm by doing that, And also it makes it more difficult to take accountability. I think accountability is really important. If we want to change and be in relationship with people in a more healthy way, then we have to like look at what we did, take accountability for it, you know, say you're sorry or whatever it is that you need to say, and figure out how to move

forward from there. Because hanging onto like oh I didn't mean to it wasn't you know, it wasn't my intent doesn't it actually will probably harm the person further, and the accountability is really key, and that's not the same as I think sometimes people get confused between being shamed and then being accountable. So if someone calls you out anything, well I didn't tend to do that, and you feel like maybe they're shaming you, it's not the same thing.

Like feeling shame and being shamed is completely different. And I think that oftentimes with the intent versus impact, like you don't want to feel the shame of what you did or what you said or take responsibility for it. And so I think we just have to get better and making mistakes and figuring out how to do better next time. That's it. It's really simple. Actually, yeah, yeah, And I think you're so right. I think it is

that being comfortable with making a mistake. And I think a lot of it goes back to what we talked about earlier and that you did such a nice job of describing, which is I can do something racist, that doesn't mean I'm a bad person. And that's where shame comes from. Shame comes from I'm a bad person. So if I equate those two things, oh, I did something racist means I'm a bad person, it's really hard to admit. Again, if I can sort of separate those things that I

can go. I can make a mistake. We all make mistakes, Okay, I'll learn, I'll do better next time I feel bad about doing it, I apologize and I move on. It's not like I've now done something that marks me for life? Is this rotten person? As long as I'm willing to learn from it and and make it right and move on, That's the only way we begin to dismantle this is if people are willing to identify when they do something

or say something racist. Right, It's like being able to catch it in the moment and address it right away, boom, and then you can move on. Yeah. I think that's the work for a lot of us, is being willing to get out there knowing that we might make a mistake and that we still need to get out there and do what we can do. It's funny because I think until not too long ago, I had more trepidation around that, because again I think I equated making that mistake as some like fatal flaw, And and now I

see it's just it's about learning. If we can trust that our hearts in the right place, then it's about educating. It's about learning about getting other perspectives and so to that end, I really appreciate you being willing to take the time to come on and spend some time with us. And I really enjoyed your book. I thought it was really helpful and I really enjoyed this conversation. So thank you so much, Thank you so much, thanks for having me.

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